The Night of May 19th, 1983

Could Diane’s obsession with a married man be the possible motive? We explore her former marriage and life leading up to the shooting of the Downs children. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, they were just catastrophic injuries, and it's really amazing
that all three didn't die that night. One Sheryl, as
far as we know, was dead on arrival at McKenzie
Allowment Hospital. The staff there was clearly not expecting this.
They hear a car honking, and somebody rents out there's
a mom or a woman standing by a car saying,

(00:20):
somebody shot my kids. So the doctors are dispatched out
there and nurses and sort of horrified to find one, two,
and then a third kid, and they had been shot
in the chest. Um any doctor would tell you that
there's just a few more catastrophic injuries socially for a
young child than to have gunshots to the chest. And

(00:43):
I remember dying at one of her news conferences saying
if I had shot my kids, would I had not
have done a good job of it. And I remember
thinking not too long after that, you did a tremendous job.
If that was what you wanted to do, you did
a great job. The story of the crime begins on

(01:16):
the evening of May Diane Downs and her three children
are riding along Mohawk Road. Dana Times was a reporter
for The Orgonian at the time a correspondent for Eugene County.
He describes the area around the shooting. It's a really
pretty area. It's kind of a gateway to a couple
of different river valleys. The Mackenzie River is really the

(01:39):
defining water feature that comes down through there, with a
couple of other branches going off of it. A lot
of farming activity and ranches up there, some cattle, a
lot of grass, very green, very emerald. That's very pretty.
There were probably homes spaced out or maybe every half
mile or so, sort of the way that you would
have anticipated homesteaders, you know, and fifty years before that,

(02:01):
everyone having enough land to do what if they wanted
to do. Diane was on the road at ten pm
on a school night with her three young children. According
to Diane, her kids like to sightsee and they would
just drive for enjoyment. She stands by her story even
now after several decades in jail. She claims she saw
a stranger in the road who flagged her down and

(02:22):
she stopped to help. She was portraying herself as a
good Samaritan. But even if you're going to do that,
my sons would be maybe you just stay on the
road and you roll you window down a little bit
and say, what's the problem. But she pulled off the road,
turn off the car, how the keys in her hand,
and gets out of the car to go talk to

(02:44):
this guy. It just seemed like a natural thing to do,
according to Diane. The man then attacked her and her family,
an attempt to steal the car, a quote unquote carjacking
gone wrong. In her telling, this guy wants the car,
so what does he do. It's dark out, the headlights

(03:05):
are shining forward. He walks up to the car, leans
in and fires five to seven bullets at sleeping kids.
The man then apparently fled, and Diane, having sustained a
gunshot wound to her forearm, wrapped the arm in a

(03:26):
towel and drove to a nearby hospital. But according to
a witness, she wasn't exactly driving with a sense of urgency.
One thing that has struck me then, as has always
struck me, was the testimony of somebody who was driving
behind her on Old Mohawk Road as she was heading
toward the hospital, and she claimed she had driven as
fast as she could um and yet her arm was

(03:48):
wrapped in a towel in a perfectly folded towel that
had been placed obviously in her car for some reason.
So she was as a clinical narcissist, which is one
of the three personality disorders that was diagnosed for her.
The driver of that car said, we were going five
to seven miles an hour. I would have passed, but
there was a double yellow line and it was just

(04:10):
pretty dark and curvy out there, so he didn't feel
safe doing that. That identified the Arizona plate that hadn't
been changed yet, and again, you know that's not enough
on its own, but it was just a very very
telling point to me in terms of just the logic
of the situation. It's not that far from where the
shooting occurred to Mackenzie Lamment Hospital where she ended up
with the kids. What is the distance from the location

(04:30):
of the shooting to the hospital, Oh, it's it's I'm
sure it's less than two miles, and a lot of
that's rural, so you can you can move along at
a pretty good clip if you need to get there.
Diane's brother, James, maintains that Diane had an excuse for
driving slowly and that she still made it as quickly
as possible. When I spoke to him about it, he
was quick to point out that the witness who saw

(04:51):
her driving wasn't behind her the entire way to the hospital.
So one question I did have is why was she
driving her vehicle very slowly on the way to the
hospital after the incident? Real hard to describe that one. Basically, UM,
I think Edman was his name. UM said he was
following her on Old Mohawk Road. The following period took

