Читать книгу Sleep In Heavenly Peace - M. William Phelps - Страница 12

1

ONE OF THE questions Dianne Molina asked herself, as she became entrenched in a world of prostitution that her mother facilitated, was why? What was it that drove Mabel to sell her only daughter’s soul? If what Dianne later said was true, it was an act of evil no child could be expected to endure, a dark and sinister world of not knowing what was going to happen on any given night. Crime statistics have proven that men who sexually violate children are capable of just about any animalistic act imaginable. Dianne would leave her apartment, and wonder if she would ever return.

As the weeks and months wore on, and Dianne found herself sleeping with men of all types, a phone call she received one day began to explain things.

“I was the only one in the house,” Dianne recalled. “The gentleman on the phone requested my mother.”

“She’s not home from work yet,” Dianne told the man.

“Well, you tell your mother that if she doesn’t pay me my money, I’m going to take care of her.”

“All right.”

Dianne said she immediately called Mabel at work, who had recently been hired as a housekeeper at a nearby hospital, working days.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mabel said. “It’s nothing.”

Dianne let it go. What else could she do? If Mabel told her to forget about something, she had better listen.

Two weeks went by. Dianne got out of school one afternoon and went straight home, as she normally did. On an average day, she would get home an hour or so before Mabel. It was, she recalled, the only time of the day or night when she could sit and be a kid.

No worries.

No wondering.

Just peaceful silence.

Minutes after she walked up the long stairwell into her apartment and put her books on the dining-room table, she heard the doorbell. “When I opened the door, there was a big man there. I mean, this guy was huge….”

“Where is your mother?” the man asked.

“She’s not here. Can I take a message?”

“Yes,” the man said. Then, without another word, he “proceeded to put his large hands around my neck,” Dianne recalled, “pushing me up against the wall.”

“You tell your mother she has two weeks to come up with the money,” he said, “or I am going to come back to take care of everybody.”

One would have to speculate that Mabel was involved in either drugs or gambling. The woman worked a full-time job, yet was borrowing money from a shylock? Dianne said she worked for her mother two to three times per week, and although she never knew what her mother charged for her services, she had to believe it wasn’t free. So, where was all the money going?

“For six weeks,” Dianne said, “after that incident occurred, everywhere I went I was looking over my shoulder.”

As Dianne later thought about the phone call and episode with the large man, she realized what had perhaps “spurred my mother to put me to work. When she first put me to work, I thought it was just going to be long enough to pay off this debt to this person who had showed up at our door. I figured a month or so, maybe a little more.”

But it continued. As the spring of 1970 came and went, Dianne was still being sent out to perform all sorts of sexual acts for money.

“Something had gone terribly wrong in what [my mother] was doing,” Dianne recalled, “and there came a point in time when she called on my brother because, she told him, we had no food.”

The call didn’t make sense, however, to Dianne. Because although her mother had abused her emotionally and made her turn tricks, she never starved her.

One thing she noticed during the early part of 1970 was that her mom had begun to carry around a white envelope containing all of her money. Generally, Dianne said, there was always $400 or $500 inside it.

“Rather than give her money—none of my family members would ever give her money. But rather than give her money, when she asked my brother for food that day, my brother’s wife went out and bought groceries for us.”

Mabel was in her fifties when she left Dianne’s father, rented her own apartment, and put Dianne to work. As soon as they moved out, Dianne claimed, Mabel had gotten herself mixed up in all sorts of things no one knew about.

“She would bring drugs home from the hospital and I don’t know what she did with them.”

As secretive a life as she led, Mabel was now begging one of her sons for food because she claimed she had no money. That envelope, Dianne remembered, with $400 or more in it, was full one day and empty the next.

After Dianne’s brother brought the groceries over and left, Dianne went to Mabel and asked her why she lied. “You have money. I saw it in the envelope.”

Without a word, Mabel pulled her hand back and slapped Dianne across the face. “What I do,” she said through clenched teeth, “is none of your business! You do what you’re told and take care of your end of things. You got that?”

Dianne shook her head in agreement. But she couldn’t let it go.

