Sleep in Heavenly Peace

by M. William Phelps

  Seth Sauerstein, a healthy, vibrant, feisty little boy, was born at Tyler Memorial Hospital, in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania. Odell and Sauerstein, after moving to Harpersville, New York—or, according to police later, running from Child Protective Services in February 1999, telling them they were moving to Albany but instead fled to Pennsylvania, eluding them—welcomed their fifth child together.

  Child Protective Services had been alerted because Odell and Sauerstein’s children, police found out later, were reported to have “excessive absenteeism from school.”

  Odell claimed they had never run from Child Protective Services, but admitted she had kept her children out of school.

  Why?

  “When we got to Harpersville, the place just brought us all down. The kids there were mean. I don’t know how to put this, but as delicately as possible, but…it [Harpersville] was like the trash heap of the world.”

  She was scared, she said, for the well-being of her children.

  “My son went out to play one day and some kid threw a two-by-four at him and split his head open…. It got to the point where we didn’t allow the children to even go outside.”

  Thus, because she feared her children would be hurt, she kept them home from school.

  “I didn’t want anything to happen to them.”

  At the time, she and Sauerstein worked thirty miles from home.

  “God forbid if anything happened to them while I was at work, it would take me an hour to get home, or an hour to get to the nearest hospital.”

  Apparently, being at home by themselves, missing out on an education and being around the potential dangers that lurk in any unsupervised home, was a risk she was more willing to take.

  None of that trouble mattered much to Odell after they moved from Harpersville later that spring to Pennsylvania and she had her eighth living child. She now had another life to take care of. And no criminal charges were ever filed against her for neglect.

  “I would do it all over again to protect my children if I had to.”

  The pregnancy, she recalled, and the circumstances surrounding it, were a gift from God.

  “I’m walking around one day and I felt this flutter in my stomach.” She was months into the pregnancy at the time. “I didn’t have any other discomforts; I didn’t have any nausea.”

  Odell had never experienced morning sickness, she claimed, with any of her kids. And one would have to imagine that after being pregnant for the better part of nine years, her body was used to it by 1999.

  “I was thinking, ‘Okay, well, it’s about time [for my period],’ and then I feel this flutter, this movement—this feeling of life. And I said, ‘Oh, my, God.’”

  When she realized she was pregnant, she went to Sauerstein with the news.

  “You better sit down….”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Well, you better sit down…and I’ll tell you why.” She paused for a moment. Sauerstein took a seat. “We’re going to have another baby.”

  Silence.

  Then he looked at her and laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  At that moment, Odell said, the baby moved, so she put Sauerstein’s hand on her stomach. “See.”

  “Okay.”

  “He seemed to be happy,” she recalled. “What, really, was he going to do?”

  They were excited and scared. Her age had a little to do with it, but it was more that she had grandchildren by then and knew she wasn’t going to be able to work all the way through her latest pregnancy, like she had with most of her pregnancies.

  When she realized she was pregnant, she sat down and thought, Was this given to me for a reason? You know what, yeah, you were given this gift for a reason.

  In terms of the law, Odell had eight “gifts” that had been given life—and four “bastards” that hadn’t.

  What would a jury think of it all?

  4

  Between 2000 and the time she latched onto the Odell case in 2003, Times Herald-Record reporter Heather Yakin said, “There [was] a rise in more white-collar [crime], contractor fraud, big larcenies” in Sullivan County. So she was always busy. But the Odell case offered her something more than the usual drug-related shooting, theft, or embezzlement case. It had elements that fueled a good story.

  By May 26, 2003, a Monday, more facts were made public. Yakin had been beating up her sources for information. The press conference held days before had been the typical “all we can say at this point” nonsense that police spokespeople, forced by white shirts to stand in front of a garrulous bunch of reporters, had to promulgate.

  Before the press conference, Yakin had found the Graham County Sheriff’s Office Web site on the Internet and had gotten hold of Frank Hughes, the sheriff.

  “Nice guy,” she recalled. “Filled me in on their end of the investigation, how the babies were found, described the boxes, gave me rough dates on when the babies were born, when Odell and Sauerstein lived in Safford, and how many living kids Odell had.”

  After she spoke to Frank Hughes, Yakin grabbed a copy of Death Investigator’s Handbook by Louis N. Eliopulos, one of the many reference books she kept on the windowsill by her desk.

  “I checked the sections on decomposed remains, child death, injuries associated with child abuse, and abandoned newborn/stillborn/fetus.”

  Doing that, she said, “refreshed” her memory regarding investigative concerns, and helped her formulate questions for law enforcement.

  A good reporter should always stay objective: get a sense of the story, report the facts, but leave her own opinions about the case with the bartender, a spouse, a friend. One might imagine that Heather Yakin, being a female, had developed personal feelings about Odell and the case in general. If what police were saying turned out to be true, Odell had murdered four of her children. In the eyes of many, she would be considered a monster.

