Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (12 page)

Sauerstein agreed to call Odell, but said he couldn’t make any promises.

“I told them,” Sauerstein said later, “that Dianne wanted to talk to a lawyer first, which I agreed with.”

After a few brief moments on the phone with Odell, Sauerstein indicated she was willing to come in and talk, providing she had a ride.

“Great,” Thomas said, “we can wrap this thing up and get back home.”

Weddle took off to Rome with a PSP trooper while Thomas stayed behind with Sauerstein. Round-trip, it would take about thirty minutes to return with Odell.

When Odell arrived, the first thing she did was walk off with PSP trooper Gerald Williams into the fingerprinting area of the barracks and “voluntarily,” Williams said later in his report, submit to fingerprinting. Williams had been a member of the PSP for twelve years, the last seven as a criminal investigator. He worked out of the Wyoming, Pennsylvania, barracks, which covered Luzerne County, or the northeastern section of the state. As a criminal investigator, he was part of a task force responsible for four different counties: Luzerne, Wyoming, Sullivan, Branford. Part of his job was to assist in all counties. Having heard that investigators from Arizona were working on a case in Rome, Williams was brought in to help out where he could.

It was 3:30
P.M
. when Williams fingerprinted Odell. The day was getting long for everyone. Odell looked tired and worn down, most likely from a night without much sleep. Her hair was uncombed, hugging her shoulders. She wore little makeup, had dark yellow-and-black—bruiselike—bags under her brown eyes. As she sat on a bench in front of a white-brick wall and Williams photographed her, she frowned and looked away. In another photograph, she stared blankly into the camera, her face bearing an expression of guilt:
Let’s get this over with.

After Williams finished fingerprinting her, Odell wiped the ink off her hands. Williams asked her if she was willing to speak to Thomas, Weddle, and himself about the three dead babies.

“You’re not under arrest,” Williams added, “and you can decline to speak to us. You’re free, in fact, to leave if you want, anytime you wish.”

Williams later said Odell thought about it for a moment and said, “Okay. Let’s talk.”

Odell remembered this same scenario a bit differently. She insisted that Williams told her she “couldn’t have a lawyer.”

Odell recalled, “There was about fifteen minutes of conversation that day that wasn’t recorded. I never decided anything. I went in to give them my fingerprints and they moved me into a conference room and that’s when…Williams said, ‘This isn’t going to go away; you’re going to have to talk to us.’ My reply to him was ‘I want to talk to a lawyer.’”

At that point, she claimed, Williams folded his hands over his chest and said, “No, you don’t need a lawyer. What would you need a lawyer for? The only thing a lawyer is going to do is tell you to keep your mouth shut.”

“Those were his words to me,” she added. “And my husband was there to hear it.”

Sauerstein claimed Odell asked for an attorney “several times,” but she was denied each request.

Trooper Williams later testified under oath that everything he, Thomas, and Weddle did that day was done with Odell’s consent. After all, Odell could have left the barracks anytime she wanted. She was never under arrest. On top of that, she had expressed to Thomas over the phone before returning to the barracks that she wanted to converse with an attorney, yet she didn’t bring one with her when she voluntarily returned to Towanda.

As Odell talked to Williams in one room, Weddle and Thomas, in another room, discussed how they were going to go about questioning her, banking on the notion she would agree to be questioned. It couldn’t be a touch-and-go–type interview; they had been down that road once already and Odell seemed to be, they now believed, evasive, hiding things.

“I have an idea,” Weddle suggested to Thomas. “Let’s lay out the photos of the babies as we found them in the boxes and bags.”

“Good, Bruce,” Thomas said. “Let’s give it a shot.”

A time usually came in any investigation when a suspect needed to be nudged. Generally speaking, a photo, or piece of evidence, might push a suspect over the edge and take them back to the time of the crime, stirring their memory a bit. Not that Odell had killed the babies, but maybe she knew what had happened. Seeing the horrific photographs, their tiny mummified and decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic, might break her.

Weddle took out a half-dozen photographs and scattered them on the table in the interview room, which was directly down the hallway and around the corner from where Odell had been fingerprinted. Then he placed white pieces of paper over each photograph. When the time came, he would ask Odell to look down, then remove the paper and expose the photographs. It was a hit-or-miss opportunity. She would either open up or leave.