“If you’ve paid this man off and you have extra money,” she said as Mabel started walking away, “why did you lie and say you had no money for food, when I know you had four hundred dollars? I watched you count it. I don’t know what you’re charging for my services, but you’re making money. Plus, you have your paycheck.”

Dianne was tired of being a whipping post. She wanted answers.

“Well, I have to…I have to…do something.”

“That was as far as I would ever get with her,” Dianne recalled. “She always had something on her mind, something that she wanted to do, or she was thinking about something. It was always ‘something, something, something’ with her. She never would clarify what ‘something’ meant.”

As Dianne stood in front of her mother that day questioning her about how much money they were making and where it was all going, Mabel, perhaps sick and tired of having to answer to a child, laid out her plans for the next few months.

“Well,” she said, “you’re going to have to continue to work because I’m broke now.”

“Please don’t make me do this anymore,” Dianne said, crying, begging. “Please, Mother. Please…”

2

By the time the GCSO finished searching all of the boxes Thomas Bright had purchased, they had uncovered three dead babies, their remains carefully packaged and stored in bags and boxes for what appeared to be years, maybe even decades. During her investigation, Thomas had found out, from just looking at some of the paperwork inside the boxes, that a woman by the name of Dianne Odell was connected to the babies. The boxes were Odell’s. There was no doubt about it. Odell’s various addresses and phone numbers and Social Security number and other personal information were scattered all over paperwork found inside some of the boxes.

For the purpose of the investigation, Thomas gave the babies names: Baby Number One, Baby Number Two, Baby Number Three. It was, in the end, the only way to keep track of each one and begin trying to figure out what had happened and who they were.

From inside the trailer, the babies were repackaged in evidence bags and driven to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson, where they would undergo a meticulous forensic examination. It was late in the evening on May 12. Although anxious, Thomas would have to wait until at least the following afternoon—maybe even longer—before she could retrieve any type of information from the medical examiner regarding how the babies had died.

The following day, May 13, while Thomas waited for forensic results, she began to track down Dianne Odell so she could maybe get some answers as to what had happened. From the looks of things, there could be no sane explanation why someone would wrap three babies in garbage bags, wrap those bags in blankets, stuff them into several different boxes, and store them away like old family heirlooms. For Thomas, there had to be some sort of sinister, criminal act that had taken place. Even if the babies were stillborn, why would they be discarded so secretly and hidden?

Thomas got word early that afternoon from the medical examiner’s office that the babies had been, in the medical examiner’s early opinion, born full-term. This was significant. A back-alley abortion could be ruled out. If the babies had been born full-term, there was a good chance they were born alive, which meant they had somehow died after birth. The cause of death wouldn’t be determined, Thomas was told, for another day or so.

Thomas was assigned as case agent. Graham County had developed a task force made up of several different officers from different agencies whose main focus was breaking cases. It would not be such a stretch to think this case in particular had hit every officer hard. Many, of course, had kids of their own. To think that a mother—or father—could discard babies like garbage fed an already burning desire among the cops to find out exactly what had happened.

As case agent, Thomas coordinated officers and handed out assignments in hope of locating Dianne Odell, who, as far as anyone could tell, was the one person who could provide the most answers at this point.

The first item of business was to conduct a computer search for Odell and find out her last place of residence. With just a few keystrokes, an officer came back to Thomas and reported Odell’s last-known address as Rome, Pennsylvania.

Address in hand, Thomas contacted the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and had a trooper from the Towanda barracks, near Rome, conduct a more thorough search for a recent residence.

“From there,” Thomas said later, “it was determined another officer and myself would travel to Pennsylvania to try and find Miss Odell and interview her.”

After speaking to the owner of the self-storage unit where the boxes had been purchased, Thomas determined that Odell had rented the units in question back in 1991, but throughout the years, she must have had some trouble keeping up with payments. In fact, she hadn’t paid her bill since June 1994, nearly ten years ago, and hadn’t been inside the unit since.

During a meeting of investigators and detectives, Bruce Weddle, a seasoned detective with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, was chosen to fly to Pennsylvania with Thomas to interview Odell. At six feet two inches, 175 pounds, the red-haired Weddle had been an Arizona state trooper, working the interstate, for eighteen years. For the past ten, he had been a detective, working mostly narcotics, where much of his time had been spent busting up large methamphetamine labs.

