Pathology has always been Baden’s calling, from that first day he walked into an autopsy suite and tried to understand through the process of death how a person had lived and died.
Near the end of World War II, a system in medicine was developed so a physician could qualify himself as a “specialist” in any number of the twenty-four different fields that make up “medicine”: internal medicine, obstetrics, oncology, radiology, pathology, and so on. Meeting criteria designed for each field and having “successfully completed a residency,” Baden said, “in that specialty in a recognized hospital,” allowed doctors to become “board certified,” a term that, one could argue, has been thrown around rather loosely over the years by radio and television doctors.
At 2:30 P.M., on March 15, 1989, Dr. Baden, along with pathology assistant Herman Thomas and criminalist Cathy Oakes, conducted the first autopsy on Baby Doe. The fetus had been sitting in a blue suitcase for sixteen years. Although it had mummified some, for the most part it was not in the condition a medical examiner might have preferred. As fragile and dry as a decades-old beehive, musty and leathery, Baby Doe looked more like a prop out of a science-fiction movie than a newborn child. To think a cause of death could be determined after so many years had passed, or even blood-typing or analyzing DNA (which hadn’t materialized into the dependable science it would later become) seemed nearly impossible. Too much time had elapsed. The environment the baby had been kept in, being moved from place to place, bounced around inside a suitcase for so long, would have an effect on any type of actual testing that would help Baden make his determinations.
Despite all that, however, one thing Baden could say for certain, as he concluded his autopsy at 4:30 P.M. that same day, was that the baby “…was a full-term Caucasian female.”
Female? Odell would later refer to the baby as “Matthew.”
“My belief? It was a male!” Odell said later when faced with the discrepancy. “How they came up with female, I don’t know. Somebody twisted it around and said that the last baby [Baby Number Three] was a little boy. I don’t know how that got twisted, but there is a lot of information that’s twisted.”
A forensic pathologist, though, would have a hard time “twisting” medical facts—and Baden was certain Baby Doe was female because he had scientific testing on the child to prove such. Furthermore, in those police reports taken in 1989, Odell herself even agreed.
“You know,” Odell said later, “I’m going to be very honest here. A lot of the stuff that I remember is in bits and pieces, because it’s not a full memory, umm, oh, a lot of it comes back in flashbacks. And, since my mother was such a loving woman,” she added sarcastically, “you know, it’s very possible that even I have it all backwards. There were two male children”—she paused for a moment to collect her thoughts—“and, I believe, two female children. It’s very easy to mix them up. The only difference in their births was the fact that my mother was there—and my mother took them first before I had the opportunity to be with them. If I could sit down and rattle off…this happened and that happened in chronological order, it would make me a pretty harsh person…. That would make me, even to myself, seem calculating.”
Baden concluded the baby “had been dead for years,” but couldn’t pin down exactly how long. “It could be upwards to thirty years,” he reported, “…before the legalized abortion era, since the birth cord was torn near the placenta instead of cut.” It was clear, too, that it was a “spontaneous birth, but I could not determine…if the baby was born alive or not.”
He said he would submit DNA samples to a local lab to see if it could come up with a death date.
By March 24, word had spread throughout the Kauneonga Lake region that a baby had been recovered from a blue suitcase inside the trunk of a Volkswagen. Hearing about it, one of James Odell’s sisters, Madeline, got hold of the state police with some rather interesting information.
“Contact George and Marie Hess,” Madeline told police. “They may have possible knowledge of the baby you guys found.”
The BCI sent an investigator out to talk to Madeline. Maybe she knew more?
“Rumor has it,” Madeline said, “that the Hesses discovered a suitcase in the attic of the house they had rented to Dianne Odell and her mother, Mabel Molina. It was blue. The Hesses called Mabel and told her to come pick it up and they did.”
This sent the BCI straight to the Hesses, who, in turn, confirmed the story. It was about eight to ten years ago, George Hess explained. “Yes. There was a fetus inside the suitcase. And yes, Mabel picked it up.”
