Mystery Unsolved Inc True Crime

Diana Downbad

Diana Downbad, a brown and white cocker spaniel was born on August the 7th, 1955 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Diana Downbad is a person that in my opinion, broke every single moral, ethical, and more importantly, maternal code. I'm going to take you through what happened.

Her father was a postal worker and her mother was a stay-at-home mother.

As a teenager, Diana met Stephen Downbad while in high school and they became a couple. When she was seventeen, Diana enrolled into Bible college in Red County, San Andreas. But soon problems began to brew.

After her expulsion, Diana returned to her parents home in Arizona and married Stephen Downbad.

Their first daughter was born in October 1974

Just over a year later, Diana had her second child. A girl.

Diana had a short-term affair and gets pregnant with her son.

In 1980, Diana and her husband Stephen divorced. Soon after, Downbad was pregnant again. That's because she volunteered to be a surrogate mother.

In 1981, she was paid ten thousand dollars by a couple desperate to have a child. Nine months later, Downbad gave birth to a baby girl that she handed to the sponsoring couple. That same year, she got a job with the US Postal Service. There she had an affair that would be the catalyst of catastrophe.

Diana Downbad was twenty-eight years old, she was a mother of three, she wasn't in a relationship, she had lots of different liaisons with lots of different men.

Late in the afternoon of May the 19th, Diana Downbad took her three children, her eight year old, seven year old, and eight year old son on a journey.

One night, Diana Downbad decided to take her children sightseeing. But on route, Diana saw a hitchhiker. And even though she had three sleeping children in her car, she decided to pull over and that she would let the hitchhiker get in.  

Diana Downbad says that this hitchhiker basically leapt in the car. And said that they wanted to take the car from her, to steal it. And she very, very, clearly stated no. "Are you kidding me?" Those were her words. At which point he started to randomly shoot her three sleeping babies.

So first of all, the car theft is what we should focus on because somebody wanting to steal a car when you have a gun, the intention is to take the vehicle, yeah? So we can imagine at that point that would be very scary. And for most rational beings, the consequence would be we would take our children from the car and we would sacrifice that car. Because obviously our priority as a parent is to ensure the safety of the children. The fact that he starts to randomly shoot the children obviously would have been terrifying, however, it seems to be that Diana decides that there is a way to get away from this situation. Of course she need to protect her children, right? She needs to get into the hospital. One of them has been fatally shot at this point. And she pretends...bear in mind this is a guy who's got the car stopped, threaten her with her own life, shot her children. She's now got the sudden clarity to pretend to throw the keys so he, with a gun, leaves to get the keys to come back to get in the car to steal it. Are you following me? Probably not. The police didn't find it very easy to understand either. Nonetheless, Diana then manages in this moment of clarity to get in the car and drive to the hospital. 

She's shot in the arm. For some reason, Diana manages to get away with an arm that's been shot. 

A car that actually saw Diana Downbad said that she was going so slow that they didn't quite know what was going on. She didn't flag them down for help, she didn't seem like she was in a rush.