Small Sacrifices (31 page)

^mbunctious little boy had grown so still, and his eyes were filled lw tears. Janet Jones moved to take Danny back to his room 206 ANN RULE

and he said softly, "Not supposed to answer . . . not supposed to answer."

Danny Downs was three years old and someone had shot him in the back. It was doubtful that a toddler, not much more than a baby, would ever be accepted as a witness in a murder trial. But Kurt Wuest saw something haunted in Danny's eyes.

Later, Danny was sitting at the window staring down at a screeching ambulance below.

Suddenly he turned to his nurse and asked, "Who shot me7"

"I don't know, Danny. Wio?"

"That man . . ."

"What man? Was it outside or in a car?"

"That man--Jack."

"Did you know him before?"

"That man was mean to me."

"What man?"

"That man Jack ..."

"Who shot you, Danny?"

"Jack--like Jack in the Beanstalk ..."

Did "Jack" mean something to Danny? Or was truth and fantasy as conjoined in his young mind as it is in most toddlers'?

"It's obvious to me they suspect my daughter," Wes Frederickson told the Springfield News. "Every time she moves and breathes, they move and breathe with her. I believe in my daughter's innocence. My daughter loves those children. I do not believe that she did--or that she could--kill those children."

Diane demanded, and got, a hearing on June 6 to question the State's right to remove her children from her custody. As in all legal maneuverings, there were pluses and minuses in Hugi's move to place Christie and Danny under protection of CSD. The juvenile court proceedings gave Diane a forum, and like all legal proceedings, the paperwork was the easy part. It would have to be backed up with hard evidence at a fact-finding hearing or a trial later. For the State the advantage of juvenile court proceedings is that a judge alone presides and the standard of proof is a preponderance of evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A

judge would tend to err--if at all--on the side of the children. The disadvantage of the juvenile court hearing for the State is that the defense is entitled to rights of discovery. They can legally seek any evidence that the State and sheriff's office might have.

In a criminal case, such discovery would not be handed over until the suspect's arraignment on indictment.

Jim Jagger could now tailor Diane's defense to the evidence and exploit any holes in the State's case. And there were still plenty of holes. "Like all legal proceedings," Hugi comments. "It was easy to start--but like a tiger by the tail, impossible to turn loose of gracefully. This proceeding might be used to call us out before we were ready."

If Jagger chose, he could have two trials, call all the witnesses who might appear in a later murder trial to the juvenile hearing where all he had at stake was the custody of the children. Indeed, he could call Christie Downs to the stand.

Up until June 6, 1983, Diane Downs was an unknown quantity to the public. Willadene had given a brief press conference, Wes had been quoted often, but Diane had appeared only in old photographs reproduced on local front pages. In the television footage filmed that June day, Diane approaches the juvenile hearing clinging tightly to Willadene's arm. She limps slightly, and her left arm is encased in plaster and supported by a navy blue sling. Glancing sideways she realizes she is being filmed by the television cameras. In the space of a heartbeat, her limp becomes exaggerated. There was no reason for her to limp. There would have been miniscule, if any, pain from the hip shaved for the bone transplant, but on that day Diane limped. As the cameras commit her

every move to film, Diane gulps noticeably, cuts her eyes again toward the lens, and then she smiles--as if she has just been given a wonderful surprise. Her limp becomes even more pronounced. The cameras follow a beautiful--almost fragile--woman

in a modest blue ruffled dress until she disappears.

Whatever else might prove to be true or untrue about Diane's life, it is apparent that she has, in this very instant on videotape,

discovered the dazzling power of the television camera. And the camera clearly loves Diane; it traces her each movement lovingly. It is as if Diane had waited her whole life for this moment.

"lane lost at the custody hearing; she would hereafter have to

"lake appointments to see my own children." But she'd won the ^edia. The cameras had warmed her, and she could hardly wait 10 get home and tell her diary about it. Elizabeth Diane Downs had become the darling of the North^t media; she loved them all back, and the honeymoon would 208 ANN RULE

last for a long, long, time. Only Eugene at first, but then Portland and Seattle, and Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, and New York. All those cameras, and microphones, and notebooks. How she had longed for someone to listen to her views. At last, she had an audience.

