On the night of May 19, 1983, Diane Downs arrived in Springfield, Oregon, with her three children. Her younger daughter, Cheryl Lynn Downs, was already dead. Her elder daughter and her son were alive and badly hurt. Downs, a 27-year-old letter carrier who had moved north from Arizona a few weeks earlier, told police that a stranger had done it on a dark stretch of country outside the city and that she had driven for help. The detective who questioned her that night did not believe her, and nine months later the Lane County district attorney charged her with murder.
A Lane County jury convicted her in June 1984 of murder, attempted murder and assault. The central witness was her elder daughter, who had spent most of the year recovering and who told the jury that the person who hurt her was her mother. In August 1984 Downs was sentenced to life plus 50 years. She escaped from an Oregon prison in 1987 and was back in custody ten days later. Since then she has lost her direct appeal, a state post-conviction case, a federal habeas petition in the Ninth Circuit, a challenge to her parole schedule in 2003 and a federal challenge to a 2020 parole decision. The Oregon Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision has refused her release at each hearing it has held. Through all of it she has said she is innocent.
Elizabeth Diane Downs came to Oregon in April 1983, after a relationship in Arizona ended. She was 27, recently divorced, and worked for the United States Postal Service. She settled in Springfield, in Lane County.
She brought her three children with her: two daughters and a son, the youngest of the three. Cheryl Lynn Downs was the younger of the two girls, the middle child of the family. She had been in Oregon for only a few weeks when she died.
The case the state eventually brought against her mother rested partly on what Downs wanted in those months. Prosecutors told the jury that she had fallen for a married man who did not want a ready-made family, and that she saw her children as the obstacle between them. The lead detective later said investigators came to believe she wanted the man to join her in Oregon, and that the children stood in the way.
Late on the evening of Thursday, May 19, 1983, Downs came into Springfield with her three children. Cheryl was dead. The two other children survived. The crimes had taken place in the countryside outside Springfield.
That night she gave the account she has held to, in one form or another, ever since: an unknown man had stopped her and harmed her children, and she had gotten away and come for help. Police put out a public alert for the man she described. For a short time the case was handled as what she said it was, a crime by a stranger against a young mother and her children.
The detective assigned to question Downs that night was with the Lane County Sheriff's Office and was working his first homicide case. He later said that the problems with her story began to show before the first interview was over. He could not see why a woman with three young children would go sightseeing in the countryside in the dark, or why she would stop for a stranger, and much of the rest of what she said did not fit either. By the end of that first conversation, he said, he and his colleagues had concluded that she was lying.
The person who had seen the most was a child. The elder daughter was the only witness, and at first she could not speak about what had happened. When she was able to communicate again, she said that she had not seen a male stranger.
Downs did not withdraw while the inquiry went on. Within a month of the crimes, while her two surviving children were still recovering, she gave a series of interviews to the press. In each she denied any part in what had happened, and the interviews only deepened the suspicion around her. A judge placed the two surviving children in the protective custody of the state.
Police arrested Downs on February 28, 1984, nine months after the crimes. The Lane County district attorney charged her with the murder of Cheryl and with the attempted murder of, and assault on, her two other children.
The trial opened in Lane County Circuit Court in May 1984, just under a year after the crimes.
The prosecution was led by the Lane County prosecutor who had carried the case since its first weeks. Its theory was the one investigators had formed early: that Downs had harmed her own children because they stood between her and the married man she wanted, and that she had then invented a stranger to explain what had happened. Downs held to her account that an unknown man was responsible.
The decisive testimony came from the elder daughter. After months of therapy she took the stand against her mother. When the prosecutor asked who had hurt her, she answered, "My mom." Years later the federal courts would be asked whether the many interviews that came before her testimony had shaped what she said.
The trial lasted about six weeks. Downs maintained throughout that she was innocent.
The jury returned its verdict in June 1984. It found Downs guilty of murder, attempted murder and assault: the murder of Cheryl Lynn Downs and the attempted murder of her elder daughter and her son. That verdict has stood for more than 40 years, though in 2024 Downs would claim that it was not unanimous on four of the counts.
In August 1984 she was sentenced to life in prison plus 50 years, with a minimum term of 25 years before she could be considered for parole. On August 31, 1984, she entered the state women's prison in Salem to begin serving it.
The case had drawn wide attention long before the verdict, and it did not fade. A best-selling book and a television film were later made about it.
Downs appealed. The Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed her convictions without opinion in 1987, and the Oregon Supreme Court declined to review the case.
She then turned to post-conviction relief, the procedure Oregon uses to challenge a final judgment. The post-conviction trial court disposed of her claims of prosecutorial misconduct by summary judgment, without a trial on those points. It held a trial on her other claims and granted her relief on two of them, both concerning restitution and sentencing. Her convictions were left in place. The Court of Appeals affirmed that judgment without opinion in 1993, and in 1994 the Oregon Supreme Court again declined review.
On Saturday, July 11, 1987, Downs escaped from the women's prison in Salem. The governor said afterward that work to fix problems with the prison's security system had been under way when she got out.
