Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) (8 page)

“Yes.”

Odell was in an emotional jam back then, she explained later. She had never told Sauerstein, or anyone else, about her secret children, so getting back to Safford to clean out the storage unit was extremely important to her—but for reasons unknown to anyone else.

After a few more questions, Thomas, a mother herself, wanted to know why Odell and Sauerstein had moved around so much, especially with “all these kids.” Thomas had worked child abuse cases for years. She knew the signs: a family that was always on the move was, generally speaking, a family running from something—usually child abuse charges.

“I guess we were looking for that perfect place, you know. Like they say: The grass is always greener on the other side. But when you get there, it’s not so green.”

For the record, Thomas had Odell then recite the names of her children and their ages. It was simple questioning; a prelude, perhaps, for what was coming.

“Have you ever had a child anyplace other than a hospital? Like natural childbirth? Like in the home? Anything like that?”

“No,” Odell said.

It was a lie.

“Have you ever been a midwife? Have you ever delivered children for anyone else?” Thomas was being thorough, giving Odell a chance to explain herself.

“No.”

“So you’ve had how many children?”

“Eight.”

“Eight?”

“Not counting the miscarriages.”

Thomas and Odell had another brief exchange regarding Odell’s youngest children. Then Thomas looked at Weddle. “You have any questions?”

“No,” Weddle said. “I’d go right ahead with it.”

“Okay…,” Thomas said while looking down at her notes. She paused a moment, then looked directly at Odell: “When we…When the individual purchased your storage shed, the contents of your storage shed, he took everything out and took them home. Going through the boxes, what he found, and what we continued to find after we were called, were three dead babies. What do you know about that?”

“Nothing. Three dead babies?” Odell seemed appalled, shocked, even confused.

“Wrapped up in sheets,” Weddle added.

“Blankets,” Thomas corrected. “They were in blankets.” And now she looked at Odell. “They were in boxes that contained all your property, all your clothing that was marked, your photo albums in there, letters, the kids’ immunization records; these boxes had all your other identifiable property in there, along with these three dead babies.”

The facts of the case spoke for themselves. One box, in particular, had “Mommy’s stuff” written in red marker on top of it. The box had been sealed. The handwriting, at least from an early comparison to Odell’s, was unmistakably a match. It didn’t necessarily mean Odell had placed those babies in the boxes, but there was a good chance—by the sheer coincidence of all the evidence—that if she didn’t, she knew who did.

5

When Dianne arrived back at the lake after suffering what she claimed was a brutal beating by her father, Mabel took one look at her and said, “I told you he wouldn’t want the ‘little bitch’ you are when you’re around.”

“I need to go to the hospital, Mother,” Dianne said.

Contractions?

“Lay down. You’ll feel better,” Mabel said.

Dianne didn’t realize it, but she was in labor. “I didn’t know…but I laid down until I felt like I had to go to the bathroom really, really bad. I felt a lot of pressure.”

“I think I’m in labor, Mother.”

“Lay down on the floor and push,” Dianne recalled Mabel telling her at that point.

So she did.

As Dianne pushed, she felt the baby coming. She then asked Mabel to call an ambulance, but, she said, “my mother convinced me it was a bad idea.”

“It will destroy the family,” Mabel said. “Do you want everyone to find out that your father is having sex with you? You won’t have anyone left after that.”

“I gave in,” Dianne said later, “because I knew I would never survive if everyone knew that.”

“Matthew was born,” Dianne recalled, “and
never
moved.”

After Dianne felt better, Mabel told her to “get rid of Matthew…bury him in the yard.” So she put the baby in a blue suitcase, she said, because if she had “buried him” in the yard, she “would never be able to find him. He would be gone forever.”

From there, she put the blue suitcase in the closet and went on with her life.

1

A FEW YEARS before Dianne and Mabel moved to Kauneonga Lake, not a mile away from where they would ultimately live in one of Marie Hess’s bungalows, the largest gathering of musicians and music fans of its day took place just up the road. The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival drew in the neighborhood of a five hundred thousand people—a weekend of love, sex, booze, drugs, and, of course, music. Some of the biggest names in the business hit the stage: Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, along with many more. Because of the festival, Bethel, New York, had become famous. People have been known to flock to the region to visit Max Yasgur’s dairy farm and experience, if only in memory, the place where it all happened, as if the region held some sort of sacred aura.

For Dianne and Mabel, small-town life and the historic relevance of the town where they now lived mattered little. To them, Kauneonga Lake was simply a new place to live. Getting out of the city and moving to the country, as they settled into the ebb and flow of what was a somewhat normal way of life, seemed to fit them well. The dead baby in the blue suitcase was a memory now. With the pace of life slower up north, it seemed easier for Dianne to forget about what had happened in her life and move on.

According to Dianne, she started dating when she hit her late teens, early twenties. As a woman, she felt she had a lot to offer. She said she still saw herself as a virgin, even though she had bedded down with more men than she could count and had given birth to her father’s child. The sexual acts she had been
forced
into weren’t about love, commitment, or sex; they were about power and money.

