Small Sacrifices (13 page)

"reprogrammed" with speech on the right side of the brain. But not rapidly. And there are no guarantees.

Whatever light Christie might have been able to shed on the mysterious shooting was dimmed. Christie understood everything. Fred Hugi could see it in the way her eyes followed visitors to her room. But Christie could not talk. Possibly, Christie might never be able to talk. What her eyes had seen--what she feared--was locked now inside her head, the intricate synapses blocked as surely as telephone lines downed in a wind storm.

The stroke had also paralyzed her right arm. Fortunately, she was left handed. But she couldn't use that hand either; the bullet wound in it was far from healed.

For the moment, at least, they might as well forget eyewitnesses. Round-the-clock, Lane County deputy sheriffs stayed in Christie's room. Large benevolent presences, sitting quietly in the corner of Room Number Five, 1CU. The deputies were under

orders from Sheriff Burks and Fred Hugi never to leave Christie alone with anyone except the medical personnel.

Quick to pick up negative vibrations, Diane sensed that the I investigators were no longer as kind as they had been. She thought she heard them out there in the hallway, talking about her. She closed herself off from them, and talked into a tape recorder instead, an idea Dick Tracy had given her when he recorded their interview.

This would be a kind of diary. The cops had copied her first diary and left it tainted. A spoken diary was better.

The suspicions of the investigators that took Diane Downs out of the victim category and placed her tentatively as a suspect were kept "in house." In the Eugene-Springfield community, Diane Downs remained a bereaved mother.

The Eugene Register-Guard carried another front page story on the case. There was a color photo of Diane and her three children, a happy picture from the past. Diane, sitting in a highI backed rattan chair, wore her hair in a French roll and was , I dressed in a demure longsleeved, high-necked blouse. Madonna-g||

like, she held a laughing Danny in her lap. The children all wore sweatshirts with cartoon characters on their chests and blue jeans. Both Christie's and Cheryl's grins betrayed gaps where they'd lost baby teeth.

Juxtaposed with the family's picture was Dick Tracy's composite drawing of the alleged killer, put together from an Ident-akit with Diane's help. A heavy jowled man with piercing eyes stared out at the reader. His hair was dark and shaggy, reaching well below his jaw line. Citizens were asked to come forward if they saw someone resembling the composite.

Similar stories appeared in the Springfield News and the Cottage Grove Sentinel. Readers were also asked to be on the

look-out for a yellow 1960s or 1970s model Chevrolet which Diane had seen parked along the readjust before she was flagged down. Each story elicited more reports of sightings of madmen

from the public.

By Monday, May 23, the Downs case had slipped off the

front page, and the headlines were calmer. The Register-Guard's ^ad, "Police seek more leads in shooting," and quoted Sheriff

-ave Burks's rather cryptic comment: "There are no new leads "lat I care to reveal. We're continuing the investigation."

* * *

84 ANN RULE

Kurt Wuest had become one of the lead detectives investigating the shooting, and he was also Diane's principal guard in the hospital since May 20.

Diane much preferred Wuest to the other detectives. She

found Welch offensive and Dick Tracy provincial. She dubbed Roy Pond "Cowboy Roy."

"Are you married, Kurt?" she asked Wuest on her last hospital day.

He nodded. "Why?"

She smiled. "Oh . . . I'm going to need somebody to be with when this is all over. I just wondered."

Sandy-haired, with a luxuriant moustache, Kurt Wuest had come to the Lane County Sheriffs Office by a route even more circuitous than his fellow investigators. Born in Switzerland, the first son of a master chef in the hotel business, he'd lived in Montreal, British Columbia, Pocatello, Idaho, and Seattle, where his father was head chef of the Space Needle restaurant.

"Then it was Chicago, and then Honolulu ..."

Wuest joined the Honolulu Police Department. From there, he'd transferred to Eugene and Lane County.

Diane confided to Kurt Wuest that she looked upon him as a friend, not a cop.

"Cheryl's better off, you know," she mused. "I feel almost guilty because I'm happy for Cheryl because she's probably in heaven."

Wuest nodded noncomittally.

