Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

kid.

      No worries.

      No wondering.

      Just peaceful silence.

      Minutes after she walked up the long stairwell into her apartment and put her books on the dining-room table, she heard the doorbell. “When I opened the door, there was a big man there. I mean, this guy was huge….”

      “Where is your mother?” the man asked.

      “She’s not here. Can I take a message?”

      “Yes,” the man said. Then, without another word, he “proceeded to put his large hands around my neck,” Dianne recalled, “pushing me up against the wall.”

      “You tell your mother she has two weeks to come up with the money,” he said, “or I am going to come back to take care of everybody.”

      One would have to speculate that Mabel was involved in either drugs or gambling. The woman worked a full-time job, yet was borrowing money from a shylock? Dianne said she worked for her mother two to three times per week, and although she never knew what her mother charged for her services, she had to believe it wasn’t free. So, where was all the money going?

      “For six weeks,” Dianne said, “after that incident occurred, everywhere I went I was looking over my shoulder.”

      As Dianne later thought about the phone call and episode with the large man, she realized what had perhaps “spurred my mother to put me to work. When she first put me to work, I thought it was just going to be long enough to pay off this debt to this person who had showed up at our door. I figured a month or so, maybe a little more.”

      But it continued. As the spring of 1970 came and went, Dianne was still being sent out to perform all sorts of sexual acts for money.

      “Something had gone terribly wrong in what [my mother] was doing,” Dianne recalled, “and there came a point in time when she called on my brother because, she told him, we had no food.”

      The call didn’t make sense, however, to Dianne. Because although her mother had abused her emotionally and made her turn tricks, she never starved her.

      One thing she noticed during the early part of 1970 was that her mom had begun to carry around a white envelope containing all of her money. Generally, Dianne said, there was always $400 or $500 inside it.

      “Rather than give her money—none of my family members would ever give her money. But rather than give her money, when she asked my brother for food that day, my brother’s wife went out and bought groceries for us.”

      Mabel was in her fifties when she left Dianne’s father, rented her own apartment, and put Dianne to work. As soon as they moved out, Dianne claimed, Mabel had gotten herself mixed up in all sorts of things no one knew about.

      “She would bring drugs home from the hospital and I don’t know what she did with them.”

      As secretive a life as she led, Mabel was now begging one of her sons for food because she claimed she had no money. That envelope, Dianne remembered, with $400 or more in it, was full one day and empty the next.

      After Dianne’s brother brought the groceries over and left, Dianne went to Mabel and asked her why she lied. “You have money. I saw it in the envelope.”

      Without a word, Mabel pulled her hand back and slapped Dianne across the face. “What I do,” she said through clenched teeth, “is none of your business! You do what you’re told and take care of your end of things. You got that?”

      Dianne shook her head in agreement. But she couldn’t let it go.

      “If you’ve paid this man off and you have extra money,” she said as Mabel started walking away, “why did you lie and say you had no money for food, when I know you had four hundred dollars? I watched you count it. I don’t know what you’re charging for my services, but you’re making money. Plus, you have your paycheck.”

      Dianne was tired of being a whipping post. She wanted answers.

      “Well, I have to…I have to…do something.”

      “That was as far as I would ever get with her,” Dianne recalled. “She always had something on her mind, something that she wanted to do, or she was thinking about something. It was always ‘something, something, something’ with her. She never would clarify what ‘something’ meant.”

      As Dianne stood in front of her mother that day questioning her about how much money they were making and where it was all going, Mabel, perhaps sick and tired of having to answer to a child, laid out her plans for the next few months.

      “Well,” she said, “you’re going to have to continue to work because I’m broke now.”

      “Please don’t make me do this anymore,” Dianne said, crying, begging. “Please, Mother. Please…”

      2

      By the time the GCSO finished searching all of the boxes Thomas Bright had purchased, they had uncovered three dead babies, their remains carefully packaged and stored in bags and boxes for what appeared to be years, maybe even decades. During her investigation, Thomas had found out, from just looking at some of the paperwork inside the boxes, that a woman by the name of Dianne Odell was connected to the babies. The boxes were Odell’s. There was no doubt about it. Odell’s various addresses and phone numbers and Social Security number and other personal information were scattered all over paperwork found inside some of the boxes.

      For the purpose of the investigation, Thomas gave the babies names: Baby Number One, Baby Number Two, Baby Number Three. It was, in the end, the only way to keep track of each one and begin trying to figure out what had happened and who they were.

      From inside the trailer, the babies were repackaged in evidence bags and driven to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson, where they would undergo a meticulous forensic examination. It was late in the evening on May 12. Although anxious, Thomas would have to wait until at least the following afternoon—maybe even longer—before she could retrieve any type of information from the medical examiner regarding how the babies had died.

      The following day, May 13, while Thomas waited for forensic results, she began to track down Dianne Odell so she could maybe get some answers as to what had happened. From the looks of things, there could be no sane explanation why someone would wrap three babies in garbage bags, wrap those bags in blankets, stuff them into several different boxes, and store them away like old family heirlooms. For Thomas, there had to be some sort of sinister, criminal act that had taken place. Even if the babies were stillborn, why would they be discarded so secretly and hidden?

      Thomas got word early that afternoon from the medical examiner’s office that the babies had been, in the medical examiner’s early opinion, born full-term. This was significant. A back-alley abortion could be ruled out. If the babies had been born full-term, there was a good chance they were born alive, which meant they had somehow died after birth. The cause of death wouldn’t be determined, Thomas was told, for another day or so.

      Thomas was assigned as case agent. Graham County had developed a task force made up of several different officers from different agencies whose main focus was breaking cases. It would not be such a stretch to think this case in particular had hit every officer hard. Many, of course, had kids of their own. To think that a mother—or father—could discard babies like garbage fed an already burning desire among the cops to find out exactly what had happened.

      As case agent, Thomas coordinated officers and handed out assignments in hope of locating Dianne Odell, who, as far as anyone could tell, was the one person who could provide the most answers at this point.

      The first item of business was to conduct a computer search for Odell and find out her last place of residence. With just a few keystrokes, an officer came back to Thomas and reported Odell’s last-known address as Rome, Pennsylvania.

      Address in hand, Thomas contacted the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and had a trooper from the Towanda barracks, near Rome, conduct a more