Murders
PROLOGUE
Ill
There is no more idyllic spot in May than the Willamette Valley
that cradles Eugene and Springfield, Oregon. Sheltered by the
Cascade Range to the east and the steel-blue and purple ridges of
the coastal mountains on the western horizon, the valley was an
oasis for pioneers more than a century ago. It remains an oasis
today. Rivers thread their way through Eugene and Springfield:
the Willamette, the McKenzie, the Mohawk, the Little Mohawk--
nourishing the land.
Eugene and Springfield are sister cities--but far from twins.
Eugene, with a population of 100,000, is bigger, brighter, and far
more sophisticated. Eugene has the University of Oregon and the
prestigious Hult Center for the Performing Arts. Eugene is the
runners' mecca of the world--spawner of champion after champion;
it has been estimated that one out of three of its citizens run
regularly. Not jog--run. Eugene is fitness personified, with bicyclists'
paths emblazoned along the edges of even the busiest y?
downtown street, sacrosanct. Eugene is the successful sister of "
the paired cities, cool and slender, professional. Her restaurants
serve artichoke and ricotta pie, salads with raspberry vinegar,
Brie and pate and wild mushroom and sorrel soup, and vie with
one another to discover ever more obscure spices.
Springfield, half Eugene's size, is the sister who never graduated
from high school, who works for Weyerhaueser or Georgia- pacific, and no longer notices the acrid smell. People in Spring"eld
work a forty- or fifty-, or sixty-, hour week and, if they still ^ed exercise, they go bowling or to a country-western dancing Bvern. The appetizers in a good Springfield restaurant are carrot ^icks, celery, pickled beets and soda crackers; the entree is
xcellent chicken-fried steak or prime rib. The main street is ailed Main Street and it wears its neon signs in proud prolifera
4 ANN RULE
tion. Excepting Portland, Springfield is the largest industrial region
in Oregon, and yet pioneers' descendants cling to tradition
even as factories threaten to obliterate the old days. It is a city
unpretentious and homey.
A long time back, Clint Eastwood lived in Springfield for
a while.
The dipping, curving Belt Line freeway connects Eugene and
Springfield, and their boundaries merge into one another. Some
citizens live in Eugene and work in Springfield--or commute to
Eugene from neat ranch houses in Springfield. Both cities have
wonderful parks and spectacular scenery. Between the two, everything
that anyone might seek--barring tropical temperatures--is
available.
Willamette Valley winters are long and dismal for rain-haters,
clouds hanging so low that they obscure even the huge buttes
looming north and south of Eugene. In May when the sun glows
and the rivers have absorbed the rain storms, it is as if the gray
days never were. Oaks and maples leaf out, brilliant against the
darker green of fir and pine. The air is drenched with the sweetness
of fresh-cut rye grass, wild roses, strawberries, and a million
bearded irises. Beneath this sweetness: the pungent lacing of
onions, sawdust, cedar, and the fecund smell of good red earth,
furrowed and waiting for seed.
May, 1984.
It was ironic that it should be May again. Four seasons had
come and gone since it happened. May to May. Neat. Some
slight sense of order finally after months of chaos and uncertainty.
Oregon has good springs and bad springs, depending on the
point of view. This May was not good. The wind that whipped
around the Hilton Hotel and the Lane County Courthouse was as
sodden as a handkerchief drenched with tears. Rain pelted and
slashed and dripped, finally trapping itself in small torrents in the
gutters at Oak and Eighth Streets. The first day of the trial so
many had waited for was a day to stay at home, light a fire, and
read a good book.
And still the parking lot across the street from the courthouse
was full, and the Hilton had dozens of rooms reserved for out-oftown
media.
The carnival began where the elevator doors opened onto the
courthouse's third-floor lobby. Cameras and lights and reporters
and microphones. Technicians laying cable along the floor, cov-
SMALL SACRIFICES 5
ering it carefully with silver duct tape. Photographers leaning
nrecariously over the "No pictures beyond here" barrier, pressins
their luck for a forbidden candid shot. The hall was filled--not
with sadness, but with excited expectancy.
The would-be gallery lined up--a hundred, two hundred peonie
shivering and drenched, women mostly, hoping to be admitted'
to the inner sanctum of Courtroom Number Three, to pass
beyond the double oak doors whose two tiny windows were covered
with butcher paper blocking even so much as a peek inside.
Uniformed deputies and a thick rope attached to a heavy steel
stanchion held them back. The women, and a sprinkling of
embarrassed-looking men, carried raincoats and lunches in precisely
creased brown bags. Those first in line had been there for
hours. Occasionally, necessities of nature forced one or another
to dash around the corner to the restrooms, a neatly folded
raincoat left to save a place in line. The fabric marker was always
honored.
Oregonians, all Northwesterners, are a civilized breed. Even
so, when the doors finally opened, there was a stampede. Two
little old ladies were carried along in the surging tide of human
bodies, their black, laced shoes inches above the floor. Unruffled,
they sailed in, and found two narrow spots on the long benches,
hats still firmly planted on their heads.
