Small Sacrifices (22 page)

He was also put off by Diane's sexual dominance. "She was the aggressor. She had no inhibitions whatsoever; whatever she p wanted, she just asked for it.

"After about three weeks, I told Diane it [our affair] couldn't continue."

"She just said, 'OK. I guess I'll try for Lew.' " It was July, 1982.

A"

At 8:00 a.m. on Monday, May 23, 1983, an exhausted Fred Hugi sat in Louis Hince's office and read aloud in a flat matter-of-fact voice to a group of detectives, each of them as tired as he was. Even so, the material in Diane's spiral journal fascinated all of them.

My dear sweet Lew,

What happened? I'm so confused. What could she have

said or done to make you act this way? I spoke to you this morning/or the last time. It broke my heart to hear you say

"don't call or write." . . . I still think of you as my best friend and my only lover, and you keep telling me to go away and find someone else. You have got to be kidding. . . .

"She uses that phrase a lot," Hugi said wryly. He had read Diane's diary—the diary she'd asked Jerry Smith to bring to her on the night of the shooting. On the Sunday after the shooting, he had read it again. A second read was only one of seventeen tasks he'd listed for himself that day. The whole thing in the form of letters. Never sent.

"That's the first entry, and it's dated April 21. Something must have happened to spark all that 'agony.' The thing's got entries every day, right up until—until the nineteenth . . . un11!

the end."

She keeps saying she expected Lew to be here with her," Dick Tracy mused, ". . . like everything was just dandy with them."

". . .but something happened," Alton said.

"He dumped her, it sounds like," Welch offered. "Sounds like the lady was dumped."

Most of them had already read the diary—or sections of

.(_and found it gushy and overdone, as if a high school girl had written it, a sixteen-year-old smitten with her first crush, scribbling in her school notebook.

"From what she told us," Welch put in, "Lew was just a step removed from the second coming of the Messiah. She loves him. He loves her. His wife--Nora--is the villainess." Hugi wrote on the chalkboard: "Could Lew have shot the kids?" "Could Nora have shot the kids?" "Steve . . . ?" Beyond the phantom gunman, these were the likely suspects. The investigators would have to implicate or eliminate Lew or Nora or Steve. Could they pinpoint where they'd all been four nights earlier? Hugi and the detectives were batting at shadows until they had lab reports back on the casings, the guns, and the blood samples. The state police crime lab was swamped, and the investigators chafed at the delay.

Jim Pex had come up with something interesting already.

When he'd rolled the red Nissan out of the county shops into the sunlight, he'd seen what could only be detected in daylight. The rocker panel below the passenger door was flecked with a mist of dark red. Testing indicated that it was human blood. Pex recognized it as high-velocity back-spatter, the pattern blood makes as it flies back from a wound toward the barrel of a gun and the hand of the shooter.

^'" High-velocity back-spatter could only mean that someone had been shot outside the car, someone who had been almost at ground level. In all ofDiane Downs's accounts of the shooting, she had said that the children were shot inside her car. Could she have simply forgotten? Perhaps Cheryl had fallen out, and her mother had somehow managed to grab her up and get her back in the car before the shooter fell for Diane's ruse of the thrown keys. They doubted it. To a man, they thought they had caugt

Diane in a lie that could not be explained away.

If there was one lie, there would be more.

"Whatever she says, I think Lew's your motive," Welch said. "You get her talking about Lew and forget anything else."

"Maybe," Hugi said. "But why would killing her kids help her get this guy? She's different from any woman I've ever met. he knows we're after her but if she was ever scared, she isn't no\^ She as much as dared me to try and arrest her."

"Then let's arrest her." a -i ^ug1 ^ook his head. "You bring me your reports--written-.^d we'll see."

\ '3,u S'c--11

148 ANN RULE

He knew the sheriffs men were irritated. He didn't blame them. But he was counting on the lab reports--on something solid that would let him grab onto Diane Downs and know he could hold her. He barely considered the possibility that lab tests might support Diane as an innocent, the victim of an actual living breathing bushy-haired stranger.

