World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 2 - Diane Downs - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-Lane County Courthouse, Eugene, Oregon -- May 8, 1984. A U.S. mail carrier and a mother of a three stood accused
of the murder of her daughter, 7-year-old Cheryl, and the attempted murder of her two other children,
8-year-old Christie and 3-year-old Danny. Her name -- Diane Downs. -Diane Downs was pure evil
wrapped up in someone who had a smile. To this day, she has never admitted that she did the deed.
-But when her daughter, Christie, testified, the terrible truth was all too clear.
-When the person asked her the question, "Who shot you and your sibling?" she says, "My mom did it."
-It was a court case that shook America, and all the while, Downs insisted she'd never harmed her family.
-She violated that sacred duty and attempted, in cold blood, to kill all three of her children.
-The callous murder of her daughter and attempted murder of her two other children
makes Diane Downs one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Springfield, Oregon -- May 1983.
The small industrial down that lies next door to the city of Eugene was home to one of
America's most reviled murderers -- Diane Downs. The 28-year-old mother had driven her three children
to a remote location just outside of town. Diane Downs then pulled over to the side of the road
and shot each of her three children. 7-year-old Cheryl died. Her siblings, Christie and Danny survive the ordeal
but were left scarred. This seemingly senseless attack stunned the nation. -What makes this case exceptional is that Diane Downs
doesn't look like any other mother who kills their children. Most mothers who kill their children,
their children are babies. They're under the age of 12 months. These mothers are from pretty desperate circumstances,
but Diane Downs was something altogether different. -...and we're talking about what the president did
in deciding not to go... -Talk-show host Lars Larson was a young investigative reporter
assigned to the sensational story in 1983. -This case involving Diane Downs really had everything.
It had a mother. It had children, murder, and sex and mystery, and you had an American murder suspect
who had tried to murder her three children and succeeded with one of them and horribly wounded the other two.
♪♪ -Downs was having a relationship with a married man, a fellow colleague at the U.S. Post Office where she worked.
♪♪ -Diane Downs said she was in love with this man. This was the man she wanted to be with.
She thought that by eliminating the children that that would be the last hurdle she would have to jump over
to be able to be with this man forever. -Downs had decided that he was the most important person in her life, bar none.
-Here, we've got a mother who'd relentlessly pursued her own wants and desires and really didn't care about her children.
-I suspect she's a classic example of a narcissistic killer. The only thing she thinks about is herself.
Her children exist in the world for her. She doesn't exist in the world for her children,
and her life history suggests that is true. This was a way to change her life. This was a way to get a new boyfriend,
the boyfriend she wanted, and that meant so much to her that it was more important to her
than the life of her children. -This killer's story begins over 60 years ago. Diane Downs was born on August the 7th,
1955 in Phoenix, Arizona. You know, there's little to indicate that there was anything especially abnormal
about her family life. -Her father was a postal worker, and her mom was a stay-at-home mother.
Her father was quite the disciplinarian. He had some quite strict rules. He would often give lectures to his children
about how to behave, but it was very much a stereotypical American nuclear family.
-As a teenager, Diane met Stephen Downs while in high school, and they became a couple.
When she was 17, Diane enrolled in Bible college in Orange, California, but soon, problem began to brew.
Diane had gone to Bible college, but that hadn't lasted very long. She was only there for two semesters,
and she was kicked out of college because of quite her promiscuous behavior, and that's a theme that we see throughout her life.
-After her expulsion, Diane returned to her parents' home in Arizona and married Stephen Downs.
-They got married when she was 18. Now, she was very quick to want to start a family,
and they soon had their child. -Their first daughter, Christie, was born in October 1974.
Just over a year later, Diane had her second child, a girl she named Cheryl. -Diane and her husband had two children together,
and after this, her husband decides, "That's it. Enough. Our family is complete."
And he goes and has a vasectomy, but Diane is absolutely adamant she wants another child,
so she goes and has a short-term affair with another man and becomes pregnant with her son, Danny.
♪♪ -I suspect that she engaged in what I call instrumental sex, and what I mean by this is for some women, sex is a tool.
It's a weapon. They want to get pregnant because they believe that they will create a relationship.