The long wait promised to be worthwhile. Advocacy both for
and against the defendant was passionate. The gallery murmured
and twittered; spectators half-rose to crane their necks for a
closer look at the principals--mostly at the defendant.
Few eyes lingered long on Fred Hugi, the lone assistant g
district attorney who would be prosecuting this case for the State.
Thirty-nine years old, his dark hair already salt-and-peppered,
Hugi had shouldered the final responsibility for bringing the defendant
to trial. Tall, lean (or downright skinny, depending . . .),
tough as whipcord, he wore a moustache that gave him the look
°f a man from another, earlier century--some frontier lawman or ^dge, maybe, peering solemnly from a browning tintype.
From time to time, Hugi's brown eyes swept over the court- ^om. They seemed to fix on no one, and they revealed nothing. rL^ glanced over his notes on the long yellow legal pad. Behind hls tightly capped facade, he was champing at the bit, eager to get on with it. He was neither pessimistic nor elated; he was "^mensely relieved to find himself at last in court. By avocation a
°ng-distance runner, Hugi saw the weeks ahead as a marathon--
L
6 ANN RULE
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steady, determined pacing after meticulous training. Brilliant and
stubborn--no, tenacious--Fred Hugi never gave up on anything
he set out to do, even though his singlemindedness had been
known to irritate the hell out of people around him.
The words before him blurred. No matter. He was ready. He
knew it all by heart; he could make his opening statement in his
sleep. He'd lain awake too many long nights, worrying this case--
seeing it from one angle, and then reversing it, turning it in his
mind like a Rubik's Cube. Sometimes he suspected he knew more
about the defendant than he did about his own wife after almost
two decades of marriage. It was a good thing Joanne understood
him, accepted that her husband had to do what he had to do, and
left him alone, unquestioning; he'd been obsessed with this case
for a year.
The defendant sat so close to him now that with the slightest
extension of his right elbow, their arms would touch. Hugi caught
the scent of jail soap and a faint whiff of acrid perspiration. He
was accustomed to the peculiar economy of space in Lane County
courtrooms. The prosecutor, the defendant, and the defense attorney
sat adjacent to one another along one nest of tables. Normally,
the State and the Defense in a major trial have their own
space, but these battle lines were only imaginary, drawn in the
air--as thick and impenetrable as iron walls. Fred Hugi sat on the
far left, the defendant sat in the middle, and Jim Jagger, attorney
for the defense, sat on the far right. They composed the triangle
around which everything else would revolve.
Hugi saw that the accused seemed confident, rolling--as
always--with any punch, leaning over often to whisper and laugh
in Jagger's ear, ignoring the prosecutor. That was fine with him.
He had taken infinite pains to be seen as only "a dopey guy," an
unknown factor. The defendant clearly viewed him as negligible.
No threat. That was exactly the way Hugi wanted it.
He, on the other hand, had tremendous respect for his opponent.
Smarter than hell, a quick study, and, through the defense's
rights of discovery, aware of his whole case going in. The worthiest
of adversaries, armed with a clever attorney, and backed,
seemingly, by a huge fan club.
It was bizarre that the crimes the defendant was accused of defied credulity. Their very nature threatened to turn the tide
against the State. Too cruel to believe.
Fred Hugi had waited so long for this moment. Days had
become weeks, and weeks months--months that had promised to
_________________ SMALL SACRIFICES 7
stretch into a lifetime. This was the case that appeared initially to
he simple--even ordinary in a macabre way--and easy to adjudicate.
He'd been hoping to be entrusted with a murder case that
might demand much more of him. Something interesting. Something
that would challenge him, push him to the wall, and hone his
trial expertise. When the Downs case came along, he had made
the erroneous assumption that it would be over in a day or so,
that it would take just long enough to clear to make him lose his
place in the long line of assistant DA's waiting for a "good"
homicide. ^:
Easy. It had been hell. There was every indication that it
would continue to be hell. There had never been a single moment
when this somber, intense prosecutor had shouted "Aha! Now
we've got it! From here on, it's a shoo-in."
H A year in Vietnam had tested Fred Hugi severely; a year
jousting with this media-savvy defendant, and with at least half
the population of Eugene and vicinity, had been worse. Prosecuting
a defendant like this--for particularly heinous crimes--scraped
roughly across the grain of middle-American mores. Fred Hugi
knew he was sniping at traditions as entrenched as Mom and
apple pie. His eyes slid again over the packed gallery and he
winced at the row upon row of "concerned" citizens.
He figured they sure as hell weren't there for him. Solid
support for the accused. If he recognized this outpouring of sympathy,
he knew the jury would see it too. It did not occur to him
that some of the spectators might be there simply to hear the juicy
details of the defendant's purportedly promiscuous sex life, or
even that some of them might be his cheering section.
He felt quite isolated. That was OK; he was accustomed to it.
Fred Hugi believed absolutely that what he was doing was
right--that he had no other way to go. He had someone to answer
to and if he lost, he would lose big.
