Small Sacrifices (6 page)

talked with Dick Tracy and Doug Welch. She spoke rapidly in a breathy teen-age voice, her sentences running on with no discernible ending. They scribbled frantically to keep up with the fountain of words. / fl

She said she had had no alcohol that evening and no drugs or medication. She did not smell of liquor; her pupils looked normal. (Indeed blood tests would bear this out.) She was coherent and sober. Her brittle shell of vivacious cooperation remained intact. It was as if she felt compelled to keep talking; if she stopped, she might have to remember.

Doug Welch studied her. "Her words were like ... the only way I can describe them . . . like verbal vomit. They just kep1 flowing.

"You have a tremendous amount of recall," Dick Tracy_ commented at one point. "You must be fairly intelligent."

"There are eight levels of intelligence," Diane explained. ^nd I'm at the seventh level." They had never heard of the "eight level IQ theory" but ™iane Downs was undoubtedly very intelligent; her vocabulary,

syntax, and ability to answer their questions indicated that. And vet she was like a robot programmed to respond. She had taken

" a mantle of words to protect herself, talking faster and faster and faster.

It almost made them dizzy.

Shortly after 1:00 a.m., Springfield Police Detective Sergeant Jerry Smith and Detective Robert Antoine came into the room. Diane held her hands out while Antoine swabbed them with a five percent solution of nitric acid--a routine test to discern the presence of trace metals that might have been left had she fired a gun. The next-of-kin must always be eliminated first. A positive reaction to the test (GSR-Gunshot residue) wasn't that precise. Especially with .22's. Rimfire .22's have a very low antimony-debris factor. Smoking a cigarette, urinating, or using toilet tissue can leave similar residue.

The tests on Diane's hands were negative for the presence of barium or antimony. Antoine sprayed her hands to test for other trace metals. Iron would turn her hands reddish; copper dusting would elicit a green tinge.

Negative.

Tracy and Welch started with the easiest of questions. How many policemen, doctors, and nurses begin by asking legal names and birthdates--as if putting the dead in some kind of order will numb the pain? And how many laymen answer with eager efficiency?

Those who still have first and middle names and birthdates cannot possibly be dead or dying.

Diane gave her own full name: Elizabeth Diane Frederickson Downs, born August 7, 1955; she would be twenty-eight in two months. Christie's birth date was October 7, 1974; Christie had "cen seated in the right rear seat of the red car. Stephen Daniel's

wthday was December 29, 1979; he'd been in the back seat with ^"nstie, on the left. Cheryl was born January 10, 1976; she had ee" on the floor in front, sleeping under a sweater.

^'The car is yours?" Tracy asked. ^ Yes," Diane nodded. "I bought it in February--a red Nissan sar MX with silver streaks on the side."

the i" was tlme ^or ^le harder questions. Diane explained quickly

"orror along the dark road, the stranger with the gun, her 36 ANN RULE

flight to save her children. They had gone to see a friend of hers that evening: Heather Plourd, who lived northeast of Springfield on Sunderman Road. Diane knew Heather wanted a horse, and she had found an article about horses that could be adopted free. |

Heather had no phone so Diane had taken the clipping out to her. f After a visit of fifteen or twenty minutes, they'd headed home. j Diane said she had detoured impulsively to do a little sight-seeing, 9 but when she realized her children had fallen asleep, she turned

around and headed toward Springfield.

Again with no particular plan, she'd turned off Marcola Road onto Old Mohawk and gone only a short way when she saw the man standing in the road, waving his arm for her to stop. Fearing an accident, she had pulled over. - -"Can you describe him?" Welch asked. II

"He was white ... in his late twenties . . . about five feet, nine; 150 to 170. He had dark hair, a shag-wavy cut, and a stubble of a beard--maybe one or two days' growth. Levis, a Levi jacket, a dirty . . . maybe off-color, light T-shirt."

The man had been right in the center of the road. 1

"I stopped my car," Diane continued, "and I got out, and I said, 'What's the problem?' He jogged over to me and said, "I want your car,' and I said, 'You've got to be kidding!' and then he shoved me to the back of the car."