♪♪ -Diane seemed to really enjoy the pregnancy stage of motherhood, but when the baby actually arrived,
she didn't quite like that so much. There were lots of reports that she left the children alone,
and she left them unattended. When they got home from school, they were waiting on the porch for hours at a time.
-In 1980, Diane and her husband, Stephen, divorced. Soon after, Downs was pregnant again.
That's because she's volunteered to be a surrogate mother. -At the time in the United States,
there were approximately 100 surrogate mothers in the entire country. Those were the estimates at the time,
so being a surrogate mom puts you in a very rarefied piece of air. You were unique.
-And she was actually interviewed for a national newspaper in the early 1980s, and she very much seemed to enjoy that experience,
so she's got a taste of that limelight, and she will use her role as a woman, her role as a mother as a way to get people to look at her.
-In 1981, she was paid $10,000 by a couple desperate to have a child. Nine months later, Downs gave birth to a baby girl
that she handed to the sponsoring couple. That same year, she got a job with the US Postal Service.
There, she had an affair that would be the catalyst of catastrophe. -He was a married man who she encountered.
They were sexually involved -- surprise, surprise. This is what she does. And he was fine with just having and affair,
but once Diane Downs wanted a real relationship with him, he was done. -Now, she's had quite a lot of short-term relationships
with people in this workplace and in the post office, and he believes that, actually,
this is just going to be a bit of a fling because he knows what her reputation is,
but she becomes quite fixated on him. She wants them to have a longer-term relationship.
-But instead, he ended things. -He made it very clear to her. He didn't want to raise her children,
and he didn't want to have children by her, and I believe at the point at which he says that to her
is when she decided that, "If he won't have me with my children, maybe he'll have me without them."
-The key thing is that he doesn't want to be the stepfather to her children, so her children, at this point in time,
they become a barrier to her getting what she wants. -By the end of 1981, Diane Downs
had moved over 1,200 miles north to Springfield, Oregon. -Now, after she moves to Oregon,
she expects that he's just going to follow her, and actually, that doesn't happen.
He's not interested. -Diane Downs pursued the man she loved for nearly 2 years, writing
and even visiting him to plead for his affections to no avail. The cold-hearted mother of three
then came to an incredible conclusion. In order to be with the man she loved, she had to kill her children.
Later in the afternoon of May the 19th, Diane Downs took her three children, 8-year-old Christie,
7-year-old Cheryl, and 3-year-old Danny on a fateful journey. They were headed to a farm in the small rural town of Marcola,
just 12 miles away from their home in Springfield. ♪♪ -She's going kind of out of the way from where she lives.
She's on the opposite side of town, so she appears to be doing things that aren't particularly rational.
-The children had no idea that their mother had made a dreadful decision. In order to run away with a man she was obsessed with,
Diane Downs had planned to kill her children that evening. -When we see a killer who says,
"Well, I was going to kill my children, and then I could be with this man forever," we say,
"Well, that's irrational. That's crazy," but to her, I think it made perfect sense.
-She's completely smashed any of our expectations about mothers, that they should put their children first,
and that is something that she's never done. ♪♪ -Diane Downs drove her three children
to a coworker's house in Marcola. -And her children get to see the horses and pet the horses,
and she talks to this coworker, and they visit for a while. -The problem was, the woman she was visiting had no idea
Downs was coming. -This friend doesn't seem to be able to make sense of why Diane has suddenly turned up there.
-The unusual trip was part of Diane Downs' carefully designed murder plan. The visit to see the horses would serve as an alibi.
-She thought, "If I could just get rid of these three children, then I could go with the love of my life,"
but she had to do it, so she conspired for a long time. She arranged this phony visit to a friend's house
that she'd never visited before. She conspired to be driving home late on a lonely road
a long way from any houses or any activity. I believe that she was planning this for at least days,
could've been even weeks. -One thing that we need to understand about these crimes is that because
She's driving down the street with a loaded gun, which means before we stepped into that car,
she knew she was going to kill her children. -In keeping with her pernicious plan, after leaving the farm,
Diane Downs packed the children in the car and drove to a carefully chosen site on Old Mohawk Road.
She pulled over and got out of the car. -We are talking about a premeditated homicide,
and this is something that the average person thinks of as inconceivable and impossible.
