Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (21 page)

A few weeks later, he returned to the house to pick up an item he had left behind. Mabel answered the door. “I forgot a kitchen utensil,” he said.

“Wait here. I’ll get it.”

Dandignac walked into the foyer area. Odell was standing there as he walked by.

“Hello” was all she said.

Dandignac said hello back, grabbed the kitchen utensil from Mabel, and walked out. It was the last time he would see or hear from Odell for nearly eighteen years. As far as how Odell and Mabel got along, David said they had a “good relationship….” Mabel was a “nice lady.” As far as what happened to the baby, he said he never knew or found out.

After the BCI tracked him down during the summer of 2003, Dandignac agreed to give a DNA sample. Baby Number Three, born sometime in 1985, was indeed fathered by Dandignac, DNA subsequently proved.

“I kept waiting to see,” Odell said later, “if he would show up at the door or, you know, call.” When he left, that was it. Odell expected a knock on the door one day after she had the baby, she claimed, or at least a phone call from him—but it never happened. “I know he had the phone number. He didn’t want to show up. He never did. He never picked up the phone and said, ‘Are you all right? Do you need anything?’ It was like a hole opened up in the ground and swallowed him.”

If Dandignac would have shown up or called, no one can say what Odell would have told him, but he would have never seen his child—because by then, it had been murdered, wrapped in plastic, placed in a box, and stored in the closet along with two others.

2

As Odell sat across from Investigator Lane on the morning of May 20, she admitted for a second time that the babies were alive at some point after she gave birth. “‘Felt child move against my thigh,’” Lane wrote as Odell spoke. “‘Heard noise.’”

Although quite subtle, those two words—“move” and “noise”—meant perhaps more than anything else Odell had said during the past three days. Those children were given life by Odell, both life
and
death, Lungen and his team of investigators were now entirely convinced.

The conversation shifted to Mabel at some point. Lane asked Odell “repeatedly whether her mother knew about the pregnancies….”

“Absolutely not!” Odell said firmly, again and again. “I was in a subordinate relationship with my mother and fearful of what she would think or what she would do if she found out I was pregnant.”

Odell said she had even kept the relationships she had with the fathers of the children secret from Mabel, with the exception of the “poultry inspector,” David Dandignac, whom, Odell said, she had been forced to stay in a relationship with because he was “supporting the family monetarily.”

“What about the storage locker,” Lane asked. “Why stop paying the bill?”

This, too, baffled investigators.
Why stop paying the one bill that could expose the dark secrets of your life?
It made no sense—unless, of course, you
wanted
to get caught.

“My intention was to go back and retrieve the boxes, but I couldn’t afford to travel out to Arizona.”

Lane soon found out that after Mabel died in 1995, Odell called the owner of the storage locker and asked if she could get her belongings, but the owner said he had sold everything to pay her overdue bills.

“I felt quite a bit of trepidation,” Odell explained, “that there would be a knock on the door [after that], but then nothing happened and I kind of thought he had not told me the truth and that he
didn’t
sell everything.”

“Why didn’t you throw the boxes out?” Lane asked.

This was also a mystery. Why hadn’t Odell discarded the boxes? No one would have likely ever found the remains.

“I wanted to give them a proper burial. And I wanted to have evidence when I went to the authorities, so they didn’t think I was some sort of wacko.”

Evidence of what? Here, once again, was Odell’s chance to involve Mabel, but she never mentioned Mabel as being connected to the deaths of the children.

Investigator Linda Paul had stepped out of the room at one point to get Odell a glass of water. When she opened the door and returned, Odell leaned in toward Lane and whispered, “Can she remain outside?”

“Sure,” Lane said.

Paul looked at Lane as she handed Odell the water. Lane motioned for her to leave.

“Okay,” Lane continued as Paul left the room, “you have eight living, healthy children, all born in hospitals. You have these children that are in boxes that no one knew of…. Why is that, Miss Odell?”

Odell took a break for a moment, possibly to collect her thoughts. She had been, when it came down to it, interviewed for the past three days, under the light for nearly twenty hours. It was the first time anyone had asked this type of question. Here, perhaps without Odell even realizing it, Lane was getting to the motive behind the murders.

“The reason I hid the pregnancies,” Odell said quietly, according to Lane’s report, “is that they were bastard children, born out of wedlock. I was afraid of what my mother would think.”

Lane wrote down part of the statement on the piece of paper in front of him: “bastard children.” Next to that, he signed his name. Then he slid the piece of paper across the table and placed it in front of Odell.