(05:14):
place for about two maybe three miles, right, Um, So
the shooting was two miles away from where, and he
followed her on Curby Roads for two miles. You must remember,
really truly must remember. She was just shot. She just
had her child in the back seat, was gurgling with

(05:36):
blood because she got tough shot in the lung right
her lung and collapsed and she couldn't breathe, and she
had to maybe tend with the child in the back
seat and getting her to roll over so she would
stop gurgling. Her other boy in the back seat had
been shot in the chest and he was also in
the midst of dying. She was maybe reaching over to
the child that was laying on the floor in saying,

(05:56):
Cheryl Saryl, Caryl, Cheryl, I wasn't there, right, But I
mean it's like maybe she was obviously wrapping her arm
with a towel. You know, I don't know. I can't
really talk about the towel. I don't have any idea,
but I don't know why she was driving slow. But
if you can imagine being shot and it's he only

(06:19):
followed her, if we're about I don't really know, be
honest with that two or three miles, but I know
it wasn't a long way. And yes, indeed she was
going slow, and she almost drove off the road and
things like that. But then what's important from my point
of view is that when she got to that stop
sign where she went right and he went left, that

(06:40):
it's a fifteen minute drive to the hospital from that point, right,
she did it in ten minutes. So yes, on the
wine he road, she was driving slow right, tending to
her that just been murdered and shot. Right. And but
once she got to the open road and where all

(07:01):
the kids were, I'm gonna use the word stabilize um
in her mind, then she went to the right. She
drove to the hospital, and she got there and fastened
the police could get there the next day. I think
she was saying it took something like twenty minutes and
her telling to get there. It just wouldn't have taken
that long, especially if you were hurrying along with your
shot kids. No matter which version you believe. In the end,

(07:35):
when Diane arrived at the hospital, the injuries to her
children were catastrophic. Cheryl, her seven year old daughter, was
dead on arrival, Danny three was paralyzed, and Christie eight
has suffered a stroke due to massive blood loss and
was unable to speak. James recalls the moment he heard
about the shootings. Let's go back to the night of
the shooting. How did you hear the news during California.

(08:00):
I want to know your experience. What happened that night? Um,
I was sleeping. My dad called me at two thirty
in the morning and said, your sister has been attacked.
She's been shot. I wondered whether or not James believed
her ex husband had anything to do with it. Even
when talking about this, James can't resist starting to put

(08:21):
the pieces into place to demonstrate his sister's innocence. What
did your mind go to? Did you think Steve what
did you think? Um? I didn't think any of that. Um,
I really just I stayed in the moment, and I
said what my dad said, Yeah, your sister has been shot. No,
I didn't think anybody the state actually thought. Steve, that's

(08:42):
a really valid question. And Diane says that the state,
Doug Welch, actually came to her and he said that, UM,
we know, we don't. We know you didn't do this.
And Steve has given us three alibis, and none of
those three alibis turned out to be any good. So
we really want to look at him, but we need

(09:04):
you to testify against him. We need you to say
it was him, so we can do that. And she
says it wasn't him. You know, if it was him,
I would be telling you. But it wasn't him. I mean,
if it was two thirds in the morning and somebody

(09:25):
just attacked my sister, and so I was like, I
just started thinking about getting up there to be with family,
and that's about all. That's all my mind was, just
you know, I need to go. I need to leave.
James also states that Diane was tested for gunpowder residue
and none was found, which he also attempts to explain.

(09:48):
James has spent years trying to prove Diane's innocence and
has a counter argument for nearly everything that might potentially
point to Diane's guilt. The shooter that killed Cheryl, the
shooter that wounded Christie and wounded Danny and shot my sister.
When he was killing the family, he got in her car.

(10:11):
The inside of that car was covered with blood spatter.
The inside of that car had gunpowder residue, and my
sister didn't have any on her. The driver's seat was
clear or void of any gunpowder residue and blood spowder
where the shooter would have been sitting or kneeling when

(10:34):
he shot them. And so you come back and you
put it all together, it's like, well, she didn't really
have the gun, so somebody else did. She didn't have
any gunpowder residue on her. Somebody else did. She didn't
have any blood spatter on her, even though it was
all over the car, so somebody else did. It's worth

(10:58):
noting that while Diane has to negative for a gunshot
residue or GSR, the bullets were from a twenty two
caliber gun. We spoke to forensic scientists Jim Packs who
worked on the Diane Downs case. He explains more about
the residue test. It's my understanding that the deputy who
was took the initial report at the hospital swabbed here

