Sleep in Heavenly Peace

by M. William Phelps

  Sitting, listening to Scileppi, Lane, and Streever testify, Odell said, she was thinking, What the hell are these people doing? At one point, she recalled, she had even turned to Schick and said, “That’s not the way it happened.”

  Schick, she claimed, turned to her and replied, “Don’t worry; we’ll get them back in trial.”

  That response, she concluded, “allayed [her] fears a little bit.” She began thinking, This is like a three-ring circus. “You know, they’re getting up on the stand and they’re like [here she mimicked the bugle call of the circus]…and I am saying to myself, ‘Jesus Christ!’”

  CHAPTER 23

  1

  BY THE TIME the Huntley hearings were nearly over, Odell said, she realized she had been doing things in a “very stupid manner.

  “At this point in time, I am very ignorant of what’s going on. I don’t start to see any of this, however, until after the trial is over. Hindsight, you know, it’s an excellent teacher!”

  On October 8, in what would end up being the last day of testimony in the Huntley hearings, Robert Sauerstein took the stand. The past few months had been rough on Sauerstein. The woman he had shared the past twenty years with was sitting in jail facing a trial by jury, which could put her in prison for the rest of her life. She had given birth to five of his kids and, by all accounts, had been a “great mother,” he said, to those children. Now she was being accused of a vicious, callous, and cold-blooded crime.

  As Sauerstein sat in the witness chair, a flood of emotion passed through Odell. There was her lover, friend, parenting partner, and confidant, sitting there, forced to talk about their life together. In the end, what could he say to help her cause that wouldn’t be viewed as subjective?

  Over the course of the first ten minutes, Schick had Sauerstein describe the events of that weekend in May when Odell was first approached by Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle at Rite Aid. It had been the first time, Sauerstein explained, he had heard about the babies.

  As Schick steered Sauerstein into a conversation about Odell’s desire to have a lawyer present while she spoke to police, Sauerstein said Odell had not only asked for a lawyer, but demanded one. It was one of the main reasons she had not gone to the Towanda barracks the day after Thomas and Weddle had approached her at Rite Aid. Sauerstein claimed he had spoken to Odell over the phone in the presence of Thomas, who had “persuaded” him to phone her and ask her to “come in” for an interview. Odell had “her mind set. She wants an attorney.”

  From there, Sauerstein described what type of attorney Odell desired. There was, according to Diane Thomas later, some rather frank discussion over what type of attorney Odell had requested, because Thomas had maintained Odell was concerned about the welfare of one of her children, who didn’t get along with Sauerstein.

  “Was there any discussions over what kind of attorney she wanted to speak to: civil, criminal? Any identification?” Schick asked.

  “No. She just said she wanted to talk to an attorney.”

  Furthermore, after Sauerstein convinced Odell to return to the barracks to chat with Thomas and Weddle, and agree to be fingerprinted, he claimed she had once again stated that she wanted an attorney after Thomas asked her if she wanted to talk about the babies.

  “She said, ‘I’d rather talk to an attorney.’ And [Weddle] said, ‘This case is not going to go away.’”

  Time and again, Sauerstein continued to say Odell had never said what type of attorney she wanted. It was a striking piece of evidence to counter the view of four cops who had maintained Odell had asked for a civil attorney, whom she wanted to “take care of some things at home” between Sauerstein and one of her children.

  Steve Lungen’s first crack at Sauerstein came in the form of “There is no conversation between civil attorney and otherwise that you heard, yes or no?”

  “That I heard of?” Sauerstein shot back, leaning forward a bit in his chair, as if he didn’t understand the question.

  “Yes.”

  “No. No. I never heard civil.”

  “What she may have said to the police,” Lungen then said, “that you didn’t hear, you don’t know?”

  Schick stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. Come on.”

  Odell sat and looked back and forth—judge, Lungen, Sauerstein—while shaking her head, thinking, This is unbelievable.

  Lungen asked the question again.

  “Objection!”

  “Overruled.”