"I suppose the police have gone through my diary," Diane speculated. "Well, I gave them all permissions to search. I want to cooperate; I have nothing to hide."

Diane still voiced complete cooperation with the police, no matter what her private thoughts might be.

Wuest found Diane pleasant and compliant, but very worried about her injured arm. She was concerned about telling Danny and Christie that Cheryl was dead. ^;

Funeral arrangements for Cheryl were still pending; Danny had been transferred to Sacred Heart Hospital in Eugene to await further surgery. Doctors hoped that they might be able to ease the pressure on his spinal cord. Danny was now paralyzed from the T chest down, perhaps permanently.

On May 23, an endless blue Monday, deputies and nurses observed Diane glaring down from the hospital window at the park

ins lot below where her ex-husband stood. Her eyes were clouded 1-th undisguised hatred. She had planned to break the news to Christie and Danny that Cheryl was dead, and she'd just learned that Steve had told them without her permission.

Diane was antsy to get out of the hospital. The investigative team wanted her there so that they could watch her. That was one of the decisions they thrashed out in the morning meetings. Even though she seemed confident, Fred Hugi felt that Diane had to be at the weakest point she'd ever be--probably expected to be arrested, jumping at the sound of each new footfall in the corridor outside her room.

"We all expected her to cave in, to give up," Hugi remarked.

"If she ever gave it up, it would be then."

They did not arrest her; they could not arrest her with the sparse evidence they had. As a suspect, Diane had far more going for her than she realized. She couldn't know that in-fighting had begun in the enemy camp.

The pressure began subtly. The sheriffs office wanted action; Hugi wanted to be sure he had a case that would fly in court. That first week their battle lines were drawn, but they remained civil with one another, camouflaging argument with debate. On a blackboard or in their notebooks, the investigative team kept an ever-changing double list:

Reasons Diane Did It Reasons Diane Didn't Do It

The first reason under the second heading was always: Mothers don't hurt their kids. And the second reason was: If she had something to do with it, why would she drive them to the hospital?

Cops and prosecutors knew all too well that some mothers did hurt their kids. They also knew that lay jurors might stubbornly

insist that it couldn't be true.

Even the probers were baffled by the second reason. If Diane had anything to do with the shootings, why would she drive the

^ctims--who might be able to testify against her--to the hospital?

They were in a bind. Unless they added a string of positives 0 their first list, she was going to walk away from them. Diane ^sn't sick enough to stay in the hospital. If she got out, how the ^11 were they going to keep track of her?

„, "Are we gonna arrest her so we can really watch her?" ^cy asked. Hugi shook his head. "Not yet. We can't."

86 ANN RULE

They were twisting in the wind, going on gut feelings, on their perception of how a mother should act when her children are attacked. If they arrested her, they damn well better have something less ethereal than intuition.

"OK," Alton sighed. "Let her out of the hospital. Maybe she'll lead us to the gun."

"Yeah," Welch countered. "And maybe she'll go to Mexico or grab the kids out of the hospital, and try again." What if they should arrest Diane with no evidence? Oregon has a sixty-day maximum delay between arrest and trial that can be stretched to ninety days in a murder case only if a prosecutor can convince a judge he has good cause. If they could not come up with evidence in that period, Diane might very well be acquitted. Then she would get her kids back, go to Mexico, do anything she wanted. ?

The public wanted the stranger caught, and many of them

would have been happy to assist in stringing him up. The sheriffs men wanted to arrest Diane; Fred Hugi planted himself stubbornly in front of the meeting full of angry detectives and kept saying, over and over, "You haven't even scratched the surface yet." Every time he said it, he knew he grew less popular with the men from the sheriff's office. And with the public.

They spoke--Fred Hugi and Diane Downs--only once. They happened to be walking down the corridor near Christie's room at the same time. Diane had come for a last visit just before her release from the hospital on May 23.

Hugi expected that she would ignore him, as always. And in his mind, as always, he repeated the silent litany that played itself out when he saw Diane. "I'll get you."

Almost as if she'd heard him speak aloud, Diane suddenly turned toward Fred Hugi, apparently acknowledging him as a person for the first time. She cut her huge yellow eyes sideways at him.

