Speaker 1: I mean it was a huge story. It made, you know,
Speaker 1: national news when Diane Downs drives to the Springfield hospital
Speaker 1: with those kids, and I think it shocked everybody just
Speaker 1: because somewhere deep in their gut, it's like a mom
Speaker 1: and kids that just that doesn't make sense. And the
Speaker 1: story of the shaggy haired stranger didn't make sense either
Speaker 1: at first. But everybody was willing to go along with
Speaker 1: that for quite a while. And I think what really
Speaker 1: sort of snapped things was the reenactment and having Diane
Speaker 1: with the car and having the police ask her various questions,
Speaker 1: and to reenact that moment, I think began the real
Speaker 1: questions in that story.
Speaker 2: The reenactment Eric Mason is referring to is a video
Speaker 2: shop by Springfield Orgon Police. In it, they asked Diane
Speaker 2: to walk them through the events of that night to
Speaker 2: try and get a better understanding of what happened.
Speaker 3: We'll get to that in a bit.
Speaker 2: But first we have to ask who exactly is Diane Downs.
Speaker 2: How does a twenty seven year old mail carrier and
Speaker 2: mother of three wind up at a Springfield organ hospital
Speaker 2: on a random weeknight having apparently shot her children and herself.
Speaker 2: The story starts in Arizona. Her brother James, describes her
Speaker 2: family life.
Speaker 3: Describe your dad for me, help me understand your household.
Speaker 4: Sure, I was thinking about this last night. The year
Speaker 4: is nineteen sixty, right. They got married in the fifties,
Speaker 4: and in the fifties and the sixties. It was before
Speaker 4: the bra burnings. You know, there was a patriarch, and
Speaker 4: there was a matriarch, and there was a mom, and
Speaker 4: there was a dad. The dads did this, and the
Speaker 4: moms did this. The dads provided the moms around the house. Right.
Speaker 4: One of the questions I had, well, what happens when
Speaker 4: there was conflict in your house? Well, there wasn't conflict
Speaker 4: in my house because that was my dad's job to
Speaker 4: take care of the conflict that there ever was conflict,
Speaker 4: and his job was to resolve the conflict. And by
Speaker 4: doing that, there was no conflict in the house because
Speaker 4: he took it all. He took it all. It's truly
Speaker 4: a patriarch kind of house.
Speaker 2: Diane's childhood was, by most accounts, pretty normal, according to
Speaker 2: her brother, although Diane herself claims that she was sexually
Speaker 2: abused by her father. She spent part of her childhood
Speaker 2: in a Phoenix suppurb before she and her family moved
Speaker 2: to a farm. So your mother always conferred to your
Speaker 2: father on decisions.
Speaker 4: Always that was her job.
Speaker 3: How big was your house?
Speaker 4: But there was five? Yeah, I had a really fantastic
Speaker 4: child that my sister had a fantastic child. And I
Speaker 4: remember growing up on Charter Oak Road, and I remember
Speaker 4: we had a block fence in our backyard and over
Speaker 4: in the right hand corner, Diane had a pigeons. You know,
Speaker 4: I thought those were the coolest thing. Pigeons, you know
Speaker 4: what I mean, there were homing pigeons. Yeah, you put
Speaker 4: little bands on their their little foot and they fly
Speaker 4: off and then they come back. You know, I was
Speaker 4: whatting in third grade, right, So I don't remember a
Speaker 4: whole lot and a lot, a whole lot about homing
Speaker 4: pigeons at the time. Yeah, Diane was one of the
Speaker 4: I don't want to say main driving factor, but I'll
Speaker 4: use the words to basically leave Phoenix and move to
Speaker 4: the farm where she inevitably changed her life forever by
Speaker 4: meeting Steve. You know, we moved from Phoenix to the farm,
Speaker 4: and out on the farm, it was a great time. Man.
Speaker 4: Diane had a horse and Kathy had a horse, and
Speaker 4: John had a steer, and I raised pigs. I raised
Speaker 4: pigs with my grandpa. As a matter of.
Speaker 2: Fact, Diane started dating Steve when she was in high school.
Speaker 2: Early on, she tried to establish a sense of standards
Speaker 2: with who she dated, but with Steve it didn't last.
