Читать книгу Parents Who Kill - Shocking True Stories of The World's Most Evil Parents - Carol Anne Davis - Страница 42

At 15, she fell in love with a boy called Steve Downs who was seven months her senior. After school, he joined the Navy and Diane went to Bible College where she studied to be a Christian missionary. She also taught at Sunday school. When Steve returned from his tour of duty, they married. She was only 18 and immature for her age.

Diane had too many emotional needs for a teenage boy to satisfy, and almost immediately she decided to have a baby so that she’d have someone of her own to love. Without telling Steve, she stopped taking her birth control pills and, nine months after the marriage, gave birth to their first daughter, Christie Ann.

But a baby can only take, and Diane soon tired of the role of caregiver. She joined the Air Force and was shipped to Texas, leaving Steve to care for their six-month-old child.

After just three weeks she was sent home with terrible blisters on her feet. Almost immediately, she decided to have another baby, and within days she was pregnant again. Christie was only 15 months old when her sister Cheryl was born.

Appalled, as their finances were already poor, Steve had a vasectomy. But the operation didn’t work and Diane got pregnant for a third time. Steve persuaded her to have an abortion, after which he had his vasectomy redone.

Psychiatrists say that most women recover their equilibrium quickly after a termination, with neurotic women being the exception. Diane fell into the latter category, convincing herself that she had to have another baby to replace the terminated cells. Two years later, she left Steve, taking the children, and moved back to live with her parents, though being in their home again made her miserable.

The couple reconciled and she asked Steve to have the vasectomy reversed, but he refused, doubtless aware that Diane enjoyed pregnancy more than motherhood. Determined to get her way, she seduced a 19-year-old youth and became pregnant by him. The baby, Stephen Daniel Downs, was born on 29 December 1979 and soon became known as Danny, his middle name.

Steve let everyone think that Danny was his biological child. He adored the boy and treated him the same as his two daughters. But Diane fell into a deep depression. She began to hit the children, just as she’d been hit by her father throughout her childhood.