“He never gave me the opportunity to sit down and really talk to him….”
Odell kept thinking, How am I going to deal with all of this? Her main objective was to keep the cops off her back while she explained the situation to her family. She wanted to tell them everything: about her mom, her dad, the rapes, and the babies. Everything that had brought her to this point in her life. She believed they would understand why she had packaged and toted the babies around. After that, she planned on talking to a lawyer—she claimed later—and then going back in to talk to Weddle and Thomas. Once everyone had a clear understanding of the circumstances, she was convinced the matter would resolve itself without any major legal problems.
On that night, Odell said she couldn’t bring herself to sit down and eat while everything was going on. My God, she kept telling herself, the media, the kids. This is going to hit the news. My kids still have to go to school, still have to take the bus, still have to come home and live in this neighborhood.
In retrospect, the situation, as Odell later explained it, was quite remarkable: here was a woman whose main objective, she insisted later, was to protect her children. Noted essayist and author Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, has dedicated his life to researching language and cognition. Among his many books, including The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and The Blank Slate, Pinker is probably best-known for his book How the Mind Works. In 1997, Pinker wrote an essay for the New York Times titled “Why They Kill Their Newborns,” a probative analysis of mothers who kill their children.
“For a woman to destroy the fruit of her womb,” Pinker wrote, “would seem like an ultimate violation of the natural order…. Most [of these deaths] remain undiscovered, but every once in a while a janitor follows a trail of blood to a tiny body in a trash bin, or a woman faints and doctors find the remains of a placenta inside her.”
Quite surprising to some, Pinker suggested in the piece that this type of murder “has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history.” Furthermore, other psychologists “found that [while] mothers who kill their older children are frequently psychotic, depressed or suicidal…mothers who kill their newborns are usually not.”
This bizarre dynamic, Pinker explained, led Phillip Resnick, a psychiatrist who published a rather now-famous study of child killing in 1970, to split “the category of infanticide”—by definition, infanticide is “the act of killing an infant; the practice of killing newborn infants”—“into neonaticide, the killing of a baby on the day of its birth; and filicide, the killing of a child older than one day.”
Killing any human being, most would agree, is, as Pinker proposed, an “immoral act, and [most] often expresses our outrage at the immoral….
“If a newborn is sickly,” Pinker continued, “or if its survival is not promising, they [those mothers who kill] may cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter, or try again later on.”
Although Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle had no idea as of yet, Odell had a fourth dead child, whom she was would later call Matthew. Truth be told, she would give birth several times throughout her life and deliver healthy children without complication. Yet in between those healthy, living children, after Matthew died, there were three dead babies, and then still, several more healthy births in hospitals after the births and deaths of the three dead babies. Could Dianne Odell fit into the category Dr. Phillip Resnick described as neonaticide? Had Odell been discarding those children she viewed as sickly or unwanted? Was this her motive?
After Sauerstein agreed to take a polygraph, Clarissa, Odell and Sauerstein’s seventeen-year-old daughter, who had been working at the store adjacent to the house, wandered over to the porch. As she approached Weddle, Thomas, and Sauerstein, wondering what was going on, Sauerstein looked at her and said, “Well, all that stuff [in the self-storage unit in Safford] been there all this time.”
“Oh?” Clarissa said.
“Except for some personal items, I don’t know.”
“So they want to give us our stuff back, or what?” Clarissa asked, obviously confused. Why would the storage company send someone all the way across the country for that purpose?
“No,” Sauerstein said, “in one of the boxes they opened, there was three babies wrapped…”
Sauerstein, apparently, was having trouble finding the right words. So Thomas stepped in and said, “There was three dead babies we found in the box.”
There was no other way to put it.
“Huh?” Clarissa said. She had a stoic, almost impenetrable look about her. “I’ll phone Gram and I’ll be back.”
Sauerstein stumbled to say, “That ought to…will light up…”
“And that’s probably good to tell her,” Thomas said, “’cause like we were telling Dianne, the media…”
“It’s all over the news already,” Weddle added.
“The media’s already had it for days.”
“Up there?” Sauerstein queried, meaning Arizona.
“Nationwide!” Thomas said.
Weddle, Thomas, and Sauerstein then discussed how the media would find out where they now lived, but Thomas reassured him they wouldn’t give out any information that breached their privacy.
As Thomas spoke, Sauerstein began smiling.
“I know I’m laughing about this, but, you know, I’m kinda nervous and tryin’…”
“Well, you know,” Weddle said.
“Somebody out there is a real freak,” Sauerstein added.
Thomas explained that Odell had agreed to meet at the Towanda barracks at ten o’clock in the morning on the following day. They expected her to keep the appointment.
For some reason, they then began talking about Odell’s oldest daughter, Alice, and the trouble Sauerstein had admitted to having with her years ago.
“I was the stepfather. I came into the house and I took control…. We didn’t find out until later on when the sisters started talking to me, [but Alice] used to plan this and plan that, say Dad did this and Dad did that.”