  “Well,” Yakin said, “I don’t have kids, and, frankly, I’ve never wanted them. I’m pretty much devoid of maternal instinct. I really didn’t have a frame of reference on dead newborns. And I’d been doing this job for a few years at that point, covering sex abuse, child abuse—including child abuse fatalities—robbery, assault. Honestly, I’m bothered less by quick deaths than by lingering deaths…. [But] although I have no maternal instinct, I tend to feel rather protective of crime victims, especially murder victims and their families. So my primary reaction to Odell was as a reporter.”

  Still, the case had flooded Heather Yakin with what she described later as “sense-memories,” which, she would soon learn, would be substantially encouraging to where her reporting was heading. Memories, she said, of “being a kid, running around those safe, quiet rural streets in the half dark of summer, playing on the shore of White Lake…riding on the school bus, passing those buildings and those streets every morning and every afternoon.”

  Odell had once lived in one of those buildings. It was the bungalow she and Mabel rented after Max Shapiro found the remains of Baby Doe in her Volkswagen.

  If Odell had gone to school up here, Yakin was thinking as she began plotting her next move, she’d have gone to school with my aunts and uncles.

  Without hesitation, she began making calls. Maybe somebody she knew would remember Odell? If so, she had the scoop of her career.

  5

  In their view, Steve Lungen and his team of investigators had gotten Odell to admit she had killed three of her babies. Odell had been arraigned, where she pleaded not guilty, in what amounted to a five-minute court appearance. For Lungen, the case against Odell was just beginning. There was no doubt, he believed, she would either present an insanity defense or try to explain the deaths of the three babies as accidental, with the hope of reaching one juror. So, for starters, Lungen had to prepare to prove Odell had, in fact, murdered the children—that they hadn’t died of natural causes or by accident. And, secondly, Odell knew what she was doing at the tim
e.

  None of this would be easy. The condition of the babies’ remains, Lungen was about to find out, was going to be his first major hurdle.

  Investigator Bill Maloney had been with the NYSP for eighteen years. For the past eight, Maloney had worked in the Crime Scene Unit out of Middletown, New York. Unlike television, where actor William Petersen’s character, Grissom, on the CBS hit show CSI, arrives at a crime scene and figures out a murder in sixty minutes, Maloney spent hours, days, and weeks processing crime scenes and evidence, which could aid in a successful, later prosecution. A lot of that time is spent documenting the scene and preparing evidence for later analysis. Troop F, where Maloney worked, is responsible for five separate counties. Forensic work is tedious and time-consuming. With all the theatrics displayed on television and crime scene classes at colleges filling up, one might be more inclined to believe that being part of a crime scene unit is a glamorous job, replete with fame, fortune, and earth-shattering discoveries. For those who work the job, day in and day out, however, scouring crime scenes on their hands and knees with magnifying glasses and other high-tech gadgets, working fifteen- to twenty-four-hour shifts in the lab, it’s hard, backbreaking work.

  Bill Maloney, crime scene technician Theodore LaRuffa, and two investigators from Troop F in Liberty left on Tuesday morning, May 27, and flew to Tucson, Arizona. Their main purpose for the trip was to retrieve the three decomposed bodies of Odell’s children and bring them back to Albany so Dr. Michael Baden could have a look and, perhaps, find out what had happened. While they were there, Bill and his crew also were going to “secure” evidence collected by Detective Diane Thomas, Detective Bruce Weddle, the GCSO, and bring it all back. Lungen would be the first to speak highly of the GCSO. Still, he needed to have his own team examine and collect evidence. Furthermore, he didn’t want the burden of having to fly in a dozen or so witnesses from Arizona if the case went to trial. The more witnesses he had closer to home base, the better off he was.

  “One of the reasons for the three of them to go all way out there was,” Lungen said, “we wanted one person to handle all the chain of custody of the evidence and that’s what he’s trained to do. The other two were there to conduct background investigation with the Arizona people as to what they got. Essentially, we wanted our New York State Police cops to redo what [Arizona] had already done. Go to the scene. Go look at everything. Take all new photographs. I was concerned with how many of the Arizona people would have to come to New York as witnesses. If I could re-create a lot of it and re-photograph it all, I could get away with mostly New York witnesses.”

  The more local people Lungen had at his disposal, the better off his case preparation would interconnect. Having witnesses fifteen hundred miles away was not what a prosecutor wanted. The expense of travel alone would be enormous—not to mention locating people and finding out information while preparing a case.

  Maloney and his team ended up spending five days in Safford, studying every container Odell had stored in the two self-storage units. After that, they met with Dr. David Winston, a pathologist in Tucson who had conducted preliminary autopsies on the children. From there, Maloney photographed and logged each piece of evidence and prepped it for travel back east. It was decided that Dr. Baden would call Dr. Winston and—to maintain the integrity of the evidence Baden was going to be looking at in New York—begin a carefully documented succession of command. That way, Dr. Baden could handle any trial testimony. In turn, Dr. Winston wouldn’t have to make the trip.

  One of the boxes Maloney collected had a particular waxy, dark-colored character to it; he described it later as a “distinct odor.” The entire box had been saturated in some sort of liquid, which had since dried. Looking at it, Maloney knew the odor, accompanied by the waxy, dark color of the box, could mean only one thing: decomposition. One of the babies had decomposed inside the box and leaked bodily fluids, saturating the cardboard.

