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She became pregnant in early 1974 and gave birth to a girl, Christie, on October 10. It was during this time that Diane developed a fascination with her ability to create life, a sense of power she had never experienced before. After Christie's birth, however, her life reverted to its usual mundane ways. Diane became pregnant again the following year and another daughter, Cheryl Lynn, arrived January 26, 1976. She would later claim Steve wasn't necessarily happy about the children, that "I wasn't allowed to have children unless he agreed to it, so I got pregnant without his permission." Steve however accused his wife of being a "lousy mother" who neglected the kids' well-being. It had become apparent that Diane got more of an emotional release from the pregnancy itself than actually caring for a child once it was born.

Diane became pregnant again a few months after Cheryl's birth, but decided to abort it. After seeing pictures of aborted fetuses at an anti-abortion display at a local fair in 1977, she regretted her decision. "At that time I was led to believe a six week old fetus was nothing more than a blob of mucus." Diane tried to take the girls and run away from home a few times, usually staying with relatives but Steve always tracked her down. The marriage was unhappy but soldiered on and Diane continued to be upset that she was not getting whatever it was that she expected from life. Steve got a vasectomy during this time. No matter, if Diane couldn't get another baby out of him she would get it from someone else.

In 1978, the Downses moved to Mesa where both Steve and Diane found work at a mobile home manufacturer. There she met and seduced a co-worker named Mark Sager. Diane became pregnant again in the spring of 1979. Steve was again not pleased, knowing for sure that the baby couldn't be his, but he grudgingly accepted it and Danny arrived on December 29. Nonetheless, this was the final straw for their marriage and they divorced several months later. Diane quickly moved in with Mark Sager and she became increasingly rebellious. She liked to work and dump the children off on any babysitter she could find. One sitter told a disturbing tale - "Diane put everything before those kids. If Danny wanted attention she would push him away, but the worst thing was one time I caught Cheryl jumping on the bed and I said that was not permitted. I made her sit in a chair and think about it. Cheryl sat quietly for a while and then she looked up. 'Do you have a gun here?' 'Of course not. Why' 'I want to shoot myself. My mom says I'm bad.'"

Diane began working at the post office in Chandler in 1981 and began seeing a married co-worker, who to her dismay, treated it as nothing more than a casual affair and soon dumped her. She requested a transfer to Oregon to be closer to her parents, who were now living in Springfield, and became a letter carrier for Cottage Grove. During this time Downs also decided to become a surrogate mother for another woman unable to conceive. She gave birth to a girl named Jennifer on May 8, 1982, who was immediately handed over to the parents.

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May 19, 1983, a Thursday. It was a warm spring evening when the staff at McKenzie-Willamette Hospital, who had been having a quiet day without much happening, were startled by a shiny new red Nissan Pulsar with Arizona plates pulling into the emergency drop-off, the driver frantically pounding on the horn. The night crew at the hospital knew something big was happening. A young blonde woman dashed inside, waving her arm and gesticulating wildly. "Somebody just shot my kids!" she yelled. The receptionist, Judy Patterson, almost instinctually picked up the phone and called police. Nurses Rose Martin and Shelby Day stepped outside and peered into the car. They could see blood splatters and three young children, one in the front passenger seat, two in the back. It was obvious that they'd been shot at close range. The one in the front seat, a blonde-haired girl about 7-8 they guessed, another girl, perhaps 9, and a boy not older than 3.

Emergency personnel rushed to get the three youngsters in intensive care. The two younger ones were alive but their breathing was labored; the boy gasped for air. The older girl in the front seat was unresponsive and beyond all help. She was pronounced dead shortly after being brought into the hospital. Only later would they be identified as Christie, Cheryl, and Danny Downs, ages 8, 7, and 3. For the time being all the hospital knew was that some monstrous individual had fired a gun at close range into three young children. They performed tracheotomies and hooked them up to heart-lung machines. Christie somehow survived major blood loss, momentary stoppage of her heart, and delicate surgery. Danny seemed stable but could be paralyzed.

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The staff then asked their mother who would possibly want to do this? Diane Downs didn't seem to have an answer. She told the receptionist that they'd been driving home from a friend's house in Marcola when a man with bushy hair flagged them down on an isolated stretch of road. She stopped to see what he wanted, whereupon he pulled a gun out and shot her children. Springfield and Lane County police put out an alert; evidently some madman was on the loose in the area. The search focused on the vicinity of Marcola and Old Mohawk Road where Diane claimed the shooting happened, a remote, rural location. Sgt. Robin Rutherford was the first lawman to talk to Diana at the hospital. She had taken a gunshot to her left arm which she said came from trying to fight off the gunman. Downs seemed unusually collected and unworried given everything that had happened, and Rutherford asked her to point out exactly where this shooting occurred.