  “I was present in the other room watching and listening when she spoke.”

  Sauerstein had explained on direct examination how he had stepped out of the room where Odell was being questioned, but sat, watched (and listened) through a two-way mirror in another room.

  “For the entire two hours?” Lungen wanted to know.

  “Objection….”

  “Let him finish,” the judge said.

  “I’m trying to answer the question,” Sauerstein replied.

  “Did you hear the entire hour-and-a-half conversation that she had with the police? Yes or no?”

  “About thirty-five minutes of it.”

  “Did you hear the entire”—Lungen raised his voice, then slowed his speech pattern down—“hour-and-a-half conversation that she had with police?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know everything she said to the police, do you?”

  “No.”

  When it came down to it, Sauerstein may have heard Odell ask for an attorney, but he wasn’t there for every minute of the conversation and couldn’t testify as to everything she had said.

  Ultimately, the judge ruled in Lungen’s favor. Odell’s statement was going to be one of the prosecution’s showcases. Schick’s attempt to keep it out had failed. For Odell, she was going to have to explain the statement, along with why, if she didn’t agree with it, she had signed it into record.

  Sauerstein’s version of the events, at trial, would be a crucial part of Odell’s defense. When he got a chance to get up in front of a jury and explain things in more detail, Odell was convinced it would at least put doubt in the jury’s mind. And reasonable doubt, in the end, was all she and Schick had to prove.

  2

  As the trial, which was scheduled to begin in December, drew closer, Odell was upset because, she claimed, she still hadn’t been briefed by Schick regarding his strategy. He hadn’t even, she said, inquired about neighbors, friends, or relatives who could perhaps take the stand on her behalf. She also wondered if he had hired someone to do some sort of investigation. Most defense attorneys lodge a full-scale investigation into the events to try to counter the prosecution’s case. According to Odell, however, Schick hadn’t.

  “He was being ‘cost efficient,’” Odell reflected later in jest. “We didn’t have an investigator because it cost too much money.”

  “Maybe if I was a couple years out of law school,” Schick later said with a hint of sarcasm, “I would have considered hiring an investigator. But I’ve learned a lot over the years. And…I had an incredible inkling—a gut feeling you could say—based upon everything she was telling me that I didn’t want to find out what she has been telling me is not true. You don’t want to be in a position of suborning her testimony. So as long as I didn’t know anything to the contrary, everything she was telling me, as far as I knew, was the absolute truth.”

  The other obstacles Schick said he faced became: What positive information would a private investigator find? There was no way for an investigator to determine if Odell had been pimped for prostitution. What john would come forward and admit such a thing? Moreover, how was anyone going to find such a person?

  “I didn’t want to spend tons of taxpayer money on something that was a wild-goose chase. Plus, an investigator may have found out things that might have been hurtful. I just had an incredible feeling that hiring an investigator was going to hurt us more than help us.”

  As the days wore on, Schick explained to Odell that it would be in her best interest to
admit the babies were hers, so as to save the state the time and trouble of mitochondrial DNA testing, which proves maternal blood typing. It would have nothing to do with proving who the fathers of the children were. In short, if Odell wasn’t going to contest the babies were hers—which was never her intention, she said—there was no reason to do mitochondrial DNA testing. It would be a waste of time and money.

  “I told Schick I didn’t have a problem with that,” Odell said. “I had always said they were my children. What I strongly disagreed with was their theory. The whole package the prosecution put together.”

  Lungen had mentioned, Odell recalled, that “money” was a factor in the murders, on top of the fact that she wasn’t married or with any one particular man at the time the babies in question were born. His case, she assumed, was being built around those two arguments.

  “Well,” Odell said, “if those two things were a factor, okay…how come I didn’t kill Doris? I had just gotten divorced. I had been separated from James Odell for a good seven months. I didn’t have any money. I was living at the lake. So, why wouldn’t I do that to her, too? If I’m this…this…this brazen maniac they think I am, then why didn’t I do that to her?”

