Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (26 page)

For the most part, Monticello, New York, is a tight-knit community of hardworking people who have lived in the region their entire lives. Many who live there believe there is justice and equality for the guilty
and
innocent. Ask someone in town about crime and punishment compared to the scales of justice and you will likely hear, “People get what they deserve.”

The Sullivan County Courthouse, where the Huntley hearings were about to get under way, sits perched high atop a sharp incline on the corner of Broadway and Bushnell in downtown Monticello. Looking up at the courthouse from Broadway, tall, Colosseum-like, weather-beaten granite pillars welcome patrons to the Hamilton Odell Library. It is a neoclassic-style building, two stories high, with what looks like an archaic pewter-capped dome on the roof one might be more apt to see on a trip to downtown Rome. In the back of the building, next door to the Sullivan County Jail, is the entrance to the courthouse. Walk in and head downstairs and you’re on your way to Steve Lungen’s office, where he has run a flawless operation for nearly three decades. Walking in on the main floor, after making it through a series of metal detectors and rather large, professional wrestler-type men guarding the building, you head into the hub of justice in Sullivan County: the walnut-dressed courtrooms, as clean and well-kept as any hospital in the region, where supreme court justice Anthony T. Kane, county court judge Burton Ledina, Judge Mark M. Meddaugh, and the Honorable Judge Frank J. LaBuda, who was chosen to preside over the Odell matter, could all be found.

On August 19, 2003, a hearing had taken place to discuss the possibility of Lungen being able to present evidence during trial regarding Baby Doe. Odell had never been prosecuted in that case, but Lungen believed the incident showed a “pattern of behavior,” not to mention how the deaths of the three babies later on could
not
have been accidental. He had to elicit every potential scenario Stephan Schick might raise. Baby Doe was going to show jurors that Odell had been involved in the deaths of
four
babies, not three.

“I tried to make it part of the case,” Lungen said, “but only from a cross-examination point of view.”

Little did anyone know, but Lungen
didn’t
want evidence of Baby Doe making it into trial. Tactically speaking, he didn’t want to win the motion he had just filed. Filing it was simply part of a well-thought-out strategy he had spent months working on.

A week or so before the hearing, Lungen filed a Molineaux motion, and a lengthy argument regarding it ensued. He believed the information about Baby Doe should be admissible before the jury because it established motivation on Odell’s part. Juries in murder cases clamor to hear motive; they want to wrap their arms around why the accused would commit such horrendous crimes. Doubly important, Lungen wanted to give the jury an example of Odell holding on to the corpse of one baby, previous to the three babies she was going to be tried for. It would prove that she had learned a lesson in 1989, because cops had knocked on her door and questioned her, and it would answer any questions jurors might have as to why she went through extensive pains to hide the other three babies in boxes from everyone, including Robert Sauerstein.

It was a respectable argument. Lungen was trying to answer any questions the jury might procure during deliberations. Any clever trial attorney leaves nothing to speculation.

“It establishes a motive,” Lungen said, “for her dealing with the other three babies like she did, carrying them with her for all those years and hiding them from everybody. I felt the jury needed to understand why someone would do that—she would do that because she got caught with the first baby.”

Legally, Molineaux “permitted the introduction of evidence of previous bad acts committed by [a] defendant toward his [or her] victim[s].”

In the end, the judge decided the information about Baby Doe would be a “clear appellate issue.” Based on that, he wasn’t going to allow any of it to be introduced. The jury, then, wasn’t going to hear about Baby Doe. Of course, one would have to believe many potential jurors were following the case in the newspapers and had heard about the baby, anyway. But formally speaking, Baby Doe wouldn’t be part of Odell’s trial.

Lungen didn’t view the ruling as a loss, however. Because through the judge’s ruling, if Odell took the witness stand on her behalf (which was, he assumed, a guarantee), he would be able to cross-examine her about the child.

It was a win-win situation—and his plan from the beginning.

“She and Stevie Schick
knew
that if she didn’t take the witness stand, I would
not
be able to talk about Baby Doe in my case in chief. But if she chose to testify, then that would open the questioning up to my questioning her about Baby Doe.”

If Odell planned on taking the stand during trial, it was likely Baby Doe was going to become part of the trial. Lungen couldn’t bring the baby up during his case, yet the moment Odell sat in the witness chair, he could walk up to her and begin his questioning with something like this: “Let’s talk about 1972 and your first pregnancy: can you tell the jury what happened to
that
child?”

