Sleep in Heavenly Peace

by M. William Phelps

  Nevertheless, after four months in Lytle, Sauerstein returned after not finding work. Odell was now living in Johnson City, a five-minute ride from Endicott. She had a hard time recalling exactly where she lived and when, but she was certain about having moved around quite a bit while in Endicott and Johnson City.

  “A lot of this comes to me and a lot of this stuff is blended,” Odell said, speaking about her life in general during that period. “I asked my therapist [later] why it comes to me this way, and she said it is my way of dealing with the trauma and my way of trying to block it out.”

  Regardless of how she remembered her life, a paper trail left behind pointed to a gypsy’s life of getting into trouble with Child Protective Services at times, running from bill collectors at others, abandoning apartments under the cloak of darkness, and changing jobs as often as three and four times a year.

  In June 1998, Odell became a grandmother. Her daughter Doris, unmarried then, gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

  By the end of 1998, near Christmas, Odell wasn’t feeling well. She was forty-five years old. She’d stopped menstruating around Christmas and thought perhaps she was experiencing early signs of menopause. Yet as the new year dawned, it became apparent she would have another announcement to make to the family.

  CHAPTER 18

  1

  HEATHER YAKIN, A reporter with the Times Herald-Record, a local newspaper in Sullivan County, was sitting at her computer on the morning of May 20, skimming the Associated Press wire, checking for any national stories that might have a local angle. It was part of her morning ritual to check the wire, she said, and plan her day.

  As she read, Yakin was struck by a story slugged with a rather bizarre headline: INFANT REMAINS. Being a crime reporter, it was a story Yakin knew she had to check out further. So, as she sipped her first cup of coffee of the day, she continued reading.

  “Dianne Odell, now living in Rome, PA,” the AP story began, “told investigators she gave birth to four babies that died in New York state between the late 1960s and 1984, including three found last week in boxes abandoned in a storage shed in Safford, Arizona, said Graham County Sheriff Frank Hughes.”

  The words “New York” jumped off the computer screen at Yakin. A local connection!

  Obviously, the AP had gotten a few of its facts wrong, but that was the nature of the daily news business. Either way, Yakin knew her day was going to be consumed with tracking down as much information as she could about the story.

  Part of her daily routine included calling local police stations in the Monticello region to see what was brewing. Like any reporter well-entrenched in the political infrastructure of a small town, Yakin had contacts and sources that fed her information. When she called the NYSP Liberty barracks moments later and asked about the Odell story, all the trooper would say was “Go to the press conference this afternoon.”

  “Is someone dead?” It was one of Yakin’s standard questions.

  “No comment,” the trooper said.

  No comment, of course, was as good as a yes. Trick questions. Reporters, at least good reporters, were masters at spinning words to get the information they wanted.

  Yakin asked the trooper where the case was being investigated.

  “Sullivan County.”

  Another great answer. She had contacts in the Sullivan County court.

  After hanging up, Yakin phoned Steve Lungen’s office. It took her a while, but she got Lungen on the phone. “[He] wouldn’t say anything beyond, ‘This is [going to be] a big case,’” Yakin recalled.

  With that, she hit Lungen with: “Is someone dead?”

  Lungen hesitated. Then, “The case is out of Bethel. It’s not a recent case. It happened over a period of years…. The defendant was living in Pennsylvania and Arizona…and the case involves the deaths of three babies.”

  Oh God! Yakin said to herself. The babies they found in the storage shed in Arizona…. It all made sense now. The AP story and Lungen’s information; it was connected. With the press conference only hours away, Yakin realized she had to move quickly.

  Big case. Big story.

  Later that morning, more stories were published around the country. For the most part, the AP was updating its original stories as information flowed in and reporters backed up bits and pieces of information.

  One story ran with the headline WOMAN CHARGED WITH MURDERING THREE CHILDREN. The brief accompanying article began by outlining the criminal case against Odell, but focused more on the bizarre nature of what amounted to a woman toting around the mummified and decomposed remains of her three children for over twenty years.

  “Think about carrying around three corpses, your own children…,” NYSP major Alan Martin, who worked out of Troop F, Scileppi’s troop, in Liberty, told the AP. “It’s very hard to comprehend. Why? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  By midday, the story had sparked media interest from all over. It was, by most standards, a slow news day, anyway. A mother killing her children was surely a crime story that could offer the talking heads on the nightly cable tragedy-TV shows something to discuss. Without a doubt, the mummified corpses of Odell’s children were going to be talking points in the days and months to come for anyone in the business of broadcast media.

  Quite persistent now in getting to the core of the story, Yakin started calling more of her contacts. She had been working at the Herald-Record since 1997. One of her professors at SUNY, New Paltz, a rather popular local college, back in 1996, who had himself worked at the Herald-Record at one time, let Yakin know the “night cops beat” was open. She was interested. So he put in a “good word” for her, and the next thing she knew she had the job.

  Heather Yakin had covered just about everything as a crime reporter—except a story like the one unfolding on the morning of May 20.

