Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime)

by M. William Phelps

  3

  On September 22, 1991, living in Arizona only about two months, Odell was rushed to Mt. Graham Community Hospital emergency room. She was hemorrhaging.

  “I was sitting on the bed in the house,” she said, “and I had Toby, he was sitting on my lap. I had no idea I was even pregnant. Well, I was sitting there bouncing him up and down and I felt like a pull on the inside. And I got up and went into the bathroom, and when I got into the bathroom, there was blood all over the toilet tissue. It was like somebody had turned on a faucet.”

  Sauerstein and Mabel were in the kitchen. When she saw the blood, Odell burst out of the bathroom, she claimed, and said, “You have to send somebody for an ambulance…. I’m bleeding and it won’t stop.”

  Mabel looked at her without saying anything. Sauerstein, quite speechless himself for the moment, had one of the kids run across the street to a neighbor’s house, saying hurriedly, “Go, go…call 911 right now!”

  By the end of the day, Odell found out she had lost the child.

  Over the course of the next year, life in Arizona became rather mundane and automatic. Odell and Sauerstein went to work, came home, and tended to their daily affairs. Mabel was living in the house, but getting on in years, meddling in her daughter’s life less and less each day. She still continued to assault Odell and the kids mentally, Odell later insisted.

  In all the years they were together, Odell said, the older children, James Odell’s kids, had had problems getting along with Sauerstein. Odell said it was Mabel who had poisoned their minds, repeatedly telling them Sauerstein wasn’t their father and didn’t care about them. Whatever the case may be, between December 1991 and March 1992, Sauerstein was charged by Arizona authorities with aggravated assault against Doris, who was ten at the time. Several months after the charges were lodged, they were dismissed. Yet a month later, he was charged with aggravated assault against Alice, and the charges against Doris were reopened.

  “I had asked the children what happened,” Odell said, “and Alice had given me her story. I had asked Maryann [who was there and had seen what had happened] what took place and she said Robert never touched her sister. Because of what I had gone through with people not believing me, I believed her.”

  Throughout this entire time, with chaos seemingly running rampant in the house, unpaid bills piling up, no phone, the lights turned on and off, Odell kept up payments on the self-storage unit in Safford. After all, what choice did she have? Many of their belongings were inside the unit—not to mention three dead babies.

  With all that was going on, it seemed as if the ebb and flow of daily life still revolved around Mabel. When was the woman going to drop dead? Odell said she was waiting for Mabel to die. With Mabel gone, the pressure would be off. She could go to the police and tell them what happened. What had become a dark “secret” she had been harboring for twenty years could be set free finally.

  CHAPTER 15

  1

  ACCORDING TO SCILEPPI, by midnight, he had gotten Odell to admit that her third baby, born in 1985, had been brought into the world alive. Odell didn’t say how the baby had died. But if Scileppi had his way, by the early-morning hours of May 20, he was going to find out.

  Odell later explained the night in a different way. She claimed Scileppi and Streever “coerced” a confession out of her—that they badgered her until she told them what they wanted to hear.

  “I kept saying to them, ‘Look, in the state I was in, I did not hear these children. I mean, how many more ways am I going to have to explain it to you?’” After she said that, she claimed, Scileppi got up from his chair and walked out of the room, and after being gone for five minutes, he returned and sat down next to her. Pausing for a moment, he grabbed hold of her shoulder and began “like, you know, rubbing my back.

  “Inside, I starting freaking out,” Odell said. “I don’t really want to jump out of my chair and start screaming, because I have never done that.”

  As Scileppi rubbed her shoulders, Odell insisted, he began saying, “Are you sure a towel didn’t end up in the baby’s mouth? Are you sure? Or a leg over the baby’s face, or a sheet in the baby’s mouth?”

  Odell said that’s when, under pressure, she told them yes. But her actions later on that night would lead one to believe her memory has become clouded over the years and she recalled the interview years later the way she might have wished it had happened.

  Scileppi and Streever assertively denied Odell’s version of the events. Like a lot of things, Scileppi and Streever later said, Odell was twisting the truth to make it fit an agenda she would later begin pushing.

  Roy Streever had been involved in the interview with Odell at certain times throughout the night. Streever had investigated Odell back in 1989, and while Scileppi questioned Odell throughout the evening, Streever reviewed the reports from the 1989 case, refreshing his memory.

  At various times, Streever would go in and question Odell about the stories she was now telling. Odell found herself backed into a corner, she said. She had been Mirandized. She was going to be charged with murder. Inside of twenty-four hours, the stakes, she realized, had changed remarkably. At one point, she claimed, it occurred to her that she wasn’t going home. And that, alone, scared her into saying things that weren’t entirely true.

  “She’s stuck on the story that each time she gave birth,” Streever recalled, speaking about Babies Number One, Two, and Three, “it was at home, she passed out during the deliveries, and when she came to, the child was dead. I was trying to get across to her that it just doesn’t happen that way—especially because of what she knows; she’s had eight living children,” three of whom born before the three dead babies. “It’s not like a child could have died because you didn’t do anything to sustain its life. At the same time, though, we were trying to give her something she could cling to. A way out, essentially. Like, ‘I didn’t murder these babies.’”

