On May 12, 2003, Thomas Bright opened storage shed number 6 in Safford, Arizona. He had bought the abandoned unit at auction two days earlier for seventy-five dollars and was going through its boxes for anything he could resell. In one of them, wrapped in towels and blankets, he found the remains of an infant. There were three, two of them at least partly mummified. The shed had been rented in 1991 by Diane Odell, a mother of eight who had fallen behind on the rent and moved on, and the rental papers led investigators to her.
The three had been born in the early 1980s at her home in Kauneonga Lake, in Sullivan County, New York, about eighty miles north of New York City. Prosecutors dated the births to 1982, 1983 and 1985; she told police the babies had died at birth between 1981 and 1984. She had hidden each pregnancy and delivered alone, without medical help. Her account was that she passed out after each birth and woke to find the baby dead, and that she kept the bodies because she did not want to throw them out like trash and hoped to bury them properly one day. At one point, according to the investigators, she said the babies had cried or gasped when they were born, which a stillborn child cannot do. Their deaths were never reported. For years the boxes moved with her as the family relocated around the Northeast and then the West, and investigators looked into whether she had hidden them for a time in Utah.
There had been a fourth. Odell told police that she first became pregnant as a teenager, that her father beat her during the pregnancy, and that the child was stillborn because of it; she said she put the body in a plastic bag and then in a suitcase. Accounts differ on the year, 1969 or 1972. Prosecutors did not believe she had killed that child, and she was never charged over it.
On May 17, 2003, investigators interviewed her at the Pennsylvania State Police barracks in Towanda. She was arrested that month, on the 17th or the 20th depending on the account, and charged with six counts of second-degree murder, two for each baby: one for intentionally causing its death and one for depraved indifference to human life. Autopsy work was done by the Pima County medical examiner and by the forensic pathologist Michael Baden. They could not determine how the infants died, though a pathologist testified that the remains showed no congenital defects. She described a childhood of severe sexual abuse and pregnancies she could not admit to anyone. Sources disagree on where she was born in 1953, Sullivan County or Orwell Township in Bradford County, Pennsylvania.
The trial opened in Monticello in December 2003 before Judge Frank LaBuda. District Attorney Stephen Lungen told the jury that she had borne the children out of wedlock and killed them because they were babies she did not need or want, then carried the remains from home to home to hide what she had done, and that she gave birth alone because she was afraid to tell her mother she was pregnant. The defense said the infants died naturally and that she carried them from state to state because she could not bear to part with them. The jury heard a recording of her describing the births, passing out and waking to find the babies dead, and saying that she thought she should go to jail. The medical evidence rested on remains eighteen to twenty-one years old. After about four hours of deliberation on December 16, 2003, the jury rejected the counts of intentional murder and convicted her on all three counts of depraved-indifference murder.
On January 28, 2004, LaBuda sentenced her to fifteen years to life for the 1982 baby, twenty to life for the second and twenty-five to life for the third, the terms to run concurrently. She has always said she did not kill her children. On appeal she argued that statements she made after she and her husband asked for a lawyer should have been suppressed. The Appellate Division upheld the conviction in 2006, holding that the requests were equivocal and were made before she was in custody.
At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility she earned a high school equivalency diploma and an associate degree in sociology, worked in the Transitional Services Office guiding newly admitted women, and was one of six inmates chosen as peer leaders in a suicide-prevention program, according to a clemency campaign that asked the governor to commute her sentence during the COVID-19 pandemic. That campaign gave her earliest release date as May 13, 2028, by parole; other accounts put her parole eligibility in 2029. No release has been reported.