All the same, Odell claimed that as they drove to Liberty that morning she overheard Investigator Lane, on numerous occasions, talking about how the “Arizona authorities were going to file charges against her if they [the BCI] couldn’t come up with anything to hold her there.”
Again, this later memory of that morning was in stark contrast with the actual facts of the case. Odell had already made an admission of guilt by the time she took off for Liberty with Lane. In addition, why would Lane, or anyone else, say something like that at that point? The BCI and Lungen didn’t need any more evidence to prosecute. She had given them enough herself already.
Lane, who later denied having said anything about the case during the car ride with Odell, had been an investigator with the BCI for the past four years, with the NYSP since 1984. He spoke with candor and integrity. Other cops respected him. He had been one of Scileppi’s top investigators since joining the BCI. With his slicked-back black hair, shiny suit, and expensive tie, he embodied, perhaps, the image of what many might view as a television cop: flashy, crass, direct. But his record spoke for itself. Lane was a clean cop all the way. He had made countless arrests that had led to convictions. There was nothing Hollywood about Robert Lane and his determination to put criminals behind bars with good, solid evidence.
In the early-morning hours of May 20, Lane’s job was to transport Odell back to Liberty so she could be processed. The hard part was over; the case, seemingly, a slam dunk. Odell had confessed. For Lane, it was a matter of paperwork and processing.
Or was it?
They arrived in Liberty, Lane recalled, at 5:40 A.M. Investigator Linda Paul was waiting at the station for them and greeted Odell and Lane as they entered the building. Incidentally, Odell later said Linda Paul rode with her and Lane from Waverly to Liberty; so her memory of that day, even of the most basic facts, was cloudy at best.
“Do you need to use the bathroom, Miss Odell?” Paul asked cordially upon greeting Odell.
“Yes, that would be nice.”
When Odell returned, Lane led her into the interview suite at the end of a long hallway. As she sat, sipping coffee, Lane went back to his office, he later said, to “prepare the accusatory instruments charging her with murder second.”
About a half hour later, Lane and Paul walked into the room where Odell was waiting.
“Miss Odell,” Lane explained, handing her copies of the accusatory instruments, “you’re being charged with three counts of murder in the second degree.”
She took a brief look at the paperwork. “Well, I expected that I would be charged with something like this.”
Odell seemed unaffected by the mere significance of what was transpiring, as if she still expected to get out of it somehow. The weight, perhaps, of what was actually happening had not yet settled on her. Maybe she thought she still could, with the right words, explain everything away. Perhaps she was in shock? Who knows?
In any event, Lane had read the statement Streever and Scileppi had prepared the previous night, so he was familiar with the particulars of the case.
While sitting across from Odell at the table in the interview room as Odell went through the paperwork, Lane began shaking his head.
“What is it?” Odell asked.
“I just find it unbelievable that you do not know what the sex of the infants were and who the fathers were? You must know the father of the children, or the fathers of the children?”
For a brief period, Odell and Lane discussed who the fathers “could” possibly be. Odell kept changing her mind. She couldn’t recall if one man, whom she described as a “poultry inspector,” was the father of Baby Number One or Baby Number Two.
“The father of the first child,” she said, “is the brother of my ex-husband.”
Eventually Lane began mapping out the brief history of each child on a piece of paper, who the fathers might be, and what year each child had been born and died. It was hard, because Odell couldn’t remember exact dates, times, or sexes of the children. Selective memory, perhaps. As for Baby Doe, Odell said, as Lane noted it on his map, that child was fathered by a “young kid.” Again, here was one more opportunity for Odell to implicate her father and say that he had raped her and fathered the child, but she didn’t. As for the next baby, Baby Number One (1982), Odell claimed it was her brother-in-law’s child. Baby Number Two had been, according to her, fathered by a “washing-machine guy.” Baby Number Three had been fathered by a “poultry inspector…David something,” she finally said, but couldn’t recall his last name.
The man’s name, David Dandignac, hadn’t resonated with Odell as she sat talking to Lane on May 20, but Dandignac later would remember his relationship with Odell quite remarkably.
Dandignac wasn’t just some common poultry inspector, as one might have gathered from what Odell said; he worked for the Department of Agriculture as a poultry grader, whose job it was to make sure New York residents could depend on the Grade A insignia slapped on the front of turkey packaging. He had also worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture for sixteen years. In 2003, when members of the BCI caught up with him, Dandignac was married for a second time, had two boys from a previous marriage, and was living with his wife and her children, making him, in effect, a father of five.
Dandignac met Odell when he lived on White Lake next door to where she and Mabel and the three kids from her marriage to James Odell had lived. It was 1983. At twenty-three years old, seven years younger than Odell, he was inspecting eggs at the time for the state of New York. They struck up a friendship one day, he explained, that soon turned into an intimate relationship.
“We just started talking now and then and would visit on occasion or something, and I would stop over….”
At some point during the spring of 1984, after being friends, they became “romantically involved.” As the affair heated up, living next door to Odell wouldn’t suffice—by June of that same year, Dandignac said, he was living with Odell, Mabel, and the kids inside their bungalow on the lake.
