When he saw the skull, Bright said, he knew what it was.
Oh Christ, he thought.
The skull was in bad shape. It looked like an artifact that an a archaeologist conducting a dig somewhere in the Middle East might uncover.
After Bright pulled the bag open a bit more, he confirmed his worst fear: staring back at him were tiny eye sockets and the deteriorated nose of what he believed was a baby. Yet, for a brief instant, it was a surreal moment, so far removed from Bright’s perception of reality he thought he might be looking at a child’s toy, an old doll or something.
“Hey,” he yelled into the room where his grandson was, “call the sheriff’s department. Tell ’em to send a deputy out.”
4
“When he was drunk,” Dianne later said of her father’s rage, “it was a thousand times worse.”
Oddly enough, John Molina never hit his wife, though.
“Something occurred at some point during their relationship that, I think, led my father to believe that if he hit my mother, she would probably kill him.”
In February 1969, five months before Americans would sit glued in front of their television sets and watch the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, Dianne Molina, at fifteen, had thought she’d seen it all in her Jamaica, Queens, home. But the horrors she said she had endured up until that point were merely stepping-stones.
One day, “My brother came to the house to see my father, who was already partially drunk,” Dianne recalled, “and sitting at the dining-room table.”
From there, she said, Jim walked in and asked her father how he was doing. Jim and John Molina had been at odds for years. From what, exactly, Dianne couldn’t remember.
“You can forget about the fucking car,” John told his son, “you’re not getting the fucking car!”
For no reason, John then picked up a drinking glass and cracked it over Jim’s head, shattering the glass and breaking Jim’s glasses. Jim ended up with a gash on his forehead and nose and started bleeding profusely from the top of his head down.
Dianne, standing in the room speechless, didn’t know what to do.
Mabel jumped up from the chair she was sitting in and “threw my father off the chair he was sitting in,” and then rushed to Jim’s aid.
“Get the fuck out of my house!” John Molina screamed.
“Come on,” Jim said, “let’s go!”
Jim, Mabel, and Dianne piled into Jim’s car and left the house.
Pulling out of the driveway, Dianne said she had a moment of contentment. She thought it was going to be the last time she ever saw her father again.
5
After calling the Graham County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO), Thomas Bright’s grandson walked over to where Bright was standing near the box.
“Did you really find a baby?”
“Take a look for yourself,” Bright said, pointing to the bag.
Staring down into the bag, which was now ripped open even wider, Bright’s grandson responded, “Yup, that’s a baby all right. Jesus.”
In the meantime, a call went out to all the available sheriff’s deputies in the area. The first deputy to respond, Abner Upshaw, showed up at 4:30 P.M. Minutes later, Mark Smith, a second deputy, arrived.
Upshaw approached Bright immediately. “‘Sometimes,’” Bright recalled Upshaw saying, “‘people report things they think they see.’”
It was a sober calculation by an experienced cop. Upshaw undoubtedly had been called out numerous times for all sorts of crimes that had never materialized. What Bright and his grandson saw as a baby could—in reality—turn out to be nothing more than a dead animal or some sort of old, weathered doll, as Bright had thought.
Bright shrugged after Upshaw explained the situation. Then, “Go ahead…see for yourself then.”
Back a few moments later, after looking inside the bag, Upshaw looked at Bright and said, “Yup, that looks like a baby all right.”
Confident it was a baby, Upshaw put in a call to have a detective and the county coroner come out.
While they waited, Bright told Upshaw what had happened the past few days: the auction, the boxes, the baby.
At about 4:35 P.M., Bright handed Upshaw a large brown envelope that contained several documents. “I found this in another box.”
There was a name on the envelope: Dianne Odell, a forty-nine-year-old female from Pima, Arizona. The document was dated 2002. Bright’s earlier estimation that the unit hadn’t been accessed in eight years had been wrong. Someone had apparently been inside the unit within the past year.
“This is helpful,” Upshaw said. “Thanks.”
As Bright, his grandson, and the two deputies stood in the mobile home staring at all the boxes, waiting for the coroner and a detective to arrive and begin an investigation, they had no idea that the one baby Bright had found was only the beginning. By the end of the evening, there would be more.
6
Dianne Molina was almost sixteen years old when she and her mother left their home in February 1969 after a bloody fight between her half brother and father. For Dianne, it felt as if the gods had answered her prayers: no more abuse from dad, no more drunkenness, no more living under the reign of a dictator.
Nothing in Dianne’s early life, however, had been that cut-and-dry. There was always a price to pay. And, according to her later on, moving out of her childhood home would turn out to be no different.
“We went straight to my [half] brother’s house in…Ozone Park,” Dianne said. Ozone Park was only a few miles from Jamaica. “We stayed there for three days,” she added. “My brother’s wife was not happy with the fact that we were there and wanted us to leave.”
When Mabel didn’t respond to her daughter-in-law’s request to leave, Dianne said her sister-in-law “concocted a story where she went to the landlord and he claimed we couldn’t stay there.”
