Then, “I will resume tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. You are going to be kept, as we talked about, sequestered….” From there, he warned jurors that they were not entering into deliberations yet. “It would be a disservice to everyone, including yourselves, so please don’t discuss this case amongst yourselves this evening. Don’t discuss this case with anyone.”
After the jury left the courtroom, the judge asked if there was anything else.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Schick said, and stood.
“What do you have, Mr. Schick?”
“Judge, I would request a mistrial based upon the impropriety contained in the prosecution’s closing statement that included…vouching for the police. Identifying the police action as ‘we in law enforcement’ and ‘we were this and we were that, the police did nothing wrong.’”
Schick continued, accusing Lungen of stating numerous inconsistent statements that were simply untrue in his opinion, thus painting a bias portrait of Odell and implying that if she had given birth to the three babies in a hospital, they would have survived.
“Finally,” Schick continued, “concluding his statement…[Lungen sat down and left] the poster up while the court was giving the instructions to the jury…his misleading poster of what the defendant allegedly said or meant. For all those reasons, I respectfully request the court declare a mistrial.”
When Lungen had his chance to speak, he said he had based his argument on the credibility of police officers. “There is nothing in what Mr. Schick said that is the basis for any mistrial whatsoever.”
“Mr. Schick,” the judge said kindly, “your application is denied. The main reason Mr. Lungen’s comments were in fair response [is that they were] part of the ebb and flow of a summation in a very emotional case.”
3
The following afternoon, December 16, Odell walked into the courtroom and, as usual, took a seat next to Schick and Havas. It was time to learn her fate. After five hours of deliberations, the jury had come to a decision. Since the start of trial, which had lasted a total of four days, Odell looked like she’d aged ten years. With her knit sweater, button-up dress shirt, olive skin, penciled-in-looking, thin, dark eyebrows, and salt-and-pepper hair, she resembled actress Bea Arthur during her days on the hit ’70s sitcom Maude.
As the jury foreperson stood, Odell appeared nervous and shaky as Schick put his arm around her shoulder to comfort her.
“Not guilty.”
There was a sigh of relief on Odell’s side of the room. On three counts of intentional murder, she had been found not guilty. Could it be? Was Odell going home?
Lungen looked stunned. What?
“That first not guilty on the first count, intentional murder, I think that made some butts tighten on the prosecution side,” Heather Yakin said later. “Dianne was pretty emotional throughout the trial…. [She]actually reacted to things in appropriate ways, crying when the babies were mentioned or shown, stuff like that. Lungen, of course, thought it was all an act. I don’t think anything in the case was that simple. I think Odell probably did have a horrible life, and I’m sure she loves all of her living kids. That said, I don’t know what really happened during those births. I think deep down, Dianne knows, but I can’t decide if she’s ever admitted it to herself.”
But then the jury finished reading its verdict: “Guilty.” On three counts of depraved-indifference murder, the jury had found Odell guilty.
Schick bowed his head and began rubbing his forehead, squeezing Odell tightly as she seemed to be in shock. And as the jury read its official verdict on each count, she broke down as Clarissa, who had stood behind her mother throughout the entire trial, ran out of the courtroom crying.
So it was. Odell had been judged by her peers in a court of law. As she left the courtroom in handcuffs, she turned and stared at Robert Sauerstein and her children and said, “Don’t cry, guys. I love you.”
4
It would be a little over a month before Odell learned how long she would be spending in prison. Some in town thought the judge might spare her hard time and grant her probation and time served. Several “Letters to the Editor” published in area newspapers supported Odell. Some residents, who had followed every detail of the trial, believed she had been wrongly convicted.
“Odell deserved better,” wrote one woman.
“I can’t get Odell out of [my] mind,” said another.
“Have mercy on Odell,” yet another.
The prevailing feeling among the many females who had chimed in after the trial was that prison was no place for a woman who had been abused by her mother and father. What was it that had sparked such support for a convicted baby killer?
On January 8, 2004, Heather Yakin finally got that exclusive interview she had been hoping for throughout the entire ordeal. As it turned out, it wasn’t with a long-lost relative who could bring forth startling information that would send the case into a whirlwind, or one of the fathers of the babies—but Odell herself.
It was time, Odell decided while waiting in jail to be sentenced, to tell her side of the story—a side, incidentally, she was now fuming that she had never gotten to tell jurors.
Headlined ODELL’S DARK TALE, the question-and-answer interview detailed, in Odell’s words, her “abusive” upbringing by her mom and dad. She spoke of the same horrors she had been telling Schick about all along, sticking to her story that she’d had nothing to do with killing her babies. The article gave the community a clear portrait of Odell’s supposed abusive life—something, she had said over and over since her conviction, she had never been given the opportunity to do in court.
After that, Odell spoke to Court TV and gave it an exclusive interview, again detailing her childhood. She shed tear after tear talking to Court TV, which would later run the interview in pieces during its airing of the trial.
Was it all enough to convince the judge to go easy on her? Like Odell, the community was about to find out.
