Small Sacrifices (50 page)

My temperature rises,

I'm getting hot

You should be with me,

and yet you're not.

My fingers touch lightly

K the place of desire

344 ANN RULE

Still I've not quenched

that burning fire.

I need your presence

towering over me

I need that passion

I can see.

So, reaching deep,

inside my heart,

I pull a memory

that will not part.

This touch can conquer

every fiber and bone

But look at me—

I'm all alone.

My passion is finally

laid to rest,

Yet none can say

"This is best."

Tenderly, I think of

your gentle embrace,

The way you gently

caress my face.

Come to me now—

lay by my side

How much more time

must I bide?

I need you more than

this rhyme can say

I need you every

hour of the day.

I love you more

than could your wife

Yet it's brought sorrow

to my life.

I just keep hoping

and hanging on

How much longer

can I be strong?

I stand alone,

just waiting to hear.

The day has come

when you'll be near.

I long to hold you

to my breast.

Then I will find

great peace and rest.

The sorrow builds

then ebbs away.

When I dream about

that beautiful day.

Masturbation is not a topic generally discussed among middleaged and elderly women in Lane County, Oregon. The courtroom

hushes as Hugi reads. Diane bows her head and cries softly into her handkerchief.

He reads from Diane's first Oregon diary--the diary filled with letters to Lew, letters damning his wife, begging him to join Diane. All those letters never sent.

He has selected only a small percentage of Diane's writings; already the courtroom is saturated with her words.

Succinctly, dispassionately, Hugi has told the jury what he'

needs to prove to them in the weeks ahead. His words, transcribed, fill eighty pages. He has fifty witnesses on tap to back him up.

Jim Jagger stands up at three minutes to two, smooth and cheer-^ ful. He explains that there are only three key portions to this

case: Christie Downs; ballistics testimony and crime lab evidence; and Diane Downs herself.

Yes. Yes and yes, Jagger admits. Of course, there have been lovers. No one is denying that; names will be named. 9 The ladies of the gallery react by shaking their heads in shock,

covering their foreheads with their hands. One murmurs, "My God!" Their own horror delights them; the long wait in line was worth it. ''

Yes, Jagger allows, there has been an obsession with a male-but never to the exclusion of Diane's children, or her career. Jim Jagger agrees that Diane is promiscuous. He has no other choice-Just as he must now explain the face that Diane Downs presents 346 ANN RULE

to the world. He cannot alter the protective smiling mask she wears. Nor is there any way he can keep her off the witness stand. Jagger tells the jury that Diane learned to hide her real emotions because she was molested by her father. They must not judge her by the way she reacts in court.

"She cannot react to pain by crying. She laughs, she jokes; everything is going to be OK—this is her habitual reaction." There will be tapes. "When we listen to the tapes . . . you'll see she talks without thinking."

Both sides have their own reasons for revealing as much

about Diane as possible. Jagger wants to evoke sympathy for a girl who has endured such a hard life that her quirks are not only understandable, but forgivable.

"From my side," Hugi recalls, "I saw her as a classic case of child abuse—perpetuating that abuse. Each side felt that the more the jury knew about Diane, the better his case would be—that was why there were so few objections during the trial." As Jim Jagger fights to save her, Diane's blonde head bends over her yellow legal pad. She is drawing something—what? It is a desperate face marked with shadows and heavy lines.

Indeed, there was a man—a stranger, Jagger assures the jury. He doesn't know who he was or why he shot Diane's children.

"Whether crazy, drugged or whatever—he just shot. Christie Downs has—she has in fact identified the perpetrator as best she could."

Diane nods yes, but she does not lift her head from her

drawing.

Jagger speaks of the trouble Diane has had with dreams after her desperate race to the hospital to save her children—a mother, hopelessly, helplessly, trying to save those she loved more than anyone in the world, confused later by her own nightmares. Diane asks for a Kleenex, yet her eyes seem dry.

"I suggest to you that she [Christie] has identified who did it—in a special way. And we'll get to that in the trial." Both sides agree. It will fall upon the fragile shoulders of Christie Ann Downs.

