Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (23 page)

One of the boxes Maloney collected had a particular waxy, dark-colored character to it; he described it later as a “distinct odor.” The entire box had been saturated in some sort of liquid, which had since dried. Looking at it, Maloney knew the odor, accompanied by the waxy, dark color of the box, could mean only one thing: decomposition. One of the babies had decomposed inside the box and leaked bodily fluids, saturating the cardboard.

After a long trip back home, Maloney brought the remains of the children to the Forensic Center in Albany.

On June 4, Dr. Baden conducted the autopsies so he could eventually report his findings to Lungen.

Baden had done tens of thousands of autopsies throughout his career. He had opened up junkies, prostitutes, stockbrokers, homemakers, businessmen and women, teenagers—and, of course, babies.

Hundreds of babies.

The Odell babies were different, however. They had been sitting in boxes for two decades, maybe longer. Doing autopsies on them would be akin to an archaeology dig, a careful examination of the human body in one of its rarest forms. Two of the babies were mere bone fragments and dust. One, though, was in fair condition, having been entombed and preserved in mummified skin, like leather.

A forensic pathologist, Baden explained, “is a doctor who gives testimony in public.” The term, he added, was likely born out of Ancient Greece. Part of the forensic pathologist’s job, “especially when it comes to deaths, is to make his or her interpretations from all of the history, circumstances, interviews with families and friends and doctors, police, as opposed to the hospital-based pathologist who has a chart.”

Professionally speaking, the forensic pathologist opts to rely on
all
the evidence, not just what the body tells him or her later on during the autopsy process; while the hospital-based pathologist, on the other hand, relies on what a nurse might report, what a patient’s chart suggests, the time of death, and the health history of the patient.

There is, of course, a major difference between the two.

“When I work as a hospital pathologist and somebody dies,” Baden said, “I have a whole chart of everything that happened in the hospital…the history and circumstances, and that is all part of medicine.” But the forensic pathologist “almost always deals with people who die
out
of hospitals.”

It is those out-of-hospital deaths that can be tricky for the forensic pathologist to figure out, especially when it pertains to time of death. Most go by the rigor mortis process, rigidity, and temperature change in the body. But also, perhaps more important, “the forensic pathologist…will render opinions and conclusions based upon not just what they see, but also what they can learn from…outside sources.”

And that would, ultimately, be what the Odell case came down to: outside sources, coupled with what Baden was about to find out while conducting the autopsies.

There are five stages of decomposition: respectively, “fresh, bloat, decay, dry and remains.” The Odell babies were, evidently, in the “dry and remains” stage. So, for Baden, the police reports, interviews with Odell, and other sources involved in the case would be indicative to the autopsy process and his ultimate findings.

Still, figuring out an exact time of death from the autopsy alone was going to be nearly impossible—and figuring out a cause of death was, likely, an unrealistic possibility. When it came down to it, this was one of the most important tasks for Lungen to prove as he prepared to indict Odell in front of a grand jury. Because if a grand jury failed to indict Odell, Lungen didn’t have a case. None of what Baden was doing would matter.

1

ROBERT SAUERSTEIN AND Dianne Odell found themselves, by early 2000, the parents of a new baby boy. Both were well into their forties, with four other children at home. Although Seth wasn’t a burden and they were proud to have him, Odell later said he demanded a lot of her attention.

By late 2000, they were living in Montrose, Pennsylvania; a few months later, they moved again, to Rome, Pennsylvania, where they would end up staying until Detectives Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle walked into the Rite Aid pharmacy, where Odell was working when she was first questioned in May 2003.

As Odell tried to figure out how she was going to get herself out of jail and back home with her children (one of whom would celebrate his fourth birthday in August) as May turned to June, she felt that if she came clean now and, in her words, explained how her mother had murdered the children, no one would believe her. Moreover, what really scared her, she said, was the fact that her living children would suffer. As she met with Stephan Schick and explained to him that her mother had been the culprit all along, she said Schick told her she should keep her mouth shut. The less she said, the better off she’d be—and that meant with Sauerstein, the kids, anyone.

Part of Odell’s strategy not to talk about Mabel’s involvement was that if she mentioned it, especially to Sauerstein, the information would end up being used against her later on during trial.

For Sauerstein, when Odell told him on that Thursday in May when he and Danielle visited, that Mabel was involved, “there was anger; there was relief.”

Sauerstein knew what she was talking about without her discussing any of the details.

But what really bothered Odell as summer 2003 moved forward was that she had no idea what Schick had planned for a defense. She didn’t know, she claimed, because he never told her and rarely went to visit her to explain what he was doing on her part.

This seeming invisibility by Schick would, in the coming months, be the one thing that, Odell said, drove a wedge between them and ultimately caused big problems for her down the road.

