Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (16 page)

“Contact George and Marie Hess,” Madeline told police. “They may have possible knowledge of the baby you guys found.”

The BCI sent an investigator out to talk to Madeline. Maybe she knew more?

“Rumor has it,” Madeline said, “that the Hesses discovered a suitcase in the attic of the house they had rented to Dianne Odell and her mother, Mabel Molina. It was blue. The Hesses called Mabel and told her to come pick it up and they did.”

This sent the BCI straight to the Hesses, who, in turn, confirmed the story. It was about eight to ten years ago, George Hess explained. “Yes. There was a fetus inside the suitcase. And yes, Mabel picked it up.”

By this time, the DNA had come back, but “an insufficient amount of human DNA was obtained from the evidence materials.” The lab, in effect, didn’t have the resources or the DNA to draw any conclusions.

Lungen still had every reason to believe either Odell or her mother had had something to do with the baby’s death and urged the BCI to continue investigating.

“Question Dianne Odell
again
. See what you can come up with,” Lungen urged.

5

At 1:00 p.m., on Monday, May 19, 2003, after a productive meeting in Wilkes-Barre with Diane Thomas, Bruce Weddle, and several other investigators involved in a strange case that had begun in Arizona a week prior, Steve Lungen and his team left to drive back to New York. The case was now officially his. That much was clear. But he really didn’t have a clue as to what Odell had admitted to, or if he even had enough evidence to consider arresting her. He hadn’t heard the interviews Thomas and Weddle had conducted with Odell, nor had he reviewed the transcripts.

“We decided to drive back to the DA’s office,” Lungen recalled, “and discuss what we had.”

In the interim, as Odell, Sauerstein, and their children were at home in Rome, the media descended upon Odell’s house as if she had announced she were giving a press conference. Several satellite trucks, local news vans, newspaper reporters, and a reporter from the Associated Press had finally figured out what had happened in Pima, Arizona, and tracked Odell down. From inside her home, Odell looked out the window to see the media hovering around the house, waiting for her to emerge. News of a mother killing her children was lead story material. Throughout the past two decades, several high-profile cases had made headlines: Mary Beth Tinning, a Schenectady, New York, woman, who, between 1972 and 1985, murdered nine of her children; Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman, who drowned her two boys by “driving her auto into a lake while the children slept in their car seats” and then blamed their “abductions” on a “black man” more recently, Andrea Yates, a Texas woman, who drowned five of her kids in the family’s bathtub.

In the eyes of the media, Odell was possibly part of that group—a mother who had killed not one or two of her kids, but several. Anytime a frightened teenager, pregnant and alone, went to her prom and left a baby in a toilet, the media whipped itself into a frenzy and ran with the story:
WHY DO MOTHERS KILL THEIR CHILDREN
? Radio and television talk shows, soon after the crimes were reported, were usually inundated with callers looking to try, convict, and sentence these women. It was a social topic that stirred heated debate among Americans—and heated debate, for good or bad, meant ratings. But a mother who could have killed several of her children? Now, that was a story.

“The media was banging on the door, driving my dog crazy,” Odell recalled.

As Odell tried to figure out what to do, Sauerstein, knowing the situation would only escalate as the day progressed, began to think of a way to get Odell out of the house without anyone seeing her. Additionally, the kids would be coming home from school soon, and reporters would question them as they got off the bus.

“I told Robert, ‘I’m going to have to get out of here and see if I can drag them (the media) with me.’ I wanted to sit down and talk to my family as a whole and explain everything that had happened from beginning to end. I didn’t want them reading about me in the newspaper.”

For a prosecutor, the media was, generally, an annoyance early on in any potential murder case, waiting, hovering, looking for information. Prosecutors were good at molding media contacts and putting out information to assist their cases, but Lungen, at this point, likely knew less than the media. He was convinced they were only going to get in the way and make matters worse. Yet, little did anyone know at the time, but the frenzied gathering outside of Odell’s home would, in the coming hours, be an asset to Lungen and his team as they headed back to New York to discuss how to proceed with the case.

As 2:00
P.M
. approached, Thomas Scileppi, senior investigator for the BCI in Liberty, drove with his partner in one vehicle from Wilkes-Barre, while Lungen, Paul Hans, and Robert Rowan—Lungen’s investigators—drove in a second vehicle behind them. It was a two-hour trip back to Monticello. Although the trip was perhaps long, it would encourage the opportunity for the four men to discuss the case via two-way radios and cell phones.

There was a lot to do.

The first “holy shit” moment of the day, as Lungen and Hans later described it, became the case itself.