On Monday morning, May 14, Judge Foote, the jury, and Diane board a yellow school bus. They are driven to Old Mohawk Road; the jurors pile out and look at the river, the trees, the narrow

roadway that looks so normal now. This is the precise week when it all happened--only a year later. The maple leaves are not the same maple leaves, but they look the same.

Diane remains in the bus, her face an inscrutable mask as she gazes out the window.

At the Lane County Public Works shop, the jurors look at the shiny red Nissan Pulsar where it has been parked for a year. The car has been washed in the interim, and the outside rocker panel on the passenger side removed for Jim Pex's analysis of the blood spatters found there.

Back again in the courtroom: Heather Plourd is the first witness.

"It was about dark. I saw somebody driving up in the driveway

. . . She [Diane] said she was out sightseeing."

The next morning when Heather visited Diane in the hospital, Diane had voiced a fear. "She told me, 'I'm afraid Christie might blame me for what happened . . . When Christie raised up, I'm the first person she saw.' "

Delores Holland, Heather's neighbor remembers firmly when she heard the car door slam and the sound of tires leaving the Plourds' driveway. ^H

"Twenty minutes to ten."

This early testimony is important in matters of establishing time, but not sensational. Jurors #6 and #12 take notes, while the other ten pairs of eyes move .from Jim Jagger to the witness. Joseph Inman is next. He has a full reddish-brown beard, wire-rim glasses, and he speaks with a slight Texas drawl not unlike Lew Lewiston's. He wears western boots and a cowboy j beltbuckle. He is a good witness. He describes coming up behind the red car with the red Arizona plates that was merely creeping along Old Mohawk. Inman identifies photos of the Downs car as the car he saw.

Deputies carry in a huge map eight feet long and three feet iwide, an overview of the vital areas in this case: Diane Downs's 'duplex on Q Street, Heather Plourd's mobile home on Sunderman

Road, the spot where the .22 casings were found on Old Mohawk Road, the point at which Joe Inman observed Diane's red car inching along the road, and the hospital. I:

The times the victims had been at each point are noted on the chart so that the jury can see for themselves.

The shooting had to have occurred at five minutes to ten. It was 10:15 when Joe Inman first observed Diane's car; he followed 348 ANN RULE

her for two-tenths of a mile for two minutes at a speed of six miles an hour. At 10:17 p.m., he reached a straight spot in the road and passed her.

Diane was only four and a half miles from the hospital at that point--and yet it took her almost twenty-two minutes more to reach the Emergency entrance.

Jim Jagger attempts to sway Joe Inman on his recall of time and speed. He cannot. Inman will not equivocate.

Judy Patterson leads off the McKenzie-Willamette ER witnesses. She is nervous, but she remembers it all--the Code 4, the page for all available personnel, her conversations with Diane.

"She told me the kids were laughing and talking, laughing at something Danny had said--and talking to Christie. That it was an awful thing to be laughing one minute, and the next ..." Patterson recalls the two versions of the shooting Diane gave. Only after she steps down does she realize she forgot one exchange.

"Diane looked up at me, that first night, and asked flatly, 'Are they dead yet?' No emotion. Just, 'Are they dead yet?' "

One after another, all of them who were in the ER a year ago take the stand. Shelby Day is next. She had dreaded testifying, but she does well as she recalls that Cheryl was dead on arrival, with blood already clotted in her throat, a straight line on the heart monitor.

Rosie Martin tells the jury about her first sight of Diane standing by the driver's side of her car. "I asked her what was going on, and she said, 'Somebody just shot my three kids--' " Rosie had suctioned Christie Downs's occluded airway. And then she had spent most of her time with Dr. Foster as he worked over Danny.

What does she remember about Diane Downs's wound, Hugi

asks.

"I just remember an entrance and an exit--somewhere on the forearm . . . She asked how the children were, and I told her the doctors were in there wprking on them. And then she--the mother-. laughed, and she said, 'Only the best for my kids!' and she laughed again and said, 'Well, I have good insurance.' I thought it t, was peculiar--but I was thinking about the kids."