Speaker 4: I remember that I was in the sixth grade and
Speaker 4: she was a junior in high school and Steve had
Speaker 4: dropped out. But it's part of dating Diane or a
Speaker 4: part of being with Diane. One of the things that
Speaker 4: was requested was that you got to check back into school,
Speaker 4: and so he did start going to high school and
Speaker 4: subsequently got kicked out because she was talking to somebody
Speaker 4: and he ended up beating the guy up. I actually
Speaker 4: admired Steve growing in. I looked up to him, as
Speaker 4: you know, he was a male figure, you know, and
Speaker 4: I put him to the Lord Mayo. You know, he
Speaker 4: was a manly man. You know, he took no guph
Speaker 4: And this something Diane says, you know, basically, you know, whatever,
Speaker 4: if there was another guy that was bugging her, he
Speaker 4: would beat him up, and she felt safe and she
Speaker 4: felt protected until there was nobody else to beat up.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, Steve's propensity for expressing his anger stopped with people
Speaker 2: who were bothering Diane, and he began to physically abuse
Speaker 2: Diane as well.
Speaker 5: Apparently those two fought. They would physically fight really often,
Speaker 5: I mean punching to the face kind of fighting.
Speaker 2: Diane briefly joined the military, possibly to escape her home life.
Speaker 4: Diane joined the Air Force, probably to get away. But
Speaker 4: Diane joined the Air Force and flag style, and she
Speaker 4: was away for a little while, and Steve was there
Speaker 4: taking care of Christy.
Speaker 3: What year was this about.
Speaker 4: I was a freshman, so nineteen seventy four. Then Diane said,
Speaker 4: you know, I can't stay away from the kids, and
Speaker 4: so she got an honorable discharger whatever happens with the
Speaker 4: Air Force, and she came back. When Diane went to
Speaker 4: the Air Force, Steve and I were playing pool and
Speaker 4: there was a lady there, and he says, I bet
Speaker 4: you I can get her to go to bed with
Speaker 4: me as a conquest. And it's like, I'm a freshman
Speaker 4: in high school, you know. It's like.
Speaker 3: His wife's brother, right.
Speaker 4: Right, and she's in the Air Force and she's not there.
Speaker 4: And whether he did or whether he didn't, I don't know.
Speaker 4: But I just know what he said to me. They fought.
Speaker 4: They fought a lot, and one time when I was there,
Speaker 4: they were fighting and he was on her back, beating
Speaker 4: on her back. I remember it. He didn't hit her
Speaker 4: in the face. He was sitting on her. I think
Speaker 4: he was even sitting on her head, holding her down
Speaker 4: like that and beating her on the back. It was
Speaker 4: just it was pretty intense.
Speaker 2: After her son, Danny's birth, Diane and Steve divorced. Steve
Speaker 2: believed he couldn't be Danny's father since he claimed to
Speaker 2: have had a vasectomy. Despite their divorce, Diane continued to
Speaker 2: be on the receiving end of his physical abuse.
Speaker 4: According to James, later on she got tired of it
Speaker 4: and she started fighting back, and so she would engage him,
Speaker 4: but obviously, you know, she lost, so he shoved her
Speaker 4: onto the bed, and at that point Cheryl came in.
Speaker 4: So these took place in front of the kids at times,
Speaker 4: and it was never Diane starting the first engaging. It
Speaker 4: was always her defending herself from him. And so she said,
Speaker 4: you know, get Cheryl out of the room. And by
Speaker 4: that time, Steve was sitting on Diana, punching her in
Speaker 4: the face and blood was everywhere. Diane shouted to take
Speaker 4: the kids and run, So we dragged Cheryl away and
Speaker 4: got Christy and Danny and they fled.
Speaker 2: It seemed inescapable.
Speaker 4: Called the police, and by the time the Maricopa County
Speaker 4: Sheriff Deputy Sean Carnahan, Steve was gone. And when he
Speaker 4: walked into Diane's living room he saw my bloody sister
Speaker 4: sitting in the chair, his shoulders dropped, the bruises, her
Speaker 4: broken nose, eyes, dark neck, ringing red. The deputy said, Diane,
Speaker 4: my god, what happened to you? What do you think?
Speaker 4: She said, It's like, he says, you've two been doing
Speaker 4: this for six years now. He says, when will it stop?
Speaker 4: And she just said, I don't know. You know, she said,
Speaker 4: I divorced him a year ago. I thought it would stop.
Speaker 4: Then I guess was wrong.
