Small Sacrifices (35 page)

obvious question: "Who do you think shot the children?" Kathy admitted that her first reaction to the news of the shooting was, "Diane did it." She still believed that.

". .. Pm glad you called. I need somebody to talk to. I was thinking about you real bad last night . . .v

—Diane Downs, Lew's first call

Lew placed his first phone call to Diane on July 2, 1983. Diane was glad to hear from him, but wary. She still wanted him; she no longer trusted any man—even Lew.

In four days, it would be a year since they had first made love.

Only one year.

Her surrogate baby Jennifer had been only two months old when she began with Lew. In the year since, Diane had sold the Palomino Street house to Steve, bought the mobile home, ended her affair with Jack Lenta, reconciled with Steve, engaged in a violent physical fight with Steve, attempted to commit suicide, returned to Louisville for insemination (twice), arranged to have her trailer burned, started college, learned to fly, begun her own) surrogate business . . . and then moved to Oregon and to all that had taken place there.

The average woman would have long since crumbled, but by July, 1983, Diane Downs had completed an almost mystic process of renewal. She was as resilient as a robot whose damaged parts had been replaced. Diane was ready to go back to carrying the

, mail. She was in wonderful physical condition, despite the cast on her arm. Her voice on Lew's first tape is girlish and cheerful, as if she had spoken to her lost lover only a day before.

Lew pretended to be annoyed by the police. They were

bothering him, asking him to take a lie detector test.

"Don't do it," Diane counseled.

"Well, I got nothing to hide."

No, she told him. It was a matter of principle. He must not fall for the cops' "bluff."

Lew's voice was laconic, lumbering, counterpointed by Diane's breathy, cheerleader's voice.

"How's everything?" she asked.

"Nothing's changed."

"That's good. Things have changed a lot for me."

"Yes, I can imagine so."

"I have a steel plate in my arm. The scar won't be very bad

. . . it's going away already. I get to go back to work next week." Diane told Lew she was planning another trip to Arizona. That didn't surprise him. He expected to see her every time he turned a corner.

"You had a .22, Diane. I know that."

There. He'd tossed it out. He'd seen the .22 Ruger, and she knew it.

Her voice stayed cheerful, but it took on an edge, as if Lew was a very slow pupil who had to be drilled on his facts.

"Yes, I did--and Steve got it back."

"Steve got it back?"

"Yes he does."

"OK" (doubtfully).

"When--think--I want you to think about this--because I know they are going to ask you," she prompted. "Do you remember when you saw that .22?"

"I saw that .22 at your trailer and I saw it before you left for Oregon."

"Two weeks before I left. Correct?"

"Oh, hell, Diane--You were packing the day before you left. You had it in the back of the car."

"No, Lew--think about it. I had a microwave and I had a TV

and I had a whole bunch of stuff. The day that you say you saw the .22,1 opened my trunk and my trunk was empty. Was it not?"

"Except for the .38 and the .22."

She would not budge; Lew's memory had to be flawed. Diane apologized to Lew for the inconvenience of having police on his doorstep.

"Well, it's just the breaks," Lew muttered.

236 ANN RULE

"I know--but it's not fun--it's--I don't know--it's unusual. Everybody knows me--wherever I go--"

"Well, I imagine so. Keep your ass off TV."

"I have to go on TV. I have to tell them the truth because the cops won't listen."

Diane warned him once more about taking a polygraph: "Lew, would you listen to me and think rationally. If you were at work the day before and the day after this, there is no way in hell that you could have gotten up here and done that."

"OK. So there's no reason why I shouldn't take the liedetector test." 3

"... All right--I miss you." *

"Thank you for returning the call."

"No problem."

"All right. Bye Bye." ; "Take

care of yourself--"

"Yup. Bye bye."

"I love you ..."

"Bye."

Lew removed the tape, labeled it, and slipped it into an envelope for the Lane County investigators. She was just the same as she'd always been. Words. Words and words. She'd hardly mentioned the kids. Only her arm and her money, and for him to keep his mouth shut. He wondered what she was afraid he might say. He poured himself a shot of Jim Beam to get the bad taste out of his mouth. It was hard to remember now that he had ever loved her.

