Small Sacrifices (25 page)

Lew never moved into her apartment. Diane gave it up.

obody was winning. Nora's patience eroded. Lew asked for a ^divorce; she refused. Lew spent the night in a motel with a triumPhant

Diane. But he went home. He couldn't afford a divorce; he grooved out of his wife's bed, and he continued to see Diane.

It didn't really matter if Lew was living home or away;

^iane flooded him with love poems, cards, letters. He had no '^ce to keep them; he gave them back.

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Lew found he could not simply walk away from Diane; he

had made a bargain with the devil. Once he chose to cheat on his marriage, there was no turning back.

"No one could believe how that woman could talk, could promise, and coax and argue—unless he'd been involved with her. I was with her all the time. She talked and talked—and she hardly ever took a breath."

Welch nodded. He'd heard Diane talk.

Diane had apparently focused every ounce of her genius on tearing Lew away from his wife. Channeled, her energy was formidable.

She had her rose tattoo improved. It was now almost six

inches long—a full-blown red rose atop a slender stem. She urged Lew to get an identical tattoo. He refused.

Lew told Alton and Welch that he had finally moved into an apartment of his own. "I didn't call Nora, but I went over there on occasion to mow the grass and take care of that for her." He still seemed bemused by the hold Diane had over him. "I drank with the woman. I slept with the woman. That was all. We didn't talk . . . she talked at me, nagging at me—promising all these things she was going to buy me—that she thought I wanted—the wonderful life we'd have when I left Nora and came with her.

I didn't want anything from her, and she sure as hell never gave me anything she didn't have a reason for. She'd buy me whiskey to soften me up."

Nora said that Diane had called her often, using her lover's wife as a message center, especially when Diane and Lew weren't seeing each other. "When he'd broken off with her, she'd call to tell me it didn't hurt anymore and I could tell him for her that it was over, and then she'd hang up on me."

Nora received two letters from Diane. "In November, 1982, she told me how my husband had said he was going to move out and get a divorce ... He left—but he came back. During that week, I just rode with the tide."

When Lew returned home a week later, Nora said Diane

wrote another letter, a rather odd letter from a mistress to a wife,

"telling me how wonderful I was and that she respected me and she loved Lew no matter what, and he was—he was gold in her mind and things like that. But then she'd call me all the time . . •

two or three times a day continuously and hang up on me." Christie, Clieryl, and Danny stayed with Steve through Christ-

mas, 1982, and Diane sent over presents for them. Diane even bought Nora Lewiston a Christmas present.

"She got me these windchimes, shaped like a frog. That was like her. She wanted my husband, but it wouldn't occur to her that it might look strange for her to buy me a present." Steve Downs sold the Palomino Street house in January, 1983. Diane asked the children to choose who they wanted to live with. They chose her. Cheryl and Christie were afraid they'd hurt her feelings if they said they wanted to stay with Steve. Diane assured Lew that she would find a way to build the huge house she had sketched out so many times. There would be a nanny to oversee the children. She had no collateral, but she was considering borrowing a hundred thousand dollars or more to pay for it all. Lew told her that she'd be laughed out of the bank. Apparently undaunted, Diane proceeded with bigger plans. Nora Lewiston showed the Oregon detectives a sheaf of

newspaper clippings. With the fire insurance money and what was left of the payment for her surrogate baby, Diane had opened her own surrogate baby clinic!

She rented office space at 1801 S. Jen Tilly Lane in Tempe, Arizona. She had kept her eyes and ears open in Louisville; she connected with an attorney and physicians. To them she seemed to be a woman who knew a great deal about surrogate parenting.'

"I understood it inside and out. I took a copy of their [the Louisville clinic's] contract, changed it to suit my needs." She had thick vellum stationery embossed with her own

letterhead: Arizona Surrogate Parenting. Wearing a tailored suit and plain white blouse, Diane gave an interview to Gail Tabor of the Arizona Republic. She told Tabor that she had five surrogate mothers waiting for childless couples. In actuality, there were only two--the Frederickson sisters: Diane and Kathy.

