Small Sacrifices (33 page)

"I think—" Christie's eyes filled with tears, and she stared off blankly into space.

Christie tried to draw a picture of the person with the gun. She labored over it. The person had come from the trunk of the car to the front door. But the person in Christie's picture had only a blank face. It could have been either a man or a woman.

"What do you think about the person that did the bad thing, Christie?" Paula asked gently.

"Yuk."

"Are you still afraid?"

"Yes . . . sometimes ..." |

It had been a scary thing for Christie just to tell Paula what she remembered. She wasn't anywhere near ready to testify in court. Not yet.

Christie had said, "I think—I think, Mom."

A defense attorney would make mincemeat of her.

It was essential that Christie—and eventually Danny—be placed in a foster home where they would be nurtured and supported both emotionally and physically. Susan Staff el conferred with other CSD caseworkers and there was unanimous agreement; the ideal

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foster home would be with Ray and Evelyn Slaven. In a dozen years, the Slavens had given long-term foster care to a half-dozen youngsters, and they had also taken in over two hundred babies and children for shelter care. The shelter-care children were taken to the Slavens when police or social workers had to remove them from their homes at once\ Two hundred babies thrust into Evelyn's arms wailing and bewildered.

"They came in the middle of the night, on holidays, any time," Ray Slaven, a big, comforting man with just a trace of Tennessee drawl, recalls. "Sometimes they didn't have any clothing; sometimes they had lice--or worse--but there are ways to take care of that. They just needed someplace safe to go to until a foster home was found for them."

Evelyn Slaven is as petite as Ray is large, a softly pretty woman with a melodious voice. She was born in Eugene; Ray on a farm sixty miles east of Knoxville. When farming got rough in Tennessee in the early fifties, Ray Slaven and his folks moved to Oregon. He was fourteen. When he met Evelyn, he was studying medical X ray at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls and working summers as a millwright for the Georgia Pacific plywood mill. It occurred to him that his summer job payed more than he would make in the X-ray field after two more years of college. He went to work full time for Georgia Pacific in 1961. Two years later, he married Evelyn.

By 1971 they had three boys of their own and a big house with extra bedrooms. Evelyn spotted an ad seeking foster homes for young children. "I was just drawn to it," she remembers.

"We talked it over, and Ray felt the same way. I come from a family of six, and there are seven kids in his family. It seemed right that we take in some foster kids."

For eleven years there were always kids at the Slavens' house, Their own three boys--who were seven, five, and three when it began--enjoyed the foster and shelter kids. "So much so," Ray laughs, "that they'd get bored when it was just them. They'd say

'When are we going to get some kids around here?' "

"One Christmas, I counted sixteen kids," Ray remembers.

"Our boys always voted on whether we should take more, and ^ey always seemed to want more. They got really good with

scared little kids; they'd play with them but never pressure them." Brenda Slaven joined the family when she was adopted. In ^ she was almost exactly the age of Christie Downs. The CSD ^nted the Slaven home for Christie and Danny. But by 1983

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Evelyn and Ray had been without foster kids for a year. Their own boys were almost grown up, and they'd decided to take at least a few years off.

"I don't know how many times they called Evelyn and asked her to consider taking Christie and Danny," Ray says. "We just kept saying no--because we knew how much would be involved. But then, finally, we just had to say yes."

The family had taken a vote--and Christie and Danny Downs won.

The Slavens were not naive; they knew that mistreated kids rarely responded to kindness with gratitude. These kids would have every reason to act out, to distrust them. They'd been through it before, but never with kids as damaged as Christie and Danny must be. Once they made up their minds, however, Ray and Evelyn vowed to do everything they could to bring the children through as whole and secure as it was possible for them to be.

"We started out by visiting the kids in the hospital," Ray says, "so they would get to know us. Christie came home first, of course--and we spent months visiting Danny. So when they came to our house, it was already like they were one of the gang." On June 22, 1983, after five weeks of treatment, Christie was released from McKenzie-Willamette Hospital. She was very thin and wan, her right arm still paralyzed, but the fact that Christie was leaving the hospital alive was in itself a miracle.