  Once Odell admitted that one of the children had breathed life, the interview flipped from, Scileppi recalled, casual conversation to an interrogation.

  Big difference.

  As Streever and Scileppi interrogated Odell further as the night wore on, her mantra, Streever said, became “I had passed out during birth, and if they died, it was because of my negligence.” Malicious intent was never part of Odell’s argument, at least according to her on that night. No one had murdered the children, she was saying; they had died because she had passed out and they essentially had been smothered in the process.

  Where was Mabel in all of it? Why wasn’t Odell giving up her mom? Mabel had been dead for many years. Odell had always trumpeted the notion that as soon as Mabel died, she was going to run to the police and tell them what happened.

  Here was her chance.

  “The only mention of her mother,” Streever recalled, “was that Dianne was ‘in fear’ of her mother. That she would get beaten by her. This was her opportunity to get [her] mom involved in the picture. Mabel Molina was dead. She couldn’t deny it!”

  Point in fact, Odell had even told Scileppi and Streever she had “concealed” the pregnancies from Mabel, which she had also told Thomas and Weddle.

  “You know, maybe for the average person on the street,” Streever recalled, “a woman could conceal a pregnancy, maybe even from one of your coworkers, if you’re a person who doesn’t really show a lot. It’s kind of tough for me to relate to, but I know of cases where females have concealed their pregnancies. But from your mother, who is there every day? That’s bull-shit. Wouldn’t her mother, at some point, ask, ‘Dianne, didn’t you get your period for the last six months?’”

  Streever was fixated in his quest to get Odell to tell them what had happened to the babies. At one point, he asked, “You know, Dianne, you said you gave birth to those babies on the floor of the bathroom. Okay, you’re emotional; you’re blacking out; you got blankets and towels down on the floor. Maybe, just maybe, one of these kids got a towel caught up in its face somehow and cho
ked to death, smothered?”

  It was a fair question, from a competent, experienced investigator who was having a hard time believing the babies had died on their own.

  Odell looked up, Streever said later, and said, “Yeah, in fact, one time I woke up and there was a towel stuck in the baby’s mouth.”

  “Really,” Streever said. “How much of the towel?”

  “Oh, about eight inches.”

  Okay, sure, Streever thought, staring at her, unconvinced, and a newborn baby just sucked in eight inches of a towel?

  At best, a newborn baby’s throat is a bit larger than a pencil. The baby Odell was talking about was fewer than twenty inches long. A newborn, on top of that, has a hard enough time finding its mother’s nipple. How could, Streever wondered, a newborn “suck in” eight inches of a towel without any help? It wasn’t possible. It was a lie.

  “If I had any doubts before that statement,” Streever said, “I was sure she had killed these babies after she made that statement.”

  While Scileppi stayed in the room with Odell, shortly after Streever had gotten the towel statement, Streever stepped out to confer with Lungen regarding what Odell had just said.

  There are key differences between first- and second-degree murder. By legal definition, first-degree murder, although the legalities vary from state to state, “is generally a killing which is deliberate and premeditated (planned, after lying in wait, by poison or as part of a scheme), in conjunction with felonies such as rape, burglary, arson, or involving multiple deaths, the killing of certain types of people (such as a child, a police officer, a prison guard, a fellow prisoner), or certain weapons, particularly a gun.”

  Second-degree murder, for which Odell was now facing multiple charges, involves “a nonpremeditated killing, resulting from an assault in which death of the victim was a distinct possibility.”

  Steve Lungen now understood that the babies were born alive and had died under Odell’s care. That alone qualified Odell for second-degree murder charges.

  Forty-nine-year-old Dianne Odell was sitting in Waverly, New York, essentially, giving Lungen and the BCI exactly what they needed to charge her with murder. If she wanted a lawyer, she could have asked for one at any time. But she never did, at least according to the BCI and an elected district attorney who had been prosecuting criminals in Sullivan County, New York, for the past thirty years.

  Lungen needed Scileppi to obtain a complete written statement from Odell, signed and dated—a permanent record of what she had said.

  At about 11:50 P.M., after Odell took a trip to the bathroom and got herself a fresh cup of coffee, Streever, Scileppi, and Odell sat down and began working out what, precisely, Odell wanted to say in her statement.

  By morning, Odell’s statement would be replete with contradictions, lies, truths, and the most bizarre set of circumstances surrounding the short life and untimely deaths of the three babies that anyone involved in the case had heard thus far.

  2

  In 1882, John T. Lytle, a common rancher, established what he called “Lytle Station” along the Texas route of the United States International Great Northern Railroad, making the little ranch town just southeast of Dallas, in the northern portion of central Texas, the only place in the county with a railway station at the time. When Lytle opened the station, the town bearing his name had a population of fifty. Not much in Lytle would change in 110 years, but as April 1992 approached, Odell and Sauerstein would be among Lytle’s twenty-two hundred residents.

  Pima, Arizona, like Ogden, Utah, turned out to be nothing but problems and letdowns for Odell and Sauerstein. But that wasn’t what necessarily drove Sauerstein to move to Texas so suddenly. There were charges pending in Pima regarding an assault incident he had gotten into with one of Odell’s children.