And so would they.
He looked at the jury. Twelve jurors; three alternates. Hugi
had rather unorthodox theories about juries. He considered the ^remony of voir dire to pick unprejudiced jurors basically bullshit,
easily abused, and a vehicle for influencing likely jurors to ^e a position before they heard any evidence at all. He was no
S°od at it; he knew he had neither charm nor charisma and he ^tested having to play the game.
Now Jim Jagger was good at it. Jagger and the prospective
L
8 ANN RULE
jurors had chuckled and chatted. Hugi had been content to play
off Jagger. As long as his opponent hadn't attempted to slant facts
that might come out in the trial ahead, Hugi kept his mouth shut.
But he tensed when he heard the defense attorney ask about
religious affiliations and insinuate references to his own church
work. Still, Hugi was relieved that it was Jim Jagger up there and
not Melvin Belli, who had been scheduled to head the defense
team. Belli would surely have held press parties on the top of the
Eugene Hilton every night, effectively turning this bleakest of
tragedies into a media circus. |
Hugi had just about had it with the press; he glanced at them,
packed into the first row behind the rail. He suspected for most of
them this was all headlines only—not pain and blood and tears.
They were as bad as the gallery—worse, really; many of them had
pandered to the suspect, dancing obligingly to whichever tune
was called. Well, now they'd get their headlines all right. He
couldn't stop that, but they might be in for a surprise or two.
Hugi hadn't changed anything about himself for this trial.
Balking at the advice of his courtroom expert—DA's Investigator,
Ray Broderick—he'd refused to grow his hair longer so he'd look
less rigid. Nor would Hugi consider modifying his apparel. In
court he always wore a conservative, off-the-rack suit with baggy
trousers, or a blazer and slacks, a regimentally striped tie, and •
heavy, polished, wing-tipped shoes. He rarely smiled.
Hugi's strategy in this trial was to be a teacher. He was going
to show the jury exactly what had happened, presenting some —
extremely technical evidence and testimony. Would the jurors •
understand it? Would they even try to understand it—or would it
strike them as repetitive and boring? And one of his witnesses
was very fragile, in danger of being broken beyond repair.
The trial would be like walking on the cutting edge of a knife. •
With it all, he was as ready as he would ever be. He would i|
demonstrate what he believed devoutly to be the truth. That was •
what justice was about. The truth. No frills. No high jinks. No
pratfalls. I
Hugi expected that he would have to play catch-up after voir
dire. He assumed he wasn't likeable, so why should the jurors
warm to him? He knew some people—particularly the cops—delighted in calling him an asshole. Hell, sometimes his own
jinvestigators called him worse. When he was working on a case,
he could be a juggernaut—and Lord help anyone who got in the
SMALL SACRIFICES 9
way or failed to complete an assignment. But he never asked
anyone to do more than he himself did.
TheJ&oil-dys^ hadn't been as bad as Hugi expected. He'd
used all his challenges, and he still had some reservations about
the final twelve, but basically it was a crapshoot. He would have
been just as happy to pick the first twelve people who came out of
the jury pool. Same difference.
All he asked were a dozen intelligent human beings with
common sense, salt-of-the-earth people who couldn't be flimflammed.
He knew that most people are frightened of making a
decision. Americans have become so used to "seeing" the crime
committed on television that anything else--including real life--
becomes fraught with "reasonable doubt."
He looked at his jury now, sitting up there, getting used to
their new roles. How many of them had guts enough to look
someone in the eye and say straight out, You're a-murderer! All
he needed was one bozo who had already made up his mind and
four to six weeks of trial would be down the tubes.
Fred Hugi was asking for a conviction on murder. He needed
all twelve of those jurors. He couldn't afford to lose even one of
them.
The defendant only needed one to beat the murder charge.
Everybody on the West Coast had heard the story by now, and
half seemed to suspect a "railroad." Hugi thought of the stacks of
letters in his files, calling him and the cops everything from cruel
fascists to crooked grandstanders. Was one of those fifty percent
sitting up there at this very moment, smiling guilelessly down at
him? If someone wanted on a jury bad enough, it wasn't that hard
to come up with the right answers on voir dire.
Fred Hugi bit down hard, unconsciously grinding his teeth.
The weeks ahead were so important to him. This was more than
Just a trial. For him, it was as simple as good against evil; the ^rdict waiting down the road might help him allay his growing feeling that the system wasn't working.
He rose to make his opening statement. The accused listened,
°ored at first, and then with an incredulous expression. For the wst time, Fred Hugi was a recognizable enemy. A dangerous enemy. The defendant bent over a yellow legal pad, furiously brawling huge letters, and then holding it up for Hugi to see. He ead it without missing a beat in his presentation to the jury.
10 ANN RULE
The tablet read, LIE!
Jim Jagger reached for the pad and shook his head slightly.
The pad hit the oak table with a slap; the defendant was seething.
Someone was lying. Maybe when they emerged from this
courtroom a month or two down the road, the question of who it
was would be put to rest forever. . . .
a
i
CHAPTER 1
May 19, 1983.
