Diane

Diane

September 15, 2020 34m S2E5

Just four days after the shooting Diane participated in a reenactment of the night of May 19th for the police. Her affect throughout the reenactment caused the police and community to look at her as a suspect. 

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I mean, it was a huge story. It made national news when Diane Downs drives to the Springfield Hospital with those kids.
And I think it shocked everybody just because somewhere deep in their gut, it's like a mom and kids that just, that doesn't make sense. And the story of the shaggy-haired stranger didn't make a lot of sense either at first.

But everybody was willing to go along with that for quite a while. And I think what really sort of snapped things was the reenactment.

And having Diane with the car and having the police ask her various questions and to reenact that moment,

I think began the real questions in that story. The reenactment Eric Mason is referring to is a video shot by Springfield, Oregon police.
In it, they asked Diane to walk them through the events of that night to try and get a better understanding of what happened. We'll get to that in a bit, but first we have to ask, who exactly is Diane Downs? How does a 27-year-old mail carrier and mother of three wind up at a Springfield, Oregon hospital on a random weeknight, having apparently shot her children and herself? The story starts in Arizona.
Her brother James describes her family life. Describe your dad for me.
Help me understand your household. Sure.
I was thinking about this last night. The year is 1960, right? They got married in the 50s.
And in the 50s and the 60s, it was before the bra burnings, you know? There was a patriarch and there was a matriarch and there was a mom and there was a dad. The dads did this and the moms did this.
The dads provided, the moms ran the house, right? One of the questions I have, well, what happens when there was conflict in your house? Well, there wasn't conflict in my house because that was my dad's job to take care of the conflict. If there ever was conflict and his job was to resolve the conflict.
And by doing that, there was no conflict in the house because he took it all. He took it all.
It's truly a patriarch kind of house. Diane's childhood was, by most accounts, pretty normal, according to her brother.
Although Diane herself claims that she was sexually abused by her father, she spent part of her childhood in a Phoenix suburb before she and her family moved to a farm. So your mother always conferred to your father on decisions? Always.
That was her job. How big was your household? There was five.
Yeah, I had a really fantastic childhood. My sister had a fantastic childhood.
I remember growing up on Charter Oak Road, and I remember we had a block fence in our backyard, and over in the right-hand corner, Diane had pigeons. You know, I thought those are the coolest thing pigeons.
You know what I mean? They were pets? They were homing pigeons. Yeah, you put little bands on their little foot and they fly off and then they come back.
You know, I was what, in third grade, right? I don't remember a whole lot about homing pigeons at the time. Yeah, Diane was one of the, I don't want to say main driving factor, but I'll use the words, to basically leave Phoenix and move to the farm where she inevitably changed her life forever by meeting Steve.
We moved from Phoenix to the farm, and out on the farm, it was a great time, man. Diane had a horse, and Kathy had a horse.
John had a steer. And I raised pigs.
I raised pigs with my grandpa, as a matter of fact. Diane started dating Steve when she was in high school.
Early on, she tried to establish a sense of standards with who she dated. But with Steve, it didn't last.
I remember that I was in the sixth grade, she was a junior in high school and Steve had dropped out, but as part of dating Diane or part of being with Diane, one of the things that was requested was that you got to check back into school. And so he did start going to high school and subsequently got kicked out because she was talking to somebody and he ended up beating the guy up.

I actually admired Steve growing up.

I looked up to him as, you know, he was a male figure, you know,

and I put emphasis on the word male.

You know, he was a manly man.

You know, he took no guff.

