This is a film based on a story that defies belief that someone, especially a mother, could be so cruel. Based on a true story that occurred in 1983, a wounded Diane Downs claims that she and her children were attacked by an armed man leaving her eight-year-old daughter in a coma, her three-year-old son paralysed and her five-year-old daughter dead. But DA Frank Joziak and Detective Doug Welch aren't convince and build evidence that proves the person who shot the children was Diane herself.
The actors in this film all give great effort in bringing this shocking story to life. Farrah Fawcett is excellent as the pathological liar that is Diane Downs, portraying the role as a woman almost bored with motherhood. John Shea's Joziak was nicely depicted with a sense of warmth, determination and anger for what he knows Downs did while a young Emily Perkins gives a strong performance as the deeply traumatised Karen Downs, the eight-year-old who awakens from a coma with the knowledge of what her mother did.
This film is fascinating on a level that will shock and disgust the viewers as it is reveals just how insidious and self-obsessed Diane Downs is, how she tries to lie her way out of the court case and the reasons for why a mother would commit a monstrous crime upon her own small children. The story is sickening but it is one that should be told, if only to emphasis to people why Downs should never be allowed to be free.
The actors in this film all give great effort in bringing this shocking story to life. Farrah Fawcett is excellent as the pathological liar that is Diane Downs, portraying the role as a woman almost bored with motherhood. John Shea's Joziak was nicely depicted with a sense of warmth, determination and anger for what he knows Downs did while a young Emily Perkins gives a strong performance as the deeply traumatised Karen Downs, the eight-year-old who awakens from a coma with the knowledge of what her mother did.
This film is fascinating on a level that will shock and disgust the viewers as it is reveals just how insidious and self-obsessed Diane Downs is, how she tries to lie her way out of the court case and the reasons for why a mother would commit a monstrous crime upon her own small children. The story is sickening but it is one that should be told, if only to emphasis to people why Downs should never be allowed to be free.