“That ruling,” Lungen said, “impacted greatly on Stevie’s thinking. He was hoping the judge would allow Baby Doe into the trial, but for an interesting reason.”

If the judge had allowed information about Baby Doe into trial, it obviously gave Schick an appellate issue. He could then, if the jury came back with a guilty verdict, argue it had been prejudicial to Odell’s guilt or innocence in the other three babies’ deaths. More important to Schick’s case, however, was if the judge had allowed it in, divulging information during trial about Baby Doe would come from Lungen.

“It would be out there,” Lungen said, “because the
prosecutor
put it out there.”

As the ruling stood now, if Schick decided to call Odell as a witness, the defense would be, in theory, forced to bring up Baby Doe first, or it would seem like they were hiding something. If Schick didn’t, Lungen would surely do it himself when he got a crack at Odell on cross-examination, and thus expose what would seem like another one of Odell’s secret babies.

This would weigh heavily on Schick’s decision to call Odell as a witness. It was a major part of the defense he and Odell were going to have to discuss under close scrutiny, and a decision that ultimately would be up to Odell. All Schick could do was advise her.

“It was indeed an advantage that the jury wouldn’t find out about, you know, a fourth baby,” Schick said later. “If the babies in the ’80s had been two instead of three, I think it would have been a tremendous advantage. The Baby Doe decision gave an important impetus to make a decision
not
to put Dianne on the stand.”

In the end, though, it was Odell’s choice—and with Odell, of course, looking to trumpet Mabel’s involvement in the deaths of the babies as loud as she could, she was determined to take the stand and tell her story.

1

CONTEMPLATING HER FUTURE, Odell sat in jail as the steamy summer days of August gave way to crisp and chilly nights of September. There were still more Huntley hearings scheduled for the next few weeks, but that’s not why Odell was losing sleep these days. She was seriously beginning to question whether she had a competent lawyer. She claimed—later—that Schick was not working with her to build a solid defense. She wanted, and felt she deserved, more from him. Yet, at the same time, despite how clichéd it sounded, she believed in her heart that the “truth would set [her] free.

“If I just get up there,” Odell said she kept telling herself, “and tell the truth about what happened, which was more or less adhering to the statement I had given to the Arizona police. Everything that deviated from that statement was done, you know, in conversation with the New York State Police.”

Detectives Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle, however, had never taken a formal statement from Odell. They had recorded an interview with her, but they had never asked Odell to sign a formal statement.

Further implicating the NYSP in some sort of conspiracy to twist statements she had given them, Odell later said, “If I’m not mistaken, when they began their conversation with me, they said to me, ‘We’re just going to sit here and have this conversation in lieu of a video camera or a tape recorder.’ And there was something else,” she added, “but I can’t remember what it was.”

The cops involved in that interview (Scileppi, Streever, and Lane, along with PSP trooper Gerald Williams) had said, she insisted, that they were just going to talk. They weren’t going to record any of it. Just casual conversation among them to try to get to the bottom of the situation.

So, what was the big deal?

“From what I gather,” Odell continued, “they turned in notes” from those conversations “that they
supposedly
took….”

Indeed, Lane and Scileppi had jotted down certain sentences from their interviews with Odell. It was part of any good cop’s policy. At the time they started interviewing Odell, Scileppi explained later, at least very early on, it was more of a fact-finding undertaking than anything else. They were looking for answers regarding the deaths of three babies. There was no need to shine a spotlight in her face and flip on a video camera. She hadn’t admitted to anything. Plus, she was openly giving information and more than willing to talk.

But Odell didn’t see it that way.

“Just one page of notes?” she steamed. “For almost twelve hours’ worth of interviews? Is that not strange?”

In fact, in the world of law enforcement, it wasn’t so strange. As the interviews with Odell wore on throughout the night and Odell began incriminating herself, the conversation turned from fact-finding to interrogation. It happened all the time. Cops set out to uncover information from a suspect about a crime and ended up getting a full confession. From that interrogation, Scileppi and Streever developed a three-page, single-spaced statement from Odell, which amounted to a confession—a document Odell had willingly signed.

“They were doing as much talking to me as—as…they supposedly said I was to them,” Odell recalled. “They were making suggestions to me as to what
could have
happened, what I
thought
I
might
have heard….” Furthermore, she said, Scileppi was “the one who came up with the idea of the blanket, the sheets, the towels.
He’s
the one who came up with
all
of that.”

