Elizabeth Diane Downs - Photos Included
Elizabeth Diane Frederickson Downs (born August 7, 1955) is an American convicted murderer. She shot her three children, killing one, and then told police a stranger had attempted to carjack her and shot the children. After her conviction in 1984, she was sentenced to life in prison. Downs briefly escaped in 1987 and was re-captured. She is the subject of a book by Ann Rule and a made for TV movie under the same name, called Small Sacrifices. She was denied parole in December 2008.
On May 19, 1983, Downs shot her three children: Stephen Daniel Downs (born 1979, age 3), Cheryl Lynn Downs (born 1976, age 7) and Christie Ann Downs (born 1974, age 8). Downs drove the children in the blood spattered car to the McKenzie-Willamette Hospital. On arrival Cheryl was already dead. Downs herself had been shot in the left forearm. Downs claimed she was carjacked on a rural road near Springfield, Oregon, by a strange man who shot her and her three children. Investigators, however, became suspicious when they noticed her manner was too calm to have experienced such a traumatic event.
Their suspicions heightened when Downs went to see Christie for the first time; Christie's eyes glazed over with fear and her heart rate jumped. They also discovered that she called a man in Arizona named Robert Knickerbocker immediately upon arriving at the hospital, a man with whom she had been having an affair. Author Ann Rule gave Knickerbocker the pseudonym of Lew Lewiston. The forensic evidence did not match Downs' story; there was no blood on the driver's side of the car, nor was there any gunpowder residue on the driver's panel. Downs did not tell police she owned a .22 caliber handgun, but both Danny Downs and Knickerbocker said she did own one.
Investigators later discovered she had bought the handgun in Arizona, and found unfired casings that had been worked through the same gun that shot the children, although they were unable to find the actual weapon. Most damaging, witnesses saw Downs' car being driven very slowly toward the hospital—Downs had claimed that she drove there at high speed after the shooting. Based on this and other evidence, Downs was arrested nine months after the event, on February 28, 1984, and charged with murder, attempted murder and criminal assault.
