Read Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Pinnacle True Crime) for Free Online Page A

first baby, it had either not been in the box as long as the first baby, or had weathered the elements better for some reason no one could immediately explain.
    Next, Thomas took the baby out of the blanket and placed it on the floor next to her so the deputy could photograph it. Then she placed it in an evidence bag and continued looking through the boxes.
    Could there be another dead child somewhere?
    4
     
    August 7, 1969, should have been a night Dianne Molina remembered with happiness for the rest of her life. It appeared as though life was beginning to calm down and take shape. She had lived under oppression for her entire childhood. But this night—her “sweet sixteen” birthday—was a night no one could take away from her and ruin.
    For Dianne, however, there would be no candles, no balloons, no birthday cakes, to celebrate what should have been a turning point in her life. There would be no surprise gifts or choruses of “Happy Birthday.” Instead, her mother had a bizarre request.
    Holding a piece of paper in her hand, Mabel looked at Dianne and said, “You have to go there and do what that man says.”
    Dianne was confused at first. She took the piece of paper and stared at it. There in front of her was the name of a man she had never seen before or recognized, and an address, just a few miles away, she had never been to.
    “What…what is this?” Dianne asked. “I had a funny feeling in my stomach,” she recalled later. “Something was wrong.”
    “You will go and you will do what he says to do,” Mabel stated firmly.
    “I don’t want to go. Please don’t make me go.”
    “Well,” Mabel said, turning, walking away casually, “if you don’t go…I will send you back to your father’s!”
    “You know I can’t go back there.”
    “Well, then, you’ll do what I say.”
    Scared to death, Dianne left the house and walked to the address.
    “What else could I do?” she said later, tearfully recalling that first night her mother “sold [her] into prostitution.” She added, “I am thinking, ‘How can I find a way to live with what is going to happen to me?’ I am trying to figure out a way for me to get away from the both of them.”
    Dianne soon found out the man she went to service wasn’t some drug pusher Mabel was paying off, as she might have assumed; he was a wealthy businessman “and old…. He wasn’t young.”
    This one night turned into, according to Dianne, two to three times per week. She would sneak around at all hours of the night, going to strangers’ houses and starring in whatever sick and twisted sexual fantasies the men had dreamed up. Soon she became numb to it all, she said, and after a while, it wasn’t the abuse that bothered her most. It was the fear of being discovered by classmates.
    “I was hiding…underneath jackets, wearing hats, sunglasses…. I’m doing everything I can do to hide. I began wearing outlandish makeup…just outlandish.”
    Over the course of the next few months, Dianne tried to stay in school, but her grades, as one might suspect, began to descend rapidly. She went from a B+ student to an F student, struggling to juggle schoolwork with the horror of being her mother’s whore.
    5
     
    Finding a second baby led Detective Thomas and other investigators working the case to believe that, perhaps, there were more. Thus, a massive search got under way inside the trailer to see if Thomas’s instincts were correct.
    Within twenty minutes, the medical examiner, who was looking through some items in a box inside the kitchen area, yelled for Thomas.
    “Another one?”
    “Yes,” the doctor said. There, before both of them, was a third baby, neatly wrapped and packaged in a garbage bag inside another box.
    After photographs were taken of the baby, the doctor made an early determination that all three babies were, possibly, newborns. It was the way they had been wrapped. The babies, he believed, if they had been born alive, hadn’t lived