“We were hoping it might shock her,” Weddle said, “to the point that she’s going to know that we know about the babies and the jig is up and it’s time to get down to business.”

As Odell and Williams walked out of the fingerprint area toward the interview room, Odell told him she “wanted to get her house in order” before she spoke to anyone else.

“It’s my younger son,” she said. “I’ll come back to the station tomorrow. I need to make sure
Brendon
is going to be okay.”

“Let me ask you something,” Williams said, walking with Odell, “why would you have to ‘get your house in order’ and provide for Brendon?”

Odell bowed her head, spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. “I want to speak to an attorney for civil purposes; mainly, to arrange living arrangements for Brendon because…Robert, my husband, doesn’t treat Brendon very well.”

In retrospect, it was an odd statement—as if Odell knew she was going to be detained by Weddle and Thomas. No one had mentioned the idea of her being arrested. She hadn’t been read her Miranda rights, but she took it upon herself to insinuate that whatever she was going to be talking about would somehow keep her at the barracks.

“They don’t get along so well,” Odell continued, meaning Brendon and Sauerstein. “I fear for his safety. Their relationship is like water and rock. They don’t mix well together.”

Once again, Odell later explained this same conversation with Williams—as she would with many of the conversations she had with law enforcement during that same period—differently.

“It wasn’t even Brendon,” she claimed, “that I wanted taken care of. They don’t even have the facts correct! That’s what I’m saying….” Brendon was 14 at the time. “It was
Adam
” who was fifteen and “…had reached that age of rebellion. I wanted to make sure he was taken care of. And without me there…who knows?” Odell wanted Adam to go down to Florida to live with one of his sisters, she said, where “he could have a fairly normal life. [His sister] would make sure he toed the mark. But more important, I wouldn’t have to worry about him and his father getting into it. There was a clash of personalities from the beginning. I didn’t want my son to feel the weight of what was about to happen because he had always been extremely close to me.”

“Is that the only reason why you would want to speak to an attorney?” Williams later said he asked Odell as they continued walking toward the room where Weddle and Thomas were waiting.

“Yes.”

“Listen, I want to be clear on this: you are not under arrest, you can leave here at any time. No matter what you have to say to us, you are going home tonight. Do you understand that?”

Odell started crying. “Okay, I am willing to speak with you….”

Just then, Williams and Odell reached the room. Weddle and Thomas were outside the room, buzzing around, waiting for them.

Then, as Odell and Williams made their way down the hallway, with Thomas standing by the doorway of the interview room, Weddle said, “Dianne, do you think we could talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure,” she said, heading into the room; Thomas, Sauerstein, Williams, and Weddle were behind her.

When they got into the room, Sauerstein said, Odell sat in between Williams and Thomas.

“They were kind of [nice to her],” Sauerstein remembered. “There was no bad cop/good cop. Now it’s nice cop/nice cop.”

“I want to talk to a lawyer,” Sauerstein remembered Odell saying again as she sat there.

At that point, Sauerstein said, Trooper Williams blurted out: “Why would you want to talk to a lawyer? A lawyer will just tell you not to say anything!”

Within a few minutes, Weddle walked over to the table where the photographs were covered with white paper and exposed a photograph showing one of the boxes the babies had been found in. The garbage bag the baby had been wrapped with was open, revealing the decomposing corpse. Thomas and Weddle were a bit flustered, only because they weren’t set up for a formal interview, meaning they didn’t have their tape recorder running. If Odell was ready to confess to a crime, having a confession on tape would be essential to the case later on.

“Do you know what those are?” Weddle asked, looking at Odell, pointing to the photographs.

Odell shook her head. “They look like bags of garbage,” Weddle recalled Odell saying at that point.

“Well, Miss Odell, that’s what they’ve been treated like—garbage.”

Thomas and Williams looked at each other.

This is it….

Weddle continued: “There’s dead babies in those bags, and you’re the one who knows what the situation was and why those babies were in those bags.” Weddle, who spoke with a noticeable Western brogue, paused for a moment to allow Odell a chance to think about the images. Then, “We don’t intend on leaving Pennsylvania, Miss Odell,” he continued, “until we find out from you what happened.”

Odell, looking at the photograph, then blurted out, “If that’s what you need, okay, the babies are mine. I’ve withheld this information for years….”

