Sitting on the couch, waiting, wondering where the ambulance was, she believed Mabel had called 911. With the pain now so severe she could hardly move, everything became secondary to the fact that the baby was coming, regardless of whether there was an ambulance on the way.
Moments later, as the pain “became so bad” it felt as though the baby was “coming out,” natural instinct took over as Odell said she began to push. As she did that, she started experiencing a “loud ringing or buzzing in [her] ears.
“I couldn’t hear myself speaking anymore.”
The next thing she remembered, when she recalled the episode later, was “my mother by my feet, bent down with her hands moving.” She doesn’t recall “hearing or seeing” the baby, contrary to what would become a major legal issue later on.
“I started to panic,” she said, “and I tried to stand up.”
That was when “my mother got up with the baby in her arms and walked away.”
As Odell stood, she said, she “passed out.”
“When I woke up, the baby was wrapped in a blanket lying next to me.”
Mabel then walked into the room.
“What happened?” Odell asked, looking at her mother.
“It had breathing difficulties,” Mabel said.
“We have to get an ambulance here right now!”
“Okay…but you know what they’ll say: that it was done deliberately!”
“What, Mother, was done deliberately?”
“You know, Dianne, what was done.”
Odell just looked at Mabel: what are you talking about?
“Come to think of it, you better go bury that thing and throw it out!” Odell recalled Mabel telling her at that point.
“When she said that to me, I felt like I was going to break into a million pieces.”
“I’ll get the girls, Dianne, and you won’t be around anymore,” Mabel continued, referring to how it would play out if the police were called in and eventually found out what happened.
“My mind felt like it was in a blender,” Odell recalled, speaking of that day when she says her mother killed Baby Number One. “Knowing what she was capable of, I made the only choice I could make.”
“I wasn’t letting her take my girls.”
2
So Thomas and Weddle were at the Towanda barracks on May 18, 2003, ready to hear from Odell what had happened to the three babies. Thomas had her tape recorder running and Odell, in tears, was finally going to give them an account of what would be the first of two different versions of what had happened.
Thomas stared at Odell while Weddle, waiting patiently, said, “Come on, Dianne, it’s okay. Take your time.”
“They’re my children,” Odell said. “The first one occurred as a—as a rape, umm…. I went the whole nine months, didn’t see a doctor, didn’t have any medical attention at all. The delivery came and I knew the baby was coming because I had already had [three other children] and I had tried to, I felt I could deliver this myself.”
There was no mention of Mabel standing below her and then handing her a dead child after she had passed out and woken up.
Thomas and Weddle were well-trained investigators; they knew to allow Odell the space she needed to talk it through.
Don’t cut in. Don’t stop her. Let her go.
On the other hand, what Odell was now saying, in many ways, was a lot to swallow. According to Odell, she had given birth to three healthy children, all in hospitals without complication, but decided, for whatever the reason, to deliver a fourth baby by herself at home.
“Unfortunately, what had happened,” Odell continued, “once the baby came out and I ended up passing out and I don’t know for how long, but I don’t know, umm…anything more than I pushed and went back, that was it.”
She took a break for a moment and sipped from a glass of water in front of her. Then, “I don’t know if the baby cried, I don’t. I have no knowledge of that. When I woke, when I came to, I kind of leaned on my side and I felt like I was going to pass out again, and I leaned back, umm…kind of caught a deep breath and I remember taking, oh, whatever was underneath me, towels or whatever it was, and trying to prop my body half up so that I could try and sit up.”
So far, she hadn’t admitted to a crime. She was careful to say she hadn’t heard the baby cry. Thus, if the baby hadn’t been born alive, there’s no way it could have been murdered. But interestingly enough—and, of course, Weddle and Thomas had no idea how large a role it would play later on—was that nowhere in Odell’s statement was Mabel participating in the birth.
“I succeeded in doing that,” Odell continued, referring to propping herself up, “but as I did, I must have started to bleed heavily again because I could feel that, not tunnel vision, it’s kind of like a light-headedness and darkness comes over you and you’re…and that’s it, and that happened.”
She was nervous. Shaking. Taking sips of water. Blowing her nose. Wiping away tears.
“And when I came to, I had tried to…umm…clean the baby’s throat out and see if the baby would breathe on its own because I had no way of knowing how long I had been out and it didn’t…. And then panic took over, panic and fear and confusion, and I don’t know what all else….”
“What year was that?” Weddle asked.
“Maybe 1982, 1983, or 1984.”
“Was this your fourth child?”
“Yes.”
“So you had three girls…and this would have been your fourth?”
The three girls Weddle was referring to had been fathered by James Odell.
“Right.”
“Where did the birth occur?”
“In a place called Hamilton House in White Lake, New York.”
After Weddle tried getting Odell to pin down an exact time of year, he asked her to continue.
