Diane Schuler: The Wrong Way Home

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. July twenty sixth, two thousand

(00:30):
and nine was the perfect summer day. It was a Sunday,
and the highway was packed with families returning to the
city from weekend trips upstate. Station wagons stuffed with coolers,
camping equipment, and screaming children vied for their piece of
the road. Frances Bagley and his wife Jean were one

(00:51):
of the cars traveling on the freeway that day. They
were returning home from a trip up to Delaware County
when they noticed a red forward Windstar driving behind them.
The car got closer and closer until it was right
on their tail. The driver flashed her lights and honked repeatedly.

(01:13):
Jean braced herself for a crash. As the vehicle came
within a hard stopping distance of their back bumper. The
Windstar swerved to the right. It tried to pull up
onto the grassy shoulder and pass them. As the minivan
edged off the road, the driver seemed to reconsider and
dove back into traffic. There was something oddly precise about

(01:37):
the driver's movements. She moved in and out of the lanes,
almost as if she were doing it with a purpose.
The Bagglies watched in horror as the other cars swerved
out of her way, allowing the red minivan to zigzag
its way down the crowded highway. Jean and Frances didn't
catch a glimpse of the driver's face as she sped

(01:59):
by them, but there were plenty of other witnesses who did.
What they described was a middle aged woman with an
oddly placid expression. She sat in the driver's seat with
her back straight and her hands gripping the steering wheel.
At ten and two, she looked forward, unblinking, focusing intently

(02:20):
on the road in front of her. As one witness
would later put it, she didn't stop, she didn't slow down,
she didn't move. I thought it was some one who
was dead set on killing themselves. Welcome to the greatest

(02:54):
true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay mac braer.
To day's episode, We're calling Diane Schuller the Wrong Way Home.
It's the story of an ordinary suburban mom who did
something extraordinarily terrible and how the people who were left
to pick up the pieces found themselves, asking the same

(03:16):
question over and over again, why more after the break?

(03:38):
When I listen to true chrome stories, even when I
watch very fictional horror movies, I want an actual ending,
no ambiguous was it all a dream? Closing scenes in
fiction that's lazy writing. Nothing will get me to quit
a TV show faster than a cliffhanger ending. It's not

(04:00):
a cliffhanger. You just didn't finish the story, and that
means you don't believe in your show enough to trust
that your audience will return if you give them an
answer to the question you've been posing all along. What
they don't tell you unless you're in a writing class,
is that real life doesn't have that tidy causality. Event

(04:23):
A doesn't ever directly cause event B, and all conclusions
have been chosen. You have to transpose the meaning when
you tell the story, otherwise it's just a list of
shit that happened. The example I always used when teaching

(04:43):
creative writing was this, real life, the queen died and
then the king died. In writing, the queen died and
then the king died of grief. We add the causality
when we tell us story, whether we mean to or not,

(05:04):
fiction or nonfiction. The telling of the story is what
makes the cause and effect. It's why the answer to
who done it is so easy to spot after the fact.
We know what happened, so in retrospect we can build
the narrative with relevant details and leave out almost everything else.

(05:28):
On the other hand, journalism has to put the lead
at the top. Leaving it till the end implies too much,
and a plot is a creative device. Basically, there are
no true stories. Life is too subjective to have three acts,
or even five. If you want to be fatalistic, you

(05:51):
could say that everything that happens is random. We get
to decide the meaning based on how we tell the story,
like Joan Diddyon said, and we tell ourselves stories in
order to live. So we avoided telling this story about
Diane Shuller for a while because the causality is so

(06:11):
subjective that it seems to not exist. There are too
many theories that leave too much unanswered, and that bothers me.
But we're telling it now because this is an important
story and it needs a conclusion. So bear with me
as I walk you through what happened, because it did happen.
Maybe you'll find a narrative thread that I couldn't see.

