Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (17 page)

By April 1989, Odell could add one more problem to what was now a growing list: how to explain to her family—who knew nothing about Baby Doe—that she’d had a stillborn child when she was in her late teens and had carried the fetus around with her in a suitcase for nearly seventeen years? She didn’t even broach the idea of explaining the additional three dead babies she had stored in the house in boxes. But since the cops had brought Baby Doe to light, there was a good chance everyone in the family knew about it.

When Odell returned from the police station after being interviewed the first time, she said later, Sauerstein went to her and asked, “What the hell is going on here? You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”

The cops had never spoken to Sauerstein. He knew there was a dead baby involved, but he had no idea to the extent of Odell’s involvement.

“No,” Odell said when Sauerstein asked her if she knew what was going on.

Roy Streever and his partner returned later that same week to ask Odell more questions. When they left, Sauerstein asked Odell again what the problem was.

“They were just following up on some things, Robert. It’s nothing.”

Subsequently the subject of Baby Doe was then dropped, according to Odell. No one in the house, at the time, save for Mabel, really knew what happened.

“You know,” Odell said later, “I could
not
tell Robert with my mother there. Everybody does not understand the tenuous situation I lived with every day.”

For now, she was safe. The case had never made the newspapers, and Odell was never brought up on charges. The cops had come, asked a few questions, and closed the case.

“Actually,” Odell said, “it wasn’t easy to lie to Robert. It was more…of, now I have five kids…and God forbid if I do something out of the way, or I go against her in any way, I am going to have five children at risk. Not three. Not two. But five! And she already hated Robert with a passion. So she hated his children as well.”

Sauerstein never pressured Odell. He went about his business of trying to take care of five kids, a “wife” and “mother-in-law.”

“I’m sure he had questions, and I’m certain he always knew there was something. Because he would always ask me, ‘What does she have on you? What is she holding over you?’”

Brendon Sauerstein, Odell’s sixth living child, tenth overall, was born on August 30, 1989. Like each child she had given birth to previously when there was a man in her life, Brendon was born at a hospital, Wayne Memorial, in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. In July 1990, nearly a year after Brendon was born, it became apparent the construction business Sauerstein was involved in was heading for a collapse. The late ’80s and early ’90s weren’t exactly peak periods for construction in and around Pennsylvania. Work was hard to come by. Odell was home, taking care of the children, raising the kids with her mom lurking and creeping around the house, not sure of what she was going to do next. According to Odell later, this was when she truly began living in a constant state of fear. If her mom had killed three of her kids already, as Odell so assertively claimed later, what would stop her from killing another?

So, Odell and Sauerstein faced a decision: look for work in the immediate area, or head west, where Robert had heard he could find work.

“There was no way I was moving back to New York, not under any circumstances,” Odell said later.

Odell and Sauerstein sat down one day and talked about moving. What did they have, really, in Pennsylvania? Thus, with nothing standing in their way, they decided to move. Not just to Scranton or Wilkes-Barre, larger towns in the same state, but all the way across country.

4

Steve Lungen had made it clear to the PSP, he said later, that they were not “to make any more decisions. We are making all the decisions now. It’s not your case.”

That said, McKee had done the right thing when he called Scileppi with news of Odell’s wanting to get away from the media.

“You have to picture the situation,” Scileppi recalled. “Odell decided to force our hand.”

After he spoke to McKee and found out Odell was going to be driving herself to the Towanda barracks, Scileppi called “his people” in New York and explained what was going on. Several investigators from the BCI in Liberty were then dispatched to drive to Towanda and meet Scileppi and Lungen. They would all meet at Towanda, interview Odell, and see what came of it.

But as Scileppi and Lungen approached Towanda, about an hour outside of town, Scileppi received another call from McKee, who was now at the Towanda barracks with Odell. The media, sensing something was going on, had started calling Towanda for information.

“Unbeknownst to us,” Lungen said, “this was a huge story in Arizona and out west. We had no idea how big it was or how big it was about to become.”

Seeing they were an hour or so outside of Towanda, Scileppi asked McKee if there was a closer location where they could meet with Odell.

“Well, I grew up around Waverly, New York,” McKee said. “I’m familiar with that location. How ’bout Waverly?”

