Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

the last time she ever saw her father again.

      5

      After calling the Graham County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO), Thomas Bright’s grandson walked over to where Bright was standing near the box.

      “Did you really find a baby?”

      “Take a look for yourself,” Bright said, pointing to the bag.

      Staring down into the bag, which was now ripped open even wider, Bright’s grandson responded, “Yup, that’s a baby all right. Jesus.”

      In the meantime, a call went out to all the available sheriff’s deputies in the area. The first deputy to respond, Abner Upshaw, showed up at 4:30 P.M. Minutes later, Mark Smith, a second deputy, arrived.

      Upshaw approached Bright immediately. “‘Sometimes,’” Bright recalled Upshaw saying, “‘people report things they think they see.’”

      It was a sober calculation by an experienced cop. Upshaw undoubtedly had been called out numerous times for all sorts of crimes that had never materialized. What Bright and his grandson saw as a baby could—in reality—turn out to be nothing more than a dead animal or some sort of old, weathered doll, as Bright had thought.

      Bright shrugged after Upshaw explained the situation. Then, “Go ahead…see for yourself then.”

      Back a few moments later, after looking inside the bag, Upshaw looked at Bright and said, “Yup, that looks like a baby all right.”

      Confident it was a baby, Upshaw put in a call to have a detective and the county coroner come out.

      While they waited, Bright told Upshaw what had happened the past few days: the auction, the boxes, the baby.

      At about 4:35 P.M., Bright handed Upshaw a large brown envelope that contained several documents. “I found this in another box.”

      There was a name on the envelope: Dianne Odell, a forty-nine-year-old female from Pima, Arizona. The document was dated 2002. Bright’s earlier estimation that the unit hadn’t been accessed in eight years had been wrong. Someone had apparently been inside the unit within the past year.

      “This is helpful,” Upshaw said. “Thanks.”

      As Bright, his grandson, and the two deputies stood in the mobile home staring at all the boxes, waiting for the coroner and a detective to arrive and begin an investigation, they had no idea that the one baby Bright had found was only the beginning. By the end of the evening, there would be more.

      6

      Dianne Molina was almost sixteen years old when she and her mother left their home in February 1969 after a bloody fight between her half brother and father. For Dianne, it felt as if the gods had answered her prayers: no more abuse from dad, no more drunkenness, no more living under the reign of a dictator.

      Nothing in Dianne’s early life, however, had been that cut-and-dry. There was always a price to pay. And, according to her later on, moving out of her childhood home would turn out to be no different.

      “We went straight to my [half] brother’s house in…Ozone Park,” Dianne said. Ozone Park was only a few miles from Jamaica. “We stayed there for three days,” she added. “My brother’s wife was not happy with the fact that we were there and wanted us to leave.”

      When Mabel didn’t respond to her daughter-in-law’s request to leave, Dianne said her sister-in-law “concocted a story where she went to the landlord and he claimed we couldn’t stay there.”

      If there was one positive aspect regarding Mabel Molina’s character, it was the self-reliance she sometimes harbored. No one was going to carry her; no one was going tell her what to do or when to do it. As soon as Mabel got word that she wasn’t wanted in her son’s home, Dianne said, “she picked herself up and left.”

      Outside the home, bags in hand, Dianne was excited. She was going to live on her own with her mom. Just the two of them. No brothers. No dad.

      “Here’s some money for a cab,” Mabel said to Dianne, handing her some spare change, “you’re going back to your father’s house.”

      Dianne was horrified.

      “From that point on,” she said later, “I was in prison.”

      Not only was she confined, but Dianne had no idea where her mother, at the time her only source of strength, had moved. Because for the next week, while living at her dad’s, she never heard from her.

      “It wasn’t until about a week later that she showed up at my school and told me she had found us a place.” Still, that “place” didn’t yet include Dianne.

      “I am going to find out if you can come stay with me,” Mabel told Dianne.

      Dianne started crying. “I can’t stay there,” she said, meaning her father’s house. “I am scared to death.”

      “Don’t you worry about it. Your father’s not going to let anything happen to you,” Mabel said.

      “You know that’s a lie!”

      Mabel ignored Dianne’s apparent worry.

      “I’ll keep looking for a place for the two of us. You go to school and make sure everything is nice and normal, and everything will be fine.”

      Because John Molina didn’t want his only daughter to be out of his sight, Dianne claimed, he made Dianne’s half brothers escort her to and from school. When Dianne returned from school for the day, she said, “that’s as far as I went. I was put in my room, period.”

      For the next few months, Dianne lived under a strict routine of going to school in the morning, arriving home in the afternoon, and, like the prisoner she later saw herself as, was sent to her room for the remainder of the day and night.

      One day, Dianne was in her room staring outside across the street at a neighbor’s house. Sitting on her bed, crying, she watched her mother, she said, walk into the neighbor’s house. With that, she ran down the stairs, where John was waiting for her.

      “Can I go see Mom? She’s across the street.”

      “No!” And that was all John Molina had to say. Dianne knew not to press him. It would do no good.

      Broken, Dianne headed back upstairs. She felt her mother wanted to tell her something important.

      “I knew that if I had tried to sneak across the street,” Dianne said later in a tearful recollection, “when I got back, I would be picking my teeth up off the floor.”

      Dianne needed desperately to get away from her father’s grasp. Furthermore, the reasons, she later claimed, were dark secrets between her and her father that Mabel knew about, yet did nothing to prevent.

      “My dad,” Dianne said, “was raping me…. It had started when I was fourteen.”

      CHAPTER 3

      1

      TO FORTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD GRAHAM County Sheriff’s Office sergeant detective Dolores Diane Thomas, a mother of two, grandmother of seven, the thought of a dead baby left in a box to rot made her sick to her stomach.

      “It was a human baby,” Thomas said later, “I wondered what had happened to it.”

      Thomas had been employed by the GCSO for the past thirteen years, the past six working in the investigation division of the department, three of those as a sergeant. Primarily, Thomas’s job consisted of “any type of follow-up on any case that the patrol deputy first on scene would determine required follow-up.”

      The GCSO employed some twenty-five sworn personnel and approximately fifty-five civilian officers. Thomas had fallen into the position of working for the investigation arm of the GCSO. Born and raised in Safford, she said later, she’s “one hundred [percent] Hispanic…and probably related to half the valley.” Her law enforcement career began in the Department of Corrections.