Three months later, however, in August, “things started to not go well and we just didn’t…we just didn’t mesh well as a…as a couple, or as a family.”
Dandignac had just turned twenty-four years old. Odell was thirty. He was doing well at work and saw the opportunity for his future. Odell was working as a secretary and having a tough time making ends meet.
Odell said she never really wanted anything more from Dandignac than to be “friends with benefits.” Again, she claimed, it was Mabel who had pushed for the relationship.
“David was a very, very nice guy,” Odell recalled. “I had nothing against David, ever. I liked him as a friend. When I sent David away, it was to make sure he was not going to be plundered by my mother.”
It was Mabel, Odell added, who had asked Dandignac to move in (although he later recalled it differently).
“My mother said to him one day, ‘You can move in here with us….’ And I looked at her and said to David, ‘Could you give us a minute?’”
A private, whispered talk with Mabel did nothing. Dandignac was moving in and that was the end of it. The problem for Odell was not that he wasn’t a nice person, or that she didn’t trust him—she just wasn’t attracted to him. He lived right near their bungalow. She could see him anytime she wanted. She’d had sex with the guy. It didn’t mean she wanted to marry him—or have his child.
“Actually, I would have preferred not to see him at all. It’s not that I didn’t like him. I just wasn’t interested in him. He was a friend when I [lived down the road], and when I left there, I assumed the friendship would stay there. Not once did I ever consider he would visit my mother and, better yet, be in my house when I came home from work.”
After it was clear they didn’t, as Dandignac later put it, “mesh well,” instead of moving out of the house, he agreed to stay until he could find and afford a place of his own. All the same, they “slept in the same bed, but nothing,” he said, “was happening.” They we
ren’t having sex.
By September, Odell went to Dandignac and said, “Let’s just end the relationship…. You need to move out.”
He didn’t argue.
With little money of his own, Dandignac, who was paying part of Odell and Mabel’s rent, talked Odell into allowing him to move into a different section of the house. It was spacey enough for them all. He could sleep in the front room, where the kids had been sleeping, and the kids could move into Odell’s room.
Through October, November, and December 1984, he stayed in another room, all the while proclaiming that he was going to move as soon as he had enough money. But by the time January 1985 came around, he was still there. There were no hard feelings to speak of, Dandignac said later. He and Odell were finished. Furthermore, he got along well with Mabel, Odell, and the kids. He said Mabel was a normal old person. There was nothing strange about her. She could be overbearing, sure, but he liked her.
Nonetheless, there was something else between Dandignac and Odell that wasn’t being discussed—a secret, perhaps, that lingered as fall turned to winter and it became more apparent he was going to have to leave as soon as possible.
Back in July, Odell had gone to Dandignac and told him she had missed her period.
“I’m pregnant,” he later remembered Odell saying.
“What?” he responded. “Pregnant?” He was in his twenties. He had worked hard. Gone to college. He was planning a career in agriculture.
“Do you want me to get an abortion?” Odell asked.
“I don’t know…. I can’t give you an answer. I don’t know what to do.”
Dandignac was confused. No one wanted to end a life with one breath and a simple yes to an abortion. It had to be thought out. Planned. Time would tell.
A while went by and David decided, he said later, that he wanted Odell to have the child. They could work it all out. He’d support the child, even if she didn’t want to be involved romantically.
Months went by. It was well into January 1985 and the matter of whether Odell would get an abortion or have the child hadn’t been resolved. It reality, though, it was too late, anyway. She was, by January 1985, seven months pregnant. No doctor would grant her an abortion at such a late stage. Still, Dandignac was behind having the child and kept insisting he’d support her. Whenever they would discuss his moving out of the house, he’d assure Odell, “I will give you money toward the child.”
“I don’t want it,” Odell said one day, Dandignac recalled later.
“You don’t want my money?”
“No! I don’t want you paying me any money.”
Odell wanted to raise the child herself, she said later. “It wasn’t that I wanted to deny him that child,” she recalled. “I was trying to get him out of the house to stand on his own…. What I was afraid was going to happen is, if I accepted money from him, then he would end up staying. And if he stayed there, my mother would, you know, the dollar signs would have just popped right up in her eyes…and she would have thought, ‘Even if they are not sharing the same bedroom together, with the baby coming, he’s going to want to do everything in his power.’ She’s going to need this and that…and we’re going to be able to do this and that…. I could hear it going over and over in my head because I had heard it all before.”
Odell, then, wasn’t hiding the pregnancy from Mabel, as she later told police she would rather chop off one of her arms than tell Mabel she was pregnant.
During the time she was pregnant, Dandignac said later, he never knew of a time where she had told Mabel about it. “She was fairly stocky,” he added, explaining how Odell looked when she wasn’t pregnant, “large, very large-boned.”
They had talked about adoption as time went on, but again, a particular plan was never resolved or put in motion. The subjects of abortion, adoption, and Dandignac financially taking care of Odell and the child were always left in limbo.
By late January 1985, however, Dandignac was finished talking. He moved to Monticello. Any decision about the baby would fall now on Odell’s shoulders. He’d done all he could.
A few weeks later, he returned to the house to pick up an item he had left behind. Mabel answered the door. “I forgot a kitchen utensil,” he said.