  “To hell with this,” Sauerstein said later, after he and one of Odell’s daughters had gotten into the scuffle, “I am not going to jail for something I didn’t do!”

  So Sauerstein “booked,” he said, to Texas, and Odell soon followed.

  Loading their vehicles with everything they could fit from their apartment, Odell and Sauerstein didn’t leave much behind. Yet most of what was inside the self-storage unit in Safford was abandoned. There just wasn’t room. Of course, inside the storage unit were the musty corpses of three dead babies—and as long as Odell continued paying the bill, no one would ever know. As soon as they got settled in a town they could call home and Mabel died, Odell kept telling herself, she would return to Safford, pick up the boxes, and give the children a proper burial. Until then, her secret was safe as long as she could afford to pay the bill and had a stamped envelope to send it.

  Life in Texas would not be cowboy sunrises and romantic rides on horseback for Odell and Sauerstein. In early 1993, as soon as they got settled, Mabel became severely ill. She began moving slower. Talked less. Had trouble breathing and walking. It was her heart. Her body, Odell said, was shutting down. After Mabel was “diagnosed with congestive heart failure, we decided to move back to New York so she could get treatment.”

  So, after being in Texas less than a year, the Odell-Sauerstein train was once again packed. Because Mabel was so ill, Odell and Sauerstein decided to drive across country. Their destination? Endicott, New York. It was close to where Mabel had lived for most of her life. She could, Odell said, get better treatment “back home.”

  “She had said to me one day, ‘I don’t want to get sick and die here (in Texas).’”

  “Well, this is where we’re living,” Odell replied. “I’m not sure [that] going back to New York and living there is what I want to do.”

  “Well,” Mabel said, “it’s what I want to do. So you talk to him (Robert) and tell him I want to go home.”

  Around the same time, Sauerstein had lost another job. Bills were piling up.

  “I had her grinding in my ear, demanding to go home. I finally said to Robert, ‘Let’s just go! Let’s go back. At least we know we can find work there.’”

  Before they left Texas, Odell began having problems with her gallbladder. She said she had suffered unbearable pain for “two years” before being diagnosed with gallstones. Nonetheless, they were determined to leave Texas as planned. So by the beginning of July 1993, despite Mabel’s and Odell’s blossoming health problems, they took off.

  During the trip back home, their car broke down in Virginia. With no money to speak of and nowhere to stay, they took up in a mission. Missions generally offered free food and shelter, as long as one abided by the rules. Odell and Sauerstein had been on food stamps. They had collected welfare and used government assistance for electric bills. Staying at a mission for a few nights wasn’t going to bruise anyone’s ego; in fact, it might be good for the family to be around a bit of godly righteousness.

  For the first few days, Odell, Sauerstein, Mabel, and the kids stayed out of everybody’s way and went about their business. But Odell’s gallstones, she said, began acting up; going to the hospital one night after suffering an attack, Odell had surgery to have her gallbladder removed.

  The surgery would be the least of Odell’s problems as she returned to the mission after her operation. Within a week, she, Sauerstein, Mabel, and the kids would leave, but one of the children would not make the trip back home—and, in fact, Odell would never see the child again.

  3

  Scileppi and Streever sat across from Odell during the early-morning hours of May 20 and began to go over what she had said earlier, so a formal statement could be typed up. Odell had admitted already that she had heard one of the babies “cry” and “gasp” for air, according to Scileppi. But was she willing to put that admission in writing and sign the statement?

  As Odell spoke, Streever typed. Scileppi, with his soothing demeanor and soft-spokenness, helped Odell sort through what she wanted to say. For the most part, he was working from notes he and other members of the BCI had taken throughout the past six hours of conversations with her.

  She t
alked about all the places she had lived, worked, and where she had given birth to each one of her living children. When it came to Baby Number One, born in 1982, Scileppi asked Odell who the father was.

  “I had been the victim of a sexual assault, which occurred [at the lake],” Odell said as Streever typed. “I did not report the rape to the police, nor did I tell anyone that it had occurred. However, I became pregnant. Because I had a relationship with my mother that included verbal and physical abuse by her, I made a decision to try and conceal the pregnancy from her, as well as from everyone else. I was successfully able to do this.”

  If Odell wanted to pin the death of the child on Mabel, this was her chance; but she never mentioned Mabel in light of her actions pertaining to killing any of the children. In truth, when it came to giving an explanation of what actually happened on the night Baby Number One had died, Odell said, “When it came time for me to have this child, I remember that my children were with my mother overnight.”

  So, Mabel was nowhere in sight?

  With intense certitude, Streever later recalled the night he and Scileppi questioned Odell. He remembered Odell as being cold, callous, and reserved: “Not showing much emotion at all.” But when it came time to talk about the actual moment Baby Number One had died, that’s when she began trembling and crying, he said.

  “That was the only time that I could say she really broke down. There was maybe five or ten minutes of crying and hugging. She got it out. It was a bit of a purge. And then it was right back to the same demeanor: quiet, just sitting there. It was like she confessed. It was all we were going to get in terms of a confession out of her.”