With the thought of a coerced confession playing on her mind as the Huntley hearings continued, Odell said, she was trying to believe in Stephan Schick, but he wasn’t visiting her as frequently as she wanted. After all, it was a murder case, a multiple-murder case at that. She had anticipated several brainstorming sessions with Schick so they could pull together a solid defense.

For his part, Scileppi was later bowled over by the notion that he could have “coerced” Odell into confessing. It’s a situation, he explained, of Odell wanting to change what she had confessed to after the fact. She wanted to recant what she had said because she now knew she was looking at life behind bars. At the time, she might have figured she would have gotten out of it somehow; maybe because of the statute of limitations or a lesser manslaughter charge. In theory, Odell had slit her wrists—and now she was trying to stitch them back up and claim she had never tried to commit suicide in the first place.

2

Steve Lungen was rallying his troops, working overtime to secure evidence and develop a point-blank case strategy. The last thing he wanted to be accused of at the conclusion of trial was not turning over every stone. No surprises. No unexpected twists. District attorneys lived and died by evidence and witness testimony they had studied in every possible way. Lungen was confident he had covered every base heading into the witness testimony portion of the Huntley hearings.

Two of the babies’ bodies had been in such a decomposed state that Lungen and his team, by mid-September, were able to get only a DNA profile from one of the babies, which was proven to be fathered by David Dandignac.

“It was three months, maybe more,” Lungen recalled, “before we found out we couldn’t go any further on the DNA testing, and realized this is what we have. We have Dandignac. We were trying to see if we could prove or disprove what was in her statements. Because that’s important to credibility matters and to determine [the] reliability of what she was saying, because she lied so often in her statements to us. She had only told us what we
wanted
to hear, essentially.”

While Lungen worked to shore up witness availability for trial and how he would proceed with experts, he was still wondering whether Schick was going to present an insanity defense. The option was still open. Under such bizarre circumstances, Lungen was concerned how the jury would react to such strange behavior.

“They were dickering with the insanity defense, back and forth,” Lungen said. “It mattered to me. They’d had her examined. I knew that. And if they were going to interplay an insanity defense, I had the right to have her examined by my own qualified psychiatrist.”

By order of law, though, Lungen couldn’t have Odell examined until Schick and Odell made the first move.

“They were hemming and hawing, and I wasn’t privy to the fact, but I can only guess that they were having difficulty getting a psychiatric doctor to definitively say she was, essentially, insane at the time of the crimes. She was intelligent. Articulate. She could say what she did. She certainly didn’t present herself as insane.”

Lungen said that when a defense attorney doesn’t call a psychiatrist it’s because they cannot prove insanity. The burden of proof in New York on an insanity defense falls on the shoulders of the defense by a preponderance of the evidence. A defendant, in other words, is presumed “sane” in New York and the defense has to plead and prove insanity under penal law. Lungen didn’t have to prove Odell was sane; the defense had to prove she was insane.

Interestingly, Lungen agreed Schick was “meeting with Odell regularly.” He knew it, he insisted, because he was constantly pressing Schick, whom he would see in the courthouse, for documents and notes, wondering where they stood on the insanity plea.

“Oh sure,” Lungen said, “Stevie was meeting with Odell all the time. I know this because there were continuous conversations about a plea and what she would get and what I would give her. He was trying to talk me into manslaughter charges.”

Through these sidebars—legal discussions—there were some interesting legal issues mulled over. The statute of limitations had run, Lungen said, “on any crime with the respect to the babies, but murder.”

With the statute of limitations being five years in New York, the only crime Lungen could try Odell for was murder. Manslaughter was not even an option he could legally consider.

“For me to get a conviction that would incarcerate her,” which Lungen desperately wanted, “it
had
to be murder.”

There was no way Lungen wanted Odell on the street. In his view, she had murdered not one or two of her children, but four. She was going to be tried for three deaths and, with any luck, a jury would convict her based on the statement she had given police—a statement that was going to be at the center of controversy as the Huntley hearings continued.

3

Unlike a trial, where the prosecution opens with its case, calling witnesses and introducing evidence, a Huntley hearing is the defense’s game all the way, designed to offer the defense a crack at some of the witnesses the prosecution might call during trial.