“Wait here. I’ll get it.”
Dandignac walked into the foyer area. Odell was standing there as he walked by.
“Hello” was all she said.
Dandignac said hello back, grabbed the kitchen utensil from Mabel, and walked out. It was the last time he would see or hear from Odell for nearly eighteen years. As far as how Odell and Mabel got along, David said they had a “good relationship….” Mabel was a “nice lady.” As far as what happened to the baby, he said he never knew or found out.
After the BCI tracked him down during the summer of 2003, Dandignac agreed to give a DNA sample. Baby Number Three, born sometime in 1985, was indeed fathered by Dandignac, DNA subsequently proved.
“I kept waiting to see,” Odell said later, “if he would show up at the door or, you know, call.” When he left, that was it. Odell expected a knock on the door one day after she had the baby, she claimed, or at least a phone call from him—but it never happened. “I know he had the phone number. He didn’t want to show up. He never did. He never picked up the phone and said, ‘Are you all right? Do you need anything?’ It was like a hole opened up in the ground and swallowed him.”
If Dandignac would have shown up or called, no one can say what Odell would have told him, but he would have never seen his child—because by then, it had been murdered, wrapped in plastic, placed in a box, and stored in the closet along with two others.
2
As Odell sat across from Investigator Lane on the morning of May 20, she admitted for a second time that the babies were alive at some point after she gave birth. “‘Felt child move against my thigh,’” Lane wrote as Odell spoke. “‘Heard noise.’”
Although quite subtle, those two words—“move” and “noise”—meant perhaps more than anything else Odell had said during the past three days. Those children were given life by Odell, both life and death, Lungen and his team of investigators were now entirely convinced.
The conversation shifted to Mabel at some point. Lane asked Odell “repeatedly whether her mother knew about the pregnancies….”
“Absolutely not!” Odell said firmly, again and again. “I was in a subordinate relationship with my mother and fearful of what she would think or what she would do if she found out I was pregnant.”
Odell said she had even kept the relationships she had with the fathers of the children secret from Mabel, with the exception of the “poultry inspector,” David Dandignac, whom, Odell said, she had been forced to stay in a relationship with because he was “supporting the family monetarily.”
“What about the storage locker,” Lane asked. “Why stop paying the bill?”
This, too, baffled investigators. Why stop paying the one bill that could expose the dark secrets of your life? It made no sense—unless, of course, you wanted to get caught.
“My intention was to go back and retrieve the boxes, but I couldn’t afford to travel out to Arizona.”
Lane soon found out that after Mabel died in 1995, Odell called the owner of the storage locker and asked if she could get her belongings, but the owner said he had sold everything to pay her overdue bills.
“I felt quite a bit of trepidation,” Odell explained, “that there would be a knock on the door [after that], but then nothing happened and I kind of thought he had not told me the truth and that he didn’t sell everything.”
“Why didn’t you throw the boxes out?” Lane asked.
This was also a mystery. Why hadn’t Odell discarded the boxes? No one would have likely ever found the remains.
“I wanted to give them a proper burial. And I wanted to have evidence when I went to the authorities, so they didn’t think I was some sort of wacko.”
Evidence of what? Here, once again, was Odell’s cha
nce to involve Mabel, but she never mentioned Mabel as being connected to the deaths of the children.
Investigator Linda Paul had stepped out of the room at one point to get Odell a glass of water. When she opened the door and returned, Odell leaned in toward Lane and whispered, “Can she remain outside?”
“Sure,” Lane said.
Paul looked at Lane as she handed Odell the water. Lane motioned for her to leave.
“Okay,” Lane continued as Paul left the room, “you have eight living, healthy children, all born in hospitals. You have these children that are in boxes that no one knew of…. Why is that, Miss Odell?”
Odell took a break for a moment, possibly to collect her thoughts. She had been, when it came down to it, interviewed for the past three days, under the light for nearly twenty hours. It was the first time anyone had asked this type of question. Here, perhaps without Odell even realizing it, Lane was getting to the motive behind the murders.
“The reason I hid the pregnancies,” Odell said quietly, according to Lane’s report, “is that they were bastard children, born out of wedlock. I was afraid of what my mother would think.”
Lane wrote down part of the statement on the piece of paper in front of him: “bastard children.” Next to that, he signed his name. Then he slid the piece of paper across the table and placed it in front of Odell.
“Would you be willing to sign that?”
“Sure,” Odell said as she grabbed Lane’s pen.
3
With Mabel dead, Odell and Sauerstein began spending their time in Endicott, New York, during fall 1995, concentrating on providing for their rather large family. They finally had found, it seemed, a place to settle. At least for the time being.
While in Endicott, though, they moved around quite a bit. From one end of town to the other, they packed it in and relocated several times over the period of a year or more. By the end of 1996, Sauerstein decided he wanted to go back to Lytle, Texas. He had heard there was work available, Odell said later, work he wasn’t finding in Endicott. A friend had even offered him a job. Yet, Odell and the kids weren’t going because they couldn’t afford to pack everything up and move across country all over again.
Sleep in Heavenly Peace Page 22
