Small Sacrifices (46 page)

She felt sicker and sicker, and she began to vomit blood. The doctor diagnosed ulcers and told her not to worry so much. Her written memories of the days with the children were

perfect in retrospect. It had been heaven. Nothing marred her life then but the presence of Steve Downs.

"I had accomplished my goal. We were a happy family. Chris and Cher were almost inseparable and they never fought. And both of them catered to Danny, without thinking of themselves first. And when one of the girls got hurt, Clan would cuddle them and coo. There was love. Lots of love! We were also able to communicate. If they thought I was wrong, they spoke up without fear of punishment. And if I thought they were at fault somehow, I could say so without fear of them withdrawing in fear. We were happy. We were a success. We were a family!"

Diane's memory was selective; she had let everything negative slip away into oblivion as if it had never happened.

Wes was playing cat-and-mouse with her. He declared that |

he had no secrets from Willadene, and Diane was tempted to fling accusations at him--to remind him of the torture of anxiety and

disgust she'd suffered fifteen years before. She said nothing; he still controlled her.

Eight months now. Eight months back in her father's house. She wanted to leave--but Diane had finally begun to worry that they might be up to something over there in the courthouse. ,y. Things were too quiet. m She went to church and felt better. She didn't know that her new interest in religion was being monitored--along with almost all of her other activities away from home--by Doug Welch.

Attached beneath the frame of her white Ford Fiesta, there was a tiny radio signal that Welch could monitor from his car. I Welch slipped the "bird-dog" under Diane's car on January 23, \ and it stayed there for a week and a half.

At first, Fred Hugi merely asked Doug to chart Diane's

| movements in the early morning hours. Welch parked his car ih around the corner from the Frederickson home, waiting in the

| cold from 5:00 a.m. until 7:30 for Diane's car to go by. Hugi feared that Diane might learn how close they were to arresting her. "She might panic and do something rash. If she I snatched Christie and took off for Mexico, she wouldn't be any I worse off if she was unsuccessful. At this point, she'd be definitely better off if Christie disappeared. It was imperative that she not know that Christie was able to relate what happened." Welch watched to be sure Diane didn't drive to the Slavens'

house--perhaps to waylay Christie and Danny on their way to school. . There was also the possibility that she might move the gun--if she still had it--or even use it again to further her defense. It had ^^ been Diane's pattern in the past to stop at a lover's home on the

way to work. If the father of the baby she carried had been part of a murder plot, and if Diane was as antsy as she was reported to be, she might drive to the father's house for comfort. Welch spent j hours following Diane, listening for the tell-tale beep the bird|

dog put out. The stake-out was tedious--and unrewarding. His family never saw him. At length, Tamara Welch packed a picnic lunch, grabbed their two young sons and announced that

» they would do a "family" stake-out for the weekend. And they did.

"When the kids and Mama saw how much fun it was to drive around aimlessly all day, and wait behind bushes, they decided I wasn't leaving them behind while I had a high old time playing James Bond. They also decided they'd just as soon stay home the ' J next time," Welch laughs.

Diane was leading a circumspect life. Welch never saw her j with a boyfriend. Work. Church. Home. She appeared to have no t fnends, male or female. If she wasn't with her brother Paul, she ( was alone. Diane never knew that Welch had been tracking her.

j On Wednesday, February 1, the bird-dog device was removed . from her car. j| I ( Rumors were rampant now that an indictment was coming

314 ANN RULE

down, but the media could find no source who would verify it. Diane called Jim Jagger often to see if he'd heard anything, and he was usually able to calm her by saying some reporter had started it.

Even as her already tenuous world was beginning to crumble, Diane felt temporarily victorious because she had been allowed to talk to Danny's teacher and the report was good. He sounded like the old Danny—so intelligent and full of mischief—even if he couldn't walk. Diane had once told Lew in those phone calls that he'd taped, "of course Danny's paralyzed, but it really doesn't bother him."

Diane's cheerfulness was bravado. She grew more and more anxious. The entity she'd felt behind her was getting closer, and she glanced back more often.

