Sleep in Heavenly Peace

by M. William Phelps

  Apparently, Odell was willing to take the chance, and in her heart, she said, she felt she could convince a jury Mabel was the true monster.

  Schick’s goal was to get Odell out of jail. If she was convicted, the plan was to argue for her release. Probation. Whatever. She had children—young children—at home who needed her. She wasn’t some lunatic child killer, looking to prey upon children in her community. In all likelihood, she wasn’t going to hurt anyone ever again—if, indeed, she had done it in the first place.

  Lungen obviously disagreed.

  “My position was that it was murder. And I felt she truly killed four babies. The babies’ deaths, to me, were no accident. They were clearly murdered. And I felt she should be convicted and sentenced as someone who had committed three murders.”

  To Steve Lungen, Dianne Odell was a murderer. No different than anyone else convicted of the same crime.

  2

  Martin Lehane, Odell’s half brother, had come forward with some startling information regarding their mother, Mabel Molina. Odell couldn’t believe it. It seemed someone had thrown her a life raft with a confession signed by Mabel inside of it.

  In the form of a letter, Martin was about to open up a vein in Mabel’s life that might just add a bit of credibility to Odell’s contention that she was involved in the deaths of the babies. If nothing else, it would at least give the jury enough to consider reasonable doubt.

  Or would it?

  “All of a sudden,” Odell recalled, “they call me for mail one day at the jail and I see my brother’s return address on the envelope. I open it up and I see a little card.”

  So she started reading.

  “I’m sorry you’re in jail,” Martin had written, she claimed. “I’m sorry for what you’re accused of; I know you’re not guilty. I know that our mother did it.”

  It was early June when Odell received the letter. She had just been arrested and arraigned.

  “I almost fell over,” Odell recalled. “At the time I’m thinking…‘I am the only one who knows about this. I am the only one who this happened to. I am the key. I am the secret.’”

  Odell then started crying “hysterically,” she remembered. There it was: possible evidence in the form of a letter of Mabel’s involvement.

  When Schick went to see Odell after she received the letter, handing it to him, she explained how important it could be to her case. “He then took it and put it in the file. And I said, ‘You have to get in touch with my brother and find out what he’s talking about.’”

  She wasn’t aware then what Martin had meant when he said he knew Mabel had done it. There were no details in the letter. Still, she was sure Martin knew something.

  When Schick left that day, Odell said, she waited. Months went by. July. August. September. October.

  Nothing. Not a word from Schick about Martin or the letter.

  Then, in early November, fearing that whatever information Martin knew would never become part of her case, Odell began pressuring Sauerstein to get hold of him. “You have to call him and ask him what he means. What did he mean in that letter? He knows!”

  A day or so later, Sauerstein called Martin and asked him about the letter. What had he actually meant when he said Mabel had done it?

  When Sauerstein returned to jail the following day and explained to Odell what Martin had told him, she said, for the first time since she’d been arrested, she believed she was going home. It was a story no one could have made up, she insisted. Furthermore, it was proof, perhaps, that Mabel had a track record of killing other children.

  So, what was the story that would be so compelling to a jury—that might convince jurors Odell was no baby killer and that Mabel was the true murderer?

  3

  On December 3, the Sullivan County court screened over one hundred potential jurors who had been summoned to the court to participate in the People of the State of New York v. Dianne Odell. When one receives that dreaded jury duty summons in the mail, the case, in which he or she may become a part, is not mentioned. Most walk into court, sit for a time, and are sent home. For a couple dozen potential jurors on that day, when Odell sat in the courtroom for the first time as the jury selection process of her trial got under way, the horror of the case was too much for her to handle. It was all too real now. Things were happening.

  There was a bit of restlessness in the room as Judge Frank LaBuda got himself situated on the bench. By the time LaBuda finished reading the indictment against Odell, however, with the sheer madness and unthinkable nature of her alleged crimes now revealed, the room had gone church silent. Some stared at Odell as she sat there in quiet repose, thinking about what was to come. No doubt, she was already being judged by some.

  Lungen was quite calm as he sat and listened to proceedings. This wasn’t his show. The judge would have to make some sense out of the crowd and whittle down the pool to fifteen—twelve jurors, three alternates. After the judge asked, “Is there anything about the nature of the charges, about the alleged facts involving infants, newborns, which would make this case hard to follow?” hands shot up as if he had asked who wanted out of jury duty.

  Nearly twenty-five men and women wanted to meet privately with the judge. Obviously, there was some concern. People had opinions about babies allegedly murdered by their mother.

  After a long process of talking to each potential juror and asking specific questions regarding the nature of the case, some were asked to go sit back in the courtroom with the remainder of the pool, while others were excused from jury duty altogether.

  It was obvious the case was going to elicit strong emotions. Babies. Murder. Mother possibly responsible. It was enough to make some—perhaps more than others—unable to focus on the facts and evidence of the case.

  In the face of what appeared to be such a complicated task, nearly everyone in the courtroom was shocked that by 5:00 P.M. on the same day a jury had been chosen. Testimony would begin on schedule, first thing Monday morning, December 8, 2003.

