Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (29 page)

What Schick admired so much about Martin, he said, was his honesty. Martin could have embellished the story to support Odell, but he didn’t. “If he wanted to color—you see, Martin wanted to obviously very, very much help his half sister, and he felt she was very, very abused as a child—her story, he could have. But he didn’t. He could not testify that it was a baby in that package.”

Schick and his colleague, Tim Havas, while Martin was in their office, had even pressured him. “
Could
it have been a baby? Could it, Martin?” Schick kept asking him. They were desperate. Maybe Martin was just being naive?

But he stuck to his story. “No, no, no. It wasn’t a baby. It was afterbirth.”

Regardless of being unable to prove culpability on Mabel’s part, Schick believed other information Martin could bring to the trial would still be helpful.

“It at least establishes that the mother was experienced in being a home midwife,” Schick recalled. “It wasn’t out of the blue that Odell had this idea of ‘Have the baby at home and I’ll take care of it.’”

So Martin was asked to hang around town, there was a chance he could testify. What role he would play exactly was still an open discussion, however.

Elation soon turned into nervousness, Odell said, as the testimony portion of the trial neared and she felt forced into sitting on what potentially could be her get-out-of-jail-free card, Martin’s story. Yet, as the trial neared, the more she thought about spilling family secrets to the world, she intimated, the more it seemed like the wrong thing to do. She was conflicted now about testifying. Wondering whether it would help or hurt her cause.

One would have to imagine that a woman with a four-year-old child at home, along with four teenagers, would jump at the chance to reveal anything she could that might set her free so she could be with her children again. But Odell said she began fighting with herself, debating whether to get up on the stand and tell everyone her father had raped her repeatedly and her mother had turned her into a prostitute. It wasn’t what she wanted her family to hear. Her kids, she said, would be ridiculed at school. Called names. “Your mother’s a whore! Inbred!” As time moved forward, she began thinking that maybe, “because of the shame and my kids,” airing family secrets in open court might not be in her best interest.

The scale of insults the children would endure, however, weighed heavily on the part of being branded a victim, as opposed to a murderer. After all, her children, she said, were already hearing “baby killer” epithets in school and around the neighborhood.

“But you have to understand,” Odell continued, “living a lifetime full of derogatory comments, for my own kids to have to deal with the repercussions of that…in June, July, and August, I was still ambivalent. But the kids came up to see me and the kids told me, ‘Do whatever you have to do to go home.’ All of the kids said to me, ‘We don’t care. Tell them what you need to tell them.’”

That meeting, she insisted, changed her mind. There would be no more debating. She had lived with her secrets, she decided, long enough. She realized now that her children were behind her. Sauerstein. And now her half brother. What, really, did she have to lose? Now all she had to do was convince Schick and Havas, who were beginning to think it wasn’t such a good idea after all, that she should take the stand and tell her story.

1

FOR SEVERAL WEEKS before Odell’s trial, Stephan Schick and his partner, Tim Havas, visited Odell daily to discuss her case, the possibility of her testifying at trial, and who else would be called to the stand to defend her. “If we were going to put Dianne on the witness stand,” Schick said, “we were going to call her half brother.”

From the first day Schick met with Odell, he said, she wanted to testify. She needed to tell her story of abuse and prostitution to a jury, and how her mother had drugged her and taken the three babies and killed them. Because Odell was now so adamant about testifying, Schick and Havas spent “days” meticulously going over what she would say once she got on the witness stand.

“Because her testimony would be the crucial part of any defense she would have,” Schick added, “we spent hours going over it with her.”

A large part of that preparation, Schick insisted, included Havas and him acting out a direct- and cross-examination scenario with Odell. They would drill her with questions Lungen was sure to ask. They would have her tell her story over and over again: Mabel, the deaths of the babies, the abuse, her upbringing, her dad fathering the first child in 1972 and repeatedly raping her, then beating her until the baby died. If she took the stand, the Molineaux decision made it possible for Lungen to introduce Baby Doe. It was a Pandora’s box, certainly, but Odell felt she could withstand any attack Lungen might wage.

As Odell went through a mock version of her testimony, telling her stories and answering questions, Schick felt she might be a compelling witness. She could turn on the tears when she needed to, he said, which was what a defense attorney wanted. Although she was uneducated formally, Schick pointed out, she came across as being bright, especially in the articulate way she answered some of the questions.

Part of their thespian undertaking, however, included Schick acting out the role of Lungen, whom he knew to be one of the most experienced—if not the best—cross-examiners he had ever witnessed in a court of law. Lungen knew how to elicit testimony from a witness and get him or her to talk about things they perhaps didn’t even realize they were bringing up. He had spent decades mastering his craft. If Odell wanted to testify, she was going to have to survive a grilling by Schick acting as Lungen. If she could get through that, well, it just might be worth putting her on the stand.