She was free for ten days. On July 21, 1987, she was taken back into custody in Salem. She later received a five-year sentence for the escape, and for that reason some later accounts give her total term as life plus 55 years.
The escape ended her time in Oregon's prisons. She was moved to a higher-security prison in New Jersey, and was later held in Washington before she was moved to California, where she has remained.
Downs went to federal court before her state post-conviction case was finished. A first federal petition, filed in the Eastern District of California in November 1993, was dismissed without prejudice because she had not yet exhausted her state remedies. Once the Oregon Supreme Court had declined review, she filed again, this time in the District of Oregon, on June 25, 1996. She amended the petition on January 17, 1997, to raise nine claims. The district court denied it without a hearing on February 8, 1999, and she appealed to the Ninth Circuit.
On November 15, 2000, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed. Its opinion, written by a senior district judge sitting by designation, took each of the nine claims in turn.
The first was that the prosecution had withheld investigators' notes. The court found that the notes recorded only investigative leads and were not material, so the state court's rejection of the claim was not clearly erroneous. The second was that a deputy's handwritten notes had been destroyed. The court found no showing of bad faith and no showing that the notes would have helped her.
The third claim concerned the closing argument. The prosecutor had read aloud from records the trial court had excluded. The court found that the reading was inadvertent and brief, that the prosecutor had disavowed it, and that it did not deny Downs due process. Her trial lawyer's decision not to ask for a mistrial was a reasonable tactical choice. The fourth claim concerned a cross-examination question about a psychological label that had been attached to her. The panel held that the question had not infected the trial with unfairness, and that her lawyer's choices not to object, not to seek a mistrial and not to call the psychologist were tactical and caused no prejudice.
The fifth claim went to the core of the case. Downs argued that her elder daughter's testimony had been tainted by the number of times investigators and others had interviewed her before trial. The court held that the interviews had not violated due process, and stated the principle plainly: the mere number of interviews did not in itself show that anything improper had happened. The ineffective-assistance claim built on the same ground failed too. Downs also argued that she was actually innocent, which, if shown, would have let the court reach claims she had otherwise forfeited. The court rejected that argument under the Supreme Court's standard in Schlup v. Delo, and found no abuse of discretion in the refusal to hold an evidentiary hearing.
The sixth and seventh claims faulted her trial lawyer for not calling a particular expert and not using a report that the defense had. The court treated both as valid tactical decisions. The eighth claim challenged a supplemental instruction the trial judge had given the jury to encourage it to reach a verdict, and the ninth challenged the denial of a continuance so that she could change lawyers and an allegedly coercive jury instruction. Both were procedurally defaulted, because they had not been properly raised in the state courts, and with the actual-innocence gateway closed, the court could not reach them.
The panel concluded that the district court had applied the correct standard under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and affirmed the denial of the petition. The federal courts were closed to her on the conviction.
Under the sentence imposed in 1984, Downs could not be considered for release until she had served 25 years. She tried to move that date. In 2003 she argued in the Oregon Court of Appeals that she had been wrongly denied a tentative parole release date and a parole hearing. On October 29, 2003, the court rejected the appeal without comment. The parole board said at the time that she would not be eligible for a hearing until 2009.
Her first hearing came on Tuesday, December 9, 2008, in Salem, after nearly 25 years in prison. Downs, then 53, appeared by video link from California. She had threatened beforehand not to take part, then took part. The hearing lasted about two and a half hours, and her mood swung from tears to sarcasm while the board's chair repeatedly steered her back to the questions.
She said again that she had not harmed her children. Her account of who had, though, had changed many times over the years. It had begun with a single stranger. It became two men, then another man she said she had met that night, and then a more complicated story involving other people and a meeting she said had been arranged for the night of May 19, 1983. A written statement she gave the board that year said she had fought with a male attacker and driven her children for help. On the question of remorse she wrote that she preferred the word "regret," explaining that she could not admit to something she had not done. She also told the board that her attempts to escape had been driven by a wish to find the man who had really harmed her children.
The Lane County district attorney wrote to the board opposing release. The retired detective who had questioned her on the first night was in the room, and so was one of the jurors from her 1984 trial.
The three-member board deliberated for less than half an hour. It found that she remained a danger to the public and refused parole. When the decision was read, Downs said only, "Thank you."
The 2008 decision entitled Downs to a new hearing in two years. Before it came, the law changed. A bill passed by the 2009 Legislature and in force from January 2010 allowed the parole board to make a prisoner wait as long as ten years between hearings. When her case came up again, the new Lane County district attorney asked the board to use that power, to deny parole and to put off any further consideration for a decade.
Downs said she would not take part. In a letter to the board dated November 30, 2010, she wrote that she would not attend and demanded her release, telling the board, "I've never resorted to violence." The board's executive director answered that the hearing would go ahead with or without her. It took place in Salem on Friday, December 10, 2010, by videoconference with the prison in California, and Downs, 55, maintained her innocence. The board denied parole again and set her next hearing ten years away.