Weddle, who had just turned fifty, grew up in southeastern Arizona and had lived in the region all his life. From an early age, he said, the idea of becoming a cop interested him.

“My dad was in law enforcement, and from that I guess I got bit by the bug early on and realized that’s what I wanted to do.”

Leaving college, Weddle worked construction for a time and then went to work for a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in the area. After a time with Pepsi, it only seemed natural for Weddle to then apply to the Arizona Department of Public Safety Police Academy, where he was quickly accepted.

For a number of reasons, Weddle and Thomas decided to take the earliest flight out of Arizona. Number one, Thomas recalled, “was to avoid the media.”

Every major television station in Arizona wanted an interview with Thomas and other members of the GCSO. Reporters were calling the GCSO from all over the country. Thomas had fed them as little information as she could. CNN called. The Associated Press had run a story, as had many local newspapers. Everyone involved agreed the story was going to find legs. The quicker Thomas and Weddle got out of town and began uncovering facts, the better off everyone would be. There even had been a memorial set up at the self-storage unit. In the same fashion teenagers might leave flowers and candles and stuffed animals near a telephone pole after a peer had been killed in an automobile accident, people were leaving all sorts of mementos in front of the doors of unit number six. With that kind of emotion floating around, the GCSO knew the local media could really push the story into national status.

On Friday, May 16, 2003, Thomas found out she and Weddle could book a flight that night. All they had to do was steer clear of the media until then.

By Saturday morning, May 17, after an all-night flight, Weddle and Thomas touched down safely in Waverly, New York, and immediately drove to Towanda, Pennsylvania, where Trooper Robert McKee, a ten-year veteran of the force, was waiting to greet them.

As one might suspect, Thomas and Weddle were exhausted from their red-eye flight out of Arizona. Neither had slept much on the plane. Before they could focus on how to approach Dianne Odell, they needed rest.

Hours later, after a brief respite at the hotel, they met with McKee for lunch. McKee informed them how he had found out that Odell had been working at a local Rite Aid near Rome, but he couldn’t confirm exactly which store. He did find out that Odell had been living with her paramour, Robert Sauerstein, for many years, a name also found on several pieces of documentation in storage unit number six.

Further, McKee explained, Odell was the mother of eight children. If those babies in the boxes were hers, that would make her the mother of eleven. She was nearly fifty years old, her youngest child just four. The woman had been pregnant just about every other year for the past twenty years. Some of her children had children, which made her a grandmother. Was it possible, Thomas and Weddle wondered as they listened to McKee, that the babies were born to one of her daughters?

After lunch, as Thomas, Weddle, and McKee worked their way toward the Towanda barracks to set up some type of mini task force, they passed a local pharmacy.

“Let’s check it out,” Thomas suggested. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

After a quick look inside and a brief talk with the manager, Thomas found out Odell had never worked there. Thomas was using a photograph of Odell that she had taken from one of the photo albums in the boxes.

Minutes later, they came up on a Rite Aid.

“Stop there,” Thomas said. “Let’s try it again.”

“When we first walked in,” Thomas recalled, “Miss Odell happened to be the first person I saw behind the cash register, and I recognized her from the photograph.”

Thomas approached Odell. “Can we talk to the manager?”

“Sure,” Odell said, then picked up the phone and dialed the back room.

Taking the manager aside moments later, Thomas asked if she employed a person by the name of Dianne Odell.

“Yes, we do.”

“Can we have permission to speak with her?”

“Sure.”

Thomas, Weddle, and McKee then walked back toward Odell, and after identifying themselves, they asked her if she would answer a few questions.

“Okay,” she said. “Sure.”

Later, Odell said she knew from the moment they entered the building who they were and why they were there. “As soon as I saw them,” Odell recalled, “I knew they were from Arizona and when they came up to me and introduced themselves as detectives, I knew immediately what it was for.”

Odell had gained a considerable amount of weight throughout the years. She was heavier now than she had been in quite some time. At about five feet six inches, 160 pounds, she had charcoal black hair with prominent streaks of gray and white running through in dramatic, checkerboardlike contrast. A mother of a four-year-old, with four teenagers at home, it was clear sleep wasn’t something Odell had been getting a lot of: the pronounced bags under her eyes, the sagging, yellowed skin on her face, along with her tired walk, spoke of an exhausted woman, working hard in a dead-end job to support what was a rather large family.

