Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime)

by M. William Phelps

  In the end, the state of New York would bury the baby at a place and time of its choice.

  2

  Robert McKee, a PSP trooper who had been involved with Detectives Thomas and Weddle and their investigation into the three dead babies found in Arizona, had met with Lungen and his team on May 19 in Wilkes-Barre. McKee was heading back to Towanda later that afternoon as Lungen and his investigators headed toward New York, when he received a call from the Towanda barracks eventually turning the investigation entirely upside down for Lungen.

  “We received calls from the Sauersteins saying they are being inundated with news media from around the country,” the dispatcher told McKee over the radio.

  For a brief moment, McKee paused. Then, “Go ahead, base, what else?”

  “Well, they are basically asking us if we can send a trooper over there to help them (or handle) the news media…. I don’t know what to tell them?”

  “Listen,” McKee said, “tell her that if she has someplace to go or could get to someplace else, and if she could leave without being seen, to please attempt to do that.”

  “Ten-four.”

  About five minutes went by. Then McKee, still traveling back to Towanda, received a second call.

  “Go ahead. What’s going on now? What did she say?”

  “She said she’s going to be coming to the [Towanda] barracks.”

  Odell was in a state of panic. The media was bearing down on her home and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Knocks at the door. Phone calls. Reporters hovering around the road leading up to her home. Odell was inside, running from window to window, paranoid, staring, watching, wondering how the hell to get rid of them. She was worried mainly, she said later, for her children’s well-being and what word about what had happened in Arizona would do to the kids at school. Your mommy is a baby killer. Some kids could be cruel. The jokes. The jarring. Odell was terrified that if any of the major news media outlets got hold of the story and twisted it into something it wasn’t, no one in her family would be able to leave the house.

  Trooper McKee had been with the state police for ten years. He was a smart, well-liked cop and, with the gut instincts of a fox, knew what he had to do. As he waited to hear from dispatch to see what time Odell would be arriving at the barracks, he phoned Scileppi to inform him what was going on.

  The problem Lungen had faced—getting Odell out of her house and into the barracks—seemed, at that moment, to have taken care of itself. Odell was actually voluntarily driving herself to the Towanda barracks. What more could Lungen ask for?

  Born in Queens, New York, senior BCI investigator Thomas Scileppi was fifty-one years old in May 2003 when he became actively involved in the Odell investigation. At five feet ten inches, 170 pounds, the white- and gray-haired, brown-eyed investigator had joined the navy after graduating high school in the late ’60s—and for the next four years spent his days and nights inside the belly of a submarine. His law enforcement career began on February 21, 1977, when he decided to apply to the NYSP. From there, he spent the next six months banging it out with other wanna-be cops at the NYSP Academy in Albany.

  “At the time,” Scileppi recalled, “I took an eight-thousand-dollar cut in pay and nobody could believe I would leave the navy. I had always wanted to be a trooper and considered state police troopers to be ‘the elite.’ I had several friends that were New York City, Nassau and Suffolk County police officers. I had taken all those tests, too, and passed. But my heart was set on being a trooper.”

  Scileppi got lucky. There had been a four-year hiring freeze on state cops, but he scored “extremely well on the entrance test and was among the first class hired” after the freeze.

  “At the time, I was married to my first wife and had one son, who was only two. I was sworn in—the cut in pay really hurt—had another child with my first wife, and then got divorced.”

  Eventually Scileppi remarried; she was a local woman, Diane, a teacher, who had one daughter, Jessica, from a previous marriage.

  Like most cops, Scileppi had seen it all. Rising up through the ranks to become senior investigator in Liberty had not always been easy, but Scileppi said he would not trade his experiences for anything.

  “One of the worst days that I’ll never forget, one that had an immense impact on me, happened in November 1988.”

  Scileppi had been working with Roy Streever at the time. They were attempting to locate a “subject” with an outstanding warrant against him.

  “We were in Middletown, New York, that day and the weather was terrible: stormy, extremely windy, and heavy, heavy rain. We had heard several radio transmissions and a large request for emergency fire and rescue and police units to respond to the Coldenham Elementary School, nearby in Middletown. So we responded.”

  When Streever and Scileppi arrived on scene, they were amazed. A tornado had quickly touched down in the area near the elementary school and subsequently hit the wall where the school cafeteria had been. Kids were eating lunch at the time. The upper portion of the wall was made of glass and cinder blocks.

  “Several children were buried under the mess,” Scileppi remembered. “It was terrible. Parents were naturally arriving, having heard what had happened. It was chaos. Numerous deaths. I’ll never forget escorting the parents into the emergency room to identify their deceased children. It still bothers me to this day.”

  When McKee got Scileppi on the phone, after hearing Odell was on her way to the Towanda barracks, Scileppi couldn’t believe it. He had just gotten off the phone with Lungen, and they had discussed that very situation. Now Odell was being delivered to them, all they had to do was change course and head for Towanda.

  “We’re heading to Towanda now,” Scileppi said. “We’d like to interview her tonight, if we can.”

