Small Sacrifices (28 page)

"Don't doubt me, Babe--there's no one but you. I'll never let anyone touch me but you. You are my mate."

Diane had already let Cord Samuelson touch her; she didn't write that to Lew--not even in the diary. She occasionally referred to Samuelson, but only as a good friend she could talk to. The diary entries seem written by a woman on an emotional seesaw. One day, she sounded suicidal; the next, she was full of ebullient plans.

On April 27, Diane told Lew/her diary that she had a good chance at an upgrade in the post office. "I was interested . . . from the beginning--but I was saving it for you." She got the job, a promotion to a 204-B and a transfer from Eugene to Cottage. Grove. Her diary entry was bubbly and optimistic.

It would have been the next day that she flew to Arizona to give Lew his gold chain back. She was gone only twenty-four hours, according to airline schedules. Hugi jotted down the timetable, amazed at how swiftly this woman whirled and turned, flew a thousand miles in a day only to return the next.

When Diane got home, she rearranged the facts of the trip for her diary. As always, she continued to write her "letters" to Lew.

| Friday: 42983

I'm home!

Boy, what an exhausting trip. Oh, Lew, I'm so glad I went. I learned so much. I'm happy again, and so content.

You love me Lew--and that's all I needed to know . . . I know you love me.

J I'm a little sad that she [Nora] has convinced you that fhe kids would be a burden because I know it would not be

186 ANN RULE

true. They are terribly independent and require very little care . . . Hugi shook his head. Once again, Diane hadn't listened to a word Lew said.

Finally then, Diane was all alone with her kids. She had told Lew often that the kids practically took care of themselves. Spending night after night with them, she must have been surprised just how much care they needed.

The diary changed dramatically on May 5, 1983. Diane wrote her daily "letter" to Lew.

/ guess today was my first day of total realization that I really do want to be somebody. I want to be bigger than

Garni or Bobb Dunn [the postmaster in Chandler], I want to look down on them . . . My dad's name pulls power--I'm a personable and intelligent person--and I'm female. Not to mention that I'm getting to know the right people . . . In time, Lew, I'll be someone that people know by name and

sight.

Well, she had that right, Hugi thought.

Reading the diary for too long at a stretch made Fred Hugi dizzy; it was wearying to track Diane's mercurial emotional swings. After many entries declaring her love, she finally blamed Lew's inability to make a decision for all their trouble, accusing him of

deceit.

But he had made his choice. She could not accept it.

Diane was lonesome and sexually frustrated and sad. As the diary moved closer to the last entry, she was beginning to be angry. Hugi's careful reading caught the veering off, the passiveaggression. Oh

Lew, it saddens me to say this but I guess it's time to

speak out loud--rather than keep it inside . . . it's all so beautiful. And I think about what a fool you are.

And then it was May and she was still alone.

Jennifer's birthday coincided with Mother's Day. For that one

day Diane wrote to her last-bom child instead of Lew, a long letter full of Victorianic advice, ending, "Goodbye Jennifer. I love you. I hope all good things come to you. Be good and kind. Always be fair. Never lie or cheat. Maybe one day, I will get to meet you (although I doubt it,) and when I do, I truly hope I find you to be happy, healthy and fair."

After reading the diary so many times, Hugi was positive that it was bifurcated, as if the writer had come to some kind of a decision. The change took place suddenly on Wednesday, May 11, 1983. Christie, Cheryl, and Danny had become the focal point of'each day's entry, almost as if Diane had just discovered her three children.

Well, sweetie—I love talking to you, but I have my own

life here. I have 3 beautiful children that I love more than anyone else. I think I even love them more than you now. They stand by me—no matter what. Danny says he's my best buddy, and I'm his best buddy. He's always giving me kisses and hugs. Every morning, when I go to work, he waves and says, "Bye, Mom. Pick me up after work. I love you." He's beautiful—and always so happy.

Christie & Cheryl are fantastic in their own right also. Chris is so smart. She always gets A's and she is always willing to help . . . [she] drew a picture . . . You'll never believe what the picture was of. You! She drew you, with me in your thought bubble. Pretty smart huh? She's so very

bright. I'll bet she really does become a lawyer when she grows up. She's been saying it for almost a year now.

