Diane Downs

• 1. Introduction

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  Diane Downs drove a blood-spattered car to McKenzie-Willamette Hospital in Springfield, Oregon, on the 19th of May 1983. Her three children were inside it. She told the staff that a stranger on a rural road had done this to them.

  Her account of that night would change in its details over the following months, and the people who heard it began to doubt it. Who was Diane Downs? What did investigators find that her story could not explain? And how did a single night on a country road keep returning to parole boards for decades?

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• 2. A Strict Household

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  Elizabeth Diane Frederickson was born on the 7th of August 1955 in Phoenix, Arizona, to Willadene and Wesley Frederickson. Her parents were of Danish and English descent, and they raised her and her four siblings under strict conservative values. Her mother later said that she and her husband raised the children "not to be crybabies."

  Fashionable clothes and makeup were forbidden in the Frederickson home, and those rules got their daughter bullied. After the age of 14, she turned rebellious. She experimented with her style and pushed back against her parents' rules.

  Downs later testified that her father sexually abused her as a child. She afterward recanted the allegation, and both of her parents denied that any abuse took place.

  At Moon Valley High School in Phoenix, she met a boy named Steve Downs. She kept seeing him even though her parents disapproved. She then enrolled at Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College in Orange, California. The college expelled her after one year for promiscuous behavior, and she went back to her parents' home in Arizona. Steve, for his part, had enlisted in the United States Navy.

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• 3. Marriage and Motherhood

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  On the 13th of November 1973, Diane ran away from home and married Steve Downs. At her trial she explained her reasons plainly. "I did not marry Steve for love," she said, "I married Steve to get out of the family."

  Their first child, Christie Ann, was born in 1974, and a second daughter, Cheryl, followed in 1976. Downs then ended a later pregnancy with an abortion. She regretted it after seeing pictures of fetuses at an anti-abortion booth at a local fair. "I felt the need to do something to make amends for what I had done wrong," she testified.

  She also testified that Steve had had a vasectomy. She said that this led her to have an affair with a friend, Mark Sager. Sager became the father of her third child, Stephen Daniel, who was born in 1979 and went by Danny.

  Money and suspected infidelity were constant sources of conflict between the couple. They divorced in 1980, after Steve discovered that Danny was the product of the affair.

  On the 8th of May 1982, Downs gave birth as a surrogate mother to a girl named Jennifer. She had twice failed psychiatric tests because of signs of psychosis. By then she was working for the United States Postal Service, responsible for mail routes in Cottage Grove, Oregon.

  Steve later described her as a mother with no maternal instincts, one who forbade nearly everything to her children. He recalled catching Cheryl jumping on her bed and making her sit and think about what she had done. Cheryl looked up and asked whether there was a gun there. When he asked why, she answered, "I want to kill me. My mom says I'm bad."

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• 4. The Stranger's Story

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  Three children arrived at the hospital that night in very different conditions. Danny, aged 3, was paralyzed from the waist down. Christie, aged 8, had suffered a disabling stroke. Cheryl Lynn Downs, aged 7, was dead. Downs herself had a gunshot wound in her left forearm.

  Shortly before 10:30 PM, she told police, she had been driving home from a friend's house. A "stranger" flagged her down on Old Mohawk Road near Springfield, and she got out of her car. The man ordered her to hand it over. She pretended to throw her keys into a nearby bush, and while he went to look, she said, he walked up to the car and shot her children with a small-caliber pistol. He then came back toward her, shot her in the arm, and ran northbound around a curve in the road.

  Downs described the gunman as having "shaggy, brown hair" and a "stubble beard." On the 9th of June 1983, she told a reporter from The Oregonian that her children had been sleeping when the shooting happened.

  In court, the story changed. She said the man shot her in the left arm during a physical struggle between them. She said he then opened the driver's side door before shooting the three children, and that she escaped in the car because he was busy hunting for the keys. Investigators set out to compare each version with what the car itself showed.

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• 5. The Evidence Against Her

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  At McKenzie-Willamette Hospital, investigators and staff judged Downs too calm for someone who had just survived such a traumatic event. She also made statements that both police and hospital workers considered highly inappropriate.

  Suspicion grew when she arrived to visit her children and phoned Robert Knickerbocker. He was a married man and a former coworker in Arizona, and the two had been having an affair. Knickerbocker later told police that she had stalked him and seemed willing to kill his wife so that she could have him to herself. He said he was relieved when she left for Oregon, and that he had been able to reconcile with his wife.

  The forensic evidence did not match her story either. There was no blood spatter on the driver's side of the car. There was also no gunpowder residue on the driver's door or on the interior door panel.

