Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

      Odell became scared at that point, as if she could feel the spotlight on her now. What’s waiting at home? Are they waiting in my driveway? she contemplated while picturing satellite trucks parked around the block where she lived. Reporters waiting at her doorstep. Headlines: BABY KILLER…MOTHER KILLS KIDS…MONSTER MOTHER.

      As Odell sat in deep thought, Weddle continued, “It’s just a matter of time, probably today, that [the media] are going to find out who the locker was rented to (which is you) and that’s more likely going to come out in the news. So be prepared for it.”

      Thomas said she and Weddle were likely going to be speaking with Sauerstein, and they wondered if Odell thought he’d have a problem with talking to them.

      “I don’t think so.”

      Weddle mentioned the DNA sample again. “We don’t know what happened out there, ma’am. We’re not trying to point the blame at you, but obviously—”

      Odell interrupted. “Well, it sure sounds like it’s coming down my way!” She was irritated. The tone of the questioning had gone from casual to accusatory. She felt pressured.

      “Well, this has to start somewhere,” Weddle said after Odell became visibly upset. “Where else would our investigators look?”

      “I…I understand what you’re saying, but, you know, I’m also getting innuendos from just the inflections in your voices, and it’s just not him, it’s you, too,” Odell said, looking now at Thomas.

      One might question Odell’s tactics here. As she sat and talked, she knew what had happened to the children. If she chose, she didn’t have to go through the rigorous questioning she was now undergoing. She could have left the barracks at any time, or demanded a lawyer, which would have suspended the interview.

      But she didn’t.

      The media kept coming up in conversation. Thomas, Weddle, and now Trooper McKee, who had been there the entire time, kept telling Odell to prepare herself. This was going to be a huge story. A mom who possibly could have killed her babies meant ratings—and the media wouldn’t stop until it tracked down the current owner of the storage shed. From there, Thomas Bright would be found. There was a good chance Odell was going to be “breaking news” in the hours and days to come. Trooper McKee, like Weddle and Thomas, had made it clear to Odell that her life was going to change, whether she had done anything or not.

      “We’re not pointing a finger at anybody,” McKee said, standing up, walking toward Odell, “until we do an investigation. And that’s what we’re doing here now. You know, put yourself in our shoes. Who would you first start with?”

      This seemed to calm Odell down some. “I understand completely,” she said, “but, you know, I’m just saying this is how, this is what is coming across to me, judging by the expressions.”

      In truth, they had found three—not one or two, but three—dead babies in boxes marked with Odell’s name. Was it such a stretch to think Odell had had something to do with the deaths of the babies, or that she knew what happened? Cops followed evidence. Thus far, there was no reason for them to believe Odell hadn’t been involved.

      3

      As Jonathan Schwartz maintained what had become a life of waiting in bed for a kidney, Dianne worked hard to support the family. She was twenty-one years old now, and had left behind a life of horror: beatings, sexual abuse, emotional abuse. Still, she hadn’t graduated high school and was stuck, one could say, in small-town America working in retail, making minimum wage, now taking care of an ill husband and a mother, who had made it clear she was responsible for providing a life of leisure she thought she deserved.

      By early 1975, Jonathan received a kidney, and almost immediately after the transplant, he began to get his strength back. He was his own man again, entirely self-sufficient.

      “When he got better,” Dianne recalled, “he realized he didn’t want to be married any longer.”

      So they split up and eventually divorced.

      With Jonathan gone and Dianne once again single, she moved back upstairs with Mabel and started living in the same tangle of dysfunction she had grown up in. Mom, Dianne insisted, began to work on her the moment she moved back in. “Find a new job! Make more money! You need to take care of me.” Mabel would say that Dianne had made a promise when she was nine years old to care for her mom—and promises were made to keep.

      Around the end of the year 1975, a “fine-looking man” Dianne would come to know as Hubert Odell, and his brother, James, rented the apartment below Mabel and Dianne. James, with a smile that caught Dianne’s eye immediately, seemed like the perfect gentleman. As he and Hubert moved in and began hanging around, she worked her way slowly into getting to know them.

      Dianne had changed jobs. She had found an opening at a local ice-cream plant and started working full-time.

      At first, she said, she and James were just “good friends.”

      “He was a backwoods, country-type guy…. I kind of accepted him the way he was. I looked at him as a friend.”

      While Dianne continued a friendship with James well into 1976, her relationship with her mom became fragile. Dianne would push certain issues and her mom would back off—one in particular was Baby Matthew. There was a dead child in a suitcase in the closet. Sooner or later, something would have to be done about it.

      “I would broach the subject a couple of times with what had happened to Matthew and she would give me a stone-cold look,” Dianne recalled. “She would say things like, ‘If you open your mouth to me about [Matthew], I’m going to kill you. I don’t want to talk about it.’ My mother had a way of looking at you that would drop you in your tracks.”

      Furthermore, Dianne said she was terrified of what Mabel would do to her if the subject of Matthew was brought to light. She believed her mom would kill her if she went to the police, or mentioned Matthew to anyone.

      “When she said, ‘I will kill you,’ it was something I took seriously.”

      James Odell and Dianne spent the next year or so just kicking back, playing cards, and talking about life. James, Dianne said, was a homebody. He liked to stay in the house. Whereas Hubert, James’s brother, was what Dianne described as someone who was out and about much of the time “with the ladies.”

      By August 1977, Dianne and James found their relationship had turned from friendship to love, and on August 22, they decided to get married. James had recently joined the navy. There was a good chance, Dianne knew, he was going to be shipped out soon after the wedding. But she still wanted to be his wife, she said, and support whatever he wanted to do.

      Indeed, no sooner did they get married than James got the call for boot camp.

      James wrote Dianne while he was away. In one letter, she learned about a lawsuit he had been involved in. It was going to be settled within the next six months to a year, he said.

      This was good news, Dianne thought. They could use the money. Why?

      She was pregnant.

      After finding and reading the letter, Mabel was under the impression the lawsuit would bring a large amount of money into Dianne’s hands. This, Dianne later claimed, was something Mabel viewed as the possible windfall of cash she had been looking for all her life. All of a sudden, James was this great person. While Mabel could barely dredge up a good word about him before, now she was praising him any chance she got.

      One afternoon, Mabel approached Dianne. “You have to go down to the dock when James gets back and meet him.”

      “No, I don’t think I want to make that trip,” Dianne said. “I don’t even know where he’s coming in.”

      “No! I think you should really try.”

      “I’m not going, Mother. Anyway, James’s mother doesn’t want me to go.”

      Mabel kept pushing Dianne to