Odell was born in 1953 in Sullivan County, New York. Between 1982 and 1985 she gave birth three times, concealing the pregnancies, and killed each baby at or shortly after birth by suffocation. She wrapped the bodies, put them in a cardboard box, and kept the box with her possessions.
The box moved with her for eighteen years, through several homes and states, and ended up in a storage unit in Arizona. In May 2003 it was opened during a clearance and three mummified infant bodies were found.
She was identified, arrested in New York, and gave an account of a childhood of severe sexual abuse and of pregnancies she could not admit to. She was convicted and sentenced on January 28, 2004 to twenty-five years to life.
The case belongs with Sabine Hilschenz, Megan Huntsman, Gertraud Arzberger and Stella Williamson in this archive. The common feature in all five is not the killings but the keeping: the bodies stayed with the women, in freezers, garages, attics and boxes, for years or decades, and in four of the five the discovery was accidental.