Pressed further by Thomas, Sauerstein said that Alice had come running at him one day—“I’ll never forget the day”—from inside the kitchen and there was a step down—“and she had socks, and she came, I seen her comin’ and I put my hands up…and she just slid, and the next thing you know…”—according to Sauerstein—“Alice said, “He hit me. He hit me.’” After that, Sauerstein said, “Oh, shit, ha, because I had!”
“The cops were called?” Thomas wanted to know.
“I did get into trouble,” Sauerstein said. He was talking about another one of Odell’s children that happened to be there the same day. Doris Odell, after hearing her sister scream, ran into the kitchen to protect her sister and began yelling in Sauerstein’s face. “So I picked her up.” The cop who answered the call, Sauerstein added, saw it as physical abuse. The judge, however, felt different. The judge “just took me out of the jail and said, ‘If everybody that spanked their kids went to jail, everybody would be in jail.’ Ha, ha, ha! I said I didn’t even spank her. I just picked her up and said shut up. She was screaming.”
It was certainly clear to Thomas and Weddle that there was negative energy in the house between Sauerstein and Odell’s kids. But for now, Thomas didn’t want to hear about it. She wanted a DNA swab from Sauerstein’s cheek and a photograph.
After taking a scrape of DNA from Sauerstein’s cheek and a photogrpah, Thomas and Weddle began preparing to leave.
But Sauerstein had a question. “How old were the babies?”
“They were estimated at forty-weeks gestation,” Thomas said.
Sauerstein seemed shocked by the answer.
After pausing for a moment, Thomas added, “They were newborns, Mr. Sauerstein. Newborn babies.”
CHAPTER 8
1
A DESTINATION THAT usually beckoned a call later in life, Florida offered sunshine, beach sand as soft and white as Styrofoam, warm
days, cool nights, and a life of serenity and leisure. Dianne Odell, in early 1980, didn’t quite see her move down south in that same manner, but she certainly saw it as an opportunity to mend a relationship with her husband that had been severed. They could start fresh somewhere new.
When James left for Florida in late 1979, Odell and Mabel, stuck with no place to live, moved back to John Molina’s house, where it all began, in Jamaica, Queens.
The obvious question one might ask: Why would a mother with two young daughters go live with a man who had beaten and raped her, she claimed, for a better part of her childhood? Why would she put her children in a position where that cycle of abuse could continue?
“It was okay,” Odell said later, “because he, my father, had a boarder living in the house with us.” In Mabel and Odell’s ten-year absence, John had been renting out rooms. “I felt fairly protected.” The boarder, she continued, was home all the time. With someone else living in the house—an outsider, no less—she didn’t think her dad would go back to his abusive ways. On top of that, she wasn’t a petrified fifteen-year-old living in a world of fear. She was a woman now: older, bigger, stronger.
“I figured he wasn’t going to pull any stunts on me.”
But what about the children?
“The woman (the renter) was retired. She never went anywhere or did anything. But as protected as I felt being back there with the boarder in the house, I still felt uncomfortable.” And for that reason, she said, she started calling James in Florida routinely, begging him to come and get her.
Are my kids safe here? Odell said she frequently asked herself.
“I never left my kids alone with him.”
Additionally, she never went anywhere without her children—even Matthew, who was in that same blue suitcase, only now in one of her dad’s closets.
Right before James drove up from Florida to get Dianne, Mabel and John got into a “huge fight. And [my mom] moved back to Kauneonga Lake and got a job taking care of an elderly woman.”
Two weeks later, James finally showed up to get Dianne and thus she found herself living in Florida.
But things took a turn for the worse, according to Dianne Odell, almost immediately. Once James picked up alcohol, she said, “he ran with it, hell yes.”
As time went on, the situation only worsened. On certain nights, James would leave and not come home, generally staying out with his brother until the following morning. There was one time, Dianne claimed, when “two young girls, crying and hysterical, and a young man in the same car” pulled up in the front of the house while Dianne was outside with the kids and, after trying to “take my daughter,” accused James of doing horrible things to them.
This scared the hell out of her, she said. She began crying. Things were too chaotic, dysfunctional. Nothing had changed—the only difference now was that she had two children: Alice, just over a year old, and Maryann, just under a year.
Complicating things even further, however, Odell realized around this same time she was once again pregnant.
2
Pennsylvania is considered one of America’s more historic states, Philadelphia often given the brand “the cradle of the American Nation” because it was in the city of “Brotherly Love” that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written by America’s Founding Fathers. Deeper into the state’s mostly mountainous terrain, with some flatland scattered conservatively about, the “Pennsylvania Dutch” region in the south-central portion of the state is what many who visit the state come to see. The Amish and the Mennonites have lived for many, many decades in the area around Lancaster, York, and Harrisburg, with smaller bands to the northeast into Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton, as well as the picturesque Susquehanna River Valley, having manifested quiet, solemn lives among themselves, entirely immune to the luxuries most Americans are accustomed to.