By this time, the DNA had come back, but “an insufficient amount of human DNA was obtained from the evidence materials.” The lab, in effect, didn’t have the resources or the DNA to draw any conclusions.
Lungen still had every reason to believe either Odell or her mother had had something to do with the baby’s death and urged the BCI to continue investigating.
“Question Dianne Odell again. See what you can come up with,” Lungen urged.
5
At 1:00 p.m., on Monday, May 19, 2003, after a productive meeting in Wilkes-Barre with Diane Thomas, Bruce Weddle, and several other investigators involved in a strange case that had begun in Arizona a week prior, Steve Lungen and his team left to drive back to New York. The case was now officially his. That much was clear. But he really didn’t have a clue as to what Odell had admitted to, or if he even had enough evidence to consider arresting her. He hadn’t heard the interviews Thomas and Weddle had conducted with Odell, nor had he reviewed the transcripts.
“We decided to drive back to the DA’s office,” Lungen recalled, “and discuss what we had.”
In the interim, as Odell, Sauerstein, and their children were at home in Rome, the media descended upon Odell’s house as if she had announced she were giving a press conference. Several satellite trucks, local news vans, newspaper reporters, and a reporter from the Associated Press had finally figured out what had happened in Pima, Arizona, and tracked Odell down. From inside her home, Odell looked out the window to see the media hovering around the house, waiting for her to emerge. News of a mother killing her children was lead story material. Throughout the past two decades, several high-profile cases had made headlines: Mary Beth Tinning, a Schenectady, New York, woman, who, between 1972 and 1985, murdered nine of her children; Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman, who drowned her two boys by “driving her auto into a lake while the children slept in their car seats” and then blamed their “abductions” on a “black man” more recently, Andrea Yates, a Texas woman, who drowned five of her kids in the family’s bathtub.
In the eyes of the media, Odell was possibly part of that group—a mother who had killed not one or two of her kids, but several. Anytime a frightened teenager, pregnant and alone, went to her prom and left a baby in a toilet, the media whipped itself into a frenzy and ran with the story: WHY DO MOTHERS KILL THEIR CHILDREN? Radio and television talk shows, soon after the crimes were reported, were usually inundated with callers looking to try, convict, and sentence these women. It was a social topic that stirred heated debate among Americans—and heated debate, for good or bad, meant ratings. But a mother who could have killed several of her children? Now, that was a story.
“The media was banging on the door, driving my dog crazy,” Odell recalled.
As Odell tried to figure out what to do, Sauerstein, knowing the situation would only escalate as the day progressed, began to think of a way to get Odell out of the house without anyone seeing her. Additionally, the kids would be coming home from school soon, and reporters would question them as they got off the bus.
“I told Robert, ‘I’m going to have to get out of here and see if I can drag them (the media) with me.’ I wanted to sit down and talk to my family as a whole and explain everything that had happened from beginning to end. I didn’t want them reading about me in the newspaper.”
For a prosecutor, the media was, generally, an annoyance early on in any potential
murder case, waiting, hovering, looking for information. Prosecutors were good at molding media contacts and putting out information to assist their cases, but Lungen, at this point, likely knew less than the media. He was convinced they were only going to get in the way and make matters worse. Yet, little did anyone know at the time, but the frenzied gathering outside of Odell’s home would, in the coming hours, be an asset to Lungen and his team as they headed back to New York to discuss how to proceed with the case.
As 2:00 P.M. approached, Thomas Scileppi, senior investigator for the BCI in Liberty, drove with his partner in one vehicle from Wilkes-Barre, while Lungen, Paul Hans, and Robert Rowan—Lungen’s investigators—drove in a second vehicle behind them. It was a two-hour trip back to Monticello. Although the trip was perhaps long, it would encourage the opportunity for the four men to discuss the case via two-way radios and cell phones.
