Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime)

by M. William Phelps

  Part of Odell’s strategy not to talk about Mabel’s involvement was that if she mentioned it, especially to Sauerstein, the information would end up being used against her later on during trial.

  For Sauerstein, when Odell told him on that Thursday in May when he and Danielle visited, that Mabel was involved, “there was anger; there was relief.”

  Sauerstein knew what she was talking about without her discussing any of the details.

  But what really bothered Odell as summer 2003 moved forward was that she had no idea what Schick had planned for a defense. She didn’t know, she claimed, because he never told her and rarely went to visit her to explain what he was doing on her part.

  This seeming invisibility by Schick would, in the coming months, be the one thing that, Odell said, drove a wedge between them and ultimately caused big problems for her down the road.

  Stephan Schick was in his late fifties. Balding, with thinning gray hair, when he wore his glasses, he resembled Vice President Dick Cheney. He spoke confidently, carefully choosing his words, as if each carried the weight of repercussion. Schick grew up on a farm in Ulster County, New York, just northeast of Sullivan County. After graduating from Cornell, he finished his law degree at New York Law School, then did a brief internship at the Sullivan County District Attorney’s Office, where he met then assistant district attorney Steve Lungen for the first time. It was 1978. Lungen was well into his career as Schick showed up at the office and began clerking. The two hit it off, Schick said, and became fast friends. Never did they believe they’d be on opposite sides of the legal scale years later.

  After leaving the DA’s office, Schick went into private practice in Monticello. Because he had worked in the DA’s office and familiarized himself with criminal law, he began his career as a criminal lawyer. With a real estate boom going on in the Catskills at the time, however, he quickly merged into real estate law.

  In 1985, when work in his private practice became somewhat unfulfilling, Schick went to work for Legal Aid. Although Legal Aid has changed over the years, its core dynamic remains the same: contracted with the county to represent those who cannot afford a lawyer, Legal Aid, staffed with eight to ten lawyers at any given time, is hired by the court to act essentially as a public defender’s office. Some rural counties in New York do not have a public defender’s office, like the larger communities. Sullivan County is one. Legal Aid makes up for the loss. It is a nonprofit organization run on a budget set by the county.

  Schick said qualifying his tenure at Legal Aid as “happy” would be an “interesting view of it.”

  “I’m happy to the extent that I am [now] the boss in the office. On a day-to-day basis, I have the freedom to exercise my own goals and strategies.”

  It has been a bit easier since working his way up throughout the years into a position of running the show. There’s no one in the office, Schick added with a chuckle, “looking to chop my head off.”

  Not everything, though, has been roses and chocolate. Fiscal realities, Schick maintained, plague Legal Aid. Like any government-run business, there have been cutbacks and budget constraints that stop him from doing certain things.

  “Only a certain amount of local tax resources go into public defense. It’s not a popular expenditure. I think in many upstate rural counties, local legislatures and local politicians, reflecting the more conservative view of the population, the constituency, would prefer not to fund or spend any of the taxpayers’ money on public defense at all.”

  Making a valid point, Schick went on to say that it is hard to go to a citizen and say, “You know that guy who just burglarized your home and stole all of your family heirlooms? Well, we have to increase your property taxes to hire a public defender to represent him.” Whereas, the opposite argument is much more appealing: “We have to increase your taxes because we want to give the DA’s office more money to increase public safety.”

  While most criminal defense attorneys have a keen understanding for explaining away the obvious regarding a client’s culpability, Schick has always had a canny way of currying favor. Instead of trying to dodge the evident and make excuses, he faces the realities of putting on the best defense he can for clients. This strong moral characteristic, which could be construed as detrimental to a defense attorney, would come into play when the Sullivan County court dropped the case of Dianne Odell in Schick’s lap in early June 2003. Because he had the most trial experience out of the lawyers in his office, Schick decided to take the case on himself.

  Indeed, because he viewed a situation the way it was, dealt with issues, and tried to construct a defense around facts, he and Odell would be at odds, starting with how they were going to approach Mabel’s culpability in the babies’ deaths.

  2

  The case for Steve Lungen came down to the fact that whenever there wasn’t a male figure present in Odell’s life, the children she gave birth to ended up wrapped in plastic bags, decomposing in boxes. It was, he believed, strong circumstantial evidence that pointed to what he understood firmly now to be her motive: bastard children don’t deserve life. She had said it herself, in not so many words, to one of his investigators.

  “Ultimately,” Lungen recalled, “that was the case right there. The babies that ended up dead were babies where she didn’t have any relationship with their fathers. They were the products of casual relationships.”

  Odell was gearing up, of course, to present a different portrait. It was Mabel who didn’t want those children. It was Mabel who considered them bastards and murdered them. And it was Mabel who had made her nervous about acquiring prenatal care and denied her access to the hospital when she went into labor and couldn’t drive herself.

  Mabel. Mabel. Mabel.