(06:43):
When people describe Diane Schuller, the person they remember was
a domestic machine. Diane took care of everything. She made
sure the car got washed, the gutters got cleaned, and
the kids got picked up from soccer practice, and she
did it all with a smile on her face, without complaint.

(07:08):
Diane was born in nineteen seventy three in Floral Park,
New York. Floral Park is a quiet suburb on the
eastern edge of Long Island. It's the kind of small
East Coast town where everyone knows everyone, where people know
their roles and they don't question them. Diane's mother left
the family when she was only nine. Though she was

(07:29):
the youngest child, Diane was the girl of the house,
and that meant that the role of mother figure passed
to her. She became the one who cleaned the kitchen
and did the laundry, who took care of her three
older brothers. If Diane resented all that responsibility, she did
not show it. In fact, she seemed to take to
the role. Diane liked being in control. Floral Park is

(07:52):
the kind of town where most women are married with
children by their early twenties, but Diane never dated much.
For a while, it must have seemed like the whole
marriage and family thing just wasn't going to happen for her,
so Diane focused on other things. She spent a few
years attending Nassau Community College, but dropped out after getting
an administrative job at an East Coast television network called Cablevision.

(08:16):
It was exactly the kind of move that an organized, efficient,
take charge sort of person might make. At Cablevision, there
was room for Diane to grow. Before long, she wasn't
the assistant anymore. Someone else was assisting her. She moved
up to the role of corporate accounting executive, and soon
she was making six figures. Her life was going well,

(08:38):
and then at a friend's wedding in nineteen ninety six,
Diane met Danny. Daniel Schuler was handsome and fun. He
loved camping and fishing, and he was on his way
to becoming a public safety officer for the Nassau County

(09:01):
Public Parks Department. But more important than any of that,
he and Diane just clicked from the start. In one interview,
Danny's mother described how Diane made all the decisions. Danny
was like her eldest son. Look, it takes all kinds
and if it worked for them, it worked for them.
Diane and Danny bought a beige split level with a

(09:22):
big yard and a small town of West Babylon. It
was just twenty miles away from the house where Diane
grew up. In two thousand and four, Diane gave birth
to a son, Brian, and then two years later she
had a daughter, Aaron. Diane settled into the role of matriarch,
the same role she'd always played, only now it was
her own house and her own family. Diane made sure

(09:46):
that her kids never had to worry about their mother
abandoning them. The house in West Babylon seemed like a
happy one. There were parties and cookouts in the big backyard,
picture perfect Christmases and Easter dinners, and Diane presided over

(10:08):
all of it. She was the one who decorated the
house and sent out the Christmas cards. She made Valentines
for her brothers and nieces, photo albums for their in laws.
She made most of the money, paid the bills, cooked dinner,
and took the kids into bed, all without a word
of complaint. After all, Diane liked being in charge. She

(10:30):
was good at it, and she had to be good
at it. In July of two thousand and nine, Danny
and Diane planned to take their two kids and three
nieces on a camping trip up to Hunter Lake Campground
in the Catskills. The nieces were the three daughters of

(10:54):
Diane's older brother, Warren Hants. There was eight year old Emma,
seven year old Allison, and five year old Katie. Diane
was always close with her brother Warren and his wife Jackie.
The two families often spent time together, but the Hants
adults were not exactly camping people, which same, so they

(11:16):
decided to sit the trip out. Diane was going to
borrow Jackie's larger car and drive all five children to
the campsite on her own. On Friday, Danny left early
to set up the camp site. A few hours later,
Diane drove to the Hanses to pick up their three girls.
Diane and the kids piled into Jackie's red Ford Windstar,

(11:39):
and Jackie Hans waved goodbye as they drove away. Jackie
was prone to anxiety, so perhaps it wasn't surprising that
she felt a pang of nerves when she learned Warren
and Diane's father would not be joining the trip. She
dismissed the thought as irrational. The campsite was only a

(12:01):
few hours away, and besides, Diane was one of the
most responsible people she knew. Jackie could trust Diane. The

