Sleep in Heavenly Peace

by M. William Phelps

  One of Odell’s brothers, Richard Molina, wasn’t shocked by his mother’s death when Odell called. He knew Mabel had been sick. And although they hadn’t spoken in many, many years, and hadn’t gotten along well, it was still comforting to Richard to get the news. He could, he said, finally let Mabel go.

  Fifty-seven-year-old Richard Molina later remembered his life in the Molina household back in Jamaica, Queens, during the early ’50s and ’60s, very differently than his sister. Soft-spoken, with an obvious Queens accent, Richard later spoke of his life with Mabel, his dad, his two half brothers, and Dianne Odell as though he had grown up in another house entirely. For example, Richard felt it his duty to “speak up for his father,” whom he loved dearly, and misses immensely, to this day. He didn’t want his father’s name, he said, besmirched by a woman—Dianne Odell—he claimed has “lied about everything her whole life.”

  “We were a family,” Richard said, “of all boys until Dianne was born.” Admittedly, Richard “divorced himself from the family” in 1981 after John died.

  “My father was a hard worker all his life.” Mabel, on the other hand, was a “schemer, a liar, a con artist. She did whatever she could to con people.”

  He remembered a time when his father had been saving money in a bank account to start his own automotive-repair business. He had thousands of dollars stowed away—that is, until Mabel found the bank-book and pillaged it, leaving John with nothing more than enough money to buy a few tools and proceed with “side jobs.”

  His dad did drink, Richard confessed without hesitation, and would get belligerent when drunk, but that was the extent of it, he insisted. It was hard for Richard to call his dad an alcoholic, because, he said, “he drank, but he got up every morning and did what he had to do.” Violence or anger wasn’t part of John’s behavior when he drank, Richard claimed. When he was “on the sauce, he’d walk around the house and stress that he was the boss, the one in charge, the breadwinner.” But his torments were directed at Mabel, Richard said, not Dianne or any of the other children.

  During the early ’60s, it was only Richard and Dianne in the house with Mabel and John. Six years older than his baby sister, Richard said Dianne was always viewed as the “spoiled one. To my father, you must understand, she was the only girl.”

  Richard recalled, “She was the flower of my father’s life. She could do no wrong! He had four sons, but they didn’t matter like his ‘little girl’ did. She didn’t have to do anything.”

  While Richard remembered having to wash and wax floors, scrub toilets, paint and help his dad at work (which he didn’t mind), he said Dianne never had to do anything. She might have swept a floor once in a while, but she never did any physical, hard labor. Quite a different story from the one Odell would later tell of living under the sword of dear old dad—mopping, sweeping, and scrubbing floors on all fours—as if she were Cinderella.

  According to Richard, any notion of his dad physically abusing Odell was “not true at all.”

  “Dianne always had a problem: she couldn’t very well get along with people.” She had no social skills, he said. “There were some nice girls in the neighborhood, Dianne’s age, but Dianne just couldn’t get along with any of them…. My guess is, Dianne wanted to always be in charge and they kind of rebelled against that.”

  Dianne Odell repeatedly painted Mabel as an evil person, laying much of the blame for what happened in her life on Mabel.

  “I won’t totally disagree with that,” Richard said. “The one thing my mother was, was diabolical. Definitely! Meaning, some of the things she did—not alone, mind you—some of what she did, she did with Dianne and the other kids.”

  One story Richard told explained perfectly this rather odd dynamic between Dianne and Mabel. It was nighttime in the Molina household when John came home from work stupidly drunk, staggering all over the place. Noticing this, Richard claimed, Mabel and Dianne waited for him to pass out. Once John was in a stupor, sleeping off his bender on the floor, Dianne and Mabel “cleaned him out,” as if he were a hobo on the street being rolled by two hoodlums.

  But that wasn’t the end of it.

  The following day, after John failed to realize he had been ripped off, and Dianne and Mabel felt they had gotten away with it, they laughed about it together, rejoicing in having made a successful “score.”