One thing was clear to Hugi; a team of detectives would have to fly to Arizona to interview Lew and Nora Lewiston and a number of other people mentioned in Diane's diary or in her conversation. If Lew was such a wonderful guy, and if he loved Diane so damned much, why hadn't he flown up here to comfort her? He hadn't sent flowers; he hadn't even called her. They couldn't be sure where Lew Lewiston was, or what he had to do with the shootings.

There wasn't enough money in the county budget for two

round-trip tickets to Phoenix, much less the expenses a couple of detectives might incur once they got to Arizona. But DA Pat Horton had said to go ahead and do what had to be done and hang the cost.

Sheriff Dave Burks was also giving it full priority. What had been Case #83-3268 would henceforth be called simply Project

#100. All the overtime hours were coming in. The budget would somehow be stretched to cover Project #100. They might as well go for it while they could.

The four law-and-order levies on the ballot in the June 28

Lane County elections sought $4.9 million in property taxes to balance a proposed 1983-84 no-frills budget. If they didn't pass, Burks would have to lay off fifty-six of his two hundred fortyeight employees, cancel police patrols, and switch calls to the state police. Hoi-ton's staff--which had once numbered eightyfive and was now down to fifty--would be cut in half. Both

departments would be crippled without the tax money. A loss at the polls would be disastrous to the Downs investigation. They might as well spend money now, even if it meant putting a murder probe on the tab.

And the other--less overt--problems were exacerbating. Sheriff Burks and DA Horton were political enemies, with a history of

, chilly relations. Burks had been challenged by one of Horton s

' investigators in the last election with Horton's full support. In j|g some ways, the cops and Hugi were like a second wife and her

predecessor trying to raise the same set of kids. Everybody had good intentions; their methods were entirely different.

^

The sheriffs detectives still wanted a quick arrest. They feared that Hugi might demand so much information on Diane that it would be too late to catch her before she ran. Fred Hugi knew they hated paper work and suspected they wanted to rush out and bring Diane in bound and tied to the front bumper of a squad car, tooting their sirens down Oak Street for an admiring crowd.

Hugi planted his feet; he would not be buffaloed or intimidated. The detectives knew that the likelihood of arresting a killer decreases in direct proportion to the delay between the crime and

the arrest. And still, they worked together, biting back acrimonious words, trying to ignore frustrations.

It is always that way. Anyplace. Anytime. Not turf wars-turf scuffles. A cop approaches a murder probe differently than a prosecutor does.

They worked it out. Two detectives would go on down to

Chandler--one from each office: Doug Welch from the sheriffs office, and Paul Alton as a DA's investigator. They would call in their reports each night--Alton to Fred Hugi, and Welch to Louis Hince or Dave Burks--and the other would listen in on the extension to be sure the reports were identical.

"Go down there," Hugi said. "And see if you can find out who Diane Downs really is."

Six days after the shootings, there were no definitive lab results. Criminalist Chuck Vaughn was working with three or four different Rugers comparing rifling and tool marks, firing them to see if

they left residue that would show up on GSR tests. He found nothing that would help one way or another.

To say absolutely that the Downs .22 Ruger had been the

death weapon, Vaughn would have to have that gun.

At odd times when Hugi wasn't sitting with Christie and

Danny, he walked the route from the river to the bridge and on up to the turn off to Heather Plourd's road. Possibilities would come

to him at night when he couldn't sleep, and he'd check them the next day. Some of the assistant DAs were skin divers, and they Pyt on their gear and joined the sheriffs divers.

Late one night, Hugi, Vaughn, Pex, Alton, Pat Horton and '"hief Criminal Deputy DA Fred Hartstrom had an impromptu Meeting at the state police crime lab. Sipping coffee at midnight,

hey threw out theories about where the gun might have been ^den. Somebody mentioned a grate out by the power plant on

150 ANN RULE

the river bank at Hayden Bridge. Diane had had some snapshots of the river that they figured had been taken from that viewpoint. Hugi started home, debated with himself, and then he cut his wheel hard and detoured to the Marcola road. It was almost pitch black as he pawed around the grate. Suddenly, he heard something--the scrape of a foot, a soft rustling off to his left. He stood up cautiously, his heart thumping. He could make out a large dark figure a dozen feet away.