(11:22):
for for G S R and at the time we
would send those to a consulting laboratory for analysis. But
in this case, you have to keep in mind that
when we talk about swabbing person's hands for G s are,
what you're looking for are two rare earth elements that
are not common in nature. One is bury um and

(11:43):
one is antimony. These are intentionally placed in the primers
of center fire cartridges. A twenty two is a rim fire.
There is no bury m an antimony in a rim
fire cartridge, so there is nothing to find. Diane also

(12:11):
sustained an injury at close range, so at testing her
for lead would have been somewhat inconclusive because she was
and what's referred to as the lead cloud. Hex explains, Uh, No,
that's a when a weapon is discharged and the bullet
exits the barrel, there is a cloud of vaporized gases

(12:31):
that contained these trace elements and uh a little bit
of trace element lead. And in centerfire cases he would
find your bariing and animony deposited from this cloud and
the fact that she was shot herself. Um, you would
have found lead on her hands anyway. Despite this, James

(12:51):
stands by his theory that Diane was not the shooter
that night. Actually, it's a funny thing. There was a
picture of her Diane at the hospital when she was
sitting there, and you notice that it's been destroyed at
this point. Actually they destroyed it, and you can notice
that her fingers are not full of dirt where she
might have buried something. Her hands are not clean where

(13:14):
she might have washed her hands. Because there's been a
lot of theories out there that well, she did this
and that she washed up. My sister was shot in
the left arm. The common theory out there is that
when you get wounded in the left arm, it must
be self inflicted. Um. If if you self inflict her,
when do you have I'm stippling around? Um, where the

(13:37):
gun was next to your arm? There was no stipling
on her arm. And more importantly, when you talk about
her left arm being broken, it didn't have a hole
in it. She had one inch of bone that was
removed from her arm where it shattered her bone. And
so if you say, well, she didn't have any gunpowder
residue on her because she washed her hands, She didn't

(13:59):
have an blood spotter on it because she washed up. Well,
it's impossible. If you've ever broken your arm, you would
know it would be impossible to move your arm. It's
impossible to lift anything with your arm. It's in possible
to do anything with your arm, especially when you have
a one in bone shattering. It was not a flesh moone,

(14:23):
it was a traumatic, traumatic injury to her arm. Not
long after Diane and her children's arrival at the hospital,
she became the main suspect. However, no arrest or charges
were brought against Diane right away. I think that the
press got the impression after about four or five days
that the police were the ones who are perhaps looking

(14:45):
at Diane. There hadn't many other suspects. Police began to
gather evidence to build their case. Officers were dispatched to
search diane Springfield home and look for any potential clues
or evidence, and found some not so set clues that
might point to Diane. They did get a break a
little bit when they searched Diane's apartment in Springfield and

(15:09):
found um bullets that appeared to have very similar markings
on them from the extractor mechanism in a gun that
moves bullets through the chamber. The rifle they found in
her apartment was the twenty two caliber rifle, but so
the bullets were also twenty two caliber that they would
also fit into a handgun. After examination, the rifle was

(15:34):
determined not to be the same weapon that fired the
bullets at the crime scene. The bullets and the rifle, however,
had markings as if they had been ejected from another weapon,
possibly a pistol, and then loaded into the rifle. Jim
Pex explains, we looked under the bed and there was
a rifle, twenty two rifle under the bed. First thought was, oh,

(15:55):
is this a possible murder weapon, and so we seize
the rival and I took it back to the laboratory
after we finished processing, and the rifle had cartridges in
the tubular magazine and there were nine of them. That's
a significant number because a lot of caliber semi automatic

(16:19):
pistols have nine cartridges in the magazine, and it's not
uncommon for people uh when they're through shooting and they
still have ammunition in the weapon to take it out
and uh maybe use it in an in another weapon,
which appeared to be the case here, because there weren't
any markings on these cartridges that they had worked through

(16:40):
the action of the twenty two rifles. There were only
markings from some other weapon. This wasn't enough to charge
Diane with the crime. There was also something else strange
about Diane's apartment. It was nearly empty. She had just
moved there, but it was very spare, very spartan inside
beds for the kids. But when police who went there,