  “Those were the kinds of things they did.”

  Odell and Mabel, Richard went on to say, “bonded” in a strange way. They were “connected.” Odell, he added, “always had a way of making things up.” Whether it was something that had happened at school, on the way home from school, or with a kid in the neighborhood, she was always “concocting stories about how [people] mistreated her.”

  She played the role of victim, according to Richard, congenially, absorbing sympathy people showered on her, learning how to use it to her advantage.

  It was in junior high school that Dianne became known as “loose,” Richard opined. She started hanging out in other neighborhoods, he said, with other kids. In Queens, during the ’60s, neighborhood was everything to a kid. One stayed in his or her neighborhood or risked invading someone else’s property. Turf wars weren’t something invented in S. E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders; it was a mortal sin to be caught in another neighborhood. Dianne, apparently, fell in with other kids, from different neighborhoods, and Richard recalled adamantly, “God knows, she would never open a book and do any homework…. I don’t recollect her doing it at all. It was in those years that she became close to my mother. She recognized that being the only other female in the house, that that’s who she should bond with the most.”

  Richard joined the navy in 1965. Dianne was 11 years old. Soon after, about midway through his tour, Dianne and Mabel moved out of the Jamaica, Queens, house and into Kew Gardens. However, whereas Odell would tell stories of being forced into prostitution by Mabel and living under the reign of a dungeon master—not being able to leave the apartment and having to answer to Mabel’s every whim—Richard saw it differently.

  Even more interesting was that Richard swore that his father stopped drinking around this same time.

  “First of all, he had a very bad back; he’d had a heart attack, so it was kind of detrimental to his own health to continue drinking…. He may have had a drink of wine or something like that, but he wasn’t drinking anywhere near the way he used to.”

  As for Odell’s claim that one of her half brothers had raped her when she was six years old, Richard said “absolutely not. No way. My father would have killed anyone who touched her. That was his little girl. As much as I dislike my half brothers, they weren’t that type of people. I’m not saying we were the Leave It to Beaver family, by any means. We had our hard times, but we saw them through.”

  Halfway through Richard’s tour, he was allowed to go home for a visit. Dianne and Mabel were living in Kew Gardens by then, by themselves, having little contact with his dad.

  “I went there to visit them when I came home for a break. I would talk to my mother, and Dianne was there, and they would fight and argue in front of me. She would accuse my mother of lying about things…and my mother would complain that Dianne didn’t want to go to school. She wanted to stay home all day. She didn’t want to work. And, you know, Dianne would be saying different: ‘No, she won’t let me get a job. I want to go to school and work part-time and you won’t let me because you want me to do the chores you should be doing in the house.’”

  Typical teen angst. Dianne was rebelling against authority. Richard called it “nonsense.”

  As for Mabel allegedly putting Odell to work on the street, Richard said it couldn’t have been possible.

  “I don’t think my mother would even know how to start something like that…you know, set it up,” he said, laughing. “She wasn’t the brightest person in the world. Okay, if that were the case, I would have found out while I was there.”

  If his sister was living this unspeakable life of a teenage prosti
tute, living in fear of Mabel, Richard believed she would have mentioned something—anything—to him when he visited.

  “When I went to visit, you must understand, they are both looking at me as someone who they want to get on their side.”

  Fighting for position, in other words: “Mom did this. Richard, help me.”

  “Dianne is not going to school. Richard, she doesn’t want to listen. Do something!”

  “They were both telling me different tales, hoping I would take one side or the other. If what Dianne says today is true, regarding the prostitution, I would have heard that from her then. She would have pleaded: ‘Save me, help me, get me the hell out of here.’

  “That was not the case.”

  Furthermore, while he was there, Richard made a point of telling Odell, “If you’re not happy here with Mom, why don’t you go back to live with Pop?”

