Small Sacrifices (27 page)

Doug Welch asked,, "Are you familiar with weapons, Lew?"

"Ahhhh—I was more familiar with them when I was in Vietnam. Since I have come back from Vietnam—which was in '69—I

don't fool with guns. I don't own one, I don't ever intend to own one. It doesn't bother me that other people have them; I just have no use for guns. They're only good for one thing, and I left that back in Vietnam."

In Eugene Fred Hugi waited for the latest report from Alton and Welch. Lewiston fascinated him; Diane's diary had been so obsessively involved with Lew. Even the poems retrieved from her apartment had been about Lew, many of them masturbatory

fantasies. Hugi could almost believe now that the love affair had been powerful enough--perhaps on both sides--that they might conspire to eliminate her children.

At 3:15 Oregon time, Hugi grabbed the phone beside him

before the first ring finished its bleat.

"Lew was here all the time," Alton began. "We've got witnesses who saw him and his wife down at a local cocktail lounge all evening. Lew and Nora are both good witnesses--but they're scared--"

"Scared?"

Alton repeated the last thing Lew told them: "I think Diane shot her children--because of me--and I'm frightened. Not so much for myself--but for my wife. I'm probably not as afraid of her as Nora is, just because I'm a man and a little bit larger. I figure I can probably take a bullet and get to her before she could kill me."

"Welch asked him if he really felt Diane was capable of coming down here and doing physical harm to them--" Alton continued. _ "... and?"

H "And he says, 'I think if she gets away with this, if she is found not guilty of shooting her children . . . that there's a good chance that she would come down here and try to arrange something to "happen" to Nora, and then, at that point if I still didn't go back with her, I'm sure she would arrange for something to happen to me.' "

"He sounded that definite?"

"You bet he did. They're practically hiding out down here." The case was beginning to fit together. Hugi felt even better when he learned that Lew had seen the .22 target pistol in Diane's I car the night before she left for Oregon.

Fred Hugi saw that the picture Diane originally painted for detectives must now be erased and redone in entirely different

|colors and shades. There had been an affair; Diane hadn't imag^ed that. There had been a sizzingly passionate affair for several months but, according to Lew Lewiston, the affair had ended the ^y Diane had driven off to Oregon. Hugi realized Diane

"ad wagered everything she had that Lewiston would leave his

^"e and follow her and the kids. But Lew didn't want to be a daddy.

There it was--the motive--as distasteful as it might be.

Grow in love and wisdom. Remember, nothing worthwhile

comes easy. Don't give yourself and your love to ''I

anyone unless they are worthy. Then love with all your

heart. And when the heart-break comes, lion''! try to

chase it away. It can't be done. Accept the pain and

learn from it.. . If you remain good, pure & honest, the good will finally come to you . ..

--Diane Downs, unmailed letter in her diary, to her

surrogate daughter on the occasion of her first birthday: Mother's Day, May 8, 1983.

Fred Hugi could practically recite Diane's first Oregon diary by heart. It was designed, he was sure, to be an advertisement for herself, and yet she was transparent in ways she did not realize. Combining the diary's day-by-day recounting of the month leading up to the shootings with information from Doug Welch, Paul Alton, Kurt Wuest, and Roy Pond, Hugi drew an amazingly clear picture of the woman he dealt with.

She rented the brown duplex but never really furnished it-She put the kids in school, but Willadene took care of them before

and afterward and when Diane picked them up, they usually stayed for supper at her mother's table.

One of the first things Diane did was have their television sets hooked up to pay TV. For three years Diane reportedly

;t watched Music Television (MTV), the cable network that features ip^ visual interpretations of popular songs, many of them violent and overtly sexual. She loved MTV--so many of the songs reminded her of making love to Lew.

If Diane had a favorite song, it was Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf." She'd bought the Duran Duran tape "Rio" in February when Lew left Nora; they played it all the time. "Hungry Like the Wolf is a sensual song of frustrated passion. In the video, the lover stalks the object of his desire--a half-woman/halfanimal creature--through the jungle. The video ends with animal cries of orgasm.