-With the children not suspecting a thing, she went to the trunk of the car. She pulled out a Ruger .22-caliber
semiautomatic pistol, walked back to the driver's side with the gun in hand. -When the children first see the gun,
they have to be in total disbelief. It has to be inconsistent with all of their experiences.
-Then she knelt on the seat, leaned forward to towards her daughter, 7-year-old Cheryl,
and from about 6 inches away, fired. [ Gunshot ] On the case on the night of the attack
was forensic expert Jim Pex. -One shot was in the back that exited about at the sternum,
and that was probably the bullet that was found in the passenger side inside the vehicle.
-As Cheryl tried to exit the car, her mother leapt out of the passenger side door
and fired again. [ Gunshot ] -There was another shot in the lower torso, here, that stayed in her.
-After the first bullet is fired, the second and third bullets are fired within seconds,
but when a gun is fired in a close space, like a car, it is very loud. I mean, it is booming, shocking.
On its own, it's stunning, and for children, more so. -Next, Downs shot her 3-year-old son in the back.
-The boy was on the driver's-side back seat, had a single wound, gunshot wound, to the spine.
-She then shot her daughter, Christie, in the chest twice. As the girl raised her hand to defend herself,
a bullet ripped through the thumb of her left hand. -There was a bullet-penetrating wound
that went through her hand, exited near the thumb, and then into her chest. -In the back of the car,
Christie and Danny were clinging to life. Lying in the footwell in the front, Cheryl was mortally wounded.
-I suspect that Diane Downs chose to shoot her children because of it placing distance,
mentally and physically, between her and men. It's a cold, calculated decision. You don't have to be staring into somebody's eyes to do it.
♪♪ -It was a clinical and cruel attack, but Downs' evil plan was far from over. While her children lay dying,
Diane Downs continued with her coldly conceived plan and covered her tracks. -Not only did she know she was going to kill her children,
she knew that she was going to have to -- In order to make it look like somebody else did it --
she was going to have to shoot herself. -So she shot herself in the arm. She knew she could probably get away with shooting
through the fleshy part of her arm, not do any permanent damage, not break a bone,
not incapacitate herself, and then she arranged to take a bandage that she'd already folded up and put in the trunk of her car --
It was a large piece of cloth -- to wind it around her arm because she had shot herself in her own left arm.
-Downs then drove for 6 miles to the McKenzie-Willamette Hospital in Springfield.
-Gunshot wounds, particularly multiple gunshot wounds -- The damage that can be done is tremendous.
If it's not destroyed something vital like the heart, then you've got serious problems with ongoing bleeding,
and that can be rapidly fatal. A number of minutes could do it. -If Downs had driven at top speed,
she might've got help for her children in about 10 minutes, but that is not what she did.
-Realizing the children were still alive, she drove very, very slowly. -So slowly that she actually held up traffic,
and what's amazing to me, and what makes this a special moment is, here are her children.
They've been shot. They're on the literal precipice of death, and she's traveling 10 miles an hour to make sure,
from her perspective, that they don't get to the hospital on time. -And we know this because of witnesses
who pulled up behind her on the road couldn't figure out, "Why is she going so slowly?"
and because it was such a winding lonely road, these people had to follow for a long period of time.
-That represents a sordid departure from her obligations as a mother like I have never seen.
That was her last chance to save those children. That was the last chance for her superego,
for her moral self to step in and say, "I've got to stop," and it didn't happen,
and that made it a truly horrible moment, maybe more horrible than the shooting itself
because at that point, she proved herself beyond redemption. -Downs' peculiar driving continued to attract attention
from other cars and their curious passengers. -A family that happened to be on the same road had a child in the car.
I think he was 8 or 9 years old, and earlier in the day, they had seen a red automobile with Arizona plates,
which happened to be red. He says to his mother, "Are all the cars from Arizona red?"
That was the kind of comment a child would make, but it would cement your mind, so they knew
that they were following a car they would later identify as Diane Downs' car who had a red Nissan car
with red Arizona license plates on it. -Diane Downs pulled into the Springfield hospital
about 30 minutes after she'd shot her children. -She finally gets to the hospital.
She spills out of the car, says to the emergency room personnel, "Please, save my children,"
while one of them has already died. The other two were just, just barely saved. -Cheryl, the middle daughter,
she was dead on arrival at hospital. She had been shot, and she had choked on her own blood.
