Diane

I mean it was a huge story. It made, you know, 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 sense either at first. But everybody was willing to go along with

The reenactment Eric Mason is referring to is a video shop by Springfield Orgon 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 twenty seven year old mail carrier and mother of three wind up at a Springfield organ 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 nineteen sixty, right. They got married in the fifties, and in the fifties and the sixties. 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 around the house. Right. One of the questions I had, well, what happens when

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 suppurb 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 house?

But there was five? Yeah, I had a really fantastic child that my sister had a fantastic child. And 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 a pigeons. You know, I thought those were the coolest thing. Pigeons, you know what I mean, there were homing pigeons. Yeah, you put little bands on their their little foot and they fly

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 and she was a junior in high school and Steve had dropped out. But it's part of dating Diane or a 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 in. I looked up to him, as you know, he was a male figure, you know, and

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 really 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 and flag style, 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 nineteen seventy four. Then Diane said, you know, I can't stay away from the kids, and so she got an honorable discharger 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.

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 it 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. So these took place in front of the kids at times, 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. And by that time, Steve was sitting on Diana, punching her in

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, dark neck, ringing red. The deputy said, Diane, my god, what happened to you? What do you think? She said, It's like, he says, you've two been doing this for six years now. He says, when will it stop?

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, 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 or 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 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 frayed between her and Steve, turned him in for that and he was arrested and charged with the 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 to Stephen Diane worked at mobile home manufacturing plans.

Oh I didn't know this, Okay.

Yeah, growing up I called growing up twenties. Right, They worked together in manufacturing plans. You know that way is Steve, you could 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

That's what the court said.

The labeled an electrical fire, but it came out that that's not what it was. That came out in court, but that's not what it was.

How much an insurance pay out for for the mobile home.

Says seven thousand dollars right there.

And back in nineteen eighty three. That was a chunk of money.

It was seven thousand dollars to repair the mobile.

Home, which wasn't used to repair the mobile that's correct. Where did the seven thousand Steve.

Yeah, Steve, and again he crossed the line. So but go moving forward. Do you wonder why Steve might have testified that against my sister, Well, here's the reasons. You know, Steve confessed to the crime of arson, rendering her homeless. I'm 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 named Karen's house and offered her a spare room until the inner November of nineteen eighty two.

House, and Karen was her coworker 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 your 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 nineteen eighty two. The shooting happened in May of nineteen eighty three.

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

And Janeyorry of nineteen eighty five, 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.

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 whoever she pleased without immediate fear of reprisal. And Diane seemed to love male attention.

Over the course of time. You watch this plate out all the time, and you when you see someone like Diane, when you see so one 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

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 says, sir, was she was a 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 rock carrier, and as a rural rock 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 rule routes.

On a road route, you you basically sub let 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 it was like crazy. You know. He wasn't very happy, and he made it known that she wasn't

He was a letter carrier also, so they worked eight hour shifts beside each other, would spent 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 down his head 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, in 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 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 then she did changed something, and that's when she moved to Oregon. She was changing her life. She'd been in order for six weeks when she was attacked. She left Steve in Arizona. She left her boyfriends. And I don't say Nick I said she left her boyfriends in Arizona. I mean, I can't say

And then in nineteen eighty three, 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 things. So we were all sort of learning

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.

Mom and Dad said, quit talking. Then, 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 nineteen eighty three, and a lot of that was due to her. I mean, as 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 and she was really the worst witness for herself, you know, I mean, it's like she she would get up and she would talk, and she would talk, 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. They wanted She wanted him to listen, but they would never listen. They would never look for anybody. She would go down there. You know, it's like, why

Months after the shooting, the police had produced no additional suspects beyond Diane herself. They had no leads, and only the Frederickson's themselves seemed to be providing contacts of potential witnesses and suspects to the police.

There didn't seem to be any elits. And this was coming from Diane's camp to say we have somebody had phoned us and indicated there was 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 solidly so I know that the police got a lot of contacts, and as far as I know, they and this was one of the stories we were trying

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, and 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 too because she needed to talk. And she was one day talking about having driven down to her letter carrying route in Cottage

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 and 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 was 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

Shooter might be.

The reenactment was strange, to say the least. Diana seemed to be a mother who was struggling to explain the murder and an 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.

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 the video.

Re enactment, mm hmm. Well, it was almost as if, I mean, as 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 the stranger, she was thinking out loud, almost about what it is that they would buy as

I'm throwing the keys.

Okay, I'm throwing the keys.

Yes, but I didn't let go.

He thinks I threw them, but I did not throw them.

Again.

He swings around at the same time, watching the keys and swings around his shoot, which he shot me in the stumm, I like that, Kesan, I just hit my kids, started the car and.

Left the car door shut itself.

Okay, this is the person.

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 reenactant with the police that was shown later that kind of verified this feeling that 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 she's consistent as far as I know to this day in saying you gotta 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 re enactment video, Diane's increasingly casual attitude and 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 them down and the 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 twenty eighth, nineteen eighty four, Diane Downs was arrested.

It was a huge deal. Diane's been arrested again. She'd been out in the community for months saying what if 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, and she was arrested.

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, Christie felt safe enough emotionally to share her thoughts. She'd been going through lots of therapy. 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,

On the next episode of Happy Face Presents Two Face, we received a bizarre letter from Diane Down's in prison that included her surprising claims of her relation to Becky. This leads us to enlist the help from DNA detective Michel Leonard to help us solve the answer of who are the biological parents of Becky. Ben Bolan is our