It had been, if not a quiet night, at least a normal night for the
Springfield Police Department. Cops know that hot weather encourages
impromptu parties and triggers family beefs. The SPD
log for that twenty-four-hour period lists the expected ration of
trouble between a quarter after ten and twenty minutes to eleven
Thursday night.
An anonymous caller complained at 10:16 p.m. about a party
on North First Street. "RP [reporting party] called to report a
loud party in the above area. Unit dispatched. Responsibles contacted.
Noise abated. Subjects to depart the area."
"Suspicious conditions" were reported--again anonymously
--at 10:22 p.m. "RP reported hearing a small child crying. Unit
dispatched. Involved parties contacted, found to be a dispute
between children. No crime involved."
At 10:32 the call was a bit more serious. "RP called to report
a male/female verbal dispute in the apartment complex on North
Seventeenth. Male half reported to be carrying rifle. Units dispatched.
Charged with menacing. Lodged Lane County Jail."
At the headquarters of the Lane County Sheriffs Office in ^ugene. Sheriff Dave Burks's officers were also pulling a fairly Viet shift. Rob Rutherford was the graveyard shift sergeant;
^elective Lieutenant Louis Hince would be on call for anything ^at might require his detectives; thirty-one-year-old Doug Welch as at home in Springfield with his wife, Tamara, and two young ^s. Richard Blaine Tracy (of course, "Dick Tracy") was a year
Way from retirement after twenty-six years as a cop, and he
°uld be just as happy if nothing heavy came down before he left. Forced, Tracy was getting ready for bed alone in his Eugene
12 ANN RULE
apartment. Kurt Wuest was away at a training seminar that Thursday
night. Roy Pond was working days.
Assistant DA Fred Hugi, radio and television turned off, was
reveling in the quiet of a perfect spring evening at his lodgelike
home set far back in the forest along the McKenzie River. It was
a different life out there in the woods, and he was a different man.
He wore frayed jeans and battered logging boots as he planted
seedlings to thicken even more the forest outside his windows.
Joanne Hugi, co-director of the computer center at the University
of Oregon, was lost in concentration in her computer
room. It made her husband smile; he, who had degrees in forestry,
finance, and law, had been baffled by the single computer
course he'd attempted, and he'd challenged Joanne to try it. She
had proved to be a natural, understanding terms and concepts that
eluded him. Hugi gave up on computers, but Joanne flew with
them, higher and higher. He was extremely proud of her. She'd
worked her way up at the university from an entrance level job to
the top.
The sun set long before 10 p.m., and Hugi paused to look at
the filigree of tree branches silhouetted against the last bit of sky
before he took his dirt-caked boots off and went inside. The
Hugis' two cats sat on the deck, alert, staring at the glowing eyes
of something--probably a deer or raccoon--out there in the woods.
The Hugis had come to this perfect spot along the McKenzie
after years of living in the kind of apartments students could
afford in the city. It was well worth the half-hour commute into
Eugene. Sometimes, they could hear logging trucks zooming by
far away on the road, but usually they heard only the wind in the
trees, or rain, or the cry of a nighthawk. |
The bad call came into the Springfield Police Department at 10:40
p.m.: "Employee of McKenzie-Willamette Hospital advises of gunshot
victims at that location. Officers dispatched. Arrived 10:48
P.M." w
Rosie Martin, RN; Shelby Day, LPN; Judy Patterson, the
night receptionist; and Dr. John Mackey, physician in charge,
comprised the evening shift in the emergency room at the
McKenzie-Willamette Hospital in Springfield.
The McKenzie-Willamette ER as it existed in the late spring
of 1983 was a little cramped, a little out of date. Paint on walls
and baseboards had been scrubbed dull and drab; the waiting
room furniture was chrome and peeling vinyl.
rSMALL
SACRIFICES 13
Facing the two sets of doors that led to the circular driveway ff Mohawk Boulevard, the three treatment rooms were to the
right: Day Surgery nearest the street, Minor Treatment in the
middle, and the Trauma Room at the back. On the left, Judy
patterson's desk was just behind a small waiting area near the
street doors. Five feet or so behind her desk there was a small
bathroom and beyond that a larger waiting room.
The floors were hospital-waxed shiny--the forest-green-andwhite-swirl
asphalt tile popular in the 1950s, patched here and
there with odd squares. The rooms smelled old. Old wax, old
dust, old disinfectant. Old sorrows, it would seem, with the sharpness
of immediate grief dulled by time. The old ER had known
decades of pain.
That velvet black spring night Dr. Mackey and his staff,
working in an almost obsolete ER, would be the first to encounter
what was unthinkable for Springfield, what would be unthinkable
for even a big city. None of them would have much time to think
during the hours they fought to save the injured, their white shoes
sliding on floors slick with fresh blood. Only later would terrible
musings rush in to destroy all hope of sleep.
