Thus, the baby now had a resting place.
Perhaps even more chilling was how, with an eerie sense of simplicity, Odell explained those few days while she slept on the couch: “During this time [that] the baby was in the closet, I did not hear any more sounds from the baby.”
As the night progressed and Streever continued to type and Scileppi kept Odell focused on what she wanted to say, the conversation shifted to Baby Number Two, born in 1983.
“About a year [after giving birth to Baby Number One], I became pregnant again. I was not dating any one person exclusively at the time and I do not know who the father was.”
Once again, Odell decided not to seek prenatal care, she said. Then she explained how she didn’t “tell anyone [she] was pregnant—especially my mother. Throughout this and the previous pregnancy, I had a significant fear that if my mother found out I was pregnant, there would be hell to pay.”
Her kids, she continued, would often sleep over her mother’s, who, she said, lived in a separate apartment on the same property.
“It was during one of these sleepover nights that I went into labor.”
Contradictory to what she would say later, Odell claimed time and again she was alone during each of the three births.
As for what happened during the birth of Baby Number Two, she blacked out and heard loud ringing noises, then passed out and fell against “some fixtures” in the bathroom, and “struck my head on the wall, or one of the fixtures.”
Important to Scileppi and Streever (perhaps more important to Lungen, who was still in a separate room, monitoring the conversation), Odell then said, “I can also recall hearing a noise coming from the baby, which is hard to describe, but somewhere between a cry and a cough.”
Further, Odell said that when she passed out, she must have fallen on top of the baby. Because when she woke up later, “I felt something under my leg…. The baby was under the thigh part of my leg. I worked myself into a position where I could check on the baby.
“There were no signs of life.”
After that, she wrapped the baby in blankets, stuffed it into a cardboard box, and put it “into the same shed behind the apartment house” as Baby Number One.
“To my knowledge, no one was aware I had given birth or discovered the contents of the box.”
Next, Scileppi and Streever asked Odell to describe what happened to Baby Number Three, whereby her most chilling confession of the night would emerge.
4
The Staunton, Virginia, mission that Odell, Sauerstein, Mabel, and the kids were staying at during the latter part of July 1993 appeared to be a godsend. There was no hurry getting back to New York. Mabel was ill, but she was holding up fairly well considering the circumstances. It was Odell, just out of the hospital after gallbladder surgery, who was in worse shape, but at the same time recovering quite quickly. As soon as she was well enough to travel, they would be on the road again heading for Endicott, New York.
Things would take an unexpected turn, however.
“When we lived in this mission,” Odell said later, “I did not realize my daughter Alice (the oldest, at fifteen) was telling all of the other people in the mission stories about me. They weren’t true. She was doing it to get attention.”
Unbeknownst to Odell, while she was in the hospital, Alice had gotten involved with a twenty-one-year-old man who was also staying at the mission.
“She had decided she wanted to do what she wanted to do. So, she was getting romantically involved with him, and when I came back from the hospital, the people who were running the mission took me into the conference room.”
“If you do not put an end to the relationship that is developing,” one of the board members said rather sternly, looking at Odell as she sat listening, nursing her stitches, “we are going to ask you to leave. We cannot have this type of relationship going on underneath our roof.”
Odell said she understood that it was a religious organization and an inappropriate relationship between a twenty-one-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old minor was not something God would have approved of.
Leaving the meeting, Odell went straight to Alice.
“I tried to sit down and explain to her what was going on.” The day before the ball had dropped on Alice’s new love interest, as Odell was in the hospital, Alice had “punched a wall and blamed Robert for it, because [he] told her that she couldn’t get involved with [the man]. I guess he knew…or had heard rumors.”
As she and Alice talked the situation through, the conversation became heated. They started arguing loudly, screaming back and forth.
“I was on medication, because I was in a lot of pain, and I was supposed to be resting. But, my God, Alice wouldn’t have it.”
So as they argued, Odell said, Alice, who was holding Toby in her arms, Odell’s youngest child, “threw him on the floor in a fit of rage.”
As she went for Toby, who was on the floor crying, Odell said, “You go sit out on that cot in the hallway.”
While Alice walked into the hallway, Odell checked on Toby, who appeared to be fine. She had a hard time leaning down to pick him up because, she said, her stitches went from her right breast all the way down to her waist.
After picking Toby up and making sure he was all right, Odell then took the “leg of a toy” on the floor next to her and walked out to where Alice was sitting on a cot.
“She sat on the cot and I went out with the stick, and I was so angry with her I hit the cot and, accidentally, hit her arm.”
The woman who ran the mission had since come out and taken Alice away to talk to her, to find out what had happened. According to Odell, Alice made up several stories: among them was that Odell had been driving while drunk, and she deliberately had hit her with the stick.
The woman then called Child Protective Services.
Here was where things got really ugly, Odell explained. The woman from Child Protective Services showed up and conducted a brief investigation. Afterward, according to Odell, the woman said, “I want permission to take your daughter.”
