Small Sacrifices (39 page)

[State of Oregon]. I also had a will drawn up. There

was no reason for me to be here . ..

--Diane Downs, letter to the author, 1984

Diane believed she had thwarted Doug Welch and Kurt Wuest; it was an empty victory. As the summer of 1983 waned, she became steadily more depressed. She didn't have her kids back. Lew had turned out to be a total fink; it finally dawned on Diane that he was only calling her to ask questions for the cops. Her attorney confirmed her suspicions about Lew. Nobody gave a damn about her. She thought of suicide--just as she had when she'd slashed her wrist at thirteen; she even used the same phrase to explain her feelings: "No reason for me to be here."

Diane's pressures were all internal. The Lane County detective unit had virtually dissolved. The investigators weren't dogging her trail anymore.

Fred Hugi didn't feel much better. Jim Jagger had--through the defense's rights of discovery--laid his hands on every bit of information the prosecution had. Hugi wondered if he should just go ahead and argue his case in juvenile court. But if the State should lose in juvenile court, double jeopardy could attach and block any murder trial. There was a precedent case where exactly lhat had happened. Now that Jagger had discovery, he no longer

pushed for the juvenile court custody hearing despite Diane's 266 ANN RULE

pressure. In the end, that long summer, Hugi and Jagger simply stood pat. Waiting.

On August 3, Diane had surgery to remove bone chips from her arm. It wasn't major surgery, but she dreaded a loss of will under general anesthetic, and the pills afterward to dull the pain. She needed a keen mind.

A second court hearing concerning her visitation rights to the kids was held on August 4. She didn't go; she didn't think she had a chance anyway to see Christie and Danny.

She was right. Diane was again denied visits with her children. Judge Gregory Foote explained that he would ask for

psychological evaluations of both Diane and Christie before he considered further visitation requests. But he pointed out that if the police were unable to develop clear evidence against Diane, his only choice would eventually be to reunite Danny and Christie with their mother.

CSD worker Susan Staffel testified that the children seemed less afraid since their mother had been prevented from visiting them, and that doctors felt they might be able to unearth their repressed memories if and when they felt safe.

Diane was ordered to keep her health insurance, which covered her children, in force.

The next day, Jim Jagger got Diane to a psychologist.

Diane liked Polly Jamison, her therapist. Polly was a young woman too, new in practice, and Diane felt sympathy from her. Polly gave her an MMPI test. Just as they had when she was given the same test for the surrogate mother screening two years earlier, Diane's scores showed dumpings that indicated antisocial personality patterns. Diane explained that her answers would have been different before the shooting and Jamison, finding that a cogent argument, gave her a repeat test where her answers came closer to a normal profile.

Diane's mood lifted appreciably when she received a birthday card from Christie on August 7. The picture on the card was a cluster of red roses. Christie had remembered! That proved to Diane that Christie still loved her, no matter what.

Christie had been ambivalent about Diane's birthday. Recognizing her painful indecision, Evelyn Slaven helped her pick out a card. Christie, the little mother still, felt responsible for Diane, and wondered who was looking out for her, now that she was all alone. No matter what was beginning to surface in Christie's

memory, she seemed to view Diane not as her mother, but as a lost little girl who had no friends. Christie's mind rested easier after she sent the card.

Steve Downs called Diane too. His love/hate feelings for her had apparently not changed, but he wished her happy birthday. There was no card, no call--nothing at all--from Lew.

On August 13, Diane called Lew. She was ready to confront him.

"First of all," she demanded. "Are you still taping for the Sheriffs Department?"

He didn't flinch. "Are you?"

"AreyoM?"

"Uh huh."

"OK."

"And you're taping for you," he said placidly.

"You should know that I am not capable of doing something as horrible as that. It takes a person that's got a real problem to kill somebody, and to kill their own kids would be insane."

"7 think so," Lew agreed softly.

Their voices on the tapes (his-and-hers tapes now) are flat and wrung dry of emotion. If they ever loved at all, one cannot detect it any longer. Diane sounds depressed; Lew has clearly grown tired of the games contrived to make her tell him the truth.

