I never imagined, until I saw a picture and story Tuesday, that Elizabeth Diane Downs might ever have a chance to get out of prison. But under Oregon law in June 1983, when Downs was sentenced to life plus 55 years in prison for shooting her three young children, killing one, she is in fact eligible for a hearing next week before the Oregon Parole Board. I have interviewed a lot of criminals and watched a lot of trials in more than 25 years of Oregon journalism. None was colder, more calculating, crueler, than Diane Downs.
I first met Downs two days after she drove her car up to the emergency room at McKenzie-Willamette Hospital in Springfield, her 7-year-old daughter, Cheryl, mortally wounded in the front seat, and her 8-year-old daughter Christie, and 3-year-old Danny, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds in the back seat. The doctors and nurses worked heroically all that night to save Christie and Danny, but the little boy was partially paralyzed.
I was a 21-year-old reporter for The Springfield News, working with a more experienced reporter, Eric Mortenson, who is also now at The Oregonian. Downs told the same story she told the hospital staff and the sheriff's detectives, that a "bushy-haired stranger" had flagged down her car on a remote road between Marcola and Springfield, and opened fire on the family when Downs refused to give him her keys. She was weirdly calm, matter of fact, in the hospital, and again that next day.
Most people believed her then. Some still do. It is very hard to accept that a mother would take her kids out to ride horses at a friend's house in the afternoon, then stop the car on the way home, turn around in her seat and gun them down.
But that's what happened. It took months and months for authorities to build the case against Diane Downs, and all the while she was spinning her story to reporters and the public. She was quick, smart, an amazing liar. She telephoned reporters all the time, sometimes at our homes, complaining to us about the police investigation and the Children's Services Division, which had custody of her children, and refused to allow her to see them.
Between the shooting and her eventual arrest, Downs even had an affair, reportedly with a journalist, and showed up for a contempt of court hearing pregnant.
When she was finally arrested and charged with shooting her children, she used a phone at the Lane County Jail to call several reporters again. She telephoned the morning after her arrest and complained to me about my story in the paper, and told me that she had new information about the case. When I went to the jail to see her, speaking into a telephone on the other side of the thick glass in the visitor's area, the first thing she said was, "How does my hair look?" Then she proceeded to repeat more or less the same bogus story of the bushy-haired stranger that shot her children.
She did it. She thought her children stood between her and a life with an Arizona man, a fellow mail carrier that she had had an affair with, but who refused to leave his wife and come to Oregon to be with her. Elizabeth Diane Downs shot her three children because she thought that if they were out of her way, she could have the relationship she wanted.
That's the woman who will be seeking parole at a hearing in Salem next Tuesday.
By the way she was denied parole.
I first met Downs two days after she drove her car up to the emergency room at McKenzie-Willamette Hospital in Springfield, her 7-year-old daughter, Cheryl, mortally wounded in the front seat, and her 8-year-old daughter Christie, and 3-year-old Danny, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds in the back seat. The doctors and nurses worked heroically all that night to save Christie and Danny, but the little boy was partially paralyzed.
I was a 21-year-old reporter for The Springfield News, working with a more experienced reporter, Eric Mortenson, who is also now at The Oregonian. Downs told the same story she told the hospital staff and the sheriff's detectives, that a "bushy-haired stranger" had flagged down her car on a remote road between Marcola and Springfield, and opened fire on the family when Downs refused to give him her keys. She was weirdly calm, matter of fact, in the hospital, and again that next day.
Most people believed her then. Some still do. It is very hard to accept that a mother would take her kids out to ride horses at a friend's house in the afternoon, then stop the car on the way home, turn around in her seat and gun them down.
But that's what happened. It took months and months for authorities to build the case against Diane Downs, and all the while she was spinning her story to reporters and the public. She was quick, smart, an amazing liar. She telephoned reporters all the time, sometimes at our homes, complaining to us about the police investigation and the Children's Services Division, which had custody of her children, and refused to allow her to see them.
Between the shooting and her eventual arrest, Downs even had an affair, reportedly with a journalist, and showed up for a contempt of court hearing pregnant.
When she was finally arrested and charged with shooting her children, she used a phone at the Lane County Jail to call several reporters again. She telephoned the morning after her arrest and complained to me about my story in the paper, and told me that she had new information about the case. When I went to the jail to see her, speaking into a telephone on the other side of the thick glass in the visitor's area, the first thing she said was, "How does my hair look?" Then she proceeded to repeat more or less the same bogus story of the bushy-haired stranger that shot her children.
She did it. She thought her children stood between her and a life with an Arizona man, a fellow mail carrier that she had had an affair with, but who refused to leave his wife and come to Oregon to be with her. Elizabeth Diane Downs shot her three children because she thought that if they were out of her way, she could have the relationship she wanted.
That's the woman who will be seeking parole at a hearing in Salem next Tuesday.
By the way she was denied parole.
