Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (20 page)

While Richard remembered having to wash and wax floors, scrub toilets, paint and help his dad at work (which he didn’t mind), he said Dianne never had to do anything. She might have swept a floor once in a while, but she never did any physical, hard labor. Quite a different story from the one Odell would later tell of living under the sword of dear old dad—mopping, sweeping, and scrubbing floors on all fours—as if she were Cinderella.

According to Richard, any notion of his dad physically abusing Odell was “not true at all.”

“Dianne always had a problem: she couldn’t very well get along with people.” She had no social skills, he said. “There were some nice girls in the neighborhood, Dianne’s age, but Dianne just couldn’t get along with any of them…. My guess is, Dianne wanted to always be in charge and they kind of rebelled against that.”

Dianne Odell repeatedly painted Mabel as an evil person, laying much of the blame for what happened in her life on Mabel.

“I won’t totally disagree with that,” Richard said. “The one thing my mother was, was diabolical. Definitely! Meaning, some of the things she did—not alone, mind you—some of what she did, she did with Dianne and the other kids.”

One story Richard told explained perfectly this rather odd dynamic between Dianne and Mabel. It was nighttime in the Molina household when John came home from work stupidly drunk, staggering all over the place. Noticing this, Richard claimed, Mabel and Dianne waited for him to pass out. Once John was in a stupor, sleeping off his bender on the floor, Dianne and Mabel “cleaned him out,” as if he were a hobo on the street being rolled by two hoodlums.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

The following day, after John failed to realize he had been ripped off, and Dianne and Mabel felt they had gotten away with it, they laughed about it together, rejoicing in having made a successful “score.”

“Those were the kinds of things they did.”

Odell and Mabel, Richard went on to say, “bonded” in a strange way. They were “connected.” Odell, he added, “always had a way of making things up.” Whether it was something that had happened at school, on the way home from school, or with a kid in the neighborhood, she was always “concocting stories about how [people] mistreated her.”

She played the role of victim, according to Richard, congenially, absorbing sympathy people showered on her, learning how to use it to her advantage.

It was in junior high school that Dianne became known as “loose,” Richard opined. She started hanging out in other neighborhoods, he said, with other kids. In Queens, during the ’60s, neighborhood was everything to a kid. One stayed in his or her neighborhood or risked invading someone else’s property. Turf wars weren’t something invented in S. E. Hinton’s novel
The Outsiders;
it was a mortal sin to be caught in another neighborhood. Dianne, apparently, fell in with other kids, from different neighborhoods, and Richard recalled adamantly, “God knows, she would never open a book and do any homework…. I don’t recollect her doing it at all. It was in those years that she became close to my mother. She recognized that being the only other female in the house, that that’s who she should bond with the most.”

Richard joined the navy in 1965. Dianne was 11 years old. Soon after, about midway through his tour, Dianne and Mabel moved out of the Jamaica, Queens, house and into Kew Gardens. However, whereas Odell would tell stories of being forced into prostitution by Mabel and living under the reign of a dungeon master—not being able to leave the apartment and having to answer to Mabel’s every whim—Richard saw it differently.

Even more interesting was that Richard swore that his father stopped drinking around this same time.

“First of all, he had a very bad back; he’d had a heart attack, so it was kind of detrimental to his own health to continue drinking…. He may have had a drink of wine or something like that, but he wasn’t drinking anywhere near the way he used to.”

As for Odell’s claim that one of her half brothers had raped her when she was six years old, Richard said “absolutely not. No way. My father would have killed anyone who touched her. That was
his
little girl. As much as I dislike my half brothers, they weren’t that type of people. I’m not saying we were the
Leave It to Beaver
family, by any means. We had our hard times, but we saw them through.”

Halfway through Richard’s tour, he was allowed to go home for a visit. Dianne and Mabel were living in Kew Gardens by then, by themselves, having little contact with his dad.