And that's something Diane says, you know, basically, you know,

whatever, if there was another guy that was bugging her, he would beat him up. And she felt safe, and she felt protected until there was nobody else to beat up.
Unfortunately, Steve's propensity for expressing his anger stopped with people who were bothering Diane, and he began to physically abuse Diane as well. Apparently, those two fought.
They would physically fight fairly often. I mean, punching to the face, kind of fighting.
Diane briefly joined the military, possibly to escape her home life. Diane joined the Air Force, probably to get away.
But Diane joined the Air Force in Flagstown, and she was away for a little while. And Steve was there taking care of Christy.
What year was this about? I was a freshman. So 1974.
Then Diane said, you know, I can't stay away from the kids. And so she got an honorable discharge or whatever happens with the Air Force.
And she came back. When Diane went to the Air Force, Steve and I were playing pool, and there was a lady there, and he says, I bet you I can get her to go to bed with me as a conquest.
And it's like I'm a freshman in high school, you know, it's like. And his wife's brother.
Right, right. And she's in the Air Force, and she's not there.
And whether he did or whether he didn't, I don't know, but I just know what he said to me. They fought.
They fought a lot. And one time when I was there, they were fighting, and he was on her back, beating on her back.
I remember it. He didn't hit her in the face.
He was sitting on her. I think he was even sitting on her head, holding her down like that, and beating her on the back.
It was just, it was pretty intense. After her son, Danny's birth, Diane and Steve divorced.

Steve believed he couldn't be Danny's father since he claimed to have had a vasectomy.

Despite their divorce, Diane continued to be on the receiving end of his physical abuse, according to James.

Later on, she got tired of him and she started fighting back.

And so she would engage him.

But obviously, you know, she lost. so he shoved her onto the bed and at that point Cheryl came in and so these took place in front of the kids at times and it was never in Diane starting the first engaging it was always her defending herself from him and And so she said, you know, get Cheryl out of the room.

And by that time, Steve was sitting on Diane on, punching her in the face.

Blood was everywhere.

Diane shouted to take the kids and run.

So we dragged Cheryl away and got Christy and Danny, and they fled.

It seemed inescapable.

Called the police, and by the time the Maricopa County Sheriff Deputy, Sean Carnahan, Steve was gone. And when he walked into Diane's living room, he saw my bloody sister sitting in the chair.
His shoulders dropped. The bruises, her broken nose, eyes darkening, neck ringing red.
The deputy said, Diane, my God, what happened to you? What do you think? She said. It's like, it says, you've two been doing this for six years now.
It says, when will it stop? And she just said, I don't know, you know, she says, I divorced him a year ago. I thought I would stop then.
I guess I was wrong. Eventually, Diane was pushed to her breaking point.
Diane shot a bullet through the floor of her trailer when he was there one night. The next Tuesday, a judge signed a restraining order to keep Steve away from Diane's home.
To be sure, that was the first or the last beating he inflicted on my sister. Ten days later, he chased her down into the bathroom.
The restraining order forbidding him access to her home was only a week old. She still wore the bruises from the last attack.
He didn't know she'd grabbed a gun to defend herself. The gun that Diane used to shoot through the floor would later be the subject of a search by police as a potential murder weapon.
We'll come back to that in another episode. Not long after the incident where Diane fired a shot into the floor, her mobile home caught on fire.
When she flew to, I think it was Kentucky, she wanted to be a circuit mom. She had done that once.
She was trying to do it again. On one of these

trips, the day or the

evening of the day that she left,

her trailer caught on fire.

And she filed an

insurance claim. They paid out.

And she, later when things

frayed between her and Steve, turned

him in for that. And he

was arrested and charged with insurance fraud and had to pay some money back. Everything she owned was gone.
She and her children were homeless. And this was a brand new mobile? It was a brand new mobile home, yeah.
It was four months old. They used, Steve and Diane worked at mobile home manufacturing plants.
Oh, I didn't know this. Okay.
Yeah, growing up. I call it growing up 20s, right?

They worked together in manufacturing plants.

That way Steve can keep better tracks of her if he's working with her.

I remember that my sister came over to visit.

And when she was over to visit, I had a guitar.

And she borrowed my guitar and she took it back with her.

And what I remember about the mobile home burning is the fact that my guitar was in the mobile home when it burned and I never got my guitar back. You know that excitement that builds when the facts of a cold case start to heat up? Of course.
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That's what the report said?

Mm-hmm.

They labeled it an electrical fire.

But it came out that that's not what it was.

It came out in court that that's not what it was.