“Is it possible,” Thomas asked the manager as Odell began walking out from behind the counter, “for Miss Odell to leave for a time?”

“Can I get my purse and coat?” Odell asked.

“Yes, of course. Go ahead. Do you have a vehicle here, a car of your own?” Thomas wanted to know.

“Yes,” Odell said minutes later, slipping on her coat.

“Do you want to drive your own vehicle, you know, follow us? Or ride with us to the barracks?”

“I’ll drive with you,” Odell said, staring at Thomas.

Odell, Thomas was quick to point out later, wasn’t “under arrest for anything.” They just wanted to speak to her and, hopefully, get some answers. Odell was extremely cooperative and willing to help in any way she could.

The Towanda barracks was a ten-minute ride from Rite Aid. Odell didn’t say much. But she was certainly thinking about what was going to happen once she got inside the barracks and began talking. She would have some explaining to do, to say the least, regarding three dead babies found inside a self-storage unit she had rented.

“We did have some small talk during the ride to Towanda,” Thomas remembered later. “‘How long have you been working there? How long have you been here?’ Nothing about the case was discussed. In fact, Miss Odell never once asked what we needed to talk to her about—which seemed odd to me.”

Odell later said she asked Thomas and Weddle several times what they wanted to talk to her about, but they kept saying, “Let’s wait until we get to the barracks.”

Thomas, Weddle, and Trooper McKee denied Odell ever asked any questions about the case.

3

Concentrating on schoolwork became almost impossible for Dianne as the 1970 school year drew to a close. Likewise, homework and studying became a nuisance. Dianne said she couldn’t focus on any of it when she spent much of her time wondering how to get out from underneath the grasp of her madam mother—especially now, since loan sharks and their goons were stopping by the apartment making threats. Life was a matter of survival, waiting and wondering what would happen next.

“For the most part, I left school because I was embarrassed to go. That was okay with Mom because she was home [most of] the day. So, she could keep me pretty much under her thumb and make sure I didn’t do or say anything I wasn’t supposed to.”

Dianne said her father generally stayed away after they moved to Kew Gardens, but would visit occasionally. One of the times he did show up, she said, she happened to be home alone.

“He wasn’t drunk, so he didn’t bother to do anything to me. But he was really quite nasty to me about why my mother wasn’t there. So I said to him, ‘I don’t know where she went….’ I then asked him if he wanted coffee. He said no and left.”

As the chilly air rolled into New York during the fall of 1970, Mabel made a decision to move after being mugged in front of the apartment. It was the latest in a string of robberies she had endured since moving to Kew Gardens. The final incident happened at a bus stop up the street from the apartment. Mabel had gotten out of work at 4:00, which would generally put her in the apartment by about 5:00 A.M. On this morning, someone who had been apparently waiting for her at the bus stop sneaked up from behind as she walked home and pistol-whipped her in the back of the head. With blood running down her forehead, she had to go back and get stitches at the same hospital she had just come from. When she finally made it home later that morning, she told Dianne they were moving.

“My life,” Mabel said, “is worth more than a lousy paycheck.”

And my life is worth more than turning tricks for you! Dianne thought, but she didn’t say anything.

With no way physically to move—neither Mabel nor Dianne had a driver’s license or car—Mabel said she’d pay for Dianne to get a driver’s license and ask her father to buy her a car, an El Camino, so they could pack up everything when they were ready and go.

“But don’t you tell him we’re moving,” Mabel warned.

Mabel had a location picked out upstate. It was on a lake in the Catskill Mountains. Comfortable. Relaxing. No big-city problems. No pollution. No muggings. Just fresh air and the pungent smell of pine needles, dry leaves, and fresh water.

John Molina agreed to buy the car, but once word got back to him they were going to use it to move, he laughed and told them to forget it.

“He ended up showing up on our doorstep one day,” Dianne recalled, “and he was almost three sheets to the wind at the time. Right about then, I went into my own protective mode. My mother was there and they started getting into it.”