Weddle, Thomas, and Williams later corroborated the statement.

“It seemed to me,” Williams recalled, “as if it was like a big burden would be relieved off of her shoulders. That’s how it appeared to me.”

With that information now exposed, Thomas immediately went for her tape recorder and explained to Odell how they needed to get her statement, and whatever else she wanted to say, on tape.

Sauerstein, who had been in the room, was asked to leave and stand on the opposite side of a two-way mirror, in another room, where he could watch and listen.

By 4:00
P.M
., Thomas had her tape recorder on the table in front of Odell, the wheels of the cassette tape squeaking and turning.

“You have already indicated a few things to us,” Thomas said into the microphone, “that we would like to have you go through again so that we have it on the tape recording. You agreed to speak to us?”

“I already agreed to that,” Odell said, crying.

“Okay, go ahead if you would, please, the first thing that we were talking about is the babies that we in Arizona had found that were in the storage unit. Okay, go ahead.”

Odell took a deep breath.
It’ll be okay. Just tell the truth. Get it over with.
She kept repeating this to herself as she tried to figure out what to say first.

1

“THERE WAS A gentleman,” Odell recalled, “between James and his brother, I dated.”

It was 1981, she explained.
Mark Ingalls
was a good-looking man in his late thirties who had worked around the apartment as a handyman. Odell said she noticed him, of course, because he was always around, but he meant little to her. Just another drifter who had showed up one day and wound up sticking around after finding work.

It was Mabel, Odell claimed, who pursued Mark, professing to be acting on her behalf. Mabel had heard that Mark, a Vietnam veteran, had filed a “large class-action lawsuit against the government over an Agent Orange” issue. Mabel saw a huge payoff coming his way. So she pressured Odell into dating him in order to get her hands on what was a potential windfall of cash.

“He was nice enough,” Odell recalled, “but he was
not
what I was looking for. I did not want this relationship. I wanted to be left alone…. I had had enough of men being in my life. I was angry at any man who would ask me to do anything. Because all of my life, all of the men in my life, in my family, all the way up to my husband, always telling me what I could do and when I could do it, what I should be saying.”

It was because of this controlling atmosphere, coupled with the fact that she had lived under the power of her mother’s hand for so long, that drove Odell to push men away entirely. Still, to appease Mabel, she began dating Mark—and, within a few months, guess what?

She was pregnant. But Mark never knew, she claimed.

“It [the relationship] was long gone and finished” by the time she found out she was pregnant. But there she was, once again pregnant and husbandless, wondering what she was going to do. She’d had three (living) children already, no child support coming in, and was working a dead-end job just to survive.

One of the first things Odell said she did was go to her mother with the news: “I’m pregnant, Mom.”

Mabel just stared at her. Then, “I can help. One phone call and everything can be taken care of.”

“I don’t think so,
Mother.
I don’t want
that
kind of help.”

Mabel was talking about an abortion, of course. She had mentioned it many times before, during Odell’s previous pregnancies.

Unlike the preceding three living children Odell had given birth to, she claimed she didn’t receive prenatal care for this child because she didn’t want Mabel “squawking about money.” Additionally, she said she was scared of leaving her living children alone with Mabel “any more than I absolutely had to.”

Moreover, she said she learned a lesson during her three previous births: that the hospital would send her home if her contractions weren’t close enough apart. Because of that, she claimed, she waited until “the pains were close enough not to send me back home.” When the time came, she said, she gave her three girls—Alice, Maryann, and Doris—a bath and put them to bed. “Just like a normal night.”

Earlier that same day, she’d warned Mabel she was in labor. “You’ll probably have to watch the girls for a while…. I won’t be able to get up and take care of them.”

As the pains became unbearable later on, Mabel began soothing her. “Lay down for a while, take the stress off of your back,” she said, rubbing Odell’s shoulders, massaging her back.

Odell rested for a while, she remembered, and “when I stood up, my water broke.”

“Call an ambulance, Mother,” she said she “begged.” Mabel was in another room. At that point, she knew she couldn’t drive herself to the hospital, so she began pleading with Mabel for help—that is, help with finding a way to the hospital.

Sitting on the couch, waiting, wondering where the ambulance was, she believed Mabel had called 911. With the pain now so severe she could hardly move, everything became secondary to the fact that the baby was coming, regardless of whether there was an ambulance on the way.

