“Did you ever read THE RED DEATH by Edgar Allan Poe?” Diane Downs asked. “Required reading in high school. Once the plague is in the house, there’s no avoiding it.”
Downs, who was convicted 35 years ago of shooting her three children in one of the most-notorious murder cases in Oregon history, believes the novel coronavirus has already rolled through the Central California Women’s Facility where she’s incarcerated -- and that she survived it thanks to luck and a conscientious prison employee.
The Chowchilla, Calif., prison, which houses about 3,000 inmates and is now locked down to protect against the coronavirus’ spread, has only tested two prisoners for COVID-19, the deadly illness caused by the virus. Neither test came back with a positive result, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s COVID-19 tracker. The online tool lists one prison employee at CCWF as having tested positive.
Downs, now 64, has been incarcerated in California for most of the past 25 years, following stints in Oregon and New Jersey prisons.
On a May night in 1983, the young, divorced letter carrier drove up to the emergency room of a Springfield, Oregon, hospital. Her three children -- 8-year-old Christie, 7-year-old Cheryl and 3-year-old Danny -- were in the car with her, each shot at close range. Cheryl was dead, Christie and Danny grievously wounded. Downs herself had been shot in the arm.
Ever since, Downs has maintained that she didn’t shoot her children. She says she now follows news about the coronavirus pandemic as closely as she can from prison and is concerned about her surviving offspring contracting COVID-19.
“Every time the World News shows the big red circles on the national map, I look at Oregon because that’s where Christie and Daniel are,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive via email sent through her brother, James Frederickson. “Compared to other States, it appears Oregon’s red circle is smaller than most places. Is Oregon relatively virus-free, or are my children in greater danger than the red circle size suggests? I still worry about them and love them, though they’ll never know it.”
At the time of the shootings, Downs told police a “bushy-haired stranger” standing on the side of an empty country road had waved down her car -- then leaned in and fired a gun at the children.
Detectives thought Downs’ demeanor during interviews was odd and that her story seemed far-fetched. They soon discovered a possible motive for her: Her diary suggested she was obsessed with a man who didn’t want children.
In the 1984 trial, 9-year-old Christie took the stand and said her mother had shot her.
After Downs was convicted (she was sentenced to life plus 55 years), the case’s lead prosecutor adopted Christie and Danny. Downs gave birth to another child shortly after the trial; that girl, Becky, was adopted by a Bend couple.
The late true-crime writer Ann Rule published a best-selling book about the case in 1987, the same year Downs escaped from Salem’s Oregon Women’s Correctional Institution. (Downs was captured 10 days later.) The book, “Small Sacrifices,” was made into a 1989 TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett.
Frederickson, who contacted The Oregonian/OregonLive this week because he’s concerned about the coronavirus in the Chowchilla prison, says he believes his sister’s story about a “bushy-haired stranger.” He points out that a man named Clayton Nysten provided a sworn affidavit in the 1990s in which he stated that a former friend of his, Jim Haynes, admitted shooting the children because Downs had found out about an illegal drug operation. Haynes allegedly said he shot the children “to teach [Downs] a lesson, and make her suffer for the rest of her life.” Nysten and Haynes are now both deceased.
At her 2008 parole hearing, Downs blamed the shootings on Haynes and suggested Haynes had been hired by Pat Horton, who was the Lake County district attorney when the shootings occurred.
Frederickson says his sister often has been a target in prison because of her notoriety. “New inmates who know of her come in and think it’s necessary for them to make a name for themselves, so it is not uncommon for her to be attacked,” he says.
But now Downs is worried about COVID-19, not inmates trying to earn a rep.
She likened the illness to Poe’s 1842 short story “The Masque of the Red Death.” “The red death had long devastated the country,” the story begins. “No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood.”
Downs said prisoners at Central California Women’s Facility began suffering COVID-19 symptoms -- headaches, extreme fatigue, coughing and tightness in the chest -- in February. Few of them had heard about the coronavirus at that time. She said the prison doctors diagnosed the sick inmates with “a rhinovirus” -- the common cold.
Whatever the illness was, it hit her cellblock hard in early March, she wrote.
On March 11, Downs told her brother that a roommate in her large, barracks-like cell had been sick for three weeks, and that the other five prisoners in the cell, herself included, were now feeling ill.
She continued to report for work every day at the prison. She said she refurbishes bicycles for underprivileged children.
“I dragged myself to work the 11th and 12th of March, exhausted and fuzzy in the brain,” she wrote this week. “Dry cough. Headache. Sinuses clogged with very thick mucus.”
Her supervisor saw she was struggling and told her to go back to bed.
“I showered, slept for 4 hours, woke up and drank water, then went back to sleep for 16 more hours,” she wrote. “When I see what others have suffered, I think my boss probably saved my life.”
She added that the prison has just received a shipment of precut swatches and she’s started sewing face masks “for the kiddos at the Children’s Hospital.”
-- Douglas Perry
This article was originally published by The Oregonian/Oregonlive, one of more than a dozen news organizations throughout the state sharing their coverage of the novel coronavirus outbreak to help inform Oregonians about this evolving health issue.
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