At twenty, Dianne wasn’t looking for a man, she insisted, but wasn’t about to shy away from love if it happened. Life had become a routine of work and home as the years progressed after the baby she called Matthew had died. Soon she found a job as a clerk in Monticello, a nearby town, at a retail-clothing outlet. It wasn’t what she wanted to do, she said, but it passed the time, kept her away from her mom, and, simultaneously, earned her a little cash.

Jonathan Schwartz
, a broad-shouldered man with a square jawline and Cary Grant–type allure, had caught Dianne’s eye from the moment she saw him at work. Jonathan spent his days in the warehouse. He and Dianne would run into each other every so often. Throughout 1973 and partly into 1974, they developed a close friendship that grew, she said, into love.

The relationship, however, was flawed from the get-go. Jonathan grew up in a Jewish family and had never dated a Gentile. Dianne was Latino and white. She looked more white than Latino, and race or religion meant little to her. She liked Jonathan and they got along well. He treated her with respect and turned out to be the first male figure in her life to show her any type of admiration and respect, which she believed she deserved.

“I really, really did love him,” Dianne recalled.

On January 8, 1974, Dianne and Jonathan, in what was a small ceremony, got married. After a brief honeymoon, they moved into an apartment near the lake, just below where Dianne had been living with Mabel for the past few years. Inside the first year of their marriage, though, things didn’t go as Dianne or Jonathan might have planned. In great physical shape most of his life, Jonathan developed severe health problems not long after he and Dianne married.

“He got very, very sick and ended up having complete renal shutdown,” Dianne said, “and had to go on dialysis.”

What made it hard for Dianne to care for Jonathan, she said, was Mabel, who was stuck on the notion of Dianne marrying into wealth and insisted she do whatever Jonathan wanted. Despite Mabel’s hatred for Jews, she would tell Dianne, “You take care of him, Dianne, and do what he says.” Mabel believed Jonathan had money, and if Dianne catered to his every need, some of it would trickle down into Mabel’s hands.

Jonathan was soon placed on a list. As soon as a replacement kidney was available, he would get it. Until then, Dianne believed it was her job as his wife to care for him.

2

Thomas and Weddle had always viewed the babies in boxes as a homicide case. Homicide and murder cases are entirely different from both a legal and investigative perspective. By definition, murder is not an act of contrition; it is an act of “willful killing.” One person sets out to kill another and completes the act, generally, in a violent manner. Most of the time, there is premeditation involved and the person committing the crime is considered to be of sane mind. Homicide, on the other hand, is the killing of one person by another in “which intention is not considered.” A drunk driver doesn’t necessarily set out to kill another human being when he gets into a vehicle drunk and begins driving down a crowded street.

“Officially, homicide—under New York state penal law—includes murder, manslaughter, criminal negligent homicide, and abortion (illegal),” a former New York state cop with over twenty-five years of law enforcement experience explained. “Murder first and second are actual charges, whereas homicide is not. When you investigate a ‘homicide,’ it’s not necessarily a murder. But when you investigate a murder, it’s
always
a homicide.”

At first, Thomas and Weddle believed that whoever was responsible for wrapping up those babies and hiding their bodies had not, perhaps, intended to kill them, but rather had been there when something terrible happened and decided to cover it up. They weren’t so sure it was Odell, yet they had good reason to consider she either knew who had done it, or had participated in it with that person.

After Weddle explained to Odell how they had found photographs of family members among her items, Odell admitted she had left the photographs behind. It was, essentially, the first time she had admitted to anything.

“I didn’t take anything,” she said, “that wasn’t absolutely necessary, like the kids’ clothing, my clothing, clothing that they needed, you know, that we needed to change into.”

Thomas and Weddle wondered why a mother—obviously a poor mother, struggling to make ends meet, someone who couldn’t even afford to pay for the storage unit—wouldn’t take her children’s clothing. The only conclusion that made any sense was that Odell and her family were running when they left Arizona. Otherwise, why would they just up and leave without taking all of their personal possessions?

Thomas, sitting, listening, decided to take the questioning down a different path. It was time to stop dodging the issue, put the facts on the table, and see how Odell reacted.

“Do you have any idea,” Thomas asked, “why the bodies of three babies would be in these boxes inside the boxes that were taped shut and marked with your identification, such as ‘Mom’s,
Doris’s
,
Alice’s
, all your court papers, anything like that?”

Whoever had packed those babies had packed them in such a way that he or she didn’t want them to be found. It was clear from the way they were packaged so carefully.

Odell shot back immediately, “No, no idea. Holy cow. I would have no idea. I’m sorry. I wish I did.”

“We would, too,” Weddle said. He was understandably frustrated. He could sense Odell knew more than she was willing to concede.

“This is…all new to me,” Odell said.

“Is there any way any of these babies could have come from any of your kids without your knowledge? Did anything like that ever happen in your home, or did your daughters ever say anything to you about being pregnant? Anything like that?”

“Not that I’m aware of. No.”

“These aren’t miscarried fetuses,” Weddle added, letting Odell know they knew more than they had been giving away, “just a few weeks old. These are full-term babies.”

