Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime)

by M. William Phelps

  While Lungen continued, Odell said, she tried to drift away through prayer: I hope to God that you straighten out this man’s tongue. Hail Mary…Hail Mary…straighten out his tongue.

  It became a mantra she would recite to herself to try to take her mind off the situation.

  Like any seasoned prosecutor, Lungen unfolded his case to the jury, piece by piece, explaining exactly what he was going to prove: “How the babies were discovered; what condition they were in; what the defendant initially had to say about those babies; what the defendant did say about the babies; what the defendant did not say; what [she] did not do; how [she] attempted to mislead, falsify, to minimize her conduct; and, ultimately, how and why she is guilty….”

  It was a barrage of accusations preceding a chronological dissertation of the events leading up to Odell’s arrest: the discovery of the mummified and decomposed remains in Arizona, Detective Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle’s initial investigation, and the Pima, Arizona, medical examiner’s early assessment of the bodies.

  He warned jurors about the graphic nature of the photographs they were going to see: “You should and you must see that…it’s the evidence of what this case is about, and I can’t clean it up,” he argued, pumping his fist angrily. “You can’t erase certain things and not erase other things.”

  Again he was trying to keep the focus on what was at stake: infants had been murdered, and it didn’t matter what type of childhood or who else was to blame. Odell had given birth to the children and allowed them to die.

  “It is what it is….”

  Over the next ten minutes or so, Lungen continued with what was, at times, a frightful version of the events leading up to Odell’s arrest. On several occasions, he spoke of “full-term” babies, and reminded the jury that the babies weren’t stillborn or born prematurely; they were born healthy. He was going to prove it, he promised.

  Then he worked his way into Odell’s background, as she had explained it to Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle. Here, he zeroed his argument in on the fact that Odell had given birth to eight “healthy” children, all born in hospitals, and three dead children, all born at home.

  From there, he talked about the interviews Odell had agreed to take part in with police, mentioning how she claimed initially to have no idea whose children they were, but under pressure—and more questioning—admitted they were hers.

  This part of Lungen’s argument carried on, perhaps, for too long, and became quite technical in its step-by-step peeling back of the layers of each interview. Then again, it was a focal point that his case, when it came down to it, hinged on Odell’s admission to police. If the jury bought it, she was guilty. If not, she would walk.

  There was one thorn that could perhaps cause Lungen some problems during trial. So, like any experienced prosecutor, he attacked it head-on. “The defendant was cooperative,” he said, pointing at Odell at times, looking at the jury at others. “She spoke freely, somewhat guarded about information she was going to give.” He was talking about the interview Odell had agreed to with Roy Streever and Thomas Scileppi in Waverly, New York, as the media converged on her home and drove her away. The cadence and tone of his voice varied at times, and when he got to certain words and phrases, he called to mind how important certain pieces of evidence would become. “She was not under duress or in custody. Like I said, she drove herself there. She expected the New York police to be there and she agreed to talk.”

  Essentially, Lungen was saying Odell had agreed voluntarily to speak about the case to the police. There would be no question about it.

  “Somewhere around eleven o’clock,” he continued, getting to the heart of his argument, “the defendant…said that the baby moved or gasped, showing signs of life. And that simple statement”—he paused a moment for effect—“changed the entire character of everything that was going on. Because not only were these babies now full-term babies, but now we had an indication from the defendant herself that the babies were born…alive…. And, as it turned out, she tells them with respect to each of these three babies, they either cried, coughed, moved, gasped, something.”

  Lungen needed to clarify how Odell had changed her story several times throughout the three days she was interviewed. One of those stories included who the fathers of the children were.

  “Knowing she’s under arrest for murder, realizing obviously the story is up, she then tells Investigator Lane with respect to Baby Number One, born in 1982, ‘No,’ she was not raped! In fact, the father of that child she believed to be her brother-in-law, her ex-brother-in-law. She was married to James Odell and it was his brother. She believed that’s who the father was. She was having an affair with him.”

  After introducing Dr. Baden as a “world-renowned pathologist,” Lungen claimed Baden would walk into the courtroom and tell the jury the babies had all been born alive and had all died of “traumatic asphyxia. By definition, it means an interference with the ability of the babies to breathe by force. Essentially,” he added, lowering and raising his voice at appropriate times to bring about the true horror of his case, “it means that the defendant suffocated to death each of these three babies.”

  The courtroom went silent at that point. It was a stark reminder, an image, perhaps, of a woman giving life and taking it back in one quick, constant, evil moment. Could Dianne Odell—sitting, crying at times, holding on to a set of rosary beads as though they were a lifeline, rolling them through her fingers in prayer—have given life to these children and, by the violent force of her own hands, taken it away the next? Was she playing God?

  If so, jurors might be asking themselves several questions: Why wouldn’t Odell just abort the pregnancies? Why would she go to the trouble of carrying them for nine months, going through the process of labor pains and having the children at home, and then murder them? Wouldn’t it have been easier just to abort them? That way, there would be no evidence left behind. Nothing to explain. Was Odell that evil, that cold-blooded, to want to give these children life and then snatch it away?

