Small Sacrifices (11 page)

^s going to need all the emotional support she could get in the

^eeks ahead. Total strangers sat down to write cards or letters to

"elp her through her grief.

"oug Welch rolled into his own driveway very late Friday eve^ng. He was very troubled at a thought that refused to go away.

"I sat down in my chair, over by the bookcases, and I Probably popped a beer. To tell you the truth, I was so tired I 70 ANN RULE

can't remember. My wife, Tamara, came over and sat down

beside me and she said, 'Well?' and I said 'Well, what?' She hadn't heard a word from me for over twenty-four hours and she kept asking 'Well?'

"You won't believe it."

"Well, tell me."

"I think she did it."

"Who?"

"Diane."

". . . No-o-o! She's their mother . . ."

"I know."

"No mother could ever do that to her children. I'm a mother and I know women better than you do."

"They'd have to pump drugs into you or me right and left to keep us sane if that happened to our kids," Welch mused. "Diane-she never shed one tear."

"I still don't want to believe that."

"Neither do I. Tracy and I are going to talk to her again in the morning. Maybe I'll feel different after."

Fred Hugi was back at his post between Christie and Danny early Saturday morning. Nobody bothered him; he had become a familiar fixture, this brooding guardian angel who watched over two children he barely knew.

Late in the morning, Hugi spotted a smiling middle-aged

couple hurry in and head toward Danny and Christie. Instantly, he was on his feet and blocking their way. He asked who they were.

Wes and Willadene Frederickson identified themselves: "We're their grandparents.''

The Fredericksons stayed at the children's bedsides for a short time. When they walked out, Hugi was puzzled by their demeanor. They seemed so happy, so cheerful. They noticed he was looking at the name tags on their shoulders and they explained merrily that they had come from a service club's "Fun Run."

To Hugi's amazement, Wes laughed. "We had to supervise," he explained. "You know how social obligations are--you can't break 'em." _ Fred Hugi stared at him, speechless.

^t 2:00 p.m. that Saturday, Doug Welch and Dick Tracy talked to niane in her hospital room. They had finally had a night's sleep and presumably so had Diane. Welch tried to keep an open mind, wondering if his gut feelings of the night before might not have

been the result of too little sleep.

Diane was ivory-pale, her heavily bandaged left arm resting on a pillow. She was willing to talk to them but was a little put off when she saw the tape recorder Tracy held. Finally, she sighed and said she guessed it wouldn't hurt to record their conversation. And so the trio sat, amid the thickening profusion of floral offerings, talking of sudden inexplicable death.

Tracy took the lead, his voice as lazy as an old cowpoke's. He sensed that Diane considered him a harmless country rube, a dumb old cop.

"Why don't you take it from the top? I guess we could start back on the nineteenth," he suggested. "That's Thursday." From time to time, their conversation was interrupted by nurses bringing more flowers and cards, by phone calls from out-of-town friends. To be strictly accurate, it was not a conversation at all; it was a monologue. Once Diane opened her mouth, she continued nonstop, seemingly without oxygen to sustain her, feeling relief, perhaps, at the catharsis.

Thursday. The last day. Diane had gotten up at 5:15, awakened the kids a half hour later, and delivered them to Willadene's house at 6:15. The girls would have breakfast there and then walk to school, while Danny stayed with his grandma. Diane had carried along a Bundt cake she'd made for the gang at the post office.

"We had the cake at break and all that, and then I got off at 3:30, but I hung around and talked to the guys for a while." Later, she had picked up the kids and visited with Willadene.

"Cheryl went out and cut me a couple of roses, and she cut one for Christie too."

I Usually, they ate at her folks' house, but Wes and Willadene I ^re going out. It had been just Diane and her kids for supper at home.

| Diane recalled that Cheryl had been begging for a kitten.

-lane told her she could have one, and she'd galloped happily to the neighbors to bring the cat and litter box home.