And Cheryl—so full of bubbly energy. She's so agile.

Always doing flips and acrobatics. I've considered getting her into gymnastics . . . But, she's just as sweet and cuddly as Danny. When I get to my mom's house after work, she

always wants to sit on my lap and be close. And, she's the one that always thinks of giving me flowers . . .

Diane thought she might even love her children more than

^e loved Lew! It seemed an entirely new concept for her—a

"•udden lightning bolt—well worthy of notation. She loved her

^ildren more than her lost lover!

Hugi shifted at his desk. The lady was protesting too much. 188 ANN RULE

Diane wrote about the outings they took: to Hendricks Park to see the flowers, to the river, and to the beach.

Well, I've decided where I'm going to take the kids-back to the beach. They really enjoyed it last time, and I told

them we'd go back in a month. I know it's only been 3

weeks, but why wait?

Hugi read on, and he felt a chill at a single--seemingly innocuous--notation in the spiral book:

Oh, I found a beautiful brass Unicorn in a store window. I'm going to buy it for Christie & Cheryl & Danny. Then I'll have it engraved. I know they'll like it.

Diane picked up the unicorn on May twelfth, and took it to be engraved, saying she needed it by May thirteenth. Why? It wasn't anybody's birthday. No special anniversary that Hugi could discern.

Friday, the thirteenth.

On Friday, Diane delivered the cake she'd made to the Cottage Grove Post Office, even though it was her day off. Then she drove her children to the Pacific Ocean.

The whole day was spelled out in the diary: gray and cloudy all morning, the sun finally breaking through at noon. They flew a kite, Cheryl discoverd a crab claw, Christie found some sea shells, and Danny was content just to dig holes and watch the sea creep into the hollows.

Hugi couldn't find anything sinister there.

Diane wrote that she couldn't find a place to build a campfire, and everybody was hungry. They drove home, stopping here and there while she looked for the perfect spot. It was a long drive, and the kids were tired. Still, Diane didn't go back to the townhouse on Q Street; she headed for the banks of the McKenzie River. They didn't stay long; Cheryl had pleaded that she had to go to the bathroom.

Diane picked up her nephew Israel--she had promised to

babysit--and, inexplicably, Diane had taken her exhausted chil|

dren back to Hendricks Park. The trees there cast thick shadows in the twilight. They then returned to the river's bank where Diane had to lead the kids along in the gray light. The park and the river were dark and spooky after sunset. Diane kept driving

from place to place, taking the kids home only when it was so dark she couldn't see and they were whining and ready for bed. Fred Hugi stared from the diary to the photograph Jon Peckels had snapped of the unicorn on top of Diane's television set. Why had it been so damned important to have it embossed with the date: May 13, 1983? Was something supposed to happen on that day that would make the date the ultimate symbol? God--it was so obvious. The unicorn was to be a memorial to her three children who were supposed to die on May thirteenth.

Nothing bad had happened. If there was a plan, it had been aborted. Or simply abandoned for the moment.

If Diane had been capable of subtlety, the diary might have been a masterpiece. Hugi saw it as an alibi before the fact: Diane had been so anxious for the cops to know about it--and it was, in its second half, a paean to motherhood. Anybody reading it would believe Diane would die for her kids.

But then he read over a statement Roy Pond had taken from a woman who lived next door to Wes and Willadene Frederickson. In spite of all the people the investigators had talked to, there were few with viable information. Nobody outside the family had actually seen much of Diane's children. But this statement came from Sada Long, who had talked to Cheryl Downs the day before she died.

She described to Pond a little girl with long, taffy-colored hair who had walked up beside her as she knelt to weed her flowerbed. Long said she'd looked up at her--a skinny, little girl, with a slightly nervous smile who blurted out a string of seemingly disconnected sentences.

"I'm Cheryl. My grandma lives over there. My father's in Arizona. My mom and dad are divorced . . . I'm scared of my mom . . . We went to the park last night, and my mom jumped out from behind a tree and she scared me."

Ms. Long had sat back on her heels and studied the child.

"Maybe your mom was just playing hide-and-seek with you?"