The mother's demeanor?

"She seemed very composed."

As the hospital personnel continue their testimony about the

night of May 19, 1983--particularly about the bizarre comments of the defendant--the jurors become more and more subdued. At afternoon break, no one in the gallery leaves.

Diane doesn't wear handcuffs into the courtroom, but there is always a faint rattle of chains just before she enters the room after recesses. Every time she walks in, she smiles.

Dr. John Mackey is to be the next scheduled witness. But his beeper sounds and he rushes from the corridor on an emergency. Court recesses early. The gallery disperses reluctantly. There is the danger that they will not be able to get into the courtroom tomorrow.

Tuesday, May 15.

The lines are longer this morning, a huge crowd on Day Six, pushing against the rope barrier an hour before the courtroom doors will open.

Mrs. Mackey hopes to get in to hear her husband testify. A chatty woman who lives three houses down from the shooting site half-apologizes for the neighborhood. "It's real quiet--and nothJng ever happens out there. This was so unusual."

|^ The crowd is jittery; they rush through the doors. A man who was far back in line stomps out when he finds the courtroom filled. "I couldn't find a seat," he announces loudly to no one in particular. "There are three fat ladies taking up a whole rowF'

The three fat ladies stay put, but look annoyed.

Dr. John Mackey is a most articulate witness. He looks

directly at the jury: "I found a small child gasping for air, crying weakly . . . and then I saw what I assumed to be a child-crumpled on the floor. I thought to myself, 'Oh my God, there's a third one. What will we do?'

"What did you do?" Fred Hugi asks softly.

"Can I refer to the children by name--it would be a lot easier." .,

"Of course."

"Cheryl appeared to be dead."

Diane is immobile, her pale right hand--with long, carefully filed nails--droops languidly on her chair's arm.

"Cheryl--had dilated pupils, no respiration. We hooked her up to a heart monitor."

Mackey's voice is emotional and husky. For twelve minuses, he describes the measures they had tried. "I knew that Danny had been shot in the chest, I knew that Christie had been shot in 350 ANN RULE

the chest, and Cheryl also had been shot in the chest. Christie had actually begun the process of dying ... the oxygen level in her bloodstream was incompatible with life . . . One of the most serious injuries you can have is a gunshot wound to the chest. . . we were just doing everything we could to bring those kids back." One of Mackey's other jobs had been to report to the mother what was happening with her children. Dr. Mackey's encounters with Diane Downs had left him astounded. He told her all three children were critically injured, and that one of them had died—

one of the girls. He started to describe the dead child—but stopped, realizing how similar the girls were in appearance.

"She said, 'Oh. She was to be my athlete' . . . She was extremely composed. She was unbelievably composed. I couldn't disbelieve she was a family member. There were no tears ... no disbelief ... no, 'Why did this happen to me?' "

Slowly, Dr. Mackey shifts slightly on the stand and turns to look at Diane as he speaks. "I told her that she would have to stay at the hospital," and she said, 'Well, will I be able to work tomorrow? I must work the day after at least.' I thought that was a truly inappropriate response."

"Objection, your honor," Jagger booms.

"Sustained."

"I felt—"

"Objection!"

' "Sustained."

Hugi rephrases a question to elicit Dr. Mackey's observation.

"Objection." i 'Ife

"Overruled."

Mackey says that he observed a lack of concern by a mother for her children. "I felt that something was very wrong at that point—"

"Objection!"

They tussle with their legal points, and finally John Mackey is allowed to say a complete sentence or two about the woman he saw on the night of May 19.

"A woman very calm, very self-assured, excited—not tearful—

but angry. Occasionally smiling, occasionally chuckling. I saw a woman who appeared to be in very good control of herself. That's

"surprising."

Fred Hugi asks if the police put undue pressure on Diane. No. "I felt they acted in a very professional manner . . . they were very cautious."