Diane Downs and Old Mohawk Road Part 1

🚨 This week on Shadows in the Pines, we head to Springfield, Oregon for one of the most disturbing and psychologically unsettling cases in true crime history: the case of Diane Downs.

On a dark stretch of Old Mohawk Road in May of 1983, three children were shot inside a family car. Seven-year-old Cheryl Lynn Downs was killed. Eight-year-old Christie and three-year-old Danny barely survived. Their mother claimed a bushy-haired stranger stepped out of the darkness and opened fire.

But almost immediately, detectives began noticing things that didn’t feel right.

The timeline.
The crime scene.
The interviews.
The smiling.

As the investigation tightened, the horrifying possibility at the center of the case became impossible to ignore: what if there never was a stranger at all?

In this episode, Dan and Bekah follow the full chronology of the Diane Downs case — from Diane’s chaotic early life and obsession with Robert “Nick” Knickerbocker, to the shooting on Old Mohawk Road, the media circus that followed, Christie’s devastating testimony, the nationally televised trial, Diane’s bizarre courtroom behavior, and the prison escape that somehow made the story even stranger.

This is not just the story of a murder investigation.

It’s the story of three children trapped inside a car on a dark Oregon road… and the mother a jury believed pulled the trigger.

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