And then, inexplicably, the man had stood outside the driver's door and put his hand inside the car. Diane heard loud

"pops" and realized with despair that the man was firing a gun at her children! First Christie, and then Danny--and finally Cheryl, who lay asleep under Diane's postal sweater on the floor of the front seat.

"What did you do?" Welch asked, shaken by the picture of the three children trapped in a dark car.

"I pretended to throw my car keys. That made him angry. I wanted him to think I'd thrown the keys into the brush. He was about four or five feet away from me. He turned in my direction j and fired twice, hitting me once. I pushed him or kicked him-maybe both--in the leg. I jumped into the car and took off for the hospital as fast as I could."

"Did you see the gun?"

"No . . . Wait ... Yes .. ."

"Can you describe it?"

"That's difficult."

"Do you have any weapons?"

"A .22 rifle that's on the shelf in my closet at home. You could go and ^ k if y°" wanted."

"We'd have to have you sign a consent-to-search form to do that," Tracy advised.

"That's OK. I'll sign that."

She was very cooperative. If Diane voluntarily signed the form, there would be no need for a search warrant. Tracy handed her the consent form. Diane perused it, and then read it aloud. She came to a paragraph stating, "I understand this contraband or evidence may be used against me in a court of law." She paused and looked at the detectives. "Does this have to do with someone who's a suspect?"

Tracy nodded.

Diane said that, of course, she had no objection to their searching her car or the duplex at 1352 Q Street in Springfield where she and the children lived. Anything that might help find the gunman quickly. She signed the form.

But there was a stilted--forced--quality in Diane's speech, hiding some fear they didn't understand.

The detectives were beginning to tumble the crime more

slowly around in their minds. They didn't really know if the shooting had happened in Springfield or in the country, even after Diane had shown them the river site. They wondered if she might possibly have recognized the person who had shot them but be under some constraint not to tell. Was the killer holding a worse sword over her head? Had he let her go to get treatment for her kids on the condition that she return, having told the cops nothing?

The most unlikely chance meeting on a lonely road made the investigators think that the killer had to be acquainted, or have some specific connection, with Diane Downs.

It was an emergency situation. They had to check out her "ome, and they also had to get to Heather Plourd's to see if anyone waited there with a loaded gun, possibly with hostages, w Diane to come back. Officers were dispatched to both addresses.

^ck Tracy left the ER briefly and joined Jon Peckels as he Photographed the red car, his strobe light illuminating the interior. ^ ""^thing glinted in the intermittent flashes. Bullet casings. They ^oed like ^o .22 caliber casings. Both men saw them, but they

"n t touch them. The car was sealed, ready to be towed to the cri^ ^"^y ^ops for processing by the Oregon State Police

»"

As Tracy strode back to the ER, he saw Diane's parents in the waiting area. The father looked grim; the mother's face was swollen from crying. Wes Frederickson verified that Diane owned a rifle which she kept stored in its case, as well as--he thought-a revolver. "She had those weapons because her ex-husband beat her up in the past."

v^ant to stay in the hospital, although he told her that she must--at least for a few days. She made him promise not to tell her father about the tattoo on her back. It was not an ordinary tattoo; it was huge rose etched in scarlet on her left shoulder.

Beneath it was a single word: Lew.

When Tracy asked Diane if she owned, or possessed, any

other weapons, she remembered that she had an old .38 pistol, a Saturday Night Special. It was a cheap gun and unpredictable; she kept it locked in the trunk of her car away from her children. Tracy and Welch had walked into Diane's life at a crisis point; it was akin to walking into a movie in the middle. They had to play catch-up in a hurry.

Diane said that she had come to the Eugene-Springfield area only seven or eight weeks earlier. She had lived all her life in Arizona, working as a letter carrier in Chandler for the previous two years. Her parents had urged her to move to Oregon, and she'd done so--mostly to please them--to give them more of a chance to be with their grandchildren. Since her father was the postmaster of Springfield, he had helped her transfer and she was presently working as a letter carrier in the Cottage Grove Post Office. She was divorced from her first and only husband, Stephen Duane Downs, twenty-eight, who was still living in the

Chandler/Mesa, Arizona area. She gave them his phone number. They talked for more than two hours, and the clock on the wall inched its way toward 3:00 a.m. The circles under Diane's eyes purpled. Still her voice held strong, and her words tumbled out, bumping into each other.