Diane felt secure with the support of the public. She couldn't even walk into a store without several people recognizing her, as if she was a movie star. Once when Diane collapsed in tears, a perfect stranger--a woman--came along the street and just held her hand and cried with her.

That seemed to Diane to be the difference between human

beings and cops. She had a word for cops and social workers. Evil. t' The more Lew called, the more Diane appeared to open up to him. Often Lew had to tell her to stop and take a breath.

"Say, you did it," Lew prodded. "You get rid of the kids, you get rid of Nora, and then you can have me. Right?"

"No. That wouldn't help. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Because you don't like trouble."

"Well, I certainly don't. That's the truth."

"You hate kinks and I know that, and this has got to be one of the kinkiest things that's ever happened. All I'm trying to do is protect you."

Theirs was, perhaps, the strangest dialogue between ex-lovers ever to buzz along telephone lines. Diane patiently explaining to Lew that she loved him, but not enough to kill for. Lew questioning her, picking apart her obscure explanations about suspects, intrigues, plots against her.

"Jesus," he breathed. "You have been watching too many cops and robbers movies."

"Oh, Lew," she cried. "I'm in a cops and robbers movie. . ."

"I can't be implicated, Diane," he reminded her.

"Oh Lew, you can. I took a lie detector today."

"You took it?"

"Yes, I did. Don't tell anybody."

"What's the big deal?"

"Because the lie detector turned out the way they wanted it to. They didn't give me the test. It was a private test, taken on the side. Don't tell anybody. They asked me, 'Are you going to tell, the truth?' I said, 'Yes.' It said I was telling the truth. They asked

if a white male stranger was holding the gun that shot my kids, I said yes. It said I was telling the truth. They asked, 'Were you holding the gun that shot your kids?' I said no. It said I was lying. It can't go both ways. Either he's holding the gun or I'm holding the gun. See what I mean?"

Diane went to great pains to explain police strategy. They could not be trusted. "Why do you think the press is on my side?

Because the judicial system here is rotten. It's fucked up. It's aWarped. They will sacrifice anybody to keep up appearances. They haven't lost a murder case here in ten years. Lew, they

fucked up this one. They didn't look for the guy and he's probably fucking out of this state by now, and now they have to pin it on somebody or they've lost a murder case, a big one, a very well publicized one."

She was deluded about the media. The press simply knew a good story when they saw it, and Diane could always be counted on for an interesting quote.

240 ANN RULE

Christie's memory--when she would let herself into it--was excellent. But she needed a safe, therapeutic environment where she could work through her trauma, where she might one day feel safe enough to relate what had happened after they left Heather's house on May 19. Her terror had to be defused gradually. Carl Peterson found Christie cautious and guarded. He didn't hurry her; he tried to find a mirror in her mind that would reflect what she was trying to keep hidden. Peterson never doubted that Christie had a memory. "The memory was put away--memories put into a vault until it was safe enough for them to come out. When they come out, it is like a flood, basically--a flood of memories."

Christie's emotional well-being was paramount. The best of all possible resolutions would be for Christie to remember that someone other than her mother had been the shooter. Peterson was not concerned with the prosecution's case nearly as much as he was dedicated to saving the child.

Christie loved her mother; that was evident. That didn't necessarily mean that her mother hadn't shot her. When Peterson asked Christie to write a list of the people she loved most, Diane's name topped the list. And yet, Christie could not talk to him aloud about her mother. There was a gap that shut Diane completely out of Christie's verbal communication to Peterson.

The green fairy hills in the Willamette Valley were gradually shading to umber. The summer of 1983 was much different from what Diane had expected. She shouldered her mailsack and walked her nine-mile route in Cottage Grove. The heat in Oregon was a pale imitation of what she was used to, but it reminded her of better days. And she felt healthier for the exercise. Back in Wes and Willadene's house, there was nothing for her to do but think. Her mother did all the cleaning, cooking, and laundry. Diane, as

always, needed action.

