Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) by M. William Phelps

Odell had another brief exchange regarding Odell’s youngest children. Then Thomas looked at Weddle. “You have any questions?”
    “No,” Weddle said. “I’d go right ahead with it.”
    “Okay…,” Thomas said while looking down at her notes. She paused a moment, then looked directly at Odell: “When we…When the individual purchased your storage shed, the contents of your storage shed, he took everything out and took them home. Going through the boxes, what he found, and what we continued to find after we were called, were three dead babies. What do you know about that?”
    “Nothing. Three dead babies?” Odell seemed appalled, shocked, even confused.
    “Wrapped up in sheets,” Weddle added.
    “Blankets,” Thomas corrected. “They were in blankets.” And now she looked at Odell. “They were in boxes that contained all your property, all your clothing that was marked, your photo albums in there, letters, the kids’ immunization records; these boxes had all your other identifiable property in there, along with these three dead babies.”
    The facts of the case spoke for themselves. One box, in particular, had “Mommy’s stuff” written in red marker on top of it. The box had been sealed. The handwriting, at least from an early comparison to Odell’s, was unmistakably a match. It didn’t necessarily mean Odell had placed those babies in the boxes, but there was a good chance—by the sheer coincidence of all the evidence—that if she didn’t, she knew who did.
    5
     
    When Dianne arrived back at the lake after suffering what she claimed was a brutal beating by her father, Mabel took one look at her and said, “I told you he wouldn’t want the ‘little bitch’ you are when you’re around.”
    “I need to go to the hospital, Mother,” Dianne said.
    Contractions?
    “Lay down. You’ll feel better,” Mabel said.
    Dianne didn’t realize it, but she was in labor. “I didn’t know…but I laid down until I felt like I had to go to the bathroom really, really bad. I felt a lot of pressure.”
    “I think I’m in labor, Mother.”
    “Lay down on the floor and push,” Dianne recalled Mabel telling her at that point.
    So she did.
    As Dianne pushed, she felt the baby coming. She then asked Mabel to call an ambulance, but, she said, “my mother convinced me it was a bad idea.”
    “It will destroy the family,” Mabel said. “Do you want everyone to find out that your father is having sex with you? You won’t have anyone left after that.”
    “I gave in,” Dianne said later, “because I knew I would never survive if everyone knew that.”
    “Matthew was born,” Dianne recalled, “and never moved.”
    After Dianne felt better, Mabel told her to “get rid of Matthew…bury him in the yard.” So she put the baby in a blue suitcase, she said, because if she had “buried him” in the yard, she “would never be able to find him. He would be gone forever.”
    From there, she put the blue suitcase in the closet and went on with her life.

C HAPTER 6
     
    1
     
    A FEW YEARS before Dianne and Mabel moved to Kauneonga Lake, not a mile away from where they would ultimately live in one of Marie Hess’s bungalows, the largest gathering of musicians and music fans of its day took place just up the road. The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival drew in the neighborhood of a five hundred thousand people—a weekend of love, sex, booze, drugs, and, of course, music. Some of the biggest names in the business hit the stage: Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, along with many more. Because of the festival, Bethel, New York, had become famous. People have been known to flock to the region to visit Max Yasgur’s dairy farm and experience, if only in memory, the place where it all happened, as if the region held some sort of sacred aura.
    For Dianne and Mabel, small-town life and the historic relevance of the town where they now lived mattered little. To them,