  Later, Odell claimed the reason she didn’t want to go live with her dad was because he was abusive, both sexually and physically, and she feared for her life. Instead of indicating this to Richard while he was there, however, she told him, he claimed: “No, no, no! I’m not going back with Pop. He’s going to try to run my life. He’s going to try to rule me. He won’t give me any kind of freedom at all.”

  Was this positive proof that Odell wasn’t involved in a life of prostitution and frequent abuse from her mom and dad, as she later claimed? Absolutely not. But it was at least another view of her life from someone who was there.

  One of the stories Richard laughed at and said was totally outrageous was the story of Odell’s brother, along with John, setting her up and scaring her. Her father had told her to answer the door if anyone knocked. When she went to the door, Odell said, there was a man with a stocking over his head who came at her with a knife. After brandishing the knife and grabbing her by the throat, the man took off the stocking, as her dad looked on, and revealed himself to be one of her half brothers.

  According to Richard, it was one more in a series of falsified stories that seemed to fuel Odell’s deep-seated hatred for her mother and father and allow her to, perhaps, live with the way her life had turned out. The half brother in question, Richard recalled, was a troublemaker. He had gotten into a few problems with the law and John Molina had bailed him out of jail, but “[he] would never, never condescend or demean himself to do something like that.”

  Furthermore, “Why would my dad, who viewed Dianne as his princess, do that? He and my brother weren’t close in that way. They would have not conspired to do that. No way.”

  As far as Odell’s children were concerned—even the dead children—Richard saw them as fixtures she could latch onto. Security blankets.

  Could Mabel or Odell have murdered the children?

  “I don’t see my mother killing babies,” Richard said. “She was a schemer, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t see her as a murderer. If there was no benefit, financially, for her, I just don’t see her doing it. If there was money involved, maybe she might entertain it; but if there was no monetary benefit to it, no way. Dianne, well, I don’t see her…Dianne, you see, was many things, but I don’t see her…I don’t think she’s the type to put her hands around a child’s neck and kill it. But in desperation, in order to save herself, she would say, ‘I have to get rid of this baby.’ I can see that!…She was definitely naive enough to think that she could pull off hiding three or four dead babies. With Mom dead, unable to defend herself, Dianne sees her as the easiest one to blame for everything. I can see her filling that role. It’s easy for her to blame all of her problems on my parents.”

  When his dad died in 1981, Richard took care of all the arrangements, and buried the old man. Admittedly, he hadn’t spoken to anyone in the family since. Whereas Odell later said she was basically dragged down to her father’s funeral by Mabel, Richard didn’t remember the day like that.

  “When my father died, I was the executor of the estate, in charge of selling off the house and fulfilling my father’s final wishes.” Those wishes, Richard continued, included selling the Jamaica, Queens, house and splitting the money among Mabel, Odell, and Richard. The other two children, who were from an earlier marriage of Mabel’s, were totally left out.

  Richard phoned Mabel at the lake the day John died.

  “Crocodile tears,” Richard insisted, came first. Odell and Mabel began crying as if they had loved John all their lives. But what happened next showed their true colors, he said. After they cried and “acted” as if they cared, Mabel abruptly stopped crying and asked about the money.

  “At that time, I had hardened myself to their behavior. Through all the things that went on throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Dianne was the type of person who would not call my father for six, twelve, eighteen months. Then, suddenly, she’d call and start crying, saying she needed this or that, needed money. He would send her money or she would come and get it. My father, whenever Dianne needed help, would help her. She was his little girl.”

  Not only did Odell and Mabel drive to Queens after hearing about John’s death, Richard said, but they “rushed down and left the kids in New York with someone, I don’t know who.”

  Odell later said she took the children with her.

  The first thing Richard noticed when he saw his sister was the size of her stomach. “What are you doing?” he asked, looking at Odell, her stomach bulging out of her dress. She looked uncomfortable and overweight.

  “Well,” Odell said, “Dad’s dead and I want to be here to help.”

