Child-killing mother eligible for parole

After nearly 25 years in prison, Diane Downs has once again changed her story about the night she and her children were shot on a lonely rural road near Springfield.

Downs was convicted of killing her 7-year-old daughter, Cheryl Lynn, and wounding 3-year-old Danny and 8-year-old Christie Ann.

It was a crime that shocked the nation long before the well-publicized cases of Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, also mothers who killed their own children. A best-selling book and a made-for-television movie starring Farrah Fawcett were based on the case.

Downs, now 53, will face the Oregon Board of Parole for the first time on Tuesday.

While she has always maintained her innocence, Downs has through the years given wildly varying accounts of what happened the night of May 19, 1983.

First, it was a bushy-haired stranger who tried to carjack Downs and ended up shooting the family.

In more recent versions, she claimed to know the shooter’s identity, as well as proof he has confessed to friends and family.

In a document provided to the parole board this year, Downs now says that at the time she was dating a man who claimed to be an FBI agent. On the night of the shooting, she got a phone call from another man who claimed to have photographs of someone the agent was investigating. She agreed to meet him.

“When I arrived at the meeting place, my children were attack,” she wrote, making a grammatical error with the word “attack.”

“I struggled with the male shooter and drove my children to the hospital,” Downs wrote.

Downs grabbed headlines again in 1987 when she escaped from the recreation yard at Oregon Women’s Correctional Center. She was captured 10 days later at a home less than a mile from the prison.

If Downs is denied parole, her next chance for reconsideration will be in two years.