Small Sacrifices (68 page)

"Is that 'Lizbet Diane Downs?"

He nodded. In the intake area, they were greeted by two

pleasant-looking women who logged Diane's personal property, and began to fill out forms.

Welch felt Diane's eyes on him again. He returned her gaze.

"You've lost some hair during all of this, Doug--or maybe I've just never looked at you before."

"I probably have."

"Well, smile, Doug--don't look so sad."

"Oh, I'm not," he taunted her, aware that she was drawing him into one of her sarcastic games. "I'm elated--I'm thrilled."

"Hmm. I know you are."

Diane's belly-chains were removed, and Rosage and Welch

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turned to leave. When Welch reached the threshold, he turned and looked back at Diane

She was leaning with her back against the wall, staring at the floor. Her smile was gone.

The deputies walked back down the sidewalk toward the

gate, and the same woman banged on the window and called to them again.

"Hey! Hey—was that really 'Lizbet Diane Downs?" Again, Welch nodded.

"Y'am mo beat her up. Y'am mo kick her ass ..." Behind Chris Rosage and Doug Welch, the door to intake slammed shut. Diane was alone now with the other women prisoners. For a moment there, as she'd stood leaning against the wall, she had looked again like the little girl who waited desperately outside the schoolroom for recess to be over.

Fred Hugi got a phone call in the first part of November, 1984; it was like a nightmare that had come back full blown. Diane had been in the penitentiary for three months when Chandler Police Sergeant Ed Sweitzer called the Lane County DA's office with news that would prove appalling.

The missing gun had been found. A .22 Ruger pistol, a semiautomatic bearing the serial number listed for the gun thought to

have been in Diane's possession--#14-76187--had been recovered in a narcotics raid by Sergeant John Hansen of the Perris California Police Department. When Hansen punched the serial numbers into the National Crime Information Center computer network, he came up with a hit citing a warrant for the gun out of Chandler.

Paul Alton flew to Chandler once again, and subsequently to Perris, California. The narcotics dealer had obtained the weapon from a Perris acquaintance. That man told Alton that he had acquired the .22 in Phoenix around Christmas of 1981!

But how could that be? Steve Downs and Lew Lewiston both swore that Diane took the gun with her when she left Arizona in April, 1983 . . .

Assuming that someone had misremembered dates, Alton

(had the .22 test-fired and all the components--shell casings, bullets, etc.--shipped to Jim Pex.

pcx found no similarities between these bullets and casings and those found at the death site on Old Mohawk Road.

This gun they had sought for so long was not the murder

weapon! This gun could not have been the gun Steve Downs had owned.

Alton couldn't believe it. There had to be some explanation. He traced the .22 with serial number #14-76187 from the

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Sturm-Ruger Company in Southport, Connecticut, to Arizona Hardware in Phoenix, and then to the Chandler Gun Shop owned by Fred Barton. Barton's records showed he acquired it on January 24, 1978.

Billy Proctor, Steve Downs's friend, said he'd purchased the gun six days later. It had disappeared during a time when Steve and his best friend were living with him. Proctor was convinced that either Stan Post or Steve had stolen it from him.

Billy Proctor was seriously ill with cancer. But he agreed to meet with Paul Alton. How could that gun have ended up in Perris, California, Alton wondered.

Proctor shook his head, pondering the question. Suddenly, a memory dawned.

"I bought that gun--that gun they've got in California--but I only had it for one day. That first gun."

"First gun?" Alton echoed.

"Yeah. I wanted a .22 Ruger like that--but I wanted one with target sights. I took it up to Mesa, and traded up for a Ruger with adjustable sights. I bought a vinyl case and two extra clips for the second gun."

Proctor had completely forgotten that he'd traded the gun he bought at the Chandler Gun Shop after only a day. Alton asked him if he had any receipts or papers that might show the serial number of the second gun.

Proctor called back a half hour later. He had found an old gun box. "There's a .38 inside, but I can see where I wrote the serial number of that other Ruger on the box. It says, 'Ruger automatic: Serial #14-57485."