“I went there to visit them when I came home for a break. I would talk to my mother, and Dianne was there, and they would fight and argue in front of me. She would accuse my mother of lying about things…and my mother would complain that Dianne didn’t want to go to school. She wanted to stay home all day. She didn’t want to work. And, you know, Dianne would be saying different: ‘No, she won’t let me get a job. I want to go to school and work part-time and you won’t let me because you want me to do the chores you should be doing in the house.’”

Typical teen angst. Dianne was rebelling against authority. Richard called it “nonsense.”

As for Mabel allegedly putting Odell to work on the street, Richard said it couldn’t have been possible.

“I don’t think my mother would even know how to start something like that…you know, set it up,” he said, laughing. “She wasn’t the brightest person in the world. Okay, if that were the case, I would have found out while I was there.”

If his sister was living this unspeakable life of a teenage prostitute, living in fear of Mabel, Richard believed she would have mentioned something—anything—to him when he visited.

“When I went to visit, you must understand, they are both looking at me as someone who they want to get on their side.”

Fighting for position, in other words:
“Mom did this. Richard, help me.”

“Dianne is not going to school. Richard, she doesn’t want to listen. Do something!”

“They were both telling me different tales, hoping I would take one side or the other. If what Dianne says today is true, regarding the prostitution, I would have heard that from her then. She would have pleaded: ‘Save me, help me, get me the hell out of here.’

“That was
not
the case.”

Furthermore, while he was there, Richard made a point of telling Odell, “If you’re not happy here with Mom, why don’t you go back to live with Pop?”

Later, Odell claimed the reason she didn’t want to go live with her dad was because he was abusive, both sexually and physically, and she feared for her life. Instead of indicating this to Richard while he was there, however, she told him, he claimed: “No, no, no! I’m not going back with Pop. He’s going to try to run my life. He’s going to try to rule me. He won’t give me any kind of freedom at all.”

Was this positive proof that Odell
wasn’t
involved in a life of prostitution and frequent abuse from her mom and dad, as she later claimed? Absolutely not. But it was at least another view of her life from someone who was there.

One of the stories Richard laughed at and said was totally outrageous was the story of Odell’s brother, along with John, setting her up and scaring her. Her father had told her to answer the door if anyone knocked. When she went to the door, Odell said, there was a man with a stocking over his head who came at her with a knife. After brandishing the knife and grabbing her by the throat, the man took off the stocking, as her dad looked on, and revealed himself to be one of her half brothers.

According to Richard, it was one more in a series of falsified stories that seemed to fuel Odell’s deep-seated hatred for her mother and father and allow her to, perhaps, live with the way her life had turned out. The half brother in question, Richard recalled, was a troublemaker. He had gotten into a few problems with the law and John Molina had bailed him out of jail, but “[he] would never,
never
condescend or demean himself to do something like that.”

Furthermore, “Why would my dad, who viewed Dianne as his princess, do that? He and my brother weren’t close in that way. They would have not conspired to do that. No way.”

As far as Odell’s children were concerned—even the dead children—Richard saw them as fixtures she could latch onto. Security blankets.

Could Mabel or Odell have murdered the children?

“I don’t see my mother killing babies,” Richard said. “She was a schemer, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t see her as a murderer. If there was no benefit, financially, for her, I just don’t see her doing it. If there was money involved, maybe she might entertain it; but if there was no monetary benefit to it, no way. Dianne, well, I don’t see her…Dianne, you see, was many things, but I don’t see her…I don’t think she’s the type to put her hands around a child’s neck and kill it. But in desperation, in order to save herself, she would say, ‘I have to get rid of this baby.’ I can see that!…She was definitely naive enough to think that she could pull off hiding three or four dead babies. With Mom dead, unable to defend herself, Dianne sees her as the easiest one to blame for
everything
. I can see her filling that role. It’s easy for her to blame all of her problems on my parents.”

