Small Sacrifices (58 page)

"Steve?"

"When we were dating. Miraculously, it stopped on our wedding day."

"Your children?"

< Diane's face glows. "Kids are different from other people. From the time they're born, they cry for you; they need you. They don't ask for anything in return."

Jagger asks her who had the children during those bad times

their ex-neighbor, Clan Sullivan, had testified about--when the kids were barefoot in the cold, and hungry.

"Steve did. I'm glad that came out. Steve would leave them alone for two hours!"

"Who were you living with then?"

"Myself."

Steve had the children from September, 1982, until the middle of January, 1983. But, Diane insists, when she had the youngsters, they were always properly clothed, and in bed by eight.

"I was pregnant. We all went to bed by eight."

"What kind of a parent were you?"

"The first year, I was learning--the next few years, I was a bad parent. Steve and I would fight and Steve would walk out the door. Then Christie would come sit by me and I'd yell at her. Cheryl was into everything, and I was always screaming at her."

"What did you do about being a bad parent?"

"Stopped it."

"Did you realize that things Steve and your father did might have affected you?"

"Yes."

They talk about Diane's essay on child abuse. She wrote it in July of 1982 because, "It was important. People don't have a right to do things to other people--especially children." Diane lowers her eyes modestly. "--I'm not a public speaker ..." She felt better after writing the paper--it had helped her.

"Even though I wasn't the kind of mother who beat her kids with a two by four--but I wanted to say it."

Jagger has done well--showing a woman from a loveless

home, sexually molested by her own father, terrorized by her own husband, pushed around and abused until she'd freaked out and struck out at her babies. But she had caught herself in time. She even tried to stop other parents' abuse with her essay. This is a good person, but a woman whose emotions have long ago frozen inside--somewhere back behind her derisive little laugh, her irriiating

smirk.

"I can only see me from the inside," Diane tells the jury. "I don't know how other people see me. I only know how I feel." Now, after all Diane has already endured, the State has taken her surviving children away and is trying to send her to prison for something a maniacal stranger did to them all.

Diane admits she doesn't remember everything about that

night, about going to the hospital, but she remembers there was 404 ANN RULE

no one to help her. Her memory of May 19 is spotty; some things are crystalline--others obscured.

She remembers filling out the insurance forms--but she can't recall telling Judy Patterson that the gunman had shot through the window. She hadn't wanted to leave her wounded children and go back out to the scene--but "a nurse knelt and put her hand on my knee and said, 'One might not make it,' and I thought I might as well go ... everyone was telling me to go--so that insurance statement was blurted out."

"Wasn't that stupid to say?" Jagger asks.

"I say lots of stupid things. I'm practiced."

Of course she had cried at the hospital. She'd begun to cry when her mom showed up in the little lounge next to the trauma room. She remembers coming back from the scene to have her arm treated. Dick Tracy and Doug Welch were there. When she first got back, someone told her one little girl was in surgery, but that Danny would be OK.

"They didn't mention the other little girl. Doug said, 'Did you know Christie died?' I screamed at Doug--I was angry--sad because Christie wasn't the one who was doing badly ... I was afraid that if Christie was dead, then Cheryl would die too, and I'd lose both of them."

There is a definite pattern in Jagger's direct examination of Diane Downs. He does not stay with a particular line of questioning for long. Whenever Diane begins to smile, he quickly switches to questions about her childhood, or introduces pictures of her children. Jagger is using Pavlovian signals. He has to remind Diane not to laugh. He cannot tie a string to her ankle and tug on it--he uses pictures and questions to pull her back. She has taken scores of pictures of her children. Christie at eight months with the cat, Christie at three months, laughing. Fred Hugi quickly picks up on the reason for the photographs. The wash of sadness that sweeps across Diane's face is instantaneous whenever Jagger hands her a new picture to identify, like turning on a switch.

"I felt like standing up and saying, 'The State will stipulate that every time Diane is handed a photo, she will look deeply moved and concerned. Now, let's get on with the trial,' " Hugi (, says.

