Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (5 page)

After just three weeks she was sent home with terrible blisters on her feet. Almost immediately, she decided to have another baby, and within days she was pregnant again. Christie was only 15 months old when her sister Cheryl was born.

Appalled, as their finances were already poor, Steve had a vasectomy. But the operation didn’t work and Diane got pregnant for a third time. Steve persuaded her to have an abortion, after which he had his vasectomy redone.

Psychiatrists say that most women recover their equilibrium quickly after a termination, with neurotic women being the exception. Diane fell into the latter category, convincing herself that she had to have another baby to replace the terminated cells. Two years later, she left Steve, taking the children, and moved back to live with her parents, though being in their home again made her miserable.

The couple reconciled and she asked Steve to have the vasectomy reversed, but he refused, doubtless aware that
Diane enjoyed pregnancy more than motherhood. Determined to get her way, she seduced a 19-year-old youth and became pregnant by him. The baby, Stephen Daniel Downs, was born on 29 December 1979 and soon became known as Danny, his middle name.

Steve let everyone think that Danny was his biological child. He adored the boy and treated him the same as his two daughters. But Diane fell into a deep depression. She began to hit the children, just as she’d been hit by her father throughout her childhood.

Yet she still loved the
idea
of motherhood, so offered herself as a surrogate mother, telling doctors that it was important to her that the adoptive parents were Christians. The clinic put Diane through a series of tests, where she scored highly on IQ and on robust physical health but did badly on the psychopathology scale. She told the psychologist about her parents being strict and distant, about the incest and how it had left her with no enjoyment of sex. He – and a second psychologist – found that she could shut down her feelings at will, and both thought that she was suffering from Histrionic Personality Disorder. But the clinic was so desperate for surrogates that they accepted her. Artificially inseminated, she became pregnant at the first attempt and was delighted, telling acquaintances that, for the first time, she had a purpose and that her aborted child might be reincarnated in the new baby. She began sending frequent letters to the anonymous parents care of the surrogacy office, giving them updates about the pregnancy.

Her marriage ended and by 1981 she was divorced and working as a post woman – she loved the job and was in a high-energy state throughout the pregnancy. Yet she ignored her existing children, wouldn’t let them into the lounge in case
they made it untidy and preferred to party at night rather than spend time with them. Cheryl became clinically depressed and told neighbours, who often fed her when she was locked out of the house, that ‘nobody cared.’ Christie was also incredibly sad and acquaintances noted that she’d tried to take on the role of mother to her siblings, old before her time.

Acquaintances said that all three youngsters were emotionally starved and physically neglected, sometimes playing outside in light clothing and bare feet in the winter. Diane hit the children so hard that a co-worker suggested she go for counselling, but she continued to party instead.

In May 1982, she gave birth to her surrogate baby, a daughter, and immediately handed her over to her new parents. She received $10,000, money she used for the deposit on a new mobile home. Three weeks later, she went back to work and began a new series of short-lived affairs with co-workers. She would act submissive and giggly until she got them into bed where she would scratch them until they bled. They were left with the impression that she hated men. They were also confused by her bizarre behaviour, as she read the Bible every night and quoted it to them chapter and verse, yet had
extra-marital
sex, which her religion forbade. On her postal route, she refused to deliver soft porn titles such as
Playboy
and
Penthouse
as they offended her, yet she was heard to call her children ‘fucking bastards’ and would push them away when they wanted a hug.

Diane had sex with at least two of her co-workers then started an affair with a third – Dave (a pseudonym). He’d never wanted children and had had a vasectomy. Now that his second marriage was going through a bad patch, he thought that he and Diane could have a casual fling. But he was alarmed to note how often she dumped her offspring on others – and equally confused during a daytrip when she asked them
repeatedly ‘How much do you love mummy?’ Trying to extricate himself, he suggested that she give her marriage a second chance.