"I'm tired of fighting." Diane's voice is heavy. "I have very little energy left. They almost made [sic] me to the point that I was so depressed that I couldn't stand it anymore, and getting a card from Christie got me going again . . . I've got to help those other people and keep fighting, 'cause that's their biggest hang-up so far--is that nobody will speak out against the cops because they don't know what to say, but this case is so ripe, so fantastic

. It's like the guy that rapes women over and over and over. If one woman will stand up and say he's the one that did it and this is what happened, it might start a trend and people will start speaking up and saying, 'Hey--yeah--he's the one that got me too.' "

She hinted that she wasn't alone in her quest. She told Lew that there was a "higher authority with much more power than the Sheriffs Department, and they're watching the Sheriffs Department and they have been for quite some time, and they

screwed up real bad."

But, in the next breath, Diane as much as spelled out to Lew 268 ANN RULE

that she was considering suicide. If he should ever receive a tape cassette from her, he must promise to listen to it. What would it be? Her confession, he suspected, rife with blame for him. He mumbled something unintelligible. He had heard it all before. Threats and promises.

Accompanied by attorneys Jim Jagger and Lauren Holland,

Diane flew to Chandler in the last week of August, 1983. They were looking for witnesses who could present a sympathetic picture of Diane. It might only be for a custody hearing; it might be for a murder trial. Until the other shoe dropped, no one could be sure.

Hearing of the trip, Hugi thought of another reason for it. If Diane should still have possession of the missing Ruger, she might arrange to plant it somewhere in Arizona. That would bolster her contention that the murder plot had originated in that state. On her own, Diane had made up what she called a "vulnerability list" for Jagger. She listed the fears, secrets, and anxieties of people who had moved in her world. She had always ferreted out Achilles' heels. She wrote out the following guidelines for her attorney:

Lew: Threaten his job and/or himself.

Karen Batten: [Diane's former co-worker who had let

Diane live with her when her trailer burned.] Relieve her guilt. Tell her no one blames her for doubting me, and talking to the cops.

Kathy: "Guilt and God." [Diane's sister had called her after the visit in Oklahoma by Dick Tracy. Kathy had told Diane, "I know you're guilty . . . but God forgives you."]

Aunt Irene: "Appeal to her friendship."

Arlys Simms: "Her husband hung himself." [Diane thought a reference to that tragedy would make an ex-neighbor vulnerable.]

Garni: He owned some property, and Diane suggested

that Jagger threaten him vaguely with the Internal Revenue Service--and accuse him of allowing someone to open mail (. addressed to her.

(Regarding several other postal co-workers in Chandler:) w*

Barb Ebeling: "Hit her sense of fair play--I've always been good to her."

Barb B.: Diane knew a man who Barb was in love with.

That would do to throw Barb B. off-balance.

Lora M.: "Prove how I'm innocent. Use guilt and pity." Russ Phillips: [Danny's biological father.] "Use Danny. Say Danny will go to Steve if I'm found guilty."

It was an organized grocery list of emotional blackmail. Jagger didn't use it. v%*

After five months in Oregon, Diane's second visit back to Chandler could hardly be called triumphant. Lew barely spoke to her when she confronted him as he came off his route. He said he'd consider talking with her and Jagger, but later he called and refused. Diane blamed Nora for that decision.

Diane was stunned by the cold shoulder she got from everyone. All of her old co-workers stonewalled Jim. She apparently had no friends in Chandler any longer. Diane spent her time sitting in a stifling hot car, waiting while Jagger and Laurie Holland worked their way through the people and places of her past. This was not how she'd visualized her return to Arizona. She and Lew were only a few miles apart, and yet he went about his life, making no effort to see her again.

Chandler was the same; but nothing else was.

Christie Downs was making tremendous progress living with the Slavens in her foster home. She still could not speak clearly, nor would she talk about the shooting. Her right arm still hung limp with paralysis. But she laughed now, and the nightmares were only sporadic. She was becoming very comfortable with Dr. Peterson.