  “To what end?” Richard wanted to know. “You don’t see him for eighteen to twenty months at a time and now you want to help? Why is it imperative that you see him now? There’s no reason for you to be here! It’s going to be a small, quiet thing. Then he’ll be buried.”

  “Well…well, I want to be here because, well, because…I want to pick some things up.”

  With that, Richard thought, Yeah, I know why you’re here: you’re trying to figure out what you can scam.

  Mabel, sitting, listening, then chimed in: “What about the will, Richard? Where’s the will?”

  “I’m going to take care of the estate. Don’t worry, Ma, you’ll get yours.”

  Richard then explained what the will stipulated.

  “They were only interested in the money. They were getting a third—and a third of anything was a lot to them.”

  “Dianne, you’re pregnant, you need to take care of yourself. I’ll take care of everything. You and Ma will get your money, don’t worry. Go home.”

  Richard was devastated by his father’s death. He was up to his neck in making funeral arrangements, paperwork, calling people, not to mention the emotional toll of actually burying him. He said he didn’t need any more stress brought on by his sister and mother beating him up for money when his dad’s corpse wasn’t even in the ground yet.

  Richard finally said, “Here’s the deal: you don’t have to worry yourselves about getting anything that’s coming to you.” He was talking to both Mabel and Odell as they sat, looking at him. As he spoke, he showed them the will. “I’ll sell the house and send you a check. That’s his last will and testament. I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t agree with it, but I am going to fulfill his final wishes.”

  After Richard finished, Mabel and Odell, apparently confident Richard would keep his word, left. They did not, Richard insisted, go to the funeral or wake. They clearly had heard what they wanted and had driven back up to the lake the same day.

  “After the funeral, I sold the house, cut them their checks, and, knowing they both had problems, wrote them off and never heard from them again.”

  Odell later said she lost touch with Richard over the years because “for one reason, he can’t stand me. He thinks the sun rose and set in my father’s eyes and that he would believe my father could do no wrong. He had no clue about what went on after he left [to go into the navy]….”

  Richard lives today near the same neighborhood in Queens where he grew up. He has been
married for decades and has several children, all of whom speak very highly of his character, as a man, husband, father. Richard, incidentally, has never been in any trouble and served his country in the navy with honors.

  CHAPTER 17

  1

  AS ODELL RESTED her head against the window in the backseat of BCI investigator Robert Lane’s unmarked cruiser, en route from Waverly to Liberty, she perhaps didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation. She was going to be booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a jail cell, where she would sit until she was arraigned.

  Investigator Lane later said Odell slept that morning during much of the ride. Odell, however, said she was faking it.

  “No, they thought I was sleeping!” She had her eyes closed, but she was listening to what Lane was saying to the cop he took along for the ride, sort of eavesdropping on the conversation she believed they were having about her in whispers. “There was a part of me that raged,” Odell explained, “because, even from the very beginning, in 1972, I wanted to make my father pay for what he did to me, and I got shamed out of it by my mother.”

  Among other things, it was that rage fueling her desire to stay awake.

  Nevertheless, Odell was on her way to jail, possibly even prison—all for something, she maintained, she didn’t do. Furthermore, she honestly believed the entire process was some sort of vendetta Steve Lungen had conspired against her because he couldn’t prosecute her for the death of Baby Doe in 1989.

  “Steve Lungen,” Odell said, “doesn’t like to lose. And he couldn’t prosecute me in 1989—but he was definitely going to find a way to do it this time.”

  This was a ridiculous theory, considering the circumstances surrounding how the babies were found and what Odell had told police during the three days in which they interviewed her. She had lied on several occasions when she had the opportunity to tell the truth about what she later claimed happened—that her mom had killed the children. But she didn’t. Moreover, she had signed a statement implicating herself in the deaths of the children. When Steve Lungen first heard about the babies found in Arizona, he had a hard time recalling the 1989 case related to Odell.