Diane would always insist it was Cheryl's favorite video, not her own. "Cheryl is [sic] a physical person and the video for that one is very physical what with people crawling around in the bushes."

It was probably only a coincidence, Hugi mused, that the Duran-Duran tape was in the tape deck of the Nissan the night it was processed.

Still, he bought the album and pored over the printed lyrics. He underlined phrases and came up with repetitive themes, finally jotting down five phrases in his notebook:

(1) Self-centered--I, me

(2) In love ifc

(3) Lost, Lonely, Afraid, Desperate

(4) Internal quandry, conflict, confusion, compelling emotions (5) Take a chance, Dare to Do Something Bold--Radical

Action/Consequences-Violence, Make the Decision.

It fit the state of mind he believed Diane Downs had been in before the shooting, but then half the songs on MTV seemed to be slated for that kind of personality. §

Reading her diary, Hugi perceived that Diane had been genu-s inely astounded that Lew didn't follow her to Oregon, when Lew

decided--according to reports from the investigators in Chandler

--to cut his losses and run like hell. Diane obviously equated sex with love. And Lewiston had apparently given Diane mixed signals, which would be a foreign language to her. "Maybe" was clearly the same as "Yes" to her. So when Lew had said, "Maybe I could give it a try," that would have meant to her that he was

absolutely, definitely, positively, coming to Oregon to live with her and the children.

Hugi talked to psychologists and sought out experts on human behavior; he read books, trying to pin down Diane's person-^ty. In the end, it was Hugi-a layman at psychology--who ^uld understand Diane best simply because he had immersed

182 ANN RULE

himself in her life completely. He had to know his opponent. Even so, just as the psychologists in Kentucky had discovered, Diane would never be irrevocably caught in any psychological slot. She defied categorizing.

In many ways, Diane--who resented men so much--reacted

as a male would. Hugi believed Lew when he said he feared Diane might try to kill him and his wife. That was a male's reaction to sexual frustration. Hugi wondered if Diane might be an erotqmaniac.

\Erotomania. The term was newly coined, but the obsession was age old. Some males would rather kill the woman they wanted than let another man have her. They stalked, they waited, they flooded the love object with flowers and letters and phone calls. In his research Hugi found that it was an almost exclusively male disorder. Women might sink into depression, or, in extremis, kill themselves, but he found only one case where a female resorted

to murder because she could not have the man she wanted. Or was it possible that Diane--who seemed to consider her children as "part of me"--intended to kill them as a kind of sacrifice upon the altar of Lew's love? A symbolic suicide, but one that would let her stay alive for her reunion with him?

Hugi--so used to rationalthinking, lists, organization, and the firm parameters of the law--became more and more adept in analyzing theories behind what had seemed a completely mad crimeJ, He always felt that the gun was the most important missing link in the case. He asked psychologist friends what a woman like Diane might do with a gun. Would she allow it to get out of her control so that she could not get it back? Or would she need to know that it was somewhere, safely hidden, waiting for her to retrieve it?

Nobody could say. Not even the experts had run across

anyone like Diane Downs.

Hugi kept at the diary, looking for something he might have missed before, and he read each new background report the detectives brought him with interest.

Diane's trail in Oregon was easy enough to follow; she'd only been in the area for eight weeks. Heather Plourd recalled that when she trained with Diane at the Eugene post office Diane mainly talked about a boyfriend in Arizona who would be moving to Oregon soon.

Diane had never been close to women. But detectives checking leads in Oregon found that Diane had "come on" immediately

to the males in her new post office. What did that do to the erotomania theory? Lew was number one, but Diane apparently couldn't resist testing her powers at conquest of the male. Within a week of her arrival in Oregon, she propositioned Cord Samuelson, one of the carrier instructors at the Eugene post office. He was tall, bearded, handsome--and married. They dated for happy hours after work for about three weeks. Samuelson learned that Diane liked punk rock, bourbon and coke, and sex. Even to Cord, she'd raved about Lew from the first day. "She expected him to move to Eugene too. She was confident of that

... at first. After a few weeks, it looked like he wasn't coming, and she became bummed out."

