Further Reading For David Rothenberg & Diane Downs
Episode: 12
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Dave Dave, born David Rothenberg (1976 – July 15, 2018) was a conceptual artist whose father was found guilty of attempting to kill him by burning in 1983, when he was six years old.
David Rothenberg was six years old and living with his mother, Marie Rothenberg, in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, when his father, Charles Rothenberg, took him on a trip to Disneyland, in California. The parents were divorced and in conflict over custody of David; after the two argued on the telephone, on the evening of March 3, 1983, at a motel in Buena Park, Charles gave his son a sleeping pill and after he fell asleep, poured kerosene on the bed and set fire to it. He left the room and watched from a telephone booth across the street while other guests rescued David.
Elizabeth Diane Frederickson Downs (born August 7, 1955) is an American woman convicted of the May 1983 murder of her daughter and the attempted murders of her other two children. Following the crimes, she told police a stranger had attempted to carjack her and had shot the children. She was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to life in prison plus fifty years.
On May 19, 1983, Diane Downs shot her three children and drove them in a blood spattered car to McKenzie-Willamette Hospital. Upon arrival, Cheryl was already dead, Danny was paralyzed from the waist down, and Christie had suffered a disabling stroke. Downs herself had been shot in the left forearm. She claimed she was carjacked on a rural road near Springfield, Oregon, by a strange man who shot her and the children. However, investigators and hospital workers became suspicious because they decided her manner was too calm for a person who had experienced such a traumatic event. She also made a number of statements that both police and hospital workers considered highly inappropriate.
Suspicions heightened when Downs, upon arrival at the hospital to visit her children, phoned Robert Knickerbocker, a married man and former coworker in Arizona with whom she had been having an extramarital affair. The forensic evidence did not match her story; there was no blood spatter on the driver’s side of the car, nor was there any gunpowder residue on the driver’s door or on the interior door panel. Knickerbocker also reported to police that Downs had stalked him and seemed willing to kill his wife if it meant that she could have him to herself; he stated that he was relieved that she had left for Oregon and that he was able to reconcile with his wife.