She knew it wasn't her creepy phone caller. Some man had been calling her continually, pressing to meet her. He finally told her what he really wanted was to star her in porno movies—and she laughed. Eight thousand dollars for taking her clothes off! Jim Jagger laughed too when she told him. The weirdos were coming out of the woodwork.

The secret grand jury, after almost nine months of meetings, continued to weigh testimony to determine if Elizabeth Diane Downs should be charged with murder and a number of lesser offenses.

Lew and Nora flew into Eugene on January 26. Lew testified on the twenty-seventh, and they left for Arizona early in the morning the next day. Diane didn't even know he was in town. When she found out on February 9, she was shocked. "I don't know what came of that. But that's not unusual. They don't tell me anything."

Everyone was talking about her behind her back. Even her parents were holding secret conversations. She saw them sitting outside in their car, talking for a long time.

So what was new? It was the story of her life. What do we do with Diane? Send her here. Send her there. Put her on a bus and wave goodbye. Get rid of her. Badger her. Ignore her.

It was wearing her down. "I get so very tired of the fight. It

* is strange how you lose your self esteem," she told her journal. T "The DA & Sheriff and Dept of CSD talk and act as if I am guilty. Everything reflects their convictions ... I know that I am innocent."

And now, after she had spoken enough words to cover the

highways from Eugene, Oregon, to Chandler, Arizona, and back, Diane began to wonder if it might not be a good idea to speak out less. She wasn't sure if it would help but "I'll say one thing for sure--it can't hurt to keep my mouth shut."

It could not hurt, indeed. But it was a little late in the game. Perhaps she did talk less for a while. Her diary--her journal-became thicker. Each day's entry was now pages long, rather than the few sentences per day she had begun with.

She knew. Somewhere in her gut, Diane knew what lay

ahead. It was coming down.

"Boy, my skin crawls when I hear those words. [Murder Trial.] There is so much violence and ugliness attached to those two words. They seem so foreign to me, and yet it is something the DA has made part of my life. All my old friends and the media are waiting for that trial. It is so sad."

On February 17, Diane went to a woman's seminar in Portland with ladies from her church. Three hundred women attended, and she was amused to see that the topic under discussion was how to be a submissive wife. Well, she could have given lessons on that one--but she was surprised when someone got up and said you could be a Christian and still not have to kneel at your husband's feet. The Baptist Church was making progress. The trip to Portland helped take strain off for a few days. The atmosphere in her father's house was oppressive. One by one, the whole family was being called to testify before the grand jury, and there was rampant suspicion about who would tell what. Willadene was sure Diane was hiding something; Wes was wanting to know what Diane was going to say. Her parents were even abrasive with each other--a most unusual situation.

A whirlwind had come into their home, churning dark hidden sides up--into the light where they shouldn't be. Fifteen years since the Arizona state policeman had stopped them in the desert. But Diane remembered, and she knew her father did too. They circled each other like wary tigers--waiting to see who would strike out first.

But it was Wes Frederickson's house. Diane was only there under sufferance. She could tell her welcome was wearing thin. On February 24, Ray Broderick met Diane for the first time when he served subpoenas requiring Diane and Paul to appear at ^e grand jury hearing. They would be next: Diane the suspect;

376 ANN RULE

Paul the relative in whom she apparently confided. Broderick had deliberately waited until he could meet with Diane in her parents'

home--alone. He had noted that Diane seemed to choreograph her meetings with authorities; this time, and perhaps this time only, she was caught unawares. They talked for four or five hours. Diane explained to Ray Broderick fervently that "no one ever listens to me; they talk to me--but they won't listen to me." Broderick had been trained to do exactly that. Listen.

He phrased his comments carefully. Diane talked about the night of the shooting, the "stranger" who had shot them. Broderick suggested that "All of us have a stranger within us--a stranger who might do things that we ordinarily wouldn't do." She did not demur.