If there was one positive aspect regarding Mabel Molina’s character, it was the self-reliance she sometimes harbored. No one was going to carry her; no one was going tell her what to do or when to do it. As soon as Mabel got word that she wasn’t wanted in her son’s home, Dianne said, “she picked herself up and left.”
Outside the home, bags in hand, Dianne was excited. She was going to live on her own with her mom. Just the two of them. No brothers. No dad.
“Here’s some money for a cab,” Mabel said to Dianne, handing her some spare change, “you’re going back to your father’s house.”
Dianne was horrified.
“From that point on,” she said later, “I was in prison.”
Not only was she confined, but Dianne had no idea where her mother, at the time her only source of strength, had moved. Because for the next week, while living at her dad’s, she never heard from her.
“It wasn’t until about a week later that she showed up at my school and told me she had found us a place.” Still, that “place” didn’t yet include Dianne.
“I am going to find out if you can come stay with me,” Mabel told Dianne.
Dianne started crying. “I can’t stay there,” she said, meaning her father’s house. “I am scared to death.”
“Don’t you worry about it. Your father’s not going to let anything happen to you,” Mabel said.
“You know that’s a lie!”
Mabel ignored Dianne’s apparent worry.
“I’ll keep looking for a place for the two of us. You go to school and make sure everything is nice and normal, and everything will be fine.”
Because John Molina didn’t want his only daughter to be out of his sight, Dianne claimed, he made Dianne’s half brothers escort her to and from school. When Dianne returned from school for the day, she said, “that’s as far as I went. I was put in my room, period.”
For the next few months, Dianne lived under a strict routine of going to school in the morning, arriving home in the afternoon, and, like the prisoner she later saw herself as, was sent to her room for the remainder of the day and night.
<
br /> One day, Dianne was in her room staring outside across the street at a neighbor’s house. Sitting on her bed, crying, she watched her mother, she said, walk into the neighbor’s house. With that, she ran down the stairs, where John was waiting for her.
“Can I go see Mom? She’s across the street.”
“No!” And that was all John Molina had to say. Dianne knew not to press him. It would do no good.
Broken, Dianne headed back upstairs. She felt her mother wanted to tell her something important.
“I knew that if I had tried to sneak across the street,” Dianne said later in a tearful recollection, “when I got back, I would be picking my teeth up off the floor.”
Dianne needed desperately to get away from her father’s grasp. Furthermore, the reasons, she later claimed, were dark secrets between her and her father that Mabel knew about, yet did nothing to prevent.
“My dad,” Dianne said, “was raping me…. It had started when I was fourteen.”
CHAPTER 3
1
TO FORTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD GRAHAM County Sheriff’s Office sergeant detective Dolores Diane Thomas, a mother of two, grandmother of seven, the thought of a dead baby left in a box to rot made her sick to her stomach.
“It was a human baby,” Thomas said later, “I wondered what had happened to it.”
Thomas had been employed by the GCSO for the past thirteen years, the past six working in the investigation division of the department, three of those as a sergeant. Primarily, Thomas’s job consisted of “any type of follow-up on any case that the patrol deputy first on scene would determine required follow-up.”
The GCSO employed some twenty-five sworn personnel and approximately fifty-five civilian officers. Thomas had fallen into the position of working for the investigation arm of the GCSO. Born and raised in Safford, she said later, she’s “one hundred [percent] Hispanic…and probably related to half the valley.” Her law enforcement career began in the Department of Corrections. She had worked for ten years as a records clerk, was promoted, and became the administrative secretary to the deputy warden, spending the better part of eight years on the job.
“When I turned thirty,” Thomas recalled, “I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I don’t want to do this all my life.’”
Thomas originally thought being a prison guard might help curb an urge she had for change, but realized quickly after taking the job that she “definitely didn’t want to do that.”
There had been an opening at the GCSO for a dispatcher in February 1990, so Thomas applied and, subsequently, got the job. Working dispatch offered Thomas a taste of life as a cop. She was the first one to take calls, listen in on what was transpiring out in the field, and would go on rides from time to time with cops to further her skills as a dispatcher. Knowing the layout of the towns helped her dispatch with “hands-on” experience, but that approach only lit the fire. Soon after, she developed a calling for law enforcement work that could only be satisfied one way.
Happily married for a second time—“[My second husband is] the most wonderful man to myself and my children any woman could ask for”—Thomas saw an opportunity when a job was posted for a sheriff. With no formal law enforcement experience, she assumed she’d fill out the application and never hear about it.
Nevertheless, after applying on a Monday and taking the written test on Tuesday, only a year or so into her career as a dispatcher, Thomas got the call later that afternoon. If she wanted the sheriff’s job, she’d have to report to the academy the following Monday to live and train for thirteen weeks.
“I had four or five days to get everything I needed together…then I spent the next thirteen weeks getting screamed and yelled at and running my little tail off.”
Among the many mental and physical challenges that potential cops had to face at the academy, Thomas learned criminal and traffic law. Thirteen weeks later, though, she was let loose as a deputy sheriff—ready to take on any type of situation filling up a cop’s day: from the clichéd cat-in-a-tree to a sniper picking off innocent people from atop a building, to investigating reports of sexual abuse against children, and everything in between. The outstanding criminal profile of Safford then (and even today) consisted of methamphetamine labs and sex crimes. Thomas viewed the job as a springboard to helping make the community a stronger, safer place. Safford was Thomas’s home. She wanted to do her part to make it the best it could be.
