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MIDDLETOWN, N.Y. -- A woman was accused Tuesday of murdering three of her children and keeping the bodies for a decade or more before leaving them in a rented storage unit in Arizona, where they were discovered last week.
Diane O'Dell, 49, who lives in Rome, Pa., told investigators that between 1972 and 1984, while living in upstate New York, she gave birth to four children who died, including the three whose remains were found abandoned in a storage shed in Safford, Ariz., state police said.
State Police Maj. Alan Martin, Troop F commander, termed the crime "pretty bizarre."
"Think about carrying around three corpses, your own children, for over a decade. It's very hard to comprehend. Why? That's the $64,000 question," Martin said.
O'Dell drove from Pennsylvania to New York on Monday night to be questioned by police. She was arraigned Tuesday on three counts of second-degree murder and ordered held without bail in Sullivan County Jail.
Stephan Schick, the Sullivan Legal Aid Bureau lawyer representing O'Dell, met his client Tuesday. He wouldn't characterize her mental state.
"I don't think it would be fair based on that (conversation) to give any sense of what her frame of mind is," Schick said. "You can imagine it's not good. But I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Obviously, it's going to be a big part of this case."
Police did not immediately release the children's cause of death.
All four children were born in the hamlet of Kaueonga, Pa., in Sullivan County, 85 miles north of New York City.
According to state police, O'Dell carried the remains with her from New York through several states before storing them in the shed when she lived in Arizona between 1991 and 1992.
Police said she had moved at least seven times in the last decade. She last lived in New York in the late 1980s, and had lived in Pennsylvania, where she worked at a Rite Aid drug store, for a couple of years, police said.
No charges were filed in Arizona. Authorities interviewed O'Dell in Pennsylvania over the weekend after identifying her through records at Customer Storage Rentals.
Investigators said O'Dell told them she gave birth to her first baby in 1972. She said her father beat her and caused the child to be stillborn, so she put the body in a plastic bag and then a suitcase, state police said.
In 1989, New York authorities discovered that infant's remains in a car that was about to be crushed, and investigated. No charges were filed. Her father had died and could not be questioned, police said. That case is being reopened, police said.
O'Dell told police she had three children with her first husband; all of those children are alive. The oldest is 25.
After she split from her first husband, O'Dell said she had three more children from 1981 to 1984, all of whom died. Police said they don't know yet who fathered those children.
Since 1984, O'Dell has had five children with her common law husband, Robert Sauerstein. Those children, all under age 18, currently live with him.
Of the three babies found in Safford, 145 miles southeast of Phoenix, one child was mummified, one was skeletal, and the third was a combination of both, police said.
O'Dell told investigators those babies also died shortly after their births. Their deaths were never reported to police, and her family knew nothing about those pregnancies, state police said.
She also told investigators that she thought the owner of the storage company had thrown out the contents of the shed in 1994 -- the same year she last paid rent on the unit, authorities in Arizona said.
State police and Sullivan County District Attorney Stephen Lungen announced O'Dell's arrest Tuesday at police barracks in Middletown, Orange County, because of its larger size.
"Certainly, the particular circumstances of this case, it would be an understatement to say they are different and to say they are strange, especially in the manner the babies were being transported around," Lungen said.
http://www.nbc10.com/news/2217703/detail.html