Diane said she'd talked on the phone after dinner to a girlfriend m Arizona. Then she'd remembered the clipping she'd found, the "ne about adopting a horse. Heather hadn't had a phone when

72 ANN RULE

Diane trained with her in Eugene so after she'd finished the dishes, she and the kids had driven out to the Plourds' trailer, leaving around 9:15. It wasn't full dark when they left Q Street. '

It turned out that Heather already had a horse. The kids had shrieked with delight as they ran back and forth from her car to the horse, feeding it grass, petting it.

"And then we left, and we went back out Sunderman Road, and, like I said, we like to just cruise around and see stuff. The kids love the scenery and the trees and they like to watch the rapids in the water at the river and stuff like that ... so we just went out cruising."

When she realized the kids had fallen asleep, Diane had

turned her car toward home, picking Old Mohawk Road on a whim.

"There was a guy standing in the road waving his arm. He was not like on the white line, but he was in the center of my lane. So I stopped and got out and asked him what was the problem. 'Cause it looked, you know . . . like he needed something. He was frantic! And so he came over to where I was and he said, 'I want your car,' and I said, 'You've got to be kidding!' I mean, how many people do that in real life?"

Welch opened his mouth to speak, but Diane was already

beyond him.

"They don't. And he pushed me back and he fired into my car so many times. My God. It was horrible, and my little girl raised up in the back seat ..."

"Which one was that?" Tracy darted a question into the stream of words.

"It's Christie . . . and she raised up and she had such a look of terror ... or confusion, or something. That's just a look I'll never forget, but I can't describe. And then she fell back on the seat and grabbed her chest. God! It was just so bad . . . and then he goes, 'I want your car,' and I was just aghast. I had to do something. So I faked throwing the keys to distract him ... I knew I couldn't beat him up in a fist fight, and he had a gun

anyway ... so I kicked him with my knee sort of and shoved him

... as he was swinging around when I threw the keys. He shot a couple of times and one of them caught me in the arm and it didn't even hurt."

Diane said she'd managed to shove the man aside, jump back in her car, put her key in the ignition, and drive off. She didn't know if the man had fired after her.

"Christie was laying in the back seat, just choking on her own blood, and I kept telling her to roll over on her stomach . . . She was just drowning in it. God. Cheryl was on the floor, not making a movement or a sound and Danny was in the back seat

,ust crying so soft, going 'Mommie' so soft, and God, I just kept on ... I couldn't stop. If I'd stopped to roll Christie over on her stomach . . . she would of just, in a panic, rolled back, and I would have lost five seconds and five seconds was a lot. . ." Desperate, Diane had carried on a running conversation with God, she said. "God, do what's best. If they've got to die, let them die, but don't let them suffer. I just kept driving . . . kept driving . . . kept driving."

She recalled that her arm had started to hurt a little bit, that she'd grabbed a towel from somewhere in the car, and wrapped it around her arm. It might have been a beach towel left from the

trip they'd taken to the ocean the week before. She had no idea when she'd done this. She'd made it to the hospital and laid on the horn.

"I wanted to grab my kids up and run in; but I couldn't, my arm was starting to hurt . . . and I told a lady to call the cops right away and she . . . she called a couple of other people first. . . but I kept sitting there, saying 'Call them! Call them!' " The detectives had no need to ask questions; Diane anticipated them, leaping ahead with her words, explaining, explicating, describing. She was wound so tightly, her words welling up as if they had been under intense pressure somewhere deep in her core. At the very moment a word was released into the antiseptic air of Room 322, ten more formed, a swarm of words fighting , their way to sound-life, ill

Tracy was not interrogating Diane. He considered himself fortunate if he could throw out a one-word question from time to time. He was like a man in a steel mill directing the flow of hot metal with a careful shifting of channels.

Diane's skin pinkened. Her voice grew less breathy.

She went over the whole night for them, in detail. It was as if ^ would all be erased if she could tell it often enough, as if she

believed she could talk it away.

Diane began to talk about Cheryl, and for the first time, her ^ice faltered. She hadn't known at first which of her children ^ was dead.