  “I was hooked [on covering crime] from the moment I first had to ask a cop what kind of knife some guy…had used to stab his wife,” Yakin said. “That was my second night on the job. I worked ‘night cops’ part-time for seven months.”

  This, mind you, while keeping a full course load in college at the same time. Then, “In August 1997, eager to put in the time in hopes of a full-time job,” Yakin said she worked every day of the month.

  The effort paid off, because she was offered a full-time job. And in March 1998, she became a full-fledged reporter working the Sullivan County crime-and-justice beat.

  The Odell story had the potential for Heather Yakin to make her mark at the Herald-Record. It had the juicy details that make Lifetime Television movies and Court TV trials so popular among those audiences today who have enormous appetites for crime and forensic entertainment. It was, in retrospect, Yakin’s chance to follow a day-by-day crime story, do some investigating—which she loved—and write about it. Many of the stories about Odell would likely end up on the front page. Everyone in town, by now, was talking about what had become the “Babies in Boxes” murder case.

  Her sources inside the Sullivan County Courthouse were talking. She was going to run Odell and Sauerstein’s names in the electronic library at the Herald-Record and see what popped. Her gut was telling her the story was going to get bigger. In addition, as she began to learn more about Odell’s life, she realized it was her own bloodline that could potentially be the pot of gold as far as getting an exclusive story. Yakin’s roots went back to the town of Bethel, where Odell had spent a better part of her early life and, more important, the location where the babies had been born.

  “My family,” Yakin said, “on my maternal grandfather’s side, has been in the town of Bethel for at least one hundred years. When I was six years old, [in late 1973], my parents, brother, sister, and I moved into [a] farmhouse there that had been my great-grandmother’s…. We kids rode the school bus each morning with Max Shapiro’s kids, and we were friends with them.”

  Max Shapiro was the junk dealer who had found the blue suitcase containing the remains of Baby Doe back in 1989.<
br />
  Yakin’s mother was elected to the Bethel Town Board when Heather was nine.

  “My sister and I used to run around downtown Kauneonga Lake in the summer while the board met. Town Hall was located behind the post office,” which was a side step from one of the bungalows where Odell and Mabel had once lived.

  The Yakin family then moved to Monticello in 1982 after Heather’s mother ran an unsuccessful campaign to head the board. After graduating high school, Heather found herself at the University of Chicago for the next two years. Then came a stint, she laughingly added, at trying to be a “rock star” and going to Orange County Community College.

  “This [was] when I was trying to decide what to do with my life. I quit…[a few jobs]…. After a couple of months, I picked up day shifts bartending. My mom, who had gone back to school to get a bachelor’s and her CPA license, actually came up with the idea of journalism.”

  The Odell story was, perhaps, a stepping-stone for Heather Yakin. She already had written about many different aspects of crime—murder, rape, sex abuse, arson, larceny, contractor fraud, elder abuse, Internet crime, burglary, robbery, drug crime—when she came upon the AP story about Odell. But none could match the drama of a mother involved in the deaths of her children some twenty years ago. No, this was different. Not your typical, run-of-the-mill murder story tucked away somewhere on page A8. It had titillating elements and a hometown connection.

  Front-page all the way.

  “You name it,” Yakin said, “Sullivan County has got a bit of a reputation for having lots of sex offense cases. I think much of that comes from the DA’s office and the police, including the Family Violence Response Team formed in 1999. They’ve learned how to build cases, including how to get confessions.”

  Indeed, an important element in the Odell case that would come into play later on: how to obtain confessions. Had Odell been coerced into an admission?

  “The DA is aggressive about prosecutions,” Yakin added, but “the same officials [also] go after people who file false reports of rape or sexual abuse.”

  For that reason alone, Heather Yakin said, she believed the scales of justice are balanced in Sullivan County.

  2

  For the past three days, Odell had been questioned about her dead babies. She had told several different versions of what amounted to one common story: because of her actions, three of her children were dead. There was no confession of malicious intent, where she explained how she snapped and strangled them; and there were no wild stories of her going crazy and murdering the children in some ritualistic act. If anything, she had told police exactly, she said, what she remembered.

  And where had it gotten her? In a Sullivan County jail cell, in downtown Monticello, awaiting arraignment on several counts of murder.

  For Robert Sauerstein, he was at home tending to his and Odell’s five children, one of whom was not even four years old. In many ways, the events of the past week were surreal. One moment, Sauerstein and Odell were raising a family, moving around the country, trying to find a place to settle, and the next, well, she was in a jail cell looking at life behind bars.

  Had it really all happened this way?

  On Thursday, May 22, 2003, one of the guards in the holding area at the Sullivan County Jail, where Odell was being held, rattled the bars of her cell with his keys and said, “Get dressed, Odell. You have a visitor.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know, Odell, just get up!”

  “Is it a legal visit?”

  “No, no. It’s no legal visit.”