(12:26):
last weekend of July two thousand and nine was a
beautiful one. Danny, Diane, and the kids spent it fishing, hiking,
and swimming in the lake. When Sunday rolled around, they
were tired, happy, and ready to go home. According to Danny,
he woke up around six am and went down to
the dock to clean out his boat. Diane was up

(12:49):
around seven cleaning, packing, and doing what needed to be
done so they could hit the road before traffic got bad.
By nine point thirty they were ready to leave. Danny
got into his truck with the dog. Diane and the
kids followed behind in the minivan. The owner of the
campground bid them goodbye. She remembered hugging Diane, and everything

(13:10):
seemed perfectly normal in a way. This moment when Danny
and Diane's path diverged is where the mystery begins. What
exactly happened after that point is anyone's guess. While many
of the events of July twenty sixth, two thousand and
nine remain a mystery, there are some things we can

(13:34):
piece together from the various people who encountered Diane Schuler
that day. Danny headed straight home and put in a
load of laundry, while Diane and the kids stopped for
breakfast at a McDonald's about fifteen minutes from the campsite.
Diane bought breakfast for the kids and coffee and an
orange juice for herself. The employees at the McDonald's remembered

(13:57):
Diane her son Brian, wanted to order chicken nuggets, but
they didn't serve them that early, so Diane asked to
speak to a manager. It seems like Diane was unusual
for and I want to speak to the manager type,
because according to the employees, she was perfectly reasonable. She
was polite, sane, and sober, just determined to get some

(14:17):
chicken nuggets for her son. Diane and the kids were
in and out of the McDonald's within half an hour,
no small feat for a single adult with five children.
The next record of their journey comes from a gas
station at eleven Diane stopped at a Sonoko and went
into the Minimore to ask if they stalked tylan al

(14:38):
or aspirin. The clerk told her they didn't have anything,
and Diane left without incident. The clerk remembers her seeming normal,
just like everyone else. There's a video of Diane and

(15:00):
walking into the mini mart, grainy footage of her striding
confidently into the store and surveying the aisles of chips
and candy. She does seem normal, but then you can
never quite know what's going on under the surface. At
eleven thirty seven, Emma, the oldest of Diane's nieces, called

(15:20):
her father on Diane's cell. She told him they hit
traffic and would be getting home later than planned. Then,
at twelve oh eight pm, Jackie Hans called Diane to
ask what time they'd be arriving. It was an ordinary conversation.
They chatted about logistics, Diane asked about getting tickets for

(15:42):
a play that Emma was in. After a few minutes,
they hung up. Jackie wasn't worried, as far as she knew,
there was no reason to be. But the next time
Emma called her mother, there was very clear cause for concern.
When Jackie picked up. Emma said there's something wrong with
Aunt Diane. Jackie could hear her other daughters crying in

(16:05):
the background. She asked Emma what was going on, but
the eight year old was too upset to give her
a real answer. Before Jackie could get any more information,
Diane took the phone from Emma. She told Jackie that
the kids were just playing around, being silly. Diane's words
sounded slurred as she continued talking. Jackie noticed that her

(16:29):
sentences were incoherent. Jackie was growing increasingly panicked. She asked
Diane to give the phone back to Emma, but Diane
ignored her. Soon the call was cut off. Jackie's husband
and Diane's brother, Warren, arrived home just as the call ended.
He called Diane back right away. They stayed on the

(16:51):
phone for eight minutes as Diane drove through a toll
booth and then pulled over at a rest stop. Warren
told his sister not to go anywhere. Then he got
her to hand the phone back to Emma, who read
him the nearby road signs. Warren thought they must be
just beyond the tappan Zee Bridge, near the village of Terrytown.

