Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (9 page)

So they split up and eventually divorced.

With Jonathan gone and Dianne once again single, she moved back upstairs with Mabel and started living in the same tangle of dysfunction she had grown up in. Mom, Dianne insisted, began to work on her the moment she moved back in. “Find a new job! Make more money! You need to take care of me.” Mabel would say that Dianne had made a promise when she was nine years old to care for her mom—and promises were made to keep.

Around the end of the year 1975, a “fine-looking man” Dianne would come to know as
Hubert
Odell, and his brother, James, rented the apartment below Mabel and Dianne. James, with a smile that caught Dianne’s eye immediately, seemed like the perfect gentleman. As he and Hubert moved in and began hanging around, she worked her way slowly into getting to know them.

Dianne had changed jobs. She had found an opening at a local ice-cream plant and started working full-time.

At first, she said, she and James were just “good friends.”

“He was a backwoods, country-type guy…. I kind of accepted him the way he was. I looked at him as a friend.”

While Dianne continued a friendship with James well into 1976, her relationship with her mom became fragile. Dianne would push certain issues and her mom would back off—one in particular was Baby Matthew. There was a dead child in a suitcase in the closet. Sooner or later, something would have to be done about it.

“I would broach the subject a couple of times with what had happened to Matthew and she would give me a stone-cold look,” Dianne recalled. “She would say things like, ‘If you open your mouth to me about [Matthew], I’m going to kill you. I don’t want to talk about it.’ My mother had a way of looking at you that would drop you in your tracks.”

Furthermore, Dianne said she was terrified of what Mabel would do to her if the subject of Matthew was brought to light. She believed her mom would kill her if she went to the police, or mentioned Matthew to anyone.

“When she said, ‘I will kill you,’ it was something I took seriously.”

James Odell and Dianne spent the next year or so just kicking back, playing cards, and talking about life. James, Dianne said, was a homebody. He liked to stay in the house. Whereas Hubert, James’s brother, was what Dianne described as someone who was out and about much of the time “with the ladies.”

By August 1977, Dianne and James found their relationship had turned from friendship to love, and on August 22, they decided to get married. James had recently joined the navy. There was a good chance, Dianne knew, he was going to be shipped out soon after the wedding. But she still wanted to be his wife, she said, and support whatever he wanted to do.

Indeed, no sooner did they get married than James got the call for boot camp.

James wrote Dianne while he was away. In one letter, she learned about a lawsuit he had been involved in. It was going to be settled within the next six months to a year, he said.

This was good news, Dianne thought. They could use the money. Why?

She was pregnant.

After finding and reading the letter, Mabel was under the impression the lawsuit would bring a large amount of money into Dianne’s hands. This, Dianne later claimed, was something Mabel viewed as the possible windfall of cash she had been looking for all her life. All of a sudden, James was this great person. While Mabel could barely dredge up a good word about him before, now she was praising him any chance she got.

One afternoon, Mabel approached Dianne. “You have to go down to the dock when James gets back and meet him.”

“No, I don’t think I want to make that trip,” Dianne said. “I don’t even know where he’s coming in.”

“No! I think you should
really
try.”

“I’m not going, Mother. Anyway, James’s mother doesn’t want me to go.”

Mabel kept pushing Dianne to “kiss James’s ass” whenever she could, all the while seeing that pot of gold when James returned. She wanted James to feel comfortable, so he would have no ill feelings over sharing the lawsuit money.

“She wanted me to do a lot more than make him feel comfortable. The difference between my mother and I, you see, is that my mother had this god-awful love of money. And I never did. As long as I had enough to survive and make sure my kids had food and shoes, I was fine. I would go out and work hard, even if I had to clean someone’s toilets. My mother was never like that.”

In a way, Mabel thought the world owed her a good life.

Shortly after James returned, Mrs. Hess, who owned the lake house Mabel, Dianne, and James were renting, announced she was selling the house. They would all have to leave.

Dianne and James found an apartment on Lake Road, right down the street. It was a quaint little place above the town’s post office. The missing shingles and weather-beaten paint on the home mattered little to Dianne. It was a place to live. Pregnant, she and James were starting a family.

The only problem with the new living conditions became what to do with Mabel: Where would she live? She didn’t work. She had no money. Who would take care of her?

“At that time,” Dianne said, “James treated me beyond belief. My relationship with him was phenomenal.”

Still, Dianne hadn’t told Mabel she was pregnant. James accepted it, she claimed, and remained “ecstatic,” but she was scared what her mom would say.

Mabel ended up moving in with James and Dianne. There was, Dianne said, nowhere else for her to go. It was clear, from what Dianne later said, that Mabel became a nuisance more than anything else. She was always there in Dianne’s face, and Dianne had a hard time letting her go.