  The evening when Lungen, Scileppi, and two of Lungen’s investigators, Paul Hans and Robert Rowan, drove back from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and ended up doing a beeline for Waverly, New York, to interview Odell, had changed the entire scope of Lungen’s case.

  “The difference of her going home and not going home [that night],” Lungen recalled, was based on decisions made on the spot while driving from Wilkes-Barre to Waverly. “We had to make a decision whether we had enough to arrest her or not. And until she told us the babies were born alive—and if she would—that was the key.”

  Lungen had Odell’s statement, which was, in a sense, telling in its own right. He believed the statement alone was enough to convince a jury she was responsible for the deaths of the children. Yet, fundamentally, the cusp of his case relied heavily, like most murder cases, on circumstantial evidence.

  Most people have a misconception regarding how effective circumstantial evidence can be in the eyes of a competent jury. The term “circumstantial evidence” almost implies by itself that a prosecutor has little else, meaning forensics or an eyewitness, to present to a jury—that perhaps his case isn’t as strong as he’d like it to be. But circumstances, when it comes down to it, are what murder cases, most anyway, are built around. The most powerful example of how valuable circumstantial evidence can be is, most prosecutors will admit, “people can lie, but circumstances cannot.”

  A way to look at it more basically is, if two people walk into an empty room and one exits with blood on his hands and the other ends up dead, an outside observer can determine, vis-à-vis “the circumstances,” that the person with blood on his hands had something to do with the death. There can be no other logical explanation.

  It’s not science, just common sense.

  Lungen could prove the babies were alive after birth because he had their mother admitting it. What better witness was there? He could prove the babies died because Odell had kept their remains. The DNA, he was being told, was going to be shaky at best, because of the age and condition of the remains. Still, Lungen had enough circumstantial evidence that when he spread it out for a jury, he believed, would convince them that Odell had not only murdered her children, but kept the pregnancies hidden from her mother—the one person
whom she was now preparing to pin the deaths on.

  “The people’s theory,” Lungen said, “[that Odell] will never admit, is that these children were killed because of their illegitimacy and because they were unwanted. They were pregnancies by casual relationships, and whether it be her mother’s influence or her own, she was not going to keep babies whom she knew she didn’t want by fathers who were not around to support them.”

  When Lungen sat down and read the interviews with Odell by Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle, along with those conducted by Scileppi, Streever, and Lane, he realized one significant factor that Odell herself had perhaps overlooked as she told one lie after the other during the days after her arrest. Through a careful review of those transcripts, Lungen was convinced, Odell defined her own lies and put them into perspective herself.

  “When you analyze those interviews, right up until the last moment, a couple of things are so: One, she never completely told the truth. The whole truth was never out there. There were still plenty of issues and questions unresolved. But, when she changed her stories each time, it was only based upon what the police knew or could reasonably infer in between each interview.”

  In other words, as Odell began cracking under the pressure of being interviewed, she started to make up stories based on what she believed the police were uncovering. During her first interview with Thomas and Weddle, for example, she denied knowing whose babies they were. Yet, as soon as she found out the babies were connected to her by documents found inside the boxes, she suddenly admitted, “They’re my babies, but…” From there, she claimed, the babies were the product of rapes. Then, after she learned that DNA could possibly prove who the fathers were, she began to talk about getting pregnant during “casual relationships.” After the police learned that DNA was going to be able to prove almost positively who the fathers were, she then admitted that yes, her brother-in-law had, in fact, fathered one of the babies, and David Dandignac had fathered another.

  In effect, Lungen maintained, over the course of three days, she changed her stories to reflect what the police were discovering. Moreover, if she hadn’t done anything, why would she lie in the first place? An innocent person isn’t afraid of the truth.

  “The biggest claim out of all of them, that her mother—which we didn’t find out until much later, after trial—was the bad person; well, her mother liked David Dandignac,” Lungen said later, “the father of Baby Number Three. She wanted that relationship to exist. It was Odell who canceled out that relationship. And it was Odell who told Dandignac to go. And because she didn’t want that relationship, it was a fourth baby that she wasn’t going to keep.”

  That baby’s fate, Lungen insisted, had been “preordained. She had already, in my view, intentionally decided, when she kicked Dandignac out of her home, that based upon what she had done to the other three children, Dandignac’s baby was going to die.”

  It was, by the first week of June, easy for Lungen to sit, review the documentation, look at autopsy reports, go over Odell’s statements, and call her a murderer. But regardless of what he thought, he still had to prove it to a jury. That was the task at hand. Would Lungen be able to convince a jury with circumstantial evidence that Dianne Odell was a murderer?

  His first test would be before a grand jury.

  3

  Heather Yakin found out that Odell had grown up in Queens, New York, which was probably a good reason why, after making a few calls to some of her relatives in the Kauneonga Lake region, none of them could recall ever meeting her.