  One of Lungen’s focal points for trial would be the fact that whenever there wasn’t a male figure—a solid male role model: a husband, a longtime boyfriend, or lover—in Odell’s life and she became pregnant, she viewed the pregnancy as “illegitimate and unwanted” and murdered the child. It was going to be a key theme, thumping its way through the trial, pushed by Lungen and his growing list of witnesses.

  “I am going to blow their main argument right out of the water right now,” Odell said. “When I left James, okay, I left him around July or August of 1980.” She was pregnant at the time. “I was living by myself and had made arrangements to have someone drive me to the hospital. My mother was not even in the picture at that time; she was taking care of an elderly woman….”

  Odell further claimed that the man with whom she had made arrangements, Lou Johnson, a “fifty-something friend” who lived at the lake near her and Mabel, had driven her to the hospital when she went into labor with Doris. So, although she was alone and without a man in her life (she and James Odell had split up months before), she gave birth to Doris at a hospital. A year later, when she had Baby Number One at home, it was her mom, she claimed, who had tricked her into not going to the hospital and made her have the child at home so her mom could take it from her and kill it.

  Beginning with Lou Johnson, though, Odell’s theory seems weak at best. Johnson had since passed away. Odell couldn’t recall exactly when he had died. But she did remember he’d had an operation “for lung cancer and he was trying to recoup, and he came and stayed down at my house for, I think, a week, week and a half.”

  Lungen saw Lou Johnson as just one more of Odell’s stories, at least from a prosecutorial position, that couldn’t be backed up because the person in question had died. But more than that, Lungen said, the reason why Doris lived had nothing to do with whether Odell had a man in her life at the time, or who had driven her to the hospital.

  “There were people,” Lungen said, “who knew she was pregnant with Doris. The baby was James Odell’s. She couldn’t kill it, had no reason to kill it. It wasn’t an illegitimate child. Sure, she had separated from Mr. Odell, but he, along with several other people, knew she was going to have a baby. That’s why she couldn’t deny the child life.”

  Lungen’s point, then, centered on the fact that Odell would never kill a child whose father would someday come looking for it. Several people knew she was pregnant with Doris. She couldn’t kill her. With the other children—Baby Doe, Babies Number One, Two, and Three—no one save for Mabel knew she was pregnant.

  “Sure, she had the baby by herself, but there was a reason why it lived—and that reason was that James Odell knew she was pregnant when he left her.”

  Lungen was sure this was going be the final nail for Odell. Truth and facts, Lungen liked to say, cannot be denied.

  3

  To think that Odell had anything good to say about Stephan Schick, her court-appointed attorney, would be grossly inaccurate. Quite to the contrary, as the trial neared, Odell’s hatred for Schick grew.

  “Between the end of the Huntley hearings, while I’m waiting for trial, I’m in and out of court sporadically, and Stephan Schick is coming to see me the day before. It was a week before trial when he finally started coming around every night trying to prep me for testimony.”

  From the start, Odell argued, the plan was to put her on the stand. It was openly discussed, she said, between her and Schick the week before trial. When it came down to it, it was her only chance to tell the jury the truth, as far as she knew it. She was going to get up there, she said—as much as it hurt, as much as those memories of Mabel prostituting her like some cheap whore and thoughts of “telling the world what my father had done”—and explain everything in full, shocking detail, step by agonizing step.

  Deciding to testify on her own behalf was one thing. It was almost a given she would take the stand. But the bombshell she said she dropped on Schick’s lap almost on the eve of trial could possibly—if the witness had any credibility—set her free. It was solid proof, Odell believed, that Mabel was, in fact, the murderer that Dianne had been saying she was all summer.

  “I had received a letter from my brother, [Martin Lehane],” Odell recalled. “My brother wrote me a letter that had been mailed on May 31, 2003. At the time, I didn’t know he was calling my home and speaking to Robert.”

  Apparently, Odell was under the belief that her half brother Martin Lehane, who lived in Florida, had been talking to Sauerstein, explaining how he believed Odell’s story about their mother and father and that she had nothing to do with the deaths of the babies. To top it off, Martin could possibly prove it to jurors.

