Small Sacrifices (4 page)

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"Call the cops! He shot my kids!"

—Diane Downs, May 19, 1983

It fell to Judy Patterson to comfort the young woman who had brought the wounded children to the hospital—and to try to find out what had happened to them.

She told Judy that her name was Elizabeth Downs, but that she went by Diane, her middle name. The injured children were her own: Christie Ann, eight, Cheryl Lynn, seven, and Stephen

"Danny" Downs, three.

Diane Downs remained in a shocklike state; she spoke with a certain flatness of expression, holding her emotions in. She wore a pale blue T-shirt that spelled out "Nantucket" across her ample breasts. Over that, she wore a blue plaid shirt. There was a small red stain on one sleeve. Diane's blue jeans were well-worn, even baggy, but she had a near-perfect figure. She looked young, probably in her mid-twenties. She was quite tan, although now the golden tan was a thin veneer of false color over chalky skin beneath.

Diane was not pretty; depending on the angle, Judy thought, she was either plain or beautiful. She had the facial bone structure!

that models have: high cheek bones, an expanse of delicately rounded brow. There was a Dresden-doll quality about the round curves of Diane's face, and yet it was far from a perfect face, marred—ever so slightly—by a jaw a trace too prominent, lipsa shade too thin over long teeth. When Diane looked away, her profile was perfect.

Her eyes . . . Diane's eyes dominated her face: someho^

.void of depth, and yet almost hypnotic in intensity. They were huge, pretty eyes; there was no fault there to jar the viewer. Diane's pupils were gray or green or yellow, depending on how the light caught itself in them, and they resembled something. What? Green grapes, maybe ... or cat's eyes. Something. Judy

felt as if she were gazing into those sunglasses that bounce back only the observer's own image, giving no clue to the identity of the watcher behind the mirrored lenses.

Diane's pupils floated toward the top of her eyes, with an unusually wide expanse of white beneath. Her brows were plucked into two pencil-thin lines, exposing her eyes even more. Judy caught herself staring and dragged her gaze away. She tried to organize her thoughts. She had called all the emergency medical personnel; the children were in good hands.

But Diane was insisting there was still a man out there with a gun ...

There was so much more to be done. Judy called the Springfield Police Department. She wasn't sure just where the shooting had taken place; the city limits were not that far from the hospital. The gunman might even be on his way here.

"I figured that it had to be some kind of domestic dispute," she later recalled. "If a man had been crazy enough and cruel enough to shoot three children, I thought he might follow them into the ER and shoot everybody here. I wanted to get the police here. I don't mind saying I was scared."

"I want to call my parents," Diane murmured. "I need to call them."

Judy nodded and covered the phone. "I'm talking to the police. Just a moment. Could you tell me what happened again, so i that I can tell them?"

"Somebody shot my kids ..."

, ^"dy repeated information as Diane related it to her. Diane aidn t know just where the shooting had occurred, but she nought she could find it again. She mentioned "Mohawk" and Marcola-" Mohawk Boulevard ran directly in front of the hospifiefri

then there was old Mohawk Readjust outside of Spring^ 'd. Marcola was a crossroads town northeast of Springfield.

abo^ dlfficult to te11 exactly which area Diane was talking restr^ Judy talked to the dispatcher, Diane went into the small JudvmJust behind her desk area. The door remained open;

> could hear running water.

24 ANN RULE

IAs she hung up the phone, she saw Diane head again toward the trauma room. She hurried after her to stop her. Judy glanced into the trauma room. Someone had drawn the drapes around the bed where Cheryl's body rested; there was a gap in the cloth, though, and one chalky arm was partially visible.

Judy quickly tugged Diane away, into the minor surgery

room. In the bright light, Judy saw that Diane had apparently been injured too. Beneath the plaid shirt, her left arm was wrapped from elbow to wrist in a brightly colored beach towel. Unwrapping the towel, Judy found an ovoid, nasty-looking wound on the outer surface of Diane's arm, almost exactly halfway between her wrist and her elbow. There were two smaller wounds.