Speaker 2: Eventually Diane was pushed to her breaking point.
Speaker 5: Diane shot a bullet through the floor of her trailer
Speaker 5: when he was there one night.
Speaker 4: The next Tuesday, judge signed a restraining order to keep
Speaker 4: Steve away from Diane's home. To be sure that was
Speaker 4: the first or the last beating he inflicted on my sister.
Speaker 4: Ten days later, he chased her down into the bathroom.
Speaker 4: The restraining order forbidding him access to her home was
Speaker 4: only a week old. She still wore the bruises from
Speaker 4: the last attack. He didn't know she'd grabbed a gun
Speaker 4: to defend herself.
Speaker 2: The gun that Diane used to shoot through the floor
Speaker 2: would later be the subject of a search by police
Speaker 2: as a potential murder weapon. We'll come back to that
Speaker 2: in another episode. Not long after the incident where Diane
Speaker 2: fired or shot into the floor, her mobile home caught
Speaker 2: on fire.
Speaker 5: When she flew to I think it was Kentucky. She
Speaker 5: wanted to be a circuit mom. She had done that once.
Speaker 5: She was trying to do it again on one of
Speaker 5: these trips. The day or the maybe the evening of
Speaker 5: the day that she left, her trailer caught on fire,
Speaker 5: and you know, she filed an insurance claim. They paid out,
Speaker 5: and she later when things frayed between her and Steve,
Speaker 5: turned him in for that and he was arrested and
Speaker 5: charged with the insurance fraud and had to pay some
Speaker 5: money back.
Speaker 4: Everything she owned was gone. She and her children were homeless.
Speaker 3: And this was a brand new mobile It.
Speaker 4: Was a brand new mobile home. Yeah, it was four
Speaker 4: months old. They used to Stephen Diane worked at mobile
Speaker 4: home manufacturing plans.
Speaker 3: Oh I didn't know this, Okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, growing up I called growing up twenties. Right, They
Speaker 4: worked together in manufacturing plans. You know that way is Steve,
Speaker 4: you could keep better tracks of her if he's working
Speaker 4: with her. I remember that my sister came over to visit,
Speaker 4: and when she was over to visit, I had a
Speaker 4: guitar and she borrowed my guitar and she took it
Speaker 4: back with her. And what I remember about the mobile
Speaker 4: home burning is the fact that my guitar was in
Speaker 4: the mobile home when it burned, and I never got
Speaker 4: my guitar back. They actually labeled an electrical fire.
Speaker 3: That's what the court said.
Speaker 4: The labeled an electrical fire, but it came out that
Speaker 4: that's not what it was. That came out in court,
Speaker 4: but that's not what it was.
Speaker 3: How much an insurance pay out for for the mobile home.
Speaker 4: Says seven thousand dollars right there.
Speaker 3: And back in nineteen eighty three. That was a chunk
Speaker 3: of money.
Speaker 4: It was seven thousand dollars to repair the mobile.
Speaker 3: Home, which wasn't used to repair the mobile that's correct.
Speaker 3: Where did the seven thousand Steve.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Steve, and again he crossed the line. So but
Speaker 4: go moving forward. Do you wonder why Steve might have
Speaker 4: testified that against my sister, Well, here's the reasons. You know,
Speaker 4: Steve confessed to the crime of arson, rendering her homeless.
Speaker 4: I'm putting her at his mercy. But Steve actually said
Speaker 4: that they conspired together to burn her home for the
Speaker 4: insurance money.
Speaker 2: Diane's living situation put Steve back into a position of
Speaker 2: power over her. She willingly gave Steve custody of their
Speaker 2: children to prevent them from being homeless. According to James,
Speaker 2: Steve leveraged this into a means of control, but.
Speaker 4: Everything she owned was gone. She and her kids were homeless.
Speaker 4: This is after the restraining order and Steve says, hey,
Speaker 4: come live with me. Diane refused, but had to let
Speaker 4: her children move in with him because she didn't want
Speaker 4: him to live in the car. Right, So she kept
Speaker 4: paying on the mortgage for the mobile home, and she
Speaker 4: went to a person's named Karen's house and offered her
Speaker 4: a spare room until the inner November of nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 4: But the kids weren't welcome because you know, it's just
Speaker 4: a bedroom and a.
Speaker 2: House, and Karen was her coworker at the post office.
