Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

officer and myself would travel to Pennsylvania to try and find Miss Odell and interview her.”

      After speaking to the owner of the self-storage unit where the boxes had been purchased, Thomas determined that Odell had rented the units in question back in 1991, but throughout the years, she must have had some trouble keeping up with payments. In fact, she hadn’t paid her bill since June 1994, nearly ten years ago, and hadn’t been inside the unit since.

      During a meeting of investigators and detectives, Bruce Weddle, a seasoned detective with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, was chosen to fly to Pennsylvania with Thomas to interview Odell. At six feet two inches, 175 pounds, the red-haired Weddle had been an Arizona state trooper, working the interstate, for eighteen years. For the past ten, he had been a detective, working mostly narcotics, where much of his time had been spent busting up large methamphetamine labs.

      Weddle, who had just turned fifty, grew up in southeastern Arizona and had lived in the region all his life. From an early age, he said, the idea of becoming a cop interested him.

      “My dad was in law enforcement, and from that I guess I got bit by the bug early on and realized that’s what I wanted to do.”

      Leaving college, Weddle worked construction for a time and then went to work for a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in the area. After a time with Pepsi, it only seemed natural for Weddle to then apply to the Arizona Department of Public Safety Police Academy, where he was quickly accepted.

      For a number of reasons, Weddle and Thomas decided to take the earliest flight out of Arizona. Number one, Thomas recalled, “was to avoid the media.”

      Every major television station in Arizona wanted an interview with Thomas and other members of the GCSO. Reporters were calling the GCSO from all over the country. Thomas had fed them as little information as she could. CNN called. The Associated Press had run a story, as had many local newspapers. Everyone involved agreed the story was going to find legs. The quicker Thomas and Weddle got out of town and began uncovering facts, the better off everyone would be. There even had been a memorial set up at the self-storage unit. In the same fashion teenagers might leave flowers and candles and stuffed animals near a telephone pole after a peer had been killed in an automobile accident, people were leaving all sorts of mementos in front of the doors of unit number six. With that kind of emotion floating around, the GCSO knew the local media could really push the story into national status.

      On Friday, May 16, 2003, Thomas found out she and Weddle could book a flight that night. All they had to do was steer clear of the media until then.

      By Saturday morning, May 17, after an all-night flight, Weddle and Thomas touched down safely in Waverly, New York, and immediately drove to Towanda, Pennsylvania, where Trooper Robert McKee, a ten-year veteran of the force, was waiting to greet them.

      As one might suspect, Thomas and Weddle were exhausted from their red-eye flight out of Arizona. Neither had slept much on the plane. Before they could focus on how to approach Dianne Odell, they needed rest.

      Hours later, after a brief respite at the hotel, they met with McKee for lunch. McKee informed them how he had found out that Odell had been working at a local Rite Aid near Rome, but he couldn’t confirm exactly which store. He did find out that Odell had been living with her paramour, Robert Sauerstein, for many years, a name also found on several pieces of documentation in storage unit number six.

      Further, McKee explained, Odell was the mother of eight children. If those babies in the boxes were hers, that would make her the mother of eleven. She was nearly fifty years old, her youngest child just four. The woman had been pregnant just about every other year for the past twenty years. Some of her children had children, which made her a grandmother. Was it possible, Thomas and Weddle wondered as they listened to McKee, that the babies were born to one of her daughters?

      After lunch, as Thomas, Weddle, and McKee worked their way toward the Towanda barracks to set up some type of mini task force, they passed a local pharmacy.

      “Let’s check it out,” Thomas suggested. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

      After a quick look inside and a brief talk with the manager, Thomas found out Odell had never worked there. Thomas was using a photograph of Odell that she had taken from one of the photo albums in the boxes.

      Minutes later, they came up on a Rite Aid.

      “Stop there,” Thomas said. “Let’s try it again.”

      “When we first walked in,” Thomas recalled, “Miss Odell happened to be the first person I saw behind the cash register, and I recognized her from the photograph.”

      Thomas approached Odell. “Can we talk to the manager?”

      “Sure,” Odell said, then picked up the phone and dialed the back room.

      Taking the manager aside moments later, Thomas asked if she employed a person by the name of Dianne Odell.

      “Yes, we do.”

      “Can we have permission to speak with her?”

      “Sure.”

      Thomas, Weddle, and McKee then walked back toward Odell, and after identifying themselves, they asked her if she would answer a few questions.

      “Okay,” she said. “Sure.”

      Later, Odell said she knew from the moment they entered the building who they were and why they were there. “As soon as I saw them,” Odell recalled, “I knew they were from Arizona and when they came up to me and introduced themselves as detectives, I knew immediately what it was for.”

      Odell had gained a considerable amount of weight throughout the years. She was heavier now than she had been in quite some time. At about five feet six inches, 160 pounds, she had charcoal black hair with prominent streaks of gray and white running through in dramatic, checkerboardlike contrast. A mother of a four-year-old, with four teenagers at home, it was clear sleep wasn’t something Odell had been getting a lot of: the pronounced bags under her eyes, the sagging, yellowed skin on her face, along with her tired walk, spoke of an exhausted woman, working hard in a dead-end job to support what was a rather large family.

      “Is it possible,” Thomas asked the manager as Odell began walking out from behind the counter, “for Miss Odell to leave for a time?”

      “Can I get my purse and coat?” Odell asked.

      “Yes, of course. Go ahead. Do you have a vehicle here, a car of your own?” Thomas wanted to know.

      “Yes,” Odell said minutes later, slipping on her coat.

      “Do you want to drive your own vehicle, you know, follow us? Or ride with us to the barracks?”

      “I’ll drive with you,” Odell said, staring at Thomas.

      Odell, Thomas was quick to point out later, wasn’t “under arrest for anything.” They just wanted to speak to her and, hopefully, get some answers. Odell was extremely cooperative and willing to help in any way she could.

      The Towanda barracks was a ten-minute ride from Rite Aid. Odell didn’t say much. But she was certainly thinking about what was going to happen once she got inside the barracks and began talking. She would have some explaining to do, to say the least, regarding three dead babies found inside a self-storage unit she had rented.

      “We did have some small talk during the ride to Towanda,” Thomas remembered later. “‘How long have you been working there? How long have you been here?’ Nothing about the case was discussed. In fact, Miss Odell never once asked what we needed to talk to her about—which seemed odd to me.”

      Odell later said she asked Thomas and Weddle several times what they wanted to talk to her about, but they kept saying, “Let’s wait until we get to the barracks.”

      Thomas, Weddle, and Trooper McKee denied Odell ever asked any questions about the case.

      3

      Concentrating on schoolwork became almost impossible for