(17:13):
It was only forty five minutes away. He told Diane
to stay where she was he was coming to get her.
That was the last time anyone ever spoke to Diane.
Half an hour after Warren left his house, calls flooded
into nine one one. There was a woman driving seventy
five miles an hour down the Taconic State Parkway and

(17:35):
she was going the wrong way. The north and southbound
lanes of Taconic State Parkway are separated by a wide,
grassy median. The road wasn't made for cars going seventy
or eighty miles an hour, and it's obvious the narrow,

(17:59):
twisting highway has a reputation for being a scary road.
For whatever unknown reason. After the call with her brother,
Diane exited the freeway headed back north. She drove fifteen
miles in the opposite direction of her home before entering

(18:22):
the Taconic State Parkway at one thirty three pm via
an exit ramp. People who witnessed her driving said that
her expression was almost serene, that she drove in a
straight line without swerving or veering off course. Diane raced
down the two lane highway for almost two miles, unfazed

(18:45):
by the honking cars that lurched out of her way
as she barreled down on them. Finally, one of those
cars didn't make it out of her way. Guy Bastardi

(19:07):
was driving up to his sister's house in Yorktown Heights
for dinner along with his eighty one year old father
and a family friend. Seven miles from their destination, a
GMC driving in front of them swerved out of the
way to avoid Diane's minivan. There was no time to react.
Guy's car collided head on with Diane's minivan in a

(19:30):
blast of tearing metal. The Windstar rolled down the grassy
slope beside the highway and burst into flames. Guy bas
Stardi's car was flung in the opposite direction. It skidded
across the two lane freeway and was hit by the
stun driver of a Chevy Tracker. The occupants of that

(19:51):
car escaped with only minor injuries, but seven of the
nine people and the other two cars were killed on impact.
Five year old ca Katie was rushed to the hospital,
but she died soon after her arrival. The only survivor
was Diane's five year old son, Brian. The media frenzy

(20:11):
began almost immediately. By eleven PM, reporters arrived at the Bustardes' home.
The following morning, a media mob gathered outside the Hans's house.
Donations to the families came flooding in, including nearby restaurants
that provided food for the Hans girl's funeral. Thousands of

(20:31):
people attended the wake, and a local priest pulled strings
so that the girls could be buried right away alongside
their aunt and cousin. Reporters questioned whether there was enough
signage at the exit ramp. A few speculated that Diane
may have been trying to kill herself, but for the
most part, those covering the crash did not blame Diane.

(20:53):
She was painted as a loving and responsible parent. As
far as anyone could see. Diane was just as much
a victim as anyone else, which leaves the question why
did this happen? Maybe there weren't as many wrong way
signs as there could be, but there were signs. Why
didn't she try to pull off the road when she

(21:14):
realized she was going the wrong way? Why did she
go fifteen miles in the wrong direction? How did she
end up on the Taconic in the first place. As
the investigation proceeded, a different story started to emerge. Investigators
soon managed to track down witnesses who encountered the forward

(21:34):
Windstar earlier in the day. They spoke to one couple
who remembered seeing the car around eleven thirty am, just
half an hour after Diane was at the Sunoco station,
seeming perfectly normal. Several drivers saw the minivan honking, aggressively,
tailgating other cars, and zigzagging between the lanes of traffic. Then,

(21:56):
at eleven forty five, just fifteen minutes before that very
ordinary conversation with Jackie Hans, a couple reported seeing the
car pulled over by the side of the road. Diane
appeared to be standing beside it, vomiting into the grass.
Another couple reported a similar story from a half hour later.

(22:16):
Diane pulled over with her hands on her knees, apparently
throwing up. And there was another clue. After accident, reconstructionists
moved the seats from the minivan, they found a broken
vodka bottle. Then came the autopsy report. According to the report,
Diane's blood alcohol content was zero point one nine percent,

(22:40):
well past the legal limit of point zero eight. There
were six grams of undigested alcohol still in her stomach,
and a high level of tetrahydrocannabinol. That's THHC, the part
of pot that gets you high. The conclusion reached by
the medical examiner was that Diane consumed the equivalent of

(23:00):
ten drinks that day and smoked within an hour of
the crash. After the details of the autopsy came out,