The first witness Steve Lungen called on September 15 was Thomas Scileppi. It was time to get to the bottom of the statement Odell had given police on the night she was arrested and booked. Scileppi was the main interviewer. He had gotten Odell to confess to hearing the babies cry and cough. Scileppi and Lungen contended the defense was making an issue out of a statement they had never given a second thought to. For Lungen, the only issue was how much Odell had lied.

Before court got under way, Judge Frank J. LaBuda, along with both parties, discussed Rosario material Lungen was forced by law to hand over to the defense. Under the law, “the prosecution at trial must turn over to the defense all statements of a prosecution witness relating to the witness’s trial testimony.” In short, Odell was going to get to see those now infamous notes the cops had taken on the nights she was questioned.

Lungen introduced not one page of notes, but ten pages from investigators who had been with Odell at various times throughout the days leading up to her arrest. On top of that, he offered grand jury testimony of Robert Lane and Roy Streever.

Scileppi’s credentials spoke of a cop with an ironclad record: twenty-seven years as a NYSP trooper, ten of which as senior investigator. As Lungen had Scileppi go through the scenario of how he was introduced to the Odell case, Odell could only sit and stare at him.

It was clear from Scileppi’s testimony he believed Odell had submitted to questioning voluntarily, and at least at first, she was not under arrest or even under suspicion. He said she initially denied knowing anything about the babies.

“Actually, she was told she was not in custody, she was not under arrest, that we just simply wanted to sit down and talk to her.”

Schick had made an appropriate amount of standard objections, but for the most part Scileppi went on and spoke openly about his conversations with Odell and her willingness to talk.

As the interview progressed, Scileppi explained, he began to bounce back questions she had asked him. For example, she kept asking what was going to happen to her.

“What is it that you
think
should happen to you?” Scileppi said he had asked back. Numerous times, Scileppi testified, Odell had said, “I should probably go to jail.”

For the next fifteen to twenty minutes, Lungen had Scileppi describe how Odell had talked about the deaths of the three babies. At one point, Scileppi said, Odell had made clear indications that one of the babies had been born alive and, later, how the other two had also made noises that, to him, indicated life.

Lungen then asked, “With respect to the eight children born to Miss Odell, three from Mr. [James] Odell and five from Mr. [Robert] Sauerstein, were you able to get from Odell, for example, dates of birth?”

“Yes.”

“Locations of birth?”

“Yes.”

“Hospitals and areas of hospitals?”

“Even as far as doctors’ names, yes!”

“With respect to the three children, babies that were the focus of the investigation, were you able to get from her dates of birth?”

“No.”

“Locations of birth…?”

“Yes.”

Obviously, it was a carefully choreographed exchange of evidence depicting how Odell had chosen to conveniently forget certain information. It showed a wanton disregard, in Lungen’s view, for hiding certain truths she likely knew.

Schick, as he stood up and approached Scileppi, brought Scileppi’s previous testimony into the heart of the matter.

“Sir, you weren’t present during any conversations between the Arizona police and Miss Odell, isn’t that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you weren’t present during any conversations between the Pennsylvania police and Miss Odell, is that correct?”

“That’s correct—other than the interview…between Trooper McKee and Miss Odell.”

It meant nothing, actually, that Scileppi wasn’t there for those interviews Diane Thomas and Bruce Weddle had conducted; there were tapes available of some of those conversations Scileppi had listened to later. But more important, it didn’t matter what Odell had said to them; what mattered was what she had admitted to Scileppi.

Schick questioned Scileppi for approximately ten minutes, nearly a third of the time Lungen had questioned him. In the end, it was clear Scileppi wasn’t going to stray from his recollection of the events.

Next on the stand were Roy Streever and Robert Lane, who basically backed up what Scileppi had said and further implied Odell had admitted murdering three of her babies, and that the babies were alive when she did it.

In all those conversations, Mabel was never mentioned as someone who possibly could have been involved in the deaths of the children.

Sitting, listening to Scileppi, Lane, and Streever testify, Odell said, she was thinking,
What the hell are these people doing?
At one point, she recalled, she had even turned to Schick and said, “That’s not the way it happened.”

Schick, she claimed, turned to her and replied, “Don’t worry; we’ll get them back in trial.”

That response, she concluded, “allayed [her] fears a little bit.” She began thinking,
This is like a three-ring circus.
“You know, they’re getting up on the stand and they’re like [here she mimicked the bugle call of the circus]…and I am saying to myself,
‘Jesus Christ!’”