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long.
    Standing, staring at the three dead babies, Thomas could only come to one conclusion: how many more?

C HAPTER 4
     
    1
     
    ONE OF THE questions Dianne Molina asked herself, as she became entrenched in a world of prostitution that her mother facilitated, was why? What was it that drove Mabel to sell her only daughter’s soul? If what Dianne later said was true, it was an act of evil no child could be expected to endure, a dark and sinister world of not knowing what was going to happen on any given night. Crime statistics have proven that men who sexually violate children are capable of just about any animalistic act imaginable. Dianne would leave her apartment, and wonder if she would ever return.
    As the weeks and months wore on, and Dianne found herself sleeping with men of all types, a phone call she received one day began to explain things.
    “I was the only one in the house,” Dianne recalled. “The gentleman on the phone requested my mother.”
    “She’s not home from work yet,” Dianne told the man.
    “Well, you tell your mother that if she doesn’t pay me my money, I’m going to take care of her.”
    “All right.”
    Dianne said she immediately called Mabel at work, who had recently been hired as a housekeeper at a nearby hospital, working days.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Mabel said. “It’s nothing.”
    Dianne let it go. What else could she do? If Mabel told her to forget about something, she had better listen.
    Two weeks went by. Dianne got out of school one afternoon and went straight home, as she normally did. On an average day, she would get home an hour or so before Mabel. It was, she recalled, the only time of the day or night when she could sit and be a kid.
    No worries.
    No wondering.
    Just peaceful silence.
    Minutes after she walked up the long stairwell into her apartment and put her books on the dining-room table, she heard the doorbell. “When I opened the door, there was a big man there. I mean, this guy was huge….”
    “Where is your mother?” the man asked.
    “She’s not here. Can I take a message?”
    “Yes,” the man said. Then, without another word, he “proceeded to put his large hands around my neck,” Dianne recalled, “pushing me up against the wall.”
    “You tell your mother she has two weeks to come up with the money,” he said, “or I am going to come back to take care of everybody.”
    One would have to speculate that Mabel was involved in either drugs or gambling. The woman worked a full-time job, yet was borrowing money from a shylock? Dianne said she worked for her mother two to three times per week, and although she never knew what her mother charged for her services, she had to believe it wasn’t free. So, where was all the money going?
    “For six weeks,” Dianne said, “after that incident occurred, everywhere I went I was looking over my shoulder.”
    As Dianne later thought about the phone call and episode with the large man, she realized what had perhaps “spurred my mother to put me to work. When she first put me to work, I thought it was just going to be long enough to pay off this debt to this person who had showed up at our door. I figured a month or so, maybe a little more.”
    But it continued. As the spring of 1970 came and went, Dianne was still being sent out to perform all sorts of sexual acts for money.
    “Something had gone terribly wrong in what [my mother] was doing,” Dianne recalled, “and there came a point in time when she called on my brother because, she told him, we had no food.”
    The call didn’t make sense, however, to Dianne. Because although her mother had abused her emotionally and made her turn tricks, she never starved her.
    One thing she noticed during the early part of 1970 was that her mom had begun to carry around a white envelope containing all of her money. Generally, Dianne said, there was always $400 or $500 inside it.
    “Rather than give her money—none of my family members would ever give her