“Do you remember ever making any, ah, rental payments for the storage locker?”
“I don’t handle them,” Sauerstein said, laughing. “I’m bad with money.”
Thomas and Weddle cracked smiles.
“I’m going to tell you why we’re here,” Weddle said.
“Yeah?” Sauerstein said, looking at the two of them.
“Just this week,” Weddle said more seriously, “it’s a week ago today, they had an auction in Safford. What they did and particular storage lockers that y’all rented, to this date nothing’s been done with them.”
“You got to be kidding me?”
Sauerstein had figured—perhaps like Odell—that the items in the storage units had been sold years ago.
“Nope, no, I’m not kidding you.”
“All that stuff been sitting there all this time?”
Weddle explained how the contents had been sold at auction and how Sauerstein and Odell’s names both came up on several of the items inside the boxes. If Sauerstein knew what was inside the boxes, he was doing a fairly decent job of hiding it. It was obvious he had no idea where Weddle was heading with his questioning. As the conversation continued, Sauerstein seemed more interested in where his artwork was than anything else.
“Yeah,” Weddle said, “a couple of pieces of paperwork that might have had your name on it.”
“Some pictures maybe?”
“Pictures, yeah….”
“Art pictures! There was a couple, right? We took the two good ones,” Sauerstein said.
“This would be the tools, clothing, ah, some boxes with some bedding stuff in it.”
“Okay…”
“And inside the boxes with bedding and stuff, in it there was three dead babies.”
“What?” Sauerstein said, looking surprised. “You got to be kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding at all,” Weddle said, and then, with perhaps not the best choice of words, added, “I’m dead serious…. That’s why we’re here.”
Sauerstein hung his head in his hands.
Jesus Christ. Three dead babies?
2
Sixty-six-year-old George Hess and his wife, Marie, had lived in Sullivan County, New York, for forty years. In 1973, George and Marie purchased the Rest Bungalows on Kauneonga Lake. They lived in the main house, on the bottom floor, and rented additional rooms and bungalows on the same property.
George later backed up Odell’s story of her and Mabel moving to Kauneonga Lake when Odell was nearly eighteen years old, and, in fact, said he had driven down to Jamaica to pick Odell and Mabel up and move them up to Kauneonga Lake.
“She [was not married],” George recalled later. “My wife and I have known the Molinas for many years. They [lived] in our upstairs apartment.” George knew Dianne was pregnant when she first moved in, he recalled, but “I never knew if [she] had her baby, nor did I ask.”
The Hesses were people, one could speculate, who minded their own business. Pay the rent on time and we’ll leave you alone. Marie had been friends with Mabel since they met in Jamaica during the ’30s, and they had written to each other periodically throughout the years after Marie and George moved up north. Some of the letters depicted a mother-daughter type of relationship. It was clear Mabel and Marie were fond of each other.
During the spring of 1979, George and Marie decided to sell the bungalows, and Odell, Mabel, and James moved. Running a hotel, if you will, was too much work for an aging couple. Retirement meant leisure and relaxation. Keeping up a place like the Rest Bungalows took time, hard work, a youthful spirit, and passion for the work that neither of the Hesses had anymore.
“As we were getting ready to move,” George recalled, “I wanted to clean out the attic.”
So George got himself a fold-up ladder and went up into the attic with a flashlight to see how dirty it was. As he began looking around, the first thing he noticed was an old suitcase: “…solid in color with two latches.”
Curious, George decided to open it and look inside. Maybe someone had left a bundle of money?
As George opened it, a foul odor consumed him. Then he looked down and saw what he thought to be a rubber doll.
“I toyed with the idea of throwing it at my wife,” George recalled jokingly. Marie was standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting for him.
But as quick as George thought about scaring his wife, he said, the smell inside the suitcase overtook him.
Oh, my God Almighty, George remembered thinking, standing on the ladder, staring at the doll-like figure, taking in the awful odor.
Then he pulled the suitcase closer and took a more concerted look inside. As he did that, he realized it was “the body of a small baby….”
George yelled down, “Marie, you’re not going to believe this.”
With Marie helping him, George lifted the suitcase down the stairs and placed it out by the rear door of the bungalow. After that, he called Mabel.
“I found this suitcase in the attic that is not mine,” he said, “and if it’s yours, well, you had better come and get it.”
“Okay,” Mabel said, and hung up.
Ten, then fifteen minutes went by, George recalled. Mabel lived, at the time, two minutes away. So George called again.
“If you don’t come over and get this suitcase, I am going to call the state police!”
“Okay….”
A minute later, Mabel was standing at the door. “Where is it?”
George handed her the suitcase, and “that was the last time I saw her.”
Not long after Odell, Mabel, and James got comfortable in the house James rented, James came home one night, Odell recalled, with what would turn out to be bad news.
“While James was overseas and before he left to go overseas,” Odell said later, “we were getting along famously. But I didn’t know at that point in time, when he came home permanently, that it was going to be the downfall.”