She led police to a location where two rural roads converged, between the Mohawk River and a field of wild phlox. Not a great location to pull over for a stranger in the dead of the night. When Diane was brought back to the hospital, she learned that Cheryl was dead and the others in critical condition. She seemed oddly unconcerned though; when told Danny might live, she replied "You mean the bullet missed his heart? Gee whiz!" Detectives who spoke with Downs found her to be the calmest and most unworried mother who'd just lost a child they'd ever seen. One detective, who had the amusing name of Dick Tracy, said she was "very rational considering what she'd undergone." His partner Doug Welch also thought Downs's behavior was unusual. The detectives asked Downs for some basic information about herself and the children, as well as events leading up to the shooting.

So far it was known that the children were shot with a .22 weapon, a handgun being more likely. Powder burns on them indicated that they were shot at very close range, especially the deceased Cheryl. There was a lot of blood inside the car, suggesting the gun was fired from the driver's side, matching Diane's account that he shot them through that window. After obtaining info on Downs's background, place of residence, and place of employment, they asked her to recreate what had happened.

She said that on May 19, her and the kids ate a quick dinner at their duplex house on 1352 Q Street in Springfield, and headed to a co-worker's house on Sunderman Road. The friend, Heather Plourd, had supposedly intended to buy a horse and Diane wanted to show her an ad in a newspaper for horse rentals. She didn't happen to have Plourd's phone number so she figured she would drive there and deliver the newspaper in person. It would also let the kids get some fresh air and exercise. After bringing Plourd the paper, she decided to take Old Mohawk Road to the main highway and that the kids might like the scenic Oregon countryside. After turning onto Old Mohawk, she saw the gunman waving for help. He was a white man in his late 20s, 5'9", of medium build, dark hair, a shag-wavy cut, and stubble for a beard. He wore a Levi jacket and an off-color T-shirt.

Downs then said she stopped and the gunman produced a pistol and ordered her to hand over her car keys. She refused, so he aimed the gun inside the car and shot the children. He then tried to grab her keys, but she resisted him. Downs got back into the car, he fired again, grazing her arm, and she immediately floored it and headed for the hospital, seeing that the children were hurt.

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Tracy thought something was off about Downs's statement. The medical report for her arm wound stated that the gunshot entered the left forearm, smashed through the radial bone, broke in half, and exited, leaving two smaller wounds. Tracy considered that this all sounded a lot like killers who inflicted a self-wound to make it look an assailant had attacked them. However, he was not going to accuse Downs of anything until the case had progressed along more. In the meantime, she agreed to let police search her home and admitted that she owned two firearms--a .38 pistol she carried for protection on her mail route and a .22 rifle for home safety.

Police prepared to have Downs's car taken in for examination by forensics techs. In the morgue, Sgt. Jon Peckels photographed the deceased Cheryl. Detective Ray Poole collected the children's bloodied clothes. All lawmen assigned to the case knew there was a lot of work ahead of them, but they weren't going to slack off on a case like this.

Diane was eventually allowed into the intensive care unit to see Christie once her condition had stabilized a bit. She held her hand and said "I love you..." in the most oddly detached tone the hospital staff had ever seen. A detective named Paul Alton, who was also accompanying them, saw that Christie's eyes almost bulged from her head when she saw her mother approaching. She looked deeply afraid of her. Alton noticed that Christie's pulse had been reading 104 on the heart rate monitor when they first entered the room, but when her mother held her hand, it jumped to 147. Other officers visited the Plourds to see if Diane's story about going to their house was true. Heather Plourd said it was and Diane had delivered her the newspaper ad about horses just as she said she did.

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In Downs's house police confiscated several items of interest, including a diary, her Glenfield .22 rifle, and a box of shells matching the ones removed from the children's bodies. Several framed photographs were sitting on top of the TV set; one showed a young bearded man and Tracy knew Diane had called a man in Arizona, supposedly an ex-boyfriend, at the hospital. Apparently she felt the need to call him and tell him what had happened before telling the children's father. The detective wondered if the man in the photo was the man she'd called on the phone.

Fred Hugi of the DA's staff instantly knew something smelled rotten in Denmark. Something bad had happened on that rural road in Lane County, and it appeared to not have gone down the way Diane claimed it did. Although a relative newbie of an investigator, Hugi nonetheless thought the facts didn't add up. Normally a stoic, unemotional man, he was almost moved to tears at the sight of Christie and Danny hooked up to the hospital machines. He also knew Paul Alton had seen Christie react to her mother's presence with panic rather than being happy to see her. Hugi ordered police to guard their hospital rooms around the clock and for a child psychologist to visit Christie in the hope that when she was sufficiently recovered, she might tell what had happened.

