Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime)

by M. William Phelps

1

  BABY NUMBER TWO never had a chance at life, same as Baby Number One.

  “The father would be,” Odell said later, “my ex-brother-in-law.”

  Odell said she had sex with Hubert Odell, her husband James’s brother, “maybe four times.” During one of those intimate moments, she became pregnant. When she found out, Hubert was out of her life entirely. It was the middle of 1983. He had borrowed money from Mabel and taken off.

  “I told my mother I was going to keep the baby,” Odell said. Mabel compared the “situation” to Odell’s “divorce from James: ‘James didn’t want to be responsible [for the children] and neither would anyone else.’”

  When Odell went into labor, she said, she “did all the things” she “would normally do, except for working.” Mabel knew she was in labor, even though Odell had never told her.

  “After I put the girls to bed, I went to sit down for a moment.”

  Mabel then walked up to her and said, “How far apart are the pains?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “I was going to catch my breath,” Odell recalled, “and then drive to the hospital while I still could.”

  She gave no reason for not doing the obvious: calling 911. If she couldn’t drive herself to the hospital, she certainly could pick up a phone. Instead, she said, she got up to go to the bathroom, and “when I stood up, the pain was so bad it brought me to my knees. It felt like I had a basketball between my legs. I was afraid to move for fear of hurting both myself and the baby.”

  Odell screamed at that point, “Mother, please help me…. Call an ambulance.”

  Again Mabel walked into the room and bent down in front of her.

  “The baby’s right there…. There’s no time.”

  “I won’t do anything until you call!”

  “The pain was so unbearable,” Odell explained later, “she knew I wouldn’t hold out long…That was when the ringing started along with something like tunnel vision. When the baby was born, I saw her holding the baby…. She turned to walk away and I tried to get up and run after her, but I blacked out. And when I woke up, the baby was already gone. Once again, she said to me, ‘Go throw this thing out or bury it somewhere.’

  “I was so upset. I felt so much anger…I knew if I said anything…she would have taken the girls. I wanted her to pay for what she had done. So I put [the babies] away to wait for the right moment.”

  2

  If there ever was a “right moment,” it was May 18, as Odell sat with Weddle and Thomas. Obviously, though, something about the moment wasn’t working for Odell, because she explained how she had passed out again while giving birth in the bathroom, which was quite a different story from what she had said later.

  This seemed odd to the detectives, for the simple reason of convenience, suffice it to say she was sitting inside a police station being questioned about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of three of her babies.

  “What did you see when you awoke?” Weddle asked.

  “Not much, because I had, umm, I had tried to sit up and I wasn’t even thinking about it this time. But I tried to sit up because I wanted to see if I could just clean everything out and I remember I went like this”—she made a motion, reenacting how she had passed out—“and that’s all I remember.”

  “You went back out again?”

  “I must have.”

  “Like what, what did you do?”

  “I went to reach, like this.” She reached underneath her leg.

  “To reach over, to get, to touch the baby?” Weddle wanted to know.

  “Yeah. I…My feet were kind of like this, and I went like this, and everything like in here kind of like scrunched together.”

  “My feet like this and everything like in here….” What did she mean? A jumble of words. It was as if she were making it up as she went along. Vague details offered Weddle and Thomas nothing. What had started out as a detailed account had turned suddenly—as they were getting down to the mechanics of what happened and how the babies actually died—into ambiguous descriptions and mimelike reenactments.

  Odell then explained her “intention” was to grab the child and clean its mouth out so it could breathe.

  Weddle wasn’t buying it. He wanted to know if she had tried to bring the baby up and onto her chest to prop it up so it could breathe easier.

  “Yeah, and maybe try to pat out whatever was in there and clean it out, and, you know, just bring it air.”

  There wasn’t much emotion now on Odell’s face. She was calm, concentrating exclusively on telling her story.

  “And I…don’t have a clue as to what happened. But when I woke up, I must have hit my head on the tub or something, because I had a lump here.” She pointed to the right side of her head, above her temple.

  After they discussed where the bump was, Weddle brought up probably one of the most important aspects of the interview so far. “When did…you clean up everything? Did you cut the umbilical cords off?”

  Surprisingly, Odell had no trouble recalling exactly where she had bumped her head, the exact location on her body, or even pointing to it, but she couldn’t remember when and if she cut either of the babies’ umbilical cords.

  “You don’t know? On either one?” Weddle asked.

  “I don’t think I did, but I’m not going to…”

  “So, you’re not sure, then?”

  “I’m not sure….”

  For Weddle and Thomas, one of the most important facts that could perhaps come out of the interview was whether the babies had been born alive. This would have to come from Odell. No one else, as far as they could tell, had been with her.

  “Okay,” Weddle said, getting up from his chair, “did you ever hear either one of these babies cry?”

  “No!” Odell said quickly, without thinking about it.

  “You didn’t hear when you awoke from being out?”

  “No. The only thing I remember hearing was, umm, you know”—she stumbled a bit with her words and paused—“when people say your ears are ringing? That’s what I remember hearing—that ringing in my ears.”