5
January 27, 2004, was a clear, cold day in Monticello, averaging about ten degrees Fahrenheit. Since the close of the trial, Schick had filed a motion to get the verdict thrown out. It was a formality. Lawyers did it because the law said they could.
“By the way of preliminary matters,” the judge said, opening court, “Mr. Schick, your application to set aside the verdict is denied. The court will publish a written decision shortly.” The judge then paused, looked down at some paperwork in front of him. Then, “Miss Odell?”
“Yes?”
“You will have the opportunity to say something if you want to….”
“Yes, I do, Your Honor.”
“…after your attorney speaks.”
“Thank you.”
Proscecutor Lungen then stood and rubbed his chin, thinking deeply about what he wanted to say. “I would normally make a straight-up recommendation to you, or position, with respect to this case,” Lungen began, “but since the verdict, there’s been some intervening events I think are…at least I feel compelled to comment on a little bit.”
Above all, Lungen was concerned about the interview Odell had given to Heather Yakin and the Times Herald-Record. It had been bothering him.
“…Of course, now she’s telling the truth as to what happened with respect to the babies and she claims she was kept off the witness stand by her attorneys because they didn’t want [Baby Doe] to be brought out. But I don’t think I can allow that to just stand by itself because the real truth is, or part of the truth at least, is that she didn’t testify because she knew there would be cross-examination, and cross-examination could very well expose much of what she said in that newspaper article…because while it’s headlined ODELL’S DARK TALE, it seems to portray throughout that she is the victim and that this represents what really happened.”
Talking about the article seemed to open some sort of wound for Lungen he thought he’d closed. Nearly two months now since the Odell trial ended, he was involved in other cases, other trials. With tha
t article, Odell obviously had wanted to do what she had been doing all along: change her story in respect to an outcome she didn’t agree with.
Lungen carried on for about fifteen minutes, restating his entire case and how the jury had come to its verdict based on facts, not speculation and hindsight.
After he finished, Schick stood with Odell by his side and asked the court to “sanction that the remains of the babies be turned over to [Sauerstein and the family] for burial.”
It was an odd request made at what some might consider to be an inappropriate time, seeing that Odell was about to be sentenced for murdering three of her children. Had she suddenly cared about them now? She’d had two-and-a-half-decades to bury them. Why now?
“The people would like to be heard on that, Your Honor,” Lungen said, standing.
The judge tabled the issue for another time.
Schick then argued for a light sentence based on the fact that Odell wasn’t a threat to society at large. She should be home with her children. They needed her.
“Thank you,” the judge said. “Miss Dianne Odell, do you wish to say anything at this time?”
“Yes.”
Odell was upset, she claimed, because the entire process had made her out to be some sort of monster. “Circumstances have been turned around,” she said with emotion. “…For what I hope is the last time in my life, I will say that I did not kill my children. I believe that all the suffering I have gone through, that this is just a continuation of that suffering.”
She then went on to talk about being locked up in an emotional jail her entire adult life. She hadn’t deserved it. It wasn’t her fault. “I would like to know,” she asked, “when does my suffering end and when do I finally get out of jail?”
It was a bold statement, made especially more potent by the notion that the judge was going to be sentencing her when she was finished. Judges like to hear convicted murderers take responsibility for their crimes. But Odell was being defiant to the end, stating her disgust in the system.
“I will not apologize for not making conscious, educated decisions,” she continued, ending her statement, “but I will say that I hope one day truth and justice will set me free. Thank you.”
The judge sat back for a moment. “Thank you, Miss Odell,” he said. Then, “Truth and justice was achieved during the course of this trial!…There was a ‘dark tale,’ Miss Odell, a dark tale that you created, a dark tale that brought us to the trial into the depth of human indifference, human immorality, human depravity toward life.”
The gallery sat back. Eyes opened. Jaws dropped.
The judge further explained how the birth and death of Baby Doe would be “considered for sentencing purposes.” Then he talked about the deaths of the three babies she had been tried (and convicted) for, saying, “…Your statement, the defendant’s statement in the presentence report, alluded to a tale of truth you now wish to tell. Miss Odell, it defies common sense and reality. You were given the opportunity by several police officers…to tell the truth. You told them what you wanted to tell and it doesn’t make any difference to me because a jury has spoken….”
Judge LaBuda was obviously taken aback by Odell’s bold stance. One might even assume—and rightly so—he felt as if Odell had insulted him.
Ultimately, Judge LaBuda sentenced Odell to life imprisonment with a minimum of fifteen years for Baby Number One, life imprisonment with a minimum of twenty years for Baby Number Two, and life imprisonment with a minimum of twenty-five years for Baby Number Three. Clearly, regardless of what Odell thought, the judge had taken the matters of three dead babies extremely seriously.
“These sentences are to run concurrently….”
And then, perhaps, the harshest words a judge could have bestowed on a convicted murderer rang throughout the courtroom.
“Miss Odell, I know during the course of the trial you were praying and reciting the rosary. I hope you take this opportunity to prepare for your final judgment when you will have to account for the four babies.” He paused, as if to allow the weight of what he had just said weigh on Odell, but she just stood and cried.