But Diane remained fixated on Dave, the first man whom she’d ever been orgasmic with. She knew that he’d never wanted a family so suggested that they could get married and that she’d keep her children out of his way. Dave reminded her that he had no intention of leaving his wife, but this was a message which Diane chose not to hear. In September 1982, she gave the children’s father full custody and began to study at night school for a pre-med course, but gave it up as she wasn’t able to spend any time with Dave. That same month, she gave him a sexually-transmitted disease which she’d contracted during a previous relationship and he ended the affair. Hysterical, Diane grabbed her ex-husband’s gun from his house and threatened to shoot herself.

A few days later, Diane mounted an all-out attempt to get Dave back. She had his name tattooed on her arm and said that this meant that she was permanently his woman. She came to work bra-less and flirted outrageously. Soon he restarted the affair. Ecstatic, she sent him handwritten poems and cards and letters, the hallmarks of a lovelorn teenager rather than the 27-year-old mother that she actually was.

In January 1983, Steve moved house and the children went back to live with Diane. She told Dave that, if he moved in with her, she’d get a full-time nanny. In the same time frame, she opened her own surrogacy clinic in town. The following month, she asked Dave who he loved best, her or his wife. He said the latter, and Diane became so violent that he finished with her again.

Diane took this incredibly badly and started phoning his
home and workplace on a daily basis. Within weeks they had reconciled and he gave her a signal that they were serious by getting a matching tattoo. In April, she moved to Springfield, Oregon, on the understanding that he would soon join her there. Her parents could babysit – ideally permanently – for the children, and she and Dave could get Springfield postal routes.

But, free of Diane’s influence, Dave decided that he wanted to reconcile with his second wife. He began to return Diane’s letters and gifts, sending them back unopened, marked ‘return to sender.’ Though her post woman’s job kept her busy during the daytime, she turned to marijuana and alcohol to get through the lonely nights. She returned to Arizona at the end of April to try and win Dave back but he said that he ‘didn’t want to be a daddy,’ that it was over. He drove away before she could create another scene. She wrote to him ‘Do you ache for me in the same way that I ache for you?’ On another occasion, she wrote that ‘the kids are terribly independent and require very little care.’ It was a sociopathic statement, given that her youngest child was three years old.

For the first half of May, Diane brooded about how she could get her lover back when he so clearly didn’t want a readymade family. If only the children didn’t exist…

On 19 May 1983, Diane took all three of her offspring – Daniel age three, Cheryl age seven and Christie Ann age eight – out for a drive in Springfield and parked in a rural location. She shot the children and herself before disposing of the gun (probably in the adjacent river) but all three children were still alive so she sat in the car and waited for them to die. Eventually another vehicle went past and she realised that she’d have to drive on or it would look suspicious. Driving slowly to the local hospital, she parked and screamed for the
nurses, telling them that a bushy-haired stranger had carjacked her, shot her in the arm, shot the children then fled.

Medics found that Daniel, the toddler, had been shot once, the near-contact wound creating holes in his chest and back. He was crying weakly. Christie, who was close to death, had been shot twice in the chest and once through the right thumb, presumably as she put up her hands to defend herself. She died on the operating table but surgeons managed to revive her. Shortly afterwards, she had a stroke which left her paralysed. Cheryl, who had been shot twice in the back at point blank range, was dead on arrival and couldn’t be revived. Medics were surprised to find that the wounds had clotted, suggesting that the shootings had occurred much earlier than the children’s mother was suggesting and negating her claim that she’d driven swiftly to the hospital. Her own wound, to her left forearm, had broken the limb, but she’d been able to drive with her right hand.

Detectives arrived, by which time Diane had been told that one of the children (Cheryl) was dying. She told them not to revive Christie if she too died in case she’d sustained brain damage. She agreed to go with them to show exactly where the carjacking took place. As they passed her vehicle – a red Nissan Pulsar MX which she’d bought three months before – she said that she hoped it was okay, that it didn’t have bullet holes in it. She remained equally impassive as she showed them where the shootings had taken place. Meanwhile, back at Springfield hospital, her father was equally unemotional as he identified his dead granddaughter, though several of the nurses were in tears.