Jagger asks a question that would seem a given: "Did you develop a real deep love for those children?"

KS® "Yeah."

"Did you ever develop a love for any man--like Lew--to pick him over the children?"

"That's ridiculous."

More pictures are introduced: Christie trying to eat righthanded; Danny and his sisters; Christie, two years old on a farm.

"Do you miss the children now?"

"Yes--very much."

Diane details the outrages perpetrated on her injured family. Jagger tenses; if he doesn't leap in at the right moment, Diane slides away on a tangent, just as she always has with detectives. She explains that she yelled at the deputies in the ICU because of her concern for Christie's elbow. Christie had two bullet holes in her chest, a stroke in the left brain, a hole through her left hand--yet her mother's main concern is for her elbow.

"Her right elbow was really bad. She wasn't scheduled for physical therapy. When she was shot the first time, she raised up. When she was shot the second time, she fell. I was concerned that she'd snapped a tendon."

Diane goes back to the moment in the hospital when she'd had the worst news of all. But even in an hour's testimony, her story has changed. She no longer blames Doug Welch for breaking the news.

"They told me Christie had died. I flipped out. I sat there mourning for Christie and for Cheryl too. Then they said Cheryl had died. I said 'Both?' And they said, 'No, Christie is alive.' I felt like a traitor because I'd been mourning for Christie and when they said it was Cheryl who was dead, I felt like Cheryl was standing there in the room, saying, 'Didn't you love me, Mom?' " Diane suddenly begins to cry. For the first time in the long trial, she appears to be mortified. She apologizes for her tears and pulls herself back together with a smile almost at once. There are more pictures of the kids in the afternoon session: the girls together; Christie with hair in her face; Cheryl grinning at the camera. So many pictures of the children that the A through Z

designations are used up, and now the photos are lettered Exhibits AA through ZZ.

Diane smiles happily as she thumbs through and identifies photos.

"You're smiling," Jagger reminds her.

"It makes me feel good to look at them. Those were the good days."

408 ANN RULE

"Did you have any guns--"

"I brought two guns to Oregon--the .22 rifle and the .38

revolver. The .38 had cream color with brown carving on the handle . . . We took Danny's kite to the beach . . . the .38 was in the trunk in clear view. They [the children] were in and out of the trunk all day. The .22 rifle was in the bedroom closet. It probably had no bullets in it."

Diane agrees absolutely with Jim Pex that a tape will not play with the keys out. Christie must have only thought she heard j "Hungry Like the Wolf during the shooting. "It's impossible.

When the keys are out of the ignition, the tape player's off." Jagger asks Diane if she is aware that she "unnerved" some of the spectators in the courtroom by her reaction to the song. She smiles. "That tape has no bad connotations. That tape was Cheryl's favorite tape. It can't make me feel bad--I'm sorry." Of course she realizes that she grinned and tapped her foot and sang along. "I was just being me." 1

But when she speaks of telling Christie that Cheryl was dead, Diane begins to cry again. She blushes. Talking about illicit sex does not faze her; expressions of grief do. She hurries along with her story: "That's when we decided the unicorn was Cheryl. Unicorns are magic. They never go away . . . The unicorn says

'Christie, Cheryl, Danny, I love you. Mom' . . . That was for the kids. They had a new free lease on life in Oregon. It was a new beginning."

Why--on the night of May 19--had she voiced her regret

about buying the unicorn to Deputy Rutherford?

"I said, 'I shouldn't have bought the unicorn, and maybe none of this would have happened. I meant that all the freedom, the unity--Maybe I was getting too arrogant, and God was slapping me in the face. The names engraved for all eternity was

too arrogant--for the Baptists, God's first. I put my children first."

She has touched on the essence of this endless trial. If Diane truly put her children above all other considerations, then she had had no reason to shoot them. If, as her letters and tapes sug-* gested, her obsession with Lew was paramount, the State's case

looked good.

It would take a modem day Medea--a monstrous excuse for

a mother--not only to shoot the three children of her own womb,

but to continue to play the martyred mother, to portray herself as a long-suffering victim and not a killer.

