The Devil in the Details: Diane Downs

Cold Case Murder Mysteries

True Crime

3.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2019

⏱️ 119 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At 10:40pm on the night of May 19, 1983 a young mother named Diane Downs pulled her Nissan Pulsar up to the ER entrance of a hospital near Springfield, OR and informed the staff her children had been shot by a strange man who tried to carjack her out on a dark, desolate road nearby. Inside the vehicle, doctors and nurses discovered three kids who had suffered severe wounds delivered by a .22 handgun, leaving one of them dead and the other two barely clinging to life. It was a mother’s worst nightmare. As the police began to investigate, however, it soon became clear Diane’s story of what happened conflicted with the forensic evidence found at the scene. Before long, Diane was arrested, charged, and convicted of the shootings, leaving the world to wonder how a loving mother could perpetrate this unspeakable act against her offspring. Join host Ryan Kraus for a psychological exploration of Diane’s childhood to uncover the irreconcilable emotional wound from her past that led to murder.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody welcome back to Cole Case Murder Mysteries I'm your host Ryan Kraus
0:10.3	coming at you once again to dissect the evil mind of Diane Downs, one of the more
0:15.1	infamous figures in true crime lore. Seeking a fresh start, the 27-year-old postal worker and mother
0:21.9	of three moved the family from Phoenix, Arizona to Springfield,
0:25.9	Oregon in the wake of a failed marriage and a subsequent relationship with a married man.
0:31.8	Before long, however, Diane's inability to let go of that latter relationship,
0:36.2	which had culminated with her lover returning to his wife,
0:39.5	became emotionally irreconcilable with her desires to an extent she was determined to find
0:45.4	a solution at any cost.
0:48.8	So on May 19th, 1983, under the guise of driving to meet some friends, Diane left home around 9.30 p.m. with all three kids in her car, including
0:59.6	Danny, age 3, Cheryl, age 7, and Christie age eight, and proceeded to take an unplanned detour
1:07.8	onto a desolate road nearby to do some sightseeing, as she described it.
1:13.6	Before long she claimed, a bushy-haired man appeared in the street ahead of her vehicle,
1:18.8	illuminated in the headlights.
1:20.9	He had his arms in the air, waving her down.
1:24.8	So Diane, realizing he needs help, pulls over to talk to him.
1:30.1	Before long, however, she realizes something is wrong, a fear confirmed when the man produces
1:35.6	a gun and demands her keys.
1:38.7	Diane refuses to surrender her vehicle, especially with her three children supposedly all sleeping inside.
1:45.9	As the argument escalates, Diane feigns throwing her keys into the brush on the side of the road,
1:51.7	distracting the man temporarily as she jumps into the car and starts it.
1:56.0	But it's a case of too little too late.
	...

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