“Waverly’s fine with us,” Scileppi said. He couldn’t show his excitement—Waverly being in New York—but one would have to imagine that upon hearing where they were possibly going to meet, Scileppi was elated.

McKee said, “Hold on.” Scileppi heard McKee take the phone from his ear and ask Odell, who was standing next to him, “Listen, they’re still an hour outside of Towanda…. We want to expedite this matter quickly. Would you mind driving to Waverly, New York, and meeting them?”

“Sure,” Scileppi heard Odell say.

No sooner had they hung up, did Odell get in her car and follow McKee to Waverly.

“Extradition by your own vehicle,” Investigator Paul Hans, who was riding with Lungen, said later, laughing.

Scileppi and Lungen agreed. Odell literally was handing herself over to them, in their own jurisdiction. Not only had she agreed to talk, but she was driving herself to some Andy Griffith police precinct in Waverly in what was, at least from a prosecutor’s standpoint, a “too good to be true” situation.

“We were in a jam,” Lungen said later. “She’s the only one who knows what happened to those babies.”

Truth be told, Odell was the only person who could tighten (or loosen) the noose around her neck—and she was more than willing to continue to talk about the events. Some suggested later that she
needed
to talk—to get it all “off her chest—” that the guilt, perhaps, had been eating away at her for decades and was too much to take. She already had opened a vein talking to Weddle and Thomas and it perhaps felt liberating. Why not finish what she had started?

According to Odell, she felt she hadn’t done anything criminal and wanted to explain herself. She believed she’d sit and talk for a few hours and the matter, like it had in 1989, would go away.

From where Lungen sat, however, it wasn’t a case of manslaughter, stillborn babies, or a simple explanation. One child, maybe. Two, well, it was suspect. But three, or four, counting Baby Doe? There was no way that that many babies could end up dead without something criminal having taken place. It was impossible.

Still, Lungen and Scileppi faced a terrible quandary heading to Waverly: they hadn’t heard the tapes that Detectives Thomas and Weddle had made with Odell on May 17 and 18; thus, they had no idea how to question Odell.

“As professionals,” Lungen recalled, “you really don’t want to conduct an interview with a suspect until you have all the details. We were pushed into this. What if we interviewed her and she needed to be arrested? We couldn’t arrest her in Pennsylvania; she would have to be extradited back to New York. There was a whole host of legal issues regarding dealing with her in Pennsylvania…. And all of a sudden, we find out that she’s
willing
to drive to New York and meet us at a little police station?”

But it wasn’t time to celebrate. In effect, Lungen and Scileppi were forced to prepare for an interview with a subject they knew very little about.

“In New York, the law is different than in any other state,” Lungen explained. “In New York, with respect to right to counsel, if she exercises her right to counsel, her ability to waive that right is essentially restricted. She can’t. In other states, you can change your mind. But if she’s deemed to be in custody, she
can’t
change her mind. The only way she can waive counsel is in the presence of counsel. Which would mean arrest, appointment of lawyer…no one would let us talk to her.”

The cards were stacked against them, suffice it to say if Odell had chosen to bring a lawyer with her—but she hadn’t. She was alone. She had even left Sauerstein behind.

“If she would have gotten an attorney,” Lungen said, “it would have had a major impact on our ability to investigate. So we were in a rush—just like Odell was in a rush to get away from the media—to try to meet with her before any of that happened.”

Essentially, a twenty-five-year-old cold case became a race.

“We thought the media would turn into our worst nightmare,” Lungen added, “and that they would screw up the investigation. They were camped on her doorstep. We were thinking they were going to force everything…force it to go the wrong way. But as it turned out, the media pressure was one of the best things that ever happened in this case for us.”

With Odell sitting, waiting in Waverly, willing to talk, the legal extradition issues had, in effect, resolved themselves. It was one less hassle Scileppi and Lungen had to worry about going into the interview. Now they could focus on finding out the facts of the case, which, they both said later, was all that concerned them.

As they walked into the Waverly station, they discussed how to go about the interview. “What should I begin with, Steve?” Scileppi wanted to know.

“Just go in and see what she’ll tell us.”

Because Lungen ultimately would be the lead prosecutor, if the case ever went to trial, he couldn’t be present for the interview. If he had, he effectively would make himself a witness.

So Lungen decided to work in the background, coaching Scileppi on legal issues as questions came up.

