The Killer Cadets
(Page 2 of 6)
But within Mansfield itself, the news had residents reeling. High school administrators set up special rooms for students to meet with counselors. A tree was planted in memory of Adrianne next to the junior varsity soccer field, and more than 150 of her classmates joined hands around the tree and shouted, “Unity! Strength! Courage!” Some residents wore ribbons in her memory, and a small cross made from two branches wrapped with red electrical wire was placed where her body had been discovered. After the family held a private funeral for Adrianne at the Methodist church, Linda Jones agreed to allow the cross-country and soccer teams to come to the church for a second memorial service. On the altar was a glamorous color photo of Adrianne, taken a few weeks earlier, that Linda had planned to give her for Christmas. “Try to remember the good things about Adrianne,” she said in a spontaneous eulogy, trying to bolster the spirits of the students. “Do you remember the way she walked with that bubble butt of hers?”
Nearly crazed with grief, Linda consulted psychics to try to find out what had happened to Adrianne. She made sure to wear some item of her daughter’s almost every day—either a piece of clothing or her shoes or her makeup. At night, she and Bill left the light on in Adrianne’s bedroom, as if hoping their daughter would find her way back home. Kids drove past the house, staring through the open curtains, able to see Adrianne’s vanity, where she had put on her makeup, her stereo, and her bookcase, which still held a couple of her Stephen King novels.
Among the nearly 2,500 students at Mansfield High, it didn’t take long for the rumors to start flying. “A lot of us had this weird feeling that the killer was walking the halls with us,” said April Grossman, a friend of Adrianne’s who also ran cross-country and played on the soccer team. “Those of us who were really close to Adrianne were scared because we thought she might have been killed because of something she knew. And we thought, ‘Well, will the killer come after us thinking that Adrianne had told us the secret?’”
Some kids said they had heard that Adrianne used to slip out of the house to attend all-night “rave” parties as far away as Denton (an hour’s drive north of Mansfield). Maybe, they whispered, someone she met at a rave had wanted to kill her. Others said they had heard that she knew drug dealers. There was so much gossip about the boys Adrianne had been with that Linda went so far as to tell one reporter that her daughter was no “sleep-around.” There was even a preposterous story that a close girlfriend of Adrianne’s had wanted to kill her because Adrianne had told that girl’s mother about her getting drunk at a party. “About the only thing we didn’t hear,” Bill said, “was that Adrianne had been abducted by aliens.”
Still, for the investigators in the case—who had come to include the Mansfield police, a Texas Ranger, and extra Grand Prairie detectives—Adrianne’s murder had all the makings of a high school whodunit. Although the Texas Education Agency had named Mansfield High a mentor school (a distinction given only to the best high schools in the state), the teenagers there were like teenagers anywhere, their lives often driven by insecurities, inchoate yearnings, and a provincial restlessness. Wavering in that territory that lies between childhood and adulthood, the students tried on and discarded different selves as quickly as they went through blue jeans, always searching for the perfect fit. It was here that they confronted raw new emotions, like their own budding sexuality, and here that they first attempted to make their way through such moral dilemmas as whether to “do it” or not.
Sitting outside the high school in their unmarked cars, watching students troop in and out, the detectives prepared themselves to enter the humid realm of adolescence. They talked to school officials about the students who had a knack for minor trouble. They asked other kids if they knew anyone who was jealous of or angry at Adrianne. Within days, they had compiled a long list of kids they wanted to talk to.
Bill and Linda Jones had told the police that on the night of Adrianne’s death, they had reluctantly allowed her to talk on the phone past her usual ten o’clock cut-off time. Her new boyfriend, Tracy Smith, had been out of town that weekend with his parents, and he didn’t call until ten-thirty. Bill and Linda didn’t know Tracy that well. He was a large kid who was built like a lineman on a college football team, and he went to high school in the nearby town of Venus. Apparently, he and Adrianne had met just a couple of months earlier at the Golden Fried Chicken. Bill told Adrianne she could talk to Tracy but only for a few minutes.
During that call, Linda heard her daughter say, “Hold on, there’s someone on the other line.” Adrianne punched the call-waiting button and spoke quietly for a minute, then clicked back over and finished her conversation with Tracy.
“Who was that who called in?” Linda later asked.
According to Linda, Adrianne replied, “Oh, that was David from cross-country, and he’s upset about something.”
After talking with Tracy, Adrianne went to her room. At ten forty-five, Linda Jones saw that Adrianne was still awake, ironing her pants for school the next day. She seemed “sort of antsy,” Linda said. Linda told her to turn off the lights and go to bed.
Sometime after midnight, one of Adrianne’s younger brothers heard the constrained tumble of a slow-moving engine outside the house. When he looked out the window, he saw what he thought was a pickup truck driving away.
The next morning, Adrianne was nowhere to be found, and Linda and Bill thought she might have risen early to go running. But when they discovered her running shoes in her bedroom, they got anxious. Linda called Lee Ann Burke, the cross-country coach at Mansfield High, and asked, “Who is someone named David on the cross-country team?”
“Well, there’s David Graham,” Burke replied.
“Adrianne’s missing,” Linda said, “and I think he called her last night.”
Burke was baffled. She didn’t even know David and Adrianne were friends. David, a senior, was a decent cross-country athlete, but he was best known around the school for his position as battalion commander of the school’s Junior ROTC program. Burke sent April Grossman to David’s second-period math class to ask him if he had called Adrianne the previous night. David stared at April as if she were not making sense. “Did I talk to Adrianne? No. Why would I?”
As their investigation began, the detectives did conduct a perfunctory interview with David Graham, but they were so certain he was not involved that they didn’t even try to give him a polygraph test. For one thing, David’s name was not among the thirty or so listed in Adrianne’s personal phone book. Nor did the detectives hear his name mentioned by any of Adrianne’s friends when they asked who might have had a close relationship with her. In fact, Tracy Bumpass said that Adrianne told her all of her “deepest, darkest secrets,” but not once did she ever talk about David.
Besides, David had supposedly been seen with tears in his eyes at the memorial service, seemingly stunned like everyone else that Adrianne was gone. Few students considered themselves good friends with David—“We all knew him, but we really didn’t know him, you know?” said Kenny Grant, whose locker was next to David’s throughout high school—and he certainly was not part of the school’s most popular crowd. Still, he intrigued other kids. With his military burr haircut and ramrod posture, he seemed to be a throwback to a different era. The youngest of four children, David lived with his father, Jerry Graham, a retired Mansfield elementary school principal. He was divorced from David’s mother, Janice, a former teacher who lived in Houston. At the age of seven, after seeing his first air show, David told his father he wanted to become an Air Force pilot, and he never wavered from his dream. Although ROTC students at Mansfield High were usually the subjects of jokes—“We thought of all of them in their green uniforms as sort of geeky,” one girl said—it was clear that David was going places. He was a National Merit commended student (just below the rank of National Merit semifinalist), and Congressman Martin Frost had agreed to support his application to enroll the next fall in the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. “Some of the more sarcastic guys in school would address him as Colonel Graham,” said Jennifer Skinner, who sat near David in a government class his senior year. “But you could tell they sort of said it out of respect.” Added another classmate, David Brennan, “He could fall asleep during class and then wake up and still answer the teacher’s questions.”
