The Bodies In The Trunk: A steamer trunk sits on the platform, leaking a vile smelling brown liquid. Who will collect it and, more importantly, what’s inside?
Blood Will Tell: A serial killer is stalking a quiet English village. Can newly discovered DNA technology catch him before he kills again?
The Ugly Death Of A Beauty Queen: Five ne’er-do-goods out looking for trouble; a beautiful, young woman walking home in the dark. A tragedy waiting to happen.
An Eye For An Eye: The victim was a burly biker, the killer, a tiny woman wielding a pickaxe. He never stood a chance.
The Colorado Cannibal: Six prospectors go into the Colorado wilderness looking for gold. Five find violent death, the other, a taste for spare rib.
The Sadistic Mr. Heath: He preferred his sex with a dollop of pain, inflicted by him, on others.
The Philadelphia Poison Ring: A routine murder inquiry unlocks one of the most heinous murder–for–profit schemes in US history.
Unhinged: Poisoned cookies, guns and firebombs. The day Laurie Dann finally cracked.
Plus 10 more riveting cases... Scroll up to grab a copy
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Murder Most Vile Volume Two
Wife, Mother, Murderess
ER medics are of course used to dealing
with such situations. Nurses Rose Martin and Shelby Day were out of the door in
an instant, running towards the woman. Seeing that she was only slightly
injured they pointed her inside, then went to the aid of her passengers.
Meanwhile, receptionist Judy Patterson, as is protocol in such cases, got on
the phone to the police.
The first thing that nurses Martin and Day
saw as they approached the car was blood, lots of it, sprayed across the
interior, spattering the bodies of three small children. A blonde-haired girl
was slumped in the passenger seat, another girl and a boy, no more than a
toddler, in back. All appeared to have suffered gunshot wounds to their
chests.
The children were pulled from the vehicle
and rushed into the hospital where it was determined that one of them, the girl
who had been in the front seat, was already dead. Meanwhile, with personnel
from the ICU brought in to assist, a battle was waged to save the other two.
Thanks to the skill of the medical professionals involved, 8-year-old Christie
Downs and her 3-year-old brother, Danny, would eventually pull through. The
dead girl was their sister, Cheryl, aged just 7.
Police officers from both Springfield and
Lane Counties had in the interim responded to the call and it was quickly
determined that the crime fell within the jurisdiction of the Lane County
Sheriff's Office. Sergeant Robin Rutherford then spoke to the children’s
mother. She said that her name was Diane Downs and that she’d been driving to
her home in Springfield, after visiting a friend in Marcola. As she’d turned
onto Old Mohawk Road, a man had flagged her down. He’d demanded her keys. When
she refused to hand them over, he leaned into the car and fired at her
children.
Without waiting to get the finer details,
Rutherford immediately put out an APB on the suspect. If there was a madman on
the highway, taking potshots at travelers, he needed to be apprehended before
he could shoot anyone else. Diane Downs described the perpetrator as, “white,
late twenties, about five feet nine, 150 to 170 pounds, dark wavy hair, a
stubble of beard, wearing a denim jacket and an off-colored T-shirt.” Yet
despite quick action by the police, despite an exhaustive search, no trace of
the mystery gunman was found.
And it wasn’t long before officers began to
wonder whether he even existed. Something about Diane Downs’ story, about her
demeanor, just didn’t sit right. She was too calm for one thing. Someone who
had come through such a terrifying experience, losing one of her children,
seeing others severely injured and not yet out of danger, would have been
devastated, traumatized. Diane was calm and dry-eyed. On hearing that her
middle child, Cheryl, had died, she registered no emotion. When she learned
that Danny was going to make it, her response stunned medical staff. “You mean
the bullet missed his heart?” she said incredulously. “Gee whiz!”
And the crime scene itself caused law
officers to question her story. The stretch of highway between Marcola and Old
Mohawk Roads was dark, desolate and eerie. Why, they wondered, would a young
mother, with three small children in the car, stop for a total stranger in such
an isolated spot?