Stephan Schick was in his late fifties. Balding, with thinning gray hair, when he wore his glasses, he resembled Vice President Dick Cheney. He spoke confidently, carefully choosing his words, as if each carried the weight of repercussion. Schick grew up on a farm in Ulster County, New York, just northeast of Sullivan County. After graduating from Cornell, he finished his law degree at New York Law School, then did a brief internship at the Sullivan County District Attorney’s Office, where he met then assistant district attorney Steve Lungen for the first time. It was 1978. Lungen was well into his career as Schick showed up at the office and began clerking. The two hit it off, Schick said, and became fast friends. Never did they believe they’d be on opposite sides of the legal scale years later.

After leaving the DA’s office, Schick went into private practice in Monticello. Because he had worked in the DA’s office and familiarized himself with criminal law, he began his career as a criminal lawyer. With a real estate boom going on in the Catskills at the time, however, he quickly merged into real estate law.

In 1985, when work in his private practice became somewhat unfulfilling, Schick went to work for Legal Aid. Although Legal Aid has changed over the years, its core dynamic remains the same: contracted with the county to represent those who cannot afford a lawyer, Legal Aid, staffed with eight to ten lawyers at any given time, is hired by the court to act essentially as a public defender’s office. Some rural counties in New York do not have a public defender’s office, like the larger communities. Sullivan County is one. Legal Aid makes up for the loss. It is a nonprofit organization run on a budget set by the county.

Schick said qualifying his tenure at Legal Aid as “happy” would be an “interesting view of it.”

“I’m happy to the extent that I am [now] the boss in the office. On a day-to-day basis, I have the freedom to exercise my own goals and strategies.”

It has been a bit easier since working his way up throughout the years into a position of running the show. There’s no one in the office, Schick added with a chuckle, “looking to chop my head off.”

Not everything, though, has been roses and chocolate. Fiscal realities, Schick maintained, plague Legal Aid. Like any government-run business, there have been cutbacks and budget constraints that stop him from doing certain things.

“Only a certain amount of local tax resources go into public defense. It’s not a popular expenditure. I think in many upstate rural counties, local legislatures and local politicians, reflecting the more conservative view of the population, the constituency, would prefer not to fund or spend any of the taxpayers’ money on public defense at all.”

Making a valid point, Schick went on to say that it is hard to go to a citizen and say, “You know that guy who just burglarized your home and stole all of your family heirlooms? Well, we have to increase your property taxes to hire a public defender to represent him.” Whereas, the opposite argument is much more appealing: “We have to increase your taxes because we want to give the DA’s office more money to increase public safety.”

While most criminal defense attorneys have a keen understanding for explaining away the obvious regarding a client’s culpability, Schick has always had a canny way of currying favor. Instead of trying to dodge the evident and make excuses, he faces the realities of putting on the best defense he can for clients. This strong moral characteristic, which could be construed as detrimental to a defense attorney, would come into play when the Sullivan County court dropped the case of Dianne Odell in Schick’s lap in early June 2003. Because he had the most trial experience out of the lawyers in his office, Schick decided to take the case on himself.

Indeed, because he viewed a situation the way it was, dealt with issues, and tried to construct a defense around facts, he and Odell would be at odds, starting with how they were going to approach Mabel’s culpability in the babies’ deaths.

2

The case for Steve Lungen came down to the fact that whenever there wasn’t a male figure present in Odell’s life, the children she gave birth to ended up wrapped in plastic bags, decomposing in boxes. It was, he believed, strong circumstantial evidence that pointed to what he understood firmly now to be her motive: bastard children don’t deserve life. She had said it herself, in not so many words, to one of his investigators.

“Ultimately,” Lungen recalled, “that was the case right there. The babies that ended up dead were babies where she didn’t have any relationship with their fathers. They were the products of casual relationships.”

Odell was gearing up, of course, to present a different portrait. It was Mabel who didn’t want those children. It was Mabel who considered them bastards and murdered them. And it was Mabel who had made her nervous about acquiring prenatal care and denied her access to the hospital when she went into labor and couldn’t drive herself.

Mabel. Mabel. Mabel.

The evening when Lungen, Scileppi, and two of Lungen’s investigators, Paul Hans and Robert Rowan, drove back from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and ended up doing a beeline for Waverly, New York, to interview Odell, had changed the entire scope of Lungen’s case.

“The difference of her going home and not going home [that night],” Lungen recalled, was based on decisions made on the spot while driving from Wilkes-Barre to Waverly. “We had to make a decision whether we had enough to arrest her or not. And until she told us the babies were born alive—and if she would—that was the key.”

Lungen had Odell’s statement, which was, in a sense, telling in its own right. He believed the statement alone was enough to convince a jury she was responsible for the deaths of the children. Yet, fundamentally, the cusp of his case relied heavily, like most murder cases, on circumstantial evidence.

