Small Sacrifices (10 page)

"bled out." Such massive blood loss wreaks havoc with the body's chemistry. Moreover, she hadn't breathed at all for some time. By 1:30 on the afternoon of this first day, Christie had no longer been able to respond consistently to verbal commands no matter how hard she tried. Something was terribly wrong, something more than the bullet wounds in her chest. Becker told Hugi that Christie had had a stroke in the left side of her brain. No one could say yet what that might mean to her eventual recovery. Reluctantly, Hugi left the ICU once more. They needed him in the continuing search of the Downs duplex.

Dick Tracy and Doug Welch were still on duty, but they were too exhausted after being up thirty-six hours to be effective searchers at Diane's home. They stayed downstairs and logged items carefully into evidence as Hugi, Paul Alton, and other members of the DA's staff brought them downstairs.

Had there been something in Diane Downs's life before the evening of May 19 that set her up as a target? And would they find some lead to it here?

They found stacks of letters, cards (almost all of them addressed to Lew), newspaper clips, instructions on how to file for bankruptcy, and, surprisingly, a number of articles and papers on surrogate parenting. Diane had evidently been very interested in the process in which a woman can bear a baby for a childless couple through artificial insemination. Hugi found several documents bearing the letterhead of a psychologist in Arizona. Those "light help them understand Diane Downs's world up to now. Maybe. Maybe not.

Alton found a Montgomery Ward receipt for $21.09. It was dated a week earlier--payment in full for a brass unicorn. Curious about Welch's report that there was no edible food in the house, Hugi poked into the garbage can in the storage shed ^nd found a large ravioli can. The tomato sauce hadn't yet dried;

tms must have been what Diane and her kids had had for supper "st before they left for the drive out to Heather Plourd's.

Looking through the downstairs coat closet, he pulled out a ^d chiffon "baby-doll" nightgown with diamond-shaped sections

64 ANN RULE

cut away from strategic areas over the breasts and navel. Hugi wondered idly why it was downstairs instead of in a lingerie drawer.

Alton shouted from upstairs. He had found the .22 round that Tracy had taken from Diane's rifle and then overlooked in the wee hours of the previous morning--a copper-wash cartridge nestled in the folds of Diane's bedspread. It was head-stamped (7--just like some of the spent casings found at the shooting scene. There were thousands of .22 rounds with the same headstamp in the state of Oregon. Still, it was a coincidence.

They left the Downs duplex after 7:00 p.m., turning small mountains of possible evidence over to Jon Peckels for transport to the safety of the locked property room. It was only when they finally finished the search that Fred Hugi glanced at his list again to see what was next.

"CallJoanne."

It was a good thing he'd written it down. And a good thing that she understood the moment she heard his voice how obsessed he was already with this case. He picked her up, explaining that they were on their way to meet with Paula Krogdahl, and then he needed to go back to the hospital just once more that night.

Paula Krogdahl was the "P.K." on Fred Hugi's original list of things to do. He had a deal to offer Paula that she might well refuse.

Paula, an attractive dark-haired law student, had once worked for the Children's Services Division of the State of Oregon. Smiling, soft-spoken, Paula spoke to children. She knew instinctively how to hug and cuddle and make a frightened youngster feel safe. Danny and Christie had every reason not to feel safe, and Hugi wanted someone who might change that.

Knowing he had no funds to pay her, and that Paula probably needed her time away from her law studies to earn a living, Hugi plunged in anyway. ;'

"Paula, I've got a case I really need your help with, a case involving the shooting of three children. One child is dead; one child is going to live, but he's too little to help; the other child might know who shot them. But she needs someone she can learn

Sfllto trust. Ideally, I need you to be with them for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. There isn't any money i11 the DA's budget to pay you. It would have to be a volunteer

job . . ."

She stopped him, nodding. The three of them--Joanne Hugi, Fred, and Paula--went back to the hospital together.

Steve Downs was there, sleeping in a chair between his two surviving children.

Diane wasn't there, nor were her parents.