“We tried to be as much like a prosecutor as we could,” Schick said, “trying to bring as much trial-level skill at cross-examining witnesses as possible, trying to make her look as
bad
as possible.”

As Schick and Havas questioned Odell, Schick said, they would try to “shake” her credibility. It wasn’t something he and Havas had worked up at the last minute; they had sat with Odell and gone over her testimony no fewer than twenty times, he claimed, over a period of three weeks before trial. Odell had everything to lose by taking the stand. But it was her life, Schick opined—which made it her call.

But as they kept questioning her relentlessly, attacking every possible scenario Lungen might bring up, she broke down.

“After we would decimate her on cross-examination,
she
came to realize it might not be a good idea.”

Odell’s volatility while undergoing mock questioning wasn’t what had bothered Schick the most, however. If it had been just one baby Odell was being accused of killing, he said, he and Havas could have worked with her. It was practical to think that a jury might buy the notion that one baby’s death wasn’t her fault.

“One baby, okay,” Schick recalled, “maybe even two. Maybe we can explain satisfactorily two babies to the jury. But when it’s three and then
four,
that’s, you know, you know that’s…even if what she’s saying about Mabel is given one hundred percent believability, I think by the time you get to the third baby, you become a coparticipant and you’re acting in concert. At what point as an adult when you’re pregnant and your mother is saying, ‘Okay, I’ll take care of it, I’ll be the midwife,’ when two prior children have died because of her previous negligence or intentional killing, at what point wouldn’t a reasonable person know that you can’t do this? That it’s going to end up in another death?”

Schick was concerned that if Odell began talking about Mabel, the jury would say to themselves, “You should have done something to stop her. You were an adult. You had given birth to healthy children that had survived. If she was this evil, malicious person, you
knew
how to get away from her.”

A decision had to be made. Schick’s hands were tied, essentially. Either way, some of the culpability—if not all—would fall on Odell’s shoulders. It didn’t matter that Mabel was there. There were four babies involved. The repetitious nature of the deaths alone was enough to convince a jury Odell was somehow involved. Bad childhood. Prostitution. Raped by her father. Abused by her mom. None of it gave Odell a license to kill or neglect her children. A bad childhood, in other words, could not have made her do it, simply because she had given birth to so many children that ultimately lived.

“Okay,” Schick continued, “let’s say I call Martin to the stand and establish that she had been abused, had a bad childhood—emotionally, physically, and sexually—and that the first child was quite possibly her own father’s child. But then a long number of years go by and she has living, healthy children and she’s leading a fairly normal life. How many more can you keep having and killing because of a bad childhood?”

Still, Schick wasn’t going to deny there was a possibility that a strong defense could be built around Odell’s alleged abusive upbringing. She could contend, Schick said, that during those pregnancies in which the children had died, she was all alone, which was what she had told the police in her statements, and it was an impossible position for her to be in. Schick’s challenge would be to convince the jury to put themselves in a similar position and have them ask themselves,
What would I do
? It was a gamble, of course, but at this stage appeared to be one of Odell’s only chances at either escaping life behind bars or getting off on a lesser charge. The argument would be: Odell couldn’t make decisions in a proper manner based on the abuse she suffered. Therefore, it wasn’t murder; it was manslaughter or criminal negligence.

Convincing Odell it was her best defense, though, was what stood in Schick’s way right up until the first day testimony was set to begin. He and Tim Havas were still teetering on advising her not to testify, even though Odell was now absolutely adamant about telling her story to jurors.

2

“I’ve lived with the shame, I’ve lived with the fear,” Odell recalled later, reflecting on what she was thinking during that crucial time before trial when she was still trying to decide what to do, “the open anger, the hostility.”

It was becoming all too much. But she insisted she had felt like a “doormat” and the “shit on the bottom of somebody’s feet” long enough. It was time to take a stand. “I can’t do this to my children any longer.”

Odell said Schick believed she had “suffered every kind of abuse possible,” but that it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the case he was preparing. She felt he didn’t care, and that he’d already made up his mind regarding the type of defense he wanted to present.

Heading into opening arguments, Odell said thoughts of Martin’s possible testimony, Sauerstein’s testimony, coupled with her own, fed her strength. Together, she was convinced, they could persuade a jury that, because she had been abused so often, for so many years, she’d had nothing to do with the deaths of the children. In effect, the deaths weren’t her fault.

“Now that Martin had agreed to testify,” Odell recalled, “all that we have to do is get up on the stand and tell the truth. Word it any way you want to word it, the truth is in the eyes of the beholder. They (the police and Lungen) see their truth one way; I see it another. I mean, you can take moments out of anybody’s life and concoct them to make anyone appear as a mass murderer if
that’s
what you want to do.”

Huh?

But Lungen and his team weren’t suggesting Odell was a mass murderer; they were content with the fact that they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt she had killed three of her children. Odell herself had signed a statement indicating as much. Now, it seemed, she wanted to change her mind and blame the police and Lungen for going after her.

