Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps
poles, crib stuff…I don’t think so.”
Detective Weddle leaned toward Odell: “What’s your mother’s name?”
“Good cop, bad cop,” Odell said later. Thomas acted sympathetic while Weddle presented himself as passive, but then changed his tone, projecting a more abrasive approach.
“Mabel,” Odell said.
“Do you remember having boxes,” Weddle asked, “I mean, boxes of photographs that were left in there?”
“Some of them were left there, yeah.”
“We found that strange,” Weddle said. “You know, Miss Odell, that somebody would go off and leave photographs, family photographs that had been collected for years, and especially photographs of your mother. Is your mother still alive?”
“No,” Odell said, “she’s not….”
Weddle, a large man in stature, Western all the way around the edges (cowboy boots, plaid shirt, big belt buckle), hardened by what he’d seen as a cop throughout the years, got up from his seat and walked around the room for a moment. After running his hand across his chin, sighing a bit, he looked at Odell. “I got another question for ya,” he said, raising his finger in the air as if he were thinking. “You said that you removed stuff one other time.” He paused. Turned around. “Was that after you had moved that you came back and removed some of the items, the last time you moved the items out of there? Had you moved at that point and came back and removed items?”
By itself, the question alone seemed confusing. A mixed bag of winding words.
“No, no,” Odell said immediately. She was getting a bit panicked now, as if she were being accused of something.
“Or was that before you moved?”
“That was before I had moved, yeah.”
“So after you moved, you never returned and removed anything out of that storage shed?”
“No, no. I had lost [sic] the key…umm…umm…with one of my daughters’ friends, just in case I had lost the keys when I came back I could get in and get stuff, you know if I had decided.”
Thomas had been studying Odell as Weddle took control of the questioning, watching her mannerisms and movements. Although Odell was shifting a bit in her seat and answering questions with more enthusiasm, she still seemed confident. It was clear in the way she thought about her answers. Thomas and Weddle knew that a suspect who thought about what she said was a suspect hiding something. Nerves fray. Lies build on top of lies and become hard to keep track of. Thus, the suspect had to think about what she had said previously so she could mold responses to those particular questions and answers.
Odell was definitely hiding something. Weddle and Thomas were sure of it.
3
Dianne was in a remarkable predicament during the first few weeks of her pregnancy in early 1972: what was she going to do about the baby she was carrying as she and her mother settled into their new home? She had broken down and told Mabel about the baby, whereby Mabel acted as if she had known all along. That wasn’t the problem. Instead, according to Dianne, it was who the father of the child was: John Molina, who, Dianne claimed later, had allegedly fathered the child while raping her one last time before she moved north.
As would be the case with many of the stories Dianne later told, there was no way to prove John had fathered the 1972 child. Nevertheless, Dianne insisted her father was responsible for both the life and death of the child she would later call Matthew.
“When we moved up to the lake,” Dianne said later, “I was already pregnant with Matthew…. [My mother]didn’t want me to have the child. We kept arguing about what I wanted and what she wanted.”
During a brief argument one day, Mabel ended up “slapping” Dianne around.
“That was when I said I’d had enough.”
She couldn’t recall how, but after Mabel hit her, Dianne “managed to get down to [her] father’s house” in Jamaica, Queens. When she arrived, she asked him, “Can I stay long enough to have the child?”
John looked at her for a moment. He was amazed, shocked by the mere sight of her. While he stood there contemplating what to do, Dianne said, she “thought he would say no.”
So, what do I do then? she asked herself while standing in the archway, waiting for a response.
“My mother’s words kept echoing in my head.” Mabel had laughed when Dianne told her where she was going, telling Dianne her father would never let her stay. “He doesn’t want you there,” Mabel said as Dianne left. “You’re a constant reminder.”
After John thought things through for a moment, he told Dianne to “go into the other room,” where, she remembered, the television was on. John headed for the kitchen, his favorite area of the house. Apparently, he was going to sit and contemplate the situation and then let Dianne know. Until then, he expected her to sit, watch television, and be quiet.
Whenever John had to make any major decision, he began drinking, according to Dianne, to help him through it. There he sat, “for hours,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking and thinking.
At some point, he finally spoke. “Come in here, Dianne!”
“I heard the anger and slur in his voice. I was scared.”
Dianne sat at the table across from him and they just stared at each other for a brief period.
“How could you do this?” she said John asked at one point. “Why did you bring this to my door? People will see you.” He paused, and as he began to say, “You should be ashamed of yourself for coming back and asking for my help,” he raised his hand.
“With all of his might,” Dianne recalled, “he came up and punched me in the head.”
With the force of the blow, Dianne fell off the chair.
As she lay on the floor, John grabbed his cat-o’-nine-tails and, like an Egyptian guard whipping a slave, began mauling her “across” her “back, legs, and head.” As he did that, Dianne said, she “curled into a ball” on the floor.
Then he starting “kicking” her violently.
“I felt like I was being hit everywhere, all at once.”
When her father ran out of energy and stopped, Dianne said, she crawled on all fours into the living room to “try to recoup some energy.”
With his whip, her dad had spoken; he obviously didn’t want Dianne around. So, after “resting until early morning,” she said, she went back up to the lake.
The subject of who the father of the 1972 child was would come under considerable scrutiny later. Dianne changed her story several times throughout the years. In April 1989, for example, she was interviewed by the New York State Police (NYSP), where she signed a two-page statement in which she had given the police a detailed description of those months she spent at the lake with Mabel while carrying that first child.
“…[In] the early part of 1972 I became pregnant by a person in New York City,” Dianne told police when they asked her who the father of the child was.
Now, if she would have left her statement at that, there would have been no controversy later on. A “person in New York City” could have certainly meant her dad.
But she didn’t stop there.
“I only had met this person,” she continued, “once, and don’t remember his name.”
This second part of the statement lent itself more to the obvious conclusion—that she became pregnant by one of the johns her mother had set her up with, or some random sexual encounter.
In 1972, Dianne weighed approximately two hundred pounds. Later, however, she described herself during that same period as “skinny”