"The look on her face was unmistakable," Hugi remembered.

"It said, 'I did it. You know I did it. I know you know I did it. But you can't prove it.' "

Then she spoke aloud. Diane Downs's voice was very, very deliberate. There was not the slightest hesitancy in Diane's tone as she looked at Hugi with her now-familiar, mocking, half-smile"I'm getting stronger . . . and . . . stronger . . . and stronger and I'm going to beat this."

When this you see, remember me,

And bear me in your mind.

Let all the world say what they may.

Speak of me as you find...

—Elizabeth Diane Downs, 1983

When I left the hospital I was scared. God, I'd go to

that front door in the wheel chair . .. I wanted to just '

grab the wheels and stop the chair. I was terrified. I

didn't know if he was waiting outside ready to get rid

of me, afraid that I'd said something. Oh ... I went

outside and I had this sick feeling. It's just a coldsweat-sick-feeling-fear, and I got in the car and I went

home. All those flowers! You wouldn't believe all the

flowers we brought home today. Goodness gracious. I

need to write Thank Tou cards to everybody.

Anyway, when we got home, my mom brought all

the flowers in. I brought in what I could, but I don't

know . .. I just—I don't feel. I feel dead. I feel like

I'm not here. I found a heart—Cheri made a heart,

cut a little piece of paper out and wrote, "I love you, Mom" on it. . .

—Diane Downs, tape-recorded diary, May 23, 1983

' "^ne dreaded having to move in with her parents; she had

^niggled for most of her life to be free of them. Now anxiety drove her back to Wes and Willadene's house.

n c-^lane returned only once to the dead quiet of the duplex on

•" ^reet, a brief visit to retrieve some of her belongings. She ouldn't live there alone, she told reporters; she was terrified

°ni the moment she walked in, not knowing who might be

siting there to try to kill her again.

90 ANN RULE

She pointed out that she could not protect herself. Her injured arm had rendered her helpless. Because her postal shoes

and thongs had been taken into evidence, she had to borrow a pair of tennis shoes from Willadene. Worse, she had to ask her mother to tie them for her.

Diane was back home again, a little girl again.

"I can't even tie my damned shoes!" she cried--to the press to the nurses at the hospital, to the police. For this woman who craved autonomy, it was the worst thing she could imagine. Diane, Christie, Cheryl, and Danny had arrived in Oregon at Eastertime just as the earth was covered with the shimmery green of spring in the Northwest. Their first days had been full of showers and the most tentative sunlight. Almost like being underwater.

Diane was out of her element. She who had been born to the hottest sunshine, a woman who coddled her tan, and preferred the tall, bronzed men of Arizona--men who wore jeans and Tony Lama boots and stashed their Silver Belly Beaver hats behind the hot bench seats of their pick-up trucks. Everyone in Oregon looked pale to her. An Arizona girl through and through, Diane could thrive in heat that would knock most Oregonians flat. She had lived in Arizona, hard by the desert, since 1955--since the very first day of her life.

7955.

Dr. Jonas Salk discovered his vaccine for polio that summer. Carmen Miranda died of a heart attack, and James Dean shattered himself and his sports car on a California road, spawning a macabre cult who would not concede his death. Confidential magazine appeared on newstands. Charles Van Doren and Dr. Joyce Brothers amazed viewers on TVs "$64,000 Question." The Bad Seed, a chilling novel about a little girl who seemed to have been born wicked, topped the New York Times bestseller list.

Even so, 1955 was the dull midpoint of an intrinsically dull decade. Men worked; wives were expected to look pretty, wax their floors once a week, shop economically, and have babies. j Child abuse was not in media vogue. It existed--it always has---but no one thought much about it. It was considered a problem o1 the poor and uneducated. In 1955 there were no warnings about population explosion; i1 was perfectly acceptable, even admirable, to have four or five or

more children. All that mattered was that everyone be happy, and families strived to be like television sit-com families. Willadene Frederickson was pregnant with her first child that summer, due to deliver in the ovenlike days of August in Phoenix. She was seventeen; Wes was twenty-five.