“He had never realized what he had done to me. And he never acknowledged it. When he looked at me, he looked right through me.”
Three days after her father’s funeral, on February 22, 1981, Odell found herself back at Community General Hospital, in Harris, New York, giving birth to her third daughter, Doris.
For the past few months, save for six weeks or so after Doris’s birth, Odell had been working at a local newspaper in the proofing room. It was hard work, she said, but it helped pay the bills. As things seemed to be going as best they could, given the life she had built for herself, she ran into a snag near the end of 1981, beginning of 1982. The owner of Hamilton House, where she and Mabel were living in a three-room apartment, decided to raise the rent, which Odell and Mabel couldn’t swing. While Odell worked, Mabel watched the children. But the hours she was working and the money coming in weren’t enough to keep up with everything. Mabel had given up her job watching an elderly woman when Odell moved back to New York from Florida, and Odell, of course, didn’t think Mabel was the best person to watch the children, but, she said, she had no other alternative.
4
Weddle and Thomas greeted Sunday morning, May 18, 2003, with the understanding that Odell was going to meet them at the Towanda barracks and submit to a polygraph test. With any luck, they’d get a chance to interview her afterward. They were feeling much more composed after finally getting a good night’s sleep. Still, now wasn’t any time to hold back on their investigation. They had some hardball questions for Odell, which might clear things up, but she was going to have to agree to be questioned. A polygraph, although not admissible in a court of law, would give them a good understanding of how much she knew about the life (and, possibly, the death) of the children. But it was only the beginning.
Surprising to both detectives, Sauerstein showed up at Towanda in Odell’s place. “We need to talk,” Sauerstein said upon greeting Thomas.
“What’s the problem?”
Weddle shook his head. What’s going on? Shoot, she’s lawyered up.
“Dianne’s had a change of heart,” Sauerstein said.
“Oh?” Thomas replied.
Hearing that, Thomas decided to call Odell at home. After four rings, she got the answering machine. “This is Detective Thomas at the Towanda barracks. Could you please call me when you get a chance.”
A few minutes later, as if Odell was at home screening her calls, she called back. “What do you want?” Odell asked bitterly.
“We thought you were coming in this morning to, you know, give us those fingerprints so we can—”
Odell interrupted. “No! I’m mad at you.”
“Why’s that, Miss Odell?” Thomas wondered.
“I didn’t want you to speak to Robert before I did. I thought I made that clear.”
Thomas played dumb. “I wasn’t aware of that, Miss Odell. I have a job to do, anyway. That’s our investigative procedure.”
“Well, I…I wanted to tell them.”
“Sorry, Miss Odell. Where are we today?”
“I need to speak to an attorney first, before I come in. I want to get my house in order before I talk to you again.”
“And then what?”
“I’ll come in and tell you everything.”
Odell was apparently calling the shots now, letting Thomas know that she had broken an agreement between them and, because of that, she and Weddle would have to pay a price.
Thomas explained to Weddle that Odell wasn’t coming in—at least not right away. Weddle, disappointed, suggested they ask Sauerstein, who had himself agreed to take a polygraph test and was finishing it up in another room, to phone her. Maybe he could talk her into coming in?
“We need her fingerprints before we leave for Arizona,” Weddle told Sauerstein. He said they were scheduled for a flight the following day and “really needed Dianne’s fingerprints” to be on that plane with them. The truth was, Weddle and Thomas could stay as long as they needed. It was an intense moment, really, in the investigation. A turning point. But intensity bred commitment. Weddle and Thomas knew that. As cops, they fed off it. They were sticking with their case, no matter where it led or how much opposition they faced.
Sauerstein agreed to call Odell, but said he couldn’t make any promises.
“I told them,” Sauerstein said later, “that Dianne wanted to talk to a lawyer first, which I agreed with.”
After a few brief moments on the phone with Odell, Sauerstein indicated she was willing to come in and talk, providing she had a ride.
“Great,” Thomas said, “we can wrap this thing up and get back home.”
Weddle took off to Rome with a PSP trooper while Thomas stayed behind with Sauerstein. Round-trip, it would take about thirty minutes to return with Odell.
When Odell arrived, the first thing she did was walk off with PSP trooper Gerald Williams into the fingerprinting area of the barracks and “voluntarily,” Williams said later in his report, submit to fingerprinting. Williams had been a member of the PSP for twelve years, the last seven as a criminal investigator. He worked out of the Wyoming, Pennsylvania, barracks, which covered Luzerne County, or the northeastern section of the state. As a criminal investigator, he was part of a task force responsible for four different counties: Luzerne, Wyoming, Sullivan, Branford. Part of his job was to assist in all counties. Having heard that investigators from Arizona were working on a case in Rome, Williams was brought in to help out where he could.
It was 3:30 P.M. when Williams fingerprinted Odell. The day was getting long for everyone. Odell looked tired and worn down, most likely from a night without much sleep. Her hair was uncombed, hugging her shoulders. She wore little makeup, had dark yellow-and-black—bruiselike—bags under her brown eyes. As she sat on a bench in front of a white-brick wall and Williams photographed her, she frowned and looked away. In another photograph, she stared blankly into the camera, her face bearing an expression of guilt: Let’s get this over with.