"She didn't resent my suggestion that she might be capable of shooting her children--an innocent woman's response would almost certainly have been one of hostility, protesting." It was a subtle balancing of wit and mind. He could see that the woman was very, very intelligent--but she talked so much, she failed to listen. Diane would write in her diary that she had explained to Broderick "what love really is." She apparently had no idea that she had just jousted with a master interrogator; she felt positive about the whole conversation--that she had gotten her points across well.

Diane extrapolated what she wanted from Ray Broderick's

conversation. As he left, he had looked directly into her eyes and said, "I do believe you. I think we both know who did this."

"It isn't that Diane doesn't know the truth, that she buries it in her subconscious somewhere," Broderick muses. "I think it's more that she picks what she chooses to discuss . . . deliberately. That seems to be her strength, judiciously emphasizing only self-1

serving statements."

For Broderick it was a fascinating exercise in human communication, both spoken and silent. "She was a woman with tremendous strength who was basically giving us the finger. Beneath it all she was saying, 'Prove it!' The chase was on, but as strong as our case was beginning to look, it could all collapse. We had over two hundred pieces of physical evidence to help us--but, even so, (, it was flimsy evidence. The mathematical combinations of what could go wrong were endless."

On Sunday, February 26, Diane had a doozy of a fight with her

father. "Just when I think that things are as bad as they can get, somehow—it gets worse," she told her journal.

She had been on her way to church, but the argument ruined that. She went driving, "talking to God," and then bought herself a new outfit to wear to grand jury. After that, she sought out a movie, a comedy where she could laugh. But it started again at supper. A discussion that grew in intensity and pitch, until they were shouting at each other. It ended with Wes telling Diane that she had to move out because he couldn't stand to live with her anger and hate toward him.

At the height of the battle, Diane turned to Willadene and blurted out accusations against Wes. She told her mother, finally, that she had been molested by her own father. Willadene shook her head in disbelief. She would not believe that—ever. Diane had fantasized it.

It was possibly the worst scene ever in the Frederickson household. If she had to go to trial, Diane had decided to use what had happened to her when she was a child—and to find every medical record or police file she could from fifteen years ago to prove it—if she had to. If it came down to him or her, she wasn't going to spare her father. She was ready to tell the whole world that her father had molested her when she was too young, and too frightened, to fight back or tell anyone.

Willadene simply shut her mind to Diane's accusations. She'd been married to Wes for almost thirty years. She'd lost her grandchildren, her daughter might be arrested for murder, and now she was supposed to believe that her own husband had done sexual things to their own daughter? It wasn't so.

On February 27, the family went to testify before the grand jury. What was said there was secret, but some of it would leak out, hints and impressions. Wes reportedly acted shocked when he was asked if anyone had ever molested Diane.

That night, Wes ordered Diane out of the house.

"Obviously I have no place to go, because I used all my money to pay my bills. But I was [am] getting all my stuff together, hoping to find room with someone, somewhere." She had no one. She had no friends. Willadene came and

talked with her while Diane ironed a dress, and they made it up. Willadene fixed supper early so that Diane wouldn't run into her father and when Wes got home, Diane left.

Diane went to see Matt Jensen; he was, after all, the father of 318 ANN RULE

the baby she carried. She thought perhaps he would let her stay the night with him.

He wasn't home.

That left no one at all. Diane drove to Foo's, a singles bar on Centennial Boulevard in the shadow of the University of Oregon's stadium. It was a meat market, where both men and women

prowled and preened, looking for instant love. She sat at a corner table, writing in her journal, sipping bourbon and water. During the hardball interview, Diane had asked Kurt Wuest and Doug Welch if they would want to know the day the world would end. They said they would; she said she would not. Even as she sat alone amid the laughing dancers at Foo's, Diane was living through the last twenty-four hours of the world as she had known it. Her world was about to come to an end.

And she got her wish. She didn't know it was the end.

One by one, those connected to the Downs shooting had been called into the secret chambers of the grand jury—some from far away, some from the Eugene area. They had told their stories, and it was done. ;