Not two months into her new job, she got a taste of what the reality of police work was going to be like. She had been on her own one afternoon. The sheriff was out of town and her supervisor was patrolling Graham Mountain, a four-hour swing of time from start to finish.
While patrolling the city, Thomas received a rather odd call from dispatch. The mail lady had opened a mailbox and found a handwritten letter: “Call the sheriff’s office, I have just killed myself.”
“As I’m driving out there to get the letter,” Thomas recalled, “I was thinking about what I had been taught at the academy. They told us to think about what you’re going to do when you arrive at a crime scene.”
She was worried the guy might be holed up inside his home with a weapon, threatening to do himself in, and if anyone tried to stop him, he might use the weapon to hurt somebody.
When she pulled up, the place appeared quiet, uninhabited.
“I had my weapon drawn when I got out and began approaching the house,” Thomas continued. “I got to the back of the home and…peeking around the corner, saw this gentleman laying on the front steps of a travel trailer he was using as his home while the main house was being built.”
Pointing her weapon at the guy, Thomas called out.
No answer.
She could see a shotgun near his leg.
Again, “You okay, sir? Can you hear me?”
Silence.
“Slowly, as I made my way up to him, I could see he was deceased,” Thomas said. There was blood everywhere. He had, in whatever turmoil he faced in life, chosen to end it, like thousands of others, with one blast to the head.
As Thomas stood and stared at the guy, she wondered, Was this actually a suicide? She had been taught to think that any scene could be a potential crime scene. Thus far, all indications pointed to suicide, but there was no guarantee. Was there someone else inside the home waiting to ambush her? Was there a spouse or someone else in need of medical assistance?
“What do I do?” Thomas questioned later. “This is my first call by myself. So, after checking his pulse to make sure he was dead, I backed away and made the appropriate calls to get everyone to the scene.”
Detectives eventually found out the guy had been in a terrible financial jam and had, indeed, taken his own life. But the day—six or seven hours of which Thomas spent at the crime scene drawing maps, taking notes, going through the man’s house, interviewing people—taught her several important lessons she would carry with her.
“I learned that you have to be so detailed,” regardless of the situation.
It didn’t matter that the guy had committed suicide; what mattered was that she shouldn’t assume anything. Dig for facts and truths until all questions were answered. That one death, so seemingly inconsequential years later as Thomas was chosen to work in the investigation arm of the GCSO, told her that the truth was in the details and specifics, not in what a cop might “think” happened.
In 1995, Thomas began working in the children’s sexual-crimes division of the GCSO. She was perfect for the job. Female, a mother and grandmother, she could talk to kids and get them to reveal secrets, a vital part of investigating crimes against children.
All of the skills she had learned throughout the years, Thomas found out as she began looking through Thomas Bright’s trailer on May 12, 2003, were about to be put to the test.
2
Kew Gardens, New York, in Queens County, a tiny neighborhood a few miles from Jamaica, is known by some as the “Urban Village in the Big City.” Today, the main thoroughfare run
ning through downtown is called Metropolitan Avenue. It is a busy street, in a bustling section of town. In the early 1900s, that same busy street, however, then known as Williamsburg and Jamaica Turnpike, was but a dirt road dotted with massive colonials and large weeping willows. If one were to walk in the shoes of his forefathers during that era, Metropolitan Avenue would have looked like a backwoods street somewhere in South Carolina, with steep driveways and fenced-in yards. Rustic, seeping with nostalgia.
The apartment complex on Metropolitan Avenue that Dianne Molina moved into with her mother was typical for the region. It wasn’t the Trump Tower, yet it wasn’t skid row, either. Located above a retail carpet store, a second-story unit with access from the street, the apartment had a dining room, two bedrooms, kitchen, and pantry.
The infrastructure of the region enjoyed a building boom during the late ’60s: multistory tenement buildings and large office complexes went up, while vendors of all kinds dotted the streets. For Dianne, as the world around her changed, it felt like she had been submerged in water while living with her dad and had now been allowed to breathe. Dad was a few miles away. But to Dianne, beginning a new life with Mom, free from the chains of Dad’s abuse, Kew Gardens might as well have been on the other side of the world.
While children around her lived normal lives—going out on dates, having slumber parties, and just girls being girls—Dianne worked day and night to survive, she later said. She hadn’t been with a boy yet, she said, only because it would have never been allowed, by her mom or dad.
“I couldn’t even be involved in life,” Dianne recalled, “better yet, boys.”
What shocked Dianne most, she said, was that the world she believed she was heading into—a somewhat “normal” life with her mom—suddenly turned into something she never thought possible. For the past two years she had been sexually abused by her father, she claimed, anytime he felt like it. Mabel knew about the abuse, but did nothing to stop it, or even discourage it. Moving out with her mom, Dianne had every reason to believe the abuse was over. Yet, even after she moved away, her dad was allowed to come over and visit, where he would, she added, continue the abuse.
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