Judy wasn't a nurse, but she was the only one available. She put Betadine on the three bloody lesions to disinfect them, wiping away the black particles around the first hole. Then she bandaged the arm. The wounds weren't life threatening, although they looked painful.

"What happened?" Judy asked Diane again. "Where were you when he shot the children?" |

"We went out toward Marcola to see a friend. We were headed back, driving along Old Mohawk Road. My kids were laughing and talking. I was laughing at something Danny said, _ and talking to Christie. . . . There was this man, standing there ^ in the middle of the road. He looked like he needed help. I stopped the car, and got out. He wanted my keys. He just reached in through the window and shot my kids. It's a terrible thing to be laughing one minute, and then have something like this happen to you."

Judy touched Diane's good arm. There were no words to say. "You can call your father now. Come on back to the desk."

Wordlessly, Diane followed her. Her face was a mask. She dialed a number, waited for someone to answer, and then blurted into the phone, "He shot the kids. He shot me too." |

She hung up and turned to Judy. "They're on their way." ^H

Wes and Willadene Frederickson, Diane's parents, the grandparents of Christie, Cheryl, and Danny Downs, had retired for the night in the white ranch house where they lived, less than two miles from McKenzie-Willamette Hospital. Elizabeth Diane was the oldest of their five grown children. She had moved from |

Arizona to be near them only weeks before. Now, just when their

,yes seemed to be moving along with some serenity, a ringing nhone in the night had signaled disaster.

Willadene was particularly afraid of hospitals; she could not imagine that anything good could come of a call from a hospital. Wes had lost both his parents in a terrible car accident a decade earlier; Willadene had never again been able to hear a phone ring in the night without a stab of anxiety.

She threw on clothes, not noticing what she wore, and joined her husband. The Fredericksons raced for the hospital. Wes realized just as he drove up to the emergency entrance that he had forgotten his false teeth.

Wes Frederickson is an ascetically handsome man in his

early fifties, who resembles Palmer Cortlandt, the millionaire-inresidence on the soap opera "All My Children." He was an important man in Springfield, the number-one man in the local branch of the U.S. Post Office: the Postmaster himself. It seemed inappropriate for him to appear in public without his teeth. He stopped the car, let Willadene out, and raced home to get his dentures.

Willadene Frederickson was forty-six but she looked a decade older. Fortune's assaults had humbled her, making her bend nervously into the wind as if braced for her next catastrophe. She seemed a woman who expected trouble at any moment. Her

lovely thick chestnut hair--still styled as it had been back in the fifties when she married Wes--was shot with gray. Willadene looked like what she once had been: a good, solid Arizona farmwoman.

She stood alone and indecisive in the empty parking lot

outside the emergency room. She sought a way into the waiting room, considered using the double doors, but was afraid they might be only for ambulance crews. She found a single door and talked into the corridor. Diane stood in front of the window to ^e nurses' station.

"What happened?" Willadene gasped.

Diane stared back at her mother, seemingly unable to respond. Judy Patterson spoke up. "The children have been shot."

^Shot?" Willadene echoed incredulously. "Shot?" road Tes'" Judy said softly-"^ght out in the middle of the

--"Where?" m

^'Marcola." "S "Mar cola?"

26 ANN RULE

Willadene Frederickson could not comprehend what had hap. pened. She had seen Diane and the children only that afternoon. She'd looked after Danny all day as always, and the girls too when they came home from school. Usually, they all ate supper j together at her house, but she and Wes had had a meeting. Diane I had picked the children up after she finished work and had taken them home for supper. Everything had been fine then. Why on . earth would Diane and the children have been in Marcola? I Diane spoke up. "We were out to Mark and Heather's ..." Willadene could not remember who Mark and Heather were,

or if she'd ever known them. That didn't matter at this point. She reached an arm out to her daughter. _

Willadene and Diane walked into the large waiting room. J

"Mom, I can't live without my kids." te f

Willadene Frederickson did what she has always done; she tried to smooth things over. "Don't worry. They'll be all right." She patted Diane. "The children will be fine. They have very good doctors."

