Diane Downs Up For Parole

Stop me if you've heard this before. A single mother falls in love with a man who doesn't want to be around her when she's with her children, so she decides the best way to deal with the situation is to get rid of the children. Oh yeah, let's throw a mysterious bushy haired stranger into the mix for good measure.

On June 14, 1984, Elizabeth Diane Downs was convicted of one count of murder and two counts of attempted murder in the first degree. Convicted of the premeditated shooting of her three children.

The shootings occured in the late evening of May 19, 1983 on a desolate backroad in Oregon. Diane Downs claimed that a bushy haired man had been in the road and she had stopped to see if he needed help. According to Downs, he demanded the car and, when she refused, shot her children.

(Investigators doubted Diane's story and found convincing circumstantial evidence that she had shot her children. Including testimony that she owned a gun that she had denied owning that fired the same type of bullets that had been used to shoot the children.)

Downs drove the children to the hospital at what a witness estimated was the speed of about five to seven miles an hour. Her seven year old daughter Cheryl was declared dead shortly after arriving at the hospital. Her other two children, eight year old Christie Downs - who would later identify her mother as the shooter in court- survived along with her three year old brother Danny.



Diane Downs will be up for parole in December 2008.





Diane Downs up for parole - KVAL.com