Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (5 page)

“I was hiding…underneath jackets, wearing hats, sunglasses…. I’m doing everything I can do to hide. I began wearing outlandish makeup…just outlandish.”

Over the course of the next few months, Dianne tried to stay in school, but her grades, as one might suspect, began to descend rapidly. She went from a B+ student to an F student, struggling to juggle schoolwork with the horror of being her mother’s whore.

5

Finding a second baby led Detective Thomas and other investigators working the case to believe that, perhaps, there were more. Thus, a massive search got under way inside the trailer to see if Thomas’s instincts were correct.

Within twenty minutes, the medical examiner, who was looking through some items in a box inside the kitchen area, yelled for Thomas.

“Another one?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. There, before both of them, was a third baby, neatly wrapped and packaged in a garbage bag inside another box.

After photographs were taken of the baby, the doctor made an early determination that all three babies were, possibly, newborns. It was the way they had been wrapped. The babies, he believed, if they had been born alive, hadn’t lived long.

Standing, staring at the three dead babies, Thomas could only come to one conclusion: how many more?

1

ONE OF THE questions Dianne Molina asked herself, as she became entrenched in a world of prostitution that her mother facilitated, was why? What was it that drove Mabel to sell her only daughter’s soul? If what Dianne later said was true, it was an act of evil no child could be expected to endure, a dark and sinister world of not knowing what was going to happen on any given night. Crime statistics have proven that men who sexually violate children are capable of just about any animalistic act imaginable. Dianne would leave her apartment, and wonder if she would ever return.

As the weeks and months wore on, and Dianne found herself sleeping with men of all types, a phone call she received one day began to explain things.

“I was the only one in the house,” Dianne recalled. “The gentleman on the phone requested my mother.”

“She’s not home from work yet,” Dianne told the man.

“Well, you tell your mother that if she doesn’t pay me my money, I’m going to take care of her.”

“All right.”

Dianne said she immediately called Mabel at work, who had recently been hired as a housekeeper at a nearby hospital, working days.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mabel said. “It’s nothing.”

Dianne let it go. What else could she do? If Mabel told her to forget about something, she had better listen.

Two weeks went by. Dianne got out of school one afternoon and went straight home, as she normally did. On an average day, she would get home an hour or so before Mabel. It was, she recalled, the only time of the day or night when she could sit and be a kid.

No worries.

No wondering.

Just peaceful silence.

Minutes after she walked up the long stairwell into her apartment and put her books on the dining-room table, she heard the doorbell. “When I opened the door, there was a big man there. I mean, this guy was huge….”

“Where is your mother?” the man asked.

“She’s not here. Can I take a message?”

“Yes,” the man said. Then, without another word, he “proceeded to put his large hands around my neck,” Dianne recalled, “pushing me up against the wall.”

“You tell your mother she has two weeks to come up with the money,” he said, “or I am going to come back to take care of everybody.”

One would have to speculate that Mabel was involved in either drugs or gambling. The woman worked a full-time job, yet was borrowing money from a shylock? Dianne said she worked for her mother two to three times per week, and although she never knew what her mother charged for her services, she had to believe it wasn’t free. So, where was all the money going?

“For six weeks,” Dianne said, “after that incident occurred, everywhere I went I was looking over my shoulder.”

As Dianne later thought about the phone call and episode with the large man, she realized what had perhaps “spurred my mother to put me to work. When she first put me to work, I thought it was just going to be long enough to pay off this debt to this person who had showed up at our door. I figured a month or so, maybe a little more.”

But it continued. As the spring of 1970 came and went, Dianne was still being sent out to perform all sorts of sexual acts for money.

“Something had gone terribly wrong in what [my mother] was doing,” Dianne recalled, “and there came a point in time when she called on my brother because, she told him, we had no food.”

The call didn’t make sense, however, to Dianne. Because although her mother had abused her emotionally and made her turn tricks, she never starved her.

One thing she noticed during the early part of 1970 was that her mom had begun to carry around a white envelope containing all of her money. Generally, Dianne said, there was always $400 or $500 inside it.

“Rather than give her money—none of my family members would ever give her money. But rather than give her money, when she asked my brother for food that day, my brother’s wife went out and bought groceries for us.”