When his dad died in 1981, Richard took care of all the arrangements, and buried the old man. Admittedly, he hadn’t spoken to anyone in the family since. Whereas Odell later said she was basically dragged down to her father’s funeral by Mabel, Richard didn’t remember the day like that.

“When my father died, I was the executor of the estate, in charge of selling off the house and fulfilling my father’s final wishes.” Those wishes, Richard continued, included selling the Jamaica, Queens, house and splitting the money among Mabel, Odell, and Richard. The other two children, who were from an earlier marriage of Mabel’s, were totally left out.

Richard phoned Mabel at the lake the day John died.

“Crocodile tears,” Richard insisted, came first. Odell and Mabel began crying as if they had loved John all their lives. But what happened next showed their true colors, he said. After they cried and “acted” as if they cared, Mabel abruptly stopped crying and asked about the money.

“At that time, I had hardened myself to their behavior. Through all the things that went on throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Dianne was the type of person who would not call my father for six, twelve, eighteen months. Then, suddenly, she’d call and start crying, saying she needed this or that, needed money. He would send her money or she would come and get it. My father, whenever Dianne needed help, would help her. She was his little girl.”

Not only did Odell and Mabel drive to Queens after hearing about John’s death, Richard said, but they “rushed down and left the kids in New York with someone, I don’t know who.”

Odell later said she took the children with her.

The first thing Richard noticed when he saw his sister was the size of her stomach. “What are you doing?” he asked, looking at Odell, her stomach bulging out of her dress. She looked uncomfortable and overweight.

“Well,” Odell said, “Dad’s dead and I want to be here to help.”

“To what end?” Richard wanted to know. “You don’t see him for eighteen to twenty months at a time and
now
you want to help? Why is it imperative that you see him now? There’s no reason for you to be here! It’s going to be a small, quiet thing. Then he’ll be buried.”

“Well…well, I want to be here because, well, because…I want to pick some things up.”

With that, Richard thought,
Yeah, I know why you’re here: you’re trying to figure out what you can scam.

Mabel, sitting, listening, then chimed in: “What about the will, Richard? Where’s the will?”

“I’m going to take care of the estate. Don’t worry, Ma, you’ll get yours.”

Richard then explained what the will stipulated.

“They were only interested in the money. They were getting a third—and a third of
anything
was a lot to them.”

“Dianne, you’re pregnant, you need to take care of yourself. I’ll take care of everything. You and Ma will get your money, don’t worry. Go home.”

Richard was devastated by his father’s death. He was up to his neck in making funeral arrangements, paperwork, calling people, not to mention the emotional toll of actually burying him. He said he didn’t need any more stress brought on by his sister and mother beating him up for money when his dad’s corpse wasn’t even in the ground yet.

Richard finally said, “Here’s the deal: you don’t have to worry yourselves about getting anything that’s coming to you.” He was talking to both Mabel and Odell as they sat, looking at him. As he spoke, he showed them the will. “I’ll sell the house and send you a check. That’s his last will and testament. I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t agree with it, but I am going to fulfill his final wishes.”

After Richard finished, Mabel and Odell, apparently confident Richard would keep his word, left. They did not, Richard insisted, go to the funeral or wake. They clearly had heard what they wanted and had driven back up to the lake the same day.

“After the funeral, I sold the house, cut them their checks, and, knowing they both had problems, wrote them off and never heard from them again.”

Odell later said she lost touch with Richard over the years because “for one reason, he can’t stand me. He thinks the sun rose and set in my father’s eyes and that he would believe my father could do no wrong. He had no clue about what went on after he left [to go into the navy]….”

Richard lives today near the same neighborhood in Queens where he grew up. He has been married for decades and has several children, all of whom speak very highly of his character, as a man, husband, father. Richard, incidentally, has never been in any trouble and served his country in the navy with honors.

1

AS ODELL RESTED her head against the window in the backseat of BCI investigator Robert Lane’s unmarked cruiser, en route from Waverly to Liberty, she perhaps didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation. She was going to be booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a jail cell, where she would sit until she was arraigned.