? "I finally accepted it was Cheryl who had died. I know she didn't suffer in the least and that's good, because now the rest of 74 ANN RULE

us, you know, we're going to go on . . . My mom wanted to know Cheryl's favorite color and she's going to buy her a dress. We're going to have a small service for her ... Cheryl loved new dresses. And so I told her red. But I've been thinking I want it to be white. I mean she's such a good kid and it should be white. She's an angel now ..."

Tears blurred the tape. Instantly, Diane choked them back, deeply embarrassed that she had broken down.

Dick Tracy asked her carefully if it was possible that she could have been under the influence of drugs that night, if her memory might be flawed. She shook her head.

"The reason that I drink and the reason that I ... occasionally

. . . smoke marijuana is when I feel lonely and depressed. It was like on Friday night when Mom would take the kids and I would be alone in the house . . . wondering why the hell Lew wasn't here . . . because he had promised we were going to be mates and we were going to raise the kids and everything was going to be just fine. And I couldn't understand why all that was different and that's when I would drink--when the kids weren't around--'cause I'm a real conscientious mother and I despise people that are lax in raising their kids . . . that can allow themselves to get drunk . . . You can't tell when an emergency is going to arise and the kids will need care . . . That's very immature, so I didn't do that around my kids."

She had been so careful with her children that the tragedy seemed doubly ironic. She never took a chance on her kids'

safety. Life with them had been so fulfilling lately, Diane told them, that she hadn't even had the urge to drink or smoke pot.

"Even in my book [diary] I told Lew, 'I think I love the kids more than you . . .' "

Tracy cut in. He had learned that when he heard the name Lew, he was in imminent danger of losing control of the questioning. Diane seemed to use her memories of her Arizona lover to block out pain.

"What about the area out there? How many times have you driven it?" Tracy asked quickly.

"Never. Never on Old Mohawk. Once to Marcola. Twice to Heather's." They had only been exploring, sightseeing, in the I hour after sunset on a May night.

' We've got a BHS here. She calls him "shaggy-haired." Same thing. The infamous Bushy-Haired Stranger."

—Fred Hugi

The forty-eight-hour cut-off point had come and gone with no arrest. Maybe it was only superstition, but missing the deadline cast a pall over the group that met each morning at eight. Hugi, his investigators, and Sheriff Burks's detectives met first in Louis Hince's office and then in Fred's. It was the only time they could halfway count on. They hadn't the luxury of putting all other business aside to concentrate on the Downs probe; each of them had between thirty and a hundred other cases of greater or lesser importance to juggle. Before they were through, thousands of phone messages would be left, scores of meetings rescheduled. If a killer had deliberately set out to choose the optimum county in which to commit murder, he could not have picked better than Lane County, Oregon, in the spring of 1983. Underfunded, understaffed—and now facing a tax vote that might well make it worse—both the DA's office and the Sheriffs department always seemed to be running to catch up.

| Only days had passed. Diane was still in the hospital when the whole complexion of the case began to change. Almost to a n^n, the investigators had begun to suspect that the shooter was someone closer to the family than the ephemeral shaggy-haired stranger Diane had described.

The "BHS" (bushy-haired stranger) is an integral part of forensic folklore. The BHS is the guy who isn't there, the man the

^fendant claims is really responsible. The suspect is merely an 76 ANN RULE

innocent person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, the BHS can never be produced in court.

"We estimate that if the BHS is ever caught, the prison doors will have to be opened to let out all the wrongly convicted defendants," Hugi mused.

The BHS allegedly holds the answer to many unsolved crimes but an essential part of the BHS-defense is that he can never be precisely identified or produced in court.

"Dead people with criminal records make the best BHS's," Hugi said wryly. "They are unable to deny their guilt." Diane's description of her attacker had raised the hairs on the back of the detectives' necks. The term in police parlance is

"hinky."

"Hinky" cannot be literally defined; it is something that doesn't ring true, that is off-center, suspicious--something that nags at the mind, that comes in the night and interrupts the sleep of even an exhausted detective.

If Diane Downs had blamed a creature from another planet for the shootings, she could not have raised more doubts in the minds of the men who questioned her. Once she'd opened that Pandora's box, there were other problems with her story.