“Well, I knew the baby was, umm…That it was at nighttime, but it was getting late in the morning and I knew my mother would be showing up…and umm…I took the baby and wrapped it up in what it was laying in. I think it was a towel, but I’m not even sure, and I put the baby in the closet. I had climbed into bed and I propped my bottom up so I would stop feeling that feeling of passing out. And I stayed in bed for three days until I had, I felt I had enough strength to get up, because between the time I got into bed and I felt well enough to get up. When I had to go to the bathroom, I used to crawl on my hands and knees to go to the bathroom.”
So, Mabel hadn’t even been there at the time of the birth.
Furthermore, as Thomas and Weddle listened, it occurred to them that the scenario Odell had just described could have happened once—but three times? Not a chance.
Weddle wanted to know how Odell provided care for her living children while she was laid up in bed for the three days.
Odell said the children “went into a different kind of mode, you know, like they were taking care of mom—”
Thomas cut in. “You said you put the baby in the closet because you knew your mother was coming over. Did she ever show up the next morning, or in the next few days?”
“Yes, she did. Yes.” Odell looked down.
“Did she notice anything? Had you been able to clean up your bed area, or wherever you had the baby?”
“Everything was on those towels and the towels were folded up and around the baby and in the closet.”
“Okay.”
“There really wasn’t too much to be cleaned up. I remember at one point or another, I had to, there was a spot on the rug or on the floor, I forget which it was, but there was a spot that I needed to clean up and I, umm, managed to get myself to the bathroom and get a washcloth and I just washed that up.”
In the context of time, it appeared that Odell had an incredible memory. It had been at least twenty years since the incident. Yet, here she was recalling, in vivid detail, spots on the rug, towels, washcloths, as though it had taken place a week ago.
Odell then explained how she “healed up” without the help of a doctor
.
“Do you know the name of the father of this child?” Weddle asked.
“No.”
“It was just a rape incident, by an unknown assailant, an unknown person?”
Odell shook her head. “Uh-huh.”
“So you were never able to obtain the name of that person, the father?”
“No.”
“Were you even able to obtain or find out, did you know the sex of the baby?”
“I probably did, but I couldn’t recall to you. I don’t remember.”
Remarkable. She could recall precise details about the birth and spots on the rug she had cleaned up, but not the sex of her child? It was as if the baby were an anomaly—some nuisance that had no name, no father, no gender, no life. Could a woman carry a baby for nine months, give birth to it, and not know the sex of that child?
As the interview progressed, Odell began to somewhat change her story. But what she was about to tell Weddle and Thomas, as Williams sat and listened, would turn an investigation of the life and death of three babies into three separate cases of murder.
3
Hubert Odell, James Odell’s brother, showed up at the lake toward the end of 1982, not too long after Odell had given birth to Baby Number One.
“I don’t know how true this is on his end,” Odell said, “but [Hubert] said he came up to the lake to visit his nieces. I never had a problem with any of James’s brothers, so it was okay.”
Odell never tried to get too involved in that end of the Odell family because “each member…had their own set of problems.” Moreover, it was hard to be around an Odell because certain members of the family “reminded me of my father.”
Regardless, she and Hubert struck up a friendship that turned into an intimate relationship, but again, only at the urging, she claimed, of Mabel.
“At that point in time, [Hubert] had the potential to make a tremendous amount of money…dollar signs in my mother’s eyes. She believed if I was able to get close to him, she could manipulate some of that money out of him.”
Again and again, Odell said, Mabel’s quest for the cash-cow husband led her down a path of meeting men, sleeping with them, and becoming pregnant.
Hubert ended up getting into a bad car accident one day, which set him back. Then, Odell said, he borrowed some money from Mabel.
“He borrowed, I think it was, five hundred dollars. And the moment he borrowed that five hundred, that was it for him: he was screwed royally. You never borrowed money from my mother. You gave her money, but you never borrowed it.”
Odell had simple goals in life at that point: work, home, and spending time with her children.
“I didn’t want any man in my life. I didn’t want to be bothered by anybody. I wanted to be left alone.”
What she meant by “spend time with my children” was obviously all of them. Baby Matthew was in a suitcase in her closet and now she had Baby Number One in a box next to Matthew in that same closet. It was important for her to keep the babies in her closet in her room, she insisted, so they were within her grasp at all times.
“I am going to be totally blunt,” she admitted, “I knew it was my secret. But I also knew at some point or another that it was also my weapon. My mother knew they [the babies] were there and I knew they were there and she was horrified I had not taken them and thrown them away—because that’s what she had wanted done.”
Odell insisted Mabel knew the babies in the closet were going to one day set Odell free.
“I would go to the police and I would explain everything. And the babies would be my proof. I never expected it to take on the connotation it took [later] on, where I would have to worry and think about my children going to school and the reaction of their peers…and the taunting my kids would take…. No one wanted to find out the truth, and that started with the police and went all the way down the line.”
