Small Sacrifices (24 page)

September 13 frightened Steve, he told the Oregon detectives. "I picked her up at the airport and took her back to my home. I felt that she'd wanted Lew Lewiston to be the person to pick her up. We were having some veiled discussions and it wasn't working out very well. She was getting weird. She began scraping her face with her nails. It freaked me out. She began kicking at me." Before they left Steve's house, he saw her stick something black into her purse. On the way out to the Sunshine Valley Trailer Park, Diane began to mumble about suicide. Steve had heard it before, but she was acting "so weird." At the trailer, Diane ran to the bathroom and locked herself in.

Steve pounded on the door, and Diane called out, "Well, you don't have to worry about it. I'll kill myself ..." |

He heard the sharp crack of a gun firing, and it scared the hell out of him. Downs put his shoulder to the door and crashed in. Diane sat on the tub inside, uninjured, pointing the .22 pistol at him. "She says, 'I can't kill myself, Steve--but I can kill you!'

He weighed the possibility of jumping her, but she could fire first, so he tried to dissuade her, "Diane, that's a .22 pistol. You got nine shots in that gun, and you can't kill me." She hesitated for a moment, and Steve grabbed the gun.

Diane wasn't bleeding. Steve saw that she had fired into the trailer floor.

Diane was overtly suicidal, perhaps for the first time since she'd slashed her wrists at thirteen. She had given up medical

school for Lew, she had given up other men for Lew, and Lew < had abandoned her. Steve took the gun home with him. They were a family--or rather, an ex-family--where guns were commonplace: rifles, handguns, passing back and forth between them. |

Steve said that, as far as he knew, the bullet hole remained in s [the bathroom floor of Diane's deserted mobile home. The detectives

perked up. If there was a bullet hole, there might be a bullet or a casing still there. Alton made a note to tell Fred Hugi about it.

).

In a second interview with Lew and Nora Lewiston, Doug Welch and Paul Alton learned more about Diane's growing obsession with her married lover. She had prevailed upon Lew to sleep with her again, and her depression lifted. She'd been down, but she'd bounced back. She was so confident that she'd gone to a tattoo parlor and asked the operator to tattoo a huge red rose on her right shoulder.

"She came out on my route and asked me to write my name because she wanted it in my handwriting," Lew recalled. "But I refused—and she got it anyway."

Her tattoo, she explained to him, meant that she was his woman, indelibly marked with a rose and his name to symbolize their pure love. If another man tried to put his hands on her, he would see Lew's mark. When Lew saw the rose, he only felt uncomfortable.

Diane Downs clearly had begun to get lost in tunnels of her own devising, twisting hollow places that demanded too much of her, but her obsession made her a powerful adversary. Doug Welch saw that Lew would be "a rotten liar. He told us he'd been lying to Nora—but she knew he was lying. I don't think he ever even lied to Diane."

His deep voice faltering from time to time, Lew continued the etiology of his affair with Diane Downs, a cyclone sweeping into his life. "The affair continued, and continued, and I was with Diane all day at work, and I'd be with her all night long and it was every day for months. I basically didn't have time to think, you know; I was with Diane all the time."

He was still living with Nora, and Nora could plainly see that it had begun again. She said nothing.

Diane planned a second trip that fall to Kentucky. After the

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September failure, Clomid--a fertility drug to stimulate the ovaries to release multiple ova--had been prescribed. Should she conceive on this visit, Diane might well bear two, three, even six babies.

She wasn't at all put off by that. If that should happen, she would probably get her picture on the cover of People or Time!

Diane was due in Louisville on October 9; she attended

Christie's eighth birthday party, and then flew east from Phoenix. Later that night, Lew recalled, her trailer burned. The Maricopa County fire marshal found it suspect that a mobile home barely six months old should spontaneously combust. Arson investigators checked the trailer meticulously. They determined the cause was an electrical short in the back wall, a wall constructed of relatively fireproof sheet rock, backed by masonite. There was a single burned spot on the floor inside, but the principal interior damage was from heat. Insulation had melted. So had Diane's stereo and her plastic flowers. Her water bed was intact. The mobile home was left marginally habitable. Diane had made only four $300 payments; she collected $7,000 in insurance. Steve agreed to repair the damage for her.