“Just begin by talking to her and see what happens from there.”

Dressed in his usual attire—blue suit, silk tie, white shirt—Scileppi presented himself as a clean-cut cop. Calming in his demeanor, he spoke with a soft Queens, New “Yok,” accent.

Any experienced cop will admit that building a rapport with a suspect is key to getting that person to open up during an interview. Scileppi didn’t know much about Odell as he prepared to head into the room where she sat waiting. But as luck would have it, he had grown up not too far from the neighborhood where Odell had spent a better part of her childhood. Would this seemingly inconsequential connection between them end up being a building block for a foundation that, by the end of the day, would send Odell to jail for the first time in her life?

Scileppi, fixing his tie, brushing the shoulders of his jacket with his hand, was about to find out as he approached the door to where Odell waited.

1

DURING THE SUMMER of 1990, Odell made contact with her former sister-in-law, who had lived in Ogden, Utah, for years. “Robert had lost his job in Pennsylvania,” Odell recalled. “There really wasn’t anything holding us in New York. There was work out west for Robert.”

Sauerstein and Odell were in need of income. Once again, Odell was pregnant—the eleventh time. She was thirty-eight years old.

Ogden, the sixth largest city in Utah, offers some of the most dazzling landscape in the country. The Rocky Mountains, seemingly kissing the clouds, with their snowcapped peaks as sharp and defined as beach coral, surround a gravelly base of bright green valleys and two-lane roadways that ostensibly go on forever. Just thirty-five miles north of Salt Lake City, Ogden is, surprisingly, only twenty-seven square miles, yet its elevation rises between four thousand and five thousand feet above sea level. Known for its striking outdoor scenery, one can expect to see wildlife that might fill the pages of
National Geographic
magazine: deer, moose, elks, ducks, geese, swans, even mountain lions. When Americans think of Utah today, though, most associate it with the Mormon community, which reportedly makes up about 70 percent of the population.

For Odell and Sauerstein, Ogden didn’t offer much, but it did present a new outlook, a different way of life, not to mention fresh surroundings that spoke of rejuvenation and clarity. One couldn’t wake up in the morning in Ogden and believe there wasn’t some sort of Higher Power calling the shots. The mere aesthetics of the land alone were enough to make a believer out of even the most ardent skeptic.

Mabel hadn’t made the cross-country trip. Not that Odell had left her behind, but she and Sauerstein wanted to get settled first. So, about a month after they found a place, enrolled the kids in school, and Sauerstein began working, Mabel took a train and subsequently moved into the trailer Odell and Sauerstein were now calling home.

The cache of items Odell had brought with her to Ogden included everything she owned. No one, save for maybe Mabel, knew it, but inside the U-Haul, which she and Sauerstein had packed as tight as cord-wood and trekked west, were the three dead babies, carefully packaged inside three separate boxes.

By January 1991, Odell had given birth to her eleventh child, seventh living child.
Toby
Sauerstein, a healthy eight-pound eleven-ounce baby boy with dark eyes, was born at Saint Benedict’s Hospital in Ogden. Sauerstein was there again for the birth.

Alice, Odell’s oldest daughter at thirteen, had not adjusted well to life in Mormon country. But she, like the rest of the children, did the best she could to accept her new lifestyle. In June 1991, merely days after Alice had turned thirteen, she was the victim of an alleged statutory rape by someone, Odell said later, Alice had been dating.

“We reported the rape to the police out there, or whatever they are called,” Odell recalled.

As one might expect, the rape had frightened Alice and the family. One might think that with all the Christianity in the air out there, one would be a bit more respectful of their fellow human beings. But it hadn’t turned out that way. As Odell and Sauerstein—not to mention Alice—learned, sexual abusers know no bounds.

“I wanted to—and would have—killed the guy,” Robert Sauerstein said later.

“A month later, I took Alice and got out of there,” Odell explained.

It wasn’t a hard sell. The rape and the culture had weighed heavily on everyone. With Odell, Sauerstein, Mabel, and the seven kids living in a trailer, to say they were crowded would be an understatement—they lived on top of each other.

“The kids slept in the bedroom with me. Absolutely, it was cramped,” Odell said. Adjusting to Mormon life was also rough. “They preach to you about one thing and they are absolutely devilish in the other half of their lives.”

