Diane

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Speaker 18 I mean, it was a huge story. It made, you know, national news when Diane Downs drives to the Springfield Hospital with those kids.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 And the story of the shaggy-haired stranger didn't make a lot of sense either at first.

Speaker 5 But everybody was willing to go along with that for quite a while.

Speaker 18 And I think what really sort of snapped things was the reenactment.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 19 The reenactment Eric Mason is referring to is a video shot by Springfield, Oregon Police.

Speaker 19 In it, they asked Diane to walk them through the events of that night to try and get a better understanding of what happened.

Speaker 19 We'll get to that in a bit, but first we have to ask, who exactly is Diane Downs?

Speaker 19 how does a 27 year old male 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 their 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.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 He took it all. It's truly a patriarch kind of house.

Speaker 19 Diane's childhood was, by most accounts, pretty normal, according to her brother.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 5 So your mother always conferred to your father on decisions? Always. That was her job.
How big was your household?

Speaker 5 there was five

Speaker 5 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 and 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 their little foot and they fly off and then they come back.

Speaker 5 You know, I was, what, in third grade, right? So I don't remember a whole lot, a whole lot about owning pigeons at the time. Yeah, Diane was one of the,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You know, we moved from Phoenix to the farm and out on the farm it was a great time, man. Diane had a horse and

Speaker 5 Kathy had a horse and John had a steer and I raised pigs. I raised pigs with my grandpa, as a matter of fact.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 5 I remember that I was in the sixth grade and she was a junior in high school and Steve had dropped out.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You know, he took no guff. And that's something Diane says, you know, basically, you know, whenever, if there was another guy that was bugging her, he would beat him up.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 5 Diane joined the Air Force, probably to get away.

Speaker 5 But Diane joined the Air Force and Flagstaff. 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 as a conquest.

Speaker 5 And it's like I'm a freshman in high school, you know, it's like,

Speaker 5 and his wife's brother. Right, right.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 They fought a lot. And one time when I was there, they were fighting and he was on her back, beating on her back.

Speaker 5 I remember it. He didn't hit her in the face.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It was just, it was pretty intense.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Despite their divorce, Diane continued to be on the receiving end of his physical abuse, according to James.

Speaker 5 Later on, she got tired of it and she started fighting back. And so she would engage him.

Speaker 5 But obviously, you know, she lost.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And it was never Diane starting the first engaging, it was always her defending herself from him. And so she said, you know, get Cheryl out of the room.

Speaker 5 And by that time, Steve was sitting on Diane on, punching her in the face. Blood was everywhere.

Speaker 5 Diane shouted to take the kids and run. So we dragged Cheryl away and got Christy and Danny, and they fled.

Speaker 19 It seemed inescapable.

Speaker 5 Called the police, and by the time the Maricopa County Sheriff Deputy Sean Carnahan,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 The deputy said, Diane, my God, what happened to you?

Speaker 5 What do you think? She said.

Speaker 5 It's like,

Speaker 5 he says, you've two been doing this for six years now. He says, when will it stop?

Speaker 5 And she just said, I don't know, you know. She says, I divorced him a year ago.
I thought it would stop then. I guess it was wrong.

Speaker 19 Eventually, Diane was pushed to her breaking point.

Speaker 20 Diane shot a bullet through the floor of her trailer when he was there one night.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 10 days later, he chased her down into the bathroom. The restraining order, forget forbidding him access to her home, was only a week old.
She still wore the bruises from the last attack.

Speaker 5 He didn't know she'd grabbed a gun to defend herself.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Not long after the incident where Diane fired a shot into the floor, her mobile home caught on fire.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 On one of these trips, the day or maybe the evening of the day that she left, her trailer caught on fire. And, you know, she filed an insurance claim.
They paid out. And she later, when things...

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 5 Everything she owned was gone. She and her children were homeless.
And this was a brand new mobile home. It was a brand new mobile home.
Yeah, it was four months old.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 They worked together in manufacturing plants.