Or it would take someone who had learned to blank out the ugly segments of her past, and believe that they had never happened.

Another weekend interrupts the flow of the trial. Will Diane be back? Or has she been spirited away to give birth?

She is not here. The bailiff looks solemn. That must be it; the strain of testifying has brought labor on early. The gallery is restive, disappointed.

"I didn't wait in that line to see nothing!" someone complains bitterly.

Suddenly Diane appears, rubbing her wrists as if her handcuffs were too tight. She is still with us, but she looks ghastly. Very tired. Very sad. Always before, she has walked into the courtroom confidently. She only shrugs now as the bailiff instructs her to go directly to the witness stand.

The vibrant hue of her cherry-red dress accentuates her

pallor. Diane has learned that the child in utero is not hers, but the State's. "The Lane County juvenile court judge has ordered them to take my baby--the one who's not even born yet. I won't even get to see it. I'm angry and depressed--but I'm gonna fight."

From now on, Diane will cradle her belly more often. They cannot rip it from her womb. It is as if she has vowed to stay pregnant. If she does not deliver the baby, they cannot take it away.

Jim Jagger moves to begin again with questions. Diane sighs and picks up her life at age twenty-two: the abortion of Steve's baby, his vasectomy, her realization at the Right-to-Life booth, her rape by her boss, her seduction of Danny's father, her triumphant pregnancy with the baby that became Danny, her surrogate pregnancy ...

From time to time, a juror blinks and shakes her head.

* * *

Jagger returns to the aftermath of the shooting. Yes, Diane may have asked about going to work the day after the shooting. She always showed up for work.

"I don't know ... it was a crazy night."

"That's a light phrase," Jagger reminds her. "Some people might not understand ..."

"No . . ." she rephrases rapidly. "It was a nightmare. I'm in a dream I can't wake up from."

Jagger asks her about her feelings that night--in the hospital.

"Scared--stripped of all my power. I've always been able to control things--so my kids were happy, healthy, well-fed. They weren't listening to me. They [sic] threw Danny over [his] shoulder. I felt invisible. They kept throwing me out of the room . . . all the cops, asking questions . . .

"They kept asking me how tall he was, and what he looked like. If they'd just gone out there with a tape measure and caught him, then they would've known how tall he was."

Diane accuses the hospital of crippling Danny. A nurse deliberately picked him up, causing the paralysis. "This might not be the time for revenge--but I hope she burns.

"I believe in God," Diane explains somberly. "And He'll give you anything you ask him. Danny will walk. I know he will." Diane's recall of the night in the ER room is completely at odds with the memories of the medical staff.

"They kept comin' up with real whoppers. They threw me out six times. I got up off the table and they pushed me down. I never saw Cheryl until she was in her coffin. I still haven't really accepted it--like they're all in foster homes, or maybe they're all dead."

She didn't have the .22 pistol--she'd given it back to Steve. She wasn't even sure how to load or unload that anyway. "If I never hear about another .22 handgun again as long as I live, I'll be in heaven!"

"How do you feel about talking about it today?" Jagger asks quickly.

"Oh ... I want to talk about it. I want to get it cleared up." All she remembers of the shooter and the gun he held is an impression that the man was a "leftie" and that the gun was shiny. ™"How do you feel about talking about the attack?" 412 ANN RULE

"Sadness predominates. But I've told the story so many times now, much of the pain is gone."

Diane talks—on and on and on—inserting a stone in the

mosaic of her life—and the crime—here, and a bit of colored glass there, identifying more pictures of her children.

The courtroom is filled with women. Most of the jurors are female. Diane tells her story to other women who have given birth and made do with too little money while wrestling with diapers, colic, chicken pox, and cleaning up vomit. Most have had lessthan-perfect husbands. Most have suffered disappointments in

love and in life. You can read it on their faces, a silent judgment. If that had been me . . .

The women of the jury seldom take their eyes off Diane.

Finally, Diane and her attorney have come to the summer of 1982. Diane talks about Lew, and her confidences are so intimate that she might well be talking to a girlfriend.