There was a lot to do.
The first “holy shit” moment of the day, as Lungen and Hans later described it, became the case itself.
“This is a twenty-five-year-old case,” Lungen explained, “three dead babies, a fourth dead baby some thirty years ago! How can a legal case of murder be made out of this? That’s what we were looking at in the beginning. From my perspective as the DA, when we left [Pennsylvania], I knew we needed to get a game plan together quickly. For one, Odell wasn’t under arrest; she was out walking around.”
There was one problem that worried Lungen at that moment more than anything else, however. “What if she gets a lawyer?” Another problem—at least it seemed like a problem to Lungen as they began to make their way back to Monticello—was the “national media,” who were calling Lungen’s office looking for information and also calling the PSP in Towanda, the closest barracks to Odell’s home in Rome. As a prosecutor, Lungen had become accustomed to telling the media to take a hike. The last thing a competent DA would have done was release pertinent information to the public as a case developed. The less information a suspect had as investigators began digging into his or her life, the better off the DA’s office was. The media—nine times out of ten—hampered this process and made it difficult for everyone to do their jobs.
Even more important was that a pathologist in Pima, Arizona, who had autopsied the three babies, hadn’t yet come up with a cause of death. Everyone was still waiting. Lungen had called Dr. Baden—who vaguely recalled the 1989 case of Baby Doe he had been involved in—and told him to call Arizona to see what he could find out. Baden said he would.
“Were they stillborn babies?” Lungen recalled later, talking about those early moments of the case as it unfolded. “Were they alive babies? Were they dead babies? We needed to know all of this.”
Heading north on Interstate 81, about an hour into their two-hour trip, Lungen, after talking to Scileppi several times over his cell phone, made a decision to meet at Lungen’s office to figure how best to approach the case.
Strategize! Toss out ideas. Gather the troops and decide on a first move.
Odell held most of the answers. Lungen needed his people to talk to her. Yet, how could he approach her? She was in Pennsylvania; they were on their way to New York.
“There was no way in hell,” Lungen said, “Odell was going to drive herself to New York to be questioned by us.”
No suspect in her right mind would. It was a matter of extradition and legal maneuvering. How was Lungen going to get an arrest warrant together? How were they going to get Odell to New York State? Once she spoke to a lawyer, she was all finished talking. But as Lungen and Scileppi continued to discuss the case over the phone, “all hell broke loose,” Lungen said, “when we received a phone call that changed everything.”
CHAPTER 13
1
WHEN ROY STREEVER went back and spoke to Odell in March 1989 for a second time regarding the fetus found in the blue suitcase, she was prepared, she said, to explain fully what had happened to the child. It wasn’t that Streever radiated some sort of magical charm, making Odell feel comfortable about opening up; instead, Streever did what any cop in his position might have done: he presented Odell with the facts in the case as the BCI had uncovered them thus far. And as soon as he mentioned the interview the BCI had done with George and Marie Hess, along with a few more details the BCI had since found out, Odell, in what would be a recurring theme throughout her life later on, “recanted,” a police report described, “her original story….”
Odell said, “Let me explain what happened,” as Streever and his partner walked into her home.
“Please, ma’am, we’re all ears here,” Streever said smartly.
Odell admitted the “fetus was hers.” It was “still-borned about seventeen years ago,” she said. As to whom the father was, Odell claimed the pregnancy was from “a one-night stand.” Then, “Around the eighth month of the pregnancy, I visited my father, John Molina, in Jamaica, Queens. After I told him I was pregnant, he became abusive and struck me about the body with a cat-o’-nine tails about fifteen times.” Additionally, “I started vaginal bleeding during the night and it continued during the ride back to the lake the next day.” Returning home, Odell said, she “bed rested, telling her mother she had a cold.”
Later on that night, Odell further explained—as Streever took notes and his partner looked on—“I felt like a bowel movement and I sat on the toilet only to have the fetus come out…. The fetus was not breathing and my attempts to get the female baby to do so were to no avail.”
