Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps
every opportunity to tell the truth. There was no reason to hide anything by then.
Her motive would become clear much later when authorities found out what happened to Matthew, as she called the child, and what she had done with it—a fourth dead child, incidentally, who was not among the three dead babies found in Arizona.
4
Odell traded jabs with Thomas and Weddle regarding who else could have had a key to her self-storage unit. For about five minutes, they went back and forth: Odell swore it was a friend of her daughter’s, but wasn’t sure; while Thomas and Weddle tried to allow her to come up with another explanation, which she couldn’t.
Finally Weddle asked Odell if she ever went back to the storage unit after abandoning it. Odell said she and her “common-law husband,” Sauerstein, had moved to Texas with the kids at one point, and “on my way back [to Safford], the car I was driving died. So I pretty much had to stay there and try to work to get another car and to put the kids in school….”
“Was Mr. Sauerstein with you at that point?” Weddle asked.
“Yeah.”
“So when you left Pima, Arizona, that’s when you moved to Texas?”
“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.
CHAPTER 6
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