  How?

  By simply walking into court and telling a story he claimed had taken place in 1947, six years before Odell was born.

  Early on, it seemed like it could be something that might potentially prove what Odell had been saying all along—that Mabel was the real murderer. Indeed, anecdotal evidence that could, without question, give the jury an image to chew on during deliberations and, possibly, sway one of them into believing Odell had never laid a finger on any of the children.

  But was Odell hanging on a thread of a story that had little merit?

  The truth was about to be unearthed, because Martin was on his way from Florida to New York.

  CHAPTER 24

  1

  SULLIVAN COUNTY DISTRICT attorney Steve Lungen was preparing to take a bifid approach to his case: one-part forensic, one-part witness testimony. Through that simple double-pronged method, Lungen believed he was going to prove Odell had “wantonly and willingly” chosen to end the lives of three of her children in a horrific, unimaginable manner. It didn’t make any difference how old the children were, or why Odell had done it. What mattered was that she had taken the lives of three human beings, and for that, she would have to pay with the rest of her life behind bars. It was the only outcome Lungen believed the People of the State of New York deserved.

  In early December, the judge ruled that Court TV, which had applied to have its cameras in the courtroom during Odell’s trial, could set up inside the courtroom and record the trial for a later broadcast. The media coverage had not let up. Scores of newspaper articles had been written since May and just about every talking head on television had his or her opinion regarding Odell’s state of mind at the time of the murders. Some believed Odell was innocent. Every time a baby killer murder case went before a judge and was profiled by the media, it brought up old cases birthed of the same ilk, names synonymous with baby killing: Mary Beth Tinning, Susan Smith, Andrea Yates. These were women who had done the unthinkable: murdered their own flesh and blood in vicious, malevolent fashion. Some more brutal than others, of course, but all with the same result.

  Could
Odell be placed in that same category? was the question on most everyone’s mind heading into trial. Was she the sinister monster the DA’s office was propagandizing? Was she competent to do such a thing? What were her eight living children thinking? Were they behind her? Was Odell going to be alone in the courtroom, or was she going to have a chorus of well-wishers and family rallying her cry behind her?

  It was anybody’s guess. Yet, one could only wonder that Court TV’s presence during trial would only add to the allure and high-profile status of the case. Lungen, Schick, Odell, Sauerstein, Scileppi, Lane, Streever—they were all going to be household names inside of a week. Tabloids. Daily newspapers. Tragedy-TV talk shows. Many would be pointing a finger and dissecting every aspect of the case as if it were put before a law class.

  Lungen had always spoken very highly of Schick. The two men had known each other for decades. The Odell case, however, put them on opposite sides of the courtroom, where it would become a battle of legal wits. In some ways, Lungen said later, Schick’s hands were tied from the beginning of the case.

  “Court TV pundits…questioned and criticized Stevie Schick during the trial,” Lungen said later. “But they didn’t have a clue.”

  Schick’s feet would be put to the flame later for not negotiating a manslaughter conviction on Odell’s part. Some felt a more skilled trial attorney could have secured a manslaughter charge for Odell, which would have gotten her out of prison—if not right away, inside of a few years.

  “From his point of view,” Lungen analyzed, “and I sort of understood it, in order for Odell to be convicted of manslaughter, the defense would’ve had to waive the statute of limitations question. They had refused to waive it because they took the position of ‘If the jury came back and said it’s not murder but manslaughter and convicted her of three counts of manslaughter in the first degree, she would still spend the rest of her life in prison.’”

  Odell’s prison time would run consecutively, potentially for all three babies. The judge could sentence her up to twenty-five years for each child. Even if Odell received ten years for each baby, she’d end up with thirty years. Heading into trial, Odell was in her fifties. She would be in her eighties before she ever felt the sun on her back again as a free woman. Thus, it was murder or nothing. Odell was either going to walk, or she was going to prison for the rest of her life.