That seemed to calm Diane a little. The two of them filled out forms that Judy Patterson gave them. Why were there always forms? What did it matter at a time like this? |

No one told Diane or Willadene that Cheryl was dead. Nor would they let Diane see her children again. Neither woman could, of course, see the desperate struggle going on in the trauma room, but they were angry at being shunted aside. Diane had apparently blanked out the sight of her younger daughter lying as still as a broken doll behind the drapes because she said nothing about that to Willadene. Surely, she must know, the nurses thought. How could she not know? Afterward, Diane said she had no memory of seeing Cheryl in the hospital. "I never saw Cheryl until I saw her in her coffin."

When a nurse or aide raced past for more blood or on some other errand, they called out to Diane and Willadene that the children were "serious," but alive. They meant Christ'e and Danny. ^pg •

cfe^ J

Wes Frederickson hurried into the waiting room. He was the parent that Diane resembled the most physically. His face was taut and impassive as he joined the women. Less than a half hour had passed since the first call for help in the parking lot. Springfield's "Morning Watch" begins at 11:00 p.m. The shift's briefing takes place from 10:30 to 11:00 p.m. Officer Rich Cha_

neau had been summoned out of that "show-up" and disn^tched to the hospital.

When Charboneau walked in, Diane looked up at him and

ried angrily, "It's about time you got here! There's some maniac Suit there shooting people."

It was now 10:48 p.m. Eight minutes since Judy Patterson's callDiane told Charboneau basically the same story she'd told Judy Patterson. A stranger had demanded her car and then shot her children when she refused to give it to him. No, the children hadn't been awake; she recalled now that they had all been sleeping.

"I wasn't going to let him have my new car!" she murmured angrily. "I just bought it."

Diane appeared frantic with worry over her children. To

compound matters, the wrong department had responded to the call for police assistance in the confusion over the location of the incident. When Diane recalled landmarks she had observed, Charboneau realized that the shooting had taken place outside the Springfield city limits. He called the Lane County Sheriff's Office. Sergeant Robin Rutherford responded.

Rutherford and Charboneau were horrified as Diane outlined her encounter with the gunman. The trouble might not be

over. Old Mohawk Road was only a few miles long, a curving, two-laned road that paralleled the main road between Marcola and Springfield. The river edged most of its west boundary, and there were vast fields, but near Springfield a score of homes huddled along the road. If a maniac was out there with a gun, they had to find him. Rural Springfield residents would open their doors to a stranger in need of "help." They had to be warned. Someone had to verify that Old Mohawk Road was indeed

where the gunman had last been seen. No one but Diane could do that. Rutherford asked her if she would come with him back to we shooting scene. It was a lot to ask. Diane explained that her arm was injured, ^"d that she hadn't much more than a Band-Aid for it. Rutherford

ked one of the nurses to evaluate Diane's wounds. -, I'm sorry," she called as she ran past.

"I have no time. ^Ke her to Sacred Heart."

fc p^1"^^' ^dy Patterson wrapped the arm again, but she wasn't "tident about it. Rosie Martin stopped, looked askance at the

28 ANN RULE

arm, and unwrapped the gauze. She quickly put a less flexible bandage on it.

"How are my kids?" Diane asked.

Rosie answered that everyone was working on them--that

they were still very serious. "We have four doctors doing their best for them."

That much was true. Neither Rosie nor anyone else had time yet to come out and tell the family just how bad things were. |

Diane and her parents conferred with the deputies. They

decided that Wes and Diane would go with Rutherford to show him where the shooting had occurred.

Shelby Day knelt down in front of Diane and said softly,

"One of your girls is really bad. She may not be alive when you come back." |

Diane nodded. She drew a deep breath and turned to Rob

E Rutherford. She would go with him. She couldn't save her chil-tt I dren just sitting there in the waiting room anyway. Judy heard

Diane murmur something else, but she couldn't understand it, the i| words didn't make sense; she turned back toward her post at the 1' I I front desk. ,„„ , | s1! H i.^-|

"' When Diane and her father walked out of the emergency room with Rob Rutherford, the sheriffs sergeant noted that though Diane was clearly in pain, she seemed to have tremendous will power. She appeared calmer now that she had something to do, something that might help find the gunman.