  Lungen, as he argued his case, certainly thought so—and was making it clear by hammering his point home to jurors, who possibly sat in utter shock at the mere image of what the last moments of life must have been like for the babies.

  As he carried on, perhaps getting caught up in the moment, allowing his passion for the case to dictate his argument, Lungen began to talk about the legal aspects of the charges against Odell, one of which being intentional murder.

  “Now, intentional murder essentially means that a defendant intended to cause the death of that person. It was that person’s conscious aim and objective to bring about the death of another person.”

  Schick, staring at his colleague and friend, shaking his head in disbelief, stood up after hearing the remark. “Objection, Your Honor. This is not an opening statement anymore.”

  Lungen stopped, looked toward the judge.

  “Objection will be overruled. Ladies and gentlemen, the law will be given to you in tremendous detail at the conclusion of the case. What the attorneys say to you is merely their argument.”

  With that, Lungen then talked about the six different counts of murder Odell was charged with and, finally, worked his way into a dramatic closing statement.

  “Some of you may believe that babies’ lives get devalued. The killing of a baby is no different than the killing of an adult…. Some of you may say, ‘I can’t believe this.’ Some of you may say it sounds sick. That’s not what this is about. This is about whether under the law, the defendant murdered her three babies intentionally or by depravity. And you will find that she committed murders in each one of these three babies and, at the end of this trial, we will ask you to render a verdict that is fair and just, based only upon the evidence and nothing else.”

  He paused and began walking back to his table. “Thank you very much.”

  The judge, after what had become a long, emotionally charged opening, decided a break was in order.

  Stre
tch your legs. Take a moment to reflect. This was only one side of the story. Stephan Schick was up next. He would, undoubtedly, have a different story to tell.

  2

  Stephan Schick knew he couldn’t get beyond the fact that his client had given birth to the children and they had died under her care. It wasn’t one or two babies; it was three, possibly four, if Baby Doe made it into trial. Schick wasn’t naive; he understood a jury wanted answers. He couldn’t overlook that Odell—like it or not—had given police a damaging statement. Fundamentally, he had to try to focus on Odell’s responsibility for the crimes and maybe point a finger at her without placing her under the same light as a murderer. Tone it all down some. Yes, she had done some things that might constitute wrongdoing. But she was no cold-blooded murderer. Get that out of your head.

  First and foremost, he wanted to attack Lungen’s argument as a whole. “One would think this case is over,” Schick began after introducing himself. “One man can give a speech for an hour and a half and everybody’s mind is made up. One man who doesn’t know all the facts. Not that I do. You’re not going to live up to your oath as jurors if you fall prey to and allow yourself to conclude that Dianne Odell is a monster. You’re not going to live up to your oath as jurors if you permit demonizing a person to influence your ultimate determination.”

  At first, the Court TV cameras had made some feel a bit uncomfortable, as if everyone were participating in some sort of human lab experiment. It wasn’t every day that trials in Sullivan County were videotaped for a national television audience. Nevertheless, Schick had a job to do, regardless of the public eye he now found himself in. He knew his opening was a building block for him to construct a reasonable-doubt defense and maybe persuade one juror that Odell hadn’t acted in concert with other, more infamous baby murderers.

  Schick spoke with an admirable, articulate nature. He was smart—one could discern it from his choice of words. In the end, though, how far would it get him with a jury of diverse Americans? What hurt him right away was the fact that there were ten females on the jury—some of whom were likely mothers themselves. This was a fragile situation. Women who gave birth would have strong opinions regarding childbirth and death; there was no doubt about it.

  “When the jury was picked,” Odell said, “it was always my contention to get on the stand, and I knew that if there were mothers on the jury, or any kind of intelligent women, that they would hear what I was saying. They would know and they would understand. Even if they didn’t ever go through it, they had people and friends they knew who had. They would know the suffering, the anguish, the fear, umm…the disbelief in yourself. Ah…and all of the other myriad of emotions you go through when you walk around with this kind of hopelessness in your life on a daily basis.”

  That might have been true. But would that same jury then believe the abuse Odell referred to was, in turn, a license to kill?

  Patient, Schick stopped at times to collect his thoughts before continuing in a soft, nonthreatening manner, as if to project: this woman has made mistakes, but haven’t we all? It was a gamble to call into question Odell’s parenting skills. After all, four of her children were dead and she was being charged with killing three of them. There was a fine line between serendipity and condescension. If he crossed that line, it was likely jurors would feel it and begin to form opinions about Odell immediately. Presumed Innocent and The Burden of Proof were titles of Scott Turow novels, not to mention clichés among legal observers and pundits. It was okay to imagine Americans were innocent until proven guilty. Yet, for bona fide defense attorneys practicing in the real world, it wasn’t prudent to practice law with those same assumptions in mind. Most trials weren’t textbook law cases, where the brunt of guilt weighed on the prosecution’s shoulders. Most cases came down to the defense proving their client was innocent.

  “You see,” Schick said, “one would think this case was over already,” referring to Lungen’s blistering accusations against Odell. “[But] you haven’t heard one witness, one iota of evidence; just a filibuster.

