Small Sacrifices (12 page)

"I don't buy it," Paul Alton said flatly. "How would the shooter know which road Diane was going to take that night? She goes out Sunderman to see Heather Plourd, she decides to go sightseeing and heads toward Marcola. She finds the kids have fallen asleep, so she turns around and she heads back toward Springfield. The normal route would be straight down Marcola and then onto Q Street. But suddenly she decides she'll veer off on the Old Mohawk Road. Say, we buy the story that she's sightseeing. Even if it's almost pitch dark, she's sightseeing. She says the kids liked to watch the moonlight on the river, or whatever. Anyway, we believe that story for now. How do we explain that the shooter knew she was going to be there? If he's following her in his own car--say the old yellow car--he could trail her onto old Mohawk. But she tells us that the stranger's in front of her, standing in the road waving her down. How does he get there?"

The detectives in Lewis Hince's office shrugged. It was unexplainable. And if there had been a shaggy-haired man who needed a car badly enough to flag a stranger down on a lonely road, and then demand that car at gunpoint, why hadn't he shot Diane first? She

was the adult who could have resisted him physically, who could have identified him.

Why would the stranger have reacted to Diane's "You've got to be kidding!" by immediately aiming his gun into her car and shooting her children? How would he have even known there were children there? Christie and Danny were supposedly asleep on the back seat, their heads below the shooter's line of sight through the windows. And Cheryl. Diane said that Cheryl had been sound asleep on the floor in front of the passenger seat, covered with a gray postal sweater, virtually invisible even to someone who knew she was there.

Suppose the shaggy-haired killer had shot Diane first? Suppose she had lain dead on the macadam of the Old Mohawk Road

with a .22 caliber bullet in her breast? The investigators took that a step further, and considered what the gunman might have done once he had the vehicle, only to discover that there were three children asleep inside. Three children could certainly slow down someone who was trying to make a getaway, but it was doubtful they could identify him. And the killer would have known that. Would the gunman not have lifted those three children out-perhaps even pulled them out roughly--tossed them onto the shoulder of the road and driven off?

Of course.

It didn't wash at all. Hinky.

They looked at it from another angle. Suppose, just for the sake of conjecture, that someone had a reason to assassinate the entire Downs family: a hired killer, maybe--or two--sent out to gun down Diane and her kids, or a disappointed lover who was jealous enough to want to kill the kids along with Diane?

That was a good theory but theories were the icing on the case. First, they had to construct a corpus delecti--not the corpse of the victim, as is generally believed, but the "body of the crime itself." This includes everything that has gone into the commisi sion of a particular crime, everything that has resulted, the complete faceting of an almost physical entity--not unlike the mirrored balls that revolve continually over dance floors, casting floating circlets of reflected light on floor, ceiling, walls, and the dancers below. The body of the crime of murder is as complex as these glittering globes of mirror tiles; different angles produce different shadows of light; different clues produce different theories. Investigators are always looking for motive, opportunity, means. The familiar MO

(modus operand!) beloved of fiction and

78 ANN RULE

television writers means quite simply, "In what manner did the killer carry out his crime?"

Real detectives look for circumstantial evidence, precious nuggets of information or coincidence that make someone look like a good suspect. But they are not nearly as entranced with it

as television detectives are. The working cop wants good, hard physical evidence: something that a jury can see or hear or touch or smell, something tangible and so incontrovertible that its very existence links the killer with the victims at the moment of the crime.

The Lane County team had only battered bullets and cartridges with no gun to match them. And they had blood--of all

types and enzyme characteristics, dripped, spattered, pooled. It wasn't enough.

"Suppose, just suppose," Alton began again. "Suppose there were two of them. Two people waiting out there?"

Welch snorted. "OK. Two assassins. They'd had to have had a two-way radio. One follows Diane and signals to the other that she's turning onto Old Mohawk. The second one parks his car, messes up his hair, and runs out to flag her down."

"Great," Tracy answered. "He's just far enough ahead so that he can get back down Old Mohawk in time to trick her into stopping. She's never talked about anyone passing her before she saw the man."