Joanne and Fred Hugi and Paula Krogdahl sat for hours,

watching Christie and Danny sleep. Long after midnight they pulled themselves away.

Hugi didn't sleep. He tossed all night, thinking, worrying. Paul Alton didn't sleep either. He kept remembering something he'd observed during the afternoon when he was spelling

Hugi beside Christie's bed. Alton was there the first time Diane came to visit her daughter. He expected a tearful reunion. Instead, it had been a strange, tense tableau. Diane had entered the ICU quietly and stared down at Christie. Then with her uninjured hand she had reached for Christie's right hand-her good hand--and squeezed hard. She stared fixedly into Christie's eyes. She wasn't smiling. She spoke through clenched teeth, and she repeated the same phrase over and over again: "Christie, I love you ... I love you."

"I happened to glance at the heart-rate monitor--the pulse-when Diane came in," Alton recalled. "The scope showed Christie's heart was beating 104 times a minute [80 is normal]. When Diane took hold of her and kept telling her that--that scope' jjumped to 147! It took a long time for it to drop back down after

her mother went back to her own room."

Christie and her mother had been through a ghastly experience together, but Alton could not put a name to the emotion he _w in Christie's eyes as she'd looked up at her mother's face. B Fear, he thought finally.

Elizabeth Downs and her three children had been

in the Marcola area visiting with a friend and were

in the process of returning to Springfield when she

was flagged down by a stranger who demanded her car.

Suspect then began shooting into her car, killing one

child and wounding the other two. He then shot Eliz-v

abeth Downs, wounding her in the arm. Suspect then

left the area, and she drove her vehicle to McKenzieWillamette Hospital. . . The case is being investigated

by the Lane County Sheriffs Office with the

assistance of the Springfield Police Department.

--Lt. Louis Hince, first news release, 5-20-1983

Hince had released that succinct paragraph to the media early Friday morning. Even with the paucity of details, the story and its sidebars filled most of the front page of the Eugene RegisterGuard. There was a color photo of Rob Rutherford and Deputy

George Poling pointing to the spot where they'd found two .22

caliber casings on the macadam of Old Mohawk. A bright yellow map with fuchsia arrows indicated the alleged shooting site and route to McKenzie-Willamette. And there were the usual fiHo1' quotes from locals voicing outraged shock; the same three people appeared on Eugene's three television stations, peering nervously

, into the cameras' lenses and declaring over and over that thing5

' like that just don't happen out here.

The door-to-door canvass of the night before spread in scope-The entire area between Hay den Bridge and Marcola was al^6

with cops and dogs and search-and-rescue Boy Scouts. Helicopters fluttered over the river and the narrow road beside it--giant dragonflies shimmering in the sunshine. If the killer was still out there someplace, his belly pressed to the red Oregon dirt, the searchers and their dogs would find him. If the shaggy-haired man had tossed the gun into the river or stashed it in a tree trunk, they'd find that too.

Jim Pex had joined the crew at the scene at 8:30 a.m. Beyond the two bullet casings, there wasn't much in the way of physical evidence. Some footprints were photographed along the side of the road away from the river bank. Some Blitz-Weinhard beer cans--empty--and some Dubble-Bubble gum--chewed--were

bagged and saved on the off-chance the killer had consumed them. There were tire tracks, but they were from a tractor not a car.

The gun was what they needed. Pex was almost positive that they were looking for a semi-automatic .22 pistol or rifle with a clip-style magazine. If they only had the weapon and its serial number, ownership could be traced back from hand to hand through a ballistic family tree.

Lieutenant Howard Kershner, twenty-four-year veteran of the Lane County Sheriffs Office--tall and ramrod-straight as a Marine drill sergeant--directed the search. His men and the scouts had been at the site since dawn. Working with machetes and brush hooks, they pulled at the blackberry thickets, and then chopped wild foliage down to six inches from the ground. They nudged deadfall logs aside with boots, exposing only grubs and snakes. They walked arm's length abreast into the field of pale flowers, staring down, until they were so deep into the field that no major league pitcher could have flung a gun so far. When they finished each search sector, they tied bright plastic ribbons to mark where they had been, mocking snippets of color in the wind. When the land gave them nothing, Kershner and his two

divers--Ned Heasty and Earl McMullen--slipped into the Mo|hawk itself, the icy chill quickly penetrating their black rubber ^its. The water was clear near the banks but midstream current churned up the bottom. Light and shadow mixed together as the aisturbed silt exploded like dust. It was an eerie quest. The root i alls beneath the water were as gnarled as a witch's grasping

' .In8ers' ^ter-logged sirens waiting to snare and hold a diver fast

, n111 his lungs emptied of air.