Investigator Lane later said Odell slept that morning during much of the ride. Odell, however, said she was faking it.

“No, they
thought
I was sleeping!” She had her eyes closed, but she was listening to what Lane was saying to the cop he took along for the ride, sort of eavesdropping on the conversation she believed they were having about her in whispers. “There was a part of me that raged,” Odell explained, “because, even from the very beginning, in 1972, I wanted to make my father pay for what he did to me, and I got shamed out of it by my mother.”

Among other things, it was that rage fueling her desire to stay awake.

Nevertheless, Odell was on her way to jail, possibly even prison—all for something, she maintained, she didn’t do. Furthermore, she honestly believed the entire process was some sort of vendetta Steve Lungen had conspired against her because he couldn’t prosecute her for the death of Baby Doe in 1989.

“Steve Lungen,” Odell said, “doesn’t like to lose. And he couldn’t prosecute me in 1989—but he was
definitely
going to find a way to do it this time.”

This was a ridiculous theory, considering the circumstances surrounding how the babies were found and what Odell had told police during the three days in which they interviewed her. She had lied on several occasions when she had the opportunity to tell the truth about what she later claimed happened—that her mom had killed the children. But she didn’t. Moreover, she had signed a statement implicating herself in the deaths of the children. When Steve Lungen first heard about the babies found in Arizona, he had a hard time recalling the 1989 case related to Odell.

All the same, Odell claimed that as they drove to Liberty that morning she overheard Investigator Lane, on numerous occasions, talking about how the “Arizona authorities were going to file charges against her if they [the BCI] couldn’t come up with anything to hold her there.”

Again, this later memory of that morning was in stark contrast with the actual facts of the case. Odell had already made an admission of guilt by the time she took off for Liberty with Lane. In addition, why would Lane, or anyone else, say something like that at that point? The BCI and Lungen didn’t need any more evidence to prosecute. She had given them enough herself already.

Lane, who later denied having said anything about the case during the car ride with Odell, had been an investigator with the BCI for the past four years, with the NYSP since 1984. He spoke with candor and integrity. Other cops respected him. He had been one of Scileppi’s top investigators since joining the BCI. With his slicked-back black hair, shiny suit, and expensive tie, he embodied, perhaps, the image of what many might view as a television cop: flashy, crass, direct. But his record spoke for itself. Lane was a clean cop all the way. He had made countless arrests that had led to convictions. There was nothing Hollywood about Robert Lane and his determination to put criminals behind bars with good, solid evidence.

In the early-morning hours of May 20, Lane’s job was to transport Odell back to Liberty so she could be processed. The hard part was over; the case, seemingly, a slam dunk. Odell had confessed. For Lane, it was a matter of paperwork and processing.

Or was it?

They arrived in Liberty, Lane recalled, at 5:40
A.M
. Investigator Linda Paul was waiting at the station for them and greeted Odell and Lane as they entered the building. Incidentally, Odell later said Linda Paul rode with her and Lane from Waverly to Liberty; so her memory of that day, even of the most basic facts, was cloudy at best.

“Do you need to use the bathroom, Miss Odell?” Paul asked cordially upon greeting Odell.

“Yes, that would be nice.”

When Odell returned, Lane led her into the interview suite at the end of a long hallway. As she sat, sipping coffee, Lane went back to his office, he later said, to “prepare the accusatory instruments charging her with murder second.”

About a half hour later, Lane and Paul walked into the room where Odell was waiting.

“Miss Odell,” Lane explained, handing her copies of the accusatory instruments, “you’re being charged with three counts of murder in the second degree.”

She took a brief look at the paperwork. “Well, I expected that I would be charged with something like this.”

Odell seemed unaffected by the mere significance of what was transpiring, as if she still expected to get out of it somehow. The weight, perhaps, of what was actually happening had not yet settled on her. Maybe she thought she still could, with the right words, explain everything away. Perhaps she was in shock? Who knows?