Moments later, as the pain “became so bad” it felt as though the baby was “coming out,” natural instinct took over as Odell said she began to push. As she did that, she started experiencing a “loud ringing or buzzing in [her] ears.

“I couldn’t hear myself speaking anymore.”

The next thing she remembered, when she recalled the episode later, was “my mother by my feet, bent down with her hands moving.” She doesn’t recall “hearing or seeing” the baby, contrary to what would become a major legal issue later on.

“I started to panic,” she said, “and I tried to stand up.”

That was when “my mother got up with the baby in her arms and walked away.”

As Odell stood, she said, she “passed out.”

“When I woke up, the baby was wrapped in a blanket lying next to me.”

Mabel then walked into the room.

“What happened?” Odell asked, looking at her mother.

“It had breathing difficulties,” Mabel said.

“We
have
to get an ambulance here right now!”

“Okay…but you know what they’ll say: that it was done deliberately!”

“
What
, Mother, was done deliberately?”

“You know, Dianne, what was done.”

Odell just looked at Mabel:
what are you talking about?

“Come to think of it, you better go bury that thing and throw it out!” Odell recalled Mabel telling her at that point.

“When she said that to me, I felt like I was going to break into a million pieces.”

“I’ll get the girls, Dianne, and
you
won’t be around anymore,” Mabel continued, referring to how it would play out if the police were called in and eventually found out what happened.

“My mind felt like it was in a blender,” Odell recalled, speaking of that day when she says her mother killed Baby Number One. “Knowing what she was capable of, I made the only choice I could make.”

“I wasn’t letting her take my girls.”

2

So Thomas and Weddle were at the Towanda barracks on May 18, 2003, ready to hear from Odell what had happened to the three babies. Thomas had her tape recorder running and Odell, in tears, was finally going to give them an account of what would be the first of two different versions of what had happened.

Thomas stared at Odell while Weddle, waiting patiently, said, “Come on, Dianne, it’s okay. Take your time.”

“They’re my children,” Odell said. “The first one occurred as a—as a rape, umm…. I went the whole nine months, didn’t see a doctor, didn’t have any medical attention at all. The delivery came and I knew the baby was coming because I had already had [three other children] and I had tried to, I felt I could deliver this myself.”

There was no mention of Mabel standing below her and then handing her a dead child after she had passed out and woken up.

Thomas and Weddle were well-trained investigators; they knew to allow Odell the space she needed to talk it through.

Don’t cut in. Don’t stop her. Let her go.

On the other hand, what Odell was now saying, in many ways, was a lot to swallow. According to Odell, she had given birth to three healthy children, all in hospitals without complication, but decided, for whatever the reason, to deliver a fourth baby by herself at home.

“Unfortunately, what had happened,” Odell continued, “once the baby came out and I ended up passing out and I don’t know for how long, but I don’t know, umm…anything more than I pushed and went back, that was it.”

She took a break for a moment and sipped from a glass of water in front of her. Then, “I don’t know if the baby cried, I don’t. I have no knowledge of that. When I woke, when I came to, I kind of leaned on my side and I felt like I was going to pass out again, and I leaned back, umm…kind of caught a deep breath and I remember taking, oh, whatever was underneath me, towels or whatever it was, and trying to prop my body half up so that I could try and sit up.”

So far, she hadn’t admitted to a crime. She was careful to say she hadn’t heard the baby cry. Thus, if the baby hadn’t been born alive, there’s no way it could have been murdered. But interestingly enough—and, of course, Weddle and Thomas had no idea how large a role it would play later on—was that nowhere in Odell’s statement was Mabel participating in the birth.

“I succeeded in doing that,” Odell continued, referring to propping herself up, “but as I did, I must have started to bleed heavily again because I could feel that, not tunnel vision, it’s kind of like a light-headedness and darkness comes over you and you’re…and that’s it, and that happened.”

She was nervous. Shaking. Taking sips of water. Blowing her nose. Wiping away tears.

“And when I came to, I had tried to…umm…clean the baby’s throat out and see if the baby would breathe on its own because I had no way of knowing how long I had been out and it didn’t…. And then panic took over, panic and fear and confusion, and I don’t know what all else….”

“What year was that?” Weddle asked.