SBelby Day is a slender, soft-spoken woman near forty, with six
years' experience in the McKenzie-Willamette ER. She wears
white slacks and pastel, patterned smocks. When she remembers
the night of May 19, 1983, tears well unbidden in her eyes.
"We were working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift. We had the
usual kind of 'nice day' injuries--lacerations, bumped heads,
sprains, and broken bones. We were busy steadily, but there were
no real emergencies. Dr. Mackey was finishing up with a patient ^ a quarter after ten, and Rosie and I were in that little back
room doing paperwork. There's always paperwork to catch up ^th. Judy was out at her desk in the corridor ..."
Judy Patterson, a smiling strawberry blonde, works two jobs 10 support her son Brandon, who was nine in 1983. She is the ^ceptionist in Pediatrics at Eugene's Sacred Heart Hospital on
ne day shift; after five, she puts in another five or six hours as he ER receptionist at McKenzieWillamette.
Rosie Martin was pregnant in the spring of 1983, into her
econd trimester. Already her belly had begun to get in her way
diri^ moved swiftly to care for patients. She was tired, but she
un l ^mplain to her co-workers. She and Shelby worked to- oether quietly in the back room.
14 ANN RULE
When Dr. John Austin Mackey had a full beard, his nurses
wondered if he ever smiled. When he shaved it off, they saw that
he had been smiling all along behind his hirsute facade. Tall,
balding, and broad-shouldered, a bear of a man, Mackey inspires
confidence. The perfect emergency room doctor; his assessment
of patients' needs is deft. In his late thirties, married, and the
father of young children, he had worked full-time in the ER for
eight years.
Because they were winding down, the others told Judy she
could go home a few minutes early. She was scheduled to leave
anyway at 10:30, but she grinned gratefully and grabbed her
sweater and purse. As she walked toward the ambulance doors, a
woman in the hall, a relative waiting for a patient, called to her.
"There's someone out there honking their horn and yelling
for help. You'd better check."
Judy whirled and walked back to where Shelby Day and
Rosie Martin were shuffling paperwork.
"Someone needs help out there. They're laying on the horn."
Judy ran back then to the ambulance entrance. Rapidly, she
propped open both sets of doors to the drive-through.
Rosie Martin grabbed an air-way and an oxygen mask and
headed toward the drive-through. Their most common crisis was
cardiac arrest; that's what she and Shelby Day expected to find.
It was strange, though, that they had had no prior warning.
Invariably, paramedics and police called to warn that they were
coming in with a critical case so that the ER crew could gear up.
The two nurses hurried through the double entry doors into
the emergency drive-through. A shiny red foreign car was parked
under the rain roof. The fluorescent lighting bounced off the car's
glittering paint, casting eerie elongated shadows. It was almost
impossible for them to see inside the car.
"What's going on here?" Rosie Martin asked.
"Somebody just shot my kids!"
A slender blonde woman in jeans and a plaid shirt stood next
to the car. She was pale, but she was in control. She wasn't
crying and she didn't appear to be hysterical. Desperately she
implored them to do something. The two nurses and the young
woman gazed at each other for a fraction of a second, and then
llic emergency personnel went into action.
Kosie Martin had reached the car just ahead of Shelby DayShe ducked through the passenger door; she'd seen a child lying
across the right rear seat. Rosie emerged, carrying a girl with long
_________________SMALL SACRIFICES 15
hrown hair. The child had to be heavy. Dead weight, Shelby Day
thought, and then bit her lip. Rosie carried the little girl in maroon
corduroy slacks and a bloody multicolored T-shirt as if she had no
weight at all, draping the child carefully around her pregnant
abdomen.
As Rosie rushed past Judy Patterson's desk, she turned her
head slightly. "Judy! Call a code! It's bad!"
A "code" meant Code 4, a page to summon all available
personnel to the ER. Judy Patterson called the hospital operator
and told her to activate a code.
Back in the drive-through, Shelby Day saw there was another
child on the back seat, behind the driver's seat—a yellow-haired
little boy, hardly more than a toddler. She ran around the front of
the car and leaned over to release the back of the driver's seat.
Her fingers numb with shock, she couldn't find the right lever. She
heard Dr. Mackey's voice behind her. %yS
"What's going on, Shelby?" he asked.
"These kids have been shot," she said softly.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," the doctor murmured.
It was not an oath; it was a prayer. Only two words had
registered in Mackey's mind: "kids" and "shot." He could see
over Shelby's shoulder to the tiny child who was gasping for air
and crying weakly.
The blonde woman murmured that the seat lever was on the
side. Shelby's hand reached the right spot, clicked the catch free.
Before she could straighten up, Dr. Mackey had reached past her,
scooped the little boy up in powerful arms, and disappeared into
the hospital. He had seen what the nurses hadn't noticed yet.
When he leaned in to get the little boy, he'd glimpsed yet another
figure crumpled on the floor in front, and thought, My God!
There's a third one! What are we going to do?
Mackey was sure Shelby Day had seen the third child a
moment after he had. But in the shadows, in her shock, she
hadn't.
