"Small Sacrifices" is based on the story of Elizabeth Diane Downs aka Diane Downs who shot her 2 daughters and 1 son in 1983 on a lonely country road while she was driving the kids home from a friend's house late at night. Diane said time and again a strange man with shaggy hair came out of the shadows and demanded her car. When she refused, he shot her sleeping children. In the book by Ann Rule, the kids are named Christie, Cheryl and Danny. In this treatment, they go under the aliases of Karen, Shauna and Robbie. In a way this confuses me because the real names of the kids are in the well-known book and in the TV movie of the same title they go under other names and everyone can find the real names by reading the book! Mild criticism aside, this movie shows another great performance by the late, wonderful Farrah Fawcett! She is so good as the narcissistic, sociopathic Diane Downs who wanted her new boyfried, Lew Lewiston (Ryan O'Neal) to be a father to the kids even though he went the permanent route of ensuring he would never have children by getting a vasectomy. After his rejection, Diane basically loses it and writes him letters proclaiming her love for the married Lew. This was the catalyst for the shooting of the three children by their mom. All the performers are great in this movie! John Shea goes toe-to-toe with Farrah as Frank Joziak the prosecutor and he really cares about her children. A very young Emily Perkins is also wonderful as the traumatized Karen who saw her mother shot her brother and sister and her. She is the one who testifies against her mother because Shauna was shot to death and while Robbie was paralyzed by the bullet, he was too young to testify in court. Next to "The Burning Bed" Farrah has another winner in the TV movie arena!

A young blond woman, Diane Downs, shoots her three children in her car on a country road at night. One dies. One survives, paralyzed. And the older girl recovers with some loss of mobility. Downs claims "a bushy haired man" did it. After an investigation, the police arrest Downs and she is convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Evidently the latest love of her life, a married man devoted to his own wife, didn't want to be a father to her children. So she tried to get rid of them.Just for the heck of it, I'll add that there was an almost identical case, involving a woman named Susan Smith, in 1995. Smith drowned her two sons, claiming a black man did it, because her boyfriend had told her he didn't want a "ready-made family." I'm developing a theory that attributes cases like these to a consumer mentality in which one buys, say, a vacuum cleaner and uses it for a while before discovering that it no longer works the way it's supposed to. The store won't take it back, so you throw it out. The moral lesson is that we need a Goodwill Industry for children.I'm not being serious about that, but it is a puzzle. How does a woman murder her own children? The bonding between a mother and a newborn infant is a biological reflex, with about a 48-hour launch window. In other words, there is some hard wiring involve. It takes a special kind of mother to kill her children in order to acquire a new lover.This is Farrah Fawcett's movie and she's pretty good, with her wildly sexy looks and debauched Texas voice. I only saw her in two other films, both junk, and don't remember her performances well. Her opposite number, on the side of the law, is DA John Shea, who isn't given much to do except look prim and determined. Ryan O'Neal has little screen time. The photography and location shooting are colorful and evocative.The story is based on a book by Ann Rule, who is a first-rate writer of true-crime books. She's not an artist but, man, does she know how to put a story together without boring or insulting the reader. Some of the more curious parts of the book are not covered in the film. The murder weapon, a Ruger .22 pistol, was never found. But the film never describes the police search for it, whereas Rule followed that dead-end path to the end and turned it into a masterpiece of folly. The cops finally identified a man living in Mexico who they thought might now own the gun. They sought to interview him on the phone, but were advised that they were babes in the woods on questions of this sort. "First of all, you don't pick up the phone and directly call somebody living in Mexico. You have to figure out someone you can try to reach in Mexico who HAS a telephone." Some time ago, a team of German scientists studied the extent to which women wiggled their rear end when they walked. (I'm not making this up.) Being German, the experiment was all very precise. The young woman walked at a given speed on a treadmill and were videoed from behind, the arc of their hip movements measured in millimeters, and so forth. One finding was that women who were ovulating swayed their hips more. Not that they necessarily knew they were doing it, but it was a fact. They radiated more sexual heat as their fertile periods approached.Diane Downs seems to have been like that -- all over. She had not only given birth to her own three children. She'd been paid as a substitute mother, and was pregnant again at the time of her incarceration. Rule's book has a photo of Downs at the time of her arrest. She's pretty, in an ordinary way, and her default expression is a kind of helpless grin. She probably smiles in her sleep. The court's shrink diagnosed her as "hystrionic personality disorder." It's a fuzzy category, but okay. They're the kind of people who attract attention by a kind of constant self display. They may be flirtatious, as Downs was, exchanging google eyes with a juror. They may talk to themselves in public, as in supermarket, "Now, where did they put the pork and beans?" They over dramatize their lives as if on a stage and become flamboyant lovers or victims of some hideous incident, as Downs not only played for sympathy before the TV cameras but accused her father of abusing her, which wasn't true.But in court, Shea calls her "a deviant psychopath" and he's wrong. She's a murderer but not at all crazy, just too impulsive. She carried on long-distance love affairs while she was locked up. I forget whether that was before or after her temporary escape -- or both.