  After a long trip back home, Maloney brought the remains of the children to the Forensic Center in Albany.

  On June 4, Dr. Baden conducted the autopsies so he could eventually report his findings to Lungen.

  Baden had done tens of thousands of autopsies throughout his career. He had opened up junkies, prostitutes, stockbrokers, homemakers, businessmen and women, teenagers—and, of course, babies.

  Hundreds of babies.

  The Odell babies were different, however. They had been sitting in boxes for two decades, maybe longer. Doing autopsies on them would be akin to an archaeology dig, a careful examination of the human body in one of its rarest forms. Two of the babies were mere bone fragments and dust. One, though, was in fair condition, having been entombed and preserved in mummified skin, like leather.

  A forensic pathologist, Baden explained, “is a doctor who gives testimony in public.” The term, he added, was likely born out of Ancient Greece. Part of the forensic pathologist’s job, “especially when it comes to deaths, is to make his or her interpretations from all of the history, circumstances, interviews with families and friends and doctors, police, as opposed to the hospital-based pathologist who has a chart.”

  Professionally speaking, the forensic pathologist opts to rely on all the evidence, not just what the body tells him or her later on during the autopsy process; while the hospital-based pathologist, on the other hand, relies on what a nurse might report, what a patient’s chart suggests, the time of death, and the health history of the patient.

  There is, of course, a major difference between the two.

  “When I work as a hospital pathologist and somebody dies,” Baden said, “I have a whole chart of everything that happened in the hospital…the history and circumstances, and that is all part of medicine.” But the forensic pathologist “almost always deals with people who die out of hospitals.”

  It is those out-of-hospital deaths that can be tricky for the forensic pathologist to figure out, especially when it pertains to time of death. Most go by the rigor mortis process, rigidity, and temperature change in the body. But also, perhaps more important, “the forensic pathologist…will render opinions and conclusions based upon not just what they see, but also what they can learn from…outside sources.”

  And that would, ultimately, be what the Odell case came down to: outside sources, coupled with what Baden was about to find out while conducting the autopsies.

  There are five stages of decomposition: respectively, “fresh, bloat, decay, dry and remains.” The Odell babies were, evidently, in the “dry and remains” stage. So, for Baden, the police reports, interviews with Odell, and other sources involved in the case would be indicative to the autopsy process and his ultimate findings.

  Still, figuring out an exact time of death from the autopsy alone was going to be nearly impossible—and figuring out a cause of death was, likely, an unrealistic possibility. When it came down to it, this was one of the most important tasks for Lungen to prove as he prepared to indict Odell in front of a grand jury. Because if a grand jury failed to indict Odell, Lungen didn’t have a case. None of what Baden was doing would matter.

  CHAPTER 19

  1

  ROBERT SAUERSTEIN AND Dianne Odell found themselves, by early 2000, the parents of a new baby boy. Both were well into their forties, with four other children at home. Although Seth wasn’t a burden and they were proud to have him, Odell later said he demanded a lot of her attention.

  By late 2000, they were living in Montrose, Pennsylvania; a few months later, they moved again, to Rome, Pennsylvania, where they would end up staying until Detectives Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle walked into the Rite Aid pharmacy, where Odell was working when she was first questioned in May 2003.

  As Odell tried to figure out how she was going to get herself out of jail and back home with her children (one of whom would celebrate his fourth birthday in August) as May turned to June, she felt that if she came clean now and, in her words, explained how her mother had murdered the children, no one would believe her. Moreover, what re
ally scared her, she said, was the fact that her living children would suffer. As she met with Stephan Schick and explained to him that her mother had been the culprit all along, she said Schick told her she should keep her mouth shut. The less she said, the better off she’d be—and that meant with Sauerstein, the kids, anyone.

  Part of Odell’s strategy not to talk about Mabel’s involvement was that if she mentioned it, especially to Sauerstein, the information would end up being used against her later on during trial.

  For Sauerstein, when Odell told him on that Thursday in May when he and Danielle visited, that Mabel was involved, “there was anger; there was relief.”

  Sauerstein knew what she was talking about without her discussing any of the details.

  But what really bothered Odell as summer 2003 moved forward was that she had no idea what Schick had planned for a defense. She didn’t know, she claimed, because he never told her and rarely went to visit her to explain what he was doing on her part.

  This seeming invisibility by Schick would, in the coming months, be the one thing that, Odell said, drove a wedge between them and ultimately caused big problems for her down the road.

  Stephan Schick was in his late fifties. Balding, with thinning gray hair, when he wore his glasses, he resembled Vice President Dick Cheney. He spoke confidently, carefully choosing his words, as if each carried the weight of repercussion. Schick grew up on a farm in Ulster County, New York, just northeast of Sullivan County. After graduating from Cornell, he finished his law degree at New York Law School, then did a brief internship at the Sullivan County District Attorney’s Office, where he met then assistant district attorney Steve Lungen for the first time. It was 1978. Lungen was well into his career as Schick showed up at the office and began clerking. The two hit it off, Schick said, and became fast friends. Never did they believe they’d be on opposite sides of the legal scale years later.