Small Sacrifices (43 page)

Hugi did nothing to apprise her otherwise.

Diane testified she had told Christie that the authorities said Christie knew who hurt her, but Christie had insisted she could only remember seeing the horses.

Bill Furtick, the children's attorney, cross-examined Diane next. He was curious about why Diane hadn't simply notified CSD that she'd been with Christie.

"Let me back up just a bit," she answered. "Steve said that if I cooperated with him, I could see the kids whenever he said

. . . Steve was basically supposed to be set up as the foster home ... I could abide with that, but that wasn't Steve's opinion. His

opinion was that he would be the custodial parent. If you understand Steve like I do, that means he can use the kids to buy

affection from me, to buy time with me. Steve is a possessive person, and it was his way of getting to me. If he got angry with me ... I would not be allowed to see the kids ... On Friday, I talked to Steve on the phone. He said, 'It's all set. Sign over the paper on the kids, and it will be done.' He made them sound like used cars. Those were my babies he was talking about." |

Furtick's voice was incredulous. "Let me interrupt you. The21 man who you say threatened to kill you is trying to buy your

affection--buy your . . . love?"

"Yes."

Diane testified that her only reason for telling Christie to keep their visit a secret was to avoid hurting the feelings of Christie's foster family. ; s

| Furtick got Diane to agree that Christie now knew that her mother was a suspect.

"If you'd like to know what I said to Christie--Christie said,

'Mommy, why can't you come to see me anymore?' And I said, I

thought they told you that I'm a suspect.' She said, 'So what?' I said, 'They think that I'm the one that hurt you.'

"And she said, 'That's stupid. How could they say that?' " What Christie had really said would remain a gray area;

Christie would not appear at this court proceeding.

Carl Peterson testified that Diane's visit with Christie had caused a pronounced setback in Christie's progress. Peterson said that Christie was at present "obliquely aware of who shot her." Eventually, he hoped that she would remember the details.

"There certainly are elements of that evening that have been suppressed--because they have slowly begun to come out." Susan Staffel told the court that Christie had to be continually reassured that it was all right for her to reveal she had been with her mother. Christie finally said Diane had "told me not to tell" about the visit.

Christie Downs was a pawn in a human chess game she could not begin to understand. If there was a way to bring murder charges against her mother without placing Christie on the witness stand, Fred Hugi would have leapt at the chance. But until the murder gun was found, there was no way.

Christie was it. And, despite the setback, Christie had not given up trying to remember. There was a resolutely gallant quality about that little girl; Hugi wondered if he would have had the guts at nine that she had. At nine? Even at thirty-nine, would he want to remember what Christie had seen? No way.

He contended in his closing argument that Diane had visited with Christie solely to protect herself against the possibility that Christie had incriminating memories of the shootings.

Diane faced jail for violating the order to stay away from her children. It seemed a definite possibility--until Jim Jagger rose to impart information that would make jail inadvisable for his client.

"My client is two-to three-months pregnant," he announced for the record. The courtroom buzzed.

i "Everyone was shocked," Diane told her diary. "I blushed." ' Not everyone was shocked. Hugi and the investigators already

knew, of course. The press, however, was caught off guard. Lars Larson had just broken the news in an AP wire story that Diane had been a surrogate mother. The immediate assumption was that Diane was pregnant with another surrogate baby. No, she smiled gently and shook her head at that suggestion

. when besieged with reporters later. But, yes, she was pregnant, I and she was very happy about it, although the father's identity 294 ANN RULE

was not for public knowledge. He was, she said, a "very private person."

Rather than sentence her to jail for defying court rulings, Judge Foote gave Diane a one-year suspended sentence.

Diane admired Foote at this stage of the game. Gregory

Foote is six feet, four--a muscular blond man in his thirties, built like an athlete, which he is. He became a judge at twenty-nine-one of the youngest judges in Oregon history, and his consuming

concern is the rights of children. He coaches a soccer team and spends untold hours counseling troubled teen-agers. If Diarae should go to trial for murder, it would be Foote's first homicide trial. Despite all the roadblocks in his path, Fred Hugi felt that they were moving steadily now toward an arrest. Timing and Christie's memory were of paramount importance.