Diane stressed that desperate parents-to-be shouldn't be overcharged. Her baby, Jennifer, had cost the natural father and

adoptive mother $40,000; Diane's business would charge only half that much: $20,000 to $22,000.

She said that the Kentucky program was "bleeding the poor Parents." Diane's surrogate mothers would be paid $10,000--just ^s Diane had been paid-but her company would take only twentywe Percent of the fee, with the remainder going for medical and Typological testing and hospital care at the time of delivery.

r°ince Diane was both the company and a potential surrogate 168 ANN RULE

mother, she would receive more than seventy-five percent of the fee.)

Diane explained that money was very important in a surrogate baby program. "If a surrogate does it strictly for money, that's a guarantee she'll give [the child] up."

And what if a mother would not give her baby up?

"I would fight tooth and nail with every legal tactic--and appeal to her conscience."

Her new business had been started, Diane explained, solely to fill a need. "I hope to find surrogates for as many people who need them. If the response isn't good, I'll let it die because it isn't needed. But as long as there's a need, I'll continue to do it. I think it's fantastic!"

Fantastic it may have been, but there was some question of its legality in the state of Arizona. Statutes forbade the payment of compensation for "placing out of a child." Diane said that her lawyer assured her she was on firm legal turf. The surrogate mothers would not be paid for babies; they would be reimbursed only for their time, their loss of work, and their pain. A sidebar interview with two prospective surrogate mothers, young women called Rusty and Cindy, accompanied the piece. Coincidentally, Rusty and Cindy were the same age, had the same number of same-age children, and the same marital circumstances as Diane and her sister, Kathy.

Rusty (Kathy) explained that she was in the process of a divorce and had a sixteen-month-old son. Kathy did not have Diane's grasp of the English language. "At first I thought it was wrong. But then I had my own kid and thought, 'What a bummer that people can't have their own.' You're not doing anything wrong. It's not like you're sleeping with him."

Cindy (Diane) enthused about having given birth to her first surrogate baby the year before. "It formed a bond, and it didn't make me feel bad a bit. It wasn't my baby. I didn't even know who the father was. When the baby was born, it was her baby. I can't imagine giving up any of my own kids, but a surrogate mother doesn't fantasize. She doesn't sit around and pick out names or wonder who it will look like. She knows she's not bringing it home."

Cindy's own children had been delighted, she said, by her first surrogate pregnancy. "The children think it's neat that Mommy had a baby for a lady who couldn't have one because her body was messed up. My daughter told all the neighbors, and they

looked at me funny. They knew I wasn't married--but after I told one of them the whole story, they understood, and it was fine. I loved being pregnant with her. There was no pressure. I was very secure. I could do other things to make $10,000.1 just loved being pregnant."

She admitted her own parents had had reservations about

surrogate parenting. "My mother said it was a noble thing to do, but why did it have to be me? My father is very conscious of his status, and he didn't like it."

IfDiane's business should prosper, it was clear that Wes and Willadene would have more to be upset about. Not one, but both of their daughters were preparing to carry surrogate babies.

Diane gave a second interview to the Tempe newspaper.

Again, she appeared in the interview in two roles: she was Diane Downs, founder and director of Arizona Surrogate Parenting, and she was also Jenny, an experienced surrogate mother.

Diane told Elizabeth Neason, the Tempe staff writer, that she had been in business for several months, and inferred that there had already been contracts, babies conceived, and that deliveries were expected. None of this was remotely true.

And there were certain glaring flaws in this fledgling surrogate business. Since anonymity is essential in such agreements, and even Diane had stressed that the parents and surrogate must never know each other's names or addresses, how had she--as founder, director, and surrogate mother--expected to keep her identity secret from the natural father and adoptive mother?

Wouldn't they have noticed that she, the administrator, was pregnant and then suddenly not pregnant just as their child was born?

Wouldn't she know who they were?