(17:04):
as soon as they could look at the refrigerator, there
was nothing there, nothing to eat, um, a real shortage
of comfortable and warm, suitable clothes for the kids. I
think Diane's closet was probably the best stocked thing in
the house, and besides that, no books, nowhere to really sit.
There was a TV because she liked to watch TV,
so she was taking care of her her own needs there,

(17:26):
but apparently nobody else's were being a thought about. Diane's brother, James,
offers his own explanation. He believes the lack of possessions
was a product of circumstance and not a sign of
a bad mother. My mom and dad drove to Arizona,
UM with a pickup truck. That's sort of you know,
it's as part of the state's theory ums that her

(17:50):
house was she was a bad mother. She had a
house in Oregon and there was no furniture in it.
There was no food in the refrigerator or mom and
dad lived about, you know, four blocks away, and the
kids were always over there because my sister was always working.
There was no furniture because they just got there six
weeks previous with a pickup truck. They didn't her house

(18:12):
just burned down four months before that. Do you remember
what she packed up in that pickup? Just personal items.
I was not there because my mom and dad drove
down there and did that. Um, I was in California working,
But yeah, I did not. I was not there. I
just thought it was just a pick up, so you
can't have too much. But yeah, there was. Her house

(18:35):
was very sparse. They did, however, find Diane's journals and
letters to a lover in Arizona, which helped paint a
picture of who she was and what investigators would later
argue could serve as a motive. One thing she had
kind of pointed them out, like, hey, I've got all
these diaries. The writings in the first diary were all

(18:57):
about the guy than Arizona, long poems. She wrote voluminously.
The guy in Arizona was Robert Nick Knickerbocker. I did
not know Nick existed until the state went to her
house the night of the shooting and collected her diary letters.
She gave them permission to go to her apartment and

(19:18):
get the letters or get I'm sorry to go get
um evidence that might help. I don't know why they
want to go to her house to get evidence, but
they went to her house to get evidence, and some
of that evidence was I'll call them diary letters. They
weren't really in a diary. They were just handwritten letters.
The letters were unmailed, James claims, but there were, according
to law enforcement accounts, tons of journals where Diane had

(19:41):
written nearly every day about Nick. Basically told Nick, you know,
it's like, you know, I wish that you were here.
I wish that I was with you. Um, I wish
things were different. I want you, you know, I you know,
I never read the letters, but they were just love letters,
you know. I mean, there's no doubt they were love
letters and that was their motive. James theory is that

(20:05):
the letters were just away for Diane to vent privately,
and the fact that they were never mailed, he believed,
shows that they weren't an act of a woman obsessed
with a man, despite the claims to the contrary. Well,
I mean, it's it's really just, um, I think about
a situation. It had been six weeks since she left Arizona.
She hadn't called him, she hadn't emailed him. There was

(20:27):
no emails, she hadn't written him, you know, there was
letters written to him but never mailed. It also came
out that Nick may have halfheartedly proposed to her at
some point. It seemed to go back and forth a
little bit. He did, I think I proposed, but maybe

(20:48):
a kind of a backhanded kind of way, and like, well, yeah,
sure that might be interesting, but nothing that would last
for more than a day perhaps. But when Diane heard that,
she was just convinced that, well, he wants to be
with me. And if I just kind of hang in there,
I think I can make this work. As for the
question of why the relationship with Nick ended, a person

(21:10):
she clearly cared for, The belief is that Diane's promiscuity
led to her contracting and STD that she later gave
to Nick, who subsequently gave it to his wife. He
basically had to tell her, I think that I have
this and you probably have it. Now you got to
get tested and here's where I got it. And so
he had to sort of admit that, and I think

(21:32):
his wife ultimately forgave him. And I think that was
kind of a turning point where it's not that he
never saw Diane again or was wasn't physical with her again, perhaps,
but it did seem to mark something of a of
a break in their relationship. Even with Diane supposedly over
the relationship with Nick, the police still believed he was

(21:53):
a motive behind the killing, and would eventually push that
narrative during Diane's trial. A phone call that apparently took
place between Nick and the police didn't help to dissuade
them the motive. Yes. I read a police report and
and the police reported shows a conversation between when the
police called him tell him what had happened. Nick, They says,

(22:16):
you know, basically, Diane um and the kids have been shot.
And his first words were, I cannot believe she did
this for me, I cannot believe she did this. While