“This is a twenty-five-year-old case,” Lungen explained, “three dead babies, a fourth dead baby some thirty years ago! How can a legal case of murder be made out of
this
? That’s what we were looking at in the beginning. From my perspective as the DA, when we left [Pennsylvania], I knew we needed to get a game plan together quickly. For one, Odell wasn’t under arrest; she was out walking around.”

There was one problem that worried Lungen at that moment more than anything else, however. “What if she gets a lawyer?” Another problem—at least it seemed like a problem to Lungen as they began to make their way back to Monticello—was the “national media,” who were calling Lungen’s office looking for information and also calling the PSP in Towanda, the closest barracks to Odell’s home in Rome. As a prosecutor, Lungen had become accustomed to telling the media to take a hike. The last thing a competent DA would have done was release pertinent information to the public as a case developed. The less information a suspect had as investigators began digging into his or her life, the better off the DA’s office was. The media—nine times out of ten—hampered this process and made it difficult for everyone to do their jobs.

Even more important was that a pathologist in Pima, Arizona, who had autopsied the three babies, hadn’t yet come up with a cause of death. Everyone was still waiting. Lungen had called Dr. Baden—who vaguely recalled the 1989 case of Baby Doe he had been involved in—and told him to call Arizona to see what he could find out. Baden said he would.

“Were they stillborn babies?” Lungen recalled later, talking about those early moments of the case as it unfolded. “Were they alive babies? Were they dead babies? We needed to know all of this.”

Heading north on Interstate 81, about an hour into their two-hour trip, Lungen, after talking to Scileppi several times over his cell phone, made a decision to meet at Lungen’s office to figure how best to approach the case.

Strategize! Toss out ideas. Gather the troops and decide on a first move.

Odell held most of the answers. Lungen needed his people to talk to her. Yet, how could he approach her? She was in Pennsylvania; they were on their way to New York.

“There was no way in hell,” Lungen said, “Odell was going to drive herself to New York to be questioned by us.”

No suspect in her right mind would. It was a matter of extradition and legal maneuvering. How was Lungen going to get an arrest warrant together? How were they going to get Odell to New York State? Once she spoke to a lawyer, she was all finished talking. But as Lungen and Scileppi continued to discuss the case over the phone, “all hell broke loose,” Lungen said, “when we received a phone call that changed everything.”

1

WHEN ROY STREEVER went back and spoke to Odell in March 1989 for a second time regarding the fetus found in the blue suitcase, she was prepared, she said, to explain fully what had happened to the child. It wasn’t that Streever radiated some sort of magical charm, making Odell feel comfortable about opening up; instead, Streever did what any cop in his position might have done: he presented Odell with the facts in the case as the BCI had uncovered them thus far. And as soon as he mentioned the interview the BCI had done with George and Marie Hess, along with a few more details the BCI had since found out, Odell, in what would be a recurring theme throughout her life later on, “recanted,” a police report described, “her original story….”

Odell said, “Let me explain what happened,” as Streever and his partner walked into her home.

“Please, ma’am, we’re all ears here,” Streever said smartly.

Odell admitted the “fetus was hers.” It was “still-borned about seventeen years ago,” she said. As to whom the father was, Odell claimed the pregnancy was from “a one-night stand.” Then, “Around the eighth month of the pregnancy, I visited my father, John Molina, in Jamaica, Queens. After I told him I was pregnant, he became abusive and struck me about the body with a cat-o’-nine tails about fifteen times.” Additionally, “I started vaginal bleeding during the night and it continued during the ride back to the lake the next day.” Returning home, Odell said, she “bed rested, telling her mother she had a cold.”

Later on that night, Odell further explained—as Streever took notes and his partner looked on—“I felt like a bowel movement and I sat on the toilet only to have the fetus come out…. The fetus was not breathing and my attempts to get the female baby to do so were to no avail.”

“Did the baby move?” Streever asked.

Odell said, “The baby did not move, nor was their any warmth to her.”

There it was:
her.
Odell had it said twice. Only later would she change her story and call the baby “Matthew.”

By the time Streever and his partner were finished, they learned Odell had, after realizing the child was dead, stuffed it into a “blue suitcase” and “kept it underneath her bed.” Whenever she and her mother moved, she said, she would take the suitcase and store it in the closet. In 1981, she put the suitcase in her Volkswagen—and for the next eight years there it stayed.

What was interesting to Streever later—and just about everyone else involved in the case on the prosecution’s side—was the fact that as Streever and his partner stood in Odell’s living room, talking to her that day in 1989, there, just to the left of where they stood, not five feet away, were three boxes containing three more dead babies, which wouldn’t be discovered for nearly fifteen years.

“I’ve pondered that one myself,” Streever said later. “Almost makes you feel like you screwed up because you didn’t figure that out. We were concerned about one baby. But who the hell knew there were three more…?