Pima, Arizona, was one thousand miles away, a fifteen-hour drive, but the climate was much warmer during winter months and there seemed to be a construction boom taking place in the region. It was July 1991. Odell and Sauerstein had been in Ogden about a year—a year too long. So, they packed it in and headed south to Pima.

When Odell arrived, she immediately applied for food stamps. She and Sauerstein moved into a motel in town while Mabel took the children and moved into an efficiency apartment nearby. Odell kept Toby, Brendon, and Adam with her in the motel, while her mom took the girls, Clarissa, Doris, Maryann, and Alice. Certainly, in some respects, Doris, Maryann, and Alice could fend for themselves; they were between ten and thirteen years old. But Clarissa was only five. If Odell was worried about the welfare of her children around Mabel, especially Sauerstein’s children, why would she allow Mabel to care for them until she could find a place big enough for all of them?

“I was trying to find a place for my mother by herself to put a separation between us,” Odell said. “Not make her think I wanted her to leave, because I knew if I told her flat out that I wanted her to leave, it was going to be devastating and somebody was going to end up getting hurt. But I wanted her to be separate from the rest of us. But it never quite happened. Every time I would get her—even out there when we found housing—there was a trailer right next to the house we were living in, she took the trailer and we took the house next door, and she would always have one or two of the kids staying with her there. So I was never able to pull away from that and get the kids completely away from her…. I knew every day, looking in her face, into her eyes, the threat was there of hurting the children or taking them away, doing something unspeakable.”

Either way, after they arrived in late summer 1991, living arrangements in Pima didn’t change.

Not long after settling down, with nowhere to store their worldly possessions, Odell and Sauerstein rented a self-storage unit at a facility in Safford. They chose two units big enough to hold most of the belongings that wouldn’t fit in the motel room—including the three boxes of dead babies. The babies had been dead now for about ten years. The boxes were starting to show signs of their age, appearing oily and pungent from the body fluids leaking from the babies. But there they sat, tucked inside a self-storage unit, among old family photos, record albums, an old computer, cards, and letters. Just one more piece of Odell’s history packed away.

No sooner had they gotten established in Pima, did Odell have another announcement to make. Yes, she was pregnant once again. Yet, this child, too—everyone was about to learn—would meet an early death.

2

Odell seemed quiet and composed as she sat in Waverly at 5:45
P.M
. on May 19, 2003, waiting for BCI senior investigator Thomas Scileppi. As she sipped water from a white Styrofoam cup, she felt she was doing the right thing. She wanted to clear up the matter of the three dead babies, explain what had happened, and move on with her life. The babies were secrets she had kept buried in her soul for over twenty years. It was time to come clean.

But as the interview got under way, Odell claimed later, she realized immediately it wasn’t going to be as easy as telling the truth.

“When they walked in to interview me,” Odell said, “they had the 1989 case in their hands,” referring to Baby Doe. According to her, Scileppi was “waving” the case in front of her face, as if to say, “We know about the first baby!”

Scileppi later disagreed with Odell’s recollection. Of course, they had a look at the 1989 case. Cops need to know everything they can about a suspect before an interview. Odell had given birth to a child in 1972 and it, too, ended up dead. They were investigating the deaths of three additional children she had possibly given birth to who had turned up dead. Why wouldn’t they want to talk to her about the 1989 case?

But that wasn’t Odell’s worry, she insisted—that they were flaunting the 1989 case in front of her. Her major concern, at least initially, was that they knew her father had beaten her and essentially killed the child. It was there in her statement.

“Knowing that,” she said, “why didn’t they seek some kind of professional help for me? Why didn’t they have somebody else, who had a little more compassion, talk to me? They came in with the idea they were going to put away this mass murderer.”

Regarding the early part of the interview, Steve Lungen later said: “She was cooperative. She spoke freely, somewhat guarded about information she was going to give. She was not under duress or in custody…. She drove herself there. She expected the New York State Police to be there and she agreed to talk….”

If there had been one dead child, well, it wouldn’t have been an issue. Two? Okay, something might be going on. But four? Lungen and his team were investigating three homicides on top of another death, all possibly connected to the same woman. It was not about getting a shrink in to see her. That was not their obligation, Lungen said. It was about finding out the facts surrounding the deaths of three children.