Speaker 4: I believe so yes. Diane rented a two bedroom apartment
Speaker 4: in December. Steve refused to let her take her children
Speaker 4: until after Christmas. Diane had to go to his house
Speaker 4: to your children, and Steve wasn't letting go of that
Speaker 4: control that he had of her. Every time she went
Speaker 4: to their house, they fought. He wanted to remarry, she didn't,
Speaker 4: and this was in December of nineteen eighty two. The
Speaker 4: shooting happened in May of nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: Diane eventually moved back into the mobile home along with
Speaker 2: her children.
Speaker 4: And Janeyorry of nineteen eighty five, Strapped for cash, my
Speaker 4: sister moved back into her burned out mobile home and
Speaker 4: stopped seeing her children at Steve's, so she brought the
Speaker 4: kids back to the home. Steve was calling my sister
Speaker 4: a worthless mother who didn't take care of her kids
Speaker 4: to go see them. He said he was sick of
Speaker 4: her having fun while he was burdened with raising the kids.
Speaker 4: So basically, the kids are still at his house, okay,
Speaker 4: and she's living there, and he's really unhappy about that
Speaker 4: because Basically, she's probably out having a good time and
Speaker 4: he's having to take care of the kids.
Speaker 2: Diane had been living for years under the constraints of
Speaker 2: an abusive relationship. Although she had been unfaithful along with Steve,
Speaker 2: she was now able to see whoever she pleased without
Speaker 2: immediate fear of reprisal. And Diane seemed to love male attention.
Speaker 6: Over the course of time. You watch this plate out
Speaker 6: all the time, and you when you see someone like Diane,
Speaker 6: when you see so one trying desperately to get attention
Speaker 6: and to move a certain way and to shake her
Speaker 6: body a certain way, you think to yourself, Wow, there's
Speaker 6: a person looking for attention, and do I want to
Speaker 6: get inside the kill radius of that person? And I
Speaker 6: could get blown up? It could blow me up, And
Speaker 6: so a little bell goes off. I think in your
Speaker 6: head when you're the person who's the target of a
Speaker 6: Diane Downs, thinking to yourself, do I want to be
Speaker 6: in the kill radius? Do I want a risk being
Speaker 6: blown up? And the answer for most men is no.
Speaker 6: But for these guys who all of a sudden attached
Speaker 6: to Diane Downs, I think they understood it was a quick,
Speaker 6: easy gratifying way to spend the night. I think that's
Speaker 6: kind of what got them going. The problem is, I
Speaker 6: think once they saw what kind of a mentally damaged
Speaker 6: person that she was, they would run. I think I
Speaker 6: think that happened over and over and over again.
Speaker 2: Diane took a job with the Postal Service, where she
Speaker 2: met Nick Knickerbocker. This was the relationship that many would
Speaker 2: speculate to be the motivation behind the attempted murder of
Speaker 2: her children.
Speaker 4: My says, sir, was she was a she worked in
Speaker 4: the post office. She was a rural route carrier. I
Speaker 4: remember that was one of their fights in Arizona. I
Speaker 4: remember seeing this because Diane was a rural rock carrier,
Speaker 4: and as a rural rock carrier, she would continually break
Speaker 4: the mirror off of the vehicle because you drive from
Speaker 4: the right hand side, and she would continually hit the
Speaker 4: mailboxes with the mirror and knocked it off. And Steve
Speaker 4: would get so mad about that.
Speaker 3: Why would he get mad, Well, because she broke.
Speaker 4: The mirror off the car continually.
Speaker 3: Oh, I was thinking she was driving a rule routes.
Speaker 4: On a road route, you you basically sub let your
Speaker 4: own vehicle, Okay, yeah, and so yeah, driving out in
Speaker 4: the country delivering mail basically, and she would hit the
Speaker 4: mailboxes with the mirror. It wasn't a physical fight, but
Speaker 4: it was it was like crazy. You know. He wasn't
Speaker 4: very happy, and he made it known that she wasn't
Speaker 4: that he wasn't happy. But that's what she did. In Oregon,
Speaker 4: she transferred from Chandler where she met Nick, and you know,
Speaker 4: and she moved up to Oregon, and my dad lived
Speaker 4: in Oregon, and my dad was a postmaster in Springfield, Oregon.