In any event, Lane had read the statement Streever and Scileppi had prepared the previous night, so he was familiar with the particulars of the case.

While sitting across from Odell at the table in the interview room as Odell went through the paperwork, Lane began shaking his head.

“What is it?” Odell asked.

“I just find it unbelievable that you do not know what the sex of the infants were and who the fathers were? You must know the father of the children, or the fathers of the children?”

For a brief period, Odell and Lane discussed who the fathers “could” possibly be. Odell kept changing her mind. She couldn’t recall if one man, whom she described as a “poultry inspector,” was the father of Baby Number One or Baby Number Two.

“The father of the first child,” she said, “is the brother of my ex-husband.”

Eventually Lane began mapping out the brief history of each child on a piece of paper, who the fathers might be, and what year each child had been born and died. It was hard, because Odell couldn’t remember exact dates, times, or sexes of the children. Selective memory, perhaps. As for Baby Doe, Odell said, as Lane noted it on his map, that child was fathered by a “young kid.” Again, here was one more opportunity for Odell to implicate her father and say that he had raped her and fathered the child, but she didn’t. As for the next baby, Baby Number One (1982), Odell claimed it was her brother-in-law’s child. Baby Number Two had been, according to her, fathered by a “washing-machine guy.” Baby Number Three had been fathered by a “poultry inspector…David something,” she finally said, but couldn’t recall his last name.

The man’s name, David Dandignac, hadn’t resonated with Odell as she sat talking to Lane on May 20, but Dandignac later would remember his relationship with Odell quite remarkably.

Dandignac wasn’t just some common poultry inspector, as one might have gathered from what Odell said; he worked for the Department of Agriculture as a poultry
grader
, whose job it was to make sure New York residents could depend on the Grade A insignia slapped on the front of turkey packaging. He had also worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture for sixteen years. In 2003, when members of the BCI caught up with him, Dandignac was married for a second time, had two boys from a previous marriage, and was living with his wife and her children, making him, in effect, a father of five.

Dandignac met Odell when he lived on White Lake next door to where she and Mabel and the three kids from her marriage to James Odell had lived. It was 1983. At twenty-three years old, seven years younger than Odell, he was inspecting eggs at the time for the state of New York. They struck up a friendship one day, he explained, that soon turned into an intimate relationship.

“We just started talking now and then and would visit on occasion or something, and I would stop over….”

At some point during the spring of 1984, after being friends, they became “romantically involved.” As the affair heated up, living next door to Odell wouldn’t suffice—by June of that same year, Dandignac said, he was living with Odell, Mabel, and the kids inside their bungalow on the lake.

Three months later, however, in August, “things started to not go well and we just didn’t…we just didn’t mesh well as a…as a couple, or as a family.”

Dandignac had just turned twenty-four years old. Odell was thirty. He was doing well at work and saw the opportunity for his future. Odell was working as a secretary and having a tough time making ends meet.

Odell said she never really wanted anything more from Dandignac than to be “friends with benefits.” Again, she claimed, it was Mabel who had pushed for the relationship.

“David was a very, very nice guy,” Odell recalled. “I had nothing against David, ever. I liked him as a friend. When I sent David away, it was to make sure he was not going to be plundered by my mother.”

It was Mabel, Odell added, who had asked Dandignac to move in (although he later recalled it differently).

“My mother said to him one day, ‘You can move in here with us….’ And I looked at her and said to David, ‘Could you give us a minute?’”

A private, whispered talk with Mabel did nothing. Dandignac was moving in and that was the end of it. The problem for Odell was not that he wasn’t a nice person, or that she didn’t trust him—she just wasn’t attracted to him. He lived right near their bungalow. She could see him anytime she wanted. She’d had sex with the guy. It didn’t mean she wanted to marry him—or have his child.