"You have to twist it to make it work, mold it to fit," Welch said. "I'm having a lot of trouble with her story." There were little inconsistencies that troubled all of them. Minor changes. Diane had told Judy Patterson that the man had leaned in the window to shoot her children. She had told the detectives that she had watched the man stick his arm inside the car while he stood outside. She sometimes said the killer had been standing in the road, and at other times that he'd jogged up to her car. Sometimes, she remembered that her children were awake and laughing; sometimes they were asleep.

Minor discrepancies.

They were getting tips from the public about suspects. The Lane County Sheriffs Office was deluged with leads and a lot of them sounded entirely plausible on paper. But when Paul Alton or Roy Pond or Kurt Wuest went out to do follow-up interviews with the informants, things fell apart. Either the timing was off--even by a week or two. Or the weather was wrong--some citizens

described seeing the stranger in jeans walking in a pouring rain; the vi^l "^ht had been clear and dry.

Fred Hugi had little doubt that there had been a stranger out along Old Mohawk Road--and probably an old yellow car too-but he wondered if either had anything to do with the shooting. Diane might merely have incorporated them into her recollection of what had happened.

Hugi, like Welch, wondered if they might already have met the killer, or the instigator.

Diane.

But then he kept coming back to "Why?" What could she have to gain from shooting her own children? There was no insurance on them. No monetary motivation. He could not conceive that she might simply have wanted to be rid of them and

| chosen such a brutal solution. It had to be more than that--if ' Diane were behind it. And anyway that was an assumption Hugi

wanted to reject as much as the rest of them.

They had to know more about her. Hugi recognized Diane's confidence as facade. Innocent or guilty, she had to be at her lowest ebb during these first days in the hospital. Hugi talked daily with the detectives who guarded her and interviewed her. If she was the shooter--or an accessory--she would be terrified that she would be found out. She could be so frightened, perhaps, that she might blurt out a confession. No one was leaning on her. To a burdened conscience, silence and solicitude can be more threatening than interrogation.

| To Hugi's surprise, nothing happened. Diane seemed more well each day, more in control of her emotions.

He watched Diane covertly as she made her way down to see her living children. At first she had seemed full of anxiety; now she seemed . . . what? Resigned. Was she working up her nerve to confess? Hugi didn't think so. Watching Diane recover was like watching a snake shed its skin; underneath, she was all shiny-new,

|blooming with health and assurance.

Diane scarcely glanced at Hugi, apparently assuming that he was just another plain clothes policeman. She visited her children-yes--but she seemed unable to talk to them, like someone who had never been around youngsters. She stood awkwardly at the end of their beds, her movements stilted and self-conscious. After jshifting from one foot to the other for a while, she would leave,

pften without saying a word. She never spoke to Fred Hugi, 80 ANN RULE

hurrying past him as he sat there watching over Christie and Danny. He was part of the furniture.

Hugi asked Dr. Terrance Carter about Diane's injuries.

"The receptionist treated her first, put Betadine on the wounds to sterilize them ..." Carter began.

"Did she notice any stippling--powder burns?" Hugi asked.

"Yes. Judy Patterson said she wiped away some black specks."

"And what did you find?"

"A single bullet entered her left forearm on the . . . dorsal, er

... the thumb side. It split in two as it shattered the radius, and then exited, leaving two smaller wounds."

As Carter explained the trauma Diane had suffered, Hugi felt a sense of deja vu, remembering Howard Williams's half-joking prediction that first morning. The surgeon's hand pointed to his left forearm in the exact gesture Williams had used.

Hugi paused for a moment. "Let me ask you something . . . and it might sound strange. If you were going to shoot yourself, deliberately, but you didn't want to do any real damage, where would you shoot?" .^i

Carter looked straight into Hugi's eyes. "There. Right there. Right or left forearm, depending on which handed you were." Maybe. But if she'd held up her arm, warding off a bullet, she might have the same injuries.