(22:41):
Diane's children were hospitalized for their injuries, Diane herself was
also undergoing surgery for the injuries to her arm. It
was during this time that full custody of Diane's children
was taken away, So she was initially hospitalized. Herself released
really soon after that, but she still had visitation right.
She was still the mom with right to go see

(23:03):
her kids. But we learned at some point that Christie's
heart rate was was just spiking on the monitor when
her mom came into the room. Again, some of this
is hindsight, but you now know that she sees the
person who killed her sister and shot her and her
brother is right in the room with her. That a

(23:24):
little little scary. Also, the county authorities moved to limit
Diane's access to the kids after hospital staff were reporting
that Christie appeared to be very traumatized when her mom
was in the room. And I think that within four
or five days the police not have any any solid

(23:45):
leads on any other suspects. Were feeling that we need
to limit access that Diane had to her kids for
their safety, for their mental stability and all kinds of things.
So they did had file orders that were approved Biling
County judge barring Diane from having access to our kids.

(24:07):
According to James, there's a more complicated story behind why
Diane's custody was taken away. I know that they had
police sitting outside the hospital room. Um, whenever we went
to as it it's like, you know, we were turned away,
and so I don't know why. Well I do know why,
because it's real obvious, whine. It's because they had an

(24:28):
agenda that they had defend. There were armed police outside
the room because if there was a shooter on the
leuse who had tried to shoot them once, perhaps that
could happen again. So they still had to take precautions.
It wasn't a situation where they were dismissing any possibility
that there was anybody else out there who could have

(24:49):
intended this. I mean, you have a little eight year
old girl who was just brutally attacked, she had a stroke,
her sister's death, and her brother is not even in
the same hospital. There's two hospitals in the Springfield area
and her brothers that are different hospital. Dan was apparently
upset that the siblings were separated and felt that they

(25:09):
should be in the same hospital, and that was one
of Diane's major contentions as to put them together so
they can be a family together. One of the doctors
had been given temporary guardianship over the children, and according
to James, believed that Diane's custy should be taken away
because she was trying to take Christie out of the hospital.
And she was trying to take Christie out of the hospital.

(25:32):
She was trying to get her to the other hospital
or vice versa, get Danny to come to Christie's hospital
so they could be in the same room and they
could get better together. And that is that's what I
was trying to get out, is the fact that they
they said that she's trying to get christ take Christie
out of the hospital before it's time. She was trying
to take Christie out of the hospital to get her
with her brother. So it was the day when she

(25:54):
was due to have surgery that they ended up taking
her rights away because she can't be court on that
day as her feelings um to defend herself basically, and
if you're not there to defend yourself, then you lose
but one has to wonder what the real motivation was
behind keeping the children protected from Diane, especially Christie. Christie

(26:18):
suffered a stroke from blood loss and was unable to
speak for months following the shooting. But aside from Diane herself,
Christie was the only other probable witness to whoever actually
did the shooting. It took a long time for charges
to finally be leveled against Diane, and I think that
everyone knew that her older daughter, Christie, who had survived

(26:42):
her I think Christie was eight when she was shot,
her younger sister Cheryl, who died with seven, and their
brother Danny was three. The police were very clear in saying,
we haven't found a murder weapon yet. So the search
went on for that, and they spent hundred of hours
with divers deployed in local rivers where Diane said that

(27:06):
the shooting had occurred. She had pulled over right next
to the Little Mohawk River, and so the assumption was, well,
she tossed the gun in there. Nothing was ever found.
So it became really clear that if anything was going
to develop, it's probably gonna be short of any other
kind of physical evidence. It's going to be on Christie

(27:28):
getting well enough that she could tell what happened that night.
On the next episode of Happy Face Presents to Face,
Diane sticks to her story that a bushy hair stranger
is the shooter, going as far as to record a
play by play reenactment video for police, but a surprise

(27:50):
past encounter with her ex husband before the shooting could
hold the evidence detectives need to charge Diane. Meanwhile, month
by month, Christie, survivor and daughter of Diane, it's getting
stronger to share in court what really happened the night
of Our executive producer is Ben Bolin, Melissa Moore is

(28:13):
our co executive producer, Maya Cole is our primary producer,
and Paul Decant is our supervising producer. Our story editor
is Matt Riddle. Research assistance from Sam t Garden. Featured
music by a Dream Tent. Happy Vas Presents to Face
is a production of I Heart Media.