Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

abuse wasn’t bad enough, what Mabel was about to make Dianne participate in within the next few months would prove to Dianne she was, indeed, invisible, as she had always believed—that her life, in the eyes of those who were supposed to care for and protect her, meant nothing.

      3

      One of the first things Detective Thomas did after walking into the trailer where Thomas Bright had found the white bag containing the dead baby was have a photographer take several photographs of it. Everything had to be documented: police reports, photographs, interviews. It would be a long night for Thomas and other members of the GCSO. As far as they could tell, there was a baby killer on the loose. Whatever needed to be done would get done.

      To everyone on scene, after carefully studying the skull of the baby, it appeared to have a hole in the top of its skull, which could mean many things, one of which included homicide, murder. Perhaps someone had shot the child and stuffed it into the bag to cover up the murder?

      By 6:31 P.M., Thomas had taken the baby out of the bag and placed it into a “new, clear” plastic evidence bag. After that, she started to remove the rest of the contents of the box, laying them carefully out on the floor next to her. Blankets. A sheet. Some personal papers. Nothing really.

      But then…a second plastic garbage bag.

      On top of the box, Thomas noticed, someone had written “Mommy’s stuff” with a red marker. Then, as she continued digging farther into the box, she came upon a green-and-orange blanket. The outside of the blanket appeared to be stained with a substance that looked like old maroon-colored paint, brittle and flaky.

      Looking at it closer, however, Thomas realized it was old blood.

      One little baby bled this much?

      Removing the orange-and-green blanket, which was rolled up like a sleeping bag, it occurred to Thomas it was a bit heavier than it perhaps should be. So she unraveled it to see if there was something inside.

      Packed in the blanket was a second baby. In far better shape than the first baby, it had either not been in the box as long as the first baby, or had weathered the elements better for some reason no one could immediately explain.

      Next, Thomas took the baby out of the blanket and placed it on the floor next to her so the deputy could photograph it. Then she placed it in an evidence bag and continued looking through the boxes.

      Could there be another dead child somewhere?

      4

      August 7, 1969, should have been a night Dianne Molina remembered with happiness for the rest of her life. It appeared as though life was beginning to calm down and take shape. She had lived under oppression for her entire childhood. But this night—her “sweet sixteen” birthday—was a night no one could take away from her and ruin.

      For Dianne, however, there would be no candles, no balloons, no birthday cakes, to celebrate what should have been a turning point in her life. There would be no surprise gifts or choruses of “Happy Birthday.” Instead, her mother had a bizarre request.

      Holding a piece of paper in her hand, Mabel looked at Dianne and said, “You have to go there and do what that man says.”

      Dianne was confused at first. She took the piece of paper and stared at it. There in front of her was the name of a man she had never seen before or recognized, and an address, just a few miles away, she had never been to.

      “What…what is this?” Dianne asked. “I had a funny feeling in my stomach,” she recalled later. “Something was wrong.”

      “You will go and you will do what he says to do,” Mabel stated firmly.

      “I don’t want to go. Please don’t make me go.”

      “Well,” Mabel said, turning, walking away casually, “if you don’t go…I will send you back to your father’s!”

      “You know I can’t go back there.”

      “Well, then, you’ll do what I say.”

      Scared to death, Dianne left the house and walked to the address.

      “What else could I do?” she said later, tearfully recalling that first night her mother “sold [her] into prostitution.” She added, “I am thinking, ‘How can I find a way to live with what is going to happen to me?’ I am trying to figure out a way for me to get away from the both of them.”

      Dianne soon found out the man she went to service wasn’t some drug pusher Mabel was paying off, as she might have assumed; he was a wealthy businessman “and old…. He wasn’t young.”

      This one night turned into, according to Dianne, two to three times per week. She would sneak around at all hours of the night, going to strangers’ houses and starring in whatever sick and twisted sexual fantasies the men had dreamed up. Soon she became numb to it all, she said, and after a while, it wasn’t the abuse that bothered her most. It was the fear of being discovered by classmates.

      “I was hiding…underneath jackets, wearing hats, sunglasses…. I’m doing everything I can do to hide. I began wearing outlandish makeup…just outlandish.”

      Over the course of the next few months, Dianne tried to stay in school, but her grades, as one might suspect, began to descend rapidly. She went from a B+ student to an F student, struggling to juggle schoolwork with the horror of being her mother’s whore.

      5

      Finding a second baby led Detective Thomas and other investigators working the case to believe that, perhaps, there were more. Thus, a massive search got under way inside the trailer to see if Thomas’s instincts were correct.

      Within twenty minutes, the medical examiner, who was looking through some items in a box inside the kitchen area, yelled for Thomas.

      “Another one?”

      “Yes,” the doctor said. There, before both of them, was a third baby, neatly wrapped and packaged in a garbage bag inside another box.

      After photographs were taken of the baby, the doctor made an early determination that all three babies were, possibly, newborns. It was the way they had been wrapped. The babies, he believed, if they had been born alive, hadn’t lived long.

      Standing, staring at the three dead babies, Thomas could only come to one conclusion: how many more?

      CHAPTER 4

      1

      ONE OF THE questions Dianne Molina asked herself, as she became entrenched in a world of prostitution that her mother facilitated, was why? What was it that drove Mabel to sell her only daughter’s soul? If what Dianne later said was true, it was an act of evil no child could be expected to endure, a dark and sinister world of not knowing what was going to happen on any given night. Crime statistics have proven that men who sexually violate children are capable of just about any animalistic act imaginable. Dianne would leave her apartment, and wonder if she would ever return.

      As the weeks and months wore on, and Dianne found herself sleeping with men of all types, a phone call she received one day began to explain things.

      “I was the only one in the house,” Dianne recalled. “The gentleman on the phone requested my mother.”

      “She’s not home from work yet,” Dianne told the man.

      “Well, you tell your mother that if she doesn’t pay me my money, I’m going to take care of her.”

      “All right.”

      Dianne said she immediately called Mabel at work, who had recently been hired as a housekeeper at a nearby hospital, working days.

      “Don’t worry about it,” Mabel said. “It’s nothing.”

      Dianne let it go. What else could she do? If Mabel told her to forget about something, she had better listen.

      Two weeks went by. Dianne got out of school one afternoon and went straight