“Would you be willing to sign that?”

“Sure,” Odell said as she grabbed Lane’s pen.

3

With Mabel dead, Odell and Sauerstein began spending their time in Endicott, New York, during fall 1995, concentrating on providing for their rather large family. They finally had found, it seemed, a place to settle. At least for the time being.

While in Endicott, though, they moved around quite a bit. From one end of town to the other, they packed it in and relocated several times over the period of a year or more. By the end of 1996, Sauerstein decided he wanted to go back to Lytle, Texas. He had heard there was work available, Odell said later, work he wasn’t finding in Endicott. A friend had even offered him a job. Yet, Odell and the kids weren’t going because they couldn’t afford to pack everything up and move across country all over again.

Nevertheless, after four months in Lytle, Sauerstein returned after not finding work. Odell was now living in Johnson City, a five-minute ride from Endicott. She had a hard time recalling exactly where she lived and when, but she was certain about having moved around quite a bit while in Endicott and Johnson City.

“A lot of this comes to me and a lot of this stuff is blended,” Odell said, speaking about her life in general during that period. “I asked my therapist [later] why it comes to me this way, and she said it is my way of dealing with the trauma and my way of trying to block it out.”

Regardless of how she remembered her life, a paper trail left behind pointed to a gypsy’s life of getting into trouble with Child Protective Services at times, running from bill collectors at others, abandoning apartments under the cloak of darkness, and changing jobs as often as three and four times a year.

In June 1998, Odell became a grandmother. Her daughter Doris, unmarried then, gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

By the end of 1998, near Christmas, Odell wasn’t feeling well. She was forty-five years old. She’d stopped menstruating around Christmas and thought perhaps she was experiencing early signs of menopause. Yet as the new year dawned, it became apparent she would have another announcement to make to the family.

1

HEATHER YAKIN, A reporter with the
Times Herald-Record,
a local newspaper in Sullivan County, was sitting at her computer on the morning of May 20, skimming the Associated Press wire, checking for any national stories that might have a local angle. It was part of her morning ritual to check the wire, she said, and plan her day.

As she read, Yakin was struck by a story slugged with a rather bizarre headline:
INFANT REMAINS
. Being a crime reporter, it was a story Yakin knew she had to check out further. So, as she sipped her first cup of coffee of the day, she continued reading.

“Dianne Odell, now living in Rome, PA,” the AP story began, “told investigators she gave birth to four babies that died in New York state between the late 1960s and 1984, including three found last week in boxes abandoned in a storage shed in Safford, Arizona, said Graham County Sheriff Frank Hughes.”

The words “New York” jumped off the computer screen at Yakin.
A local connection!

Obviously, the AP had gotten a few of its facts wrong, but that was the nature of the daily news business. Either way, Yakin knew her day was going to be consumed with tracking down as much information as she could about the story.

Part of her daily routine included calling local police stations in the Monticello region to see what was brewing. Like any reporter well-entrenched in the political infrastructure of a small town, Yakin had contacts and sources that fed her information. When she called the NYSP Liberty barracks moments later and asked about the Odell story, all the trooper would say was “Go to the press conference this afternoon.”

“Is someone dead?” It was one of Yakin’s standard questions.

“No comment,” the trooper said.

No comment, of course, was as good as a yes. Trick questions. Reporters, at least good reporters, were masters at spinning words to get the information they wanted.

Yakin asked the trooper where the case was being investigated.

“Sullivan County.”

Another great answer. She had contacts in the Sullivan County court.

After hanging up, Yakin phoned Steve Lungen’s office. It took her a while, but she got Lungen on the phone. “[He] wouldn’t say anything beyond, ‘This is [going to be] a big case,’” Yakin recalled.

With that, she hit Lungen with: “Is someone dead?”

Lungen hesitated. Then, “The case is out of Bethel. It’s not a recent case. It happened over a period of years…. The defendant was living in Pennsylvania and Arizona…and the case involves the deaths of three babies.”

Oh God
! Yakin said to herself.
The babies they found in the storage shed in Arizona….
It all made sense now. The AP story and Lungen’s information; it was connected. With the press conference only hours away, Yakin realized she had to move quickly.

Big case.
Big
story.

Later that morning, more stories were published around the country. For the most part, the AP was updating its original stories as information flowed in and reporters backed up bits and pieces of information.

One story ran with the headline
WOMAN CHARGED WITH MURDERING THREE CHILDREN
. The brief accompanying article began by outlining the criminal case against Odell, but focused more on the bizarre nature of what amounted to a woman toting around the mummified and decomposed remains of her three children for over twenty years.