It was after 3:00 a.m. when the two detectives left Diane and headed out to join the men at her townhouse on Q Street. Dr. Terrance Carter, an orthopedic surgeon, treated Diane's wounds. Her left arm was broken, but there was no nerve or tendon damage. Fortunately, she had still been able to open and close her fingers--and drive--despite the pain. In a week or so

she would need surgery to strengthen the arm. Carter excised tissue around all three wounds to insure drainage.

He took Diane's blood pressure and pulse. Both reading5 were normal. Carter also found Diane quite flat emotionally, her v/ords so alive and rapid while her eyes looked somehow dead. She didn'1

fcr

MSG ID 3293 SENT 5/19/83 2340 FROM TID 42 (AI)

AM.EGS.EGO. * * * ATTEMPT TO LOCATE ARMED SUBJECT

* * WHITE MALE ADULT POSSIBLY ARMED WITH

.22 SEMI-AUTOMATIC WEAPON. DESCRIBED AS WMA 5'9" |

150-170 LBS DARK BROWN SHAGGY HAIR, STUBBLE

BEARD, WEARING DIRTY T-SHIRT, LEVI JACKET, BLUE

JEANS. POSSIBLE VEHICLE INVOLVED '60 TO '70 YELLOW

CHEVROLET CHEVELLE, BEAT-UP, NO LIE. KNOWN.

SUBJ. WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH SHOOTING IN

MARCOLA AREA. OCA 83-3268. j

LANE CO. S.O., EUGENE, 687-4150 VLB.

--First teletype sent by Lane County i

Steve Downs had spent a pleasant Thursday evening in Mesa, Arizona. He and his date had gone for a walk around the reservoir in the cool of the evening and then returned to her apartment. Although he and Diane had been divorced for two years, their lives had remained entwined--often abrasively--until she'd left for Oregon. With his family gone almost eight weeks, Downs was finally beginning to feel single, although he missed the kids. He missed Diane, too, in a way. Their relationship had derived fron1 the can't-live-withher/him; can't-live-without-her/him school--ft111 of passion, jealousy, estrangements, and reconciliations.

The desert sky over the Superstition Mountains had faded from the peach and yellow striations of sunset to deep black by the time Steve's roommate--advised of the tragedy in a phone call from Wes--located him. The man blurted out that all three o1

Steve's kids had been shot. Steve's new girlfriend drove him to

<

Steve Downs had no idea how it could have happened. He

berated himself silently for letting his kids go away as he sat, wide awake, amid his dozing fellow passengers.

Roy Pond and Springfield Detective Al Hartman had been dispatched to Heather Plourd's trailer. They drove north on Marcola Road, and turned right onto Sunderman Road, a weathered asphalt path through the woods. Gnarled maples and oaks leaned

over the road, giving the sensation of driving through a tunnel. The air was damper here, and colder.

As they approached the far end of Sunderman, which--like Old Mohawk--hooked into Marcola Road at each end, the road broke out of the woods. There were cleared fields here and a small cluster of mobile homes on the left side of the road. Pond shone his flashlight on the mailboxes and read "Plourd." The trailers were dark. Pond had a discomfiting feeling. This road was so like Old Mohawk; he wondered if Diane might have been holding back for some reason nobody knew yet. The shooting might have taken place here. The detectives walked cautiously up to the porch of the mobile home and knocked, waited, and knocked again. Finally they heard movement inside.

A sleepy young couple opened the door. Heather Plourd

verified that Diane Downs had come to visit her earlier.

"She came driving up in her red car around eight thirty or nine. I was shocked to see her because she had only been hereg once before, about three weeks ago. She drove over then to ask" me to work a shift for her so she could fly to Arizona. She had the

three kids with her tonight. I went outside to talk to her. She told roe she had found an ad in the paper about adopting a horse. I

said we'd just bought a horse, and we couldn't handle another

°ne. Her kids played with our new horse for a few minutes while I ^Iked with Diane." Diane hadn't seemed upset and she wasn't in a hurry when ^e left, although Heather had the impression that she had somehere else to go. Heather was sure Diane hadn't been drinking ^d wasn't under the influence of drugs.

"Why are you asking me all these questions?" she asked ^ond. "Has there been an accident?"