How much did insurance pay out for the mobile home?

It says $7,000 right there.

And back in 1983, that was a big chunk of money. It was $7,000 to repair the mobile home.
Which wasn't used to repair the mobile home. That's correct.
Where did the $7,000 go? Steve. Yeah, Steve.
And again, he crossed the line. So, but moving forward, you wonder why Steve might have testified against my sister.
Well, here's the reasons. You know, Steve confessed to the crime of arson, rendering a homeless and putting her at his mercy.
But Steve actually said that they conspired together to burn her home for the insurance money. Diane's living situation put Steve back into a position of power over her.
She willingly gave Steve custody of their children to prevent them from being homeless. According to James, Steve leveraged this into a means of control.
But everything she owned was gone. She and her kids were homeless.
This is after the restraining order. And Steve says, hey, come live with me.

Diane refused, but had to let her children move in with him because

she didn't want him to live in the car, right?

So she kept paying on the mortgage

for the mobile home and

she went to a person's name,

Karen's house and offered her a spare room

until the end of November of

1982, but the kids weren't

welcome because, you know, it's just a bedroom and a house.

And Karen was her co-worker at the post office.

I believe so, yes.

Diane rented a two-bedroom apartment in December.

Steve refused to let her take her children

until after Christmas.

Diane had to go to his house to see her children,

and Steve wasn't letting go of that control

that he had of her.

Every time she went to their house, they fought. He wanted to remarry.
She didn't. And this was in December of 1982.
The shooting happened in May of 1983. Diane eventually moved back into the mobile home along with her children.
In January of 1983, strapped for cash, my sister moved back into her burned out mobile home and stopped seeing her children at Steve's. So she brought the kids back to the home.
Steve was calling my sister, a worthless mother who didn't take care of her kids, to go see them. He said he was sick of her having fun while he was burdened with raising the kids.
So basically the kids kids are still at his house, and she's living there. And he's really unhappy about that because basically, she's probably out having a good time, and he's having to take care of the kids.
Diane had been living for years under the constraints of an abusive relationship. Although she had been unfaithful along with Steve, she was now able to see whomever she pleased without immediate fear of reprisal.
And Diane seemed to love male attention. Over the course of time, you watch this played out all the time.
And when you see someone like Diane, when you see someone trying desperately to get attention and to move a certain way and to shake her body a certain way, you think to yourself, wow, there's a person looking for attention. And do I want to get inside the kill radius of that person? And I could get blown up.
It could blow me up. And so a little bell goes off, I think, in your head when you're the person who's the target of a Diane Downs, thinking to yourself, do I want to be in the kill radius? Do I want to risk being blown up? And the answer for most men is no.
But for these guys who all of a sudden attached to Diane Downs, I think they understood it

was a quick, easy, gratifying way to spend the night.

I think that's kind of what got them going.

The problem is, I think once they saw what kind of a mentally damaged person that she

was,

they would run.

I think that happened over and over and over again.

Diane took a job with the Postal Service

where she met Nick Knickerbocker.

This was the relationship that many would speculate

to be the motivation behind the attempted murder of her children. My sister, she worked in the post office.
She was a rural route carrier. I remember that was one of their fights in Arizona.
I remember seeing this because Diane was a rural route carrier. And as a rural route carrier, she would continually break the mirror off of the vehicle because you drive from the right-hand side

and she would continually hit the mailboxes with the mirror

and knocked it off and Steve would get so mad about that.

Why would he get mad?

Well, because she broke the mirror off the car continually.

Oh, I was thinking she was driving a postal.

No, no, no.

It's a rural route.