(23:25):
the backlash was swift and fierce. People were furious with
Diane Schuler. The New York Post reported rumors that Diane
was a drinker and her marriage was on the rocks.
They claimed the campground where Danny and Diane took the
kids was a known party spot. Hateful messages from people
all over the country filled Danny's social media feed. The

(23:49):
Bustardi family thought Diane was a murderer and suspected that
Danny knew she was drinking. They wondered if the Hanses
could have known as well, if that was why they
drove to get Diane rather than immediately calling nine one one.
Danny was an ordinary guy, and suddenly he was thrust
into the spotlight. He needed someone to help him handle

(24:10):
the national media machine. Enter Dominic, Barbara Dominic, Barbara was
a Long Island lawyer famous for defending high profile clients.
At least at the time, that's what he was known for.
These days, he's remembered for his multiple arrests for extortion
and assault. Of everyone in this story, he's the only

(24:32):
one who strikes me as a true villain. Up until
he got involved, there was some tension between the Hanses
and Danny Schuler, but things got so much worse after
Dominick entered the picture. As Jackie hans put it, quote,
that's when the small rift between our families became a chasm.
On August sixth, Dominic called a press conference where a

(24:55):
deeply grieving Danny spoke about his late wife. He described
Diane as a perfect wife and mother, an innately responsible person,
and the love of his life. When he talked about Diane,
Danny's expression softened, and it was easy to believe that
he meant everything he said. But it definitely wasn't what

(25:16):
the grieving families wanted to hear, And what they found
especially infuriating was what he said at the end of
the press conference. He said, listen to this. My heart
is clear. She didn't drink. She's not an alcoholic did
you get that I go to bed every night knowing
my heart is clear. That sentence, more than any other,

(25:39):
enraged the Hands and Bustardi families, and it stoked the
media's fascination with the case. Over the next few weeks,
Dominic Barbara lined up a series of media appearances for
Danny and his sister in law, Jay Jay was married
to Danny's brother, but she was always close with Danny
and Diane, Aaron's godmother, and after the crash, she took

(26:03):
up the cause of being Diane's defender. Every interview only
seemed to make things worse for Danny's reputation and inflame
the animosity between the families. The Bustardes in particular, were
frustrated by the pace of the investigation into Danny's possible
knowledge of Diane's drinking. Once they learned that there would
be no grand jury hearing, the family decided to file

(26:25):
a civil suit against Diane's estate and Warren Hands. The
case against Warren Hants might seem uncalled for, but apparently
the Bustardes needed to include them in the case because
the mini van had belonged to Warren. Before the case
could go to court, Danny filed his own suit against
the State of New York and against Warren Hants. Danny

(26:50):
was more certain than ever that his wife had knowingly
drunk ten shots of vodka and then gotten into a
van with five children. Now claimed that the highway's poor
construction and lack of signage contributed to the accident, and
that the mini van Warren loaned Diane was in a
state of disrepair, making Warren quote vicariously liable. To me,

(27:15):
this lawsuit feels like the last grasp of a desperate man.
He was suing the state for building bad roads and
Warren for loaning them a faulty car. Danny was also
trying to get another medical examiner to exhume Diane's body,
and he wanted to retest the results from the toxicology report.
From what I can tell, there was nothing wrong with

(27:36):
the car, and the road had plenty of signs. Danny
did eventually get the toxicology results retested, and they came
back the same, But it didn't matter. All that mattered
was that Danny was doing anything and everything he could
to avoid facing the truth. There are plenty of theories

(28:02):
about why what happened happened, one of the most popular
theories will call the tooth absess theory. Dominic Barbara said
that about a year before the accident, Diane was having
severe tooth pain. She went to a dentist and was
scheduled for a root canal, but left the dentist's office

(28:22):
before the procedure could be completed. Diane didn't like accepting
help or admitting that she was in pain. She was
the kind of person who believed in toughing it out.
If she was still in pain after that visit to
the dentist, she didn't tell anyone, but that didn't mean
nobody noticed. In the weeks leading up to the accident,