4
It was getting close to 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 18, as Odell sat with Weddle, Thomas, and Williams, trying to sort out what had happened to the babies. It was important for Thomas and Weddle to get Odell to lock down what she was saying. If she decided to change her story later, at least Weddle and Thomas would have something to work from.
“What eventually happened and what did you eventually do with the babies’ remains while you were at [the lake]?” Weddle asked.
Odell said she put the baby in a closet.
It was hard to grasp. Right there, among the children’s toys, winter jackets and hats and mittens, was this dead child, as if it, too, was some household item Mabel and Odell had no use for.
Thomas and Weddle then asked Odell to describe exactly where the baby was stored.
“A broken-down cabin,” she said. “A cottage.” It was in back of the main house where she had been living. Totally “[un]inhabitable by anyone….” This important fact told Weddle and Thomas that, regardless how the baby died, Odell knew what she was doing and had purposely hid the body.
Then came the question everyone—the media, family, friends—would be asking in the coming days and months.
“It may be hard to describe or explain, but why, what was your thinking process as you were keeping this child rather than doing other things with it?” Meaning, going to the authorities and maybe explaining what had happened. Odell was a grown woman, almost thirty years old at the time. Why wasn’t the child given a proper burial?
“Eventually doing exactly what I’m doing now and laying them to rest in a peaceful manner,” Odell said, as if she had facilitated the events of the past week.
For a few moments, Thomas asked Odell about the color of the blankets she had used to wrap the babies in, but she couldn’t remember.
“Okay, then you said the second baby you had, how long after the first baby, do you think you could have delivered the second baby?”
“It was no less than a year. It might have been a little longer, but I can’t…give you the dates exactly, my memory is extremely fuzzy.”
“And this second baby,” Thomas asked, “you said it was from a boyfriend, a relationship with a man?”
“Right.” Odell seemed more relaxed. Perhaps the relief of exposing such deep-seated secrets she had been carrying around with her for two decades had settled her.
“Do you recall who he was?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Can you tell us what happened with that infant?”
What was odd about how Odell reacted to the question was how she immediately began to talk about the relationship with the man, not what had happened to the child. Had the relationship with the man affected the future of the child? Is that what she was implying?
“That lasted approximately six weeks,” she said. “It started out on a fairly even level, and about three weeks into the relationship, he started to get physical, a side of him I hadn’t seen come out. He wasn’t very nice to the girls and I decided it was time for him to go!”
As she continued to talk, she failed to mention the baby. Instead, she kept talking about how abusive the man had been and how abusive her former husband had been, along with the “toll” it had taken on her girls.
“Is that before you knew you were pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“So, he never knew you were pregnant?”
“No.”
The conversation then shifted to whether anyone knew she was pregnant: Her mom? The kids?
Over and over, Odell insisted no one—not even Mabel—knew.
“I could wear regular clothes. I was wearing regular jeans, regular shirts.”
“Okay,” Weddle said.
“I’m heavier now than I ever have been in my life.”
Again, she said she never saw a doctor and never received prenatal care.
Mabel had moved in with her, she explained, at about the same time because the elderly woman she had been caring for had passed away.
“Okay, tell us about the birth of that baby.”
As Odell explained it, she was on th
e couch in her living room. “I could feel contractions starting, and I didn’t think anything of it because I thought I had some time, and I had put the girls to bed and, umm, right after they had gone to sleep, which I couldn’t even tell you what time it was, but I know that it was dark.”
From there, she claimed, she went into the bathroom—same as she had done the previous year—and as she was taking cloths and towels off the towel rack, her water broke. After that, she said, she sat down on the floor with all of the towels and cloths and “propped [them] underneath me because I could feel that pressure, that pressure coming, that need to push…and I did, and when I did, everything came out—swoosh—and then I went again.”
Weddle and Thomas were confused: “And then I went again?”
“I’m sorry?” Weddle asked.
“Out I went again!” Odell said, snapping her fingers.
“Oh, shit, you passed out?”
“Yup!”
CHAPTER 10
1
BABY NUMBER TWO never had a chance at life, same as Baby Number One.
“The father would be,” Odell said later, “my ex-brother-in-law.”
Odell said she had sex with Hubert Odell, her husband James’s brother, “maybe four times.” During one of those intimate moments, she became pregnant. When she found out, Hubert was out of her life entirely. It was the middle of 1983. He had borrowed money from Mabel and taken off.
“I told my mother I was going to keep the baby,” Odell said. Mabel compared the “situation” to Odell’s “divorce from James: ‘James didn’t want to be responsible [for the children] and neither would anyone else.’”
When Odell went into labor, she said, she “did all the things” she “would normally do, except for working.” Mabel knew she was in labor, even though Odell had never told her.
“After I put the girls to bed, I went to sit down for a moment.”
Mabel then walked up to her and said, “How far apart are the pains?”
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