"That's the gun Steve stole from your house?"

"Yeah. I'm sorry--but I completely forgot about the first gun. I had it such a short time, and that's the one listed at the gun shop. The one Downs had is the one I got in Mesa the next day." Kathy Austin, of the Chandler Police Department, started now to trace the new gun from its original point of origin. It too had come from Sturm-Ruger originally. It went first to a wholesaler in Massachusetts and then was shipped on November 1,

1977 to a loan company in Mesa, Arizona.

Austin called the loan company/jewelry store. Their records I, verified Billy Proctor's memory. "The gun was sold to William R. Proctor on February 1, 1978. He traded in another Ruger--the

one with the original serial number you were looking for:

#1476187."

Paul Alton worked his way through all the owners of the

"wrong" gun and satisfied himself that it had never, ever been in either Steve or Diane Downs's hands. Steve had stolen the second Ruger that Billy Proctor had purchased--the gun with the adjustable

sights that Stan Post had described. And Diane had taken that second gun from Steve.

Nothing had changed then. The gun that had been used on

the night of May 19 was still missing. It was still a .22 semiautomatic Ruger manufactured by Sturm-Ruger Company. But

the serial number had been wrong. The missing gun bears the number: #1457485.

At the Women's Correctional Center, Diane--whose case had been deemed Project 100 by the Lane County Sheriffs Office-was, coincidentally, given a similar prison number. She was now

#0100W.

Diane continued to grant interviews throughout the fall of 1984. Reporters had merely to ask for an audience with her at the prison in Salem. She still protested her innocence, but she was remarkably cheerful. As long as the glow of the media warmed her, Diane functioned quite well.

She told a reporter from the Cottage Grove Sentinel that she much preferred the Oregon State Women's Correction center to the Lane County Jail. She bragged that she had scored higher onthe IQ section of the routine entrance diagnostic tests than any woman who had come to the women's prison in five years.

"Personally, I think I'll probably do pretty well in college here . . ."

Diane planned to get a "state grant" to finance her college education. "I want to be a teacher ... I think probably something like family development--or something along those lines." The institution did offer college credit courses in all manner of subjects--from creative writing to plumbing, but prisoners had ito earn the right to attend. Diane was a long way from that. She could wait. In prison, Diane was allowed outside to walk on the grass, and she even had a sunburn. The sun had always cheered her.

The woman who needed male admiration to validate her

existence was locked up with eighty-three females. Diane was not popular with her peers, but no one had attacked her physically. There was a verbal exchange or two, notes slipped under her cell door.

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Half of her correspondence in the Lane County Jail in Eugene had been from convicts, and Diane continued to write to

"the guys." She had an enthusiastic following among the male prisoners. Mailcall always meant a stack of letters for her. Randy Woodfield, who had hinted at--and then denied to the media--his formal engagement to Diane, continued to write, but she grew tired of him. |

Diane's first assignment was the kitchen crew, which meant getting up at five to cook and wash dishes.

She had a single cell initially, but was moved to share a double with a woman convicted of poisoning her children. Diane tacked up pictures of Christie and Danny, and the newborn shots of Amy Elizabeth. There were no pictures of Cheryl.

She found prison boring, but she was, for the most part, a compliant prisoner. She was written-up by a guard who claimed she was in the yard facing the men's section--nude from the waist down. The demerit was eventually removed.

Diane found that many of the other prisoners had "turned off their minds. It's really sad, but they are like walking vegetables." She read murder mysteries and love stories, but said she didn't watch soap operas.

Diane insisted for months that she would be free in five to seven years. And then she said confidently that she would be out of prison in six months to two years, convinced her appeal would be successful.

In the meantime, Diane planned to take philosophy and psychology in prison college classes. By January, 1985, she had

changed her career ambitions; she had decided to became a counselor for teen-agers, to help them cope with the "rigors of growing up in a mean, tough world." She was initially granted permission 9 to attend college classes, but that was withdrawn. She was--and

is--considered an escape risk.