The quick look he'd had at the first two injured youngsters
^old Mackey they were dealing with chest wounds. Short of a
lrect head shot, there is nothing more cataclysmic than gunshot
founds into the chests of little children. Mackey too shouted at
""y Patterson. The command was short, but Judy understood.
• "Find Wilhite!"
br ^v' '» clue was still caught in one of the shirts. Pond slipped it into a
// siu&
dear envelope.
n'ck Tracy had almost two decades on the other detectives in
-- County. "Silver Fox" attractive--white hair, ice-blue eyes--
Tracv could be dapper and shrewd or play the country hick to perfection. A long time back, when he played football in Warwood,
West Virginia, Tracy was All-City, All-State, All-Ohio-Valley.
He won a scholarship to the University of Iowa, but with the
Korean War he joined the Marines. Like everyone else on this
case he hadn't planned on being a policeman either. He hadn't
even liked cops. But here he was, with a quarter century of law
enforcement behind him.
Dick Tracy had cleared every homicide he'd ever worked;
Welch had never worked a homicide as a detective. Off-duty,
Doug Welch researched the stock market; Tracy was an avid
student of metaphysics. Fellow cops tormented Welch by telling
him he looked like Howdy Doody. Tracy had his name to contend
with. They would be only the first of a number of "odd couple"
partners in a case just beginning to unfold. Dick Tracy turned into
the emergency drive-through. Louis Hince waved him down, leaned
into the car window. "The family's waiting for you to pick them
up at the E-Z Mart. The mother's evidently been shot too and she
needs treatment. Bring them back here."
"How about the children?" Tracy asked.
Hince shook his head. "One little girl is gone. The others are
critical."
Tracy sighed and turned his car northeasterly. He expected ^to find an hysterical mother waiting for him in Rutherford's police cruiser. Instead, he encountered a woman still in control: "very
"atlonal, considering what she had undergone." Tracy had seen in "manner of emotional responses to disaster. He didn't know the ^oman or her father, who seemed as stoic as she was; he wouldn't resume to predict how they might react when the numbness
°re off. Anxious to get his passengers back to the hospital, he
_ fessed down on the accelerator.
. Back at McKenzie-Willamette Hince motioned to Doug Welch.
Ihi10 s ^"""g m with the mother now. I want you to work with "lm in questioning her."
fath was tw0 mmutes to midnight when Diane Downs and her
food^ ^nce again entered the McKenzie-Willamette emergency In- Dr. Mackey leaned protectively toward Diane, quietly tell
34 ANN RULE
ing her that Cheryl Lynn had died, that she had been dead on
arrival. Welch watched Diane's face as she heard the news. Her
expression was impossible to read, a faint flickering of emotion,
and then a closing in. Stoic.
Diane followed Tracy into a small treatment room. Welch
joined them. The woman was young, slender and quite pretty.
Her face was a papier-mache mask.
Welch found Diane's demeanor flat, almost brittle. She laughed
inappropriately; her mind didn't appear to be tracking. It seemed
to him that she simply would not accept that her little girl had
died.
Tracy and Welch accompanied Diane into the X-ray room.
Dr. Mackey came to tell Diane that Christie was critical and in
surgery. She thanked him for letting her know. I
Dr. Miller came to treatment room number eight and told her
that they were cautiously optimistic about Danny. He described
the bullet's pathway in Danny's body.
"You mean it missed his heart?" Diane asked.
"Yes."
There was too much for the family to absorb that night. Diane
was confused over which of her daughters had died. Wes made
the final identification. Shelby Day remembers him as he stood,
impassive, in the center of the trauma room, gazing at the body of
his younger granddaughter, nodding slightly as he said, Yes, that
is Cheryl.
While the doctors worked over Christie and Danny, Diane
talked with Dick Tracy and Doug Welch. She spoke rapidly in a
breathy teen-age voice, her sentences running on with no discernible
ending. They scribbled frantically to keep up with the fountain
of words. / fl
She said she had had no alcohol that evening and no drugs or
medication. She did not smell of liquor; her pupils looked normal.
(Indeed blood tests would bear this out.) She was coherent and
sober. Her brittle shell of vivacious cooperation remained intact.
It was as if she felt compelled to keep talking; if she stopped, she
might have to remember.
Doug Welch studied her. "Her words were like ... the only
way I can describe them . . . like verbal vomit. They just kep1 flowing.
"You have a tremendous amount of recall," Dick Tracy_ commented at one point. "You must be fairly intelligent."
SMALL SACRIFICES 35
"There are eight levels of intelligence," Diane explained. ^nd I'm at the seventh level."
They had never heard of the "eight level IQ theory" but ™iane Downs was undoubtedly very intelligent; her vocabulary,
syntax, and ability to answer their questions indicated that. And
vet she was like a robot programmed to respond. She had taken
" a mantle of words to protect herself, talking faster and faster
and faster.
It almost made them dizzy.
Shortly after 1:00 a.m., Springfield Police Detective Sergeant
Jerry Smith and Detective Robert Antoine came into the room.