Diane no longer shared information with the detectives. They hated her. Paula Krogdahl hated her. Susan Staffel, the kids'

caseworker for the Children's Services Division, hated her.

"Stupid women. Stupid liars. I have met some of the lyingest people since I've come to this state, and they're sheriffs and legal people."

Henceforth, if Diane had something she wanted to say, she would tell it to the press.

To hell with the detectives.

Diane didn't even mention Fred Hugi in her sweeping denunciation of her tormentors. She had forgotten him--if he'd ever

registered at all. She had no idea he stalked her more relentlessly than any of them.

4^

"Look," Fred Hugi reminded the disgruntled group of cops and investigators. "This isn't an organized army we're fighting; it's one young woman. Only one woman against all of us. She's bound to make some mistakes."

Inside, he was not nearly as sure, thinking, "How incongruous

. . . What has happened to our legal system that would allow a mother to drive her kids out on a lonely road, shoot hell out of them, pitch the gun, drive them to the hospital--and get away with it. How can such a thing happen?"

The daily meetings had disintegrated after two weeks. The cops were angry because all Hugi had managed to do was get a juvenile court order. They were sure they had enough for a murder charge, and he was sick and tired of nagging them, nagging the crime lab, of barking out orders when he knew his list of supporters grew shorter by the day.

This huge joint meeting in Harris Hall, adjoining the courthouse, was on semi-neutral territory. For hours, they went over everything they'd come up with so far.

It was enough to arrest Diane, but in Fred Hugi's opinion it wasn't enough to convict her.

Although a lot of people in Lane County believed that a bushyhaired stranger had shot the Downs family, the deluge of tips

coming into Sheriff Burks's department slowed to a trickle. Detective Roy Pond handled most of them. Pond canvassed each

home in the Mohawk Road area with little success. He worked his ^ght-hour shift at the hospital guarding the victims and then he ^nt out mornings, evenings, and nights--so that he wouldn't "uss anyone. He had made at least one hundred fifty contacts, ^th only slight information coming out of them.

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He had perhaps thirty to thirty-five written reports on possible clues or sightings from people who had theories on where the detectives should look for the death weapon. Some citizens called to suggest the shooting might have happened somewhere else_in the Marcola Valley, for instance. They told Pond to look in creeks, trees, culverts, wells. Searchers had already tried all those spots. Some were blunt: "You don't need to look any farther. Check on her and her boyfriend." Some tips came from psychics and proved to be about as valuable as a look in a cracked crystal ball.

Many of the tips had been generated by Wes Frederickson

himself, who was vocal in his criticism of the Lane County Sheriff's Office. Frederickson's input was followed up along with the rest of the leads offered by citizens of Lane County.

Heather Plourd's best guess ofDiane's departure time on May 19

was 9:45 p.m. Determination of the exact time the Downs family left Plourds' was vital to the investigation. Detectives had to account for the location of the family from the moment they left Heather's trailer until Diane called for help at the McKenzieWillamette Hospital twelve and a half miles away just before

10:30 p.m.

Dolores Holland, who lived in the mobile home next door to the Plourds, gave a much more precise departure time: 9:40. Holland, a department manager at Albertson's supermarkets, had been reading a romance novel in her living room. She'd heard the car door slam outside, and the sound of tires backing out of the I Plourds' driveway.