“Maybe 1982, 1983, or 1984.”

“Was this your fourth child?”

“Yes.”

“So you had three girls…and this would have been your fourth?”

The three girls Weddle was referring to had been fathered by James Odell.

“Right.”

“Where did the birth occur?”

“In a place called Hamilton House in White Lake, New York.”

After Weddle tried getting Odell to pin down an exact time of year, he asked her to continue.

“Well, I knew the baby was, umm…That it was at nighttime, but it was getting late in the morning and I knew my mother would be showing up…and umm…I took the baby and wrapped it up in what it was laying in. I think it was a towel, but I’m not even sure, and I put the baby in the closet. I had climbed into bed and I propped my bottom up so I would stop feeling that feeling of passing out. And I stayed in bed for three days until I had, I felt I had enough strength to get up, because between the time I got into bed and I felt well enough to get up. When I had to go to the bathroom, I used to crawl on my hands and knees to go to the bathroom.”

So, Mabel hadn’t even been there at the time of the birth.

Furthermore, as Thomas and Weddle listened, it occurred to them that the scenario Odell had just described could have happened once—but
three
times? Not a chance.

Weddle wanted to know how Odell provided care for her living children while she was laid up in bed for the three days.

Odell said the children “went into a different kind of mode, you know, like they were taking care of mom—”

Thomas cut in. “You said you put the baby in the closet because you knew your mother was coming over. Did she ever show up the next morning, or in the next few days?”

“Yes, she did. Yes.” Odell looked down.

“Did she notice anything? Had you been able to clean up your bed area, or wherever you had the baby?”

“Everything was on those towels and the towels were folded up and around the baby and in the closet.”

“Okay.”

“There really wasn’t too much to be cleaned up. I remember at one point or another, I had to, there was a spot on the rug or on the floor, I forget which it was, but there was a spot that I needed to clean up and I, umm, managed to get myself to the bathroom and get a washcloth and I just washed that up.”

In the context of time, it appeared that Odell had an incredible memory. It had been at least twenty years since the incident. Yet, here she was recalling, in vivid detail, spots on the rug, towels, washcloths, as though it had taken place a week ago.

Odell then explained how she “healed up” without the help of a doctor.

“Do you know the name of the father of this child?” Weddle asked.

“No.”

“It was just a rape incident, by an unknown assailant, an unknown person?”

Odell shook her head. “Uh-huh.”

“So you were never able to obtain the name of that person, the father?”

“No.”

“Were you even able to obtain or find out, did you know the sex of the baby?”

“I probably did, but I couldn’t recall to you. I don’t remember.”

Remarkable. She could recall precise details about the birth and spots on the rug she had cleaned up, but not the sex of her child? It was as if the baby were an anomaly—some nuisance that had no name, no father, no gender, no life. Could a woman carry a baby for nine months, give birth to it, and
not
know the sex of that child?

As the interview progressed, Odell began to somewhat change her story. But what she was about to tell Weddle and Thomas, as Williams sat and listened, would turn an investigation of the life and death of three babies into three separate cases of murder.

3

Hubert Odell, James Odell’s brother, showed up at the lake toward the end of 1982, not too long after Odell had given birth to Baby Number One.

“I don’t know how true this is on his end,” Odell said, “but [Hubert] said he came up to the lake to visit his nieces. I never had a problem with any of James’s brothers, so it was okay.”

Odell never tried to get too involved in that end of the Odell family because “each member…had their own set of problems.” Moreover, it was hard to be around an Odell because certain members of the family “reminded me of my father.”

Regardless, she and Hubert struck up a friendship that turned into an intimate relationship, but again, only at the urging, she claimed, of Mabel.

“At that point in time, [Hubert] had the potential to make a tremendous amount of money…dollar signs in my mother’s eyes. She believed if I was able to get close to him, she could manipulate some of that money out of him.”

Again and again, Odell said, Mabel’s quest for the cash-cow husband led her down a path of meeting men, sleeping with them, and becoming pregnant.

Hubert ended up getting into a bad car accident one day, which set him back. Then, Odell said, he borrowed some money from Mabel.

“He borrowed, I think it was, five hundred dollars. And the moment he borrowed that five hundred, that was it for him: he was screwed royally. You never borrowed money from my mother. You
gave
her money, but you
never
borrowed it.”