Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

female inmates, one guard, and no lights. I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face.

      For a minute, we sat there in silence and waited for the generator to kick on. That day would become a metaphor for my continued talks with Odell. Over the course of listening to Odell’s stories, I realized this book, in many ways, is about blacking out and trying to recall lost memories—memories that I am convinced are shrouded in a veil of evil.

      Throughout the past year or so, I have corresponded with Odell through letters and phone calls. I have well over twenty hours of interviews on audiotape. I must say, much of Odell’s story cannot be backed up by secondary sources. In certain places, I have tried, without success, to track down people and get a second or third version. In many instances it just couldn’t be done. Either the people involved had died, records didn’t exist, or those individuals who could back up Odell’s claims would not speak to me, for whatever reason.

      I decided to open the book with Odell telling her own story. At times, she is quoted in these passages. Other times, however, as the narrative flows without quotations and I tell Odell’s story for her (as she told it to me), it is still Odell speaking. I have simply taken what she has said and put it into an easy-to-read format. I have added nothing to those passages except background information and regional town and state research. It is all fact—but based on Odell’s version of the events.

      In addition to Odell’s story, I have related the truth as we know it: the Sullivan County, New York, District Attorney’s Office version of what happened. To write those passages, I used a multitude of documents, trial transcripts, police reports, medical reports, and dozens of interviews with many of the individuals involved. I’ve inserted this additional layer of factual information into the narrative to offer you, the reader, the entire story as I have uncovered it.

      Lastly, any name in the book where italics appear on first use represents a pseudonym. For whatever reason, that person wishes to remain anonymous. In some instances, I have decided to change the name to protect the identity of said person.

      As when a woman with child in the ninth month bringeth forth her son, with two or three hours of her birth great pains compass her womb, which pains, when the child cometh forth, they slack not a moment.

      —II Esdras 16:38 (Apocrypha), the Holy Bible, King James Version

      My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.

      —George Washington

      Contents

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      CHAPTER 3

      CHAPTER 4

      CHAPTER 5

      CHAPTER 6

      CHAPTER 7

      CHAPTER 8

      CHAPTER 9

      CHAPTER 10

      CHAPTER 11

      CHAPTER 12

      CHAPTER 13

      CHAPTER 14

      CHAPTER 15

      CHAPTER 16

      CHAPTER 17

      CHAPTER 18

      CHAPTER 19

      CHAPTER 20

      CHAPTER 21

      CHAPTER 22

      CHAPTER 23

      CHAPTER 24

      CHAPTER 25

      CHAPTER 26

      CHAPTER 27

      CHAPTER 28

      CHAPTER 29

      CHAPTER 30

      CHAPTER 31

      EPILOGUE

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      BONUS SECTION

      CHAPTER 1

      1

      IN THE EARLY 1960s, the Molina family lived in a three-story house on Ninety-fifth Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, New York, near Brooklyn, Coney Island, and JFK Airport. Bright lights, big city. Neighborhoods made up of what seemed like a thousand and one different cultures. It was a time in New York when a ride on a graffiti-free subway cost twenty cents and racial riots were part of the fabric of everyday life. Shea Stadium, an iconic structure by its own merit and home to Major League Baseball’s New York Mets, was built back then. In 1964, some 51 million people flocked to Flushing Meadows Park to visit the World’s Fair, where today the only hint of a fair is the massive steel globe sitting at the base of a wide open green blemished with homeless, drug dealers, crackheads, trash, and abandoned vehicles.

      The ’60s were a time of great social change in America. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech in Washington, DC, and was fighting furiously to get blacks registered to vote. Around the same time, well-known Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was assassinated. America, one could say, was at a turning point: two worlds colliding, people fighting for an identity.

      None of what was going on in the world mattered much to little eleven-year-old Dianne Molina while living on Ninety-fifth Avenue, however—a house, incidentally, Dianne would later refer to as a “prison.” What Dianne focused on, even then, she said later, was survival.

      It was near Easter, Dianne remembered. A time of year when it was “still cold enough to wear a jacket.” Her father had come home from work drunk. He had been celebrating, she claimed, yet rarely needed a reason to drink.

      “I don’t ever remember a happy holiday. He always came in drunk and ruined it.”

      One night, while sitting at the table and eating, Dianne’s father, John Molina, a mechanic by trade, said, “If anyone rings the doorbell, you be sure, Dianne, to answer it.” He obviously didn’t want to be bothered while he was eating. John would laugh, Dianne recalled, a certain grunt whenever he gave her an order. She had learned to fear that laugh and everything else about him. John was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1900. “His eyes were green to silver.” He had a temper. According to John, or at least the story Dianne Molina said he would tell the kids, he was “sold into slavery at the age of nine.” From there, things just got worse until he moved to America.

      There were bedrooms on the first, second, and third floor of the Molina home. Dianne was the youngest. Two of her brothers lived in the home with their wives: one on the second story, the other in the attic. There were problems between Dianne’s brothers and father, she said, but she didn’t know exactly what had caused such acrimony.

      The front door was at the end of a long and narrow corridor downstairs. At night, her father kept most of the lights turned off in the house. Perhaps there was a flickering television coming out of the living room and lighting up the other rooms, like a strobe light, but other than that the house was always theater dark. Much in line, Dianne insisted, with the secrets it held.

      She sat that night, waiting, anticipating. He wouldn’t tell me something unless there was a reason behind it, she thought. “If anyone rings the doorbell, you be sure, Dianne, to answer it.” That’s what John Molina had told his daughter. And that’s what John expected her to do.

      Dianne would later hear that sentence over and over again. She had to remember—because disobeying her dad wasn’t an option. Yet, what ended up being behind the door that night was a horror, Dianne remembered, she could never have imagined.

      2

      Fifty-eight-year-old Thomas Bright was born and raised in Safford, Arizona. When he reached the eleventh grade in the early ’60s, Bright decided