Video: 'My Mother’s Sins l 20/20 Diane Downs l Part 1'

(Thursday, May 19, 1983, approximately 9:55 p.m. PDT) — Diane Downs murdered her daughter and attempted to murder her other two children tonight near Springfield, Oregon, and then falsely claimed a man shot the children after he had attempted to carjack her on a rural road.

Video: 'My Mother’s Sins l 20/20 Diane Downs l Part 2

After shooting her three children, Downs drove them in a blood-spattered car to McKenzie-Willamette Hospital in Springfield, Oregon.

Upon arrival, Cheryl (aged 7) was already dead, Danny (aged 3) was paralyzed from the waist down, and Christie (aged 8) had suffered a disabling stroke.

Downs had shot herself in the left forearm to make herself appear to be a victim.

Video: 'My Mother’s Sins l 20/20 Diane Downs l Part 3'

She claimed that she was carjacked on a rural road near Springfield by a strange man who shot her and the children.

However, investigators and hospital workers became suspicious, because Downs’ manner was too calm for a person who had just experienced such a traumatic event.

Video: 'My Mother’s Sins l 20/20 Diane Downs l Part 4'

She also made a number of statements that both police and hospital workers considered highly inappropriate.

Suspicions heightened when Downs, upon arrival at the hospital to visit her children, phoned Robert Knickerbocker, a married man and former coworker in Arizona with whom she had been having an affair.

Video: 'Small Sacrifices - 1989 - Diane Downs'

Prosecutors argued that Downs shot her children to be free of them so that she could continue her affair with Knickerbocker, as she claimed that he let it be known that he did not want children in his life.

Downs was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to life in prison plus fifty years. She briefly escaped in 1987 but was quickly recaptured.

She was denied parole in December 2008, December 2010, and 2020.