She died in pain. -Her daughter, Christie, has also been shot twice, but she's alive.
Danny, the son, had been shot once, and he was clinging onto life, as well. -On arrival at hospital,
Christie had not been able to speak, so we may have a mixture of direct trauma there,
injury to the brain from the stroke, and the shock, the horror of what's happened to her,
and she ultimately suffers a stroke, most likely as the result of blood loss, so in her case, it wasn't lethal,
but it was totally life-changing. Danny has been shot, and he's paralyzed because of the damage to his spinal cord.
-Only one member of the family had a bandage on their wounds. -She's got these three,
one fatally injured child in the car, and she goes into the hospital, and she is the only one that appears to have a dressing.
She's the only one who appears to have an injury that's been treated, so that suggests to me
that, actually, she's put herself first again. She's made sure that she's okay. She's nursed her own injury
whilst her children were in the car dying. -Every action Downs took in the wake of the attempted murder of her three children
was part of a perverse plot, one that painted herself and her family as the victims of a random attack.
-Well, I think the fact in the case that is the most extraordinary is that after she mustered up
whatever courage it took to shoot three of her children, she had to create the impression that somehow, she was a victim.
-She wasn't a victim in this case. She was a coldly calculating mother who had decided to eliminate her children
as the roadblock between her and her life with this man. -Downs had concocted an incredible story
about a bushy-haired stranger, a mysterious car-jacker who shot her children. Downs claimed she managed to trick the murderous man
and drove hell-for-leather all the way to the hospital in order to save her fatally wounded children,
but as the investigation would soon prove, Downs' story was part of a desperate and devious scheme
she'd formulated to get away with murder. The McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center.
May the 19th, 1983 -- Springfield, Oregon. -So in the hospital, she starts to put aside
her version of events. She says the car was flagged down by a bushy-haired stranger.
-She said, "Had been attacked on a lonely road late at night," and she was on her way, driving home,
and she sees a man, her story, and decides to stop. He's signaling for help. -According to Downs, when she got out of the car,
the bushy-haired man shot her in the arm, and then he shot her three children. -What didn't make sense is that he would shoot her in the arm,
here, not in the head, not in the chest, but shoot her in the arm and then shoot her three children inside the car,
blood everywhere, and then she claimed that she had her keys for her car on a ring,
kind of like the ring that I have, and she said she pretended to throw it, the way you could, say, pretend to throw a ball for your dog.
While he's distracted, she jumps in the car, she says, pulls her door shut and manages to drive off,
she says, "at high speed." I believe she said, "I drove like a madwoman." -The sensational story that Diane Downs
told about the events baffled everyone. -The story that didn't make sense at all
was that Diane Downs would stop her car, open her door and get out of the car for this man who she didn't know.
-But it was not just the odd tale that was troubling. Downs' extraordinary behavior at the hospital
also alarmed observers. -But according to the doctor in charge at the hospital, she was calm.
She was quite self-assured. She appeared to be in control of her behavior. She was occasionally laughing.
She was occasionally giggling. -Staff at the hospital described her reaction as surprising.
-Danny sustained a shot to the spine, and when his mother was told about this, she seemed to be quite surprised.
"Oh, so it didn't hit him in the heart?" suggesting that perhaps that was her intention when she shot him.
-Again, when she was told of Christie's injuries, she showed little compassion for her injured child.
-Diane told the doctors that if her daughter was going to have, you know, any kind of brain damage to let her die.
This is very unusual as an immediate response. -But it was her daughter Christie's reaction
to her own mother that set alarm bells ringing. -Diane comes into the room where Christie is in the hospital,
and she leans over the bed and starts saying to Christie, "I love you," and from the people in the room,
they say that Christie looked absolutely terrified. They notice that her heart rate had gone through the roof
when Diane came into the room, so this is a little girl who was very frightened.
She's afraid of her mother, and this is a really clear indication of that. She's scared that her mother is going to try and harm her again.
-For one of the children to wake up with a memory that her mother shot her is --
It's just indescribable. It -- The universe becomes unstable and untrustworthy. The sky has fallen.