Was there a bushy-haired stranger after all, and had he managed to meet up with him, alone, on this slippery bank above the deadly chute?

The figure moved toward him, and Hugi put his hand tentatively on the .45 he carried.

"Hugi!"

It was Fred Hartstrom, late of the same coffee drinking

theorizers. They'd both had the same idea.

And neither found a gun.

In Springfield Wednesday afternoon. May 25, Cheryl Lynn Downs's funeral drew a huge crowd, which included many strangers showing their sympathy for the bereft mother. Diane placed a single red rose in her daughter's coffin and swayed in a near faint. She told her diary later that she had never seen Cheryl so still, not even when she was sleeping.

Diane constantly visited Christie at McKenzieWillamette

Hospital and then Danny at Sacred Heart in Eugene. She had detested Paula Krogdahl on sight. They were close in age, and they were both beautiful and highly intelligent--but there the similarities ended. Paula dressed in classically low-keyed separates and zipped around Eugene in a vintage white sports car.

Diane's ambitions had always ended in ashes, and Paula had almost realized hers. Paula was the epitome of the girls Diane had always envied.

Paula spent two hours a day with Christie, morning and

afternoon. As Christie grew to trust Paula, Diane deemed Paula

"a witch--an evil witch." When Paula brought her favorite childhood doll--a rag doll with yellow braids--for Christie, Diane I. snatched it from the crook of Christie's paralyzed arm and flung it 1 across the waxed floor where it skidded with a thunk against the Ka wall. Paula watched as Christie struggled to sit up, her eyes

misted with terror, choking garbled croaks of protest.

Diane whirled on Paula, spitting out her words flatly, "I don't need somebody interfering in my life with my child!" Christie was no longer in critical condition, but she was confused and frightened by her inability to speak. When she was able to convey to Diane her questions about what had happened to all of them, Diane only murmured, "We've had a tragedy." The tube in Danny's chest continued to put out fluid, but it was no longer scarlet; packed cells, transfused, had brought his hematocrit within normal range, and he could breathe without distress.

He had not yet discovered that he couldn't walk.

Judy Patterson, who still worked at both hospitals, caught glimpses of Diane as she walked outside Sacred Heart after visiting Danny. "She never seemed to recognize me, or even remember where we'd met before. It's funny. She brought in a big box of chocolates for the staff--the way parents do to say thank you for taking care of their kids--but nobody would touch it. The candy got moldy, and we threw it away."

Fred Hugi learned that Diane was actively seeking the stranger who had shot her and her children, asking questions around Springfield.

Down in Chandler, Arizona, Doug Welch and Paul Alton had figured they'd be back in Oregon in three or four days. "But each person we talked to gave us three or four more names," Welch remembers. "It spider-webbed. We were down there nine days." In Oregon the end of May is a gentle precursor of summer; in Chandler, Arizona, it was brilliantly hot. Paul Alton and Doug Welch felt as if they'd flown into a shimmering oven. Palm trees, cacti, oranges overripe to bursting on the sidewalks and in the gutters, flies droning heavily in the still air--all reminding them that they were far from home, looking for answers to perhaps Impossible questions from absolute strangers.

The Oregon detectives walked through the heavy carved door 01 the Chandler Police Department. The building on Commonwealth

Street was off-white, surrounded by palm trees and cedar "sdges, its windows recessed inside bunkerlike projections, as ^ol as a cave against the heat. It. Bobby Harris led them to an

_terview room.

H The first interview seemed the most important: Lewis Stan°n Lewiston, a good suspect in the shootings either as the actual 752 ANN RULE

shooter or as an accomplice. They recognized him; he was the man in the pictures on Diane's television set in Springfield. Lew. A tall, wide-shouldered man in his mid-thirties with almost-military

short hair, dark brown eyes, a neat beard. When he spoke, he sounded like Texas.

Doug Welch and Paul Alton were eager to hear what Lewiston had to say. They were less anxious to ask their explicit questions when they saw that Nora Lewiston had accompanied her husband to the interview. My God, how do you ask a man intimate details about his lover when his wife is sitting there beside him?