Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (24 page)

Back on May 22, Yakin had published an article that spoke to that part of her curiosity. Headlined
WHY DID ODELL ALLOW HER BABIES TO DIE
? the story focused on the psychology behind why mothers kill their children. Yakin had interviewed a psychiatrist, Dr. Neil Kaye from Wilmington, Delaware, who had “consulted on more than one hundred infanticide cases.”

On average, about “once per day,” Yakin wrote, “somewhere in the United States, a newborn baby is killed or discarded.” Shocking statistic. Nearly one baby per day didn’t make it because of the actions of his or her parent. Yet, a woman who murders “multiple children,” Dr. Kaye explained, “and [gets] away with it,” was “very rare.”

The doctor had a hard time, like many people involved in the case, accepting that no one knew Odell was pregnant four times.

“A lot of people had to not notice…” he said.

All Lungen would say on the record for Heather Yakin was that the babies “had died from a criminal agency.” Lungen wouldn’t commit to how or why.

Dr. Kaye noted in the article that one of the reasons “why” mothers murdered their children was because “[they] don’t want to be pregnant. They don’t want the baby. They don’t form a bond.” More bizarrely, though, he added, because Odell had kept the children with her for two decades, “she may have thought they were still alive.” It was just “speculation.” No one could really tell at that point because, he said, Odell hadn’t yet been interviewed by a psychiatrist.

So as the case for Lungen moved forward, Heather Yakin began digging in, tracking down leads, and interviewing as many people involved in the case as she could. With any luck, she’d soon have answers to those important questions.

4

By the end of June, Dr. Baden had conducted the autopsies on the three babies and handed his report to Steve Lungen. He had examined the X rays taken in Arizona of the babies and also X rays taken in Albany more recently.

“The babies were largely skeletonious,” Baden said, “some soft, leathery tissue attached.” Through those observations, he added, he could, without a doubt, maintain that the babies were full-term, which was important, of course, to Lungen’s case. Moreover, the babies “showed no evidence of any disease process, congenital anomalies that can show up in bone.” Further, there was no “fractures to any of the bones.” The babies were, Baden concluded, newborns. “There was no evidence of [them] having lived for a while.”

One of the things that had intrigued Lungen from the start was how the babies had managed to mummify. A process that originated with the Ancient Egyptians, mummification thousands of years ago was possible because Egyptians generally buried their dead in tombs surrounded by sand, which sped up the process of dehydration because of the dryness and warmth of the sand. Bodies under those conditions can dry out quickly as a tough, leathery outer shell of skin emerges over time and seals in bodily fluids. For years, scientists and archaeologists have been astonished after digging up ancient tombs and, considering the age of the corpse, finding mummies in immaculate condition.

“After death, or after the babies [were] born, the baby,” Baden reported, “initially looked like a baby, full-term…. Then, depending on weather conditions, temperature, not weather but environmental condition, especially temperature there, if as in a situation the baby being born at home where the temperature is reasonable, then initially be some decomposition caused by bacterial proliferation. Babies can turn greenish and bloat over a period of days or weeks. At some point, these babies were put in a warm environment in which there was loss of fluids and water and drawing out of the baby, and that leads to hardening of whatever tissues are left, which is usually the skin…and mummification refers to the drying out of tissues because of loss of fluids and water. In this instance, that process developed after all of the internal organs were destroyed by the decomposition process. The bones themselves remained intact and were presented as normal skeletal remains.”

Important to Lungen’s case was the fact that the process had taken place on its own; it wasn’t as if Odell had intentionally wrapped the children in sheets and blankets to preserve their bodies, like the Egyptians. What happened to the children happened because of how and where the bodies had been stored, which told Lungen several things as he approached the case. For one, it leaned more toward his theory that Odell had killed the children because they were unwanted. She wasn’t acting out on some insane notion. She couldn’t claim insanity, at least in his view—that maybe she snapped and decided to mummify the children in some sort of ritualistic act of passage. Second, the premeditation factor looked more favorable now: carefully wrapping and positioning those babies in boxes meant she
knew
what she was doing.

Baden further explained that the age of the children was easy to tell because of the bone structure. Bones develop in the first twenty years of life only one way, he explained, and it is, for a forensic pathologist, easy to tell how long a set of bones has been growing.

When it came to the manner of death, well, that’s where Lungen’s problems began. He wasn’t going to be able to rely exclusively on Baden’s autopsy report. From what Baden could tell from the autopsies alone, he couldn’t conclude
how
the children died. He would have to take into consideration police reports and interviews with Odell, along with other factors.