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Over the next few days, Diane changed her story slightly. Each time she was asked to recount the shooting, she offered different variations of where the gunman stood when he shot, and her own actions around him. Doug Welch went down to Arizona to talk to Steve Downs and he told him Diane in fact had three guns, including a .22 handgun which she never mentioned. Steve was a friendly guy more than willing to talk and apparently glad to be rid of his wife, whom he said was a cheater. He was currently working as an electrical contractor in Mesa and enjoying bachelor life. Steve said he had no hard feelings towards Diane and they still talked on the phone sometimes, though usually not about much more than the kids. He seemed genuinely upset to learn that they'd been shot, hoped Christie and Danny would be ok, and that he would like to fly to Oregon and visit them as soon as he could.

When Welch asked who Diane had called in Arizona, Steve, not at all surprised at the question, immediately replied that it was the co-worker she had an affair with before leaving for Oregon. Their fling had ended after a few months but Diane continued to be obsessed with him. Welch then asked about any guns they owned and what she took with her to Oregon. Steve said Diane had a .22 rifle, .38 revolver, and .22 Ruger Mark IV nine shot semiautomatic pistol. She used to do target shooting at a range in Chandler. Welch asked what Diane needed the guns for and Steve replied that as a woman, she felt she needed protection on her mail route. The detective finally asked an obvious question. "Steve, would your ex-wife harm your kids in order to get her boyfriend back?" Steve looked surprised. "No way. She loves those kids," he replied.

Nobody in the DA's office, especially Fred Hugi, seriously believed a random maniac had shot Diane Downs's kids. Paul Alton felt that nothing in her story seemed to add up. First she visited Heather Plourd, then took the kids on a sightseeing trip along Old Mohawk Road although didn't seem to be a lot to see out there late at night. How did the shooter know she was there? If he was following her in his own car he could have tailed her onto Old Mohawk, but she said he was just standing in the road waving her down. How did he get there? Supposing his main aim was to steal Diane's car. Why then wouldn't he just shoot her? What purpose would shooting the children serve?

Oregon state police investigator James Pex completed the examination of Diane's Nissan. He found several .22 U-shell copper casings in there. None of the gunshots had hit any part of the vehicle; five rounds were fired and all went into the children's bodies. Blood smeared the side door of the front seat where Cheryl had fallen after being shot and pools of blood stained the back seat where Danny and Christie were. But the driver's side had no blood at all. If Diane was shot as she got out of the car, she would have instinctively grabbed the wound with her other hand, which would have blood on it, and then as she drove off she'd also get blood on the steering wheel. Further, there was no powder residue anywhere on the driver's side, only on the passenger's side and the back seat. When all was added up, it suggested strongly that the gunman had been sitting in the driver's seat, and that Diane shot herself just before reaching the hospital.

The gun was not found anywhere near the area of the shooting, although ejected casings from a spent .22 weapon were found nearby. Divers also searched the Mohawk River and failed to find a gun down there, but the river tended to run rapidly in springtime as melting snow pack from the mountains dumped into it and it was quite likely that the gun was simply washed away by the current. Knowing they needed the gun to have a case, Hugi even took to searching the river himself but also came up empty-handed.

Hugi got even worse news when he heard that Christie had suffered a stroke; a blood clot caused by her injuries traveled up into her brain and caused a blockage that affected the left hemisphere. Her speech was slurred and doctors worried the impairment might be permanent. However as Christie was a growing child, there was still a chance she might recover. Hugi was convinced to his soul that Diane was guilty as sin after reading her diary and letters, writings that showed a hopeless longing for a married man who had moved on from her; the letters suggested it was most likely his wife who had cut their affair short.

One letter caught Hugi's attention. It was dated April 21, slightly less than a month before the shooting, and read "What happened? I'm so confused. What could she have said or done to make you act this way? I spoke to you this morning for the last time. It broke my heart to hear you say 'don't call or write'. ...I still think of you as my best friend and my only lover, and you keep telling me to go away and find somebody else. You have got to be kidding..." Hugi couldn't prove it, but he had an unmistakeable feeling that Diane had shot her own children in an attempt to win her ex back. His wife could well be next for all anyone knew. In between references to masturbating herself to the thoughts of her one true love, she had a short poem. "I love you more/than could your wife/Yet it's brought sorrow/to my life/I just keep hoping/and hanging on/How much longer/can I be strong?" Before the weekend ended, he dispatched two of his investigators to Chandler, Arizona, to find out who this man of her wet dreams really was.

Cheryl's funeral was held on May 23. Christie and Danny also got out of the critical phase and were considered in stable condition. Christie had slurred speech and a paralyzed arm and Danny had a spinal cord injury and would probably be a quadraplegic for the rest of his life, but both children were going to live. Doug Welch and Paul Alton were sent to Arizona to find as much about Diane Downs's past as they could. Firstly, they knew for sure that neither Steve Downs or Diane's lover could have been the gunman; Steve had an airtight alibi for his whereabouts on May 18.