Carl Peterson reported--to his great relief and surprise--that a rebound effect had ensued after Christie's initial reaction to the surreptitious visit. For every backward step, Christie now leapt forward two or three. They worked with play therapy, with pillows and chairs. Peterson obtained a copy of the Duran Duran

tape "Rio"--the one that had been in the Nissan's tape deck on the night of the shooting--and played that during their sessions. Sounds--like smells--can often bring back total recall.

They had reached a new plateau. Peterson gave Christie slips of paper and told her that if she wanted to, she could write the name of the person who shot her and Cheryl and Danny on the paper, put it in an envelope, and seal it. If she didn't want anyone to read what she wrote, she could burn the envelopes in his fireplace before she left his office.

Gravely, carefully, Christie wrote something on the paper slips and placed them in the envelopes. But she kept the enve-j lopes with the names inside until the end of each session. And always, before she left Dr. Peterson's office, she flung them into the flames and watched until the paper curled and scorched and finally turned to unreadable ash.

Of all the television reporters covering the Downs case, only Anne Bradley of KEZI (ABC) had never approached Diane about doing an interview, and this annoyed Diane.

Anne Bradley, the daughter of newspaper editors, had graduated from the University of Oregon at twenty, interned at KEZI, and was now an anchor-person. Pertly pretty and blonde, Bradley was a consummate media professional, although she had difficulty hiding her empathy for another's tragedy. Bradley was highly visible in Eugene's media corps, and her failure to appear at Diane's news conference left a noticeable gap. Bradley had stayed away deliberately, suspecting that might make Diane jump at a KEZI interview.

On the afternoon after the show-cause hearing, the time seemed right. Bradley didn't want to be premature; Diane Downs hadn't been charged with anything yet except disobeying a visitation order. But there was a feeling in the air, the heaviness of a major move soon. Bradley suspected that it was only a matter of time before Diane would be arrested for murder. Once that happened, there would be no more interviews.

Anne Bradley chose not to speak to Diane on the phone; that i would water down a face-to-face taping. She asked her news I director to call Diane. Diane was delighted to cooperate. The next day, a Saturday, she arrived at KEZI, accompanied not by her

| attorney, but by her brother, Paul.

In three hours on tape, Diane would give Bradley one of the most revealing views of her personality yet seen. The tape that resulted contained astounding footage. For Bradley, it would mean a tremendous struggle between conscience and ambition. Diane Downs and Anne Bradley sat side by side in the conference room 296 ANN RULE

of KEZI and talked for hours on camera. Diane recalled her thought processes on that ugly night in May.

"I have been through that night so many times; I have been through it with my psychologist. It's very hard, it's very tearful-there are a lot of memories that--I don't know. A lot of people if something traumatic happens to them, they suppress it immediately.

/ kept those memories because I knew that I was the only person that could be able to tell them what happened when we went to the hospital. And when I got there, the first thing I said was 'Call the doctor!' Second thing the blood type, and the third thing was 'Call the cops!' . . . And so, I had to remember as much as I could remember. When this man shot my daughter, my first reaction was to snap back to my childhood, to the pain that had happened to me back then, my marriage, my entrapment by

society. This man was bigger than me; he was stronger than me; he had more power because he had a gun. He was in control and I was not. And I had--there was nothing I could do and I stood there, and I looked at Christie reaching and the blood that just kept gushing out of her mouth, and--What do you do? You just stand there trapped, and then--and then, the gun kept firing and firing and firing and it made it--it was monotonous . . .