“We were pleased she finally came around and admitted Baby Doe was hers,” Streever added. “Whether or not she told the true version of the events, we were at least happy to be able to close the case out and have a statement from her that she had, in fact, given birth.”

A few days later, BCI investigators interviewed Mabel. Beyond admitting she had retrieved a blue suitcase from George and Marie Hess’s home, Mabel kept quiet about what she knew, if indeed she knew anything. She said she recalled taking the suitcase from the Hesses’, but said she never looked inside it and, in turn, gave it to Odell to do with it as she wished.

The case against Odell in 1989 was at best manslaughter, yet it all hinged on what Dr. Baden could find.

“Dr. Michael Baden was on board,” Streever remembered, “and he was telling us he was going to be able to pinpoint pretty close to the time of death, whether the baby ever lived, et cetera. So we were kind of banking on him. But when the autopsy report finally came out, he narrowed it down to about a thirty-year span. He could not determine whether it was born alive or stillborn.”

With no forensics and no real hard evidence against Odell, the BCI was left with only the two statements from Odell, which contradicted each other. Most important, John Molina, who had allegedly beaten Odell and killed the baby, had died in 1981. It was Odell’s word against his. She was young, single at the time, living with her mother. Now she had six living children. Was there a jury that would convict her?

On March 25, 1989, senior BCI investigator Edward McKenna “conferred with DA Lungen” regarding the case against Odell. Lungen was “satisfied,” he said during the meeting, with Odell’s explanation of the events and the legal fact that “no homicide or self-abortion had occurred.” Even more interesting was the idea that Lungen considered prosecuting John Molina “for manslaughter and for causing the miscarriage of an almost full-term baby….”

Seeing that John Molina was pushing up dirt in a Queens cemetery, Lungen concluded the “manslaughter case will be adopted and closed by exceptional clearance….” Lungen even took it a step further, promising in writing how he “would not seek criminal action against any of the other actors involved: Dianne Odell, her mother, Mabel Molina, or the Hesses, for their improper handling of the remains….”

One of the reasons—the main reason, actually—Odell repeatedly gave for toting around the corpses of her many dead babies was to be able to bury them at or near a location where she would eventually pitch her tent for good. On numerous occasions, she later said she wanted the babies close to her so she could one day give them a proper burial.

On March 26, 1989, she had that opportunity. Because BCI investigators went to Odell and, seeing that the case was now closed, asked her what she wanted to do with the remains of Baby Doe.

“She does not wish to bury the fetus,” the investigator who spoke to Odell that day wrote in his report, “but wants Sullivan County Social Services to do so.”

On the receipt, Odell released the remains of Baby Doe to the “State of New York.”

“Further, that on this…date, I relinquish all claims to said fetus, and turn her remains over to the Sullivan County Department of Social Services…for proper burial.”

In the end, the state of New York would bury the baby at a place and time of its choice.

2

Robert McKee, a PSP trooper who had been involved with Detectives Thomas and Weddle and their investigation into the three dead babies found in Arizona, had met with Lungen and his team on May 19 in Wilkes-Barre. McKee was heading back to Towanda later that afternoon as Lungen and his investigators headed toward New York, when he received a call from the Towanda barracks eventually turning the investigation entirely upside down for Lungen.

“We received calls from the Sauersteins saying they are being inundated with news media from around the country,” the dispatcher told McKee over the radio.

For a brief moment, McKee paused. Then, “Go ahead, base, what else?”

“Well, they are basically asking us if we can send a trooper over there to help them (or handle) the news media…. I don’t know what to tell them?”

“Listen,” McKee said, “tell her that if she has someplace to go or could get to someplace else, and if she could leave without being seen, to please attempt to do that.”

“Ten-four.”

About five minutes went by. Then McKee, still traveling back to Towanda, received a second call.

“Go ahead. What’s going on now? What did she say?”

“She said she’s going to be coming to the [Towanda] barracks.”

Odell was in a state of panic. The media was bearing down on her home and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Knocks at the door. Phone calls. Reporters hovering around the road leading up to her home. Odell was inside, running from window to window, paranoid, staring, watching, wondering how the hell to get rid of them. She was worried mainly, she said later, for her children’s well-being and what word about what had happened in Arizona would do to the kids at school.
Your mommy is a baby killer.
Some kids could be cruel. The jokes. The jarring. Odell was terrified that if any of the major news media outlets got hold of the story and twisted it into something it wasn’t, no one in her family would be able to leave the house.

Trooper McKee had been with the state police for ten years. He was a smart, well-liked cop and, with the gut instincts of a fox, knew what he had to do. As he waited to hear from dispatch to see what time Odell would be arriving at the barracks, he phoned Scileppi to inform him what was going on.