The small town of Towanda, tucked up in the North Country, close to the border of New York, became the hub of the babies-in-boxes murder investigation for Dianne Thomas and Bruce Weddle. But they had been in town now for two days and hadn’t really gotten any closer to finding out what had happened than they were before they left Arizona. The case was weighing on Thomas especially, who had hoped to have it wrapped up quickly so she could send the babies to their final resting place. In a sense, for over twenty years the babies had been in a state of purgatory, decomposing, mummifying, waiting for someone to come along and claim them. The flower and candle memorial at the self-storage unit in Safford had only grown in size. Thomas and Weddle wanted answers.
After leaving Sauerstein and Odell’s home, Weddle and Thomas located Odell’s daughter, Doris, who was twenty-two years old and living about an hour and a half away in New York.
After Thomas and Weddle explained why they were there, Doris was “shocked,” Thomas recalled later, “at the news….” As Thomas explained how the babies likely traveled with the family from state to state, Doris put her hands over her mouth. Oh, my, God…I don’t believe it. She turned white, Thomas said, to a point where they thought she might faint.
“I had no idea about those babies or that they traveled with us,” Doris said.
It was okay, Thomas said. She could rest easy. They weren’t there to cause her any trouble. They just wanted to know a few things.
As Doris talked, Thomas and Weddle became concerned that perhaps they had missed something—because Doris talked about a fourth dead baby.
“My older sister, Alice, called me a few years ago and told me the New York authorities were looking for my mom. Alice told me they had found a baby in a suitcase…but I can’t recall anything more than that.”
Thomas and Weddle looked at each other. A fourth dead baby?
Then Thomas learned that Alice and Doris hadn’t had any contact with their mother for the past five years.
“My mother took my first son,” Doris said, “and would not return him! I’ve been trying to find her for some time.”
“The only help Doris ended up being,” Weddle said later, “was that we could check her off the list of being the potential mother of the children.” More than that, Weddle and Thomas had it under good information now that there was some conflict between Odell, Sauerstein, and Doris. “And we hoped that if she knew anything, she could fill in some of the blanks.”
“I believe the interview with Doris was productive,” Thomas recalled. “We at least eliminated her as the possible mother [of] the children. We were thinking that maybe Dianne’s daughters were having babies and hiding the pregnancies and births. Doris was surprised to hear her mother lived so close to her.”
As frustration built, even mildly, for Thomas and Weddle, patience would prove to be their biggest asset in the coming days. Because within the next twenty-four hours the case would unravel into an intricate myriad of odd circumstances that began to answer, at least, some of the questions everyone was asking.
For now, though, as Weddle and Thomas settled into their hotel suites and said good night to May 17, 2003, the focus was on the following morning, when Odell would hopefully be back at the Towanda barracks answering more questions.
3
By July 1980, stuck in Florida with a man Dianne Odell later described as an “alcoholic husband” who was staying out all night doing God-knows-what, it was time for her to make a decision. Before she did that, James suggested they get out of his sister’s house and move into a place of their own. Soon to be a mother again, Dianne felt the change might do them both some good. Maybe she could still salvage the relationship.
“We moved into this trailer…and he’s getting progressively worse. Umm, he’s living on one end of the trailer and I’m living on the other.”
Faced with the prospect of not wanting to wait around for James to change, Dianne convinced him to bring her back to upstate New York, a place she had called home for the past ten years.
When they arrived in New York, Dianne Odell said, “James went his way and I went mine.”
> But this time, it was for good.
Dianne Odell moved into what was called Hamilton House on White Lake, where Mabel had been living since she left Queens after the argument with John. White Lake was about a mile south of where Odell had lived on Kauneonga Lake. White Lake and Kauneonga Lake are, actually, one in the same. In the shape of an inkblot, White Lake and Kauneonga Lake, technically speaking, are the same body of water. The north side is called Kauneonga Lake and the south side, by Route 17B, White Lake. For ten years, Dianne had lived on the north side, Kauneonga Lake.
“James needed to be free—and I needed to be stress free.”
With the split, Diane Odell said, she assumed James was going to still be a dad; he just wouldn’t be living with the kids. She wondered how she was going to make it on her own with two kids and one on the way. She assumed James would help out financially.
“I figured he was going to put some money into their upbringing and want to see them. But he doesn’t. He takes off, and that’s the end of it.”
Nine months pregnant, living again in Sullivan County, on February 19, 1981, Dianne Odell received news that her father, a man who had, she claimed, sexually and physically abused her for years, had died.
“I went down to the funeral,” Odell said later, “pregnant. I wasn’t going to go, but my mother had to have a way down there, and I had to drive her. So I loaded the kids in the car, and, if nothing else, I thought I might wait at the house while my mother went to the funeral.”
She was furious at her father.
“I was happy he was gone, but angry I had never gotten an apology. I hated him. I was glad he died a slow and agonizing death.”
At eighty years old, John had lost a battle with stomach cancer, Odell said. It had gradually eaten away at his body, putting him through a tremendous amount of pain and suffering at the end.
Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) Page 10