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They interviewed Diane's former co-workers at the Chandler post office all of whom had mixed opinions of her. None considered her an excellent worker or human being, some outright disliked her. Some of them thought she had a ruthless ambition they'd never seen before. Others just thought her confused and not knowing exactly what she wanted. When all was put together, it was apparent that Diane was a thickheaded woman with strong convictions, most badly confused or misplaced. She seduced any man who fancied her but wouldn't deliver skin mags to customers on her mail route as she said that was against her personal morals.

Welch and Alton talked with Diane's former lover at his house. He was gracious and willing to talk; he even insisted his wife be in the room with him as he discussed salacious details about his affair with Diane. She already knew everything and had since gotten over it, he said. Both were happy to move on and neither wanted anything to do with Diane. He explained that they'd met at work in late 1981 and that Diane, who dressed in midriff-baring shirts with no bra, was a tempting piece of ass, and so they had a series of sexual encounters in roadside motels. He expected the affair to be over on a few weeks or months, but as time passed it became clear that Diane didn't want to let him go; she even urged him to dump his wife for her.

Diane was harder to shake than he'd expected; he saw her at work all day and every night and it went on for months. As he talked, he gradually confirmed Welch and Alton's suspicions that Diane's children had gotten in the way of her pursuit of him. He was adamant that he would not be with her when the children were around as that would be wrong. After months of guilt, he finally told her it was over. Diane didn't take this graciously; in fact she threw an outright temper tantrum over it. He'd never seen anyone do this before. Diane followed him home, even when his wife was there. She pounded on the front door all night and harrassed him on the phone. Finally, when his wife came outside, Diane started telling her to her face about what to do with her husband, marriage etc. She slammed the door in her face. This all happened back in February. About a week later, Diane got transferred to Oregon but she continued to send her ex harrassing letters and phone calls. The detectives asked the boyfriend if Diane had any guns. He said he knew of her having a .22 handgun, but Diane still insisted she'd never owned such a weapon.

In June, Fred Hugi and the investigative team met to review their findings. They could not decide if they had enough probable cause to arrest Downs or not. Hugi would have liked to see her arrested, but worried about the damage that could be done to the county office's reputation if the case got thrown out pre-trial. The team believed in her guilt, but knew that without a gun or a credible witness, they didn't have a case and she would probably walk free. The evidence so far included retrieved shells, the blood splatters in Downs's car, an estimation of the bullet paths, Diane's diaries and letters, and the admission from Steve Downs and her former lover that she owned a .22 handgun she herself denied having. Jim Pex believed that the unused .22 rounds found in Diane's home had been put inside the same gun that shot the children, but without the weapon itself there was no real proof of it.

Diane claimed she floored it and drove the kids to the hospital in a panic when they were shot, but the hospital personnel said she arrived there at about 10:48 PM. Heather Plourd estimated that she left her house at 9:48. The shooting then must have happened at 10:15 to give Diane enough time to regain her senses, see what condition the kids were in, and then drive to the hospital by 10:48. But a witness named Joe Inman claimed that about 10:20, he saw her car crawling along Old Mohawk Road at a very low speed, under 10 mph. He said she didn't look like she was in any kind of hurry.

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In the meantime, Judge Greg Foote had Christie and Danny put in the custody of the state child services bureau which prevented Diane from seeing them. That she felt she was being treated like a criminal was, in reality, a nose-thumb by Hugi after she violently threatened to remove the children from the hospital and take them away if detectives wouldn't stop harrassing her. Danny was still unable to leave the hospital so police would guard his room until he was recovered enough, then be put in a foster home. Christie was taken to an undisclosed location. During the summer months, bad news came down for the investigators. The sheriff's office experienced a significant budget cut--Paul Alton was laid off and Doug Welch and another investigator named Kurt West told they would be let go in a month. In fact the entire team was laid off or reassigned elsewhere.

Over late 1983 and early '84, Downs was becoming a media star. A few news outlets distrusted her but most believed she was a damsel in distress being unfairly persecuted out of lawmen's frustration with not being able to find the mysterious gunman. As Downs bore something of a physical resemblance to Princess Diana, she became much feted by media along the West Coast. A few skeptical papers called her "Princess Die." Downs continued to express her indignation that her kids had been taken from her and whisked off to parts unknown and she whined to the press that she was misunderstood, bullied, and harrassed. Fred Hugi was not impressed and to that end he invited Welch and West to do all they could in the time remaining before they got laid off.