  “Now, the prosecutor said this case, as all cases, is about accountability, it’s about responsibility. My client, Dianne, has things to be accountable for, she has things she’s responsible for, but she did not kill those babies, and even more so, she did not murder those babies.”

  He continued that there wouldn’t be “one iota of evidence” presented to prove the babies were born alive. And with the exception of Odell’s statement, he was correct. “Not one bit of scientific evidence. Not one bit of medical evidence.”

  Part of Schick’s case had to confront the undeniable fact that Odell had toted the babies around the country with her for the better part of twenty-two years. He couldn’t get around it. The jury would want to know why.

  “She wrapped them up and packed them and took them wherever she went because she couldn’t bear to part from them.”

  His argument centered on the prosecution’s notion that Odell was some twisted monster, carrying around mementos of her gruesome crimes. She was not anything like that, he insisted. If she was, and she had wanted to conceal evidence and deliberately try to evade being caught, why, he asked, would she keep the babies with her for that long? Why not discard them? Did she keep them in a garbage area of the houses she lived in? No, Schick said. She kept them with her “personal belongings” because they meant something to her.

  “What was she going to do? She had three infant children living with her. She wasn’t going to keep them around the house!”

  He promised he wasn’t going to argue insanity, “but there is more to this case and there is more surrounding facts than the prosecutor gave you…. One of the things I want to do, and I won’t be as long as the prosecutor, I’ll only be a few minutes…. I want to be forthright here in the beginning, right at the get-go, with some of the things that are not in dispute….”

  That said, Schick explained how Odell had given birth to the babies. “She’s the mother! What’s not in dispute is that she wrapped them in sheets and blankets and kept them with her as she moved from place to place for employment and other reasons….”

  Furthermore, it wasn’t in “dispute” that the police contacted Odell, or that “she wasn’t truthful. She wasn’t accurate.” But “there are reasons for that. Doesn’t mean she’s a murderer…. This is a woman who wants to have children.”

  Successful defense attorneys confront those obvious bad situations for their clients that will come up during trial only one way: head-on. “Did she mislead and falsify?” Schick asked the jury, quite animated. “Yes! It’s interesting that the prosecution always wants it all their own way…after speaking to police in Pennsylvania for two days, and for twelve and fourteen hours to the New York State Police, and they finally manipulate her into saying something about possibly hearing something,” meaning that Scileppi had somehow managed to put words into Odell’s mouth regarding hearing the children “gasp” for air. “All of a sudden, that’s truth. That’s accurate.” He threw up his arms in disgust. “See, she’s only truthful, inaccurate, and saying things falsely when it serves their purposes. But any little tidbit that serves her purposes and it’s…[wrong information.]”

  He then launched into a discussion regarding the DNA evidence, which he agreed was “true” evidence. He wasn’t going to question any of it. He wanted the jury to understand that “concrete facts” were going to dictate his portion of the case, not assumptions and speculation.

  “Don’t make her into a monster until you’ve heard everything, heard things the prosecution doesn’t even know about as we sit here today. I’m not talking about insanity. I’m talking about real evidence of real life with real situations, all of which should and must be taken into consideration before you make a decision. Please keep that in mind.

  “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 27

  1

  SITTING IN A courtroom facing the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison didn’t seem re
al to Dianne Odell. Yet, as Stephan Schick concluded his opening argument and Odell clutched firmly the rosary beads she held in her right hand, the reality of her life began to settle on her. Was it because she was alone? Sauerstein and the children couldn’t sit behind her in the courtroom because there was a possibility they would be called as witnesses. So there Odell sat, wearing a dark blue sweater, white button-up dress shirt, looking like a Sunday-school teacher, tears running down her cheeks, in between two men—Tim Havas and Stephan Schick—she hardly knew. Schick and Havas, like everyone else in the courtroom, would go home later in the day and have dinner with their families. They might turn on the television afterward, relax, think about their day, and get up in the morning and drive to the courthouse for another day of work. But Odell, she was going back across the street to endure another night of screams and fights and strangers, who, for the most part, saw her as a vile person. On the prison food chain, there weren’t many inmates lower than a child killer.

  Prayer and hope, Odell said later, kept her sane enough during trial to focus on maybe escaping a guilty verdict and going home. Faith in the system. Faith in justice. Faith in the jury.

  One juror…that’s all it took.

  2

  When Schick finished his opening, the court took a brief break. After that, Lungen called his first witness: Diane Thomas, the Graham County Sheriff’s Office detective who had opened the investigation after Safford, Arizona, resident Thomas Bright discovered the first baby.

  Thomas explained how, why, when, and where. She described the gruesomeness of the discovery, the sheer horror of finding three dead babies wrapped in plastic and blankets and stuffed into cardboard boxes like trash. It sent a message to the jury Lungen had promised in his opening: the death of innocence. To solidify his theme further, Lungen introduced a host of photographs; deeply disturbing images of the crime scene, quite unlike anything anyone possibly had seen on television. This was the real thing. The babies were dead. And someone—that woman sitting over there, fumbling with rosary beads nervously, praying to herself—murdered them.