Diane O’Dell and the Babies in the Boxes
She carried her grisly secrets with her for over three decades.
May 12, 2003, Safford, Arizona: Thomas Bright opens the door to storage shed #6, an abandoned unit he bought at auction just two days earlier, at the start of Mother’s Day weekend. Hoping to find some items to resell and make back the $75 he spent on it, he begins going through the many boxes stacked inside.
He soon comes to a box that gives off what he calls a “musty” odor. It’s sealed up, so he cuts through the tape and finds another box inside. He opens it; the box is stuffed with cloth and plastic. He peels away the layers, his fear growing ever sharper, until he spies the very thing he was afraid to think of: a tiny, mummified infant.
He notifies the police immediately. They search the unit and find two more sets of infants’ remains, for a total of three: a boy, a girl, and another whose sex couldn’t be determined. All wrapped in blankets, towels, and plastic garbage bags, then sealed up in cardboard boxes.
It doesn’t take much to figure out who had last rented the storage unit: Diane O’Dell. And after police look into her background, they find that this is not the first time Diane has been connected to a dead infant.
Diane was born in 1953, in Orwell Township, Pennsylvania. Her brother described her as headstrong, a “go-getter” who didn’t let anything stand in the way of what she wanted. And, as a teenager, what she wanted was to party.
Her brother recalled that Diane rebelled against her Catholic upbringing, drinking, doing drugs, and having sex with multiple men. The family moved around quite a bit, so it could be that trying to keep their daughter out of trouble was just more than they could handle.
But eventually, the former party girl settled down. She married James O’Dell and moved to Florida to live with him. But the marriage didn’t last; in 1981, Diane left him and their three children and went back to live with her parents in Kauneonga Lake, in the Catskills of New York state.
While she was living with them, Diane went back to her old ways, staying out late and having affairs with several men.
Then, in 1985, she settled down again. That year she fell in love with Robert Sauerstein, and the two moved in together. Though they never married, the couple would eventually have five children.
But in 1989, the Sullivan County, N.Y., police came knocking on their door. It seems an employee at a salvage yard had made a grisly discovery. In a junked car that was about to be sent to the crusher, he found a battered blue suitcase containing the decayed remains of an infant.
The car’s registration led police to Diane.
At first, she denied that the child was hers. But after police confronted her with more evidence, she admitted it was hers. She claimed she had gotten pregnant at 16 because she had been sexually assaulted by her (now dead) father, and given birth to his child in 1969. The baby had been stillborn, she said, because her father had beaten her so badly while she was pregnant. However, she would also claim the baby had been born in 1972, when she was either 18 or 19 — a legal adult.
She said she was ashamed of the child’s birth and couldn’t afford a proper burial, so she put it in the suitcase, which she kept for several years before hiding it in the trunk of her old car.
Since the remains were so decomposed, it was impossible to determine a cause of death, and there was no evidence of foul play. So the Sullivan County police declined to press charges against her.
The remains found in the Arizona storage unit were examined by the well known forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, and the Pima County, Arizona, medical examiner. While they couldn’t determine cause of death, they could estimate that the babies had been born sometime between 1981 and 1984.
The storage unit had been rented to Diane in 1991, meaning she had been keeping the boxes with her, in her home with her partner and living children, for seven years.
During that time, not a lot is known about Diane. The large blended family moved around a lot. She apparently received some form of welfare benefits and worked at various retail jobs to make ends meet. Her children and family described her as a loving mother who doted on her children, who were always clean and well cared-for.
Neighbors and co-workers mostly described her as being very private; she was also known to be difficult to work with, combative and headstrong. For that reason, she was often fired from her jobs.
The family pulled up stakes and moved out of Arizona in 1992, thanks to Sauerstein being charged with aggravated assault on a minor. Even so, Diane continued to pay the rent on the storage unit. Though she was often late and behind on the rent, Leroy Smith, the owner of the storage facility, had a “lenient attitude,” he said. “Maybe too lenient.”
In 1993, the checks stopped altogether. Nevertheless, Smith continued to hold on to Diane’s unit for another decade before finally auctioning off the contents to Bright.
After the gruesome discovery, Graham County, Arizona, police found Diane in Rome, Pennsylvania, where she was living with Sauerstein and their blended family.
Under questioning, she told police that she had given birth to the babies in quick succession — in 1982, 1983, and 1985 — while living with her mother in Kauneonga Lake.
At first, she claimed they had all been stillborn. She had kept them in boxes, she said, because she didn’t want to throw them out “like trash,” hoping to give them a proper burial at some point.
But under further questioning, her story changed multiple times. At one point, however, she admitted that the babies had cried or gasped when they were born — something stillborn babies can’t do.
New York State Police arrested her on May 20, 2003, and charged her with six counts of second-degree murder, one count for each baby for intentionally causing the death of a person and a depraved indifference to human life, and for recklessly causing the death of the babies. Her trial began in December of that year, and relied mostly on forensic experts like Baden, as well as witness testimony.
Her defense was that the babies had been stillborn — there was no conclusive evidence they had been murdered, after all. Her defense also claimed that she had been abused — physically and sexually — from the time she was 9 years old, making her unable to make appropriate decisions.
Diane did not take the stand, but she did cry when images of the babies’ bodies were shown to the court.
After deliberations, the jury declined to convict her on any first-degree murder charges, but did convict her of three counts of second-degree murder. She was sentenced to a total of 75 years to life for “depraved and indifferent murder.”
At her sentencing, she maintained her innocence: “For what I hope is the last time in my life, I will say I did not kill my children,” she said.
She is currently serving her sentence in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Bedford Hills, New York. The earliest she would be eligible for parole is in 2028.
The crimes of Diane O’Dell shocked the nation. It was one of the few known cases of a mother committing multiple neonaticide (the killing of a newborn) and keeping the remains of her victims with her. It is believed to be the rarest kind of serial killing. Over the next decade, three similar cases would crop up in France and in nearby Utah, where a woman named Megan Huntsman would become another such rare killer.