  The situation still posed a problem for Lungen: they weren’t going to be interviewing Odell in New York, where the case would, he knew, end up eventually. Pennsylvania would suffice for now, but the goal was to get Odell into the state of New York, where the case, if it came down to it, would eventually be prosecuted.

  As Scileppi and Lungen changed course, still about an hour and a half outside of Towanda, they discussed how to go about questioning Odell out of their jurisdiction. If it came down to a trial, perhaps anything they got from Odell in Pennsylvania would not be admissible in New York. Was it something Lungen wanted to take a chance at?

  Yet, there was still one other major dilemma….

  “Before she got lawyered up,” Scileppi said, “we wanted to interview her. But we needed to go back to Towanda and listen to those tapes between Odell and Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle before we spoke to her.”

  The tapes were the core of the case. Lungen and Scileppi had no idea of the substance of those tapes. They had been told Odell had contradicted herself several times and even changed her story on numerous occasions. But they still needed factual information. The last thing a cop wanted to do was go into an interview without any knowledge of the case.

  “We were at a disadvantage without listening to those tapes,” Scileppi said.

  The original plan had been to drive back to Monticello and, along with several other investigators from the Major Crimes Unit in Liberty (Scileppi’s team), sit down and listen to what amounted to five hours of taped interviews between Odell, Thomas, and Weddle. If there was any information of any value on the tapes, they were going to set up an interview with Odell for Tuesday morning and question her further.

  But all that had changed now that Odell was on her way to Towanda.

  3

  After Odell made it through the horror of being accused of murdering her firstborn child, Baby Doe, she tried to settle into life as best she could. Not only did she have five children to raise with her paramour, Robert Sauerstein, but she was five months into her tenth pregnancy. The stress alone of the past few days was enough, she certainly knew, to potentially cause problems.

  By April 1989, Odell could add one more problem to wha
t was now a growing list: how to explain to her family—who knew nothing about Baby Doe—that she’d had a stillborn child when she was in her late teens and had carried the fetus around with her in a suitcase for nearly seventeen years? She didn’t even broach the idea of explaining the additional three dead babies she had stored in the house in boxes. But since the cops had brought Baby Doe to light, there was a good chance everyone in the family knew about it.

  When Odell returned from the police station after being interviewed the first time, she said later, Sauerstein went to her and asked, “What the hell is going on here? You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”

  The cops had never spoken to Sauerstein. He knew there was a dead baby involved, but he had no idea to the extent of Odell’s involvement.

  “No,” Odell said when Sauerstein asked her if she knew what was going on.

  Roy Streever and his partner returned later that same week to ask Odell more questions. When they left, Sauerstein asked Odell again what the problem was.

  “They were just following up on some things, Robert. It’s nothing.”

  Subsequently the subject of Baby Doe was then dropped, according to Odell. No one in the house, at the time, save for Mabel, really knew what happened.

  “You know,” Odell said later, “I could not tell Robert with my mother there. Everybody does not understand the tenuous situation I lived with every day.”

  For now, she was safe. The case had never made the newspapers, and Odell was never brought up on charges. The cops had come, asked a few questions, and closed the case.

  “Actually,” Odell said, “it wasn’t easy to lie to Robert. It was more…of, now I have five kids…and God forbid if I do something out of the way, or I go against her in any way, I am going to have five children at risk. Not three. Not two. But five! And she already hated Robert with a passion. So she hated his children as well.”

  Sauerstein never pressured Odell. He went about his business of trying to take care of five kids, a “wife” and “mother-in-law.”

  “I’m sure he had questions, and I’m certain he always knew there was something. Because he would always ask me, ‘What does she have on you? What is she holding over you?’”

  Brendon Sauerstein, Odell’s sixth living child, tenth overall, was born on August 30, 1989. Like each child she had given birth to previously when there was a man in her life, Brendon was born at a hospital, Wayne Memorial, in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. In July 1990, nearly a year after Brendon was born, it became apparent the construction business Sauerstein was involved in was heading for a collapse. The late ’80s and early ’90s weren’t exactly peak periods for construction in and around Pennsylvania. Work was hard to come by. Odell was home, taking care of the children, raising the kids with her mom lurking and creeping around the house, not sure of what she was going to do next. According to Odell later, this was when she truly began living in a constant state of fear. If her mom had killed three of her kids already, as Odell so assertively claimed later, what would stop her from killing another?

  So, Odell and Sauerstein faced a decision: look for work in the immediate area, or head west, where Robert had heard he could find work.

  “There was no way I was moving back to New York, not under any circumstances,” Odell said later.

  Odell and Sauerstein sat down one day and talked about moving. What did they have, really, in Pennsylvania? Thus, with nothing standing in their way, they decided to move. Not just to Scranton or Wilkes-Barre, larger towns in the same state, but all the way across country.

  4

  Steve Lungen had made it clear to the PSP, he said later, that they were not “to make any more decisions. We are making all the decisions now. It’s not your case.”

  That said, McKee had done the right thing when he called Scileppi with news of Odell’s wanting to get away from the media.

  “You have to picture the situation,” Scileppi recalled. “Odell decided to force our hand.”