  4

  When Sauerstein sat down next to Odell and began talking about the conversation he’d had with her half brother the previous night, Odell was both pleased and scared, she remembered, regarding the contents of the conversation.

  It was a simple story. But, in Odell’s mind, it would explain a lot.

  According to Odell, Martin had told Sauerstein that Mabel had “delivered a child in 1947,” six years before Odell was born, which in itself wasn’t so shocking. It was what happened after the child had been born that could, Odell thought, change everything.

  “After my mother had delivered a child in 1947,” Odell said, “she gave my brother a package wrapped in brown wrapping paper with a string around it and said, ‘Bury this in the backyard.’”

  Odell said she understood it was “secondhand information,” but the mere circumstances alone were enough to flood her with optimism.

  Actually, it was third-party hearsay. Martin had told Sauerstein, who had then told Odell. To believe it was plausible, certainly. Then again, at the end of the day, would a jury not think it was extremely “convenient” information, suffice it to say it would be coming from a family member? That being said, what did it actually prove?

  After hearing what could be potentially devastating evidence—if Martin was, of course, willing to share his story with the jury and Schick could get it in—Odell found herself scurrying around, trying to get the information to Schick as the trial approached.

  Sauerstein, at Odell’s urging, went to Schick and told him. “Schick knew about it,” she said, “but he was not doing anything about it.”

  Schick later said he knew about Martin Lehane’s story and how potentially helpful Martin could be. But to say that he hadn’t done anything about it was a flat-out lie on Odell’s part. Not only did Schick act on it, he called Martin himself in Florida and spoke to him at length several times. Then, after realizing Martin might be able to offer Odell’s defense a serious boost, Schick withdrew
money from his personal bank account and flew Martin to New York to go over his potential testimony.

  “The information about Mr. Lehane,” Schick recalled, “didn’t become available to us until about a month before trial. I had a number of phone conversations with Martin, and near the beginning of the trial, I flew him up here at my own personal expense.”

  Martin spent a considerable amount of time in Schick’s office going over his story.

  “Odell claimed we ignored the information,” Schick said. “But we thought the information was very important.”

  Furthermore, Martin’s credibility was ironclad. “But, unfortunately, it was too good,” Schick said. “I think Martin is an honest guy. I believe he was absolutely telling the truth because, in the end, the truth wasn’t good enough.”

  Indeed, what Martin could testify to regarding Mabel’s past ultimately wasn’t going to help Odell. In fact, it didn’t even point a finger at Mabel as possibly being involved in any type of crime against a child. Odell obviously had believed what she wanted to, based on what Martin had said.

  Mabel had given Martin a package to bury in the yard, according to Schick. That was true. But it wasn’t a child; it was afterbirth, a placenta. Martin was thirteen years old at the time. Mabel had worked as a midwife during the late ’40s. She had helped many women give birth to their children at home at a time when it was a fairly common practice. The story Martin told Schick involved Mabel aiding a woman who was giving birth, and then asking Martin to take a package containing the “afterbirth” and bury it in the backyard. Martin knew it was afterbirth, Schick explained, because he had seen the child leave the house with the woman.

  What seemed like a beacon of hope, a chilling recollection of Mabel perhaps involving Martin in some sort of plot to get rid of a dead child, turned in the end into a story that added little to Odell’s contention that Mabel was responsible for the deaths of her three children. It wouldn’t add anything to her defense. Instead, it would only open doors that Odell would have a hard time closing.

  What Schick admired so much about Martin, he said, was his honesty. Martin could have embellished the story to support Odell, but he didn’t. “If he wanted to color—you see, Martin wanted to obviously very, very much help his half sister, and he felt she was very, very abused as a child—her story, he could have. But he didn’t. He could not testify that it was a baby in that package.”

  Schick and his colleague, Tim Havas, while Martin was in their office, had even pressured him. “Could it have been a baby? Could it, Martin?” Schick kept asking him. They were desperate. Maybe Martin was just being naive?

  But he stuck to his story. “No, no, no. It wasn’t a baby. It was afterbirth.”

  Regardless of being unable to prove culpability on Mabel’s part, Schick believed other information Martin could bring to the trial would still be helpful.

  “It at least establishes that the mother was experienced in being a home midwife,” Schick recalled. “It wasn’t out of the blue that Odell had this idea of ‘Have the baby at home and I’ll take care of it.’”

  So Martin was asked to hang around town, there was a chance he could testify. What role he would play exactly was still an open discussion, however.

  Elation soon turned into nervousness, Odell said, as the testimony portion of the trial neared and she felt forced into sitting on what potentially could be her get-out-of-jail-free card, Martin’s story. Yet, as the trial neared, the more she thought about spilling family secrets to the world, she intimated, the more it seemed like the wrong thing to do. She was conflicted now about testifying. Wondering whether it would help or hurt her cause.