The early-morning meetings continued. Hugi scribbled quotes from the detectives concerning Diane's attitude in the left margin of his yellow tablet.

"Mother acted . . . like maybe her parakeet died. Joking." One detective had summed up Diane's reaction with a crude phrase: "Mother's attitude totally fucked."

"Many statements--fairly consistent," Hugi wrote. The case built only in their minds. Diane could act "totally fucked" but they had no case without the gun. Although fingerprints are the best physical evidence available, ballistics is only a shade less precise. Criminalists can determine with microscopic certainty that a bullet has been fired from one and only one weapon. Every gun (except a shotgun or other smooth-bore barrel) has had rifling machined into the barrel to make the bullet's path truer, lands and grooves resembling a has relief candy cane, circling spirals. The high points, or "lands," mark the bullet as it passes through the barrel. Some manufacturers' lands and grooves

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are so familiar to firearms examiners that they can identify the manufacturer by the marks on the bullets. (A Colt has six lands and grooves, and a left-hand twist; a Smith and Wesson has five lands and grooves and right-hand twist.)

"Tool marks" are left on bullet casings by a gun's extractor and ejector, by the firing pin. Even if a bullet has not been fired from a gun, but has merely been worked through the magazine,

there will be distinctive tool marks left on the slug's casing. But there was no gun. Pex told them that tool mark comparisons and the lands and grooves on the .22 caliber bullets retrieved

| from the victims were consistent with a semi-automatic pistol or rifle using a clip-style magazine.

All the diving and searching hadn't turned up a gun. Every letter box along the route from Marcola to the shooting site to McKenzie-Willamette Hospital had been checked. Someone

directly--or peripherally--connected to the postal system might have mailed a gun to a fake address in a previously prepared envelope, aware that it would eventually end up in a dead-letter office far away from Springfield, Oregon. But none of the boxes between the river and the hospital had slots big enough for anything but letters.

Fred Hugi and Paul Alton decided to go out and look for the gun themselves.

Alton had been a detective in the biggest county in California (San Bernardino County) for twenty-two years. Desert country. He suspected that whoever the shooter had been, he or she had

come to Oregon from Arizona.

"We're creatures of habit," Alton argued. "If you're from Arizona, you don't throw something in the river, because there are no rivers to speak of there, or they're dried up. You dig a hole in the sand and you bury it. Even with the river right next to the road, I figure the shooter stuck to old habits."

Paul Alton and Fred Hugi walked along the river, searching for the weapon. Alton's eyes were drawn to the white milepost stakes. They would have made good markers if someone wanted to go back later and retrieve the weapon. He dug around each

°ne. And found nothing.

Alton contacted a metal detection expert in Sweet Home, Oregon. They moved along Old Mohawk Road; the sun burned "own on them as they tested likely spots to have hidden a smok^S gun. The metal detector sounded often, and there were moments when they felt close. "We found a bunch of metal," Alton 82 ANN RULE

recalls. "We dug up chunks of car parts, tools, everything, all up and down both sides of the road ... but we didn't dig up a gun." Fred Hugi walked every foot of road from the Hayden Bridge turn-off to where Old Mohawk Road cuts away from Marcola Road and back to 1-105 searching for the glint of a gun. Remembering the road dust on Diane's car, Hugi's thoughts kept turning to the Camp Creek Readjust beyond Hayden Bridge. Road crews had been in the process of widening it along its entire length of six or seven miles. Each day, a portion would be covered with rock and gravel and then paved. Paving had continued on Friday, the day after the shooting. If a gun had been tossed onto the prepared surface late Thursday night, it nestled safely now under layers of macadam, impervious to metal detectors. What if they never found the gun?

They would be left with two eyewitnesses.

One was Diane. The other was Christie--who could no longer talk.

Each day after her stroke, it became more obvious 'that

Christie had lost much of her ability to speak. The speech cortex-Broca's Area--is located on the left side of the brain, and damage to that hemisphere almost always compromises speech. In adults, insult to the left brain is often irreversible. In children under the age of ten the prognosis is more optimistic. They can often be