  After he spoke to McKee and found out Odell was going to be driving herself to the Towanda barracks, Scileppi called “his people” in New York and explained what was going on. Several investigators from the BCI in Liberty were then dispatched to drive to Towanda and meet Scileppi and Lungen. They would all meet at Towanda, interview Odell, and see what came of it.

  But as Scileppi and Lungen approached Towanda, about an hour outside of town, Scileppi received another call from McKee, who was now at the Towanda barracks with Odell. The media, sensing something was going on, had started calling Towanda for information.

  “Unbeknownst to us,” Lungen said, “this was a huge story in Arizona and out west. We had no idea how big it was or how big it was about to become.”

  Seeing they were an hour or so outside of Towanda, Scileppi asked McKee if there was a closer location where they could meet with Odell.

  “Well, I grew up around Waverly, New York,” McKee said. “I’m familiar with that location. How ’bout Waverly?”

  “Waverly’s fine with us,” Scileppi said. He couldn’t show his excitement—Waverly being in New York—but one would have to imagine that upon hearing where they were possibly going to meet, Scileppi was elated.

  McKee said, “Hold on.” Scileppi heard McKee take the phone from his ear and ask Odell, who was standing next to him, “Listen, they’re still an hour outside of Towanda…. We want to expedite this matter quickly. Would you mind driving to Waverly, New York, and meeting them?”

  “Sure,” Scileppi heard Odell say.

  No sooner had they hung up, did Odell get in her car and follow McKee to Waverly.

  “Extradition by your own vehicle,” Investigator Paul Hans, who was riding with Lungen, said later, laughing.

  Scileppi and Lungen agreed. Odell literally was handing herself over to them, in their own jurisdiction. Not only had she agreed to talk, but she was driving herself to some Andy Griffith police precinct in Waverly in what was, at least from a prosecutor’s standpoint, a “too good to be true” situation.

  “We were in a jam,” Lungen said later. “She’s the only one who knows what happened to those babies.”

  Truth be told, Odell was the only person who could tighten (or loosen) the noose around her neck—and she was more than willing to continue to talk about the events. Some suggested later that she needed to talk—to get it all “off her chest—” that the guilt, perhaps, had been eating away at her for decades and was too much to take. She already had opened a vein talking to Weddle and Thomas and it perhaps felt liberating. Why not finish what she had started?

  According to Odell, she felt she hadn’t done anything criminal and wanted to explain herself. She believed she’d sit and talk for a few hours and the matter, like it had in 1989, would go away.

  From where Lungen sat, however, it wasn’t a case of manslaughter, stillborn babies, or a simple explanation. One child, maybe. Two, well, it was suspect. But three, or four, counting Baby Doe? There was no way that that many babies could end up dead without something criminal having taken place. It was impossible.

  Still, Lungen and Scileppi faced a terrible quandary heading to Waverly: they hadn’t heard the tapes that Detectives Thomas and Weddle had made with Odell on May 17 and 18; thus, they had no idea how to question Odell.

  “As professionals,” Lungen recalled, “you really don’t want to conduct an interview with a suspect until you have all the details. We were pushed into this. What if we interviewed her and she needed to be arrested? We couldn’t arrest her in Pennsylvania; she would have to be extradited back to New York. There was a whole host of legal issues regarding dealing with her in Pennsylvania…. And all of a sudden, we find out that she’s willing to drive to New York and meet us at a little police station?”

  But it wasn’t time to celebrate. In effect, Lungen and Scileppi were forced to prepare for an interview with a subject they knew very little about.

  “In New York, the law is different than in any other state,” Lungen explained.
“In New York, with respect to right to counsel, if she exercises her right to counsel, her ability to waive that right is essentially restricted. She can’t. In other states, you can change your mind. But if she’s deemed to be in custody, she can’t change her mind. The only way she can waive counsel is in the presence of counsel. Which would mean arrest, appointment of lawyer…no one would let us talk to her.”

  The cards were stacked against them, suffice it to say if Odell had chosen to bring a lawyer with her—but she hadn’t. She was alone. She had even left Sauerstein behind.

  “If she would have gotten an attorney,” Lungen said, “it would have had a major impact on our ability to investigate. So we were in a rush—just like Odell was in a rush to get away from the media—to try to meet with her before any of that happened.”

  Essentially, a twenty-five-year-old cold case became a race.

  “We thought the media would turn into our worst nightmare,” Lungen added, “and that they would screw up the investigation. They were camped on her doorstep. We were thinking they were going to force everything…force it to go the wrong way. But as it turned out, the media pressure was one of the best things that ever happened in this case for us.”

  With Odell sitting, waiting in Waverly, willing to talk, the legal extradition issues had, in effect, resolved themselves. It was one less hassle Scileppi and Lungen had to worry about going into the interview. Now they could focus on finding out the facts of the case, which, they both said later, was all that concerned them.

  As they walked into the Waverly station, they discussed how to go about the interview. “What should I begin with, Steve?” Scileppi wanted to know.

  “Just go in and see what she’ll tell us.”

  Because Lungen ultimately would be the lead prosecutor, if the case ever went to trial, he couldn’t be present for the interview. If he had, he effectively would make himself a witness.