Neither Thomas nor Weddle had heard from forensics by this point, but every doctor involved had given an early opinion that the babies were born full-term, which meant the babies could have been delivered alive and killed afterward, or had died during delivery. It wasn’t a long shot to think someone Odell knew had hidden pregnancies, decided to deliver by herself, and discarded the children. It happened. Today, perhaps, more than any other time, teens were having children. Every year, there were stories of girls showing up at their high-school proms, giving birth in the bathroom, and trying to flush the babies down the toilet. Babies were found in Dumpsters, on the side of the road, in back alleys. It wasn’t such a stretch, Thomas and Weddle assumed, to believe one of Odell’s children had delivered the children and discarded them.

“Now, these babies,” Thomas said, “are currently being processed for DNA. Would you be willing to give us your DNA so we can compare it to these babies?”

“Sure,” Odell said.

Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, Thomas questioned Odell about Sauerstein, asking if he had any knowledge of the babies. Odell said he didn’t. After that, they talked about Odell and Sauerstein’s move from Utah to Arizona, and if she had remembered ever moving boxes that were never opened. Finally Weddle asked why Odell had left so many personal items behind, adding, “That was hard for us to understand. Why a family that has so many children, why they would leave behind that many things.”

Odell had no answer. She just shook her head, shrugged her shoulders.

Next they talked about the storage unit and asked if Odell had ever been contacted about not paying her bill. It seemed entirely unbelievable that if Odell had indeed left the babies behind, she would have stopped paying the bill. Why would someone do that, knowing what the eventual outcome would be?

Odell said she was never contacted. She had even called the owner of the storage facility at one point, she added, but never followed up or received word back.

“Do you have any ideas where those babies would have come from?” Thomas asked.

“No, I don’t….”

Weddle asked Odell if she watched television—especially the news.

Odell said no. With kids at home, where would she find the time?

“This is national news,” Weddle insisted, “’cause it’s been on the news the last three or four days.”

Odell became scared at that point, as if she could feel the spotlight on her now.
What’s waiting at home? Are they waiting in my driveway?
she contemplated while picturing satellite trucks parked around the block where she lived. Reporters waiting at her doorstep. Headlines:
BABY KILLER
…
MOTHER KILLS KIDS
…
MONSTER MOTHER
.

As Odell sat in deep thought, Weddle continued, “It’s just a matter of time, probably today, that [the media] are going to find out who the locker was rented to (which is you) and that’s more likely going to come out in the news. So be prepared for it.”

Thomas said she and Weddle were likely going to be speaking with Sauerstein, and they wondered if Odell thought he’d have a problem with talking to them.

“I don’t think so.”

Weddle mentioned the DNA sample again. “We don’t know what happened out there, ma’am. We’re not trying to point the blame at you, but obviously—”

Odell interrupted. “Well, it sure sounds like it’s coming down my way!” She was irritated. The tone of the questioning had gone from casual to accusatory. She felt pressured.

“Well, this has to start somewhere,” Weddle said after Odell became visibly upset. “Where else would our investigators look?”

“I…I understand what you’re saying, but, you know, I’m also getting innuendos from just the inflections in your voices, and it’s just not him, it’s you, too,” Odell said, looking now at Thomas.

One might question Odell’s tactics here. As she sat and talked, she knew what had happened to the children. If she chose, she didn’t have to go through the rigorous questioning she was now undergoing. She could have left the barracks at any time, or demanded a lawyer, which would have suspended the interview.

But she didn’t.

The media kept coming up in conversation. Thomas, Weddle, and now Trooper McKee, who had been there the entire time, kept telling Odell to prepare herself. This was going to be a huge story. A mom who possibly could have killed her babies meant ratings—and the media wouldn’t stop until it tracked down the current owner of the storage shed. From there, Thomas Bright would be found. There was a good chance Odell was going to be “breaking news” in the hours and days to come. Trooper McKee, like Weddle and Thomas, had made it clear to Odell that her life was going to change, whether she had done anything or not.

“We’re not pointing a finger at anybody,” McKee said, standing up, walking toward Odell, “until we do an investigation. And that’s what we’re doing here now. You know, put yourself in our shoes. Who would
you
first start with?”

This seemed to calm Odell down some. “I understand completely,” she said, “but, you know, I’m just saying this is how, this is what is coming across to me, judging by the expressions.”

In truth, they had found three—not one or two, but
three
—dead babies in boxes marked with Odell’s name. Was it such a stretch to think Odell had had something to do with the deaths of the babies, or that she knew what happened? Cops followed evidence. Thus far, there was no reason for them to believe Odell hadn’t been involved.

3

As Jonathan Schwartz maintained what had become a life of waiting in bed for a kidney, Dianne worked hard to support the family. She was twenty-one years old now, and had left behind a life of horror: beatings, sexual abuse, emotional abuse. Still, she hadn’t graduated high school and was stuck, one could say, in small-town America working in retail, making minimum wage, now taking care of an ill husband and a mother, who had made it clear she was responsible for providing a life of leisure she thought she deserved.

By early 1975, Jonathan received a kidney, and almost immediately after the transplant, he began to get his strength back. He was his own man again, entirely self-sufficient.

“When he got better,” Dianne recalled, “he realized he didn’t want to be married any longer.”