Early Life
Elizabeth Diane Frederickson was born in Phoenix, Arizona to Wes and Willadene Frederickson on August 7, 1955. She alleges that her father molested her when she was a child. She graduated from Moon Valley High School in Phoenix where she met her future husband, Steve Downs. After high school, she enrolled at Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College in Orange, California, but after a year was expelled for promiscuity and returned to her parents’ home. On November 13, 1973, she married Steve Downs. They were divorced in 1980, about a year after the birth of Stephen "Danny" Downs.
Downs was employed by the United States Postal Service assigned to the mail routes in the city of Cottage Grove, Oregon before her 1984 arrest and trial.
By accounts of friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and eventually her surviving daughter Christie, Diane Downs was an unfit parent who put everything before her children and was especially cruel to Cheryl, who told a neighbor of her grandparents shortly before her death that she was afraid of her mother.
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