(28:43):
friends and family members noticed Diane rubbing or holding her
lower jaw. If Diane did have an absessed tooth, and
if that infection spread to her brain, which I know terrifying,
it could have caused confusion and difficulty seeing. Maybe Diane,

(29:03):
in a state of delirium, grabbed the bottle of vodka
thinking it was water, or maybe she tried to use
it to numb the pain from the abscess. After all,
she did stop for pain relief at the Sunoco. I
don't understand this mentality at all. But some people believe
that being on no medication is a moral statement. I
again don't personally understand that at all, especially because if

(29:27):
you're around these people then you have to hear about
their discomfort. This martyrdom is for the final record, completely unnecessary,
because you are suffering for nothing. According to her friends
and family, Diane was definitely one of those people who
avoid medicine, and if she was trying to buy a
pain relief, then something was very wrong. This brings up

(29:48):
another of the theories about the crash, the idea that
Diane may have suffered some kind of stroke or aneurysm.
Most types of strokes would have been detected in the autopsy,
but there is one kind that doesn't cause permanent damage.
Dominic Barbara suggested that Diane could have suffered a transient
ischemic attack, a condition caused by a blockage of blood

(30:11):
flow to the brain. This kind of attack usually only
lasts for one or two minutes, but in very rare
cases it can last up to twenty four hours. It
can also cause confusion and disorientation. As with the tooth
absess theory, this attack could have caused Diane to drink
the vodka by mistake. These theories are both possible, but

(30:37):
they're not exactly plausible. They don't explain the marijuana in
Diane's system or the reason that the vodka bottle was
in the car in the first place. But there's one
explanation that stands out above all the others because it
does account for those things. That's the theory that Diane
struggled with a substance abuse problem. In this theory, Diane

(31:01):
didn't drink ten shots of vodka during that last hour
of the day. She'd been drinking since she stopped at
the McDonald's at ten am. She drank vodka because it
was easy to hide. And Diane always hid her problems.
She hid tooth pain and emotional pain. And if she
did have a drinking problem, I'm guessing she would have

(31:23):
hidden that too. If you subscribe to the theory of Ockham's
razor the idea that the simplest solution is the most
accurate solution, then yeah, she had a substance abuse problem.
And let's be honest here. As fun as it might be,
life is not an Agatha Christie novel. No Owl knocked

(31:43):
her down the staircase, and OJ did it in this
version of events, Diane drank throughout the day, but if
she did, no one agreed to it in court. In
twenty fourteen, all of the Taconic State lawsuits were settled privately,
they talk about the case died down, and the families

(32:04):
who had been impacted by the crash went back to
their separate lives. When we hear this story, we want
to think that there's some crazy explanation for Diane's behavior.

(32:28):
It's always hard to see someone in a caregiving role
as a killer, even if it is anavertent. We prefer
a story that portrays her as a victim rather than
the very complicated, damaged person she really was. But the
truth is there's no version of this story where Diane

(32:49):
isn't complicated. Thank you to Jackie Hans for her book

(33:13):
I'll See You Again. That book, along with the film
There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, was a great help
in writing this episode. Other sources include The Taconic Tragedy,
A Son Search for Truth by Genie Bustardi, and several
news articles. All of these sources are linked in our

(33:33):
show notes. If you want to learn more, join me
next week on the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever. Told
for the bizarre story of Rebecca Vance. Vance was a
woman whose beliefs took her deep into the conspiracy theory
rabbit hole. That rabbit hole led her, her sister, and
her teenage son into the Colorado wilderness and left them

(33:56):
there to die. And the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever
Told is a production of Diversion Audio. Your host is
me Mary Kay mcbraer and this episode was written by
Zoe Luisa Lewis. Our show is produced by Emma Dumouth

(34:20):
and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Our theme music is by
Tyler Cash. Executive produced by Scott Waxman.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Diane Schuler: The Wrong Way Home