Regarding James and Mabel’s relationship while they set up a family in the new apartment, Dianne said, “[They] were getting along fabulously then. She was big-time kissing his ass. And he thinks she’s the greatest thing since sliced white bread. She went out of her way to cook everything he wanted, make him every kind of pie imaginable, did everything he wanted…. As a matter of fact, in the house we were living, he told me that the kitchen was my mother’s, not mine.”

As the winter of 1978 fell on the Catskills, packing a wallop of snow and subzero temperatures, the apartment Dianne, James, and Mabel were renting turned into an icebox. After the first few nights of below-freezing temperatures, Dianne and James realized quickly that it wasn’t the best place to raise an infant.

Alice Odell
had been born on June 16, 1978. When Alice was about five months old, Dianne worried the apartment was much too cold for her. In what would become an important point to law enforcement some twenty-five years later, Alice was born at Community General Hospital in Harris, New York—without any complications. Dianne had delivered Alice in the setting of a maternity ward, like thousands of other mothers who passed through the doors of the hospital. The baby Dianne called Matthew, whose resting place amounted to a suitcase in a closet, had
not
been born at a hospital, but rather inside the apartment Mabel and Dianne shared. What would become an even bigger issue was that there was no male figure around the house when Matthew was born; yet, when beautiful Alice came into the world, James was part of Dianne’s life.

With the cold air bleeding through the slats of the apartment on Lake Road, a constant reminder that it was just too cold for Alice, Dianne spoke to James about moving. James agreed. It was time, he and Dianne decided, to look for a home of their own. James had money. Why not?

The house they found was not too far away. James didn’t purchase the home outright, but instead he paid the owner a year’s rent. After the year was up, they would see how things had gone and decide what to do. Anyway, moving anytime soon wouldn’t be a good idea. Dianne had another announcement to make.

She was pregnant again.

1

THERE ARE, FOR many cops, defining moments in their careers that they remember for a lifetime. For Detective Bruce Weddle—a happily married man of a few decades, with children and grandchildren of his own—the babies-in-boxes homicide case was beginning to weigh on him emotionally as bits and pieces of the story started coming together. It wasn’t a case of a common drug pusher who had robbed a fellow druggie and ended up with a bullet behind his ear; these were children, infants, three babies who hadn’t a chance at life. Another case, Weddle recalled, that bothered him nearly as much happened in the late ’70s.

There was a strike at one of Arizona’s largest copper mines and union workers had been picketing for a few days out in front of the mines.

“During the strike,” Weddle recalled, “we were put in a position where we were working against the strikers.”

Over a period of a few days, thousands of townspeople had converged and sided with the union. The scene grew intense, building in size and energy as time went on.

“We were on the strike line trying to keep the road open. It put me in an awkward position, because several of the people who were on strike were people I had known very well and grew up with.”

Neighbor against neighbor. Brother against brother.

“It became a very volatile situation, where, at one point, we had somewhere between four hundred and five hundred police officers working the scene.”

It was a moment in Weddle’s career when he found himself conflicted. But what could he do? It was his job. He had to leave friendship and family out of it.

Here now, a proud grandfather and father, Weddle saw three babies wrapped up and placed in boxes as if they didn’t deserve life. This, Weddle said, was something he
could
control. He could find out what happened to the children and allow justice its due course.

But the interview on May 17, 2003, that Thomas and Weddle had conducted with Odell ended up yielding more questions than answers. For one, it was clear Odell was either hiding the truth for some reason, perhaps protecting someone, or she was responsible. Second, neither Thomas nor Weddle had a clear understanding of what had happened to the three dead babies. There was no doubt the children had died shortly after birth. Still, for a murder to have occurred, the children would have to have been born alive. Thus far, there was no proof supporting that theory.

As Odell collected her belongings and prepared to leave the Towanda barracks, Thomas offered her a ride back to Rite Aid, where her car was parked. Odell said sure. But before Thomas had a trooper bring Odell back to Rite Aid, Odell asked Thomas and Weddle for a favor.

“Please don’t mention anything to Robert [Sauerstein] about what we talked about here.”

Odell said she wanted time to talk to Sauerstein. According to Odell, he had no idea the babies even existed. As one might guess, he would be surprised by the news. Sauerstein had been with Odell for eighteen years. Here was this deep, dark secret between them that was now going to be exposed.

No sooner did Odell leave the Towanda barracks did Thomas, Weddle, and McKee drive to Odell and Sauerstein’s home in Rome, Pennsylvania, hoping to speak with Sauerstein before Odell had a chance to talk to him.