Was it a matter of perhaps not knowing each other well enough before jumping into marriage? Odell said no. “I knew him. It was James who changed.”
Around this same time, Odell said, Mabel began to “meddle” even more in her and James’s life, causing problems and coming in between them. It wasn’t anything specific. Mabel was just always there, always in their face, always saying something to make them feel uncomfortable. Whereas James liked Mabel when he didn’t have to see her all that much, being home all the time began to wear on him.
“It was at that time that he decided he didn’t like being around the house, so he started hanging out with his brother, Hubert. Drinking [and doing other things], shall we say, fool around.”
With an eggshell-type atmosphere inside her home, Odell decided it was not time to announce she was pregnant again. It was the summer of 1979. They had not been in the house quite a year and yet everything seemed to be falling apart. But after several attempts to try to get along better, Odell and James agreed to split.
“He went his way and I went mine.”
With nowhere left to go, Odell moved back up to the lake, a small bungalow on Horseshoe Lake Road. Kauneonga Lake had become a sort of safe haven for her by this point—somewhere to return to always. She had spent many years living at (or near) the lake. She was twenty-five years old, had one young child, another on the way, and had given birth to a child out of wedlock (Matthew), who was dead and locked inside a suitcase.
Now she was on her own again.
The bungalow was part of a larger house. With Odell pregnant, living with a child in a one-room apartment, Mabel decided to move in.
Then, on November 12, 1979, after being in the new home just a few months, Maryann Odell was born at Community General Hospital in Harris, New York, the same facility where Odell’s now one-year-old daughter, Alice, had been born the previous year.
As Dianne once again began what was a new life, James started stopping by the bungalow to see how she was doing. They had been married for a little over two years. They had
two children. Life was about second chances. It was worth giving it a shot.
“I’d like to try and keep our marriage together,” Odell remembered James asking her one day.
She believed in love. Better yet, she believed the children deserved to have a father. “Okay,” she said.
James had one stipulation, however, regarding the reinvention of their marriage. “I want us to get out of here—and away from your mother!”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Florida. My sister will put us up until we find a place.”
It was February 1980, and deathly cold in upstate New York. Florida not only offered Odell a break from her mom, but the climate would certainly be a welcome change. James had gone down in December to look for a place. He promised he’d be back in February to get her.
Little did Odell know as she, James, and their two daughters made the twenty-four-hour trip down to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, to move in with James’s sister, that she wouldn’t be there long. Nor did she foresee that the problems they were essentially running from in New York would only get worse as, she claimed, she got to know the “real” James Odell while in Florida.
3
The main purpose of talking to Robert Sauerstein before Odell got a chance to speak with him was, for Weddle and Thomas, to get a reading on his initial reaction to the situation. The first few days of any investigation were crucial. Cops will tell you: homicide investigation is a “specialized undertaking,” a craft that takes an experienced investigator not afraid to learn new techniques as he or she goes along. Practical thinking—that’s what many cops claim is one of their biggest assets going into a homicide investigation. With three dead babies, whose parched, leathery remains had been mummified and decomposed to the point of fossils, and no forensics or eyewitness testimony to deconstruct, it was a case of narrowing down the most likely scenario and following it. For Weddle and Thomas, their investigation consisted of going from person to person, collecting stories, and then sitting down and putting the information together. As a cop, when you have several different people who could potentially be involved, you have to get to them as soon as you can so their memories don’t get clouded with pressure from outside sources—and, most important, they don’t have a chance to get together and collaborate on stories. From everything Weddle and Thomas could discern thus far, Odell hadn’t spoken to Sauerstein.
Still, Weddle later said, it might have been a mistake to interview Odell when they did.
“On that particular day, it may have been a mistake on our part…but the media was going to find her before we did. And that was our main reason for leaving [so quickly]. But on the day [May 17] we first interviewed her, I had been up all the previous day; then we flew that night, and drove right to our hotel and found Odell. We were both exhausted. We look back on it now and think, ‘If we would have been fresh, we would have waited until the following day, we would have probably ended the whole deal with one interview.’”
Instead, Weddle and Thomas now found themselves at Odell’s house, interviewing a man they knew little about, and not having much information from Odell to draw on.
After mentioning the fact that three dead babies had been found in the self-storage unit Odell had rented, Weddle and Thomas were confident that Sauerstein hadn’t a clue as to what was going on.
As the interview progressed, he spoke of the many children he’d had with Odell.
“All your kids are accounted for, as far as you know?” Weddle asked. It seemed like an odd question, but in the scheme of Weddle and Thomas’s investigation, it was something they needed to know.
A cop never assumed anything.
“Yup,” Sauerstein said. As he said it, one of the children walked onto the porch. “As a matter of fact, there’s one of my little guys right now,” Sauerstein, a proud father, said.
Weddle then asked Sauerstein if he was willing to give them a DNA sample.
“Yes, I would.”
The interview then took on a rather chronological scope as Sauerstein and Weddle discussed the self-storage unit, who had visited it, how often, and when. Then Weddle got into Odell’s children from her marriage to James Odell. He wanted to know if, perhaps, any of her older girls could have had a miscarriage.