As they argued, Dianne stepped away, trying to remain, she said, “invisible.” But her father, at one point during the argument, said, “Dianne, I want you to come down to the house with me.”

Dianne knew what that meant.

“Whenever he was angry, he would never take his anger out on the person he was angry with. It was always me.”

“No, no, no,” Dianne said. “I have to do something else. I can’t go.”

I can’t go…. I can’t go…. I can’t go. This was what Dianne thought as she stared at her father. I know you’re going to rape me again.

Mabel stepped up and said, “No! She’s got something to do for me. She has to go somewhere for me.” While talking, Mabel took out her address book and pointed to an address. “You have to go here, Dianne,” she said.

John looked at the both of them—What the hell is going on?—and asked, “Where is she going? What’s this about, Mabel?” He seemed confused.

“She has to go to Flushing and take care of an errand for me.”

With that, John left.

“You get your ass upstairs,” Mabel told Dianne after John left, “get dressed in those clothes I bought you and go now.”

Since Dianne had started turning tricks, Mabel had purchased her an entire new wardrobe of provocative clothing, which went along with the job. But Dianne had a hard time wearing any of it.

“Let’s put it this way,” she said later, “even if I had Marilyn Monroe’s body, I would not have been caught dead in those clothes!”

The obvious questions one might ask looking back on all this would be: Why didn’t Dianne go to her father—or anyone else, for that matter—and explain what was happening? Why keep it all secret? Why not tell her brother? The police? Anyone who could possibly put an end to it.

“I tried always to be invisible…,” Dianne said. “You have to look at it from my point of view: there were other situations that occurred in the house…my father would not have believed me if I told him what my mother was doing.”

Experts claim this type of severe emotional and sexual abuse would have prevented most people in Dianne’s situation from believing she could report the abuse without suffering repercussions. Psychologists claim some of the main reasons why kids don’t report such savage sexual abuse are that they “may have been threatened by the offender regarding telling,” or “may not know it is wrong.” Some may even “assume responsibility.”

In Dianne’s case, she later said, she felt a bit of each. She felt, for example, if she ever went to someone and explained what was happening, she wouldn’t be believed.

One story Dianne later told that led her to believe her father, especially, would have written off her allegations against her mom as preposterous involved her dog. When she lived in Jamaica, her father used to make Dianne keep the hallway area of the house free from any dog hair. Dianne would sweep it often, but the dog would shed throughout the day. By the time her dad got home, the hallway was generally full of hair. If he found as much as one hair in the hallway, she claimed, he would beat her, accusing her of not having swept the hallway at all. How, she asked, could she have gone to that same man and reported what her mother was making her do? On top of that, she said her father was raping her. Would he want to get the authorities involved at the expense of perhaps exposing his own behavior?

“He used to bash my head up against the wall whenever he saw hair in that hallway. He’d grab me by the back of my hair—which was down to my knees then—and bash me against the wall, calling me all kinds of names: ‘slut, whore, bitch.’ I wasn’t going to talk to him about anything, even if I was dying.”

If all of what Dianne said was true, it was a situation where there was no end and no beginning for her. She was caught in the middle, just trying to survive as best she could. The move upstate, at least at first, seemed like a new beginning. Dianne was getting older. In a year or two, she could think about leaving home. The move up north would be the start of something different. Maybe things would change. Dianne didn’t see Mabel sending her 100 miles south to turn tricks with johns in the city. At the least, the prostitution would end.

Mabel had a friend, Marie Hess, a woman who had lived near them in Jamaica, but she had moved up north many years ago. When Mabel found herself without a vehicle and no one to help her move, she called Hess and asked for help.

“Mrs. Hess,” Dianne recalled later, “sent her husband down to Kew Gardens in his truck to help us.”

The move didn’t happen as quickly as Dianne might have hoped. In fact, it would be a few years before Dianne and Mabel relocated. Dianne was almost eighteen years old, she said, when they finally moved.