“One of the girls at the store (Rite Aid) called me, got me all kind of nervous,” Sauerstein said after Weddle and Thomas knocked on the door and introduced themselves. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“Okay,” Weddle said casually, “what the deal is, we got involved in an investigation”—he looked at Thomas, looked back at Sauerstein—“and your—you and your wife’s name came up as the—as the lead in the investigation back when you lived in Arizona.”

Weddle wasn’t so good at getting his words to flow clearly, but what he said surely piqued Sauerstein’s interest.

“I thought you were here for me,” Sauerstein said, as though a weight had been lifted. Thomas recalled later that Sauerstein, when they first approached him, assumed they were serving an outstanding warrant for previous allegations of child abuse in Arizona.

At first blush, Weddle saw a guy who, he recalled, “grew up in the country. He wasn’t a city-type fella, or anything like that.” The community of Rome, where Odell and Sauerstein had been living, was very rural: one church, town green, general store, local sheriff. “Sauerstein was a little bit on the offensive when we first got there,” Weddle continued. “You see, when he left Arizona, he had a situation there that was possibly pending. He thought it was going to warrant and he thought he was going to be arrested, a child abuse case he was involved in.”

Sauerstein presented himself as a bit standoffish and defensive, but Thomas reassured him that they were there for another reason entirely. It had nothing to do with an outstanding warrant. “No, no,” she said, “we have other things to talk about.”

Sauerstein just stood at the doorway as they continued asking questions. In six months, he would turn fifty-three years old. A small man, compared to his husky common-law wife, Odell, who was five feet six inches, approximately 155 pounds, Sauerstein had needle-straight brown hair tinged with streaks of gray and black. He wore a multicolored shirt—blue, maroon, white—with the logo “Pony” tattooed on the left breast. His pencil-thin beardline merged into a point with his salt-and-pepper goatee. His blue eyes looked tired, worn. He had a pair of reading glasses hanging from his shirt collar.

“Huh!” Sauerstein said when he realized why they were there. He was relieved, but at the same time curious about what was going on.

“You remember,” Weddle asked, “the…You remember, when you lived there [in Arizona]?”

“Yeah.”

Weddle and Thomas stepped back onto the porch, passing an old oven on the front steps; 217 was written in Magic Marker on a wooden pole next to it. The house was small, a bit run-down. For the next few moments, Weddle questioned Sauerstein regarding the time frame he and Odell had lived in Safford.

Then, “What was the purpose of leaving?”

Sauerstein paused and looked down at the wooden slats making up the porch floor. “Well,” he said, “Dianne’s…one of Dianne’s daughters accused me of hitting her, which I didn’t do. And I just, I got scared…I took off.”

Weddle asked if there was an outstanding warrant.

“I hope to God not, ’cause everything is going pretty good for us, I mean, swell.”

“I better tell you that’s not the reason we’re here.”

This seemed to relax Sauerstein, who, according to Odell later, had a “mean streak to him” at times. There was an indication he had run into some trouble in Arizona with law enforcement regarding one of Odell’s daughters, and he had taken off to Texas to avoid possible charges. Investigators and the prosecutor who would go after Odell later said they believed Sauerstein had “abused” some of the children, but he was never prosecuted or convicted.

Thomas and Weddle knew little about Sauerstein. It was a developing case. They were still gathering evidence—information about everyone involved, including Sauerstein, who had to believe that if Thomas and Weddle had traveled all the way from Arizona to ask him questions, it wasn’t for an outstanding warrant.

As the conversation continued, Weddle thought it odd that Sauerstein would allow his children, who were in the house and wandering around the porch area, to listen to what was being said.

“We wanted to get to the point about the babies, and his oldest daughter worked in a small store that was adjacent to the house, almost on the same property,” Weddle recalled. “We suggested to him several times that he might want to ask his children to go inside the house so they couldn’t hear the whole conversation.”

But Sauerstein didn’t. Instead, Weddle said, Sauerstein allowed the children to hover around him and soak up what was being said.

“Sounds like you’re doing a pretty good job,” Weddle said after some small talk, reassuring Sauerstein again that they weren’t there to serve a warrant, “from what I’ve seen so far.”

“Well…”

While Weddle and Sauerstein talked, Thomas sat and listened, being sure not to disturb the flow of the conversation.

Sauerstein started talking about the self-storage unit Odell had rented. Obviously, he didn’t know much about it. He explained how, when he took off to Texas, he didn’t take anything from the unit. Why? Because there was a get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge element to his leaving. Why chance it?

“Do you remember ever making any, ah, rental payments for the storage locker?”

“I don’t handle them,” Sauerstein said, laughing. “I’m bad with money.”

Thomas and Weddle cracked smiles.

“I’m going to tell you why we’re here,” Weddle said.