Diane called for a truce and hoped to explain her side of the story and tell additional info she'd never divulged before. The detectives initially bought into it but quickly realized they were being manipulated. She said the gunman might have been someone she knew as he'd addressed her by her name. This bit of info would have drastically altered the entire case, but the detectives began to believe it was a con job. They let her have with everything they had. Why did she wait all this to tell them? She had no answer. Was this man an acquaintance from Oregon or Arizona? She didn't know. Why would he want to kill her kids? She didn't know. Did she haul it to the hospital when they were shot or did she dawdle a while? She didn't know. Why didn't she try to stop the gunman from shooting her kids. She didn't know that either. Finally, Welch and West asked her point blank: Did you shoot them because they were interfering with your love life? At that point, Downs had had enough. She called them a string of expletives and ended the interview.

And then it happened. Downs became pregnant again from one of her favorite studs. She told a reporter that she missed her children; if she couldn't get them back, she might at least experience the feel of motherhood again. Watching on TV, Fred Hugi grumbled that it might also be a way to get her out of the electric chair.

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While this was going on, Paula Krogdahl, the counselor assigned to psychologically rehabiliate Christie, was making good progress. The 8 year old was learning how to talk again and regain her self-awareness. Krogdahl proceeded gently and for a long time did not directly bring up the murder. Instead, she asked Christie to talk about her family life and her mother. She admitted that Diane beat her and her siblings on a regular basis. After Krogdahl felt that enough progress had been made, she was prepared to start asking about May 18. "Was there anyone there that night you didn't know?" "No." "Were Danny and Cheryl crying?" "No." "Why wasn't Cheryl crying?" "She was dead." Finally, Krogdahl asked the million dollar question. "Do you know who was shooting?" "I think..." Christie began, but she was unable to finish the sentence so Krogdahl decided to let her go for now.

Fred Hugi was assured by all the experts that he had enough evidence for a case now, but it still wouldn't be easy. He had to take all the disparate fragments of evidence and assemble them into a narrative a jury would believe. It was now February 1984, nine months since the shooting. Numerous persons of interest had been interviewed and a grand jury finally decided to indict Diane on one count of first degree murder, two counts of attempted murder, and two charges of criminal assault. On February 28, Diane was arrested in the parking lot of the post office as she stepped out of her car to go to work. The case was national news, attracting reporters from as far away as the East Coast. Most journalists were professional; a few were tabloid reporters who swarmed over Springfield, Oregon and Chandler, Arizona trying to find anyone who had ever met Diane Downs. Her father Wes Frederickson was interviewed by the Eugene Register-Guard. He said if she did actually do it, she deserved to pay the price, but he would still love his daughter all the same.

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Downs chose as her defense attorney the brilliant and much regarded Melvin Belli, who in fact had been specifically interested in taking the case on due to its high profile. However, Belli had personal commitments he couldn't put on hold and insisted the trial be delayed until late summer if he was to represent her, but the courts wouldn't agree. Fred Hugi was impatient after all this time and delaying it further might cause more delays while Diane gave birth. And so Melvin Belli was off the table and she replaced him with a different, folksy attorney named Jim Jagger.

The trial opened at Lane County Courthouse in Eugene on May 10, featuring nine jurors and presided over by Judge Foote, the man who had taken the surviving Downs children out of their mother's custody. Fred Hugi opened the proceedings by declaring that Downs had shot her kids over her obsession with a married man. He read aloud her salacious diary entries, including her descriptions of pleasuring herself. Jim Jagger argued that although his client had an obsession, that didn't mean she would have killed her children for i. He argued that she was a neglected child, sexually abused by her father, and that led to her promiscuity. But that didn't make her a murderer. On May 14, the jurors were driven out to the scene of the crime and then to the impound lot where Diane's Nissan sat.

When the trial resumed, the state presented witnesses, mainly McKenzie-Willamette Hospital personnel. Nurse Rose Martin told of how strangely Downs had acted. When they reported on the doctors' progress working on Christie and Danny, she laughed and said "Only the best for my kids!" and "I got good insurance." Dr. John Mackey described the children's wounds and how Diane was so calm and cool he couldn't believe she was really their mother. X-ray tech Carleen Elbridge said that Diane seemed mainly concerned about being seen in public without her makeup.

The testimony dragged on. Finally, Christie herself was brought into the courtroom. She was nervous and had tears welling in her eyes. Fred Hugi didn't want to have to do this, but he had no other choice. Hugi was measured and gentle with Christie as he questioned her. He asked if she knew the difference between the truth and a lie, and said it was important that she tell the truth here. Christie nodded and said she understood. Hugi asked her some basic questions about herself and her family before he began asking about May 18, starting with the trip to Heather Plourd's house. As the 3rd grader trembled a bit, Hugi continued his questioning. "She leaned over into the back seat and shot Danny." "What happened then? What happened after Danny got shot?" Christie began crying a bit.

Hugi paused and rephrased his question; it was apparent that the court already knew the answer to it. "Do you remember when you got shot?" "Yes." "Who shot you?" "My mom."