Speaker 5 That way Steve can keep better tracks of her if he's working with her.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

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Speaker 21 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Speaker 5 They actually labeled it an electrical fire.

Speaker 5 That's what the report said? They labeled it an electrical fire. But it came out that that's not what it was.
That came out in court that that's not what it was.

Speaker 5 How much did insurance pay out for the mobile home? It says $7,000 right there.

Speaker 5 And back in 1983, that was a big chunk of money. Right.
It was $7,000 to repair the mobile home.

Speaker 19 Which wasn't used to repair the mobile home.

Speaker 5 Which that's correct.

Speaker 5 Where did the $7,000 go? Steve.

Speaker 5 Yeah, Steve. And again, he crossed the

Speaker 5 line.

Speaker 5 So, but moving forward, you wonder why Steve might have testified against my sister. Well, here's the reasons.

Speaker 5 You know, Steve confessed to the crime of arson, rendering her homeless and putting her at his mercy. But Steve actually said that they conspired together to burn her home for the insurance money.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 According to James, Steve leveraged this into a means of control.

Speaker 5 But everything she owned was gone.

Speaker 5 She and her kids were homeless. This is after the restraining order.
And Steve says, hey, come live with me.

Speaker 5 Diane refused. but had to let her children move in with him because she didn't want him to live in the car, right?

Speaker 5 So she kept paying on the mortgage for the the mobile home and she went to a person's named Karen's house and offered her a spare room until the end of November of 1982.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Steve refused to let her take her children until after Christmas.

Speaker 5 Diane had to go to his house to see her children, and Steve wasn't letting go of that control that he had of of her. Every time she went to their house, they fought.
He wanted to remarry. She didn't.

Speaker 5 And this was in December of 1982. The shooting happened in May of 1983.

Speaker 19 Diane eventually moved back into the mobile home along with her children.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 So basically the kids are still at his house and she's living there.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 19 Diane had been living for years under the constraints of an abusive relationship.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 Over the course of time, you watch this played out all the time. And you, when you see someone like Diane,

Speaker 18 when you see someone trying desperately to get attention and to move a certain way and to shake her body a certain way,

Speaker 18 you think to yourself, wow, there's a person looking for attention.

Speaker 18 And do I want to get inside the kill radius of that person?

Speaker 18 And I could get blown up. It could blow me up.

Speaker 18 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?

Speaker 18 Do I want to risk being blown up?

Speaker 18 And the answer for most men is no.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 The problem is, I think once they saw what kind of a mentally damaged person that she was,

Speaker 18 they would run.

Speaker 18 I think that happened over and over and over again.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 5 My sister was, she was a, she worked in the post office.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And Steve would get so mad about that. Why would he get mad? Well, because she broke the mirror off the car continually.

Speaker 19 Oh, I was thinking she was driving a

Speaker 5 it's a rural route. So on a rural route, you basically sublet your own vehicle.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And so, yeah, she's driving out in the country delivering mail, basically. And she would hit the mailboxes with the mirror.

Speaker 5 It wasn't a physical fight but it was it was like he crazy you know he he wasn't very happy and he made it known that she wasn't that he wasn't happy but um that's what she did in oregon she transferred from chandler where she met nick and

Speaker 5 you know 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 her new family with you know start start a new life.

Speaker 5 And she was working in the post office. So she was, she was truly on her way, man.
She was on her way to getting her life.

Speaker 5 But this happened to her. And it's really, you know, sort of sad because, I mean,

Speaker 5 the reason,

Speaker 5 you know, talking about the post office and, you know, it makes me think of Nick Knickerbacher, the guy she met at the post office, the guy that, you know, they say that everything got done for her.

Speaker 5 She did this crime, the motive. Yes.
Thank you very much.

Speaker 20 He was a letter carrier also. So they worked eight-hour shifts beside each other, would spend at least two hours after that, oftentimes having sex at one location or another.