Diane held her hands out while Antoine swabbed them with a five
percent solution of nitric acid--a routine test to discern the presence
of trace metals that might have been left had she fired a gun.
The next-of-kin must always be eliminated first. A positive reaction
to the test (GSR-Gunshot residue) wasn't that precise. Especially
with .22's. Rimfire .22's have a very low antimony-debris
factor. Smoking a cigarette, urinating, or using toilet tissue can
leave similar residue.
The tests on Diane's hands were negative for the presence of
barium or antimony. Antoine sprayed her hands to test for other
trace metals. Iron would turn her hands reddish; copper dusting
would elicit a green tinge.
Negative.
Tracy and Welch started with the easiest of questions. How
many policemen, doctors, and nurses begin by asking legal names
and birthdates--as if putting the dead in some kind of order will
numb the pain? And how many laymen answer with eager efficiency?
Those who still have first and middle names and birthdates
cannot possibly be dead or dying.
Diane gave her own full name: Elizabeth Diane Frederickson
Downs, born August 7, 1955; she would be twenty-eight in two months. Christie's birth date was October 7, 1974; Christie had "cen seated in the right rear seat of the red car. Stephen Daniel's
wthday was December 29, 1979; he'd been in the back seat with ^"nstie, on the left. Cheryl was born January 10, 1976; she had ee" on the floor in front, sleeping under a sweater.
^'The car is yours?" Tracy asked. ^ Yes," Diane nodded. "I bought it in February--a red Nissan sar MX with silver streaks on the side."
the i" was tlme ^or ^le harder questions. Diane explained quickly
"orror along the dark road, the stranger with the gun, her
36 ANN RULE
flight to save her children. They had gone to see a friend of hers
that evening: Heather Plourd, who lived northeast of Springfield
on Sunderman Road. Diane knew Heather wanted a horse, and
she had found an article about horses that could be adopted free. |
Heather had no phone so Diane had taken the clipping out to her. f
After a visit of fifteen or twenty minutes, they'd headed home. j
Diane said she had detoured impulsively to do a little sight-seeing, 9 but when she realized her children had fallen asleep, she turned
around and headed toward Springfield.
Again with no particular plan, she'd turned off Marcola Road
onto Old Mohawk and gone only a short way when she saw the
man standing in the road, waving his arm for her to stop. Fearing
an accident, she had pulled over. - --
"Can you describe him?" Welch asked. II
"He was white ... in his late twenties . . . about five feet,
nine; 150 to 170. He had dark hair, a shag-wavy cut, and a stubble
of a beard--maybe one or two days' growth. Levis, a Levi jacket,
a dirty . . . maybe off-color, light T-shirt."
The man had been right in the center of the road. 1
"I stopped my car," Diane continued, "and I got out, and I
said, 'What's the problem?' He jogged over to me and said, "I
want your car,' and I said, 'You've got to be kidding!' and then
he shoved me to the back of the car."
And then, inexplicably, the man had stood outside the driver's
door and put his hand inside the car. Diane heard loud
"pops" and realized with despair that the man was firing a gun at
her children! First Christie, and then Danny--and finally Cheryl,
who lay asleep under Diane's postal sweater on the floor of the
front seat.
"What did you do?" Welch asked, shaken by the picture of
the three children trapped in a dark car.
"I pretended to throw my car keys. That made him angry. I
wanted him to think I'd thrown the keys into the brush. He was
about four or five feet away from me. He turned in my direction j
and fired twice, hitting me once. I pushed him or kicked him--
maybe both--in the leg. I jumped into the car and took off for the
hospital as fast as I could."
"Did you see the gun?"
"No . . . Wait ... Yes .. ."
"Can you describe it?"
"That's difficult."
"Do you have any weapons?"
SMALL SACRIFICES 37
"A .22 rifle that's on the shelf in my closet at home. You
could go and ^ k if y°" wanted."
"We'd have to have you sign a consent-to-search form to do
that," Tracy advised.
"That's OK. I'll sign that."
She was very cooperative. If Diane voluntarily signed the
form, there would be no need for a search warrant. Tracy handed
her the consent form. Diane perused it, and then read it aloud.
She came to a paragraph stating, "I understand this contraband or
evidence may be used against me in a court of law." She paused
and looked at the detectives. "Does this have to do with someone
who's a suspect?"
Tracy nodded.
Diane said that, of course, she had no objection to their
searching her car or the duplex at 1352 Q Street in Springfield
where she and the children lived. Anything that might help find
the gunman quickly. She signed the form.
But there was a stilted--forced--quality in Diane's speech,
hiding some fear they didn't understand.
The detectives were beginning to tumble the crime more
slowly around in their minds. They didn't really know if the
shooting had happened in Springfield or in the country, even after
Diane had shown them the river site. They wondered if she might
possibly have recognized the person who had shot them but be
under some constraint not to tell. Was the killer holding a worse
sword over her head? Had he let her go to get treatment for her
kids on the condition that she return, having told the cops nothing?