After that, the trial was basically an anticlimax. Jim Jagger cross-examined Christie, who insisted she'd never been coached or told to lie; Jagger implied that others had told her about what happened the night of the shooting and led her to believe her mother did it. Diane took the stand in her own defense and denied all the charges against her, insisting she would never put any man above them. On June 14, the jury found Diane Downs guilty on all counts. Oregon did not then have a death penalty statute, but Judge Foote gave her the maximum possible sentence - life plus 50 years for using a deadly weapon in the commission of a crime. Between the verdict and sentencing, the pregnant Diane gave birth to a daughter she named Amy. The girl's father wanted nothing to do with her so she was taken in by a foster family.

Downs began serving her sentence at Oregon Women's Correctional Center in Salem. As things would have it, that was not the last anyone heard from her and she still had one more big stunt left in her.

On July 11, 1987, three years into her sentence, Downs escaped the prison by climbing two 18 foot fences, hid under a pickup truck, and waited several minutes before walking away. She had apparently worn multiple layers of clothing to protect herself from the barbed wire atop the fence. A striped shirt was found under the truck where she had hid. An alarm attached to the fence sounded at 8:40 AM, but nobody paid any attention to it as the alarm was often set off by a bird or other external disturbances. A nurse arriving at the prison 15 minutes later saw a suspicious woman crawl out from under a truck and walk away. She believed it was Diane Downs, who was AWOL after the prison did an emergency roll call.

A massive multi-state manhunt was launched, which ended July 21, ironically only a few miles from where it started. Crime lab techs analyzed indentations on a piece of paper in her cell, which proved to have an address of a house and a map showing its location. The house was watched by police for two days, a warrant was served, and inside they found Diane with four men. The men were arrested for obstruction of justice. In November, Downs was transferred to a maximum security prison in distant New Jersey as part of a swap for two Garden State female prisoners.

Downs was not eligible for parole until 2009, by which time she was 53 years old and had since been transferred from New Jersey to a California prison. At this parole hearing, she continued to maintain her innocence. The parole board noted that she had never shown any remorse for her actions and continued to tell new and increasingly unbelievable accounts of the shooting, saying that two men wearing ski masks attacked her, drug dealers, or rogue cops. She was rejected again for parole in 2010 and 2020.

Christie and Danny were adopted by Fred Hugi and his wife rather than their natural father; Steve Downs was judged to not have the ability to care for children with their mental and physical impairments. Both made a partial recovery from their injuries; Danny remained wheelchair-bound while Christie was left with a permanent speech impairment.

>>18166144
>>18166150
>>18166157
holy god, this fucking trailer trash bitch. fuck you you worthless child killing waste of life.

Should have been tied to horses and slowly pulled apart.

RIP Cheryl you deserved better.

>>18166205
how did this horse face convince so many dudes to fuck her? get some standards for fuck's sake.

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Is this thread some long Norm MacDonald joke?

>>18166144
>was raised by Christtards
>was molested by her dad
>horribly murders or tries to murder her own kids
Atheists 1, Christians 0

I'm glad the other two kids turned out somewhat ok and were able to live as normal lives as they could under the circumstances.

from her interviews, one gets the impression she liked making a child more than caring for it

She is being considered for parole for the 4th time now. The board has until the end of the month to render its decision.

>>18166487
You'll be happy to know that Susan Smith was denied parole last year.

>>18166462
Apparently Christie has two kids. May the bitch never get to see her grandchildren.

>>18166268
>Between the verdict and sentencing, the pregnant Diane gave birth to a daughter she named Amy. The girl's father wanted nothing to do with her so she was taken in by a foster family.
This daughter was interviewed on Oprah years ago. Man she's fucking ugly.

>>18166157
She actually appeared on a TV documentary about surrogate mothers.

>>18166170
it's an ugly 80s tin can, mostly popular with girls. fucking hunk of scrap.

>>18166261
>On February 28, Diane was arrested in the parking lot of the post office as she stepped out of her car to go to work.

wait how'd she do that if her car was in a police impound lot?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmv4m53qRlY

Wow damn she really was gross white trash.

>>18166413
Pathetic dudes who knew they couldn't do any better.

>>18166227
>Hugi got even worse news when he heard that Christie had suffered a stroke; a blood clot caused by her injuries traveled up into her brain and caused a blockage that affected the left hemisphere
I believe this is incorrect and what actually happened was that low blood pressure from blood loss caused an artery to partially collapse.

>>18166593
>"in two years time I had 10 separate lovers and less than half of them were married"
Just fucking stop.

>>18166283
My take on why Steve didn't adopt the kids is that he had solid reason to believe they weren't actually his. I mean, Danny obviously wasn't but the girls might not have been either.