So on a rural route, you basically sublet your own vehicle. Okay.
Yeah. And so, yeah, driving out in the country delivering mail, basically.
And she would hit the mailboxes with the mirror. It wasn't a physical fight, but it was like crazy.
You know, he wasn't very happy. And he made it known that he wasn't happy.
But that's what she did in Oregon. She transferred from Chandler where she met Nick and she moved up to Oregon.
And my dad lived in Oregon and my dad was a postmaster in Springfield, Oregon. And so she came up here to start a new family, to start a new life.
And she was working in the post office. So she was truly on her way, man.
She was on her way to getting her life. But this happened to her.
And it's really, you know, sort of sad because, I mean, the reason, you know, talking about the post office, and, you know, it makes me think of Nick Niggerbacher, the guy she met at the post office. The guy that, you know, they say that everything got done for.
She did this crime. The motive.
Yes. Thank you very much.
He was a letter carrier also. So they worked, you know, eight-hour shifts beside each other.
Would spend at least two hours after that, oftentimes having sex at one

location or another. So they did paint a picture that when they were in Arizona, because he was a

married guy and for the longest time didn't tell his wife about Diane. She eventually found out,

and he still sort of carried on and was not very forthcoming.

Diane was apparently obsessed with Nick to the point where she would have done anything for him. There were unsent letters and journals found in her apartment where she declared her feelings.
Seems to me that he was fairly nice looking, strong jaw, kind of wiry hair. And this person that seemingly Diane Downs had over heels about and that she, when any of the male partners, sex partners said to her, listen, you're a really wonderful sexual partner, but I don't really, I don't think I want to raise kids, that would absolutely crash her world.

And so I think with respect to Robert, the question of whether or not he could deal with kids, you know, was certainly a part of the narrative.

After Nick's rejection and years of abuse from Steve, Diane decided to leave Arizona.

Her father was a postmaster in Oregon, so she moved and was able to get a letter carrier job in Springfield. When you're in an abusive relationship, it's the same question that everybody asks everybody that's in that kind of relationship.
How long are you going to let this happen before you change something? But when you, and then she did change something, and that's when she moved to Oregon. She was changing her life.
She'd been in Oregon for six weeks when she was attacked. She left Steve in Arizona.
She left her boyfriends, and I don't say Nick. I say she left her boyfriends in Arizona.
I mean, I can't say that she didn't have a thing for Nick, and I can't say that Nick didn't have a thing for her because obviously they did. But she left him there because, really,

he was a married man, you know?

And you're not going to get together with a married man

because the married man's not going to leave his wife.

That's just what married men do.

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That's a huge leap, Fernando, don't you think? After you, Chulito. But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take.
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I'm Mala. The host of Locatora Radio, a radiophonic novela.
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And then in 1983, the shooting occurs.

From the beginning, the press made every effort to find all the information they could about the incident and about Diane herself. The whole goal was to figure out who she was, how long she had been in Eugene or the Eugene-Springfield area.

So you had kind of this small army of media types, mainly

local print and television stations doing their own thing. So we were all sort of learning from each other too.
If KVAL and Eugene had a news broadcast that night with something a little bit new, well, you figured I wish I had gotten that in first, but nonetheless put that into the notebook and just kept on trying to compile our best ability to figure out who was involved. And you also had, at the same time, the search for the assailant.
That was still the official line that there's somebody out there, although even early on, my feeling was, and I think other media people, were having questions. Although the police department wasn't very forthcoming with the details of the case and the investigation, Diane herself proved to be very willing to talk to the press.
I was trying to find out who among law enforcement was primarily assigned to the case, and would there be a chance of getting an interview with these folks? And I was able to do that after a while, but not early on. And the police were never open and forthcoming with reporters, as far as I could find out.
Almost all the information as the case developed ended up coming really out of Diane's mouth. She was a prolific talker when we finally got a chance to sit down and get her a story.
And when she started, she just didn't stop. Mom and dad said, quit talking, man.
Do not talk to the press. They are not your friends.
Diane was the most publicized and talked about individual in the state of Oregon in 1983.

And a lot of that was due to her.

I mean, she would talk to everybody.

Diane gave several interviews with the press and insisted that she and her kids were attacked by a shaggy-haired stranger,

a description which, over time, has become a trope when describing non-existent suspects of crimes.