Baden was a pro. A world-renowned pathologist, he had been involved in some of the nation’s most high-profile (and historically important) autopsies and exhumations: Medgar Evers, JFK, Martin Luther King. He had been working in the field, all over the world, for forty-plus years. He was no slouch, coming up with harebrained theories favoring the prosecution’s point of view. Likewise, he was no hired gun, determining manner of death and pulling evidence out of the air to support that theory. He was one of the best in the world—and juries, history would prove, respected and valued his “opinions” and medical findings.

Manner of death, Baden said, falls into “five categorizations: natural, accident, suicide, homicide, or an undetermined fifth classification.

“The cause of death is the reason for death, the manner—and that is done by the pathologist, the medical examiner, based on examination of bodies.” Moreover, medical history and “circumstances of death and crime, the scene of death,” are all part of the examination process.

He further clarified how he comes to conclusions regarding manner of death. If a woman, for example, had been found on a sidewalk dead, her injuries, during the autopsy, might prove she had died of multiple fractures and internal injuries. But those findings wouldn’t necessarily explain the manner of death, which could be suicide, homicide, or accident.

“A case like that will rule out and will depend on history from friends, neighbors, police. Did somebody see her being pushed out of the window? Did she write a note and jump out? Was she washing windows and, accidentally, the strap broke or something?”

It was that type of information, Baden maintained, gathered from “other sources,” that the judgments he and his colleagues made depended on and “is required on death certificates around the country….”

Heading into a crucial stage of his preparation for the grand jury, Lungen was convinced Baden could step into a court of law and, based on his
entire
investigation, say without a doubt that the cause of Odell’s babies’ deaths was homicide.

1

“MY LAWYER WAS asked two more times…in July,” Odell recalled, “to submit paperwork for bail, but he never processed a bail application for me.”

To Odell, it was just one more careless piece of lawyering on Stephan Schick’s part that was keeping her confined behind bars and away from her family. Furthermore, being in the dark about the kind of case Schick was going to present was something Odell later said she came to live with as the summer months dragged on and on. She insisted she never knew what Schick was doing or planning.

Why?

Because, she claimed, he never told her.

As for getting Odell out on bail, it was entirely out of the question, Schick said later. The court wouldn’t even consider it. Odell had made it clear she had no money. Sauerstein had no money. Her bail would be $1 million dollars or more, not hundreds of thousands. Why waste the court’s time if there was no chance of Odell ever coming up with the money?

“Obviously,” Schick added, “with three homicide charges and her having traveled all over the country, there was no way she was going to make bail.” Additionally, Odell lived in Pennsylvania. She had no connection to anyone in New York. “There wasn’t going to be bail set on an amount anywhere near what she could afford.”

Another key component was the application itself. Filing an application for bail would involve giving a lot of background information regarding Odell’s life. In her case, Schick said, that wouldn’t be the wisest thing to do.

“You don’t want to give away things that may be contradictory to what you want to present to the court later on. You have to be careful. We didn’t want to say anything about her background that we would later have a different viewpoint about.” They would be stuck, Schick added, explaining away things that they themselves had put on record for the DA’s office to chomp on.

It would have been a disaster.

2

When the BCI tracked down David Dandignac and matched his DNA to the DNA extracted from Baby Number Three—the results of which had come in—he was mortified to learn that, for one, Odell had given birth to the child, and two, the child hadn’t survived.

Lungen had the BCI running all over the country looking for the fathers of the babies. Roy Streever had gone to Florida to speak with James Odell and his brother; while Scileppi focused on the Kauneonga Lake region, having his investigators bang on doors there. They had found Dandignac. They had spoken to Dianne Odell’s brother-in-law and confirmed an intimate relationship. That took care of two of the babies. But Odell herself had claimed one of the children was fathered by a “washing-machine” guy.

Needle in a haystack.

In the end, all the BCI could prove scientifically—and be certain of—was that Dandignac had fathered Baby Number Three. Through interviews, they believed James Odell’s brother had fathered one of the other children, but there was no DNA available to prove it conclusively. Still, at least Lungen had Dandignac. Bringing him into court was going to give
all
the babies credibility. With most murder trials, the gallery in the courtroom was split: family and friends of the victim on one side, family and friends of the accused on the other. Both were generally there to show solidarity and support. In this case, Lungen knew, the victims were not going to be represented. It fell on his shoulders entirely, he believed, to represent the babies and make the jury understand they were, in fact, human beings.