It was the summer of 1972. Tucked deep in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, Kauneonga Lake, Sullivan County, New York, seemed like a tranquil, quiet place for Dianne and Mabel to begin a new chapter. Arriving there, it was everything Dianne had pictured it would be: peaceful, serene, colorful, secluded. Dad couldn’t just pop over anymore and give her any problems; he would have to drive for hours. Mom couldn’t pull an address out of her smock and say, “Go here, Dianne, and do what he says.” In a way, her life of emotional imprisonment with her mom would continue, but it might be tolerable now that they had moved. Yet, inside the first few months of living next to Mrs. Hess on Kauneonga Lake, Dianne made an announcement that ultimately changed the entire dynamic of her and her mom’s relationship—and sparked a debate between them that would soon turn deadly.

4

When Odell, Thomas, Weddle, and McKee arrived at the Towanda state police barracks, Odell began thinking about how she was going to explain to her children and common-law husband, Robert Sauerstein, what she had left behind in Safford.

“What was going through my mind,” Odell recalled, “was I now have to brace my family for what is to come. I need to get back to my family, sit down, talk to my husband, and tell my children what occurred. I was going to tell them what had actually happened.”

Odell had never, in the nearly two decades she had been with Sauerstein, told him about the babies. “I wasn’t going to say anything to anybody until I had a chance to inform my family.”

The last thing Odell wanted to do was to sucker punch everyone. They were all at home, going about their day—school, work, television, bedtime—and now this ugly secret from decades ago was going to unearth itself. What if they turned on the nightly news and there was Odell being branded a baby killer?

“I wasn’t trying to protect my family,” Odell later insisted. “I was trying to prepare them. I knew what was going to come about—but I also knew the truth at that time of what had taken place. And I figured, as long as I tell the truth in this, I am going to be okay.”

Regardless of how Odell felt, Thomas and Weddle wanted answers. They had three dead babies found in boxes, wrapped in plastic garbage bags, and, obviously, packaged in a way that led them to believe that the person(s) who had stored them away didn’t want them to be found. They needed to know what happened. Their job, in effect, was to find that truth Odell was referring to—whatever it was. No one in law enforcement was pointing a finger at Odell; at this point, she was merely the likely person to begin questioning.

Thus far, Odell hadn’t been read her Miranda rights. There was no mention of the babies, or why, in fact, Thomas and Weddle wanted to talk to her. As far as Odell could determine, she was there to talk about “seized items discovered in a storage shed in Arizona.”

Weddle looked on as Thomas took out an audiotape recorder and set it in front of Odell on the table. Trooper McKee was there to observe.

It was around 3:00 P.M. when Thomas turned on the audio recorder and stated her name, credentials, and the person she and Weddle were preparing to interview.

After Odell recited her vitals—birthday, address, Social Security number—Thomas made something clear: “You are not under arrest. What we are doing here from Arizona is we are investigating a situation that has been discovered in the last week…and what’s happened is your name has come up as a possible lead in the case that we are working. Do you recall when and if you’ve ever lived in Arizona?”

“Yes…”

“Could you tell us about that?”

Odell said she had lived in Pima back in 1993 in a house with seven of her eight children: four daughters and three sons, ranging in age from four to twenty-three years old.

For the most part, Odell was “unemotional,” Thomas recalled. “In total denial of having any knowledge or involvement…. She appeared very calm and confident.”

“Was there a father or husband involved?” Thomas asked.

“Yes,” Odell said, “the father of my children, Robert Sauerstein.” Sauerstein had fathered five of Odell’s eight living children.

“The two of you are not married?”

“No.”

“Okay, are you still with Sauerstein?”

“Yes.”

“And may I ask how many children you still have at home?”

This was, of course, vitally important to Thomas and Weddle. Their entire investigation focused on children. There was a chance the mother of the three dead babies was somehow responsible for their demise.

Odell named her children, but she also mentioned a grandson who had been staying at the house.

Detective Weddle piped in, asking, “Who does that grandson belong to…?”

Odell said the child was her daughter’s.

“Does she live there also?” Thomas asked.

“No.”

“So, you just have custody of your grandson?”

“No,” Odell answered, “I don’t have custody. She just walked away from him. She left him with neighbors and they called me and asked me if they could bring him to me.”

The statement didn’t prove anything, but it did tell Weddle and Thomas there was some sort of friction in the home where the children and Odell were concerned. Even more important, the child had been with Odell for five years, not one or two weeks.