  Downs never told police that she owned a .22 caliber handgun, but both Steve and Knickerbocker did. Investigators learned that she had bought it in Arizona while married to Steve. They never found the gun. They did find unfired cartridges in her home whose extractor markings matched those of the murder weapon.

  The most damaging evidence came from witnesses who saw her car approaching the hospital at an estimated 5 to 7 miles per hour. She had claimed she drove there at "high speed." On the 28th of February 1984, nine months after the shooting, Downs was arrested and charged with one count of murder and two counts each of attempted murder and criminal assault. The prosecution still needed to explain why a mother would do this.

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• 6. Trial and Verdict

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  Prosecutors argued that Downs shot her children to be free of them so that she could continue her affair with Robert Knickerbocker. She had claimed that he made it known he did not want children in his life.

  The prosecution's psychiatrist diagnosed her with narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial personality disorders. He testified that "she shows no remorse. She regards her children with no empathy and as objects or possessions. Any feelings she has for them are superficial and only extend to how they are part of her and her life." He said these qualities placed her within a now outdated profile known as malignant hysteria psychopathy.

  Much of the case rested on Christie, the surviving daughter. Once she recovered her ability to speak, she described how her mother shot all three children while parked at the side of the road, and then shot herself in the arm.

  On the 17th of June 1984, a jury convicted Downs on all charges. She was sentenced to life in prison plus fifty years, and she had to serve twenty-five years before being considered for parole. Most of the sentence was to run consecutively. The judge made clear that he did not intend for her ever to be free again. Christie and Danny, the two surviving children, now needed a home.

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• 7. Escape and Aftermath

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  In 1986, the two surviving children were adopted by Fred Hugi, the lead prosecutor on their mother's case, and his wife, Joanne.

  On the 11th of July 1987, Downs escaped from her cell at the Oregon Women's Correctional Center in Salem by scaling an 18-foot razor wire fence. For ten days she evaded a fourteen-state manhunt before she was recaptured. She received an additional five-year sentence for the escape.

  Hugi had spent those ten days afraid that she would travel to his home in Springfield, hoping to reach Christie and Danny. The Salem prison sat 66 miles from his house. After her recapture, he lobbied heavily to move her out of Oregon. Oregon officials had made significant security upgrades at the women's facility, but they accepted his argument that the risk to the children was too great. Downs was transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women, run by the New Jersey Department of Corrections.

  While in prison, she earned an associate degree in general studies. In 1994, after serving ten years, she was transferred again, this time to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

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• 8. Parole and Legacy

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  Downs sat for her first parole hearing on the 9th of December 2008. Under Oregon law at the time, as a dangerous offender, she would have been eligible for a hearing every two years until she was released or died in prison. In her application she insisted, "over the years, I have told you and the rest of the world that a man shot me and my children. I have never changed my story."

  Lane County District Attorney Douglas Harcleroad wrote to the parole board that Downs "continues to fail to demonstrate any honest insight into her criminal behavior... even after her convictions, she continues to fabricate new versions of events under which the crimes occurred." He added that "she alternately refers to her assailants as a bushy-haired stranger, two men wearing ski masks, or drug dealers and corrupt law enforcement officials."

  Downs was not permitted a statement at the hearing, but she answered the board's questions. After three hours of interviews and thirty minutes of deliberation, the board denied her parole. Hearings in 2010 and 2020 also ended in denial, and she maintained her innocence at every one. Doctors have diagnosed her with narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial personality disorders, and she has been labelled a "deviant sociopath."

  In 2010 she was moved to the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, California. The facility was converted to an all-male institution in 2013, and she was transferred out.

  A fourth child, Amy Elizabeth, was born a month after the 1984 trial. Ten days before Downs' sentencing, the State of Oregon seized the baby, and Chris and Jackie Babcock adopted her and renamed her Rebecca. As an adult, Rebecca appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and ABC's 20/20 to discuss her feelings about her biological mother. She wrote to Downs when she was younger, now regrets the contact, and calls her mother "a monster." In 2020, Rebecca was the subject of Season 2 of the podcast Happy Face, which followed her search for her biological father.

  Author Ann Rule published Small Sacrifices in 1987, a book about Downs' life and trial. It drew on accounts from friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and Christie, who questioned the quality of her mother's parenting. A made-for-TV movie also titled Small Sacrifices, starring Farrah Fawcett as Downs, aired on ABC in 1989.

  In 2025, the Oregon Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision denied Downs parole again. It gave her a 6-year extended deferral and scheduled her next hearing for 2031.

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