Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps
had a truckful.”
“Did it all go into your home?”
Weddle, sitting patiently, studying Odell’s body language, knew where Thomas was heading.
“No, no,” Odell said.
“Do you recall what you did with that property?”
“Had to put some of it into storage.”
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere, Weddle told himself.
“Where at?”
“I don’t remember his name,” Odell said, sipping from a cup of water. “He was the mayor of the town where we lived.”
“So, there was a storage shed there in Pima?”
“No, I think it was in Safford,” Odell said.
Indeed.
Thomas and Weddle did everything they could not to look at each other at that moment. All of their previous questions seemingly didn’t matter when compared to what was transpiring now. Getting Odell to admit she had rented a storage shed in Safford was important. She was offering significant, relevant information pertaining to the dead children.
“When was the last time you’ve been to the storage shed?” Thomas asked.
“Maybe…I think it was April ’93.”
“And you only took some of the things out?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what happened to the rest of your things?”
“No.”
Thomas then changed the subject and asked if Odell was still legally married to James Odell. Odell said she hadn’t been married to James for over twenty years. She met Sauerstein in 1985 in New York and had been with him ever since.
“And since you’ve been with Mr. Sauerstein, you’ve had several children?”
“Yes.”
“Okay…no other children?”
“No.”
“Did you ever have any miscarriages or abortions?”
Odell thought about it for a minute. “I had miscarriages in New York.”
“Do you recall, one, two…?”
“I think it was three.”
Weddle and Thomas looked at each other. How convenient: three dead babies, three miscarriages.
CHAPTER 5
1
DIANNE AND MABEL adjusted comfortably to their new surroundings. Their apartment was on the second floor of Mrs. Hess’s main house. Scattered around the grounds, along the banks of the lake, were several bungalows Mrs. Hess rented, generally to summer vacationers or folks just passing through town. During colder months, the Hesses closed the nonwinterized bungalows for the season.
Mabel hadn’t worked since the pistol-whipping incident back in Kew Gardens. As she and Dianne got settled into their new digs at Kauneonga Lake, Dianne began wondering what they were going to do for money. Here they were starting a new life and neither one of them had an income. Had Mabel saved any money from Dianne’s days as a prostitute? Was the mattress stuffed with hundreds and fifties?
According to Dianne, when she asked Mabel how they were going to live, Mabel looked at her and, as serious as she had ever been, said, “Now it’s your turn to take care of me!”
Dianne said she felt as if she owed her mother for raising her, like there was some sort of debt to be paid for her upbringing. Taking on a job at this point, however, wasn’t something Dianne could physically do, even if she wanted. It wasn’t that she was lazy, or didn’t want to work. No, Dianne had a secret. There was a baby on the way, which she later said she was happy about when she found out. What ate at her—more than Mabel demanding she go to work and take care of them—as she tried to figure out how to tell her mom she was pregnant, was who the father of the child was.
2
The startling fact that Odell—sitting, sipping water, openly giving Thomas and Weddle information about her life so they could try to wrap up the case of the three dead babies found in boxes—would admit to having three miscarriages was a significant breakthrough during the interview. By this point, neither Thomas nor Weddle had mentioned they were investigating the deaths of three babies, or that the remains of three babies had been found. Yet here was Odell admitting to renting a self-storage unit in Safford and having three miscarriages.
Two plus two equals four.
Thomas asked Odell, after she admitted to the three miscarriages, to explain the circumstances.
“I started hemorrhaging,” Odell offered. Again, unemotional. All business.
“Do you know what caused that? Did they—your doctors—know?”
“No,” Odell said. “I was bouncing and I felt like a tear…like a pull, and I just started bleeding.” She paused for a moment. Looked down at the table. Took a deep breath. “I mean uncontrollable bleeding.”
“Now, was that three times in a row, or was that in between your other children that it happened?”
“For a long period there after my son was born, I had miscarriages. One was in Arizona after [my son in 1991] was born and I went to the emergency room there and they did an emergency [procedure] on me, and there were two in New York when we came back here.”
None of it added up to what Thomas and Weddle knew by that point. It was clear the babies in the boxes were much older. Odell was talking about 1991 and beyond.
“Do you know…how far along you were in your pregnancy when this happened?”
“I would say not even two months.”
It didn’t make sense with the approximate ages of the babies in the boxes. The thought was, someone had delivered the children at home and, perhaps embarrassed or scared, discarded the babies without alerting anyone.
Weddle and Thomas wanted to pinpoint dates and perhaps tie the dates of Odell’s miscarriages to her having rented the self-storage unit. Maybe the children hadn’t met with ill harm, after all? Perhaps Odell, if she was indeed responsible for leaving the children in the boxes, had delivered and wanted to hide the births for some reason? Maybe she had misjudged how long she was pregnant?
“And you said,” Thomas asked, “the last time you were in your storage shed in Safford would be approximately April of ’93? Do you know what happened with the rest of the property there?”
“No, I don’t have a clue.”
“Well, let me tell you what we found—”
Before Thomas could finish, Odell said, “Okay,” and looked at Thomas and Weddle with a confused, serious stare, as if to say, “What is going on here?”
Thomas explained how the contents of Odell’s storage unit had been auctioned off about a week ago. “What was found,” she added, “is why we are here.”
Odell sat up in her chair.
“Do you have any idea what would be in that storage shed that would cause law enforcement to be involved?” Thomas paused for a moment. Then, “Any idea whatsoever, ma’am?”
“None.”
“Has anyone else ever had access to that storage shed?” Thomas still hadn’t come out with it. She was still giving Odell the benefit of the doubt to come up with some sort of explanation.
“There was,” Odell started to say, then stumbled a bit with her words, “there was…another key, yeah.”
“And who had that key?”
“It wasn’t