“At this point in time, I was so overwrought,” Odell said, explaining herself, “I just said to her, ‘Go ahead and take her! Go ahead and take her!’”
Alice was immediately taken away and placed in foster care. Odell was subsequently charged with assault and summoned to appear in court a day or so later.
Eventually, after three court dates, Odell said she was released on her own signature, pending a future court date.
The court later reported that Odell “never returned to court” and thus a “warrant,” which had been issued for her, was “vacated [after] three years.”
CHAPTER 16
1
SCILEPPI AND STREEVER had one more bit of business to take care of before they could present Steve Lungen with Odell’s statement: Baby Number Three.
“We went back and forth, back and forth with her,” Scileppi recalled, “and she started to open up more and more. Once again, it was never a question of: she didn’t want to talk to us.”
To the contrary, Scileppi insisted, Odell was openly discussing the birth and death of each child, as if she were getting some sort of self-gratification from revealing such dark secrets. Streever and Scileppi, sitting, listening, felt Odell needed to talk.
Later, Odell’s version of the night would differ substantially. She said she felt intimidated and pushed into confessing, not to mention scared of implicating her mother or father. But her statement didn’t refer to her dad or mom being involved in the deaths of the babies. The only references to her parents refer to the abuse Odell had suffered from them. She never stated that either one had had anything to do with the deaths of the babies.
“About six months [after Baby Number Two was born], I was dating a man whose first name began with an H, although I’m not totally sure of his first name,” Odell said as Streever typed.
It was pushing 2:00 A.M. and Scileppi and Streever were exhausted. Odell was showing signs of b
reaking down, Streever and Scileppi recalled, but demanded they finish what they started.
“We dated for about six weeks. During this time, I became pregnant again.”
When she found out she was pregnant, Odell said, she was no longer dating the man she now called “H.”
“Due to the same circumstances of fear of my mother’s reaction and lack of financial or emotional support, I elected to have the child at home and without medical assistance.”
For Scileppi and Streever, the same pattern that had been present throughout her previous two pregnancies presented itself again: whenever there wasn’t a male figure in Odell’s life and she became pregnant, the baby ended up being wrapped in plastic and put in a cardboard box.
She further explained how she had carried the child full-term without anyone realizing she was pregnant, including Mabel. By this time, she and Mabel were living together in the same apartment, along with her three living children. Yet, she said, Mabel and the kids lived on one side of the apartment and she lived on the opposite side.
Each side, she claimed, had its own bathroom.
The day of the birth, she said, started out with explosive “lower-back pain,” which, to Odell, meant labor. She had given birth six times previously, so she knew by then when labor began. It was later that night, in February or March 1985, she couldn’t recall exactly which month, when she went into full-fledged labor. In fact, she remembered, she had been sleeping and the labor pains were so severe, they woke her out of a deep sleep.
“After getting on the toilet, my water broke. Within a short period of time, I was in full labor and situated myself on the bathroom floor…. As had happened with my previous two births at home, I began to hear ringing and to black out as I began pushing. I lost consciousness at some point and I recall waking up to see the baby lying on the floor before me. Although there was no apparent obstruction in the baby’s mouth, nor was I on top of him as in the previous instances, there were still no signs of life.”
She then wrapped the baby in a towel, but this time made sure not to obstruct the baby’s face.
Again, these were remarkable details—but details, in effect, that seemed to remove some of the blame from Odell.
“I crawled with the baby to the floor next to the bed and lay there holding the baby close to me. I don’t know how long I was there, but it was beginning to get light out, so I laid the baby in the closet and climbed into bed.”
“So I laid the baby in the closet and climbed into bed”— as if it were just another day in her life. Streever and Scileppi couldn’t believe how common she made it sound.
At no point during any one of the three births—that eventually would end in the deaths of three babies—did Odell ever consider, according to her statements then or later, calling 911 herself to, perhaps, save the child’s life.
The remainder of her statement consisted of Odell explaining how she had met Robert Sauerstein and moved throughout the country, the entire time toting the three dead babies around with them. That is, until she moved to Pima, Arizona, and—like she later would do with her fifteen-year-old daughter—abandoned them.
Finally: “In the third and final unsuccessful birth that I described above, I recall just before losing consciousness that the baby made a brief cry of a second or less. Also, I would like to add that I know now the decisions I made to do the things the way I did was wrong, but I now realize I was motivated to do this because of the terror I always felt from my mother and my father. This in no way excuses my decisions, but today I would do things differently.”
Perhaps the most telling statement Odell would make during the course of the entire interview came at the end. It spoke of someone who was ready and willing to accept the consequences and responsibility of her actions, and, in Steve Lungen’s view, could have been made only by someone who was guilty.
“I have read the above statement consisting of three pages”—single-spaced pages of text at that—“and it is true and accurate to the best of my recollection. This statement was given of my own free will and I have been treated fairly. I have been offered food and drinks and have been permitted to use the bathroom as needed.”