The first day back after her long lay-off, Diane came home with blisters and aching muscles. She called Lew to tell him how bad she hurt. He'd never been sympathetic with her; he seemed even colder now.

At least work helped to keep her mind off waiting. If Diane had one fatal weakness, it was an inability to wait. No matter how many warnings she got from Jim Jagger, Diane could not wait for the detectives and the prosecutor's office to make the moves. If she didn't hear from them, she contacted them--with new clues

about the stranger with the gun, with new memories that constantly superseded the old. Diane knew she was smarter than the

cops, so she saw no danger in talking with them.

Not much was happening on the case by July. Dolores Holland, Heather Plourd's neighbor, finally remembered the name of a man she thought resembled the composite sketch of the shooter. She mentioned it to Heather, and was soon visited by Wes, Diane, and Diane's brother Paul. Mrs. Holland told them that the composite looked a little like her daughter's friend--a young man of Indian descent: Samasan Timchuck. She showed Wes and Paul an old snapshot of him.

The next day, Paul Frederickson drew a new sketch and took it--not to the detectives, but to the Eugene Register-Guard. The Register-Guard published it: "Downs Revises Assailant Sketch."

Diane suddenly remembered that the shaggy-haired stranger was thinner in the face and parted his hair differently than the subject in the first composite. In fact, the second sketch looked amazingly like the picture of Sam Timchuck.

Roy Pond and Kurt Wuest ran Sam Timchuck's name on the

computers without success. They sent out teletypes requesting information on Timchuck and got no response. If Timchuck had been along the Little Mohawk that night, no one saw him. Indeed, no one had seen him for months.

Kurt Wuest shook his head when he saw the second sketch.'

The first composite showed a man with a couple of double chins-the kind of guy you would expect to have a beer belly. The new sketch portrayed a cadaverously thin man whose haunted eyes stared back from a gaunt face. Quite a difference.

"Do you think she could identify the guy if she saw him?" Wuest asked Diane's brother.

Paul shook his head. "The guy could walk right past her and she wouldn't know him. She just doesn't know if she can ID him or not."

"Why bother putting that second sketch together then?" Wuest asked.

"We were testing you," Paul Fredrickson grinned slyly. "Just to see how long it would take you to contact us."

Wes Frederickson monitored Kurt Wuest and Doug Welch

continually. It was Wes Frederickson's belief that Diane was being railroaded by the Lane County sheriffs office.

Frederickson reminded Wuest and Welch often that he was a very influential person with access to all types of information. He 242 ANN RULE

told them he knew Christie was at the Slavens' home. He had not told Diane where she was. When Fred Hugi heard this, he felt stark dread. If Wes knew where Christie was, it surely would be only a matter of time until Diane found out too. During the day Hugi knew Diane was in Cottage Grove delivering mail, and he relaxed a little. But not much. There was no way he could know where she was all the time or what she was doing--or what she might be planning to do. If the DA or the sheriff had had any manpower left, Hugi would have put a tail on Diane. But there was no one.

"That whole summer was cat and mouse," Hugi recalls. But it was sometimes a question of who was the cat--and who was the mouse. One afternoon, Hugi spotted Diane tearing out of the courthouse in a rage. Obviously, it wasn't one of her on-camera days. She was bra-less in a cut-off T-shirt; Hugi saw no trace of her pious television image. He was curious. Was there someone she would run to see when she was this angry? He stayed just far enough behind to keep out of sight as he followed her to her car, then he quickly slid behind the wheel of his.

"She didn't even know I was behind her," Hugi remembers.

"She went up 1-105 at seventy miles an hour, cutting in and out between cars. I kept up with her--long enough to see she wasn't going anyplace special--she just liked to go fast; there was a wild side to her."

Mad or not, Diane always drove that way. She was stopped twice in one day in Cottage Grove for speeding by a state trooper. When Hugi asked the state cop why he'd only given her one ticket, the cop shrugged and said, "It would look like we were really piling it on her."

Diane was back to driving her old Ford Fiesta; the red Nissan was still in the Lane County shops, held as evidence.