Odell believed Scileppi, Streever, and Lane, along with Lungen, were out to get her from day one. She felt they had zeroed in on her and forced the facts to juxtapose with a notion they dreamed up, putting her at the center of some evil plot to kill her own children. She felt strongly that because Lungen couldn’t prosecute her in 1989 for the death of Baby Doe, he was fixated on putting her away now. Yet, that being said, she wasn’t prepared to call them “liars.”

“To be really fair, I am not going to accuse them of lying. I’m accusing them of
omission
. They led people to believe one thing by leaving out a plethora of others. Not one of them—ever—said that I had asked for a lawyer. That goes for all of them.”

Even Stephan Schick had a hard time believing Odell had never asked for a lawyer. If one truly believed cops didn’t pressure suspects and fool them into thinking they didn’t need to speak to a lawyer, Schick said it was an extremely naive position.

Odell maintained that all she had to do was get up on the witness stand and tell the truth. It would save her. But Schick, she said, was “telling [her] that the DA was going to try to twist everything….

“Schick is trying to make me feel,” Odell recalled, “like I have to have an answer for everything—and I
don’t
have an answer for everything.”

Schick had no trouble admitting that he, in fact, did tell Odell she had to have an answer ready for any question Lungen might ask. It was his job to extend that virtue of courtroom experience to her. After all, Schick had been inside courtrooms for nearly three decades. One of his worries, where Lungen’s questioning was concerned, involved the idea that Odell never sought prenatal care while she was pregnant with the three dead babies. Lungen undoubtedly would bring it up on cross-examination. She had to be ready.

“If I did that,” Odell said, meaning going out and getting prenatal care like she had with her living children, “I would have had to leave my children with my mother. And she was definitely in control of everyone and everything at that point in time. So I weighed out leaving my children with her for a short amount of time and going to do something I
know
she didn’t want me to do, and coming back and maybe finding one of them gone. There was a point in time where I even went to work and I came home from work and I said to my mother, ‘Where are the kids?’ and she said, ‘They should be outside playing.’ And they were nowhere around.”

Some would later say Odell had a way of explaining away everything that had gone wrong in her life as being someone else’s fault, mainly Mabel’s. It seemed she had a hard time taking responsibility for anything.

“The problem is,” Schick commented, “if you look at her and what she says, it’s always everybody else. That’s the problem. I mean, I was never accused of killing four people! I couldn’t get away from the fact, viewing this thing from a defense standpoint, that
she
had given birth to all these babies. She was there during the births.”

Indeed, Odell had an answer for everything—except when it came to certain parts of her obviously troubled life with her mom.

“There are going to be blanks in [my story],” Odell intimated. “Pieces of time that I can’t fill in. No matter how hard I try. My personal opinion is that the things that were going on in my life then, the things that were being done to me, the things that I was trying to do to protect my girls, were so horrific, in my own mind I think I shut them…there was a point in time when I just shut them out to save my own sanity.”

The abuse Odell suffered—if, in fact, she was abused—was not, in Schick’s view, enough to save her from harsh questioning by Lungen, not to mention all the evidence against her. It didn’t answer the question of guilt, which was the only initiative weighing on Schick’s mind as the first day of opening arguments approached. Would she or wouldn’t she testify? That was the question the defense faced.

3

Stephan Schick and Tim Havas sat in Schick’s office inside Legal Aid during the first week of December and discussed how they were going to proceed. Time and again, weighing how Odell stood up to pressure during the dozens of times they had cross-examined her, they came to the same conclusion: if she decided she wanted to testify, it was in her best interest, they were going to advise her, not to.

“Another awful decision we were forced to make,” Schick said, “regarded manslaughter. If the judge would give her manslaughter as a ‘lesser included,’ and the jury would find manslaughter, then the charges would have to be dismissed because the statute of limitations had run [out].”

The only way around this option was for Odell to waive the statute of limitations on a possible manslaughter charge. But Odell could still be found guilty of three counts of manslaughter in the second degree, which, in turn, could amount to a life sentence.

Schick said the case, from the get-go, was a tangled web of legalities, many of which Odell (nor anyone in her family) ever understood fully—a dynamic that caused some friction between them. But Schick remained steadfast in doing his job to the best of his ability, and part of it came down to Odell’s decision to testify. It was up to her, he said. No one else.

“We were, most of the time, leading up to the trial,” Schick recalled, “as she says, under the opinion that we would
have
to put her on the stand. We thought her half brother would have better testimony than he ended up having. We thought there might have been another baby that was buried in the backyard, but it didn’t turn out to be his actual testimony. We thought he might be helpful with some other testimony—I think he’s the nicest guy in the world and he was absolutely truthful—but, unfortunately, because of that, he was limited to the amount of testimony he could give.”