"When she jumped out at me?"

"Yes--maybe it was just a game?"

"Yeah ... I guess so ... I like that T-shirt--I'd like one of those," Cheryl said.

"Well, go ask your grandma what size you wear. Maybe I ^nget one." 190 ANN RULE

The little girl skipped off, but she didn't come back.

Sada Long had wondered if she should say something to

someone--perhaps talk to the grandparents. She hated to think of a child being so frightened, even if it was over a game. But then she decided that she was being ridiculous.

She was horrified when she heard on the news that Cheryl was dead, murdered. Long felt it might be important to tell the authorities about her brief encounter with Cheryl. It was. No one else came toward to speak of Cheryl Downs's terror.

According to Diane's diary, the last week before the shooting had been deceptively normal. It sounded almost boring, Hugi thought. Diane wrote about doing the kids' laundry and scrubbing the bathroom on Sunday, May 15. She had taken the kids to the river again that night.

Wes and Willadene went to Seattle for a convention early in the week. They came back in time to help Kathy pack to fly to Oklahoma to rejoin her estranged husband.

Two days before the shooting, Diane damned Lew in her

diary, but in the next breath she adored him. She would wait forever--if she had to. "I miss you Lew, and I love you very much. Where are you? Why aren't you here? We were so happy." Christie brought home that little bouquet of tissue-paper roses--all the colors she could find, even purple--with stems of pipe cleaners, a present for her mom.

They went to the river almost every night. Diane wrote that the kids just loved it.

On May 18th, Diane drove Kathy and Israel to the airport for their flight to Oklahoma where Kathy's husband attended Oklahoma State Technical College in Okmulgee.

Hugi noted that Diane kept close tabs on her menstrual cycle; that figured--she would have needed to know to the day when she ovulated, so she could get pregnant when she wanted. Her calendar showed her last period had begun Friday, April 22. Hugi checked with women advisors. They explained that would make Diane premenstrual during the week before the shooting, with her flow due to start by Thursday or Friday--the nineteenth or twentieth.

I' On that last Thursday night, May 19, Diane did the dishes after supper, and then called an acquaintance, Barb Ebeling, in Arizona. She confided that she missed Lew's lovemaking more than usual. "Horny" was the word she used. Diane cried a little

bit and raved to Barb about Lew's sexual prowess. "That man can come three times in one night!" Barb was embarrassed; she didn't know Diane that well, and she didn't feel comfortable talking about such intimate things.

Diane chatted away for about an hour, according to Barb. Hugi looked at his time chart. It would have to have been right after that when she called the kids and told them to get in the car, they were going for a ride . . .

He looked at the diary. There was no real entry for May 19 ip Diane's letter-diary.

All she'd written was: "Thursday: 51983."

The rest of the page was blank. The diary had ended.

A

Eight days after the shooting, Doug Welch and Paul Alton talked with Stan Post in Chandler, Arizona. The distaste Diane had often evinced toward Post, her ex-husband's sometime-employee

longtime-friend appeared to be mutual.

Diane had told the detectives that Stan Post was "crazy about guns." Welch and Alton figured then that if anyone had kept track of the perambulations of the missing .22 Ruger, it might be Post. They were right. Post remembered guns the way some men recall treasured hunting dogs. He told them that he and Steve Downs had shared a home three years earlier with a man named Billy Proctor. The semi-automatic .22 had been Proctor's; Post himself had fired between two and three thousand rounds from that very gun.

"Where's the gun now?" Welch asked.

Post flushed. "Steve took it from Proctor. As far as I know, Steve had it for some time, but then somebody swiped it from Steve. I don't know who has it."

Alton held out two colored photos of a Ruger with a six-inch barrel.

"That looks identical to Billy Proctor's gun," Post said. "It's possible though that Billy's gun may have had adjustable rear sights, and this one doesn't.

"Three years ago," Post continued, "me and Mike Hickle went on a hunting trip out at 96 and the Freeman Ranch. I shot a porcupine that must have weighed in at maybe thirty-five pounds

. . . had to shoot him twenty times to get him out of the tree. I was using Billy Proctor's .22 Ruger."