They found no gun. Th»s should have been the most likely 68 ANN RULE

spot to dispose of it; the casings had been at the one spot along Old Mohawk where the road came nearest to the river. When they didn't find it there, they knew they would have to go in the river at Hayden Bridge.

Even for experienced divers, there are few more treacherous sites than "The Chute" under the bridge.

"It's fast water," Kershner explained. "Half the water goes downstream, and half goes upriver."

The current is so swift there—there under the bridge where Christie Downs "stopped choking"—that it rips off face masks, dislodging muscular men off ropes like leaves snatched from a thin branch in a wind storm. It is forty-five feet deep, and there are boulders twenty feet high beneath the surface.

"You can only release yourself and fly through the water . . . and it seems like you're going a hundred miles an hour as you go past the boulders. If you don't gauge exactly, you'll get trapped. Once you're caught under the water there, no one can get you out."

Kershner and his fellow divers found a number of thingsincluding a motorcycle—but they did not find a gun. In the end,

they would have put in 1,149 manhours.

For nothing.

Reporters scattered throughout Lane County to get quotes from people who had known Diane Downs before.

"You could tell she really loves those kids, just by the way she used to talk about them," Floyd Gohn, the Cottage Grove Postmaster, told them. "I think she is probably as good a mother as an employee, and she's a number-one worker as far as I'm concerned!"

Superintendent of the Cottage Grove Post Office, Ron Sartin, was furious. "When the hell are the law enforcement agencies or the people going to do something about all the dopeheads in this country?" he fumed to reporters. "Here's a gal with three kids and something like this happens out of the blue. You can't even drive your car down the streets at night!"

Sartin pretty much spoke for the citizens of Lane County, appalled that such a tragedy could happen to a young mother and three little kids.

Diane's room at McKenzie-Willamette Hospital had begun to fill up with floral offerings and cards; cut flowers, potted plants, and tastefully subdued sympathy cards covered every available

surface. Room 322 had a funereal odor, a too-heavy clotting of fragrance. Although Diane had lived in Oregon for such a short time, she had her parents there, and she'd made friends at the nost office where she worked. She'd trained with Heather Plourd at the main branch.

Post office officials said Diane had transferred to Cottage Grove because she wanted a smaller facility where she could learn all aspects of the postal business. She had shown great ambition.

Cottage Grove, Oregon, is twenty miles south of Eugene and Springfield. Fewer than 5,000 people live there, and all of them seemed to have heard about the Downs shooting. Diane's fellow postal workers were particularly distressed.

Diane had no great love for cooking. She and the children ate dinner at Willadene's table almost every night, or picked up fast food. But she often brought home-baked cake-mix goodies to the Cottage Grove post office to share. On one occasion, she'd even come in on her day off to bring them a cake, and the children were with her. Everybody there had been taken with her kids. Now, they chipped in and sent a huge bunch of flowers to Diane at the hospital.

The Page Elementary School PTA mothers were in the midst of setting up a garage sale when they got the news. They felt the stab of horror first, and then grave concern about how their children would handle it. Cheryl Lynn's teacher, Sharon Walker, arranged for Ellie Smith, the school counselor, to come in for an hour and help the children spill out their feelings.

"They talked about feeling sad, and some of them shared experiences of losing grandparents or pets. They also expressed fear. I led them into a discussion about how a person lives on in our memories, even when they're taken from us."

In Christie's third grade class, teacher Beverly Lindley kept her students busy making get-well cards.

| The public was squarely behind Diane Downs, aware that she