Another cause for suspicion was the wound
to Diane’s arm. Those officers who’d been on the job more than a few years had
seen that kind of injury before. Usually, it was self-inflicted by criminals
who wanted to create the impression that they were the victim, rather than the
perpetrator.
All of this was, of course, conjecture.
Downs had said that she’d stopped because she thought the man needed help and
that might be true. As for her demeanor, well, we all deal with grief and
trauma in our own way. Better to focus on the physical evidence. Of that, there
was plenty.
It was determined that the weapon used had
been a .22, probably a handgun; powder burns on the children’s skin suggested
that the shots had been fired at extremely close range; blood spatters
indicated that the shooter had fired from the driver’s side of the vehicle.
This tied in with Diane Downs’ story. She
said that she’d been returning from visiting a co-worker, Heather Plourd. On
the drive home she’d decided that she’d take Old Mohawk Road rather than the
highway because she thought it might be, “fun to go sightseeing.” It was just
after making the turn that she spotted the man, standing in the middle of the
gravel road, signaling for her to stop.
She applied the brakes and got out of the
car. The stranger approached, then produced a pistol from his jacket and
demanded her car keys. She refused to hand them over, whereupon he leaned in
through the driver’s window and fired at her children. He then reached for her,
but she evaded his grasp, got into the car and got the engine started. He fired
one more shot, hitting her in the arm. Then she mashed her foot down on the gas
and raced away. Her only thought, she said, was to get her kids to the
hospital.
The next step in the investigation was to
carry out a search of Diane’s home. She willingly agreed, informing officers
that she kept a .38 revolver and a .22 caliber rifle there for self-protection.
Neither weapon had been fired recently but the police nonetheless took both
into evidence, along with a diary.
Meanwhile, Diane’s vehicle was transported
to the crime lab for further investigation, and the body of Cheryl Downs went
to the morgue for autopsy. Then Diane was allowed in to see her daughter
Christie, who was now out of surgery and stable. Several nurses and a police
officer were present at this visit. All would later testify to Christie’s
strange reaction to her mother’s presence. As Diane approached the bed and
whispered a faint, “I love you,” Christie’s eyes appeared to widen in fear,
while the monitor measuring her heart rate jumped from 104 beats per minute to
147.
The day after the shootings, the case was
assigned to rookie Assistant DA Fred Hugi. Despite his relative inexperience,
Hugi took one look at the evidence and decided that something was amiss. And
those inklings of doubt only increased after he interviewed Diane Downs. Her
description of the harrowing event was nonchalant, even peppered with humor at
times. Not only that, but she kept making subtle enhancements to her story, as
though the added details would lend credibility.
Another reason to question Diane’s version
of events was a piece of information gleaned from the children’s father, Steve
Downs. According to Downs, his former wife had not been entirely honest about
her weapons cache. She also owned a .22 pistol, he said. Asked about this,
Diane flatly denied ever owning such a weapon.
Hugi didn’t believe her, and now made
finding that weapon his number one priority. But an extensive search of the area
surrounding the crime scene, even sending divers to the depths of the nearby
Mohawk River, did not turn it up. And there was more bad news for Hugi, when
doctors informed him that Christie Downs had suffered a stroke. The child was
probably the only one who could testify as to what had really happened that
night. Now doctors were saying that she might never recover fully enough to do
so.
Despite these setbacks ADA Hugi was more
certain than ever that Diane Downs had been the shooter. One question, though,
still bothered him. Why? Why would a young mother brutally gun down her three
young children? In order to find the answer, he decided to look into Diane’s
background and dispatched investigators Doug Welch and Paul Alton to Arizona,
where she’d lived until recently.
Diane had worked as a mail deliverer out of
the Channing post office. Co-workers there didn’t have anything particularly
negative to say about her, but there were not many who had a kind word either.
What emerged was a picture of a determined, yet insecure woman, a woman with a
warped sense of priorities. She
refused for example, to deliver copies of Playboy magazine on her route, yet at
the same time it was common knowledge that she slept around. Steve Downs had
told investigators that his former wife liked to “bed hop.” In Arizona,
investigators found plenty of evidence of that.