-Her attitude and demeanor in the hospital was very unusual for the kind of incident
that occurred to her own children, and so that was probably one of the first indications
by the deputy who was there that, "This doesn't look right." -As they did not believe Downs' version of the events,
investigators quickly identified her as the prime suspect. -In the aftermath of this attack,
the decision is made to remove the children from Diane's car, to put them into foster care.
They became wards of the state, so Diane, at this point, has lost her children. -The police did not immediately arrest Downs.
Instead, they meticulously gathered evidence in the case. State Trooper and forensic expert Jim Pex
was called the night of the incident. -I received a call from the sheriff's office
that there had been a shooting, and it involved a woman and her children and that there was a need to process a vehicle.
-Jim Pex closely examined the entire car that night and in daylight the whole of the next day.
When he looked at the passenger-side door and the areas underneath the car, he made a series of discoveries
that would break the case wide-open. -I spotted a bloodstain in the doorjamb of the passenger door,
and the direction was wrong, and it came from the outside. -According to Diane Downs, the bushy-haired man
was standing outside the vehicle on the driver's side of the car, but Jim Pex had found that the murdered girl's blood
had spattered back onto the doorjambs on the passenger side of the car, the opposite side to where the bushy-haired man
had supposedly attacked. -You can see that there is a small bloodstain here, so the door was open at the time
that this bloodstain was created outside the vehicle. -The blood spatter meant the victim,
in this case, 7-year-old Cheryl, was shot at least once when she was outside the car
on the passenger side of the vehicle. -The strings are used to show the position
of the origin of these bloodstains and from when they traveled through the air and struck the side of the vehicle.
-Crucially, Jim Pex also found some tiny droplets of blood under the car as well on the rocker panel on the passenger side.
-This particular slide shows the rocker panel that's underneath. You can see on this lower portion here,
there are a number of very small bloodstains. These are probably 1 to 2 millimeters in size.
-This discovery lead Jim to an irrefutable conclusion. -When I found the blood spatter outside the vehicle,
that was, you know, something is amiss in this story because that's a long ways away to shoot
someone who is very close to the rocker panel, and I knew from the size of the droplets
that it was created by someone who was coughing blood or a contact/near-contact shot.
The muzzle would have to be close to get droplets that were that small. Then you have to stop back and think.
When the individual, the bushy-haired stranger, allegedly is standing outside the driver's door,
that takes some pretty long arms to get clear over there and outside the passenger door.
-What Jim Pex did not find further confirmed their suspicions. There were no blood spatters
on the driver's side of the car at all. If the bushy-haired man had attacked as Downs had said,
Jim would've expected to find blood spatters on the driver's side of the car, but there were none.
-So, again, it arouses our suspicions in law enforcement that something is amiss here
if someone is not telling the truth. -It was clear to Jim Pex and his fellow detectives
that whoever shot 7-year-old Cheryl could not have been standing outside the car
on the driver's side. The evidence also showed that the shooter fired the gun within inches of the victim's body.
-And that was significant in her case because one of the children had tried to open the car door
to escape, either because Diane Downs was shooting the two kids in the back, or because she had already been shot and fell out of the car,
and she was shot again. [ Gunshot ] -More evidence uncovered in the car showed how Christie and Danny had been shot
and where those shots came from. -In looking at the clothing that all of the children had on,
I was able to do specific tests to determine how far away the end of the muzzle was from each of them at the time
that the shot was fired. -You can tell both from powder burns because when the bullet is fired,
there is a certain amount of powder that comes out, and it's still burning. If a gun is fired at very close range
to either clothing or to skin, it will cause burning around that, that you will not see
if somebody is shot from a greater distance. -Jim Pex concluded the two children in the back seat
had been shot by someone who'd fired from inside the car and from point-blank range.
Detectives now had proof that Diane Downs' story about a mysterious bushy-haired stranger was a lie.
Whoever shot the children must have been inside the car when they fired their fatal shots.
-The physical evidence, the blood-splatter evidence did not conform to the way she described the crime,
so it became pretty apparent pretty quickly that she was the perpetrator. -Meanwhile, Diane Downs was there,
free to talk to the press and protest her innocence. -It was decided to kind of go ahead
and continue to let her talk because we knew there was a relationship to her with this shooting,
and so she continued to harangue law enforcement and imply that we're looking at her
and that we weren't looking for the bushy-haired stranger. Yeah. She was right. We weren't.