The problem Lungen had faced—getting Odell out of her house and into the barracks—seemed, at that moment, to have taken care of itself. Odell was actually voluntarily driving herself to the Towanda barracks. What more could Lungen ask for?

Born in Queens, New York, senior BCI investigator Thomas Scileppi was fifty-one years old in May 2003 when he became actively involved in the Odell investigation. At five feet ten inches, 170 pounds, the white- and gray-haired, brown-eyed investigator had joined the navy after graduating high school in the late ’60s—and for the next four years spent his days and nights inside the belly of a submarine. His law enforcement career began on February 21, 1977, when he decided to apply to the NYSP. From there, he spent the next six months banging it out with other wanna-be cops at the NYSP Academy in Albany.

“At the time,” Scileppi recalled, “I took an eight-thousand-dollar cut in pay and nobody could believe I would leave the navy. I had always wanted to be a trooper and considered state police troopers to be ‘the elite.’ I had several friends that were New York City, Nassau and Suffolk County police officers. I had taken all those tests, too, and passed. But my heart was set on being a trooper.”

Scileppi got lucky. There had been a four-year hiring freeze on state cops, but he scored “extremely well on the entrance test and was among the first class hired” after the freeze.

“At the time, I was married to my first wife and had one son, who was only two. I was sworn in—the cut in pay really hurt—had another child with my first wife, and then got divorced.”

Eventually Scileppi remarried; she was a local woman, Diane, a teacher, who had one daughter, Jessica, from a previous marriage.

Like most cops, Scileppi had seen it all. Rising up through the ranks to become senior investigator in Liberty had not always been easy, but Scileppi said he would not trade his experiences for anything.

“One of the worst days that I’ll never forget, one that had an immense impact on me, happened in November 1988.”

Scileppi had been working with Roy Streever at the time. They were attempting to locate a “subject” with an outstanding warrant against him.

“We were in Middletown, New York, that day and the weather was terrible: stormy, extremely windy, and heavy, heavy rain. We had heard several radio transmissions and a large request for emergency fire and rescue and police units to respond to the Coldenham Elementary School, nearby in Middletown. So we responded.”

When Streever and Scileppi arrived on scene, they were amazed. A tornado had quickly touched down in the area near the elementary school and subsequently hit the wall where the school cafeteria had been. Kids were eating lunch at the time. The upper portion of the wall was made of glass and cinder blocks.

“Several children were buried under the mess,” Scileppi remembered. “It was terrible. Parents were naturally arriving, having heard what had happened. It was chaos. Numerous deaths. I’ll never forget escorting the parents into the emergency room to identify their deceased children. It still bothers me to this day.”

When McKee got Scileppi on the phone, after hearing Odell was on her way to the Towanda barracks, Scileppi couldn’t believe it. He had just gotten off the phone with Lungen, and they had discussed that very situation. Now Odell was being delivered to them, all they had to do was change course and head for Towanda.

“We’re heading to Towanda now,” Scileppi said. “We’d like to interview her tonight, if we can.”

The situation still posed a problem for Lungen: they weren’t going to be interviewing Odell in New York, where the case would, he knew, end up eventually. Pennsylvania would suffice for now, but the goal was to get Odell into the state of New York, where the case, if it came down to it, would eventually be prosecuted.

As Scileppi and Lungen changed course, still about an hour and a half outside of Towanda, they discussed how to go about questioning Odell out of their jurisdiction. If it came down to a trial, perhaps anything they got from Odell in Pennsylvania would not be admissible in New York. Was it something Lungen wanted to take a chance at?

Yet, there was still one other major dilemma….

“Before she got lawyered up,” Scileppi said, “we wanted to interview her. But we needed to go back to Towanda and listen to those tapes between Odell and Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle before we spoke to her.”

The tapes were the core of the case. Lungen and Scileppi had no idea of the substance of those tapes. They had been told Odell had contradicted herself several times and even changed her story on numerous occasions. But they still needed factual information. The last thing a cop wanted to do was go into an interview without any knowledge of the case.

“We were at a disadvantage without listening to those tapes,” Scileppi said.

The original plan had been to drive back to Monticello and, along with several other investigators from the Major Crimes Unit in Liberty (Scileppi’s team), sit down and listen to what amounted to five hours of taped interviews between Odell, Thomas, and Weddle. If there was any information of any value on the tapes, they were going to set up an interview with Odell for Tuesday morning and question her further.

But all that had changed now that Odell was on her way to Towanda.

3

After Odell made it through the horror of being accused of murdering her firstborn child, Baby Doe, she tried to settle into life as best she could. Not only did she have five children to raise with her paramour, Robert Sauerstein, but she was five months into her tenth pregnancy. The stress alone of the past few days was enough, she certainly knew, to potentially cause problems.