Diane had no experience in running a business, precious little medical or legal knowledge, yet she had undertaken a business desperately dependent on the maintenance of a delicate balance between human behavior and contractual matters. Moreover, Diane was still under contract to the surrogate parenting clinic in Louisville. She'd been scheduled to fly there to be inseminated w the third try in the first week of February, 1983. She hadn't

informed them of her new enterprise. She considered it prudent to ^sep all her bases covered. It seemed to be simply a matter of ^ere she conceived first--her own clinic or theirs. ^ Would even Diane know whose baby she carried? t Nora Lewiston said she placed a phone call to the head of the ^-ouisville clinic after she read the article. He was appalled when

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she read the articles to him and stunned to hear about Diane's bout with venereal disease. The perfect maternal specimen from Arizona was no longer welcome in Kentucky.

Diane spoke of the wives of the natural fathers as women whose bodies were "messed up," always stressing that surrogate mothers must be healthy--that "most people want [a surrogate mother]

who is happy, outgoing, level-headed, and straight." Diane Downs herself had a perfect body and a superior IQ, but there were increasing signs that her head had become more and more "messed up."

The question Fred Hugi had to wrestle with was just how

messed up Diane was. Her behavior had been--and was--outrageous. But was she insane within the parameters of the law? Had she been aware of the nature and quality of the act of murder?

Had she known the difference between right and wrong at the moment of the crime?

Hugi thought that she had. He also thought that it had not mattered to her.

Arizona Surrogate Parenting never got off the ground. The first prospective parents split up before they could sign a contract. Her surrogate business was to have been a way for Diane to have both Lew and her children. Her plans for a six-figure income died--in utero, as it were. She needed to find another way. As Paul Alton and Doug Welch extended their stay in Chandler, Arizona, Fred Hugi pored over Diane's calendars, actually a form of diary. The woman loved diaries.

Despite setbacks, Diane's hold on Lew Lewiston seemed to have grown stronger. Diane's calendar-diary had a single entry in February, 1983.

"I could hardly believe my ears today. Lew said he would live in the same house with my kids and me (of course.) Then he said he would have to 'marry my ass.' But I think I can talk him into all of me. I'm so happy. Just when I thought Lew would call off our relationship, he said that he would marry me and live with my kids. But before I get too excited, I'll wait awhile. He could take another look at the situation and change his mind. I hope he doesn't. I sure love him."

Doug Welch asked Lew about this. Lew nodded. They had

been drinking, and he barely remembered the half-proposal. But

piane remembered it. Ignoring all the times he'd said he didn't want to raise kids, she chose to remember this one time. Lew had once given Diane four red plastic cups; she took the gift as an almost mystic sign that he had accepted her and her children. Four cups. One mom plus three children equals four.

"I had them in Texas," Lew recalls. "And they were just old beat-up red plastic drinking glasses that I got from a little store along my mail route in Texas. I didn't need them."

Lew's apartment on South Dakota was as barren as a monk's. Guilt would not allow him to live in any comfort at all; he had betrayed Nora--and he wasn't even sure why. When he left her, the only thing he took was his mother's sterling.

'"I continued to go home to mow the lawn for Nora, to do chores around the house. Then I went back to my apartment." Diane came this close to winning Lew. But she began to

push. Welch could see Lewiston was a man who avoided argument. But this time, Lew had refused to decide one way or the

other.

During the last half of February, 1983, Diane was at Lew's apartment so much that he felt stifled. One night, she pushed him to the wall.

"Diane asked me who I loved the most--her or Nora. I said I loved Nora. She blew up. She ranted and raved and screamed at me. I'd never seen anyone act that way before. She just lost it.-I know it sounds silly, but the final straw was when she broke my hairbrush."

Lew walked out, and Diane raced to her car and maneuvered it to block him. Calmly he clambered over the hood of her Ford Fiesta and strode off down the street. He called Nora from a phone booth at the 7-Eleven. Nora picked him up, and Diane followed them home.

"She pounded on our door all night long," Nora recalled.

"We wouldn't answer. Then she called on the phone." Diane was back the next morning. In uniform. She delivered "^ail to the Lewiston's house, but she reversed her route so that,