>>18166743
this kind of woman is best used as a masturbation aid, you don't actually marry her

>>18166760
she's a psycho killer you idiot

>>18166776
well it's not like the guys she fucked knew that or anything

>>18166776
What is this is?

>>18166144
There was a made-for-TV movie about Diane Downs from 1989 starring Farrah Fawcett. It does take a few creative liberties, for one thing Fawcett (most likely cast for her physical resemblance to Downs) was 41 when the movie was shot and a bit old for the character as Downs was in her late 20s at the time, and as she's shooting the kids "Hungry Like The Wolf" is playing on the car radio. That song had been out a year in May '83 and probably wouldn't be still in rotation, maybe "Billie Jean" or "Flashdance" would have been more appropriate.

>>18166810
they made a movie about Barbara Graham as well (from crime anon's last thread)

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>>18166750
Here's Steve. You tell me. He does not look like either Christie or Cheryl at all. Both girls look very similar to each other and probably had the same father, but that father wasn't Steve.

>>18166844
Cheryl was probably Steve's because she was conceived not long after they got married and she did kind of look like him. Christie is more iffy.

I get the impression that Steve didn't actually want any kids and Diane tricked him by not taking birth control.

>>18166870
I did not know that about him. Wow those kids had the cards stacked against them from the get go.

the daughter Diane gave birth to after her arrest did write her in prison but broke off further contact after the self-serving replies she sent back. the woman seems to have no remorse or a shred of self-awareness at all.

According to Ann Rule's book about this case, the girls were definitely Steve's, Danny obviously wasn't but he accepted him as his own anyway. Steve and Diane did not get along very well and had frequent, violent arguments with each other. However Diane was the one who mostly abused the kids, especially Cheryl who seems to have gotten the worst of it. So tl;dr the entire house was a shitshow, but Steve didn't abuse the kids as he was too focused on his drama with Diane although the kids became pawns in their fights. As for Diane, she was the "Cheryl" of her family growing up, her dad molested her and her mom was basically AWOL.

>>18166879
Yeh she's not getting out on parole because the parole board expects you to have some kind of remorse or understanding of what you did, and she hasn't demonstrated she'll ever be able to do that.

>>18166870
be that as it may, Steve really didn't have the ability to care for the two surviving children. Danny of course was permanently paralyzed from the waist down and Christie mostly recovered but was left with a speech impediment and difficulty using her left arm.

>>18166743
Even most notorious roasties can't manage this body count. That aside, how? That bitch was seriously not attractive.

>>18166980
Yeah they're gay people who have a faux-marriage to hide it. What about it?

According to Ann Rule's book Steve just didn't feel he had what it took to raise Christy and Danny. Their grandparents apparently didn't want to take them either.

>>18167004
>Their grandparents apparently didn't want to take them either.
probably for the best seeing as to how Diane's dad molested her

>>18167009
Diane later retracted that accusation and claimed she made it up, but I believe her dad actually did it and it explains a lot of her behavior.

it gets worse. the girls were Steve's of course the boy wasn't. she apparently thought the girls were too ugly and she fucked and got knocked up from another dude because she wanted better looking kids.

>>18167004
Steve never did see the kids in the hospital like he promised. Their grandparents did visit for like 5 minutes and were like "'K..." and left. Fred Hugi spent a lot of time with them, he and his wife decided to adopt them because they couldn't have their own kids due to a medical condition.

>>18166593
Still, Steve did seem awfully detached in that interview. "Her kids." Your kids, dude?

>>18167048
i'm not sure about it. you know when they interview you for these Dateline or 60 Minutes segments they love heavily editing them to make you look like they want you to look.

I knew a chick who loved being pregnant and caring for babies, as long as they were babies. Once they got older, started walking and talking, had more demanding needs, etc. she couldn't deal with them anymore. She especially didn't like when they started talking. Her and her husband eventually split and he got custody. I suspect Diane Downs was exactly like that.

>>18167048
he was tricked into having them. he said he either didn't want kids period or didn't want them without discussing it with Diane first. she purposely didn't take birth control. i don't understand why /pol/tards who fantasize about having 10 kids with their Aryan tradwife don't get it, but some men aren't suitable fathers and know it too.

>>18167092
>>18167048
From what I understand, basically Steve was never that serious about their relationship and saw it as a teenage fling, and they just got married to have sex in a more legitimate way. I believe he probably expected to move on from her soon but after she got pregnant he was kind of stuck, and their relationship was ever increasing levels of toxic. He was probably just happy to be rid of her.

>>18167066
always wondered why my cousin would keep getting pregnant but never actually seemed to care about the kids after they were born

>>18167111
Supposing even if Steve had tried to get custody of them, good luck in that era. The 70s-80s was back when courts would virtually _never_ side with the dad in a custody dispute. It's a little better today but that was peak women's lib era. Once Diane fucked off to Oregon staying in contact with her would have been difficult too; there was no Internet or anything only expensive long distance phone calls.

