Friday, May 21, 2010

Diane Downs' lost daughter

True-crime readers like me know Ann Rule's book "Small Sacrifices" well -- it's a masterpiece of the genre about an especially creepy case, and Downs was played on TV by Farrah Fawcett. (Read the book if you have any interest in true crime at all...it's not gory, it's incredibly well-written.)

She shot three of her children, killing one and paralyzing another. But this is the story about the baby she gave up for adoption. She was pregnant with this baby while on trial for murdering and trying to murder her other children. Tell me finding that out won't shake you to your core, no matter how wonderful your adoptive parents were.


Excerpt: "As she watched the movie with her boyfriend, Becky wept at the scene in which Farrah Fawcett cradled her newborn. “Every emotion a person can feel swept over me in a haze,” says Becky. “It was like a dream. I couldn’t be from the belly of such a monster. But I was."

1 comment:

Nadya said...

FYI: The author was apparently fired from her newspaper job at The Oregonian for selling this piece to Glamour.
http://blogs.wweek.com/news/2010/05/20/oregonian-reporter-fired-after-diane-downs-story-appears-in-glamour/