A young blond woman, Diane Downs, shoots her three children in her car on a country road at night. One dies. One survives, paralyzed. And the older girl recovers with some loss of mobility. Downs claims "a bushy haired man" did it. After an investigation, the police arrest Downs and she is convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Evidently the latest love of her life, a married man devoted to his own wife, didn't want to be a father to her children. So she tried to get rid of them.
Just for the heck of it, I'll add that there was an almost identical case, involving a woman named Susan Smith, in 1995. Smith drowned her two sons, claiming a black man did it, because her boyfriend had told her he didn't want a "ready-made family." I'm developing a theory that attributes cases like these to a consumer mentality in which one buys, say, a vacuum cleaner and uses it for a while before discovering that it no longer works the way it's supposed to. The store won't take it back, so you throw it out. The moral lesson is that we need a Goodwill Industry for children.
I'm not being serious about that, but it is a puzzle. How does a woman murder her own children? The bonding between a mother and a newborn infant is a biological reflex, with about a 48-hour launch window. In other words, there is some hard wiring involve. It takes a special kind of mother to kill her children in order to acquire a new lover.
This is Farrah Fawcett's movie and she's pretty good, with her wildly sexy looks and debauched Texas voice. I only saw her in two other films, both junk, and don't remember her performances well. Her opposite number, on the side of the law, is DA John Shea, who isn't given much to do except look prim and determined. Ryan O'Neal has little screen time. The photography and location shooting are colorful and evocative.
The story is based on a book by Ann Rule, who is a first-rate writer of true-crime books. She's not an artist but, man, does she know how to put a story together without boring or insulting the reader. Some of the more curious parts of the book are not covered in the film. The murder weapon, a Ruger .22 pistol, was never found. But the film never describes the police search for it, whereas Rule followed that dead-end path to the end and turned it into a masterpiece of folly. The cops finally identified a man living in Mexico who they thought might now own the gun. They sought to interview him on the phone, but were advised that they were babes in the woods on questions of this sort. "First of all, you don't pick up the phone and directly call somebody living in Mexico. You have to figure out someone you can try to reach in Mexico who HAS a telephone." Some time ago, a team of German scientists studied the extent to which women wiggled their rear end when they walked. (I'm not making this up.) Being German, the experiment was all very precise. The young woman walked at a given speed on a treadmill and were videoed from behind, the arc of their hip movements measured in millimeters, and so forth. One finding was that women who were ovulating swayed their hips more. Not that they necessarily knew they were doing it, but it was a fact. They radiated more sexual heat as their fertile periods approached.
Diane Downs seems to have been like that -- all over. She had not only given birth to her own three children. She'd been paid as a substitute mother, and was pregnant again at the time of her incarceration. Rule's book has a photo of Downs at the time of her arrest. She's pretty, in an ordinary way, and her default expression is a kind of helpless grin. She probably smiles in her sleep. The court's shrink diagnosed her as "hystrionic personality disorder." It's a fuzzy category, but okay. They're the kind of people who attract attention by a kind of constant self display. They may be flirtatious, as Downs was, exchanging google eyes with a juror. They may talk to themselves in public, as in supermarket, "Now, where did they put the pork and beans?" They over dramatize their lives as if on a stage and become flamboyant lovers or victims of some hideous incident, as Downs not only played for sympathy before the TV cameras but accused her father of abusing her, which wasn't true.
But in court, Shea calls her "a deviant psychopath" and he's wrong. She's a murderer but not at all crazy, just too impulsive. She carried on long-distance love affairs while she was locked up. I forget whether that was before or after her temporary escape -- or both.
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