“Oh, no, they were kids then,” Sauerstein said.
“The one wasn’t fourteen, fifteen years old, which is…?” Weddle started to say.
“That was Alice,” Sauerstein said, “she was a real troublemaker.”
A rebellious teenager was one thing. It was in a teen’s nature to be antieverything. What Weddle wanted to know, however, was “Did she have any miscarriages?”
“She had it against me….”
Weddle and Thomas looked at each other. What the hell is he talking about? Maybe he didn’t understand the question.
“Did she have any miscarriages, or anything of that nature, that you know of?”
“I know that she had, according to her, she was raped up in Oregon,” Sauerstein said. “That was one of the main reasons we left. They were investigating, they were looking at his [sic] uncle, who supposedly was a child molester or whatever. And they knew we were leaving. But nothing ever panned out. I don’t think she was ever pregnant….”
Standing quietly throughout most of the interview, Thomas spoke up again. She could feel Weddle getting somewhere. Sauerstein, if he didn’t know what had happened to the babies, certainly could be helpful in a number of ways. It was more than likely he knew things about the case without even realizing it.
“You don’t have any idea where these babies came from?” Thomas asked.
Turning quickly, perhaps surprised by the tone Thomas used, Sauerstein said, “Hell no.” He was a bit incensed, and began pacing back and forth on the porch. “We were there [in Utah] maybe three or four months. Can’t have three babies in three or four months—not unless you’re a cat!”
“These babies,” Thomas continued, “were wrapped inside and packaged up in boxes that had all your other stuff in them. It could have been moved from—”
“All right, all right,” Sauerstein said, throwing up his hands.
“It doesn’t mean she”—Thomas stopped herself from pointing a finger at Odell—“I mean, anybody had them there in Arizona. They could have been moved from somewhere else. We just don’t know. So—”
“We don’t know how long they’ve been there,” Weddle added. “That’s what we’re saying.”
“What are your thoughts on that?” Thomas asked.
“You got to be a sick son of a bitch to be traveling around with three dead babies,” Sauerstein said.
“A person might have a rational reason,” Weddle added, “why they ought to do it. I don’t know, but I can’t think of one offhand, but—”
Sauerstein interrupted. He wanted his point to be understood clearly. “No! Hell no! I don’t think anybody would do that kind of thing that was rational…. Ah…you said something and I lost my train of thought.”
There was a quick exchange regarding whether Sauerstein had been back to Arizona since he and Odell left.
He said no.
Then, “Let me ask you this,” Weddle posed, “we’ve requested that your wife submit to a polygraph test tomorrow. She said she would. Are you going to have a problem with that?”
“Me doing it?” Sauerstein pointed to himself.
“No, for her doing it.”
“No, no, I mean, Dianne’s the type of person where you go into the supermarket and you hand the woman twenty dollars, right, and the woman gives you back twenty dollars…and me, I’m like shut up.” He laughed at the situation. There was no way, he said, he would give the money back in the same position. But Odell, he insisted, was such an honest person that she would speak up.
“That’s a good person,” Weddle said.
“You know, I mean, she does good with the kids.”
“How ’bout you,” Thomas asked, “would you take a polygraph?”
“Yeah,” Sauerstein said, “but I don’t think it would work on me.”
“Why’s that?”
“I have a nervous condition.”
“Would you be willing to try, see how?”
“All right.”
After getting dropped off by Gerald Williams, a PSP trooper, Odell left Rite Aid and drove straight home. She was flustered, worried about what she was going to do next. What would she tell everyone? How does one explain three dead babies left in boxes? How does one tell family members about a secret she’s been harboring for decades? The following days were going to be filled with explanations, interviews, polygraph tests, fingerprints, and DNA results, Odell knew as she made her way down the interstate. The media was going to be calling, knocking on the front door, hovering around the neighborhood, asking questions of neighbors and coworkers. How would she explain it all? What options did she have, really, when it came down to it? Her only course of emotional stability at this point was the comfort in knowing she would be able to tell Sauerstein and her children before Weddle and Thomas (or the media) got a crack at them.
After all, in Odell’s mind, Thomas had promised her that she and Weddle wouldn’t speak to Sauerstein before she had a chance to.
She was nervous as she drove. When she arrived home, as soon as she walked in, Sauerstein said, “They’ve already been here!”
Odell dropped her head. “Robert was already frothing at the mouth. He was pissed,” she recalled later. All she wanted to do was cook dinner, calm Sauerstein down, and figure out a way to break the news to everyone. She wanted to talk to Sauerstein “rationally,” she said. “Because…I knew if I tried to sit down and explain it to him right away, we were going to get into a major fight.”
“I’ll cook dinner,” she told Sauerstein, “and we’ll talk later.”
That comment seemed to appease Sauerstein for the moment. However, as Odell began taking out pots and pans, getting dinner started, he wouldn’t let it go.
Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) Page 9