-Downs was now the only suspect in the murder of her daughter, Cheryl, and the attempted murder of her other two children,
Christie and Danny. All three had been shot at night in the family car on a lonely country road after a day out.
When forensic expert Jim Pex found spent bullet cases inside the car, he determined that all the victims had been shot
with a .22-caliber semiautomatic weapon, so they issued a warrant and searched Diane Downs' house in Springfield.
-The police are quite surprised at what they find. This does not look like a family home.
This looks like the home of a rather narcissistic single woman, so there are three pictures
on top of the television stand of Diane. Also, one of the things that the police find is a unicorn,
which appears to be a kind of memorial to the children. It has their names on it and a date on it,
but surprisingly, this wasn't something that Diane came to acquire after the attack.
It's something that was already there before, so she's memorializing her children even before they're dead.
♪♪ -The question becomes, how can a mother maim two of her children and kill another child
and live with herself? And the answer is, she can live with herself only if the only thing in her universe
was her narcissism and herself. Her children don't exist. They, from her perspective,
was an obstruction between her and her new love. Beyond that, they were nothing.
-When the detectives found Downs' diary, her motivation for attempting to murder her three children was eerily clear.
-In that diary, she talks an awful lot about the coworker that she's become incredibly fixated on,
and it becomes quite clear to police that this relationship with him is the reason that she's tried to kill her children,
was because they were the barrier. They were the obstacle that was standing in the he way of her relationship with him.
-During the search, the police also found a .22-caliber rifle, and their hopes were piqued.
-It was certainly suspicious. It's a .22 rifle. So, you know, is this potentially the murder weapon?
And we took the rifle back to the crime laboratory. I test-fired the rifle and compared the tool marks
created by the rifle to the cartridge casings that were found at the scene, and they were different,
so the rifle was not used in the commission of this crime. -But the unspent bullets found in the magazine cartridge
did provide a vital clue that would help solve the case. -Even though the marks on the cartridges from the rifle
didn't match test-fires that I performed with the rifle, they had the same extractor marks on them
as the casings that I retrieved from the vehicle. -The extractor marks are made on the softshell casing
when a bullet is ejected from the barrel of a gun. -The way the gun gets rid of that bullet
is a thing called an ejector. As that gun cycles, pulls the shell back and then kicks it out of the port,
and it's gone and then chambers another round. Let's say you have a pistol that's already loaded,
and you decide, "I want to unload the gun." You would then release the magazine.
That's all the other bullets, and then pointing it in a safe direction, you pull the slide,
and when you pull it back, it will take the unfired bullet, so bullet and shell, and kick it out of the gun.
She'd apparently done this, had cycled some rounds of ammunition through the gun,
and they had ejector marks on them. Even within the same brand, make, model, and year of a gun,
those ejector marks are somewhat unique. Even if you had two identical Ruger pistols,
the ejector marks will be slightly different. They're imperfections in manufacturing of the gun.
They'll be small differences, but there will be differences. -Jim Pex placed two .22-caliber bullets side-by-side
under a comparison microscope -- one ejected by Downs' rifle and the other one that was found inside the crime-scene car.
-What you have is a split image down the middle, and what we're looking at are extractor marks,
and as you can see by the fine striations here, these extractor marks were both made by the same extractor,
which means there is a relationship between the cartridge casings from the crime scene
and the cartridges from her apartment. Then we knew that this is a breakthrough moment
where there is a relationship to the fired casings that hit the children to the cartridges
that were inside the tubular magazine of the rifle. -Checking sales records, police knew that Diane Downs
had owned a Ruger .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol. After test-firing one exhaustively,
Jim Pex found similar extractor marks on the bullet casings. He concluded that a Ruger .22-caliber pistol
was the murder weapon, but it was never found. -While Diane Downs managed to dispose of the gun,
but at home, she had a rifle that also shot .22-caliber rounds, and when the police processed this evidence,
they found that they were the same manufacturer as the bullets that were used to shoot her children.
They had ejector marks on them, some of them that were the same as the ejector marks from the pistol.
-The bullet casings and their telltale extractor marks were enough to convict Diane Downs
for the murder and attempted murder of her three children. On February the 28, 1984, 9 months after the crime,
she was brought into custody. -When the arrest finally went down, I think the whole town breathed a sigh of relief.
