Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

and I, you see, is that my mother had this god-awful love of money. And I never did. As long as I had enough to survive and make sure my kids had food and shoes, I was fine. I would go out and work hard, even if I had to clean someone’s toilets. My mother was never like that.”

      In a way, Mabel thought the world owed her a good life.

      Shortly after James returned, Mrs. Hess, who owned the lake house Mabel, Dianne, and James were renting, announced she was selling the house. They would all have to leave.

      Dianne and James found an apartment on Lake Road, right down the street. It was a quaint little place above the town’s post office. The missing shingles and weather-beaten paint on the home mattered little to Dianne. It was a place to live. Pregnant, she and James were starting a family.

      The only problem with the new living conditions became what to do with Mabel: Where would she live? She didn’t work. She had no money. Who would take care of her?

      “At that time,” Dianne said, “James treated me beyond belief. My relationship with him was phenomenal.”

      Still, Dianne hadn’t told Mabel she was pregnant. James accepted it, she claimed, and remained “ecstatic,” but she was scared what her mom would say.

      Mabel ended up moving in with James and Dianne. There was, Dianne said, nowhere else for her to go. It was clear, from what Dianne later said, that Mabel became a nuisance more than anything else. She was always there in Dianne’s face, and Dianne had a hard time letting her go.

      Regarding James and Mabel’s relationship while they set up a family in the new apartment, Dianne said, “[They] were getting along fabulously then. She was big-time kissing his ass. And he thinks she’s the greatest thing since sliced white bread. She went out of her way to cook everything he wanted, make him every kind of pie imaginable, did everything he wanted…. As a matter of fact, in the house we were living, he told me that the kitchen was my mother’s, not mine.”

      As the winter of 1978 fell on the Catskills, packing a wallop of snow and subzero temperatures, the apartment Dianne, James, and Mabel were renting turned into an icebox. After the first few nights of below-freezing temperatures, Dianne and James realized quickly that it wasn’t the best place to raise an infant.

      Alice Odell had been born on June 16, 1978. When Alice was about five months old, Dianne worried the apartment was much too cold for her. In what would become an important point to law enforcement some twenty-five years later, Alice was born at Community General Hospital in Harris, New York—without any complications. Dianne had delivered Alice in the setting of a maternity ward, like thousands of other mothers who passed through the doors of the hospital. The baby Dianne called Matthew, whose resting place amounted to a suitcase in a closet, had not been born at a hospital, but rather inside the apartment Mabel and Dianne shared. What would become an even bigger issue was that there was no male figure around the house when Matthew was born; yet, when beautiful Alice came into the world, James was part of Dianne’s life.

      With the cold air bleeding through the slats of the apartment on Lake Road, a constant reminder that it was just too cold for Alice, Dianne spoke to James about moving. James agreed. It was time, he and Dianne decided, to look for a home of their own. James had money. Why not?

      The house they found was not too far away. James didn’t purchase the home outright, but instead he paid the owner a year’s rent. After the year was up, they would see how things had gone and decide what to do. Anyway, moving anytime soon wouldn’t be a good idea. Dianne had another announcement to make.

      She was pregnant again.