Diane told detectives that the stranger had stood in the centre of the lane and that she’d stopped the car to help him. He’d leaned in and shot all four of them, after which she’d pretended to throw her car keys into the lane and he’d
stumbled after them. When his back was turned, she’d driven off at speed.

She phoned Dave the following day and told him what had happened and said that she loved him. He expressed his sympathy for the tragedy but warned her to stay away.

Meanwhile, nurses noted that Christie exhibited severe anxiety when she was visited by her mother, her heart rate accelerating from 104 to 147. She appeared terrified of Diane.

Detectives were also concerned. The children, curled up in the backseat – and, in Cheryl’s case, sleeping under a sweater on the floor beside the front passenger seat – hadn’t been visible from the passenger window, so how had the stranger noticed them? Why hadn’t Diane mentioned that she had access to a .22 Ruger, the murder weapon? Why had that weapon, which her husband confirmed she had borrowed, suddenly disappeared?

They were also aware that Diane’s wound could easily have been self-inflicted, and noticed that she had yet to shed a tear for her dead child and critically injured children. As one detective put it: ‘Mother’s attitude totally fucked.’ She told the authorities that ‘Cheryl was in heaven’ and ‘was probably an angel.’ They were convinced that Christie could name the killer, but the little girl couldn’t speak and was still too weak to write.

Increasingly convinced that Diane Downs had shot all three of her children, and that Christie would ultimately be able to identify her as the killer, the police made sure that Christie always had an armed guard and was never left alone with her mother. Meanwhile she and her brother Danny, who would never walk again, were transferred into the care of the local authorities.

Police tried to gently question Danny about the shootings,
but his eyes filled with tears and he whispered that he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. Later, he told nurses ‘I can’t stand up – my mummy ran over me with the car.’

Meanwhile, Christie was slowly opening up to the authorities, admitting that her mother had often slapped her and Cheryl across the face and had spanked Danny. Asked who had shot them, she stammered ‘I think… I think Mom.’ She had frequent nightmares, still had great difficulty in speaking and never asked to see her mother. Yet, asked to write down the names of people she loved, Diane topped the list.

By now, Diane had told detectives that she’d seen the
bushy-haired
stranger before and that he’d used her name, so it couldn’t have been a random shooting. She added that her
ex-husband
or Dave’s wife might have hired someone to kill her and the kids.

Detectives pointed out how bizarre it was that the man had managed to shoot three little children in the centre of their bodies, despite their being in a darkened car, yet had only shot Diane, the largest and closest body, in the arm. She then alleged that she knew who the killer was and that he had deliberately tried to kill the children to devastate her. On another occasion she said that there were two men present who were wearing ski masks and that she’d pulled one of the masks off. Later she decided that this version of events was only a dream.

Incredibly, she deliberately got pregnant for the sixth time, seducing a casual boyfriend at her most fertile time of the month. She would later tell author Ann Rule (who wrote an impressively-detailed book about the case,
Small Sacrifices
) that ‘for nine months I had love again… Someone I could love who was with me.’ She had somehow blotted out the fact that she was so bad at actual motherhood that her children were
emotionally and physically neglected, and that she’d attempted to take all three of their lives. She and her parents also put a bizarre happy birthday poem for Cheryl in the local paper, writing ‘Jesus loved you… he took you to heaven.’

Fortunately, by now Christie was beginning to heal emotionally and was able to confront the reality that her mother had shot her and her siblings. Asked to play the role of her mother in a reconstruction, she stood outside the car and pointed her finger at the dolls representing herself and her brother and sister. After pretending to shoot them, she burst into tears.

On 28 February 1984, Diane was arrested for murder and attempted murder. She pleaded not guilty to all charges and was remanded in custody.