After Williams finished fingerprinting her, Odell wiped the ink off her hands. Williams asked her if she was willing to speak to Thomas, Weddle, and himself about the three dead babies.
“You’re not under arrest,” Williams added, “and you can decline to speak to us. You’re free, in fact, to leave if you want, anytime you wish.”
Williams later said Odell thought about it for a moment and said, “Okay. Let’s talk.”
Odell remembered this same scenario a bit differently. She insisted that Williams told her she “couldn’t have a lawyer.”
Odell recalled, “There was about fifteen minutes of conversation that day that wasn’t recorded. I never decided anything. I went in to give them my fingerprints and they moved me into a conference room and that’s when…Williams said, ‘This isn’t going to go away; you’re going to have to talk to us.’ My reply to him was ‘I want to talk to a lawyer.’”
At that point, she claimed, Williams folded his hands over his chest and said, “No, you don’t need a lawyer. What would you need a lawyer for? The only thing a lawyer is going to do is tell you to keep your mouth shut.”
“Those were his words to me,” she added. “And my husband was there to hear it.”
Sauerstein claimed Odell asked for an attorney “several times,” but she was denied each request.
Trooper Williams later testified under oath that everything he, Thomas, and Weddle did that day was done with Odell’s consent. After all, Odell could have left the barracks anytime she wanted. She was never under arrest. On top of that, she had expressed to Thomas over the phone before returning to the barracks that she wanted to converse with an attorney, yet she didn’t bring one with her when she voluntarily returned to Towanda.
As Odell talked to Williams in one room, Weddle and Thomas, in another room, discussed how they were going to go about questioning her, banking on the notion she would agree to be questioned. It couldn’t be a touch-and-go–type interview; they had been down that road once already and Odell
seemed to be, they now believed, evasive, hiding things.
“I have an idea,” Weddle suggested to Thomas. “Let’s lay out the photos of the babies as we found them in the boxes and bags.”
“Good, Bruce,” Thomas said. “Let’s give it a shot.”
A time usually came in any investigation when a suspect needed to be nudged. Generally speaking, a photo, or piece of evidence, might push a suspect over the edge and take them back to the time of the crime, stirring their memory a bit. Not that Odell had killed the babies, but maybe she knew what had happened. Seeing the horrific photographs, their tiny mummified and decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic, might break her.
Weddle took out a half-dozen photographs and scattered them on the table in the interview room, which was directly down the hallway and around the corner from where Odell had been fingerprinted. Then he placed white pieces of paper over each photograph. When the time came, he would ask Odell to look down, then remove the paper and expose the photographs. It was a hit-or-miss opportunity. She would either open up or leave.
“We were hoping it might shock her,” Weddle said, “to the point that she’s going to know that we know about the babies and the jig is up and it’s time to get down to business.”
As Odell and Williams walked out of the fingerprint area toward the interview room, Odell told him she “wanted to get her house in order” before she spoke to anyone else.
“It’s my younger son,” she said. “I’ll come back to the station tomorrow. I need to make sure Brendon is going to be okay.”
“Let me ask you something,” Williams said, walking with Odell, “why would you have to ‘get your house in order’ and provide for Brendon?”
Odell bowed her head, spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. “I want to speak to an attorney for civil purposes; mainly, to arrange living arrangements for Brendon because…Robert, my husband, doesn’t treat Brendon very well.”
In retrospect, it was an odd statement—as if Odell knew she was going to be detained by Weddle and Thomas. No one had mentioned the idea of her being arrested. She hadn’t been read her Miranda rights, but she took it upon herself to insinuate that whatever she was going to be talking about would somehow keep her at the barracks.
“They don’t get along so well,” Odell continued, meaning Brendon and Sauerstein. “I fear for his safety. Their relationship is like water and rock. They don’t mix well together.”
Once again, Odell later explained this same conversation with Williams—as she would with many of the conversations she had with law enforcement during that same period—differently.
“It wasn’t even Brendon,” she claimed, “that I wanted taken care of. They don’t even have the facts correct! That’s what I’m saying….” Brendon was 14 at the time. “It was Adam” who was fifteen and “…had reached that age of rebellion. I wanted to make sure he was taken care of. And without me there…who knows?” Odell wanted Adam to go down to Florida to live with one of his sisters, she said, where “he could have a fairly normal life. [His sister] would make sure he toed the mark. But more important, I wouldn’t have to worry about him and his father getting into it. There was a clash of personalities from the beginning. I didn’t want my son to feel the weight of what was about to happen because he had always been extremely close to me.”
“Is that the only reason why you would want to speak to an attorney?” Williams later said he asked Odell as they continued walking toward the room where Weddle and Thomas were waiting.
“Yes.”
“Listen, I want to be clear on this: you are not under arrest, you can leave here at any time. No matter what you have to say to us, you are going home tonight. Do you understand that?”
Odell started crying. “Okay, I am willing to speak with you….”
Just then, Williams and Odell reached the room. Weddle and Thomas were outside the room, buzzing around, waiting for them.