“She never came back for him?” Thomas asked, puzzled and, perhaps, a bit shocked. How in the hell does a mother abandon her child?

“No.” Then Odell talked about the contact she’d had with her other daughters throughout the years. Beyond the one daughter whose child Odell was looking after, and her oldest daughter, it was clear, at least from her point of view, she hadn’t any real problems with her older children.

“My grandson and my youngest son,” Odell recalled later, “are almost inseparable; they’re like brothers. I had my grandson since he was eight months old. I’m the only mother he’s ever known. Although I’ve shown him pictures of his mother, he’d shake his head and say, ‘No, you’re my mommy.’”

Later in the interview, Thomas sat back and said, “Okay,” taking a deep breath, trying to digest what amounted to a large family tree involving many different children and grandchildren, “when you lived in Pima, were there any other children involved in the home, or that you gave birth to, or anything like that?”

It was the first time Thomas or Weddle had broached—even remotely—the subject of babies and what might have happened to the three dead children. After all, this was the main purpose of the interview: to find out what happened to the babies who hadn’t lived—as far as anyone could tell thus far—for more than a few hours. The medical examiner was still trying to figure out how the children had died, but it was clear from early tests the babies were newborns.

“No,” Odell said stoically.

Thomas didn’t pressure Odell immediately. Instead, she did what any experienced investigator might have done: she began to float the opportunity for Odell to come up with an explanation. It was clear from the energy in the room—the aura of the conversation and the demeanor between the detectives and Odell—that there was an awfully large white elephant hanging around, and sooner or later, it was going to have to be talked about. For Thomas and Weddle, however, they had traveled nearly twenty-five hundred miles. They had all day and night to talk to Odell. There was no need to push the subject now. Once Odell invoked her right to remain silent and asked for a lawyer, the conversation was over. Up to now, though, according to Thomas, Weddle, and Trooper McKee, she was calm and, as far as they could tell, somewhat cooperative, and at no point mentioned that she wanted a lawyer.

“When you moved to Arizona,” Thomas asked, “where did you come from?”

“Pennsylvania,” Odell shot back, adding, “No, excuse me, Utah.”

“How long did you live in Utah?”

“About a year.”

“Where have you lived most of your life?”

“New York.”

For the next few moments, Thomas and Odell traded dialogue about Odell’s children and where they were born. Most of her children were born in New York—all in hospitals. Odell said Sauerstein had fathered the youngest of the children, and James Odell, a man she had been married to at one time, fathered her three oldest daughters: twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four years old.

“When you moved to Arizona, did you bring a lot of property with you for your home?” Thomas asked.

“I had a truckful.”

“Did it all go into your home?”

Weddle, sitting patiently, studying Odell’s body language, knew where Thomas was heading.

“No, no,” Odell said.

“Do you recall what you did with that property?”

“Had to put some of it into storage.”

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere, Weddle told himself.

“Where at?”

“I don’t remember his name,” Odell said, sipping from a cup of water. “He was the mayor of the town where we lived.”

“So, there was a storage shed there in Pima?”

“No, I think it was in Safford,” Odell said.

Indeed.

Thomas and Weddle did everything they could not to look at each other at that moment. All of their previous questions seemingly didn’t matter when compared to what was transpiring now. Getting Odell to admit she had rented a storage shed in Safford was important. She was offering significant, relevant information pertaining to the dead children.

“When was the last time you’ve been to the storage shed?” Thomas asked.

“Maybe…I think it was April ’93.”

“And you only took some of the things out?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know what happened to the rest of your things?”

“No.”

Thomas then changed the subject and asked if Odell was still legally married to James Odell. Odell said she hadn’t been married to James for over twenty years. She met Sauerstein in 1985 in New York and had been with him ever since.

“And since you’ve been with Mr. Sauerstein, you’ve had several children?”

“Yes.”

“Okay…no other children?”

“No.”

“Did you ever have any miscarriages or abortions?”

Odell thought about it for a minute. “I had miscarriages in New York.”

“Do you recall, one, two…?”

“I think it was three.”

Weddle and Thomas looked at each other. How convenient: three dead babies, three miscarriages.