When Paul Alton totaled Diane's income for 1982, he saw that financially, through both design and disaster, it had been a fruitful year. When the insurance pay-off was added to the $10,000 she'd received for the first surrogate baby and to her yearly salary, she'd come into almost $40,000 in twelve months. If the trailer had been completely destroyed, there would have been a lot more insurance money. l y ,

Lew told Alton and Welch he was curious about the fire. "I ':K asked her how it got started, what the fire department had found.

And she said it was either a cigarette burning, or a loose electrical ^re ... it started in the bedroom."

But then Diane had laughed mischievously. "I asked her how it really happened. She said 'I worked it out with Steve. He was opposed to start the trailer on fire. I told him I wanted it completely

burned. But Steve messed up--as usual--and left one of "ie doors shut, and the fire never went any further than the "edroom.'

"She wouldn't tell me if she and Steve agreed to split the ^oney from the insurance, only that they planned the arson . . .

m not even sure why she wanted the trailer burned--other than ^at she didn't want it anymore."

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162 ANN RULE

Being stuck with a half-burned trailer was the least of Diane's problems. Diane, who had always prided herself on her fecundity, had failed--again--to conceive, even with a boost of fertility drugs. And Lew told Diane frequently that he felt obligated to Nora--that he loved her, for God's sake--and would break off the affair.

After the fire, Diane moved in temporarily with Karen Batten. She paid off her Ford Fiesta, gave Steve $100, and purchased some materials needed to fix the mobile home. Steve and his friends said they could make it good as new for $1,000.

They never did though.

Lew acknowledged that he'd never stayed away from Diane for long. The investigators nodded. They had seized Diane's calendars for 1982 and 1983. She'd marked the days they were together, the days they'd broken up; the calendar looked like a

patchwork quilt.

Although she was intimate only with Lew, she moved in with Steve and her children in November. Steve reneged on his promise to fix her trailer. He stalled. He had his family back together. Steve recalled a violent scene. He had been sitting on the tailgate of his truck with Cheryl when he saw Diane's white car racing down Palomino Street. Diane screeched to a stop and held out a black object. "This is what I've got!" she'd cried. It was the gun.

Steve dove through the driver's window toward Diane: she put the car in gear and headed toward the Alma School Road.

"I held on," Steve recalled. "Another car was coming. As we were going toward the other car, I just bailed off. I rolled quite a ways. I could hear the kids then. Cheryl and Danny were running down the street screaming."

Clan Sullivan, from his yard down the street, saw Diane with the gun, and Steve--who appeared to be pinned inside as she revved up the car faster and faster. "He slid on his heels for about twenty feet before he lost his balance and fell." Steve called the police but he told Diane to stay away when she came back. He had once again softened toward her and didn t want to get her in trouble. He sent the cops away.

Steve recalled that Diane found the incident humorous. "She said it was real hilarious when I let go of the car and rolled down the street."

Christie, Cheryl, and Danny went to bed with their clothes on

and fell asleep listening for the sound of their mother's return, covering their ears so they wouldn't hear the screaming. Nobody remembered to give them supper.

Investigators into murder eventually come to know both the victim and the killer as well--or better than--anyone else. They must turn up hidden things no one was ever meant to see. Diane Downs had always protested that no one understood

her. Fred Hugi, Paul Alton, and Doug Welch were certainly trying to do just that--reconstructing her life from her records, diaries, calendars, and her own voluminous statements. It was a matter of picking up a thread of information, following it back to its end, and then weaving each new thread into a tapestry that steadily revealed a clearer and clearer image.

Welch and Alton talked with a number of Diane's friends-and critics--at the post office, and to several of her discarded lovers. A good percentage turned pale when they learned that their indiscretions had become part of a homicide file.

The investigators also located witnesses who could verify that neither Lew nor Steve Downs could have been in Oregon on the night of May 19. A waitress at the West Chandler Tavern had chatted with Lew and Nora there between nine and midnight. Steve's new girlfriend had walked with him around the Mesa City Canal between 7:30 and 9:00 p.m. She was watching televisio'n with him shortly after 1:00 a.m. when his roommate came to tell him about the emergency phone call from Oregon.