  “But you never heard either baby crying?”

  Odell, a bit taken aback by the continued questioning, then said, “They might have. I’m not going to say that they didn’t, but I didn’t hear it.”

  Weddle wanted a firm answer. Yes or no?

  “You didn’t hear it?”

  Before Odell could answer, Thomas piped in, “What happened next after you passed out again?”

  It was getting late, she explained. She said she could see out the window that “daybreak” was coming. The sun, signifying another day of life, was just creeping up above the bathroom window. Then, “And this baby”—Baby Number Two—“was already gone,” she said, “and I wrapped it up and put it”—she stumbled again, trying to hold back tears—“I put it in the closet.” The closet was “adjacent to the bathroom.”

  Time and again, Odell recalled certain definitive details.

  “I put the baby in the closet and I closed the door and I went to go back into the bathroom because I had…had blood all over my legs, and I went to just get water, and I had to go forward to get water, and as I did, I passed out again.”

  Then she crawled on her hands and knees to the couch in the living room and just lay there.

  “I remember by the time I reached the couch, I could hear that ringing in my ears again and I was afraid I was going to pass out. It was one of those couches that opened into a bed….”

  Another piece of minutia.

  Odell said she stayed on the couch for the next “three or four days.”

  “And the girls”—Odell’s three daughters—“just kind of took care of themselves again?” Thomas asked. She was curious how the heck three girls—five, four, and three years old—could have fended for themselves.

  “The girls kind of took care of me,” Odell said.

  Thomas and Weddle looked at each other. What?

  Odell stuck t
o her story. She was saying that her three daughters, questionably old enough to go to the bathroom without the help of an adult, had taken care of her while she got her strength back.

  Weddle and Odell then discussed how the babies were wrapped.

  “There might have been a bedspread…I can’t say for sure.”

  “So,” Thomas asked, “how long do you think the baby was in the closet?”

  “I know it was at least three days….”

  “After the three days, what did you do?”

  “Umm…those—those three days, ah…I guess the stuff in the bottom of the closet was stuff that I decided I didn’t—I didn’t need to use every day, and I put it all in the box along with the baby.”

  “Do you remember at all…did your mother come over in those three days that you were in bed, with the second baby, I mean?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Odell said excitedly, as if the mere mention of Mabel had sparked a memory.

  “Did she notice anything? Ask anything?”

  Odell said Mabel was upset because Odell hadn’t kept a promise to bring her “someplace.” Whether Mabel knew anything about the birth, she added, “I don’t, I couldn’t answer you, ’cause she had never said anything to me.”

  “She had never said anything to me.”

  “Did you ever tell her about this baby?” This would become one of the most crucial questions of the interview.

  “I would rather cut off my arm than tell [my mother],” Odell said without hesitation.

  3

  Shortly after being impregnated in late 1984 by a man named David, who had moved into the house Odell and Mabel were living in, according to Odell later, he moved out in early 1985 and she never saw him again.

  Alone in the house with Mabel, Odell went into labor one afternoon a few months later.

  “I don’t remember too much about this, because nothing is clear…. Everything is like one fluid movement.

  “I had coffee with my mother—she fixed everything in the kitchen. When I got up, I lost my balance and I couldn’t stand. She had said, ‘This will help you.’ When I woke up, I was on the floor…and my baby was next to me. It felt like I cried for days.”

  Beyond that, Odell couldn’t recall much else about giving birth to the child and what happened to it afterward—only that her mother had killed it and she put it next to the others in a box.

  By the middle of 1985, Odell had gotten a job at a local warehouse that imported lighting material from overseas to manufacture and sell in the United States. She had been through a plethora of men since divorcing James, one of whom was, in fact, James’s brother. At thirty-two years old, she had given birth out of wedlock to three children between 1982 and 1985, to bring her child bearing total up to seven, four of whom were dead. The three children between 1982 and 1985 were killed by her mother, she claimed. She was hanging on to their corpses, which were inside her closet, carefully packaged in garbage bags, boxes, and a suitcase, because she wanted to give the children a proper burial someday, and, most important, she wanted to have proof of what Mabel had done to the kids when she went to authorities. Holding on to the bodies, she insisted, was going to later prove that Mabel had murdered them.

  “Whenever I would broach the subject with Mom,” Odell said, “she would give me one of those stares…. I kept the babies with me, in my room, I made sure she didn’t have access to them, because I didn’t want them disappearing. I wanted people to understand the things that were done to me…. I wanted to let them know my mother was as crazy as a bedbug, and they were my proof. And if I let them go and never saw them again, I would never get to lay them to rest properly. I would never have a grave site to go to. I knew what she had taken away from me. I didn’t have the strength, tenacity, or the courage to break away from her. That’s my ghost, my monster—that’s the beast I deal with every day. My downfall. I could not, for the life of me, break away from her to do what I had to do.”