That hearing came in 2020, and the result was the same. The board's decision said it still considered Downs to have narcissistic personality disorder, and that she was a danger to vulnerable people in her care. It noted that her past violence "occurred in the context of her care of vulnerable children." The board deferred her next parole consideration date.
Downs challenged the 2020 decision in federal court. In Downs v. Oregon Board of Parole, a habeas case filed in the District of Oregon in 2022, she attacked the board's decision to defer her parole consideration date. A magistrate judge recommended that the petition be denied. On November 14, 2023, the district judge reviewed the file anew, found no error, adopted the recommendation and denied the petition. He also refused a certificate of appealability, finding that she had not made a substantial showing of the denial of a constitutional right. She had also asked the board itself to review its 2020 decision, in a 59-page request that repeated many of the claims she had made before.
In October 2023 she was 68 years old and serving her sentence in California.
In February 2024, more than 40 years after her trial, Downs filed a new petition in Marion County, Oregon. She claimed that the jury's verdicts on four of the five counts had not been unanimous, and that the jury had voted ten to two on the attempted murder and assault charges. She relied on the United States Supreme Court's holding that a conviction by a non-unanimous jury violates the right to a fair trial.
In late October 2024 a judge granted an extension so that her lawyer could continue to gather evidence. No ruling on the merits of the petition had been reported, and as of November 2024 she remained in prison in California, still saying that she was innocent.
Two pieces of Oregon law shaped the later course of the case.
The first is the parole deferral statute. Downs's release depends on the Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision. Before the 2009 change, the board's 2008 refusal entitled her to a new hearing two years later. The law that took effect in January 2010 let the board defer a hearing by up to ten years, and the board used that power in her case at the first hearing after the law took effect. The schedule of her later hearings, in 2020 and beyond, follows from it, and both her 2003 appeal and her federal petition in 2022 were attacks on the board's control of that schedule.
The second is the jury rule. For decades Oregon allowed juries to convict people of felonies by non-unanimous verdicts, such as ten votes to convict and two to acquit. In 2020, in Ramos v. Louisiana, the United States Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous verdict to convict of a serious offense, which made non-unanimous felony convictions unconstitutional. Ramos left open what would happen to cases that were already final. On December 30, 2022, in Watkins v. Ackley, the Oregon Supreme Court held that Ramos applies retroactively as a matter of state law, so that people convicted of felonies by non-unanimous juries are entitled to a new trial, but only if they file a claim for post-conviction relief. The state's public defense agency told prisoners that there was no limit on how long ago the conviction had occurred, that the time to file was two years from the Watkins decision, and that a successful claim usually means a retrial rather than release, with the case returning to the county of conviction and the district attorney deciding whether to prosecute again. Downs's February 2024 petition was filed inside that two-year window.
Downs has denied the crimes from the first night and has never changed that position, though the details of her account have changed many times. Each court that has examined the case, from the trial jury to the Ninth Circuit, has rejected her claims, and the verdict stands.
Her claim that the jury divided ten to two on the attempted murder and assault counts is an allegation in her 2024 petition. It has not been decided by any court.
The length of her sentence is given in two ways. The 1984 sentence was life plus 50 years. The five-year term she later received for the 1987 escape is why some accounts give the total as life plus 55 years.
April 1983: Downs moves to the Springfield area of Oregon from Arizona.
May 19, 1983: Cheryl Lynn Downs is killed and her elder daughter and son are badly hurt outside Springfield; Downs blames an unknown man.
1983: A judge places the surviving children in state protective custody.
February 28, 1984: Downs is arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder and assault.
May 1984: Trial opens in Lane County Circuit Court.
June 1984: The jury finds her guilty.
August 1984: Sentenced to life plus 50 years, with a 25-year minimum.
August 31, 1984: Enters the state women's prison in Salem.
1987: The Oregon Court of Appeals affirms without opinion; the Oregon Supreme Court denies review.
July 11, 1987: Escapes from the prison in Salem.
July 21, 1987: Taken back into custody in Salem; later moved out of Oregon.
November 1993: First federal habeas petition, in California, dismissed for non-exhaustion.
1993 and 1994: The state post-conviction judgment is affirmed and review is denied.
June 25, 1996: Federal habeas petition filed in the District of Oregon.
February 8, 1999: The district court denies the petition.
November 15, 2000: The Ninth Circuit affirms in Downs v. Hoyt.
October 29, 2003: The Oregon Court of Appeals rejects her challenge to her parole schedule.
December 9, 2008: First parole hearing; parole denied.
January 2010: The ten-year deferral law takes effect.
December 10, 2010: Parole denied; next hearing set ten years away.
2020: Parole denied a third time.
December 30, 2022: The Oregon Supreme Court decides Watkins v. Ackley.
November 14, 2023: A federal judge denies her habeas petition against the 2020 parole decision.
February 2024: She files a petition in Marion County alleging non-unanimous verdicts.
October 2024: A judge grants an extension in the petition.