Diane was permitted to buy clothes and shoes for her children, but she could not deliver them personally; they had to be left with Susan Staffel.

Christie started the third grade on September 6, 1983. Two days later, she was overjoyed; her little brother was finally released from the hospital after almost four months. Danny would

be living with the Slavens too. Basically, Christie and Danny had only each other--the two of them who shared the same mother and the same memories, good and bad.

Danny was in a wheelchair; barring a medical breakthrough, he always would be. His physicians' worst possible scenario had come true; Danny had no feeling or control below chest level. 270 ANN RULE

It had been love at first sight when the Slavens met Danny. They had spent hours and hours at the hospital with him. They were already Mom and Dad to him. As Diane had once said, he did have a wonderfully charismatic personality. But, in the aftermath

of the shooting, Danny's moods swung wildly. "He was either way up or way down," Evelyn Slaven remembers. As soon as he adjusted to his new environment, Danny too would begin counseling with Carl Peterson.

The Downs shooting had dropped out of the headlines. Notoriety-like celebrity--is fleeting. There were articles once a month or so each time Diane was denied visitation rights.

Diane's life had become as aimless as foam on the ocean. Her emotional equilibrium--however tenuous--had always been rooted in the male in her life. The Number One male. She may have detested her father, and she might have hated Steve after their first few years of marriage, but they had been an integral part of her existence. She still hated men, and yet wanted them as much as she detested them. From the first time she'd had sex outside her marriage, through all the men she'd had affairs with, right up to Lew Lewiston, there had always been somebody close at hand. Some man to wind herself around so that the winds of change would not blow her away entirely.

Now, there was nobody.

Lew was no longer there for her on the phone. Cord Samuelson would listen to her, albeit nervously, but he wouldn't sleep with her. Kurt Wuest really appealed to her--but a cop who was trying to arrest her seemed a bit too much of a challenge.

Despite her constant theme that it was her children who had given her stability and happiness, reality shows that Christie, Cheryl, and Danny were in and out of Diane's life--sometimes there to hold and cuddle and play games with, but more often shunted to the side, or smacked, when they were in the way. But the man--whichever man it might be--was always there.

Diane felt relentlessly miserable as the fall of 1983 approached. She was drinking heavily that autumn and thanks to her many press conferences, she was highly visible when she showed up stag at dance halls and taverns.

"We saw her at a dance at the Embers," a Springfield woman recalls. "She was alone and all fixed up. This man came in with some friends, and you could tell she hadn't known him before.

She went over and started talking to him, and they danced, and then they were necking. And then she left with him. Just like that."

Feelings among the citizens of Lane County on the Downs

case were shifting to more pronounced battle lines. Some considered Diane a beleaguered saint; others judged her far more harshly. No one seemed unaware of her, and no one seemed neutral.

"In September, I started drinking so I could be numb against the emptiness I felt ... I stopped," she would explain in a letter to the author. "But I only stopped after I found a happy, healthy way to survive the waiting game. Even though I couldn't stop the grieving, I could love and be loved while the time passed waiting for Chris and Clan to be home."

The plan that Diane had formulated would become obvious-but not for some months. Diane searched for somebody--some man to give her ballast in the storm. The dancehall pick-ups didn't last. She always ended up back at Wes Frederickson's house, and in trouble to boot for coming in late, smelling of alcohol.

She was so damned depressed. She hadn't talked to Doug or Kurt--or anybody connected with the case--since the end of July. She couldn't fight shadows. She couldn't deal with the constant waiting, postponements of custody hearings, the nothingness that crept in when she was alone. One night, Diane

suddenly remembered a special man she knew. It was quite possible that he could make her feel good again . . .

Diane had always dated attractive men, but this man was by far the handsomest. Better than Lew. Better looking, better educated than any man she'd ever known. He was perfect for the

plan that had come to her. With his assistance, Diane could be a phoenix, rising from the ashes of her ruined life.