Mabel was in her fifties when she left Dianne’s father, rented her own apartment, and put Dianne to work. As soon as they moved out, Dianne claimed, Mabel had gotten herself mixed up in all sorts of things no one knew about.

“She would bring drugs home from the hospital and I don’t know what she did with them.”

As secretive a life as she led, Mabel was now begging one of her sons for food because she claimed she had no money. That envelope, Dianne remembered, with $400 or more in it, was full one day and empty the next.

After Dianne’s brother brought the groceries over and left, Dianne went to Mabel and asked her why she lied. “You have money. I saw it in the envelope.”

Without a word, Mabel pulled her hand back and slapped Dianne across the face. “What I do,” she said through clenched teeth, “is
none
of your business! You do what you’re told and take care of
your
end of things. You got that?”

Dianne shook her head in agreement. But she couldn’t let it go.

“If you’ve paid this man off and you have extra money,” she said as Mabel started walking away, “why did you lie and say you had no money for food, when I know you had four hundred dollars? I watched you count it. I don’t know what you’re charging for my services, but you’re making money. Plus, you have your paycheck.”

Dianne was tired of being a whipping post. She wanted answers.

“Well, I have to…I have to…do something.”

“That was as far as I would ever get with her,” Dianne recalled. “She always had
something
on her mind,
something
that she wanted to do, or she was thinking about
something.
It was always ‘something, something, something’ with her. She never would clarify what ‘something’ meant.”

As Dianne stood in front of her mother that day questioning her about how much money they were making and where it was all going, Mabel, perhaps sick and tired of having to answer to a child, laid out her plans for the next few months.

“Well,” she said, “you’re going to have to continue to work because I’m broke now.”

“Please don’t make me do this anymore,” Dianne said, crying, begging. “Please, Mother. Please…”

2

By the time the GCSO finished searching all of the boxes Thomas Bright had purchased, they had uncovered three dead babies, their remains carefully packaged and stored in bags and boxes for what appeared to be years, maybe even decades. During her investigation, Thomas had found out, from just looking at some of the paperwork inside the boxes, that a woman by the name of Dianne Odell was connected to the babies. The boxes were Odell’s. There was no doubt about it. Odell’s various addresses and phone numbers and Social Security number and other personal information were scattered all over paperwork found inside some of the boxes.

For the purpose of the investigation, Thomas gave the babies names: Baby Number One, Baby Number Two, Baby Number Three. It was, in the end, the only way to keep track of each one and begin trying to figure out what had happened and who they were.

From inside the trailer, the babies were repackaged in evidence bags and driven to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson, where they would undergo a meticulous forensic examination. It was late in the evening on May 12. Although anxious, Thomas would have to wait until at least the following afternoon—maybe even longer—before she could retrieve any type of information from the medical examiner regarding how the babies had died.

The following day, May 13, while Thomas waited for forensic results, she began to track down Dianne Odell so she could maybe get some answers as to what had happened. From the looks of things, there could be no sane explanation why someone would wrap three babies in garbage bags, wrap those bags in blankets, stuff them into several different boxes, and store them away like old family heirlooms. For Thomas, there had to be some sort of sinister, criminal act that had taken place. Even if the babies were stillborn, why would they be discarded so secretly and hidden?

Thomas got word early that afternoon from the medical examiner’s office that the babies had been, in the medical examiner’s early opinion, born full-term. This was significant. A back-alley abortion could be ruled out. If the babies had been born full-term, there was a good chance they were born alive, which meant they had somehow died
after
birth. The cause of death wouldn’t be determined, Thomas was told, for another day or so.

Thomas was assigned as case agent. Graham County had developed a task force made up of several different officers from different agencies whose main focus was breaking cases. It would not be such a stretch to think this case in particular had hit every officer hard. Many, of course, had kids of their own. To think that a mother—or father—could discard babies like garbage fed an already burning desire among the cops to find out exactly what had happened.

As case agent, Thomas coordinated officers and handed out assignments in hope of locating Dianne Odell, who, as far as anyone could tell, was the one person who could provide the most answers at this point.