Most people have a misconception regarding how effective circumstantial evidence can be in the eyes of a competent jury. The term “circumstantial evidence” almost implies by itself that a prosecutor has little else, meaning forensics or an eyewitness, to present to a jury—that perhaps his case isn’t as strong as he’d like it to be. But circumstances, when it comes down to it, are what murder cases, most anyway, are built around. The most powerful example of how valuable circumstantial evidence can be is, most prosecutors will admit, “people can lie, but circumstances cannot.”

A way to look at it more basically is, if two people walk into an empty room and one exits with blood on his hands and the other ends up dead, an outside observer can determine, vis-à-vis “the circumstances,” that the person with blood on his hands had something to do with the death. There can be no other logical explanation.

It’s not science, just common sense.

Lungen could prove the babies were alive after birth because he had their mother admitting it. What better witness was there? He could prove the babies died because Odell had kept their remains. The DNA, he was being told, was going to be shaky at best, because of the age and condition of the remains. Still, Lungen had enough circumstantial evidence that when he spread it out for a jury, he believed, would convince them that Odell had not only murdered her children, but kept the pregnancies hidden from her mother—the one person whom she was now preparing to pin the deaths on.

“The people’s theory,” Lungen said, “[that Odell] will never admit, is that these children were killed because of their illegitimacy and because they were
unwanted
. They were pregnancies by casual relationships, and whether it be her mother’s influence or her own, she was not going to keep babies whom she knew she didn’t want by fathers who were not around to support them.”

When Lungen sat down and read the interviews with Odell by Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle, along with those conducted by Scileppi, Streever, and Lane, he realized one significant factor that Odell herself had perhaps overlooked as she told one lie after the other during the days after her arrest. Through a careful review of those transcripts, Lungen was convinced, Odell defined her own lies and put them into perspective herself.

“When you analyze those interviews, right up until the last moment, a couple of things are so: One, she never completely told the truth. The whole truth was never out there. There were still plenty of issues and questions unresolved. But, when she changed her stories each time, it was only based upon what the police
knew
or could reasonably
infer
in between each interview.”

In other words, as Odell began cracking under the pressure of being interviewed, she started to make up stories based on what she believed the police were uncovering. During her first interview with Thomas and Weddle, for example, she denied knowing whose babies they were. Yet, as soon as she found out the babies were connected to her by documents found inside the boxes, she suddenly admitted, “They’re my babies,
but
…” From there, she claimed, the babies were the product of rapes. Then, after she learned that DNA could possibly prove who the fathers were, she began to talk about getting pregnant during “casual relationships.” After the police learned that DNA was going to be able to prove almost positively who the fathers were, she
then
admitted that
yes
, her brother-in-law had, in fact, fathered one of the babies, and David Dandignac had fathered another.

In effect, Lungen maintained, over the course of three days, she changed her stories to reflect what the police were discovering. Moreover, if she hadn’t done anything, why would she lie in the first place? An innocent person isn’t afraid of the truth.

“The biggest claim out of all of them, that her mother—which we didn’t find out until much later, after trial—was the bad person; well, her mother
liked
David Dandignac,” Lungen said later, “the father of Baby Number Three.
She
wanted that relationship to exist. It was
Odell
who canceled out that relationship. And it was
Odell
who told Dandignac to go. And because she didn’t want that relationship, it was a
fourth
baby that she
wasn’t
going to keep.”

That baby’s fate, Lungen insisted, had been “preordained. She had already, in my view, intentionally decided, when she kicked Dandignac out of her home, that based upon what she had done to the other three children, Dandignac’s baby was going to die.”

It was, by the first week of June, easy for Lungen to sit, review the documentation, look at autopsy reports, go over Odell’s statements, and call her a murderer. But regardless of what he thought, he still had to prove it to a jury. That was the task at hand. Would Lungen be able to convince a jury with circumstantial evidence that Dianne Odell was a murderer?

His first test would be before a grand jury.

3

Heather Yakin found out that Odell had grown up in Queens, New York, which was probably a good reason why, after making a few calls to some of her relatives in the Kauneonga Lake region, none of them could recall ever meeting her.

The Odell case, for a small-town crime reporter, had the potential to boost her career—and Yakin knew it. All she had to do was score that one exclusive interview, open up a vein in the story no one had poked yet, and it would take on a life of its own.

“I knew it was big,” Yakin said later, referring to how the story was beginning to play out in the early part of July 2003. “I knew it was a national story. And I knew I wanted the
real
story—to find out what happened and, to the best of anyone’s ability to determine it,
why
it happened. I wanted to find the story’s place in the world.”

A reporter after the social significance of a mother allegedly murdering four of her children. This was what Heather Yakin’s readers would want out of her reporting: what the story meant to society at large. Why was it that so many mothers murdered their children?