-She appeared at the Lane County Courthouse for her arraignment. After the charges were read,
Diane Downs sprung a major surprise. -Her attorney stands up, and after he's finished all the legal arguments says,
"And besides, Your Honor, my client is pregnant, and it would be bad for her health to go to jail."
I was sitting in that courtroom seat. You could hear the entire room take a big, deep breath.
It was stunning, just absolutely stunning. -According to rumors, the father was a local reporter.
-There was one reporter that had sex with her, and I can tell you this -- It wasn't me, and she became pregnant from that,
but she loved the attention that she got. -By the time the trial began on May the 8th, 1984,
Downs was 8 months pregnant. -Obviously, she was pregnant at the time of the trial,
and this was something that I think she thought would help her garner quite a bit of sympathy.
-Her antics, however, were not enough to fool the jury. A mountain of evidence went a long way to convincing them
of Diane Downs' culpability in the crime. Then her surviving daughter, Christie, took to the stand.
-This little girl had to have been under so much strain and stress. Her mother has tried to kill her.
She's living with a new family. Her sister is dead. Her brother is in a wheelchair for rest of his life,
and now, she has to sit in front of a room full of strangers and talk about the most difficult night of her life.
-And she gets up on the stand, and when the person asked her the question, "Who shot you and your sibling?" she says, "My mom did it."
-This was one of the most moments in court where everything is dead still. Nobody dares breathe.
-Christie laid out how her mother first shot Cheryl, then turned and shot Danny in the back,
then shot her twice in the chest. -The testimony just tore your heart apart. This wasn't the critical piece of information.
There was lots of physical evidence of what Diane Downs had done, but I think this was essential in making sure
that Diane Downs was convicted of the crime she committed. -On June the 17th, 1984, the jury found Diane Downs
guilty of the murder of her 7-year-old daughter, Cheryl, and the attempted murder of her daughter, Christie,
and son Danny. She was sentenced to 50 years in prison. A month after her sentencing, Diane Downs gave birth
to a baby girl that she named Amy. The child was immediately given up for adoption.
At the same time, the prosecutor in the case, Fred Hugi, adopted the two children
who survived their mother's attack. -After the trial was over, Fred adopted the two children,
and he did a wonderful job of raising those two kids, so I admire him for that. -It was a lifetime commitment to be the father, and his wife,
the mother, to these children that they really deserved and that Diane Downs denied to them.
♪♪ -In prison, Diane Downs managed another surprise. On July the 11th, 1987, 3 years after her incarceration, she escaped.
-She got out of the prison easy as pie, climbed the fence. She was loose for more than a week,
and she was only about 10 blocks away. She was staying with some men. Later, one of the men said
he thought she was trying to get pregnant. -Diane Downs, a mother who tried to kill her
three children, was returned to prison where, to this day, she protests her innocence.
-I can tell you that for all the stories I've covered, Diane Downs stands out because this woman was pure evil.
-She did something that's unheard of. She violated that sacred duty and attempted, in cold blood,
to kill all three of her children for no other reason than to increase her chances at having a particular boyfriend.
-I don't think there is anything worse than this kind of betrayal by your own mother.
Your mother is the one that should nurture you, should protect you. -The cold-hearted murder of her daughter, Cheryl,
and the attempted murder of her two other young children, Christie and Danny, makes Diane Downs
one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Diane Downs shot her three children, killing her seven-year-old daughter Cheryl and wounding her other two children.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Diane Downs shot her three children, killing one, to pursue a relationship, leading to her conviction and a shocking trial.

Key points

Diane Downs: The Face of Evil. A chilling description of Diane Downs, a mother who committed unspeakable acts.
The Shocking Testimony. Christie Downs reveals the truth about her mother's actions in court.
The Unusual Case. Diane Downs defies the typical profile of mothers who kill, shocking the nation.
A Mother's Betrayal. Diane Downs' actions lead to the tragic death of her daughter and the injury of her other children.
A Calculated Plan. Diane Downs' premeditated actions reveal her cold intentions to eliminate her children.
Diane's Unusual Response. Diane shows little compassion for her injured daughter, raising suspicions about her intentions.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

My mom did it.

Christie's testimony in court revealed the shocking truth about her mother.

0:49WatchJul 29, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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