"I finished the last few pages of the book, and I looked at the clock to set the time on the coffeepot for morning. It was ten minutes to ten then. The clock's accurate--it's my husband's 'pet clock.' "

One of Wes Frederickson's best tips seemed to correlate with that time period. Basil Wilson's property abutted the Fredericksons'

yard, although Wes and Wilson weren't very well acquainted. Wilson had seen something peculiar on the night of May 19. Basil Wilson was very active in the Springfield Country Club. The 1,1 country club's buildings, grounds, and golf course lay between UMarcola Road and Sunderman Road, with its entrance off Marcola.

itSDiane would have passed the club's grounds three times on the night of May 19. First, she would have driven by its southern

boundaries both going to and coming from Heather's trailer on Sunderman Road. Next, when she exited Sunderman Road after the visit, she turned away from Springfield and headed toward Marcola. She then would have passed the entrance to the country club. When Wes heard Basil Wilson's story, he was particularly impressed, given the proximity of the club to the shooting site. On the night of May 19, there had been a board meeting at the country club from 7:00 to 9:30. Wilson remembered an odd duck who appeared at the club about nine. That Thursday was also

"Calcutta Night" at the Springfield Country Club, but the man who bumbled in was certainly neither a member nor a guest. Wilson had been sitting with the club's assistant golf pro when he looked up to see a shabbily dressed man enter the meeting room. The stranger, who had a green and blue crocheted bag slung over his shoulder, looked either bewildered or lost. Wilson had nudged the assistant pro and kidded, "There's your relief--you can go home now."

After the man left, Wilson checked the men's room to see if the intruder had ducked in there. But he had left the club, and Wilson saw him just outside approaching a bicycle, apparently his own. Wilson himself left the club about 9:30, and he didn't see the stranger with the crocheted shoulder bag again.

Basil Wilson didn't go to the police immediately after the shooting. He went to see Wes and Wes bypassed the sheriff's office, going directly to the local TV reporter with the "flash" that the suspect had, indeed, been seen near Marcola Road. It made the five o'clock news.

Sometime later Wilson spied a young man who lived down

the street from him, and he was struck by his resemblance to the man on the bicycle. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that Tommy Lee Burns probably was the same man.

Again Wilson contacted Wes and told him that this time, he could i give a name to the suspect.

I When detectives went to check on Burns, they found he ^sn't in residence; he was in jail serving a short sentence for a

nonviolent offense. Kurt Wuest and Doug Welch started to ques-^on him, but the instant Burns opened his mouth, he took himself

off the list of suspects. Diane had been adamant that the stranger "ad had no unusual speech patterns and no accent.

Tommy Lee Burns sounded exactly like the cartoon character Tinier Fudd. Doug Welch and Kurt Wuest had never heard a

272 ANN RULE

more pronounced lisp. "I wasn't awound that wiver woad and I didn't shoot nobody with no Wuger," Burns said fervently. They believed him.

John Hulce, seventy-two, had made a point of scrutinizing every yellow car he saw after he read the papers. Four days after the shooting and forty miles away, Hulce was driving on a forest service road east of Oak Ridge when he spotted a yellow car approaching. He looked at the driver as their vehicles drew abreast. The man was in his thirties, and his face was scrabbly with several days' worth of whiskers. John Hulce turned to his wife and said,

"That fellow sure matches the description!"

All Hulce was able to tell detectives about the car was that it was an older yellow car with front end and left front damage-"minor wrinkling." It was a Chevrolet, dirty, early seventies model. On June 13, Roy Pond contacted yet another informant, a citizen who had been driving north of Springfield on Thursday, May 19. He had left a message that he might have something to add to the investigation. Pond set out with little enthusiasm.

His attitude soon changed.

Joseph P. Inman, who worked for the Springfield Water

i; Board and lived in Eugene, explained that he'd had relatives visiting from Southern California, on May 19. He had taken them

to his sister's home in Marcola earlier that evening. Inman and his wife and two children left Marcola at ten minutes after ten and headed toward Springfield.

"I had to go to see someone in Coburg to get papers notarized before 11:00 p.m., so I decided to go by Old Mohawk Road, Hill Road, and then over McKenzie View Road."

As Inman drove along Old Mohawk Road, he had to slow to

a crawl because there was a red car with an Arizona license plate in front of him, traveling only five to seven miles an hour. Inman's own speedometer bounced near zero. The red car was new and foreign made--either a Nissan or a Toyota.

"We followed it for two or three minutes. I assumed the driver was lost or looking for an address. The car wasn't being driven erratically, and it was on the right side of the road. My son t said something about cars from Arizona always being red, and