Susan Staffel drove Christie to the Slavens. Their address was known to only a few trusted people.

"We don't know where she's at," Willadene told a RegisterGuard reporter. "All they told us was something about her going to a foster home the first of this week."

Evelyn Slaven is even tempered and infinitely patient. She found Christie "very, very fragile--both physically and emotionally.

"Christie observed us for a long time. She needed to be sure that we were the same all the time--that we wouldn't be nice to her one day, and then angry the next. It took her quite a while to trust us."

The Slavens' adopted daughter Brenda and Christie clung

together. "They went everywhere together," Evelyn laughs. "And I mean everywhere--even to the bathroom!"

Diane's visiting privileges with her children had been re

scinded. Christie never mentioned her mother, never asked about where Diane was or why she didn't come to visit.

Christie still had great difficulty with speech, but she grew a little more verbal each week. She talked about Cheryl once she began to feel safer--but not in the context of the shooting. Instead, she remembered past times with her sister, good and bad. Cheryl had always been in trouble, Christie confided--for sucking her thumb, for wetting her bed.

Although Christie was only eight when she came to the Slavens, Evelyn was amazed to see that she was used to doing the laundry for a family. "She told me she always had trouble folding her father's pants--because she was too short."

Christie had been the mother in her family. Evelyn saw that Christie assumed that's the way it always was--that little girls cooked and did dishes and laundry and babysat.

On June 27, Susan Staffel referred Christie Downs to Dr. Carl Peterson, a child psychologist.

"Christie is currently living in a shelter home . . . visiting weekly with her brother," Staffel wrote. "She has been unable to totally recall the events on the night of the shooting, however, she has maintained that there was no one present 'when the bad things happened' other than her family. Christie has awakened regularly at night crying, and frequently becomes visibly upset when contemplating her scars. She has been unable, however to express her feelings."

Christie's nightmares where charted: 6-22, 6-23, 6-27, 630, 7-6, 7-19 ... As she began to feel secure, the time between bad dreams lengthened. Evelyn ran to Christie the moment she heard her cry out, so that she wouldn't wake up alone.

The Slavens walked a fine, fine line. They provided Christie with love and security, but on the advice of experts they could not validate what she said--one way or the other. They bent over backward not to show surprise or shock or confirmation at anything she said. "All we could say was 'Oh,' " Evelyn says. "We knew Christie needed some answers, but we knew the best way she could find them was with Dr. Peterson. Still, it was so hard for us---always having to let her wonder if what she'd said was right--or a dream--or whatever."

Something terrible obviously weighed on Christie's mind, and crept out in her dreams, but she would not share it.

On June 28, the levy to fund the Sheriffs and District Attorney's offices failed.

Sheriff Dave Burks--frustrated and angered by his inability to protect the public--parked row after row of empty patrol cars in the lot across from the courthouse. Let the citizens of Lane County see them there and know that the failed levy had taken away funds needed to put officers into those units. A county bigger than either Rhode Island or Delaware was virtually without police patrols.

Paul Alton was laid off. Doug Welch and Kurt Wuest were

given a reprieve--but only for a month. They had until August 1

to clear the Downs shooting. Thereafter, Dick Tracy would handle all major crimes in the county, a job even Superman couldn't have managed.

Fred Hugi still had his job, but he had no investigators. He agonized over his decision not to charge Diane. She didn't know where Christie was, but he feared she might find out. He watched Diane's televised press conferences and listened to her spin out her stories of bereft motherhood. It seemed as if every time he turned on his set, Diane was on the screen, mocking him. Diane and her father continued to snipe at the detectives, the DA, the sheriff. And Diane was free. She could drive wherever she wanted. The decision to prosecute Diane Downs for murder and attempted murder had been made even before May eased into June--back at the mass meeting of all investigators, criminalists, and DA's men in Harris Hall. But the question of when the arrest would take place had sparked the corrosive arguments between Hugi and the sheriffs detectives. The onus of the decision to wait fell on Fred Hugi.