“Did the baby move?” Streever asked.
Odell said, “The baby did not move, nor was their any warmth to her.”
There it was: her. Odell had it said twice. Only later would she change her story and call the baby “Matthew.”
By the time Streever and his partner were finished, they learned Odell had, after realizing the child was dead, stuffed it into a “blue suitcase” and “kept it underneath her bed.” Whenever she and her mother moved, she said, she would take the suitcase and store it in the closet. In 1981, she put the suitcase in her Volkswagen—and for the next eight years there it stayed.
What was interesting to Streever later—and just about everyone else involved in the case on the prosecution’s side—was the fact that as Streever and his partner stood in Odell’s living room, talking to her that day in 1989, there, just to the left of where they stood, not five feet away, were three boxes containing three more dead babies, which wouldn’t be discovered for nearly fifteen years.
“I’ve pondered that one myself,” Streever said later. “Almost makes you feel like you screwed up because you didn’t figure that out. We were concerned about one baby. But who the hell knew there were three more…?
“We were pleased she finally came around and admitted Baby Doe was hers,” Streever added. “Whether or not she told the true version of the events, we were at least happy to be able to close the case out and have a statement from her that she had, in fact, given birth.”
A few days later, BCI investigators interviewed Mabel. Beyond admitting she had retrieved a blue suitcase from George and Marie Hess’s home, Mabel kept quiet about what she knew, if indeed she knew anything. She said she recalled taking the suitcase from the Hesses’, but said she never looked inside it and, in turn, gave it to Odell to do with it as she wished.
The case against Odell in 1989 was at best manslaughter, yet it all hinged on what Dr. Baden could find.
“Dr. Michael Baden was on board,” Streever remembered, “and he was telling us he was going to be able to pinpoint pretty close to the time of death, whether the baby ever lived, et cetera. So we were kind of banking on him. But when the autopsy report finally came out, he narrowed it down to about a thirty-year span. He could not determine whether it was born alive or stillborn.”
With no forensics and no real hard evidence against Odell, the BCI was left with only the two statements from Odell, which contradicted each other. Most important, John Molina, who had allegedly beaten Odell and killed the baby, had died in 198
1. It was Odell’s word against his. She was young, single at the time, living with her mother. Now she had six living children. Was there a jury that would convict her?
On March 25, 1989, senior BCI investigator Edward McKenna “conferred with DA Lungen” regarding the case against Odell. Lungen was “satisfied,” he said during the meeting, with Odell’s explanation of the events and the legal fact that “no homicide or self-abortion had occurred.” Even more interesting was the idea that Lungen considered prosecuting John Molina “for manslaughter and for causing the miscarriage of an almost full-term baby….”
Seeing that John Molina was pushing up dirt in a Queens cemetery, Lungen concluded the “manslaughter case will be adopted and closed by exceptional clearance….” Lungen even took it a step further, promising in writing how he “would not seek criminal action against any of the other actors involved: Dianne Odell, her mother, Mabel Molina, or the Hesses, for their improper handling of the remains….”
One of the reasons—the main reason, actually—Odell repeatedly gave for toting around the corpses of her many dead babies was to be able to bury them at or near a location where she would eventually pitch her tent for good. On numerous occasions, she later said she wanted the babies close to her so she could one day give them a proper burial.
On March 26, 1989, she had that opportunity. Because BCI investigators went to Odell and, seeing that the case was now closed, asked her what she wanted to do with the remains of Baby Doe.
“She does not wish to bury the fetus,” the investigator who spoke to Odell that day wrote in his report, “but wants Sullivan County Social Services to do so.”
On the receipt, Odell released the remains of Baby Doe to the “State of New York.”
“Further, that on this…date, I relinquish all claims to said fetus, and turn her remains over to the Sullivan County Department of Social Services…for proper burial.”
Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) Page 16