  Odell had been trying to sleep. The past week had been a blur. Time hadn’t passed; instead, the days and nights, she said, had all run together. On Tuesday and Wednesday, she spoke to her court-appointed defense attorney, Stephan Schick. But Odell insisted later she hadn’t really gotten any information out of Schick that was useful. Their first meeting was more or less a “get acquainted” conference. In her view, a good attorney—not that Schick wasn’t—would have gotten her out on bond by Wednesday. Scared and lonely, sitting in jail, she was wondering what the hell was taking so long.

  “I’m in jail on Tuesday and Wednesday,” Odell said, “and I did not receive a visitor. You know, no communication with my family whatsoever.”

  When she didn’t hear from Sauerstein or Maryann, who was twenty-three years old now, or anyone else from her family, she assumed Sauerstein had “taken off with the kids to make sure they were safe and okay.”

  As Odell walked out into the visiting area of the jail, she was startled to see Sauerstein and a woman named Danielle, a neighbor with whom she had been friends ever since living in Rome. Odell and Sauerstein lived next door to a general store in Rome and Odell had worked at the store from time to time, where she met Danielle.

  Odell sat across from Sauerstein and her friend. At first, they looked at her and couldn’t believe where they were. Odell appeared beaten down, tired. The bags under her eyes were more pronounced than they had ever been, her face devoid of any real energy or life. She had been crying, of course, on and off, wondering how she had managed to land herself in jail for the murder of her own children.

  Almost simultaneously Sauerstein and Danielle said, “What happened?”

  Odell shrugged her shoulders and looked down at the graffiti-laden table. So many initials carved in the tabletop, representing so many women who had come and gone before her through what was a revolving door. Now she, too, was a notch in a table.

  After thinking about it for a moment, Odell looked at Sauerstein and said, “My mother was involved.”

  It would be a recurring mantra in the weeks and months to come. Odell would place all the blame on Mabel. Yet she’d had her chance—multiple chances, really—to tell police about Mabel’s responsibility in the crimes, but thus far had chosen not to say anything.

  When she explained to Sauerstein that Mabel had been involved, he said, “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew you were hiding something.”

  At that moment, Odell believed that Sauerstein was having trouble coming to terms with the situation. Not what had happened to the babies, she was quick to point out, but what had happened to her.

  “I don’t think Robert wanted to deal with [the issues regarding the police] at that point. But I think he was having problems about him not coming to my rescue…not barging in on a white horse, but you know, showing up with a lawyer and doing all of those things.”

  Sauerstein was a man with a strong moral character, Odell insisted. He was from the old school, where a man took care of his wife, no matter what the circumstances were.

  Nothing came out of the visit other than the fact that Odell now knew her husband was going to be there for her. The visit was his way, she believed, of showing support.

  What started out five days ago on a Sunday afternoon as answering a few routine questions for the Graham County (Arizona) Sheriff’s Office had turned into the worst possible situation imaginable. Odell believed then that all she had to do was answer a few questions about the babies and the situation would work itself out. After all, in her mind she hadn’t done anything criminal.

  “That was what I thought at the start. The first thing I wanted to do was, I wanted to sit down and I wanted to talk to my family and I wanted to let them know everything that had happened and everything that went on. From the very beginning to the very end, which included what had happened with my father and everything else.”

  Furthermore, she said Thomas Scileppi, Diane Thomas, Bruce Weddle, and the Sullivan County DA’s Office all lied to her when they told her the media was chasing the story on a national level.

  “On the first day when I spoke to the police, at the end of that conversation that had included me in the media, they (Thomas and Weddle) are telling me this story is going across the nation and all of this other shit. It’s on TV. It’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Okay, this is the way this is going to go if you tell them the trut
h. You’re going to tell them that your mother was there, your father raped you, all the way down the line. From beginning to end: you were raped by your [half] brother when you were five, your father took his turn, and after you turned fourteen, your mother put you into prostitution…. My God,’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘my kids are going to have to live with this?’”

  Because of that pressure, Odell insisted, she began lying on that first day to protect her family, mainly her living children.

  From what?

  The fallout from everything that came with being branded a baby killer.

  “No matter what happens to me, my kids are going to have to live with this. So I kept my mouth shut.”

  Wasn’t a mother’s place with her children? If Odell had chosen to lie for the sake of protecting her children, she now realized where those lies had gotten her. All she needed to do was look around at the steel bars and stainless-steel toilets and hear the screams and foul language and smell the wretched odors coming from her surroundings to know that her kids were not better off with her in jail. Why not come clean and get it over with? Why not tell the truth and go home to your kids?

  3

  It wasn’t planned, Odell claimed later. It was something that just “happened.” And for the first four months of her latest pregnancy, she said, she never knew she was pregnant. When she stopped menstruating, she thought she was experiencing early signs of menopause.

  But with the birth of the baby came one of the best surprises of her life. On August 7, 1999, Odell celebrated her forty-sixth birthday with labor pains. The following day, August 8, merely six hours after the day she was born, she was given what she later described as “the best birthday present I could have ever given myself.”