“Yeah?” Sauerstein said, looking at the two of them.

“Just this week,” Weddle said more seriously, “it’s a week ago today, they had an auction in Safford. What they did and particular storage lockers that y’all rented, to this date nothing’s been done with them.”

“You got to be kidding me?”

Sauerstein had figured—perhaps like Odell—that the items in the storage units had been sold years ago.

“Nope, no, I’m not kidding you.”

“All that stuff been sitting there all this time?”

Weddle explained how the contents had been sold at auction and how Sauerstein and Odell’s names both came up on several of the items inside the boxes. If Sauerstein knew what was inside the boxes, he was doing a fairly decent job of hiding it. It was obvious he had no idea where Weddle was heading with his questioning. As the conversation continued, Sauerstein seemed more interested in where his artwork was than anything else.

“Yeah,” Weddle said, “a couple of pieces of paperwork that might have had your name on it.”

“Some pictures maybe?”

“Pictures, yeah….”

“Art pictures! There was a couple, right? We took the two good ones,” Sauerstein said.

“This would be the tools, clothing, ah, some boxes with some bedding stuff in it.”

“Okay…”

“And inside the boxes with bedding and stuff, in it there was three
dead
babies.”

“What?” Sauerstein said, looking surprised. “You got to be kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding at all,” Weddle said, and then, with perhaps not the best choice of words, added, “I’m dead serious…. That’s why we’re here.”

Sauerstein hung his head in his hands.

Jesus Christ. Three dead babies?

2

Sixty-six-year-old George Hess and his wife, Marie, had lived in Sullivan County, New York, for forty years. In 1973, George and Marie purchased the Rest Bungalows on Kauneonga Lake. They lived in the main house, on the bottom floor, and rented additional rooms and bungalows on the same property.

George later backed up Odell’s story of her and Mabel moving to Kauneonga Lake when Odell was nearly eighteen years old, and, in fact, said he had driven down to Jamaica to pick Odell and Mabel up and move them up to Kauneonga Lake.

“She [was not married],” George recalled later. “My wife and I have known the Molinas for many years. They [lived] in our upstairs apartment.” George knew Dianne was pregnant when she first moved in, he recalled, but “I never knew if [she] had her baby, nor did I ask.”

The Hesses were people, one could speculate, who minded their own business.
Pay the rent on time and we’ll leave you alone.
Marie had been friends with Mabel since they met in Jamaica during the ’30s, and they had written to each other periodically throughout the years after Marie and George moved up north. Some of the letters depicted a mother-daughter type of relationship. It was clear Mabel and Marie were fond of each other.

During the spring of 1979, George and Marie decided to sell the bungalows, and Odell, Mabel, and James moved. Running a hotel, if you will, was too much work for an aging couple. Retirement meant leisure and relaxation. Keeping up a place like the Rest Bungalows took time, hard work, a youthful spirit, and passion for the work that neither of the Hesses had anymore.

“As we were getting ready to move,” George recalled, “I wanted to clean out the attic.”

So George got himself a fold-up ladder and went up into the attic with a flashlight to see how dirty it was. As he began looking around, the first thing he noticed was an old suitcase: “…solid in color with two latches.”

Curious, George decided to open it and look inside.
Maybe someone had left a bundle of money?

As George opened it, a foul odor consumed him. Then he looked down and saw what he thought to be a rubber doll.

“I toyed with the idea of throwing it at my wife,” George recalled jokingly. Marie was standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting for him.

But as quick as George thought about scaring his wife, he said, the smell inside the suitcase overtook him.

Oh, my God Almighty
, George remembered thinking, standing on the ladder, staring at the doll-like figure, taking in the awful odor.

Then he pulled the suitcase closer and took a more concerted look inside. As he did that, he realized it was “the body of a small baby….”

George yelled down, “Marie, you’re not going to believe this.”

With Marie helping him, George lifted the suitcase down the stairs and placed it out by the rear door of the bungalow. After that, he called Mabel.

“I found this suitcase in the attic that is not mine,” he said, “and if it’s yours, well, you had better come and get it.”

“Okay,” Mabel said, and hung up.

Ten, then fifteen minutes went by, George recalled. Mabel lived, at the time, two minutes away. So George called again.

“If you don’t come over and get this suitcase, I am going to call the state police!”

“Okay….”

A minute later, Mabel was standing at the door. “Where is it?”

George handed her the suitcase, and “that was the last time I saw her.”

Not long after Odell, Mabel, and James got comfortable in the house James rented, James came home one night, Odell recalled, with what would turn out to be bad news.

“While James was overseas and before he left to go overseas,” Odell said later, “we were getting along famously. But I didn’t know at that point in time, when he came home permanently, that it was going to be the downfall.”