Speaker 20 So they did paint a picture that when they were in Arizona, because he was a married guy and

Speaker 20 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.
forthcoming.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 It seems to me that he was fairly nice looking, strong jaw, kind of wiry hair, and this person that seemingly Diane danced head over heels about.

Speaker 18 And that

Speaker 5 she,

Speaker 5 when

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 And so I think

Speaker 18 with respect to Robert, the question of whether or not he could deal with kids, you know, was certainly a part of the narrative.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 and I can't say that Nick didn't have a thing for her, because obviously they did.

Speaker 5 But she left him there because,

Speaker 5 really, he was a married man,

Speaker 5 you know, and you're not going to get together with a married man because the married man is not going to leave his wife. That's just what married men do.

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Speaker 10 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io/slash podcast.

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Speaker 21 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 21 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 21 That's why I'm seriously excited to be teaming up with Gerber. They do so much to make football season a more parent-friendly experience.

Speaker 21 I mean, over 95 years, they've been the MVP for parents who just want to nourish their little ones with stuff they can trust. And you can certainly trust Gerber.

Speaker 21 Did you know Gerber holds the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand out there? And Gerber has certainly been a go-to for me.

Speaker 21 Right now, in between naps to dinner, or, you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy. If he's sitting and he starts to get a little frustrated, here, have a yogurt melt.

Speaker 21 It will put you in such a better mood, which means I'm in a better mood too. It all comes down to this.

Speaker 21 With Gerber, there's just one less thing to worry about, and that really lightens the load for me. So grab your little ones Gerber favorites at a store near you.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 20 The whole goal was to figure out who she was, how long she had been in Eugene or the Eugene Springfield area.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 20 there's somebody out there. Although, even early on, my feeling was, and I think other media people

Speaker 20 were having questions.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 20 I was trying to 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Almost all the information as the case developed ended up coming

Speaker 20 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 once she started, she just didn't stop.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And a lot of that was due to her.

Speaker 5 I mean, she would talk to everybody.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 5 Do you think that helped her? No,

Speaker 5 no,

Speaker 5 no, absolutely not.

Speaker 5 It did the opposite, you know, it's like, and she was really the worst witness for herself, you know. I mean, it's like

Speaker 5 she

Speaker 5 would get up and she would talk. and she would talk.

Speaker 5 And, you know, and they think it's because she liked to hear herself talk. Well, the reality is that she wanted to have them listen.

Speaker 5 She wanted them to listen, but they would never listen. They would never look for anybody.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But anytime she goes and talks to him, we're looking for him, we're looking for him.

Speaker 19 Months after the shooting, the police had produced no additional suspects beyond Diane herself.

Speaker 19 They had no leads, and only the Fredericksons themselves seemed to be providing contacts of potential witnesses and suspects to the police.

Speaker 20 There didn't seem to be any elites, and this was coming from Diane's camp to say, we have somebody had phoned us and indicated

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 There weren't solid leads. I mean, I know that the police got a lot of contacts.

Speaker 20 And as far as I know, and this was one of the stories we were trying to keep up on, they were tracking these leads down, going and talked to the people who phoned them in.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 19 Diane would talk and tell her story to anyone who would listen. She seemed to love talking to the press.

Speaker 20 I do remember very clearly, Diane would even in news conferences talk about dreams that she had had.

Speaker 20 And she would call me, and I'm sure she called other reporters on a fairly regular basis just to, because she needed to talk.

Speaker 20 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,

Speaker 20 and

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 I think that's how she referred to them, at least for the police's sake, because it did come out that I think it would have been a terrible place to be raised in her house because

Speaker 20 they got hit, they got slapped, they were treated very, very poorly.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 And I think for the detectives and the officers who were working on it, that was the moment that things shifted a little bit.

Speaker 18 And to go back to like Detective Welch and some of the first folks on the scene, their radar was going off, I think, before that.