  The Odell case, for a small-town crime reporter, had the potential to boost her career—and Yakin knew it. All she had to do was score that one exclusive interview, open up a vein in the story no one had poked yet, and it would take on a life of its own.

  “I knew it was big,” Yakin said later, referring to how the story was beginning to play out in the early part of July 2003. “I knew it was a national story. And I knew I wanted the real story—to find out what happened and, to the best of anyone’s ability to determine it, why it happened. I wanted to find the story’s place in the world.”

  A reporter after the social significance of a mother allegedly murdering four of her children. This was what Heather Yakin’s readers would want out of her reporting: what the story meant to society at large. Why was it that so many mothers murdered their children?

  Back on May 22, Yakin had published an article that spoke to that part of her curiosity. Headlined WHY DID ODELL ALLOW HER BABIES TO DIE? the story focused on the psychology behind why mothers kill their children. Yakin had interviewed a psychiatrist, Dr. Neil Kaye from Wilmington, Delaware, who had “consulted on more than one hundred infanticide cases.”

  On average, about “once per day,” Yakin wrote, “somewhere in the United States, a newborn baby is killed or discarded.” Shocking statistic. Nearly one baby per day didn’t make it because of the actions of his or her parent. Yet, a woman who murders “multiple children,” Dr. Kaye explained, “and [gets] away with it,” was “very rare.”

  The doctor had a hard time, like many people involved in the case, accepting that no one knew Odell was pregnant four times.

  “A lot of people had to not notice…” he said.

  All Lungen would say on the record for Heather Yakin was that the babies “had died from a criminal agency.” Lungen wouldn’t commit to how or why.

  Dr. Kaye noted in the article that one of the reasons “why” mothers murdered their children was because “[they] don’t want to be pregnant. They don’t want the baby. They don’t form a bond.” More bizarrely, though, he added, because Odell had kept the children with her for two decades, “she may have thought they were still alive.” It was just “speculation.” No one could really tell at that point because, he said, Odell hadn’t yet been interviewed by a psychiatrist.

  So as the case for Lungen moved forward, Heather Yakin began digging in, tracking down leads, and interviewing as many people involved in the case as she could. With any luck, she’d soon have answers to those important questions.

  4

  By the end of June, Dr. Baden had conducted the autopsies on the three babies and handed his report to Steve Lungen. He had examined the X rays taken in Arizona of the babies and also X rays taken in Albany more recently.

  “The babies were largely skeletonious,” Baden said, “some soft, leathery tissue attached.” Through those observations, he added, he could, without a doubt, maintain that the babies were full-term, which was important, of course, to Lungen’s case. Moreover, the babies “showed no evidence of any disease process, congenital anomalies that can show up in bone.” Further, there was no “fractures to any of the bones.” The babies were, Baden concluded, newborns. “There was no evidence of [them] having lived for a while.”

  One of the things that had intrigued Lungen from the start was how the babies had managed to mummify. A process that originated with the Ancient Egyptians, mummification thousands of years ago was possible because Egyptians generally buried their dead in tombs surrounded by sand, which sped up the process of dehydration because of the dryness and warmth of the sand. Bodies under those conditions can dry out quickly as a tough, leathery outer shell of skin emerges over time and seals in bodily fluids. For years, scientists and archaeologists have been astonished after digging up ancient tombs and, considering the age of the corpse, finding mummies in immaculate condition.

  “After death, or after the babies [were] born, the baby,” Baden reported, “initially looked like a baby, full-term…. Then, depending on weather conditions, temperature, not weather but environmental condition, especially temperature there, if as in a situation the baby being born at home where the temperature is reasonable, then initially be some decomposition caused by bacterial proliferation. Babies can turn greenish and bloat over a period of days or weeks. At some point, these babies were put in a warm environment in which there was loss of fluids and water and drawing out of the baby, and that leads to hardening of whatever
tissues are left, which is usually the skin…and mummification refers to the drying out of tissues because of loss of fluids and water. In this instance, that process developed after all of the internal organs were destroyed by the decomposition process. The bones themselves remained intact and were presented as normal skeletal remains.”

  Important to Lungen’s case was the fact that the process had taken place on its own; it wasn’t as if Odell had intentionally wrapped the children in sheets and blankets to preserve their bodies, like the Egyptians. What happened to the children happened because of how and where the bodies had been stored, which told Lungen several things as he approached the case. For one, it leaned more toward his theory that Odell had killed the children because they were unwanted. She wasn’t acting out on some insane notion. She couldn’t claim insanity, at least in his view—that maybe she snapped and decided to mummify the children in some sort of ritualistic act of passage. Second, the premeditation factor looked more favorable now: carefully wrapping and positioning those babies in boxes meant she knew what she was doing.

  Baden further explained that the age of the children was easy to tell because of the bone structure. Bones develop in the first twenty years of life only one way, he explained, and it is, for a forensic pathologist, easy to tell how long a set of bones has been growing.