Her face is lined. Her hair like straw. But the eyes of Diane Downs -

intense, sly - haven't changed in 25 years. What has changed - many times - is her account of a spring night in 1983 when she shot her three children, killing her 7-year-old daughter.

Tuesday, Downs tried to convince a three-member parole board in Salem to let her out of prison.

Speaking via a video link from the Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, Calif., she repeated a tearful, rambling account of how a bushy-haired stranger killed her children. She tried to sell the board on the notion that she was trying to save her children from corrupt police who would have killed them at the hospital to conceal an elaborate plot involving drug dealing and the FBI. She said she was trying to get them medical attention after the bushy-haired stranger repeatedly fired rounds into her car the night of May 19, 1983, out on Old Mohawk Road near Springfield.

The attack left 7-year-old Cheryl Lynn Downs dead. Christie, 8, and Danny, 3, suffered permanent damage.

It took the parole board less than half an hour to reject Downs' application for parole. She is serving a sentence of life plus 55 years on the grounds that she remains the same: dangerous, defensive and in denial.

Few facts of the case remain unexplored in books, a movie and countless articles. What remains a mystery is how a mother of three could have killed her children to be with a man.

And it has happened since. In an eerily similar tragedy in 1993, Susan Smith, 23, drove her sedan into a South Carolina lake. Her 3-year-old and 14-months-old sons were strapped inside. She did it to be with her lover. Before she broke down and confessed nine days later, she blamed a black man who carjacked her vehicle and sparked a nationwide manhunt for him. She tearfully addressed the camera.

There's no moral here. There's barely an understanding. There is a sad pattern of the willingness to blame "the other."

We even heard it in Corvallis in 1982, when Brenda Kirkelie told police that an "Iranian-looking man" was the one who fired a fatal blast from a 12-gauge shotgun into her 29-year-old husband, Greg, at the couple's shoe repair store in downtown Corvallis.

In that case, a resolution was long delayed. It wasn't until Oct. 12, 2005, when Corvallis cold-case investigators acting on a tip from Brenda's ex-husband followed the investigation to Oklahoma and found justice for Greg Kirkelie. Known by then as Brenda Duran, the woman who confessed to pulling the trigger was sentenced in 2006 to nine years in prison.

And we saw a circuitous route to justice Saturday, when - 13 years after being found not guilty of the murders of his wife and a young waiter returning her sunglasses - O.J. Simpson was sentenced to a 15-year sentence on unrelated 2007 charges of burglary and kidnapping. Somehow, although the sentencing judge said the cases were unrelated, it still felt like justice. Simpson won't be eligible for parole for at least nine years.

In a week when the FBI reports that the "clearance" rate for murder - particularly involving stranger murders such as drive-by shootings - has dropped from 91 percent in 1963 to 61 percent in 2007, it's important to note that it's still virtually impossible to get away with killing family members. The links and motives are too well known.

It's small comfort, but when we're dealing with the murder of children, wives and husbands, comfort is not easy to find.