Speaker 4: And so she came up here to start her new
Speaker 4: family with, you know, a start of new life. And
Speaker 4: she was working in the post office, so she was
Speaker 4: she was truly on her way, man, she was on
Speaker 4: her way to getting her life. But this happened to her.
Speaker 4: And and it's really, you know, sort of sad because
Speaker 4: I mean the reason, you know, talking about the post office,
Speaker 4: and you know, it makes me think of Nick Knickerbocker,
Speaker 4: the guy she met at the post office, the guy
Speaker 4: that you know, they say that everything got done for
Speaker 4: if she did this fine the motive, yes, thank you
Speaker 4: very much.
Speaker 5: He was a letter carrier also, so they worked eight
Speaker 5: hour shifts beside each other, would spent at least two
Speaker 5: hours after that, oftentimes having sex at one location or another.
Speaker 5: So they did paint a picture that when they were
Speaker 5: in Arizona. Because he was a married guy and for
Speaker 5: the longest time didn't tell his wife about Diane, she
Speaker 5: eventually found out, and he still sort of carried on
Speaker 5: and was not very forthcoming.
Speaker 2: Diane was apparently obsessed with Nick to the point where
Speaker 2: she would have done anything for him. There were unsent
Speaker 2: letters and journals found in her apartment where she declared
Speaker 2: her feelings.
Speaker 1: Seems to me that he was fairly nice looking, strong jaw,
Speaker 1: kind of wiry hair, and this person that seemingly Diane
Speaker 1: down his head over heels about, and that she when
Speaker 1: any of the male partners sex partners said to her, listen,
Speaker 1: you're a really wonderful sexual partner, but I don't really.
Speaker 1: I don't think I want to raise kids that would
Speaker 1: absolutely crash her world.
Speaker 7: And so I think with respect to Robert, the question
Speaker 7: of whether or not he could deal with kids, you know,
Speaker 7: was certainly a part of the narrative.
Speaker 2: After Nick's rejection, in years of abuse from Steve, Diane
Speaker 2: decided to leave Arizona. Her father was a postmaster in Oregon,
Speaker 2: so she moved and was able to get a letter
Speaker 2: carrier job in Springfield.
Speaker 4: When you're an abusive relationship, it's the same question that
Speaker 4: everybody asks everybody that's in that kind of relationship, how
Speaker 4: long are you going to let this happen before you
Speaker 4: change something? But when you then she did changed something,
Speaker 4: and that's when she moved to Oregon. She was changing
Speaker 4: her life. She'd been in order for six weeks when
Speaker 4: she was attacked. She left Steve in Arizona. She left
Speaker 4: her boyfriends. And I don't say Nick I said she
Speaker 4: left her boyfriends in Arizona. I mean, I can't say
Speaker 4: that she didn't have a thing for Nick. And I
Speaker 4: can't say that Nick didn't have a thing for her,
Speaker 4: because obviously they did. But she left him there because
Speaker 4: really he was a married man, you know, and you're
Speaker 4: not going to get together with a married man because
Speaker 4: the married man is not going to leave his wife.
Speaker 4: That's just what married men do.
Speaker 2: And then in nineteen eighty three, the shooting occurs. From
Speaker 2: the beginning, the press made every effort to find all
Speaker 2: the information they could about the incident and about Diane herself.
Speaker 5: The whole goal was to figure out who she was,
Speaker 5: how long she had been in Eugene or the Eugene
Speaker 5: Springfield area. So you had kind of this small army
Speaker 5: of media types, mainly local print and television stations, doing
Speaker 5: their own things. So we were all sort of learning
Speaker 5: from each other too. If Kval and Eugene had a
Speaker 5: news broadcast that night with something a little bit new,
Speaker 5: well figured I wish I had gotten that in first,
Speaker 5: but nonetheless put that into the notebook and just kept
Speaker 5: on trying to compile our best ability to figure out
Speaker 5: who was involved. And you also had at the same
Speaker 5: time the search for the assailant. That was still the
Speaker 5: official line that there's somebody out there, although even early
Speaker 5: on my feeling was and I think other media people
Speaker 5: were having questions.
Speaker 2: Although the police department wasn't very forthcoming with the details
Speaker 2: of the case and the investigation, Diane herself proved to
Speaker 2: be very willing to talk to the press.
