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

track of. Thus, the suspect had to think about what she had said previously so she could mold responses to those particular questions and answers.
    Odell was definitely hiding something. Weddle and Thomas were sure of it.
    3
     
    Dianne was in a remarkable predicament during the first few weeks of her pregnancy in early 1972: what was she going to do about the baby she was carrying as she and her mother settled into their new home? She had broken down and told Mabel about the baby, whereby Mabel acted as if she had known all along. That wasn’t the problem. Instead, according to Dianne, it was who the father of the child was: John Molina, who, Dianne claimed later, had allegedly fathered the child while raping her one last time before she moved north.
    As would be the case with many of the stories Dianne later told, there was no way to prove John had fathered the 1972 child. Nevertheless, Dianne insisted her father was responsible for both the life and death of the child she would later call Matthew.
    “When we moved up to the lake,” Dianne said later, “I was already pregnant with Matthew…. [My mother]didn’t want me to have the child. We kept arguing about what I wanted and what she wanted.”
    During a brief argument one day, Mabel ended up “slapping” Dianne around.
    “That was when I said I’d had enough.”
    She couldn’t recall how, but after Mabel hit her, Dianne “managed to get down to [her] father’s house” in Jamaica, Queens. When she arrived, she asked him, “Can I stay long enough to have the child?”
    John looked at her for a moment. He was amazed, shocked by the mere sight of her. While he stood there contemplating what to do, Dianne said, she “thought he would say no.”
    So, what do I do then? she asked herself while standing in the archway, waiting for a response.
    “My mother’s words kept echoing in my head.” Mabel had laughed when Dianne told her where she was going, telling Dianne her father would never let her stay. “He doesn’t want you there,” Mabel said as Dianne left. “You’re a constant reminder.”
    After John thought things through for a moment, he told Dianne to “go into the other room,” where, she remembered, the television was on. John headed for the kitchen, his favorite area of the house. Apparently, he was going to sit and contemplate the situation and then let Dianne know. Until then, he expected her to sit, watch television, and be quiet.
    Whenever John had to make any major decision, he began drinking, according to Dianne, to help him through it. There he sat, “for hours,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking and thinking.
    At some point, he finally spoke. “Come in here, Dianne!”
    “I heard the anger and slur in his voice. I was scared.”
    Dianne sat at the table across from him and they just stared at each other for a brief period.
    “How could you do this?” she said John asked at one point. “Why did you bring this to my door? People will see you.” He paused, and as he began to say, “You should be ashamed of yourself for coming back and asking for my help,” he raised his hand.
    “With all of his might,” Dianne recalled, “he came up and punched me in the head.”
    With the force of the blow, Dianne fell off the chair.
    As she lay on the floor, John grabbed his cat-o’-nine-tails and, like an Egyptian guard whipping a slave, began mauling her “across” her “back, legs, and head.” As he did that, Dianne said, she “curled into a ball” on the floor.
    Then he starting “kicking” her violently.
    “I felt like I was being hit everywhere, all at once.”
    When her father ran out of energy and stopped, Dianne said, she crawled on all fours into the living room to “try to recoup some energy.”
    With his whip, her dad had spoken; he obviously didn’t want Dianne around. So, after “resting until early morning,” she said, she went back up to the lake.
     
     
    The subject of who the father of the 1972