Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

mother, born Mabel Myrtle Smith in Brooklyn, 1915, was a peanut of a woman at four feet eleven inches. Mabel had wavy, curly gray-and-black hair, frayed at the ends like rope. Her nose was stubby, as if someone had pushed it in and it never recovered. Mabel’s own birth, she would tell Dianne, had been unusual and strange. According to Mabel, she was born in a funeral parlor. Mabel had been brought into this world where human life normally ended.

      Mabel’s life with John Molina, after they married in the ’30s and set up a home in Jamaica, Queens, centered around Mabel currying favor and never questioning John’s strong-arm tactics with the kids. “My mother,” Dianne said later, “no matter what my father did, my mother was right there on his side.”

      Mabel would wear what Dianne later called “house-dresses” and slippers around the home and keep herself rather dumpy and plain-Jane. The only time she’d ever get dressed up, where she “put things around her neck and hung things from her ears,” was when she went out on a job interview or over to see her sister.

      While Mabel cooked his meals and made sure he had plenty of booze hanging around, John spent his days working on cars.

      “He had handshake deals,” Dianne said, “with car dealerships in the area. And when they got a car that needed to be repaired, so they could resell it, they called my father and my father fixed it.”

      Dianne was rail thin as a young girl, she claimed. So skinny, she said, her bones were visible through her skin—rather noticeably, like a concentration camp prisoner. It wasn’t that she had been starved, but as a girl heading into her teens she developed tonsillitis that hadn’t been taken care of and it made her severely ill, which led to drastic weight loss. Doctors insisted she be hospitalized, but, she said, her parents “refused to let the doctor do anything medical.” It wasn’t until a neighbor, a year or so after she became ill, gave her “some sort of vitamin” that she started to gain weight and feel better.

      Yet, similarly, she said dealing with a medical condition, which was certainly treatable but wasn’t being taken care of, was a blessing compared to the abuse her dad was perpetrating against her.

      “My life kind of went like that on a weekly basis,” Dianne said. “My father would think it was funny to lock me down in the basement and shut off all of the lights and then run around the outside of the house and shake the sides of the house and door to the cellar. He used to laugh at things like that.”

      Before she had put on any weight, when Dianne was, she liked to say, a “bag of bones,” her dad would never hit her. But soon after she began to gain weight, “I guess my father,” she added, “felt he could finally start hitting me and not worry about breaking my bones.”

      It was right around this same time that her dad broke out the cat-o’-nine-tails, a long leather whip consisting of nine knotted fingers generally used by slave masters centuries ago to flog slaves as they worked. When he began to use it on her, she was about eleven or twelve years old, she recalled.

      “I remember my mother was giving a party for somebody. There were balloons in the house.”

      Dianne claimed she climbed up onto her father’s bed to reach for the balloons, which were rubbing up on top of the ceiling. Like any child might, she wanted one—and she didn’t want to wait until someone told her it was okay.

      The impatience of a child. It’s part of their purity, part of their penchant for wanting to, quite fearlessly, take in everything life and their environment offers.

      As she was jumping up on the bed, trying to reach the tails of the balloons, her dad walked in.

      “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.

      Dianne turned around quickly.

      Just then, John Molina reached into the closet and pulled out his cat-o’-nine-tails and began whipping her back and legs.

      When he finished, he said, “If I ever catch you doing anything like that again, I’ll hit you again…and this time it’ll be harder!”

      Looking at her legs, Dianne wondered how much worse it could get.

      “I had welts about six inches long…. Lucky for me, I had a shirt on, which kind of stopped the welts from being too bad on my back.”

      The memory of that day was so deeply etched in Dianne’s mind years later, she recalled in vivid detail how her legs looked after the beating. It was summertime, so she’d had shorts on. “My legs looked like an old barber’s pole.” There were red welts from the fingers of the cat-o’-nine-tails in circles—elongated like a candy cane—surrounding her legs.

      Later, many would question whether Dianne was telling the truth. Was that beating and all the others, including a knife-wielding brother with a stocking over his head, mere figments of an active, clouded imagination? Were these events the product of hindsight?

      Some would say yes. The real Dianne Molina was manipulative, callous, cruel, and selfish. According to others, above all else, a pathological liar who made up stories to support her own agenda.

      3

      Unraveling the third white bag, Thomas Bright took one look inside and knew exactly what it was that had caused such a foul odor.

      “There was a third bag in thar,” Bright recalled, “and I opened it up and I could see the side of a skull…a little baby skull.”

      When he saw the skull, Bright said, he knew what it was.

      Oh Christ, he thought.

      The skull was in bad shape. It looked like an artifact that an a archaeologist conducting a dig somewhere in the Middle East might uncover.

      After Bright pulled the bag open a bit more, he confirmed his worst fear: staring back at him were tiny eye sockets and the deteriorated nose of what he believed was a baby. Yet, for a brief instant, it was a surreal moment, so far removed from Bright’s perception of reality he thought he might be looking at a child’s toy, an old doll or something.

      “Hey,” he yelled into the room where his grandson was, “call the sheriff’s department. Tell ’em to send a deputy out.”

      4

      “When he was drunk,” Dianne later said of her father’s rage, “it was a thousand times worse.”

      Oddly enough, John Molina never hit his wife, though.

      “Something occurred at some point during their relationship that, I think, led my father to believe that if he hit my mother, she would probably kill him.”

      In February 1969, five months before Americans would sit glued in front of their television sets and watch the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, Dianne Molina, at fifteen, had thought she’d seen it all in her Jamaica, Queens, home. But the horrors she said she had endured up until that point were merely stepping-stones.

      One day, “My brother came to the house to see my father, who was already partially drunk,” Dianne recalled, “and sitting at the dining-room table.”

      From there, she said, Jim walked in and asked her father how he was doing. Jim and John Molina had been at odds for years. From what, exactly, Dianne couldn’t remember.

      “You can forget about the fucking car,” John told his son, “you’re not getting the fucking car!”

      For no reason, John then picked up a drinking glass and cracked it over Jim’s head, shattering the glass and breaking Jim’s glasses. Jim ended up with a gash on his forehead and nose and started bleeding profusely from the top of his head down.

      Dianne, standing in the room speechless, didn’t know what to do.

      Mabel jumped up from the chair she was sitting in and “threw my father off the chair he was sitting in,” and then rushed to Jim’s aid.

      “Get the fuck out of my house!” John Molina screamed.

      “Come on,” Jim said, “let’s go!”

      Jim,