Then, as Odell and Williams made their way down the hallway, with Thomas standing by the doorway of the interview room, Weddle said, “Dianne, do you think we could talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure,” she said, heading into the room; Thomas, Sauerstein, Williams, and Weddle were behind her.
When they got into the room, Sauerstein said, Odell sat in between Williams and Thomas.
“They were kind of [nice to her],” Sauerstein remembered. “There was no bad cop/good cop. Now it’s nice cop/nice cop.”
“I want to talk to a lawyer,” Sauerstein remembered Odell saying again as she sat there.
At that point, Sauerstein said, Trooper Williams blurted out: “Why would you want to talk to a lawyer? A lawyer will just tell you not to say anything!”
Within a few minutes, Weddle walked over to the table where the photographs were covered with white paper and exposed a photograph showing one of the boxes the babies had been found in. The garbage bag the baby had been wrapped with was open, revealing the decomposing corpse. Thomas and Weddle were a bit flustered, only because they weren’t set up for a formal interview, meaning they didn’t have their tape recorder running. If Odell was ready to confess to a crime, having a confession on tape would be essential to the case later on.
“Do you know what those are?” Weddle asked, looking at Odell, pointing to the photographs.
Odell shook her head. “They look like bags of garbage,” Weddle recalled Odell saying at that point.
“Well, Miss Odell, that’s what they’ve been treated like—garbage.”
Thomas and Williams looked at each other.
This is it….
Weddle continued: “There’s dead babies in those bags, and you’re the one who knows what the situation was and why those babies were in those bags.” Weddle, who spoke with a noticeable Western brogue, paused for a moment to allow Odell a chance to think about the images. Then, “We don’t intend on leaving Pennsylvania, Miss Odell,” he continued, “until we find out from you what happened.”
Odell, looking at the photograph, then blurted out, “If that’s what you need, okay, the babies are mine. I’ve withheld this information for years….”
Weddle, Thomas, and Williams later corroborated the statement.
“It seemed to me,” Williams recalled, “as if it was like a big burden would be relieved off of her shoulders. That’s how it appeared to me.”
With that information now exposed, Thomas immediately went for her tape recorder and explained to Odell how they needed to get her statement, and whatever else she wanted to say, on tape.
Sauerstein, who had been in the room, was asked to leave and stand on the opposite side of a two-way mirror, in another room, where he could watch and listen.
By 4:00 P.M., Thomas had her tape recorder on the table in front of Odell, the wheels of the cassette tape squeaking and turning.
“You have already indicated a few things to us,” Thomas said into the microphone, “that we would like to have you go through again so that we have it on the tape recording. You agreed to speak to us?”
“I already agreed to that,” Odell said, crying.
“Okay, go ahead if you would, please, the first thing that we were talking about is the babies that we in Arizona had found that were in the storage unit. Okay, go ahead.”
Odell took a deep breath. It’ll be okay. Just tell the truth. Get it over with. She kept repeating this to herself as she tried to figure out what to say first.
CHAPTER 9
1
“THERE WAS A gentleman,” Odell recalled, “between James and his brother, I dated.”
It was 1981, she explained. Mark Ingalls was a good-looking man in his late thirties who had worked around the apartment as a handyman. Odell said she noticed him, of course, because he was always around, but he meant little to her. Just another drifter who had showed up one day and wound up sticking around after finding work.
It was Mabel, Odell claimed, who pursued Mark, professing to be acting on her behalf. Mabel had heard that Mark, a Vietnam vet
eran, had filed a “large class-action lawsuit against the government over an Agent Orange” issue. Mabel saw a huge payoff coming his way. So she pressured Odell into dating him in order to get her hands on what was a potential windfall of cash.
“He was nice enough,” Odell recalled, “but he was not what I was looking for. I did not want this relationship. I wanted to be left alone…. I had had enough of men being in my life. I was angry at any man who would ask me to do anything. Because all of my life, all of the men in my life, in my family, all the way up to my husband, always telling me what I could do and when I could do it, what I should be saying.”
It was because of this controlling atmosphere, coupled with the fact that she had lived under the power of her mother’s hand for so long, that drove Odell to push men away entirely. Still, to appease Mabel, she began dating Mark—and, within a few months, guess what?
She was pregnant. But Mark never knew, she claimed.
“It [the relationship] was long gone and finished” by the time she found out she was pregnant. But there she was, once again pregnant and husbandless, wondering what she was going to do. She’d had three (living) children already, no child support coming in, and was working a dead-end job just to survive.
One of the first things Odell said she did was go to her mother with the news: “I’m pregnant, Mom.”
Mabel just stared at her. Then, “I can help. One phone call and everything can be taken care of.”
“I don’t think so, Mother. I don’t want that kind of help.”
Mabel was talking about an abortion, of course. She had mentioned it many times before, during Odell’s previous pregnancies.
Unlike the preceding three living children Odell had given birth to, she claimed she didn’t receive prenatal care for this child because she didn’t want Mabel “squawking about money.” Additionally, she said she was scared of leaving her living children alone with Mabel “any more than I absolutely had to.”
Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) Page 11