Now, the money was gone. The bottom had fallen out. Hugi lay awake nights, juggling the components of the case. Diane told her diary she was "beginning to feel like everyone is against me." Fred Hugi could empathize with her. In certain circles, he too was a pariah. The detectives all felt they had a "go." But Hugi refused to budge, urging them to get out there and dig for more. He had seen jurors disregard simpler and stronger evidence than they had so far and bring back not-guilty verdicts.

If they arrested Diane, Hugi had to be prepared to go to court within three months at the most. Oregon adheres rigidly to the right to a speedy trial. According to Petersen, there was no way Christie could be ready to testify in sixty days. She could barely speak, and she was too frightened to remember.

During the day at work Hugi had so many things to do, so many other cases that came and went, that he could often forget the Downs case for the moment. "But always, when the immediate tasks were over, my mind would return to it. It wasn't going to go away by itself. I was the only one who could make it happen." Hugi wrote dialogues in his head, playing devil's advocate. B If they went ahead without Christie, the defense would cry,

"Why hasn't the State waited so that the eyewitness--Christie-could testify and clear her mother?" Hugi could almost hear JimJagger as he said, "And how will you, as jurors, feel if you find Diane Downs guilty--only to have Christie remember later that the 'bushy-haired stranger' was the shooter? All this could have been avoided if the State had simply waited. Why are they in such a hurry? The children are safe. Diane isn't going anywhere. What are they afraid of--the trutW That they have made a mistake by focusing on Diane and allowing the real killer to escape!" It made a dandy defense, and if Hugi had thought of it, Jagger certainly would.

I At night Fred Hugi tossed in bed, listening to some damned I rooster crow far down the road--and pictured another scenario. ok. They would wait-they were waiting. That allowed a whole "ew set of problems to rear their ugly heads. Maybe Christie was never going to be able to talk. Or say she did regain her speech: Christie might try to protect her mother by going along with the bushy-haired stranger story. That was a paragraph right out of ^hat essay Diane had written about child abuse. She knew that ^ds often stuck by their parents ... no matter what. God only

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knew what Diane had said to Christie as she'd spent hours visiting her in the hospital before the court order stopped her.

If Christie was brainwashed, it wouldn't be a surprise to Hugi.

Would the long wait make the public--the potential jurors--lose confidence in the case?

Jagger would go for that too: If the

State had such damn good physical evidence, why did they need to wait for Christie?

Hugi gave up on sleep and went out on the deck to watch the sun rise. He tried to focus on the bright side. With the passage of time, Christie might talk; she might remember everything. He knew he could count on one thing. Diane would keep on talking, keep changing the composite drawings, and altering her versions of the shootings. She opened her mouth so often, she was bound to put her foot in it.

It wasn't that he didn't want to see Diane behind bars. It always came down to the kids. Remembering, even two years later, his face is agonized. "How could I ever face those kids if I lost? Especially if Christie remembered later that Diane was the shooter, and she could say it. Double jeopardy would attach, and we'd be helpless--a truly bungled prosecution."

They wouldn't be able to try Diane again if she was acquitted; she could pack up her two living kids and take them anywhere she wanted. Hugi shook with chills at the thought of it. The only time he knew where Diane was for sure was when he saw her on live television. Danny Was safe; he was still under guard at Sacred Heart. But Christie was the biggest threat to Diane's story. What if Diane waited until she saw Christie in the street-and ran over her? If that happened, it would be his fault. Hugi believed that whatever happened to Christie and Danny from here on out was his responsibility.

A thousand times in the summer of 1983, Hugi went over his decision not to press charges until he was ready. A thousand times, he concluded that he had gone the only way he could. They had to wait until Christie was ready.

Or until they found the gun.

The essence of Diane's press conferences seemed to be that she thought the murder probe was pretty much over; she was striving to get her children back.