PORTRAIT OF AN ATROCITY (original) (raw)

SMALL SACRIFICES

A True Story of Passion and Murder

By Ann Rule

New American Library. 487 pp. $18.95

"Small Sacrifices -- A True Story of Passion and Murder" opens in a jampacked Oregon courtroom. The defendant barely notices the prosecutor, Fred Hugi, who "had taken infinite pains to be seen only as a 'dopey guy,' an unknown factor." Hugi is at a disadvantage. Nearly everyone, not just in the state, but in the country, has heard about the case, and most suspect that the defendant is being railroaded. But worse: "Prosecuting a defendant like this -- for particularly heinous crimes -- scraped roughly across the grain of middle-American mores."

The defendant is Diane Downs, a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties. She is accused of having shot her three children, ages 3, 7 and 8, at nearly point-blank range. One child is dead. The remaining two have been terribly crippled. The older of the surviving children will -- if her fragile emotional state permits -- serve as the prosecution's chief witness.

Nearly a year before, on May 19, 1983, Diane Downs had arrived at the emergency room of McKenzie-Willamette Hospital with her wounded offspring. Her erratic comments there, made while doctors and nurses worked to save the children, would be used against her in court. "I hope my car's OK," she said of her new red Nissan Pulsar. "Does it have any bullet holes in it?"

Downs' version of what happened that night is that she stopped to help a stranger, who shot her, then the kids. Two things about her tale give us pause. One is that we've overheard a police cynic, when he'd heard that the mother herself had been shot, predict the exact location of her wound. "Right there," he tells his fellow cops, holding his arm up and pointing at the lower part, "where it won't kill you, and it won't even hurt much."

The other thing is that the alleged assailant is what police call a "BHS," or bushy-haired stranger, "an integral part of forensic folklore. The BHS is the guy who isn't there, the man the defendant claims is really responsible ... Of course, the BHS can never be produced in court." Diane Downs' story, too, sounds flawed, and she is moved "out of the victim category and placed tentatively as a suspect."

Now the author guides us through the unhappy story of Downs' early years: "Her life was dichotomized; during the day at school she was supposed to dress and behave like a child. At night, she was caught in aberrant sexual games, expected to respond as a mature woman would." At 13 she cuts her wrists, though not deeply, and the cuts heal.

Diane marries to escape her unhappy life with her parents but is unhappy with Steve Downs, too, until she becomes pregnant.

"She viewed this first pregnancy and all the pregnancies that followed as near-immaculate conceptions. The male furnished viable semen; that was all. She gave life itself." She likes pregnancy so much that she does it again.

The third time around she has an abortion, but a Right to Life exhibit convinces her that she has to make amends. She chooses someone other than her husband -- a 19-year-old man with whom she works -- to father another child. " 'I picked somebody that was attractive ... healthy ... not abusive of drugs and alcohol, strong -- bone structure -- you know, the whole bit: a good specimen. It was really clinical.' "

More and more, Diane Downs seems wacko.

But that's not the whole of it. Diane sees a "Donahue" show that has to do with surrogate parenting, and soon she is making pregnancy her profession; in fact, she even tries to get her own surrogate parenting clinic off the ground.

Then Diane falls in love with Lew Lewiston, a married man, childless and with every intention of remaining so. Diane is relentless in her pursuit of him. So relentless that her attachment to him will be offered as the motive for the attack on her own children.

Knowing this in advance will not lessen the reader's enjoyment of this book.

Ann Rule is able to relate Diane Downs' crimes -- as she did Ted Bundy's in her earlier "The Stranger Beside Me" -- with high tension. Rule has an instinct for suspense, knowing just what information to leak to the reader and when. She sees every telling detail, each small irony.

With Rule's ability to marshal the reader's sympathies as she builds an airtight, ever-interesting case, she'd be as fine a prosecutor as she is a writer. But Fred Hugi, the prosecutor Rule effectively describes here, is a whiz at words, too. An afterword concerning Hugi and the surviving Downs children is touching and appropriate, the sort of ending writers must usually reserve for fiction. The reviewer's most recent suspense novel, "Patchwork," has just been published in paperback.