“Those babies,” Lungen said, “had never had their first day of kindergarten, their first date, the prom—all those things that came with being a human being. I had to represent them in that manner—because there was going to be
no one
else in that courtroom who would or could!”

What the BCI and Lungen learned from Dandignac set off a maelstrom of speculation. Dandignac was under the impression, he said when they interviewed him, that Odell had aborted the child. It was the main reason why he never returned or called.

“Because she didn’t want the relationship,” Lungen said, “that was just a fourth baby she was not going to keep. The day she kicked Dandignac out,” Lungen added, “was the day she decided, based upon what she had done to the three previous babies, that this baby, too, was going to
die
.” Lungen believed his case hung in the balance on that note alone.

As the BCI pieced together Odell’s life, Lungen began to learn odds and ends that, in his estimation, only further proved Odell’s guilt. And more important, it added to his belief that she had planned each death rather heartlessly and coldly.

He knew the case of Baby Doe wouldn’t likely be allowed into trial if, of course, Odell was indicted. There would be hearings about the admissibility of the baby, sure. But experience told Lungen it wasn’t going to happen. Regardless, the Baby Doe case, as Lungen went back and studied it, spelled out clearly many things about Odell’s state of mind as she toted the remains of the three additional babies around with her.

“The key to Baby Doe,” Lungen said, “which was always important to me, was that it answered the question of ‘Why would a mother take the
other
three babies with her and tote them around from place to place, wherever she moved, keeping them hidden?’ It answers that question clearly.

“Because she got
caught
by
not
taking the first baby with her. She was not
now
”—meaning all those years she kept the additional three babies hidden—“going to lose possession of the other three.”

One could argue that Odell couldn’t let go.

“It was not maternally that she couldn’t let go! It was strictly a matter of a crime, a cover-up! If she took them with her, they weren’t going to be found. And if they weren’t found, well, she wouldn’t get caught.”

The babies became, in Lungen’s view, pieces of evidence. Odell, in other words, learned her lesson back in 1989 when Baby Doe showed up in the trunk of her Volkswagen and the BCI knocked on her door and questioned her about it.

Any emotional ties Odell had to the four babies, Lungen insisted, were “nonexistent, or false.

“You can’t have an emotional tie and do what she did, and have
eight
living babies in between. When she didn’t want the baby, she simply hid the pregnancy best she could, and when she
did
want the baby, she had the child at a hospital.”

For Lungen, it was simple: hospital birth, baby lives; home birth, baby dies.

Lungen further maintained that as he and his colleagues traced backward and began to dig into Odell’s life on the road with Sauerstein, based on his decades of experience as a prosecutor, the evidence pointed to one thing: child abuse.

“In Arizona, Robert Sauerstein was arrested,” Lungen said, “for abusing Alice Odell. And that’s why he took off to Texas. And that’s why Odell took the kids and ran off to Texas—to be with him. And that’s what ultimately left the three babies in the storage shed in Arizona. She couldn’t transport everything by herself at one time. That’s why the babies ended up left behind. She
had
to leave the evidence behind. She was forced to, really. Sauerstein left Arizona because he
knew
the cops were looking for him.”

Moreover, anytime a family moved from state to state, Lungen added, abruptly picking up and leaving town, like Odell and Sauerstein had done some twenty times over a fifteen-year period, “it is generally a sign that child abuse is occurring in the home.”

Throughout the summer of 2003, as the investigation into Odell’s life heated up for the BCI, Scileppi started to put a finger on what he and Lungen had suspected all along was repeated child abuse accusations against Odell and Sauerstein. Yet, when it came time to delve into hospital records, the law kept them from going any further. Police station after police station, in some of those towns where Odell and Sauerstein had lived, had complaints of some type of child abuse, the same as Social Services, Lungen and Scileppi found out. All against Odell and Sauerstein.

“We caught the abuse a little bit in 1991 and 1992 as we went through and looked at Social Services records. Aggravated assault by Sauerstein. Twice. On two of the kids.”

It was more evidence, in Lungen’s view, of bad parenting on Odell’s part, allowing her children to grow up in an abusive environment.

Odell viewed Lungen’s argument as biased. He had put her life in a box and filled it with circumstances and evidence that conformed to his argument.

“One of the reasons we moved around a lot,” Odell explained later, “was because Robert was never happy or satisfied in one particular spot. Every time we moved…he would get a job and then something would happen, where he would lose his job. It had always been his dream to own a piece of property in Arizona. He was the reason we moved around a lot, not me! Not because of any specific
child abuse
charges. Because if that made any kind of sense, don’t you think Child Protective Services would have had something on record somewhere? I mean, that’s kind of an insane thing to say without any kind of documentation….”