“Think about carrying around three corpses, your own children…,” NYSP major Alan Martin, who worked out of Troop F, Scileppi’s troop, in Liberty, told the AP. “It’s very hard to comprehend. Why? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

By midday, the story had sparked media interest from all over. It was, by most standards, a slow news day, anyway. A mother killing her children was surely a crime story that could offer the talking heads on the nightly cable tragedy-TV shows something to discuss. Without a doubt, the mummified corpses of Odell’s children were going to be talking points in the days and months to come for anyone in the business of broadcast media.

Quite persistent now in getting to the core of the story, Yakin started calling more of her contacts. She had been working at the
Herald-Record
since 1997. One of her professors at SUNY, New Paltz, a rather popular local college, back in 1996, who had himself worked at the
Herald-Record
at one time, let Yakin know the “night cops beat” was open. She was interested. So he put in a “good word” for her, and the next thing she knew she had the job.

Heather Yakin had covered just about everything as a crime reporter—except a story like the one unfolding on the morning of May 20.

“I was hooked [on covering crime] from the moment I first had to ask a cop what kind of knife some guy…had used to stab his wife,” Yakin said. “That was my second night on the job. I worked ‘night cops’ part-time for seven months.”

This, mind you, while keeping a full course load in college at the same time. Then, “In August 1997, eager to put in the time in hopes of a full-time job,” Yakin said she worked every day of the month.

The effort paid off, because she was offered a full-time job. And in March 1998, she became a full-fledged reporter working the Sullivan County crime-and-justice beat.

The Odell story had the potential for Heather Yakin to make her mark at the
Herald-Record
. It had the juicy details that make Lifetime Television movies and Court TV trials so popular among those audiences today who have enormous appetites for crime and forensic entertainment. It was, in retrospect, Yakin’s chance to follow a day-by-day crime story, do some investigating—which she loved—and write about it. Many of the stories about Odell would likely end up on the front page. Everyone in town, by now, was talking about what had become the “Babies in Boxes” murder case.

Her sources inside the Sullivan County Courthouse were talking. She was going to run Odell and Sauerstein’s names in the electronic library at the
Herald-Record
and see what popped. Her gut was telling her the story was going to get bigger. In addition, as she began to learn more about Odell’s life, she realized it was her own bloodline that could potentially be the pot of gold as far as getting an exclusive story. Yakin’s roots went back to the town of Bethel, where Odell had spent a better part of her early life and, more important, the location where the babies had been born.

“My family,” Yakin said, “on my maternal grandfather’s side, has been in the town of Bethel for at least one hundred years. When I was six years old, [in late 1973], my parents, brother, sister, and I moved into [a] farmhouse there that had been my great-grandmother’s…. We kids rode the school bus each morning with Max Shapiro’s kids, and we were friends with them.”

Max Shapiro was the junk dealer who had found the blue suitcase containing the remains of Baby Doe back in 1989.

Yakin’s mother was elected to the Bethel Town Board when Heather was nine.

“My sister and I used to run around downtown Kauneonga Lake in the summer while the board met. Town Hall was located behind the post office,” which was a side step from one of the bungalows where Odell and Mabel had once lived.

The Yakin family then moved to Monticello in 1982 after Heather’s mother ran an unsuccessful campaign to head the board. After graduating high school, Heather found herself at the University of Chicago for the next two years. Then came a stint, she laughingly added, at trying to be a “rock star” and going to Orange County Community College.

“This [was] when I was trying to decide what to do with my life. I quit…[a few jobs]…. After a couple of months, I picked up day shifts bartending. My mom, who had gone back to school to get a bachelor’s and her CPA license, actually came up with the idea of journalism.”

The Odell story was, perhaps, a stepping-stone for Heather Yakin. She already had written about many different aspects of crime—murder, rape, sex abuse, arson, larceny, contractor fraud, elder abuse, Internet crime, burglary, robbery, drug crime—when she came upon the AP story about Odell. But none could match the drama of a mother involved in the deaths of her children some twenty years ago. No, this was different. Not your typical, run-of-the-mill murder story tucked away somewhere on page A8. It had titillating elements and a hometown connection.

Front-page all the way.

“You name it,” Yakin said, “Sullivan County has got a bit of a reputation for having lots of sex offense cases. I think much of that comes from the DA’s office and the police, including the Family Violence Response Team formed in 1999. They’ve learned how to build cases, including how to get confessions.”