Speaker 18 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?

Speaker 18 And was even that, you know, the highway back there near Mohawk,

Speaker 18 was that folks in danger back there living out in the rural part of Lane County? And the more I think

Speaker 18 Diane spoke,

Speaker 18 the more there were questions about what it is that the motive was all about and about who the shooter might be.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 She came across like an actress playing a part and catering to the audience.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 This is how I reacted. This is what I did when I threw the car keys into the bushes.

Speaker 18 The police saw something there that didn't quite add up. And that was

Speaker 18 what the children ended up seeing from inside the car

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 And they got a lot of things right down to the detail about the car and other things so that they could understand what happened.

Speaker 18 And so

Speaker 18 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,

Speaker 18 in the way Diane even acted in the video. This wasn't a mom who was shell-shocked.
She was a

Speaker 18 actress. playing out a scene in a movie that we hadn't seen yet.

Speaker 19 Tell me about her behavior the video reenactment.

Speaker 18 Well, it was almost as if, I mean, from what I can remember of the details and them showing it, it was almost as if

Speaker 18 she had to think about what it was that was the right answer that they wanted, as opposed to this is exactly what happened.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 19 And you could see that.

Speaker 18 You could.

Speaker 22 I'm throwing the keys, okay? I'm throwing the keys.

Speaker 5 Simulating me.

Speaker 22 Yes, but I didn't let go of them. He thinks I threw them, but I did not throw them, okay?

Speaker 22 He swings around at the same time, watching the keys, and he swings around his shoe. Probably he thought he shot me in the stomach, right?

Speaker 22 I go like that.

Speaker 22 I got in the car, jumped in, put the keys in, and I just hit my cat.

Speaker 22 Started the car

Speaker 22 and left. The car door shut itself.

Speaker 5 God damn.

Speaker 5 This is worse than me. Okay.

Speaker 19 The police weren't the only ones who found Diane's behavior and explanation strange.

Speaker 19 The press also saw the video, and for many, it confirmed their suspicions that Diane was the most likely suspect in the shooting.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 That's about the only part of her story that has remained consistent.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 18 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.

Speaker 5 her car.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 18 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

Speaker 18 the police had to do was just find this person and track them down and the things would be over.

Speaker 18 But over time, and you really didn't want to believe it at first, that Diane

Speaker 18 had some of these strange characteristics about her. They didn't make sense.

Speaker 19 Eventually, police felt like they had gathered enough evidence. On February 28th, 1984, Diane Downs was arrested.

Speaker 20 It was a huge deal. Diane's been arrested.
Again, you know, she'd been...

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 But I think among most people that there was just no goodwill left for Diane, with no other suspect ever having come close to

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 5 She was looking tired, bedraggled.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 But she was, I think, kind of beaten down by circumstance when they finally took her into custody.

Speaker 20 But at that point, we all knew that, well,

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 We'll have you start your trial within three months.

Speaker 19 It wasn't just the reenactment, her strange behavior, and the inconsistent story that led police to arrest Diane.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 20 Diane was ultimately charged because Christie could talk.

Speaker 20 Christy felt safe enough emotionally to share her thoughts.

Speaker 5 She'd been going through lots of therapy, and as part of these sessions,

Speaker 20 Her therapist, a guy named Carl Peterson, would ask her eventually, just in talking about this,

Speaker 5 Do you know who shot you?

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 5 So, no harm, no foul. So, she did that for quite a while.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 19 And what did she say?

Speaker 20 Said my mom

Speaker 19 On the next episode of Happy Face presents Too Face, we received a bizarre letter from Diane Downs in prison that included her surprising claims of her relation to Becky.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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 T. Gardner is our researcher.

Speaker 19 And Matt Riddle is our story editor. Featured music by Dreamtent.
Happy Face Presents 2Face is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culturalistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. Get ready for your next TV obsession.
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