Odell signed the statement next to Scileppi’s signature.
Lungen had exactly what he needed to prosecute Odell for the murder of her three children. All that was left to do now was arrest her and process her in Liberty, New York. Once that was done, she would sit in jail until her arraignment.
If Scileppi had intimidated Odell into saying she had killed her children, as she later claimed, why would she sign such a statement? After all, one of the final sentences was very clear: “This statement was given of my own free will and I have been treated fairly.”
“From my point of view,” Odell said, “I had been talking to police,” and she stumbled a bit with her words here, taking long breaks to collect her thoughts before continuing, “…how can I explain this so you’ll understand…for three days. I was absolutely exhausted. But that was not something they were concerned about. The reason I signed it was I didn’t know I could refuse to sign it! I’m surprised I wasn’t sitting on a mushroom the way they fairy-taled this thing out.”
Odell went on to say she believed, at the moment she signed the statement, that she had no support from her family. She felt, essentially, alone. Moreover, she was convinced, she added, that Sauerstein was going to take off with the kids, which scared her into doing many things she didn’t want to do.
“The reason I signed the statement was because I thought Robert was taking off with the children, and the best thing for me to do was to sign the statement and disappear into the penal system for the rest of my life. Because if I lose them, I have nothing anyway.”
Although the ride back to Liberty took only two hours, it seemed much longer. It was late. The sun was rising. Odell was beyond tired. Still, the things she would tell Investigator Robert Lane, one of Scileppi’s investigators from the BCI in Liberty, who was in charge of booking her, would implicate her further in the deaths of her children. But perhaps more important, it would give law enforcement a taste of the motive behind the murders, which was something Scileppi and Streever hadn’t touched on during their interview with Odell.
2
According to Odell, during one of her court appearances in July 1993, before she left Staunton, Virginia, she had a conversation with Alice regarding the situation between them that had escalated to the point where Odell had allegedly struck Alice with a child’s toy.
“I said to Alice in the courthouse that day, ‘We need to sit down and talk. We need to start bridging this gap.’ She stood in the courtroom hallway…while I said, ‘Come on, we need to try to bring this back together,’ and she said, ‘I am not coming back to live with you! I will do whatever I have to do so that I do not have to come back and live with you.’”
Odell walked away from Alice that afternoon, she said. She felt Alice would cause her “big trouble down the road.” Outside the courthouse, she explained further, she stood for a moment and contemplated the future: If I continue to stay here and try to make her do something she doesn’t want to do, the stories are going to continue, they are going to get worse. I’m going to end up going to jail for something I didn’t do…and my mother is going to have these kids.
Facing the difficulties of parenting a troubled child was apparently too much for Odell to swallow—because she left Alice in Staunton, in foster care, didn’t fight to get her back, and never saw her again.
By September 1993, Odell, Sauerstein, Mabel, and the six kids, minus Alice, were living in Endicott, New York. Odell had tried to make payments on the self-storage unit in Safford, where the dead babies were stored, but she couldn’t keep up with them. By June 1994, she had stopped paying the bill altogether.
Knowing what Odell knew, why in the world would she stop paying the bill, certainly aware that someday, most definitely, the contents of the unit would be auctioned off and the three dead children, she had kept
hidden from the world, would be revealed? Did she want to get caught? Was it some sort of unintentional way of allowing the situation to resolve itself?
“You know what?” Odell said later. “When you don’t have the money to pay, where do you get it from? It wasn’t a conscious thought to stop paying the bill. I had also made every conscious effort to get money to [pay the bill] as soon as I had it…but my mother had gotten really, really sick as soon as we settled in Endicott.”
Indeed, throughout the next year, Mabel got sicker and sicker. It was all she could do to move around the house they were now living in. She stopped talking and walking. She seemed to be preparing for death.
At home one day in 1995, Mabel “dropped,” as Odell later put it, and never got up.
“I called the ambulance and they took her to the hospital.”
By the early-morning hours of the following day, the woman who had become Odell’s emotional ball and chain was gone. The same woman who had caused her daughter so much pain, so much tragedy and dysfunction throughout their lives together, was finally dead. Odell wouldn’t have to worry any longer about what Mabel would do to her kids. She wouldn’t have to stress over Mabel running to the cops, telling them she had three dead babies in boxes in Arizona. It was all over. The burden of a lifetime gone for good.
One might suspect Odell would have thrown a party the night Mabel died, jumping for joy at the mere thought that the woman (and all of her problems) was finally out of her life.
“There was a portion of me that was terrified. She had told me she was never going to let me go. She was coming back to get me after she died. After she died, I kind of looked around every corner, and had a hard time going to sleep.”
At Mabel’s request, Odell had her cremated. She took care of all the arrangements. There was no memorial. No funeral. Mabel died, her body was cremated, and that was the end of it. Odell notified her brothers and went on with life.
Sleep in Heavenly Peace Page 20