Do you think that helped her? No. No.
No, absolutely not. It did the opposite, you know.
It's like she was really the worst witness for herself, you know. I mean, it's like she would get up and she would talk and she would talk, and they think it's because she liked to hear herself talk.
Well, the reality is that she wanted to have them listen. She wanted them to listen, but they would never listen.
They would never look for anybody. She would go down there, you know, it's like, why aren't you looking? Well, we're looking for the guy.
We're looking for the guy. You know, but if then you take a look into the newspapers and the time, you know, two weeks after the shooting, Pat Horton, the district attorney says, the search for the shaggy-haired stranger is not a priority on our list.
Two weeks after the shooting, the district attorney says, the search for the shaggy-haired stranger, his words, not hers,

the search for the shaggy-haired stranger is not a priority on our list.

But anytime she goes and talks to him, we're looking for him.

We're looking for him. months after the shooting the police had produced no additional suspects beyond Diane herself.
They had no leads, and only the Fredericksons themselves seemed to be providing contacts of potential witnesses and suspects to the police. There didn't seem to be any leads, and this was coming from Diane's camp, to say, we have somebody had phoned us and indicated there was some guy who had shown up at the Springfield Country Club, or she was advising police be on the lookout for some dinged up yellow car that was in the area.
There weren't solid leads. I know that the police got a lot of contacts.
And as far as I they, and this was one of the stories we were trying to keep up on. They were tracking these leads down, going and talk to the people who phoned them in.
But as far as we could tell, that never really got a solid start. There was nothing that felt like a breakthrough in terms of finding somebody else who might be involved in this.
Diane would talk and tell her story to anyone who would listen. She seemed to love talking to the press.
I do remember very clearly, Diane would even in news conferences talk about dreams that she had had. And she would call me, and I'm sure she called other reporters, on a fairly regular basis just to, if she needed to talk.
and she was one day talking about having driven down to her letter-carrying route in Cottage Grove that morning. She said it was kind of foggy in I-5.
And she could see Cheryl coming out of the mist, kind of holding her hand toward her. And Diane said, and there we were.
We were the four musketeers again. I think that's how she referred to them, at least for the police sake, because it did come out that I think it would have been a terrible place to be raised in her house because they got hit, they got slapped, they were treated very, very poorly.
The police struggled to make sense of the events that night based on the story Diane had provided. They asked her to recreate everything that happened that night, step by step, in a reenactment.
And I think for the detectives and the officers who were working on it, that was the moment that things shifted a little bit. And to go back to Detective Welch and some of the first folks on the scene, their radar going off i think before that but at first certainly the stories were all about who is this shaggy haired stranger what was the motive of this person to shoot kids and was even that you know the the highway back there near my walk was that folks danger back there living out in the rural part of Lane County? And the more I think Diane spoke, the more there were questions about what it is that the motive was all about and about who the shooter might be.
The reenactment was strange, to say the least. Diane didn't seem to be a mother who was struggling to explain the murder and attempted murder of her children by a stranger.
She came across like an actress playing a part and catering to the audience. I think that when they videotaped her and they wanted her to say, hey, this is where I was standing.
This is where the shaggy haired stranger is standing. This was the song playing on the radio.
This is how I reacted. This is what I did when I threw the car keys into the bushes.
The police saw something there that didn't quite add up. And that was what the children ended up seeing from inside the car and what it is she was saying.
And that was a contradiction. There was an immediate contradiction when they viewed what she did with the video reenactment in the car.
They got a lot of things right down to the detail about the car and other other things so that they could

understand what happened and so I think the detectives right off the bat thought wow this is not right there's something here that's not right and you could see it I think in the way Diane even acted in the video. This wasn't a mom who was shell-shocked.
She was a actress playing out a scene in a movie that we hadn't seen yet. Tell me about her behavior in that video reenactment.
Well, it was almost as if, I mean, from what I can remember of the details and then showing it, it was almost as if she had to think about what it was that was the right answer that they wanted, as opposed to this is exactly what happened. And instead of it being something that was ingrained in a part of her sailor understanding of that shooting from this stranger, she was thinking out loud almost about what it is that they would buy as a story.
And you could see that. You could.
I'm throwing the keys, okay? I'm throwing the keys. Simulating, yes.
But I didn't let go of them. He thinks I threw them, but I did not throw them.

