DID SHE, OR DIDN''T SHE? (DIANE DOWNS) Elizabeth Diane Frederickson was born on August 7, 1955. The Frederickson family lived in Phoenix, Arizona. She was raised on a succession of farms alongside her four siblings. It wasn''t the easiest of childhoods, especially for a girl who thought of herself as ugly, and who was treated as such by other girls her age. Boys, on the other hand, tended to simply ignore her. Later in life, she would accuse her father of sexually molesting her when she reached the age of puberty. The experience, which she said happened regularly and repeatedly, must have been deeply traumatizing for her; the kind of trauma that can scar a person for life. After graduating from high school, she went on to study at a Bible college in California.
For reasons of promiscuity, she was expelled in her second semester. Throughout her life, Diane would have numerous male lovers, a number of whom were married. In November of 1973, Diane married an old flame from high school: Steve Downs. They had three children together, Christie, Cheryl, and Stephen Daniel (who went by Danny), before the marriage ended in an acrimonious divorce in 1980, after it emerged that Steve Downs was not Danny''s father. Diane later became a surrogate mother and got a job working for the U.S. Postal Service in Chandler, Arizona, before moving to Oregon a couple of years later. At 10:30 p.
m. on May 19, 1983, Diane parked her car outside the entrance to a hospital emergency department in Springfield. She was bleeding heavily from her left arm, but by far her bigger concern was the children in the car with her. When the medical staff rushed out to help her, she told them breathlessly that somebody had shot her and her kids. She was right. Somebody had. Inside the car, all three children bore gunshot wounds. Despite the best efforts of the emergency department staff, they were unable to save Cheryl, who was just 7 years old.
She had been shot twice, both times in the chest. Christie, age 9, and 3-year-old Danny were also severely wounded, but both thankfully survived, albeit with significantly life-altering side effects. Christie suffered a stroke. Danny was paralyzed. Diane Downs'' story was as strange as it was disturbing. She told the detectives who came to the hospital to take a statement that she had stopped to help out a man who standing at the side of the road. This wasn''t a stranded man in need of assistance, however; it was a carjacking. Diane wouldn''t let him have the car, so he pulled a .
22 caliber pistol and started shooting. She and all three of her children were hit before she floored the accelerator and drove away. or so she claimed. The police understandably wanted as much detail about the assailant as they could get. The more they knew about him, the faster they would be able to catch him, before even more innocent lives were lost. Diane seemed to find it difficult to accurately describe their assailant, noting that he was "shaggy or bushy haired" but otherwise giving officers little to go on. Diane''s affect in the hours and then days after the shooting seemed to be off to many people. She simply did not present as being the traumatized, grieving mother that most would expect to see.
Instead, she appeared coldly disinterested, showing an inappropriate degree of detachment given the circumstances. Eyewitnesses noted that she didn''t cry or seem to be remotely upset. The detectives investigating the case found her story suspicious almost from the outset. For one thing, how was it that three children, all of whom were smaller in size than their mother and positioned further back inside the car than she, had been shot in the chest and back, causing life threatening wounds, while Diane -- the larger and the closer target -- had escaped with a non-life-threatening wound to the forearm? Based on her inappropriate affect, several puzzling comments she made, and a host of other factors, suspicion quickly fell on Diane as the real perpetrator of the crime. She owned a .22 caliber handgun; it would never be located during any police search, and Diane herself conveniently failed to mention the fact that she had access to a .22 Ruger to the police. Where was the gun? Nowhere to be found.
It is likely that she drove out to the dark and deserted stretch of road at 10pm that night, where she could be reasonably sure that she would not be disturbed. Once she was satisfied that there was nobody around, she took the pistol and shot her children at almost point-blank range. The wounds had powder burns to indicate as much, proving that the barrel of the gun was close to the point of impact when the shots were fired. The bullet in her own arm was an attempt to buy herself some credibility and sympathy. She then drove to the closest hospital and began to spin her tale. All the way there, her children were slowly bleeding out. As she recounted the events of the shooting, the details of Diane''s story changed in ways both large and small. On at least one occasion, she claimed that there were multiple shooters, rather than just a single straggly haired man -- once again, something for which there was not a shred of evidence.
Most people, caught in the situation described by Diane Downs, would have driven like a bat out of hell to the closest hospital, or stopped to call 911, to alert emergency services. Not so Diane, who was seen driving at a painfully slow speed somewhere between 5 and 10 miles per hour -- hardly the actions of somebody worried about the lives of her hemorrhaging children. One of the key issues presented by any prosecutor in a murder trial is that of motive. Why would the mother of three young children kill them all in cold blood? (She wrote an entry in her diary just three months before the shooting, in which she declared "I have three beautiful children that I love more than anyone else"). The attention of the prosecutors became focused upon one of her lovers, a married co-worker named Robert "Knick" Knickerbocker. He lived back in Arizona, but it was Downs'' intent to have him move out to be with her in Oregon. It was proposed that she had tried to get her children out of the picture because their presence was an impediment to her relationship with Knickerbocker. He had made it very clear that he wasn''t at all interested in being a stepfather.
Careful assessment of her car found no evidence to support Diane''s story. It didn''t appear that anybody had fired into the car from the outside. One of the most damning pieces of evidence came from her daughter, Christie. She was unable to communicate after she was shot, but when she had recovered sufficiently, she told investigators that her mother had been the one to shoot her and her siblings. A heavily pregnant Diane sat through her own trial, including an emotionally fraught day in which Christie testified against her own mother. At the conclusion of her trial, the jury found Diane Downs guilty of murder and two counts of attempted murder in the first degree. There were also convictions for assault. The presiding judge sentenced Downs to life imprisonment, plus an extra fifty years.
After their mother was sent to prison, Christie and Danny were adopted by the prosecutor who had sent her there. The girl with whom she had been pregnant during the trial was also adopted. The case gained widespread publicity again three years after the trial when Ann Rule, the respected writer of true crime cases, detailed the story of Diane Down in her 1987 book Small Sacrifices. Two years later, the book was adapted for the small screen, with Farrah Fawcett playing the role of Diane. Most of those who were involved with the case in real life dismissed the TV version as being little more than a soap opera. On July 11, 1987, Diane climbed over a prison perimeter fence and escaped. She was on the run for ten days before she was recaptured and returned. The successful escape added an extra five years to her sentence.
Afterward, Diane was transferred out of Oregon to a higher security facility in New Jersey to complete the remainder of her incarceration. More escape attempts followed. None of them were successful. She was moved again to yet another prison. Diane Downs did not sit idly behind bars. In addition to orchestrating multiple appeals and legal complaints, she also penned a memoir titled Diane Downs: Best Kept Secrets. It was subtitled Her own true story, told by Diane Downs with the aid of police documents and trial transcripts no one else will share. The back cover copy bills the book as "a chilling first-hand account of how she and her children were cut down by an assassin''s bullets, only to find themselves further victimized by the Oregon State legal system.
" The book is an unabashed attempt to vindicate Diane in the eyes of the public, meant to entrench her version.