  Yet, that emotional bondage, Odell claimed, which had been with her for the better part of her thirty-two years, would begin to subside after she met the man who would later become her soul mate, confidant, and friend, Robert Sauerstein.

  Late in 1985, after taking a few days off from work, Odell walked in one morning and saw Sauerstein. She walked past him the first time, she said, and didn’t pay much attention. Soon, though, they were talking and, a while later, dating.

  Obviously, from what Odell said later, any man she dated would have to pass Mabel’s litmus test: Did he fit her qualifications for the ideal man? Or, rather, did he have the means to make money? Lots of money.

  “She didn’t like him,” Odell said, “and I had asked her why, and she said, ‘He has no potential.’

  “Well, he’s a friend,” Odell said, “and I like him.

  “‘You just make sure it doesn’t become any more than that!’”

  Odell and Sauerstein were still friends at that point. Sauerstein had only been over to the lake house a few times for dinner.

  “We laughed. We talked. We joked around. We did all those things.”

  Months later, as the friendship between Odell and Sauerstein turned into intimacy and romance, she and Mabel got into a financial jam. She couldn’t recall the exact circumstances, but she remembered they needed extra money and Odell’s checks from the factory weren’t cutting it.

  “That’s when she came to me and asked me to ask Robert to move in with us, so he could help with the bills.”

  Following a pattern that seemed to dominate Odell’s life as an adult, no sooner did Sauerstein move in during the fall of 1985, than Odell became pregnant for the eighth time.

  4

  Odell, sitting at attention, told Weddle and Thomas, near the end of that May 18 interview, that she would have rather lapped off her arm than tell Mabel she was pregnant. Still, Weddle and Thomas wanted to be certain they understood her correctly.

  “So the answer is no?” Weddle asked. “You never told Mabel you were pregnant?”

  “The answer is no!”

  “She was just that type of person, huh?”

  “Very stoic,” Odell said.

  “Is that…Was she a factor in…why you didn’t take these babies to the hospital?”

  “Oh, very much so.”

  “She was that much of an influence on you?”

  “Oh yeah!”

  “Is she living now?”

  “No.”

  Mabel was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 1993, generally a fatal disease of the heart. In 1995, she died. Was it a time of celebration for Odell, who had lived, she claimed, under Mabel’s dysfunctional reign for the better part of forty years?

  Odell said it wasn’t. She felt a sense of relief, for obvious reasons, but it was no time to break out the champagne.

  “My mother had used her disease as a crutch,” she said, “to draw sympathy from me, guilt from me.”

  In many respects, one could say it worked, because it was Dianne Odell who had taken Mabel to the doctor’s office whenever she needed to go.

  “She wouldn’t go by herself. She wouldn’t take care of herself…. Even though I went out of my way to make sure she had her medications and shit, she wouldn’t take them. At that point in time, I had drawn a line: I could lead a horse to water, but I couldn’t force it to drink. I could get her pills, but I couldn’t make her take them.”

  Near the end of her life, Mabel was having “mini-strokes,” Odell recalled. She started losing her ability to speak. Finally she died of an aneurism one afternoon.

  “I felt unbelievable relief when she was finally gone. Unbelievable guilt. And then I spent two weeks waiting for her to come back and get me.”

  According to Odell, Mabel had said at various times that she was “never going to let [Odell] go.” Even death, Mabel said, wouldn’t stop her return from the grave to haunt her. Mabel had gotten into her head to a point, Odell claimed, where she believed she would never be rid of her.

  “And she st
ill tortures me to this day.”

  Questioned further about Mabel by Weddle, Odell said, “Her and my father were a good pair, they were.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well, my father spent his life torturing me, and she—she spent her time trying to make me feel like it was okay.”

  “In what way do you mean ‘torture’?”

  “I used to get hit for nothing!”

  “Physical, physically….”

  “Physical, yeah, something like that.”

  Odell then gave Weddle and Thomas an example, telling them a story about being hit in the face by her father’s “closed fist” after being slashed with a belt.

  “So very strong-personality-type parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  For a few moments, Odell talked about her brothers, explaining how the abuse, as far as she could tell, was directed only at her. Afterward, she said she believed that if Mabel had never been in her life none of what was occurring at the moment—the babies in boxes, cops, the questioning—would have happened.

  Weddle was curious, as was Thomas, why she thought her life would have turned out differently if Mabel hadn’t been part of it.

  “I would have…I would have done what any normal person does.”

  “Was there a question because you were an unwed mother?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “That there would have been problems between you and your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would she have done?” Thomas asked. “You had the baby, the baby was deceased. What do you think she would have done if you were to have told her…. What would have happened?”

  “She probably would have hit me. She didn’t hit me very often, but when she did, she did.”

  Weddle seemed interested in Odell’s answer. Was Mabel one of the “underlying reasons” why her life had turned into such a mess?

  “Yes.”

  “I mean why…why this happened? Why the three babies were found deceased and not buried?”

  “A very big factor,” Odell said. “I’m not blaming…I’m not blaming this on her—”