Speaker 5: I was trying to find out who among law enforcement
Speaker 5: was primarily assigned to the case, and would there be
Speaker 5: a chance of getting an interview with these folks, And
Speaker 5: I was able to do that after a while, but
Speaker 5: not early on, and the police were never open and
Speaker 5: forthcoming with reporters as far as I could find out,
Speaker 5: Almost all the information as the case developed ended up
Speaker 5: coming really out of Diane's mouth. She was a prolific talker.
Speaker 5: When we finally got a chance to sit down and
Speaker 5: get her a story, and once she started, she just
Speaker 5: didn't stop.
Speaker 4: Mom and Dad said, quit talking. Then, do not talk
Speaker 4: to the press. They are not your friends. Diane was
Speaker 4: the most publicized and talked about individual in the state
Speaker 4: of Oregon in nineteen eighty three, and a lot of
Speaker 4: that was due to her. I mean, as she would
Speaker 4: talk to everybody.
Speaker 2: Diane gave several interviews with the press and insisted that
Speaker 2: she and her kids were attacked by a shaggy haired stranger,
Speaker 2: a description which over time has become a trope when
Speaker 2: describing non existent suspects of crimes.
Speaker 3: Do you think that helped her?
Speaker 4: No, no, no, absolutely not. It did the opposite. You know.
Speaker 4: It's like and she was really the worst witness for herself,
Speaker 4: you know, I mean, it's like she she would get
Speaker 4: up and she would talk, and she would talk, and
Speaker 4: you know, and they think it's because she liked to
Speaker 4: hear herself talk. Well, the reality is that she wanted
Speaker 4: to have them listen. They wanted She wanted him to listen,
Speaker 4: but they would never listen. They would never look for anybody.
Speaker 4: She would go down there. You know, it's like, why
Speaker 4: aren't you looking, Well, we're looking for the guy. We're
Speaker 4: looking for the guy, you know. But if then you
Speaker 4: take a look into the newspapers and the time, you know.
Speaker 4: Two weeks after the shooting, Pat hort and the district
Speaker 4: attorney says, the search for the shaggy haired stranger is
Speaker 4: not a priority on our list. Two weeks after the shooting,
Speaker 4: the district attorney says, the search for the shaggy haired
Speaker 4: stranger his words, not hers. The search for the shaggy
Speaker 4: head stranger is not a priority on our list. But
Speaker 4: anytime she goes and talks to him, we're looking for him.
Speaker 4: We're looking for him.
Speaker 2: Months after the shooting, the police had produced no additional
Speaker 2: suspects beyond Diane herself. They had no leads, and only
Speaker 2: the Frederickson's themselves seemed to be providing contacts of potential
Speaker 2: witnesses and suspects to the police.
Speaker 5: There didn't seem to be any elits. And this was
Speaker 5: coming from Diane's camp to say we have somebody had
Speaker 5: phoned us and indicated there was there was some guy
Speaker 5: who had shown up at the Springfield country Club, or
Speaker 5: she was advising police be on the lookout for some
Speaker 5: dinged up yellow car that was in the area. There
Speaker 5: weren't solidly so I know that the police got a
Speaker 5: lot of contacts, and as far as I know, they
Speaker 5: and this was one of the stories we were trying
Speaker 5: to keep up on. They were tracking these leaves down,
Speaker 5: going and talk to the people who phone them in,
Speaker 5: but as far as we could tell, that never really
Speaker 5: got a solid start. There was nothing that felt like
Speaker 5: a breakthrough in terms of finding somebody else who might
Speaker 5: be involved in this.
Speaker 2: Diane would talk and tell her story to anyone who
Speaker 2: would listen. She seemed to love talking to the press.
Speaker 5: I do remember very clearly, and Diane would even in
Speaker 5: news conferences talk about dreams that she had had, and
Speaker 5: she would call me, and I'm sure she called other
Speaker 5: reporters on a fairly regular basis, just too because she
Speaker 5: needed to talk. And she was one day talking about
Speaker 5: having driven down to her letter carrying route in Cottage
Speaker 5: Grover that morning. She said it was kind of foggy,
Speaker 5: and I five and she could see Cheryl coming out
Speaker 5: of the mist, kind of holding her hand toward her,
Speaker 5: and Diane said, and there we were the four Musketeers again.
Speaker 5: I think that's how she referred to them, at least
Speaker 5: for the police sake, because it did come out that
Speaker 5: I think it had have been a terrible place to
Speaker 5: be raised in her house, because they got hit, they
Speaker 5: got slapped, they were treated very, very poorly.