But there were, of course, accusations made by Social Services and police regarding assault against two of Odell’s children.

“We moved around a lot,” Odell concluded, “because Robert was never happy. He had, I guess you could say, a great wanderlust.”

3

Heather Yakin kept banging on doors as the case against Odell proceeded, talking to former neighbors and friends of Odell’s, hoping to score one interview that could offer a different perspective on the case. Many people in town were shell-shocked. Here was a woman who had, based on the stories being generated and the facts the DA’s office was making available, murdered three of her children and carried their mummified remains around with her for twenty years. Public reaction to just how bizarre that behavior was in the face of reality never wavered. Justifiably, people were horrified.

For Yakin, after talking to a few friends and neighbors of Odell’s, she didn’t find out anything new, but she did develop a professional relationship with Robert Sauerstein, who could become an important source down the road, she knew.

“I struck up a fairly friendly relationship with Mr. Sauerstein,” Yakin recalled. “I gave him my card after Dianne’s arraignment, [and] the next time he was in town, he stopped by the office to talk….”

Fortunately, Yakin hadn’t put Odell’s photograph on what she later described as the “Bad Boys” wall in her office. Because if Sauerstein would have seen it, he would have likely turned around and walked out the door.

“My photographer, Michele Haskell, and I,” Yakin said, “had set up this half-joking ‘Bad Boys’ bulletin board. Mostly, it had mug shots and stills of bank robbery suspects and police sketches, plus an Orange County school superintendent who had molested a student, [along with] a mug shot of my editor, one murder suspect—oh, and a picture of Steve Lungen’s face superimposed on a Batman costume. Some local guy had bought Batman and Spider-Man costumes stolen off movie sets, and Lungen’s office and the state police had recovered them. They gave us photos of the costumes for the caper story, and, well, the mug of Lungen and the Batman picture in the paper were a perfect size match…. I faxed a copy to Lungen’s office for good measure. Great merriment was had.”

Yakin said she spoke to Sauerstein “a few more times throughout [the summer], [and later as the case progressed], although he didn’t want to talk on the record.”

In early September, Heather Yakin received a letter from Clarissa Sauerstein, who was now seventeen years old. Clarissa was standing tall behind her mother. She couldn’t understand why the community had turned against Odell. In Clarissa’s view, her mother wasn’t “capable” of murder.

What drove her to this belief?

“If she was capable,” Clarissa wrote, “…then why would the rest of us still be here…?”

“Great letter,” Yakin recalled. “I got permission and wrote a story [about Clarissa’s] defense of her mom.”

The story ran with the headline
ODELL DAUGHTER DEFENDS MOM
.

Part of the letter blasted Stephan Schick, who the family insisted wasn’t “communicating with them or Odell.” Moreover, if he was working hard behind the scenes on Odell’s part, he wasn’t sharing his strategy with anyone in the family.

“I went to see Dianne fairly often,” Schick said, defending himself. “Beginning in early June. You also have to understand that, unlike private attorneys, our office is across the street from the jail, and we have a direct telephone connection. Unlike other attorneys, it’s a free call. We don’t have to pay for it.”

If a suspect has a private attorney, he or she would have to go down to a certain area in the jail and call collect. Legal Aid has a direct line to the jail. Anytime a client wants to, he or she can pick up the phone and call. For Odell, she could have called Schick’s office every day if she chose to.

“Anytime she wanted,” Schick said, “on any weekday, she could have called me directly.”

In July, Schick filed the appropriate paperwork with the court to have Odell examined by a psychiatrist. The court had since agreed and a meeting between Odell and Janet Hooke, a psychiatrist, was scheduled. Schick had also gone to a Drug Court Training Conference in Florida during the first week of September and—lo and behold—Steve Lungen and Judge Frank J. LaBuda, who was presiding over the Odell matter, happened to be there. Schick said he spoke to them about Odell and tried on her behalf to get some sort of offer, but nothing ever came of it.

Schick felt, after speaking with Odell on several occasions, that there were issues regarding her sanity. Those potential conversations, coupled with the fact that she had toted the babies around for twenty years, could possibly make for a strong insanity defense. Furthermore, he wasn’t at liberty to discuss intimate details of the case with family members.

The family, however, didn’t see it that way. According to the letter Clarissa wrote to Heather, Clarissa was 100 percent behind her mom and couldn’t believe she could have done the things people were saying.