Diane talked on and on of her love for Lew--but that didn't keep her from sleeping with Samuelson. Why? For sex? For comfort?

To prove she could seduce him? From simple boredom? Or

to drive away the fear nibbling at the edges of her mind, the old fear that she wasn't really pretty, that she was still such an ugly little girl that Lew would desert her?

Even as she was intimate with Cord Samuelson, Diane was

flooding Lew with mail from Oregon, telling him that Oregon was their paradise. But Lew never came.

Diane bragged in her diary/letters how popular she was. Hugi wondered if she had really expected Lew to read it someday. He thought so; Diane rarely seemed to do anything without device'. She wrote that the guys at her new post office called her "Lady Di," and "Arizona" and "Beautiful Lady." A flower vendor had bowed and handed her a yellow carnation, saying, "You have the most beautiful eyes and sweet smile." Another day, she wrote that a cab driver pulled up beside her mail jeep and yelled at her to open her window. She did, and he handed her a lavender carnation, saying, "Have a nice day, mail lady." See, Lew--I am beautiful and everyone loves me.

Hugi sensed Diane's accelerating panic as the diary contin"ed, and she began to suspect that Lew might not come to her at all.

Diane's days fell into a dull pattern: work, childcare, and cleaning house. Cord pulled away from her, and other prospects

in the Eugene office turned down her blatant approach. She began 0 call women she knew in Chandler, asking questions about Lew.

-aren Batten told detectives that Diane sounded distraught when sue learned Lew had moved back in with his wife.

The diary made it clear that Diane blamed Nora because she 184 ANN RULE

could not accept that Lew had just stopped loving her. Yes, Hugi thought, Nora Lewiston might well be in danger.

. . . Nobody else can fill your empty place in my bed, or heart. I guess I really have been bewitched . . . I wish you'd come around. Just before 1 left, you said you were too smart to fall for any of Nora's tricks. What happened? Good night babe. Sweet dreams.

Diane's writings were a complete denial of reality. She seemed to believe devoutly that it was she who made all the sacrifices, she who had rebuilt her whole damn life for Lew. She ignored what he had told her on the phone. She simply blotted all ugly rejection out of her consciousness.

Fred Hugi could see how difficult it became for even Diane to rationalize--especially when the flowers she sent Lew by Express Mail came back: "Refused LSL."

The roses she sent had suffocated and died, trapped inside the unopened box. If Diane saw the rampant symbolism in that, she did not write of it in her diary. But she kept that box of flowers, carrying them back to Arizona to show Lew, and then leaving them in the trunk of the red Nissan. They were still there when Pex and Peckels processed the blood-soaked car.

Hugi read on, marveling at Diane's blind spots.

Are you playing games?

Are you just pretending to go along with Nora so that

when you get a divorce, it will look like it's on the up and up?

Do you ache for me the same way I ache for you? Does your heart hurt, knowing the pain I feel?

Of course, Lew never received the letter. It was only one of a growing number of desperate messages in her diary. She'd promised not to call or write.

Cord Samuelson told detectives that depression had settled over Diane like a smothering cloud. He'd seen her letters refused, and the long box of desiccated flowers returned. Suddenly, he said, Diane would seem to bounce back. But when she laughed, it was a near-hysterical laugh wrought tinny and hollow by anxiety. The little diary in the spiral notebook had grown thick. It was all Lew. Or how men reacted to Diane's attractiveness or how

Diane felt. Fred Hugi noted that Christie, Cheryl, and Danny were hardly ever mentioned, except to remind Lew that they were pining for him too. One Sunday, Diane wrote of driving her children to see the Sea Lion Caves where the giant creatures play in natural rock caverns carved away by centuries of pounding from the Pacific Ocean. "I bought Danny a stuffed seal, and he wanted to send it to you. They all really like you." How could her kids have "really liked" Lew? According to Lew, they hadn't known him. Christie, at least, apparently knew that her mother's moods depended on Lew.

Hugi grimaced as he read where again Diane pledged fidelity _to a man who had no wish to see her . . . ever.