After watching a 20/20 program about Dianne Downs, they had played a little clip from the movie Small Sacrifices. I was absolutely horrified by this story, I couldn't believe how a mother could so coldly shoot her children and almost without thinking twice about it. But the movie had me intrigued, it's been over a year since Fawcett's tragic death, I heard that this was one of her finest performances so I decided to go ahead and check out the movie. Knowing before what the outcome was going to be, I just hoped that Small Sacrifices wasn't going to romanticize what happened as it was discovered that Dianne's motive was due to wanting her boyfriend to love her back. Hollywood sometimes likes to do damage to real life tragedies, but it turns out that they actually over all did it right this time and showed the true heart break that came from this story but ended up leaving with a little hope.On 19 May 1983, Dianne Downs drove to the hospital with a gunshot wound to her arm and her three bloody children. She claimed that an unknown assailant attempted to carjack her and shot her the children: Karen, Shauna, and Robby. Shauna was dead on arrival at the hospital. Eldest daughter Karen was badly injured, but survived suffering a temporary loss of speech due to a stroke after the shooting, but recovered sufficiently to serve as a witness in court against her mother. Diane's son was paralyzed from the chest down. Downs was eventually tried and convicted of murder, attempted murder, and assault. Downs had started a romance with a man, but he discontinued the relationship as he did not want children. Downs planned to kill her children to be free to pursue this relationship. Going to show the small sacrifices she had to make for the man she loved.I can't imagine what pain Farrah went through to channel this performance for this evil woman, she gave such an incredible performance, I was absolutely amazed. It's so sad she never made it really to the big screen, she was a true talent and beauty. The children actors also did a terrific job, Emily Perkins as Karen was great. I remembered her from the TV Mini Series IT where she pulled in a good performance, I'm surprised that she's not a bigger name now, but who knows the reason behind that. I'm glad they didn't glamour the story up, it was pretty hard to watch. I'm not sure if Small Sacrifices should have been as long as it was and I'm a little disappointed they skipped over Dianne's clumsy videos of her reenacting the carjacking, how she's laughing and giggling while her children are barely holding onto life in the hospital and one's life is lost. I thought that was one of the major keys into her being a suspect of her children's injuries and death. However this was a good movie, I would recommend it if you are interested in murderers or the story of Dianne Downs and her children. Watching the updates on the news to find out that her children are now doing fine and have moved on was wonderful, but so sad that they have to live with the fact that their mother wanted to take their lives for such a petty reason. Farrah gave a great performance and the film was well done and very realistic, not for the faint of heart. Much love and happy thoughts towards her children and the family that they will never have to go through this pain again and that Downs is locked away where she should be.7/10

Here's TV doing true crime the way it should be done--slowly unfolding plot through character, threading the cops and perps stories together, good courtroom drama--it's spellbinding. Farrah Fawcett is exceptional as Diane Downs, the woman who manages to kill one out of three kids. The two surviving kids are also stand-outs, especially the small daughter who must choose whether or not to testify against the monstrously narcissistic Downs. John Shea is also good as the D.A. A must-see for crime buffs.