He swings around at the same time. He's watching the keys and he swings around and shoots.

Probably thought he shot me in the stomach. I don't know.

I go like that. I got in the car, jumped in, put the keys in.

I just hit my cast.

Started the car and left. The car door shut itself.

God damn. This is worse than me.
Okay. The police weren't the only ones who found Diane's behavior and explanation strange.
The press also saw the video, and for many, it confirmed their suspicions that Diane was the most likely suspect in the shooting. She did a reenactment with the police that was shown later that kind of verified this feeling that a lot of us had gotten from the start.
The story just didn't really add up. She claimed, for instance, that when she got out of her car, this guy said, I want your car.
And she said, and she's consistent as far as I know to this day in saying, you got to be kidding me. That's about the only part of her story that has remained consistent.
Her affect is not one of somebody who's trying to protect their kids. It was almost as if she'd never done these things before.
And she was saying, well, what are you asking me to do? And they say, no, just do it just like it happened. And that was their question.
It didn't seem she was operating from memory. It was almost like, how would you want me to be? And so that sort of raised alarm bells as they went through her reenacting what it was like to have a stranger outside her car.
After the reenactment video, Diane's increasingly casual attitude in interviews, and the lack of any real evidence pointing to a shooter on the loose, everyone began to accept that Diane was most likely guilty. So at the beginning, I think all of us wanted to believe that it made sense that this stranger was out there and that all the police had to do was just find this person and track him down and then things would be over.
But over time, and you really didn't want to believe it at first, that Diane had some of these strange characteristics about her. They didn't make sense.
Eventually, police felt like they had gathered enough evidence. On February 28, 1984, Diane Downs was arrested.
It was a huge deal. Diane's been arrested.
Again, you know, she'd been out in the community for months saying whatever she wanted to, disparaging the police, which that's okay. People are unfairly charged and it's certainly fair to push back on that.
But I think among most people that there was just no goodwill left for Diane with no other suspect ever having come close to being charged or arrested or identified. She was in the spotlight.
She was the one and it was a big deal when she was arrested. She was looking tired, bedraggled.
The emotional strain, I think, had taken a toll on her. She was still kind of prone to smirk and smile a lot, whether she should be or not.
But she was, I think, kind of beaten down by circumstance when they finally took her into custody. But at that point, we all knew that, well, we're going to be going to trial in about three months.
I think Lane County had a stipulation at that point that once you were charged with that kind of serious crime, just do a speedy process. We'll have you start your trial within three months.
It wasn't just the reenactment, her strange behavior, and the inconsistent story that led police to arrest Diane. During the nine months between the shooting and the arrest, a key witness was at last able to provide the final piece of the puzzle needed to charge Diane.
Diane was ultimately charged because Christy could talk. Christy felt safe enough emotionally to share her thoughts.
She'd been going through lots of therapy, and as part of these sessions, her therapist, a guy named Carl Peterson, would ask her eventually, just in talking about this, do you know who shot you? And Christy would nod, and he would say, do you want to write that down? And I'll put this in an envelope and we'll just burn it when it's done. So no harm, no foul.

So she did that for quite a while. And I think there was probably one day in particular where

she felt okay about sharing that with him, what she had written on the paper.

And what did she say?

Said my mom. On the next episode of Happy Face Presents Two-Face, we received a bizarre letter from Diane Downs in prison that included her surprising claims of her relation to Becky.
This leads us to enlist the help from DNA detective Michelle Leonard to help us solve the answer of who are the biological parents of Becky. Ben Bolin is our executive producer.
Melissa Moore is our co-executive producer. Maya Cole is our primary producer.
Paul Deccant is our supervising producer. Sam Teagarden is our researcher.
And Matt Riddle

is our story editor. Featured music by DreamTent.
Happy Face Presents Two-Face is a production of

iHeartRadio. We'll see you next time.