Read Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) Online
Authors: M. William Phelps
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 that 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.”
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.
At one point, I explained to her that I try to stay neutral and objective while writing my books. She said, “I don’t believe that…. And I think I have found a new friend.”
I cannot be friends with Dianne Odell. I can try to understand what she did and write about it, but I cannot, as a father of three kids, comprehend a parent taking a child’s life. Whether Mabel Molina murdered Dianne’s children is not an issue for me. What matters is that Dianne could have (and should have) done something to keep her children alive. She had plenty of opportunity to make sure they lived—especially Baby Number Two and Baby Number Three.
A jury of her peers convicted Odell. She had every opportunity to tell her story to police. She chose not to. If she had told police that the children were stillborn, and stuck to that story, she would have likely never been prosecuted for murder. The statement she gave police was the state’s only true piece of evidence against her. In the end, Dianne Odell’s own words condemned her.
MANY OF THE
legal definitions in this book came from the Law.com Dictionary, a wonderful resource.
Sullivan County DA Steve Lungen’s confidential secretary Susan Parks was extremely helpful to me in setting up interviews and collecting documents. All those e-mails and phone calls from me that Susan had to manage must have been a nuisance during what are, I’m sure, extremely hectic days in the DA’s office. But Susan never once denied a request and was always timely in answering me. I can’t thank her enough for everything she did to make this book what it is.
Diane Thomas, Bruce Weddle, DA Steve Lungen, Paul Hans, Robert Rowan, Tom Scileppi, and Roy Streever were all helpful in their own ways. I recall a trip Paul Hans and I took to Wal-Mart one cold winter afternoon in the Catskills to make some digital copies of photographs. I stood there at the machine for what was an hour at least, carefully copying each photograph, as Paul stood right beside me not wincing or complaining once. “Take your time,” he kept saying. “Don’t worry about it.”
It is that simple, yet vital, help that allows me to produce these books. Without people like Paul, or Robert Rowan, who showed me all of the evidence and allowed me to take photographs and search through packet after packet of documentation and photographs, I could not do the work I do. Furthermore, although Robert and Paul don’t show up all that much in the narrative, their work in the Odell case behind the scenes was matched by
none
.
Likewise, DA Steve Lungen assisted me in obtaining those documents I needed to make sure I got every aspect of the story—whether it helped his cause or not—correct. He should be commended for the integrity he showed.
The interview I conducted with Robert Sauerstein was extremely helpful for a number of reasons, and I gratefully wish to acknowledge Mr. Sauerstein for being so candid and honest. Odell’s lawyer, Stephan Schick, was at first a bit apprehensive regarding granting me an interview. In the end, though, we spoke openly for a few hours one day. I appreciate the trust Mr. Schick put in me. That interview helped this book tremendously.
I need to thank Heather Yakin from the
Times Herald-Record
in Monticello, who was extremely helpful in familiarizing me with Sullivan County and how the case impacted the community. Her detailed answers to my many, many questions were helpful in different areas of the book.
Dr. Michael Baden’s wonderfully written book
Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers,
cowritten with Marion Roach, an outstanding author in her own right, was helpful to me in understanding the decomposition process. I quoted from it briefly in one section of the book. I thank both Dr. Baden and Marion Roach for writing such an important book.
Special thanks to Kensington editor-in-chief Michaela Hamilton, who helped me choose this story after weeks of e-mails discussing several different ideas. The undisputed queen of true crime, Michaela has been nothing but wonderful throughout my career, and I thank her for that. She was right when she told me, “Yes! That is the book you must do next.”
My editor at Kensington, Johnny Crime: thanks for the book’s title and support.
I need to acknowledge William Acosta, J.G., A.R., R.K. Also, Peter Miller, Kelly Skillen, and everyone else at PMA Literary & Film Management, Inc., who have helped me along my path in more ways than I can count.
Gregg Olsen, a superb author and journalist, has been a mentor of mine now for several years. Through that relationship, we have developed one of the most meaningful friendships I have ever had in my life. I thank Gregg for a lot of things, but most of all, for truly believing in me perhaps more than I believe in myself.
Of course, I need to thank Dianne Odell. I know she is going to have a problem with some of the material in this book. Although I did repeatedly tell her as we spoke that I was going to report every side of this story, I felt at times she thought I sympathized with her. I came as close as I could to reporting every possible angle. But I need to acknowledge that without the candid, exclusive interviews I conducted with Odell, I would have never written this book.
She spoke from her heart—that much I believe. She told me several times that the horror of what she recalls sometimes comes to her in fragments. I believe that. But I also believe those clusters of darkness she said she experienced during the three births in question were, in some way, the children screaming, and Odell trying to block out those screams.
Dianne Odell is a very intelligent, confident woman, who speaks with a remarkable intellectual sense. I was amazed at times by what she said—and, to be honest, did sympathize with her on occasion. But after we hung up, I had time to go back and listen to the tapes—think about what she had said, apply my better judgment to it all, and begin the process of trying to back up what she said through other interviews and documents. I realized there is a disturbed woman in Odell’s head somewhere, struggling with the conscience of a woman with a heart and peaceful soul. I believe Miss Odell’s abusive upbringing contributed greatly to her criminal life—and for that I am sorry. But thousands of abuse survivors never commit crimes and learn to deal with their lives.
I failed to thank an old friend, Kerry Williamson, in the acknowledgments of my previous books. It’s been ten years since we spoke, but I need to acknowledge that without her direction many years ago, at a time when my soul was destitute and I was deciding what to do with my life—without her guidance, belief, and inspiration, I never would have pursued a career as an author. Thank you, Kerry, for everything you did for me—in many ways, you saved my life. Those virtues you instilled in me (and banged into my head week after week) are still with me today. I need you to know that—although I didn’t believe it at the time—you were right about
everything
. The work we did together has had a profound effect on my entire life.
My family is always there to support my efforts: Thomas Phelps, Frank Phelps, Florence and Tom Borelli, Tyler, Markie and Meranda, the Fournier family, the Castellassi family, Mary and Frank Phelps, and, of course, my late brother, Mark Anthony Phelps Sr.
I dedicated this book to my wife. I watch her with our daughter and I feel there is no other mother on this planet who can match her love, parenting skills, tenderness, patience, and will. She is the most incredible mother. My children and I are lucky to have her in our lives.
Matthew Jr. and Jordan—thank you.