“Actually, I would have preferred not to see him at all. It’s not that I didn’t like him. I just wasn’t
interested
in him. He was a friend when I [lived down the road], and when I left there, I assumed the friendship would stay there. Not once did I ever consider he would visit my mother and, better yet, be in my house when I came home from work.”

After it was clear they didn’t, as Dandignac later put it, “mesh well,” instead of moving out of the house, he agreed to stay until he could find and afford a place of his own. All the same, they “slept in the same bed, but nothing,” he said, “was happening.” They weren’t having sex.

By September, Odell went to Dandignac and said, “Let’s just end the relationship…. You need to move out.”

He didn’t argue.

With little money of his own, Dandignac, who was paying part of Odell and Mabel’s rent, talked Odell into allowing him to move into a different section of the house. It was spacey enough for them all. He could sleep in the front room, where the kids had been sleeping, and the kids could move into Odell’s room.

Through October, November, and December 1984, he stayed in another room, all the while proclaiming that he was going to move as soon as he had enough money. But by the time January 1985 came around, he was still there. There were no hard feelings to speak of, Dandignac said later. He and Odell were finished. Furthermore, he got along well with Mabel, Odell, and the kids. He said Mabel was a normal old person. There was nothing strange about her. She could be overbearing, sure, but he liked her.

Nonetheless, there was something else between Dandignac and Odell that wasn’t being discussed—a secret, perhaps, that lingered as fall turned to winter and it became more apparent he was going to have to leave as soon as possible.

Back in July, Odell had gone to Dandignac and told him she had missed her period.

“I’m pregnant,” he later remembered Odell saying.

“What?” he responded.
“Pregnant?”
He was in his twenties. He had worked hard. Gone to college. He was planning a career in agriculture.

“Do you want me to get an abortion?” Odell asked.

“I don’t know…. I can’t give you an answer. I don’t know what to do.”

Dandignac was confused. No one wanted to end a life with one breath and a simple yes to an abortion. It had to be thought out. Planned. Time would tell.

A while went by and David decided, he said later, that he wanted Odell to have the child. They could work it all out. He’d support the child, even if she didn’t want to be involved romantically.

Months went by. It was well into January 1985 and the matter of whether Odell would get an abortion or have the child hadn’t been resolved. It reality, though, it was too late, anyway. She was, by January 1985, seven months pregnant. No doctor would grant her an abortion at such a late stage. Still, Dandignac was behind having the child and kept insisting he’d support her. Whenever they would discuss his moving out of the house, he’d assure Odell, “I will give you money toward the child.”

“I don’t want it,” Odell said one day, Dandignac recalled later.

“You don’t want my money?”

“No! I don’t want you paying me any money.”

Odell wanted to raise the child herself, she said later. “It wasn’t that I wanted to
deny
him that child,” she recalled. “I was trying to get him out of the house to stand on his own…. What I was afraid was going to happen is, if I accepted money from him, then he would end up staying. And if he stayed there, my mother would, you know, the dollar signs would have just popped right up in her eyes…and she would have thought, ‘Even if they are not sharing the same bedroom together, with the baby coming, he’s going to want to do everything in his power.’ She’s going to need this and that…and we’re going to be able to do this and that…. I could hear it going over and over in my head because I had heard it all before.”

Odell, then, wasn’t hiding the pregnancy from Mabel, as she later told police she would rather chop off one of her arms than tell Mabel she was pregnant.

During the time she was pregnant, Dandignac said later, he never knew of a time where she had told Mabel about it. “She was fairly stocky,” he added, explaining how Odell looked when she wasn’t pregnant, “large, very large-boned.”

They had talked about adoption as time went on, but again, a particular plan was never resolved or put in motion. The subjects of abortion, adoption, and Dandignac financially taking care of Odell and the child were always left in limbo.

By late January 1985, however, Dandignac was finished talking. He moved to Monticello. Any decision about the baby would fall now on Odell’s shoulders. He’d done all he could.