"I pushed him. I ran. And when he swung around he was pointing--when he swung around ... the gun hit the tips of my fingers and that snapped me, and I went Wait a minute! I'm not trapped by society. I don't care if he is bigger. If I stand here, and I say, 'Yeah, here--take the keys; there is nothing I can do--you win because you have the gun,' my kids are going to die. I'm not going to let my kids die. And so ... I feigned throwing the keys. He did not take time to point the gun and shoot me, obviously, because he would have shot me the same way he shot the kids. When he was swinging in the direction of the keys, firing the gun, he hit my arm. Everybody says, 'You sure are lucky!' Well, I don't feel very lucky. I couldn't tie my damned shoes for about two months! It is very painful, it is still painful, I have a steel

plate in my arm--I will for a year and a half. The scar is going to be there forever. I'm going to remember that night for the rest of my life whether I want to or not. I don't think I was very lucky. I think my kids were lucky. If I had been shot the way they were, we all would have died--except maybe for Danny."

Diane talked freely of her past, of her marriage, of her abortion, and of her search for a "good specimen" to father the baby

^

that became Danny. But always she came back to her valiant fight to save her children.

Bradley noted that Diane lingered obsessively over the feel, sight, smell of blood. Again and again, she described how she could see "the blood coming out of Christie's mouth." "Driving to the hospital, I can smell blood."

"The DA has come up with this idea that someone was shot on the outside of the car--on the passenger side of the car ... And that's why it was so--I'm going--'It was planted!' and ... it just seemed, I mean it can't be real. Because they talk about blood spatter and when they say 'spatter,' I think of something being shot out. Like the blood spatter in the car--you know, it was so uniform. It was so regular. Same size droplets spread evenly in a pattern. And when they say spatter, that's what I thought of. And we saw pictures of this so-called spatter--It's drops. When they took Chris and Cher out of the driver side of

the car, and it's blood droplets. It's when they picked the kids up and carried them over the threshold, there is blood dripping down the side of the car."

Bradley suddenly felt faint, her senses saturated with the continual talk of the children's suffering, their life fluid pouring out endlessly as their mother's car moved toward the McKenzieWillamette Hospital. She touched Diane's arm.

"I have to stop," Bradley murmured. "I'm getting sick--" Diane half-turned toward Bradley, and the cameras caught Diane's expression. It was a smile--but such a strange smile--her eyes narrowed, her lips in a smirk. Freeze frame.

Bradley noticed that when she threw unexpected questions, Diane's body language telegraphed subtle signals that she was disturbed, even though her voice stayed calm. Diane flushed visibly when she was caught off-guard.

Bradley had discovered elements of the case that Diane had thought were privileged information, known only to the police, herself, and her attorney. The fact that she'd said at one point that two men attacked her, and the information that Cheryl's Type 0 blood had been found on the exterior of the car had hit Diane with particular force.

"When I asked her about those things," Bradley recalls, "she was shocked . . . Her neck blushed scarlet, and she kind of

pulled her head back and stared fixedly at me. And then I could see her composing herself ... I perceived that inwardly she was frightened, but outwardly she could control it.

298 ANN RULE

"When I asked her about the 'two men story,' Diane gasped so quickly that her breasts heaved as if she was trying to catch her breath--but she never flinched. If she didn't want to answer me, she had a coughing attack, or she asked for a drink of water. She needed to buy time to formulate the right answer." It was the interview of a lifetime, and Anne Bradley was twenty-five years old. Conscience forbade her showing it to the public immediately. If she did, they'd never get an unbiased jury in Lane County. And her station's attorneys forbade her showing it to law enforcement.

In the end, Bradley played fair with both the State and her station, and lost the sharpest edge of her scoop. She rewound her videotape, and placed it far back on a shelf--saving it for

"someday."*

Diane knew that the police had read much into the diary she'd sent them to retrieve the night of the shooting. Her second diary seems even more designed--contrived--to be read.

"Went Christmas shopping this evening. There was a little boy there, crying. His hands were so cold and red," she wrote in December. "I wanted to reach out and put his hands in my warm coat--but I didn't. Before all this happened, I would always comfort children in stores. It keeps them from getting hit by up-tight parents. People . . . said I had a special way with kids. Now, I don't try. I'm afraid they'll think I'm going to do something wrong ..."