The first item of business was to conduct a computer search for Odell and find out her last place of residence. With just a few keystrokes, an officer came back to Thomas and reported Odell’s last-known address as Rome, Pennsylvania.

Address in hand, Thomas contacted the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and had a trooper from the Towanda barracks, near Rome, conduct a more thorough search for a recent residence.

“From there,” Thomas said later, “it was determined another officer and myself would travel to Pennsylvania to try and find Miss Odell and interview her.”

After speaking to the owner of the self-storage unit where the boxes had been purchased, Thomas determined that Odell had rented the units in question back in 1991, but throughout the years, she must have had some trouble keeping up with payments. In fact, she hadn’t paid her bill since June 1994, nearly ten years ago, and hadn’t been inside the unit since.

During a meeting of investigators and detectives, Bruce Weddle, a seasoned detective with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, was chosen to fly to Pennsylvania with Thomas to interview Odell. At six feet two inches, 175 pounds, the red-haired Weddle had been an Arizona state trooper, working the interstate, for eighteen years. For the past ten, he had been a detective, working mostly narcotics, where much of his time had been spent busting up large methamphetamine labs.

Weddle, who had just turned fifty, grew up in southeastern Arizona and had lived in the region all his life. From an early age, he said, the idea of becoming a cop interested him.

“My dad was in law enforcement, and from that I guess I got bit by the bug early on and realized that’s what I wanted to do.”

Leaving college, Weddle worked construction for a time and then went to work for a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in the area. After a time with Pepsi, it only seemed natural for Weddle to then apply to the Arizona Department of Public Safety Police Academy, where he was quickly accepted.

For a number of reasons, Weddle and Thomas decided to take the earliest flight out of Arizona. Number one, Thomas recalled, “was to avoid the media.”

Every major television station in Arizona wanted an interview with Thomas and other members of the GCSO. Reporters were calling the GCSO from all over the country. Thomas had fed them as little information as she could. CNN called. The Associated Press had run a story, as had many local newspapers. Everyone involved agreed the story was going to find legs. The quicker Thomas and Weddle got out of town and began uncovering facts, the better off everyone would be. There even had been a memorial set up at the self-storage unit. In the same fashion teenagers might leave flowers and candles and stuffed animals near a telephone pole after a peer had been killed in an automobile accident, people were leaving all sorts of mementos in front of the doors of unit number six. With that kind of emotion floating around, the GCSO knew the local media could really push the story into national status.

On Friday, May 16, 2003, Thomas found out she and Weddle could book a flight that night. All they had to do was steer clear of the media until then.

By Saturday morning, May 17, after an all-night flight, Weddle and Thomas touched down safely in Waverly, New York, and immediately drove to Towanda, Pennsylvania, where Trooper Robert McKee, a ten-year veteran of the force, was waiting to greet them.

As one might suspect, Thomas and Weddle were exhausted from their red-eye flight out of Arizona. Neither had slept much on the plane. Before they could focus on how to approach Dianne Odell, they needed rest.

Hours later, after a brief respite at the hotel, they met with McKee for lunch. McKee informed them how he had found out that Odell had been working at a local Rite Aid near Rome, but he couldn’t confirm exactly which store. He did find out that Odell had been living with her paramour, Robert Sauerstein, for many years, a name also found on several pieces of documentation in storage unit number six.

Further, McKee explained, Odell was the mother of eight children. If those babies in the boxes were hers, that would make her the mother of eleven. She was nearly fifty years old, her youngest child just four. The woman had been pregnant just about every other year for the past twenty years. Some of her children had children, which made her a grandmother. Was it possible, Thomas and Weddle wondered as they listened to McKee, that the babies were born to one of her daughters?

After lunch, as Thomas, Weddle, and McKee worked their way toward the Towanda barracks to set up some type of mini task force, they passed a local pharmacy.

“Let’s check it out,” Thomas suggested. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

After a quick look inside and a brief talk with the manager, Thomas found out Odell had never worked there. Thomas was using a photograph of Odell that she had taken from one of the photo albums in the boxes.

Minutes later, they came up on a Rite Aid.

“Stop there,” Thomas said. “Let’s try it again.”