  One would have to imagine that a woman with a four-year-old child at home, along with four teenagers, would jump at the chance to reveal anything she could that might set her free so she could be with her children again. But Odell said she began fighting with herself, debating whether to get up on the stand and tell everyone her father had raped her repeatedly and her mother had turned her into a prostitute. It wasn’t what she wanted her family to hear. Her kids, she said, would be ridiculed at school. Called names. “Your mother’s a whore! Inbred!” As time moved forward, she began thinking that maybe, “because of the shame and my kids,” airing family secrets in open court might not be in her best interest.

  The scale of insults the children would endure, however, weighed heavily on the part of being branded a victim, as opposed to a murderer. After all, her children, she said, were already hearing “baby killer” epithets in school and around the neighborhood.

  “But you have to understand,” Odell continued, “living a lifetime full of derogatory comments, for my own kids to have to deal with the repercussions of that…in June, July, and August, I was still ambivalent. But the kids came up to see me and the kids told me, ‘Do whatever you have to do to go home.’ All of the kids said to me, ‘We don’t care. Tell them what you need to tell them.’”

  That meeting, she insisted, changed her mind. There would be no more debating. She had lived with her secrets, she decided, long enough. She realized now that her children were behind her. Sauerstein. And now her half brother. What, really, did she have to lose? Now all she had to do was convince Schick and Havas, who were beginning to think it wasn’t such a good idea after all, that she should take the stand and tell her story.

  CHAPTER 25

  1

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS before Odell’s trial, Stephan Schick and his partner, Tim Havas, visited Odell daily to discuss her case, the possibility of her testifying at trial, and who else would be called to the stand to defend her. “If we were going to put Dianne on the witness stand,” Schick said, “we were going to call her half brother.”

  From the first day Schick met with Odell, he said, she wanted to testify. She needed to tell her story of abuse and prostitution to a jury, and how her mother had drugged her and taken the three babies and killed them. Because Odell was now so adamant about testifying, Schick and Havas spent “days” meticulously going over what she would say once she got on the witness stand.

  “Because her testimony would be the crucial part of any defense she would have,” Schick added, “we spent hours going over it with her.”

  A large part of that preparation, Schick insisted, included Havas and him acting out a direct- and cross-examination scenario with Odell. They would drill her with questions Lungen was sure to ask. They would have her tell her story over and over again: Mabel, the deaths of the babies, the abuse, her upbringing, her dad fathering the first child in 1972 and repeatedly raping her, then beating her until the baby died. If she took the stand, the Molineaux decision made it possible for Lungen to introduce Baby Doe. It was a Pandora’s box, certainly, but Odell felt she could withstand any attack Lungen might wage.

  As Odell went through a mock version of her testimony, telling her stories and answering questions, Schick felt she might be a compelling witness. She could turn on the tears when she needed to, he said, which was what a defense attorney wanted. Although she was uneducated formally, Schick pointed out, she came across as being bright, especially in the articulate way she answered some of the questions.

  Part of their thespian undertaking, however, included Schick acting out the role of Lungen, whom he knew to be one of the most experienced—if not the best—cross-examiners he had ever witnessed in a court of law. Lungen knew how to elicit testimony from a witness and get him or her to talk about things they perhaps didn’t even realize they were bringing up. He had spent decades mastering his craft. If Odell wanted to testify, she was going to have to survive a grilling by Schick acting as Lungen. If she could get through that, well, it just might be worth putting her on the stand.

  “We tried to be as much like a prosecutor as we could,” Schick said, “trying to bring as much trial-level skill at cross-examining witnesses as possible, trying to make her look as bad as possible.”

  As Schick and Havas questioned Odell, Schick said, they would try to “shake”
her credibility. It wasn’t something he and Havas had worked up at the last minute; they had sat with Odell and gone over her testimony no fewer than twenty times, he claimed, over a period of three weeks before trial. Odell had everything to lose by taking the stand. But it was her life, Schick opined—which made it her call.

  But as they kept questioning her relentlessly, attacking every possible scenario Lungen might bring up, she broke down.

  “After we would decimate her on cross-examination, she came to realize it might not be a good idea.”

  Odell’s volatility while undergoing mock questioning wasn’t what had bothered Schick the most, however. If it had been just one baby Odell was being accused of killing, he said, he and Havas could have worked with her. It was practical to think that a jury might buy the notion that one baby’s death wasn’t her fault.

  “One baby, okay,” Schick recalled, “maybe even two. Maybe we can explain satisfactorily two babies to the jury. But when it’s three and then four, that’s, you know, you know that’s…even if what she’s saying about Mabel is given one hundred percent believability, I think by the time you get to the third baby, you become a coparticipant and you’re acting in concert. At what point as an adult when you’re pregnant and your mother is saying, ‘Okay, I’ll take care of it, I’ll be the midwife,’ when two prior children have died because of her previous negligence or intentional killing, at what point wouldn’t a reasonable person know that you can’t do this? That it’s going to end up in another death?”

  Schick was concerned that if Odell began talking about Mabel, the jury would say to themselves, “You should have done something to stop her. You were an adult. You had given birth to healthy children that had survived. If she was this evil, malicious person, you knew how to get away from her.”