When the Oregon State Parole Board met in the spring of

1985 to consider Diane's minimum sentence, they were succinct. She will not be considered for parole until 2009. When she is fifty-four years old, a decade after the turn of the century, the parole board will again ponder each year a decision to hear her petition for parole.

The board had listened well to Judge Gregory Foote's

comments.

* * *

Exactly a year after Chris Rosage and Doug Welch drove Diane Downs to the Oregon State Prison, she grudgingly granted a television interview; she explained that she no longer trusted the media.

The woman on the screen in September, 1985, had once more changed in appearance. It has always been so. Through each phase of Diane's life, she has melted into her surroundings, assuming a kind of protective coloration. The color of her hair, its length, her make-up and attire, are only partially responsible for the continual transformation. It is as if Diane Downs has no idea who she really is; she is like heated wax conforming to the shape of the container it fills.

After that first year in prison, she appeared the complete convict--no longer delicate, clearly fifteen pounds heavier on starchy prison fare. But it was more than that. There was a hardness about Diane, some subtle loss of femininity. The deep circles beneath her eyes and the skin pallor so evident at her trial were gone. She looked to be blooming with health, very tan, and without make-up. Her cheeks were round, herjawline strong. The television camera caught her eyes squinting into the sun. Hard eyes. She looked for all the world like the female truck-driver she once was.

Her hair was straight, long, and brown, but she tossed it from her brow with the same impatient shake of her head. She contin'

ued to smile broadly as she spoke of tragedy and loss.

In the fall of 1986, after two full years in prison, Diane faced the cameras yet again. Mary Starett from KATU TV in Portland prevailed upon Diane to skip one of the college classes that she is now permitted to attend. She would grant an interview, Diane stressed imperiously, if she were the only convict filmed. She would not participate in a group discussion of how women coped in prison.

The face that flashed across Portland screens is delicately lovely. Diane now looks like a homecoming princess, a decade younger than her actual age--as if being incarcerated offers a beauty regime far superior to the Golden Door or any other posh spa. Yes, she says softly, she had been so depressed at first that she didn't bother with her hair or use make-up, but her hope of a new trial in the year ahead has cheered her.

Her external regeneration is complete. Her cosmetics have been applied with a skilled hand, her huge eyes edged with silver blue and kohl, her high cheekbones blushed pink. Her eyebrows 482 ANN RULE

have been plucked away almost entirely. Diane's hair is ash-blond and curls to her shoulders. Her nails are long, and exquisitely manicured.

Either Diane has had elocution lessons, or she has learned from her earlier television interviews. She speaks more slowly. She pauses at sentence breaks. There is a studied calmness about her that was never there before, as she urges educational opportunities for prisoners and expounds on the need for rehabilitation. After all, all of them will one day be out among the populace again, she warns. Without rehabilitation and education. "We'll go out and be the same--or worse."

Diane blames her conviction on "past press," declaring that the jury never really looked at the evidence. She explains that her sister convicts have long since accepted her "because I'm just me; I'm just a little girl--they can see I'm no threat." And yet, behind her newly demure media-facade, Diane Downs continues to behave bizarrely. This last fall, she prevailed upon one of her attorneys to bring her Cheryl's autopsy photographs, which she insisted she needed to help prepare her appeal. In her cell, she studied them for a long time, then horrified fellow prisoners and guards by insisting that they look at her dead daughter's image.

One guard demurred forcefully, but Diane pushed the photos into her field of vision. The woman ran from the corridor, vomiting. That guard set about getting the pictures away from Diane. It was not easy; Diane wanted to keep them.

Nevertheless, prison becomes Diane. Perhaps she feels somehow safer locked up--even as she predicts that she will soon be free.

This woman whose life has been one long rebellion against rules and control has come at last to a place where her every waking moment is governed by rules, where she is under the control of others.

Prison. -^

Fred Hugi, in his final arguments, described Diane as "the truck without brakes." She has brakes now.