>>18166873
>>18167034
Adopting normal kids is one thing, adopting kids with Christie and Danny's physical issues was quite another and a lot of people wouldn't be up to it. Dealing with a kid who is literally a quadraplegic is a challenge most can't handle.

>>18166810
Two points. Diane was in fact listening to that song in the car when she shot the kids, Christie said she was. Second, they played "Hungry Like The Wolf" in the courtroom during the trial and she was actually bopping her head to it. It is used in the Small Sacrifices movie, though a cover version so they didn't have to pay to use the original song.

oh, great performance by Farrah Fawcett in the movie even if you want to quibble that she was in her 40s and a fair bit older than the real Diane Downs was

>>18166524
Becky didn't learn for some time who her real mother was, apparently she found Ann Rule's book in the library and read read it. She also had a rough teenage life, got into alcohol and drugs, got knocked up twice by boyfriends, gave away one kid for adoption because she just couldn't care for it.

And then she wrote Diane in prison and got a bunch of narcissistic bullshit replies back, unhappy that Becky didn't make the conversation mainly about her instead of them. After that she kept insisting she was innocent, framed, etc and that the people who shot Cheryl/Christie/Danny might come back and get her too so she better watch her back. After that Becky stopped writing her. She did turn her life around and became a responsible mother to her remaining child.

>>18166593
this woman is a new level of creepy i never even thought possible

>>18167191
she's never going to admit she did it, she isn't capable of it. i think she's actually started to believe her own bullshit over the years.

Why were boomers like this?

>>18167030
>she apparently thought the girls were too ugly and she fucked and got knocked up from another dude because she wanted better looking kids.

>>18166150
I mean she wasn't wrong. They were some ugly-looking goofy goobers.

another story I heard is that Steve wasn't necessarily against having kids but he really only wanted a son and didn't care to have daughters

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Well, hell.

Some sucker got her car at a used lot after the police department auctioned it off I'm sure. Imagine driving a fucking murder car.

>>18167276
she hasn't aged badly for decades of being in prison, eating the shitty food there, and having lesbian prison sex

>>18167309
nor has she changed her haircut at any time in the last 40 years

This woman is sick and evil it's only too bad Oregon didn't have the death penalty when she did this.

>>18167379
god I hope my brain doesn't fossilize and I am mentally stuck in my teens when I'm old, not a good way to live life

sneed

>>18168822
Accurate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b50NHapJMcE

This...this...is truly something else. Astonishing how in all this time she hasn't developed a shred of maturity or self-awareness. And, oh wow, her mom is still alive at 88 apparently.

>>18166170
>The receptionist, Judy Patterson, almost instinctually picked up the phone and called police.
Plagiarism phraseology

>>18169179
>>18167276
>>18167309
>"I'm in good shape for my age, don't take any medications not even aspirin."
There is no god.

this woman is fucking evil, man

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>>18166150
>It was during this time that Diane developed a fascination with her ability to create life, a sense of power she had never experienced before.

If she had been born a few decades later, she could have satisfied herself with just one kid and made a fortune off being a surrogate (they only require that you pop out one to prove that your parts work) and basically been every pregnancy fetishist's wet dream

>>18167066
>I knew a chick who loved being pregnant

Got her number?

>>18166955
Its easier for women to get laid than it is for men. Modern society allows women too many options instead of being forced to marry Edgar the one armed fortress bridge guard.

>>18169515
maybe God is giving her more time to repent.

>>18169515
Sneed, Ivan

>>18167248
maybe they would grow into their jawlines like she did

>>18169984
>If she had been born a few decades later, she could have satisfied herself with just one kid and made a fortune off being a surrogate

>>18166157
Already taken care of.

>>18167248
She was trading up. Thought her kids had meh genetics and she was going to off them and fuck some Chad she imagined would give her superior kids.

>>18166185
>>18166170
oh dear...

>>18169179
I had to stop, just listening to her bullshit gave me a migraine.

>>18166205
I don't know how desperate you'd have to be to hit this 4/10 horse face, but apparently many dudes did.

>>18166198
She wasn't even supposed to be visiting Christie in the hospital, she ignored police orders to stay away from her during the investigation. Christie's therapist believed that unfortunate visit delayed her recuperation from the shooting by weeks. The judge was going to jail Diane as punishment but then she got pregnant and managed to sucker him into letting her off.

>>18172160
absolute bullshit. fuck this cuck judge.

>>18166144
would

>>18174424
SAAR

>>18174424
Get some standards.

>>18166234
A 7/10 by trailer park standards I guess.

>>18169179
i get that she was 27 when the crime happened and everyone in their 20s is a shallow, narcissistic piece of shit but you're supposed to grow out of that at some point