A number of the people were asked to take a lie detector test, and all agreed. None of their responses indicated that they had any guilty knowledge about the shooting on Old Mohawk Road. Diane Downs had never been a contender for Miss Congeniality of Chandler. The lady had made enemies, and the Oregon detectives had to take her abrasive frankness into account. But then homicide investigations are not popularity contests.

Some of the informants described a woman with a single-mindedness, a channeling of ambition, that they had rarely, if ever, encountered. Others disagreed; Diane Downs had been flippy ^Ppy, up and down, mad and sad. A few--a very few--witnesses _Poke in her behalf, and then only with faint praise.

B "Diane is headstrong; she knows what she wants and will do ^at she has to to get it." 164 ANN RULE

"Diane didn't care for her kids. Diane's not a good mother. The children were a hindrance to her."

"Diane was moody. One day she would be in a good mood, and the next day she seemed to be mad."

"Diane was looking for love."

"Diane was going to shoot Steve once, but she said she chickened out."

"One time, Danny threw up on the rug. Diane screamed at him and called him a 'fucking bastard.' The kids were hungry. There was never any food in Diane's house."

"Diane took on married men because they are more willing. It was a sexual need that made Diane really come on to men."

"Diane wouldn't hurt her kids."

"She was a very poor mother. Everything came ahead of the children. When she picked the kids up and Danny wanted affection, she pushed him away. She would come to visit and leave

the kids home alone--from thirty minutes to two hours. She said they'd be all right."

"Diane was just a sad lady ..."

"Diane's gone through a lot of people and has no scruples or conscience. She doesn't care who she hurts. That lady is pure poison. The lady is whacked out."

Lew told Welch and Alton that Diane had moved back into her blackened trailer. Her sister Kathy and Kathy's baby, Israel, joined her. Kathy had left her husband too.

Sometimes Diane brought Christie, Cheryl, and Danny to

stay at the trailer. The ugly remains of the fire frightened them. Lew hit the roof one night when Diane climbed into bed with him and told him she'd left the kids home alone in the trailer. "I told her that eight wasn't old enough for a little girl to look after two other little kids, and that she had to go home and not come back until Kathy got there to sit with them."

Nora Lewiston bided her time. She never said a word to Lew when he was out late or when she spotted the purple hickeys Diane deliberately planted on Lew.

Just before Thanksgiving, Lew went off by himself to think. When he came back, he told Diane that he was going to leave Nora. Diane found a small apartment on Ray Street and persuaded Lew to sign the lease with her. She furnished the place

^vith a rocking chair and a sleeping bag. Lew never moved in; he only visited there.

Diane gave Lew "messages" that the kids had sent him which struck him as absurd; he barely knew Diane's children.

"They were nice little kids, sweet little kids--but I hardly ever saw them," Lew told the detectives. "And I didn't want to be their daddy.

"Diane kept saying, 'I don't want a daddy. I want someone to love me and care about me and like my kids, but not be part of them."

With Lew, Diane had talked about "pure love" and "heart love." But what Diane primly termed "heart love" was something far more earthy in her voluminous diaries and letters. Her confidences to friends were full of sexual references bordering on

obscenity.

She had told a number of men that she'd worked a long time to become an expert at making love, that she was very, very, good at it. With other men, Diane's knack with sex was apparently nothing more than a means to an end: seduction . . . gaining control. With Lew, it looked as if Diane was the one in danger of losing control.

Lew was, quite possibly, the only man with whom she was

orgasmic.

Lew admitted he'd enjoyed good whiskey before he met

Diane, but he'd handled it. Diane had never been much of a drinker--possibly a vestige of her fundamentalist Baptist nurturing. Lew recalled that she hated the taste of whiskey. But they drank together, blurring and softening the cruel edges of his dilemma. They drove through the autumn and winter Arizona nights, sipping Jim Beam or Jack Daniel's. When a glass was emptied, it was placed on the floor of the back seat. When they turned corners, the glasses chinked and clinked together like so Eany atonal chimes stirred by a desultory wind.