Diane’s most recent beau had been one of
her co-workers, Robert Knickerbocker. When the officers interviewed
Knickerbocker, he said that he’d become involved with Diane shortly after her
divorce from Steve Downs in 1981. She had actively pursued him and he, knowing
her reputation, had gone along, thinking that the affair would amount to
nothing more than a few sexual encounters with no strings attached. Instead,
he’d landed himself in a “Fatal Attraction,” situation. Diane was soon pressing
him to leave his wife for her. Knickerbocker then tried to break off the affair
but Diane refused to let go.
Matters eventually came to a head when
Diane insisted that he choose between her and his wife. Knickerbocker told her
that he still loved his wife. After that he confessed the affair and he and his
wife were reconciled. But Dianne continued to stalk him, once even confronting
his wife at their home and on another occasion pounding on their front door for
hours and screaming obscenities.
That was in February 1983. Not long after,
Diane put in for a transfer to Oregon and moved to Springfield to be close to
her parents. But she continued harassing her old boyfriend with letters and phone
calls.
Knickerbocker shared two other important
pieces of information with the officers. He confirmed Steve Downs’ assertion
that Diane had indeed owned a .22 handgun. He also provided the officers with a
possible motive for the shootings.
On one occasion during the relationship,
Diane had showed up to meet him with her kids in tow. Knickerbocker had left
immediately, saying he didn’t want to spend time with her while she was with
her kids. His reason for this, he explained to the officers, was because he
didn’t believe that the children should be exposed to their mother’s
infidelities. However, Diane had interpreted it differently. She became
obsessed with the idea that Knickerbocker only wanted to end the relationship
because of her children. Armed with this information, the detectives returned
to Oregon.
In June 1983, Assistant DA Hugi called a
meeting of his investigative staff to determine if they had enough to arrest
Diane Downs for murder. The conclusion was that, despite strong circumstantial
evidence, the absence of the murder weapon meant that they probably didn’t.
Nonetheless, a grand jury was assembled to hear testimony in the case.
During the nine months that those
proceedings lasted, Diane Downs became something of a media darling, appearing
in tabloids and newspapers up and down the Pacific coast. Most media depicted
her as an innocent woman who been through a terrible ordeal and was now having
her grief compounded by being dragged through the courts. Contributing to this
image, Diane got herself pregnant by a new lover and used this in the press.
She said that she’d decided to have another child because she missed Christie
and Cheryl and Danny so much. (Christie and Danny had been placed in foster
homes by a judge.)
In February 1984, the grand jury announced
its ruling. They indicted Downs on one charge of murder, two charges of
attempted murder, and two charges of criminal assault.
The matter came to trial at the Lane County
Courthouse, in Eugene, Oregon, on May 10, 1984. By then, it was a sensation across America, with people
divided as to whether Diane Downs had gunned down her children or not.
There were several moments of high drama
during the trial, most notably when the jury was transported to the crime
scene, and when they were allowed to view Downs’ blood-spattered Nissan Pulsar.
The most dramatic interlude, though, was the testimony given by Christie Downs.
Shivering and teary-eyed, speaking in a
barely audible voice, Christie was asked, “Who shot you?"
“My mom,” she said simply.
After that the case was lost to Diane
Downs. Almost overnight, public opinion swung against her. She went from martyr
to demon in the blink of an eye. When the jury announced its decision on June
14, 1984, no one was surprised that it was, “Guilty.”
Diane Downs was sentenced to life in
prison, with fifty years added for using a firearm in the crime. Not long after
sentence was passed she gave birth to a daughter who she named Amy. The child
was subsequently adopted.
In 1987, Downs pulled off a daring escape
from the Oregon Women's Correctional Center. She remained at large for 10 days,
before being captured less than a mile from the prison. As a result of that
escapade she was transferred to the maximum-security Clinton Correctional
Institution in New Jersey. She remains there to this day.
Danny Downs was confined to a wheelchair as
a result of his injuries, while Christie made a full recovery. Both were
adopted by Fred Hugi, the Assistant District Attorney who had successfully
prosecuted their mother.
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