Indeed, an important element in the Odell case that would come into play later on: how to obtain confessions. Had Odell been coerced into an admission?

“The DA is aggressive about prosecutions,” Yakin added, but “the same officials [also] go after people who file false reports of rape or sexual abuse.”

For that reason alone, Heather Yakin said, she believed the scales of justice are balanced in Sullivan County.

2

For the past three days, Odell had been questioned about her dead babies. She had told several different versions of what amounted to one common story: because of her actions, three of her children were dead. There was no confession of malicious intent, where she explained how she snapped and strangled them; and there were no wild stories of her going crazy and murdering the children in some ritualistic act. If anything, she had told police exactly, she said, what she remembered.

And where had it gotten her? In a Sullivan County jail cell, in downtown Monticello, awaiting arraignment on several counts of murder.

For Robert Sauerstein, he was at home tending to his and Odell’s five children, one of whom was not even four years old. In many ways, the events of the past week were surreal. One moment, Sauerstein and Odell were raising a family, moving around the country, trying to find a place to settle, and the next, well, she was in a jail cell looking at life behind bars.

Had it really all happened this way?

On Thursday, May 22, 2003, one of the guards in the holding area at the Sullivan County Jail, where Odell was being held, rattled the bars of her cell with his keys and said, “Get dressed, Odell. You have a visitor.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know, Odell, just get up!”

“Is it a legal visit?”

“No, no. It’s no legal visit.”

Odell had been trying to sleep. The past week had been a blur. Time hadn’t passed; instead, the days and nights, she said, had all run together. On Tuesday and Wednesday, she spoke to her court-appointed defense attorney, Stephan Schick. But Odell insisted later she hadn’t really gotten any information out of Schick that was useful. Their first meeting was more or less a “get acquainted” conference. In her view, a good attorney—not that Schick wasn’t—would have gotten her out on bond by Wednesday. Scared and lonely, sitting in jail, she was wondering what the hell was taking so long.

“I’m in jail on Tuesday and Wednesday,” Odell said, “and I did not receive a visitor. You know, no communication with my family whatsoever.”

When she didn’t hear from Sauerstein or Maryann, who was twenty-three years old now, or anyone else from her family, she assumed Sauerstein had “taken off with the kids to make sure they were safe and okay.”

As Odell walked out into the visiting area of the jail, she was startled to see Sauerstein and a woman named Danielle, a neighbor with whom she had been friends ever since living in Rome. Odell and Sauerstein lived next door to a general store in Rome and Odell had worked at the store from time to time, where she met Danielle.

Odell sat across from Sauerstein and her friend. At first, they looked at her and couldn’t believe where they were. Odell appeared beaten down, tired. The bags under her eyes were more pronounced than they had ever been, her face devoid of any real energy or life. She had been crying, of course, on and off, wondering how she had managed to land herself in jail for the murder of her own children.

Almost simultaneously Sauerstein and Danielle said, “What happened?”

Odell shrugged her shoulders and looked down at the graffiti-laden table. So many initials carved in the tabletop, representing so many women who had come and gone before her through what was a revolving door. Now she, too, was a notch in a table.

After thinking about it for a moment, Odell looked at Sauerstein and said, “My mother was involved.”

It would be a recurring mantra in the weeks and months to come. Odell would place all the blame on Mabel. Yet she’d had her chance—multiple chances, really—to tell police about Mabel’s responsibility in the crimes, but thus far had chosen not to say anything.

When she explained to Sauerstein that Mabel had been involved, he said, “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I
knew
you were hiding something.”

At that moment, Odell believed that Sauerstein was having trouble coming to terms with the situation. Not what had happened to the babies, she was quick to point out, but what had happened to her.

“I don’t think Robert wanted to deal with [the issues regarding the police] at that point. But I think he was having problems about him not coming to my rescue…not barging in on a white horse, but you know, showing up with a lawyer and doing all of those things.”

Sauerstein was a man with a strong moral character, Odell insisted. He was from the old school, where a man took care of his wife, no matter what the circumstances were.

Nothing came out of the visit other than the fact that Odell now knew her husband was going to be there for her. The visit was his way, she believed, of showing support.

What started out five days ago on a Sunday afternoon as answering a few routine questions for the Graham County (Arizona) Sheriff’s Office had turned into the worst possible situation imaginable. Odell believed then that all she had to do was answer a few questions about the babies and the situation would work itself out. After all, in her mind she hadn’t done anything criminal.