Speaker 2: The police struggled to make sense of the events that
Speaker 2: night based on the story Diane had provided. They asked
Speaker 2: her to recreate everything that happened that night, step by
Speaker 2: step and a reenactment.
Speaker 8: And I think for the detectives and the officers who
Speaker 8: were working on it, that was the moment that things
Speaker 8: shifted a little bit. And to go back to Detective
Speaker 8: Welch and some of the first folks on the scene,
Speaker 8: their radar was going off I think before that. But
Speaker 8: at first, certainly the stories were all about who is
Speaker 8: this shaggy haired stranger, what was the motive of this
Speaker 8: person to shoot kids? And was even that you know
Speaker 8: the highway back there near Mohawk, Was that folks danger
Speaker 8: back there living out in the rural part of Lane
Speaker 8: County And the more I think Diane spoke the more
Speaker 8: there were questions about what it is that the motive
Speaker 8: was all about, and about who the.
Speaker 1: Shooter might be.
Speaker 2: The reenactment was strange, to say the least. Diana seemed
Speaker 2: to be a mother who was struggling to explain the
Speaker 2: murder and an attempted murder of her children by a stranger.
Speaker 2: She came across like an actress playing a part and
Speaker 2: catering to the audience.
Speaker 6: I think that when they videotaped her and they wanted
Speaker 6: her to say, Hey, this is where I was standing,
Speaker 6: this is where the shaggy haired stranger is standing, this
Speaker 6: was the song playing on the radio, this is how
Speaker 6: I reacted. This is what I did when I threw
Speaker 6: the car keys into the bushes. The police saw something
Speaker 6: there that didn't quite add up, and that was what
Speaker 6: the children ended up seeing from inside the car and
Speaker 6: what it is she was saying, and that was a contradiction.
Speaker 6: There was an immediate contradiction when they viewed what she
Speaker 6: did with the video re enactment in the car, and
Speaker 6: they got a lot of things right down to the
Speaker 6: detail about the car and other things so that they
Speaker 6: could understand what happened.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 6: I think the detectives right off the bat thought, wow,
Speaker 6: this is not right. There's something here that's not right,
Speaker 6: and you could see it, I think in the way
Speaker 6: Diane even acted in the video. This wasn't a mom
Speaker 6: who was shell shocked. She was a actress playing out
Speaker 6: a scene in a movie that we hadn't seen yet.
Speaker 3: Tell me about her behavior in the video.
Speaker 6: Re enactment, mm hmm. Well, it was almost as if,
Speaker 6: I mean, as from what I can remember of the
Speaker 6: details and then showing it. It was almost as if
Speaker 6: she had to think about what it was that was
Speaker 6: the right answer that they wanted as opposed to this
Speaker 6: is exactly what happened, and instead of it being something
Speaker 6: that was ingrained in a part of her sailor understanding
Speaker 6: of that shooting from the stranger, she was thinking out loud,
Speaker 6: almost about what it is that they would buy as
Speaker 6: a story. And you could see that, you could.
Speaker 3: I'm throwing the keys.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm throwing the keys.
Speaker 3: Yes, but I didn't let go.
Speaker 4: He thinks I threw them, but I did not throw them.
Speaker 1: Again.
Speaker 4: He swings around at the same time, watching the keys
Speaker 4: and swings around his shoot, which he shot me in
Speaker 4: the stumm, I like that, Kesan, I just hit my kids,
Speaker 4: started the car and.
Speaker 3: Left the car door shut itself.
Speaker 4: Okay, this is the person.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: The police weren't the only ones who found Diane's behavior
Speaker 2: and explanation strange. The press also saw the video, and
Speaker 2: for many it confirmed their suspicions that Diane was the
Speaker 2: most likely suspect in the shooting.
Speaker 5: She did a reenactant with the police that was shown
Speaker 5: later that kind of verified this feeling that that a
Speaker 5: lot of us had gotten from the start the story
Speaker 5: just didn't really add up. She claimed, for instance, that
Speaker 5: when she got out of her car, this guy said
Speaker 5: I want your car, and she said, and she's she's
Speaker 5: consistent as far as I know to this day in
Speaker 5: saying you gotta be kidding me. That's about the only
Speaker 5: part of her story that has remained consistent.