Because he had been involved in the 1989 case, Roy Streever was called in to assist Scileppi. Together they would see if they could get to the bottom of what had happened to the three babies and figure out if Lungen had a case to pursue.

“I wouldn’t say she looked scared,” Scileppi said, recalling seeing Odell for the first time. “I would say she looked depressed, concerned. For the first hour and a half, I was just getting to know her. Nothing was said about the babies. I had to feel her out and build a rapport, so I could figure out how to take a shot. How to start this.”

Trooper McKee had been there waiting, but he didn’t stick around long after Scileppi and Lungen arrived.

“She was very receptive,” Lungen said. “Very at ease to being talked to. And she’s not someone you have to pull words out of. Very verbal. Very talkative.”

By the time Scileppi and Streever were prepared to talk to Odell, Lungen had spoken to the pathologist in Arizona, and had been given a preliminary report regarding the autopsies on the three babies.

“We found out the babies were full-term,” Lungen said, “but they couldn’t tell us if they were born alive or not. Still, they were full-term babies, they
weren’t
premature, and there didn’t appear to be any initial appearance of any kind of disease.”

The idea was to “arm” Scileppi, Lungen added, with some sort of information to talk about with Odell. This would be an entirely different interview from the two Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle had conducted previously. It would be more refined and detailed. There would come a time when Scileppi wanted answers from Odell.

“The key to me, at the time,” Lungen said, “was only one question: if we can’t prove the babies breathed life, we can’t prove they were murdered.”

It was that simple. Were the children murdered or left to die? Big difference in the eyes of the law. Interestingly enough, there was only one person who could provide those answers.

For a time, Scileppi and Odell spoke about inconsequential theatrics that make up everyday life: where she grew up, background, family. After an hour or so of chitchat, Scileppi stepped out of the room to confer with Lungen about where to take the interview next.

“We need to establish that the three babies were alive. Finding three babies was great, but if we can’t establish that, at some point, the babies were alive…that’s the only question,” Lungen told Scileppi.

Scileppi shook his head. He understood. If Odell said they were stillborn and maintained that fact, there was no case. In other words, all she had to do was say the children were stillborn and, essentially, the case was over.

Trooper Rick Sauer, who had made the original call to Lungen on Sunday night regarding Odell and the three babies, had been on hand for much of the early part of the interview. He sat and listened while Scileppi asked most of the questions. Scileppi later said Odell knew exactly why she was there and had even expressed interest in talking the situation through. Sauer later backed it up.

“She was very open to participating in the interview,” Scileppi remembered.

Furthermore, Odell was advised several times that she wasn’t under arrest or in custody. She was free, in fact, to leave at any time. Additionally, on numerous occasions, Scileppi, Streever, and Sauer offered Odell food and drink. Anytime she needed to excuse herself to use the bathroom, Scileppi said, she was free to do so. It wasn’t like she had been thrown into a closet-size room with a light perched on her face, and cops swarming around her like CIA interrogators. It was relaxed, laid-back. They were, Scileppi said, just talking.

After they went through Odell’s life—where she lived, how old her children were, and how many lovers she’d had throughout the years—Scileppi brought up the point that out of her twelve children, eight of which had been born in hospitals, four had not. Out of the eight born in hospitals, all had lived. The other four were dead. Those circumstances alone, Scileppi urged, needed further explanation.

Several times throughout the interview, Odell would stop the conversation and ask, “What is going to happen to me?”

“We don’t know what’s going to happen to you, Dianne,” Scileppi said more than once. “Why would you ask a question like that?”

Odell shrugged.

“Let me ask you this, then,” Scileppi said after Odell continually badgered him about what was going to happen to her. “What do you
think
should happen to you?”

Odell looked down at the table, fidgeting with a tissue in her hand. The tea-bag-colored puffiness under her eyes seemed like an indication of some sort of private inner battle she had waged for the past two decades. She was obviously debating what she wanted to say. Finally, looking up at Scileppi, she said, “I should probably go to jail.”

“For what, Dianne? Why would you say that?”

Odell didn’t answer. But it was apparent, Scileppi said later, that “she clearly was feeling guilty of things or expressing guilt of things….”

At times, Odell would break down and sob, even tremble, Scileppi recalled. But she would ultimately talk her way through it and compose herself.