“This matter is concluded.”
Gavel.
6
Stephan Schick was never convinced his client had murdered her children. He fought for her freedom as best he could and, suffice it to say, in the end was dissatisfied with the way things had turned out. “Listen to what she’s saying,” Schick recalled later, looking back on the case. “If she intended to murder these children, number one, she would have had an abortion. I mean, why go through the pain of childbirth to murder them at childbirth? What’s the point? You can do it legally! Why risk childbirth at home, risking your own life, because you want to murder them at childbirth—it doesn’t make any sense at all. I tried to argue to the jury that this person did not obviously want the children to die. That her actions are of a horribly ignorant and misguided person.”
In a sense, Schick had won that argument, because the jury hadn’t found Odell guilty of intentional murder.
Toting the babies around for twenty years, Schick concluded, “shows that something is wrong with her mind. But the greatest tragedy of the entire thing is, she doesn’t even see it. There’s a lot of self-pity there, and she doesn’t see it for what it is.”
EPILOGUE
AS I SPOKE with Dianne Odell and got to know her better, I sensed that some of the stories she told me had become a version of the facts based on what she wished had happened—that is, only if she could go back and change the past. One such scene in the book takes place at the Towanda State Police barracks in Pennsylvania while Odell is being fingerprinted. When we first spoke, Odell told me a version of what happened that day. Later, as we were going back and discussing her story again, she told me a second version that was, basically, the same as the first, but had a few additional memories attached to it that, in my opinion, further promoted her latest version of the truth. To believe Odell, one would have to agree that three investigators with over sixty years of cumulative law experience lied about the same event and then testified in a court of law about it, thus committing perjury.
Is it possible? Sure. Is it probable? No. There was no reason for law enforcement to lie about such an event. This was not an investigation with any time constraints on it. There was no serial killer running loose with the clock ticking. It was, essentially, only the fifth day of the investigation. There was not enough information available for law enforcement even to be certain Odell had done anything.
Stephan Schick posed a question to me when I interviewed him: “Do you think cops don’t coerce suspects and put words into their mouths and break them down over a period of days?” he asked.
The thought had crossed my mind. I’ve interviewed scores of cops over the years and not all of them have been completely truthful. In this case, however, the facts supported Investigators Thomas Scileppi, Roy Streever, and Robert Lane’s testimony. The question of whether they badgered Odell and pushed her into a confession only became an issue later, when Odell wanted to take back what she had admitted to.
Odell went to the police station not once or twice, but three times, voluntarily, without a lawyer. She obviously wanted to talk about what had happened.
I ended up using all three versions of that interview: the two Odell told me and the one from the record. Furthermore, there are five sources for this scene: three are law enforcement, one who has been convicted of murdering three of her children, and one fathered five of Odell’s eight living children.
As I went back and listened to some of Odell’s stories on tape, they seemed convincing at first. As I learned more about the case, studying documents, interviewing other people, I began to see her stories under a different light. Holes began to appear in them. Time and again, Odell would call me with an incredible story. But when I tried to contact people who could back up what she was saying, I found they were either dead or wouldn’t respond to my letters and/or phone calls. The only
person who could corroborate the stories was Odell herself.
Much further into my interviews with Odell, out of nowhere, she said to me one night, “Everybody has made the assumption that when my father hit me, he was drunk.” She had told me several stories where her father was drunk and raped her and beat her up. “My father was drunk,” she continued that night, “once, and beat the shit out of me once while he was drunk. The rest of the time when he hit me, he was stone-cold sober.”
I have no idea why she told me this. But I suspect it was in response to her learning the previous week that I had interviewed her brother Richard Molina. Moreover, there was an anger in her voice that night I had never heard before. It was a part of Odell I had not experienced inside of our months of conversations. She was seemingly a different person—a much colder, darker person who believed her father was responsible for the life she led.
“When he got drunk, there was a whole different set of rules he lived by,” she concluded.
At times, she would call and tell me how much she despised Stephan Schick for not doing his job. Partly because of him, she felt her life was now made up of walls, steel bars, barbed wire, and emptiness. She wanted people to understand that she was abused. She wanted someone to acknowledge that the abuse she suffered did things to her mind. And it was Schick’s job, in her view, to get that information to the jury.
I agree—Odell had been abused. There’s evidence of it beyond her words. But did that abuse give her a license to kill? This was the question she failed to answer. To me or the jury.
As of this writing, Odell sits in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Bedford Hills, New York, awaiting word on her appeal. She claims to have several issues her new appellate lawyers will argue successfully, which will grant her a new trial.
In my view, Odell doesn’t belong in prison. She should be in a hospital, where she can sift through her memories and come to some sort of finality with what has happened. I believe there is still a part of her that wants to claim responsibility for the crimes she was convicted of. I could hear it in her voice when we spoke. I’m convinced she wants to accept part of the blame, yet at the same time ask everyone to believe it wasn’t her fault.
Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) Page 37