The most unlikely chance meeting on a lonely road made the
investigators think that the killer had to be acquainted, or have
some specific connection, with Diane Downs.
It was an emergency situation. They had to check out her "ome, and they also had to get to Heather Plourd's to see if anyone waited there with a loaded gun, possibly with hostages, w Diane to come back. Officers were dispatched to both addresses.
^ck Tracy left the ER briefly and joined Jon Peckels as he
Photographed the red car, his strobe light illuminating the interior. ^ ""^thing glinted in the intermittent flashes. Bullet casings. They ^oed like ^o .22 caliber casings. Both men saw them, but they
"n t touch them. The car was sealed, ready to be towed to the
cri^ ^"^y ^ops for processing by the Oregon State Police
ANN RULE SMALL SACRIFICES 39
»"
As Tracy strode back to the ER, he saw Diane's parents in
the waiting area. The father looked grim; the mother's face was
swollen from crying. Wes Frederickson verified that Diane owned
a rifle which she kept stored in its case, as well as--he thought--
a revolver. "She had those weapons because her ex-husband beat
her up in the past."
v^ant to stay in the hospital, although he told her that she must--at
least for a few days. She made him promise not to tell her father
about the tattoo on her back. It was not an ordinary tattoo; it was huge rose etched in scarlet on her left shoulder.
Beneath it was a single word: Lew.
When Tracy asked Diane if she owned, or possessed, any
other weapons, she remembered that she had an old .38 pistol, a
Saturday Night Special. It was a cheap gun and unpredictable;
she kept it locked in the trunk of her car away from her children.
Tracy and Welch had walked into Diane's life at a crisis point; it
was akin to walking into a movie in the middle. They had to play
catch-up in a hurry.
Diane said that she had come to the Eugene-Springfield area
only seven or eight weeks earlier. She had lived all her life in
Arizona, working as a letter carrier in Chandler for the previous
two years. Her parents had urged her to move to Oregon, and
she'd done so--mostly to please them--to give them more of a
chance to be with their grandchildren. Since her father was the
postmaster of Springfield, he had helped her transfer and she was
presently working as a letter carrier in the Cottage Grove Post
Office. She was divorced from her first and only husband, Stephen
Duane Downs, twenty-eight, who was still living in the
Chandler/Mesa, Arizona area. She gave them his phone number.
They talked for more than two hours, and the clock on the
wall inched its way toward 3:00 a.m. The circles under Diane's
eyes purpled. Still her voice held strong, and her words tumbled
out, bumping into each other.
It was after 3:00 a.m. when the two detectives left Diane and
headed out to join the men at her townhouse on Q Street.
Dr. Terrance Carter, an orthopedic surgeon, treated Diane's
wounds. Her left arm was broken, but there was no nerve or
tendon damage. Fortunately, she had still been able to open and close her fingers--and drive--despite the pain. In a week or so
she would need surgery to strengthen the arm. Carter excised
tissue around all three wounds to insure drainage.
He took Diane's blood pressure and pulse. Both reading5 were normal.
Carter also found Diane quite flat emotionally, her v/ords so
alive and rapid while her eyes looked somehow dead. She didn'1
fcr
CHAPTER 3
MSG ID 3293 SENT 5/19/83 2340 FROM TID 42 (AI)
AM.EGS.EGO. * * * ATTEMPT TO LOCATE ARMED SUBJECT
* * WHITE MALE ADULT POSSIBLY ARMED WITH
.22 SEMI-AUTOMATIC WEAPON. DESCRIBED AS WMA 5'9" |
150-170 LBS DARK BROWN SHAGGY HAIR, STUBBLE
BEARD, WEARING DIRTY T-SHIRT, LEVI JACKET, BLUE
JEANS. POSSIBLE VEHICLE INVOLVED '60 TO '70 YELLOW
CHEVROLET CHEVELLE, BEAT-UP, NO LIE. KNOWN.
SUBJ. WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH SHOOTING IN
MARCOLA AREA. OCA 83-3268. j
LANE CO. S.O., EUGENE, 687-4150 VLB.
--First teletype sent by Lane County i
Steve Downs had spent a pleasant Thursday evening in Mesa,
Arizona. He and his date had gone for a walk around the reservoir
in the cool of the evening and then returned to her apartment.
Although he and Diane had been divorced for two years, their
lives had remained entwined--often abrasively--until she'd left
for Oregon. With his family gone almost eight weeks, Downs was
finally beginning to feel single, although he missed the kids. He
missed Diane, too, in a way. Their relationship had derived fron1 the can't-live-with-her/him; can't-live-without-her/him school--ft111 of passion, jealousy, estrangements, and reconciliations.
The desert sky over the Superstition Mountains had faded
from the peach and yellow striations of sunset to deep black by
the time Steve's roommate--advised of the tragedy in a phone call from Wes--located him. The man blurted out that all three o1
SMALL SACRIFICES 41
Steve's kids had been shot. Steve's new girlfriend drove him to
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