Speaker 6: Her affect is not one of somebody who's trying to
Speaker 6: protect their kids. It was almost as if she'd never
Speaker 6: done these things before, and she was saying, well, what
Speaker 6: are you asking me to do? And they say, no,
Speaker 6: just do it just like it happened, and that was
Speaker 6: their question. It didn't seem she was operating from memory
Speaker 6: it was almost like, how would you want me to be?
Speaker 6: And so that sort of raised alarm bells as they
Speaker 6: went through her reenacting.
Speaker 1: What it was like to have a stranger outside her car.
Speaker 2: After the re enactment video, Diane's increasingly casual attitude and interviews,
Speaker 2: and the lack of any real evidence pointing to a
Speaker 2: shooter on the loose, everyone began to accept that Diane
Speaker 2: was most likely guilty.
Speaker 6: So at the beginning, I think all of us wanted
Speaker 6: to believe that it made sense that this stranger was
Speaker 6: out there and that all the police had to do
Speaker 6: was just find this person and track them down and
Speaker 6: the things would be over. But over time, and you
Speaker 6: really didn't want to believe it at first that Diane
Speaker 6: had some of these strange characteristics about her. They didn't
Speaker 6: make sense.
Speaker 2: Eventually police felt like they had gathered enough evidence. On
Speaker 2: February twenty eighth, nineteen eighty four, Diane Downs was arrested.
Speaker 5: It was a huge deal. Diane's been arrested again. She'd
Speaker 5: been out in the community for months saying what if
Speaker 5: she wanted to disparaging the police, which that's okay. People
Speaker 5: are unfairly charged and it's certainly fair to push back
Speaker 5: on that, but I think among most people that there
Speaker 5: was just no goodwill left for Diane. With no other
Speaker 5: suspect ever having come close to being charged or arrested
Speaker 5: or identified. She was in the spotlight, she was the one,
Speaker 5: and it was a big deal, and she was arrested.
Speaker 5: She was looking tired, be draggled. The emotional strain I
Speaker 5: think had taken a toll on her. She was still
Speaker 5: kind of prone to smirk and smile a lot, whether
Speaker 5: she should be or not, but she was I think
Speaker 5: kind of beaten down by a circumstance when they finally
Speaker 5: took her into custody. At that point, we all knew that, well,
Speaker 5: we're going to be going to trial in about three months.
Speaker 5: I think Lane County had a stipulation of that point
Speaker 5: that once you were charged with that kind of serious crime,
Speaker 5: just to a speedy process, we'll have you start your
Speaker 5: trial within three months.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just the reenactment, her strange behavior and the
Speaker 2: inconsistent story that led police to arrest Diane. During the
Speaker 2: nine months between the shooting and the arrest, a key
Speaker 2: witness was at last able to provide the final piece
Speaker 2: of the puzzle needed to charge Diane.
Speaker 5: Diane was ultimately charged because Christy could talk, Christie felt
Speaker 5: safe enough emotionally to share her thoughts. She'd been going
Speaker 5: through lots of therapy. As part of these sessions, her therapist,
Speaker 5: a guy named Carl Peterson, would ask her eventually, just
Speaker 5: in talking about this, do you know who shot you?
Speaker 5: And Christy would nod and he would say, do you
Speaker 5: want to write that down? And I'll put this in
Speaker 5: an envelope and we'll just burn it when it's done,
Speaker 5: so no harm, no foul. So she did that for
Speaker 5: quite a while, and I think there was probably one
Speaker 5: day in particular where she felt okay about sharing that
Speaker 5: with him, what she had written on the paper and
Speaker 5: what did she say, said my mom.
Speaker 2: On the next episode of Happy Face Presents Two Face,
Speaker 2: we received a bizarre letter from Diane Down's in prison
Speaker 2: that included her surprising claims of her relation to Becky.
Speaker 2: This leads us to enlist the help from DNA detective
Speaker 2: Michel Leonard to help us solve the answer of who
Speaker 2: are the biological parents of Becky. Ben Bolan is our
Speaker 2: executive producer. Melissa Moore is our co executive producer. Maya
Speaker 2: Cole is our primary producer, Paul Dekant is our supervising producer,
Speaker 2: Sam T. Garnan is our researcher, and Matt Riddle is
Speaker 2: our story editor. Featured music by dream Tent Happy Face
Speaker 2: Presents to Phase is a production of iHeartRadio