The Killer Cadets
(Page 3 of 6)
David Graham might have seemed tailor-made for the military—when he and others in the ROTC squadron presented the colors before the football games, he stood so perfectly still that people tended to watch him instead of the flag—but he never came across as one of those overly aggressive GI Joe types. He quit the football team after his freshman year because, it was said, he didn’t have the necessary ferocity to make it in Texas high school football. What’s more, girls liked him for his courtly manners. Angel Lockhardt, who was on the girls’ cross-country team, said David gave her rides home a few times after cross-country practice, “and he always acted like a gentleman.”
Plenty of girls would have dated David—“He was one of the last cool guys on earth,” a girl who served with David in the Mansfield High ROTC would later tell a reporter—but what few of them knew was that he already had a girlfriend. Her name was Diane Zamora, and she was a high school senior in the nearby town of Crowley. She was just as smart as David, and she was equally determined to get into one of the U.S. military academies. She was a member of the student council, the Key Club, the National Honor Society, and the Masters of the Universe, a science organization. She played flute in the marching band, and like David, she ran on her high school’s cross-country team. “When you looked at the two of them together,” one of Diane’s relatives said, “you just knew that a great future lay before them.”
The plan was to (and this is not easy for me to confess) break her young neck and sink her to the bottom of the lake…
THE FIRST MAJOR SUSPECT TO EMERGE in Adrianne’s murder was a Mansfield teenager, Tara (not her real name), who lived in a trailer park and already had something of a reputation around town. A year before, she thought her boyfriend had had a sexual encounter with one of Adrianne’s closest girlfriends. According to police records, Tara attacked the girl with a baseball bat, hitting her over the head, breaking her cheekbone, and leaving her with a concussion. Tara also shot and wounded her boyfriend. A restraining order was filed against Tara to keep her out of school and away from the girl she had attacked. At the hearing, Adrianne testified for her friend. Tara, in turn, allegedly told Adrianne, “I’ll get you for this.” Some students were convinced Tara was the killer. She fit their picture of what a killer would be: a surly, aimless individual far removed from the mainstream of suburban teenage life who had already shown her willingness to use a gun and a bat.
But the police discovered that Tara had a solid alibi, and she passed a polygraph test. Although Bill and Linda told the police they were suspicious of Adrianne’s boyfriend, Tracy Smith—Linda said he had never tried to contact the family after Adrianne’s killing—he too passed a polygraph.
Tracy did, however, give the police another clue. He said that Adrianne had told him that it was someone named Bryan who had clicked through on the phone that night. She had never mentioned David. She had said that “Bryan” was depressed and wanted to meet her that night to talk.
The detectives then learned that a Mansfield teenager named Bryan McMillen worked at an Eckerd’s near a Subway sandwich shop where Adrianne once worked. According to Adrianne’s friends and family, Bryan had become infatuated with Adrianne and often dropped by the Subway to see her. “He began to bother her so much that when she saw him coming, she started ducking her head behind the counter,” Linda Jones said.
The investigators’ suspicions were heightened when they discovered that the seventeen-year-old Bryan took four kinds of medication to battle symptoms of clinical depression. They asked him to come to the police station for an interview. According to an affidavit, Bryan first said he didn’t know an Adrianne Jones. Then he admitted that he did. A detective asked him if he had talked to Adrianne the night she was murdered. Bryan said he could have talked to her, but he didn’t remember. He had been drinking that night for the first time in six months, he said, and had become intoxicated. When asked why he had been drinking, Bryan said he had gotten upset because all of his friends had found girlfriends, but he hadn’t. He told detectives he felt like the “odd man out.”
It wasn’t hard for the police to put this scenario together: a lonely boy, unable to get the beautiful blonde from the high school to pay attention to him, devising a way to meet her late at night, then losing control. The detectives bored in, asking Bryan if he had gone to Adrianne’s house that night. Bryan said he might have. He said it was also possible he could have taken her somewhere. He just didn’t remember, he said.
A week later, in the pre-dawn hours of December 15, 1995, police officers armed with guns and a search warrant arrived at Bryan’s house. He was arrested for murder, and his pickup truck was impounded. This time, the story made the front pages of the newspapers, but several of Bryan’s friends defended him, saying that he was a gentle, slightly baffled kid who would never resort to violence. Bryan’s father insisted that the night of the murder, Bryan came home and never left the house.
Finally, after Bryan had spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve in jail, a lead prosecutor in the district attorney’s office arranged for a polygraph. “He not only passed,” the prosecutor said, “he passed with flying colors.”
Bryan’s release triggered more rumors, but no other suspects emerged. Because Adrianne’s brother had said that he had seen a pickup truck, the police ran computer checks to find any student who owned one. It never occurred to anyone that the vehicle her brother had seen might not have been involved in the murder. Nor, apparently, did anyone guess that Adrianne had told Tracy about a “Bryan” to keep him from learning about her relationship with someone else. Only months later would Tina Dollar, the manager at the Golden Fried Chicken, remember that Adrianne had once pulled a small photo of a boy out of her wallet and showed it to her.
“His name is David,” Adrianne had said.
…[Her] beautiful eyes have always played the strings of my heart effortlessly. I couldn’t imagine life without her; not for a second did I want to lose her.
DAVID GRAHAM AND DIANE ZAMORA first met about four years before Adrianne Jones’s murder, when their parents began dropping them off at a small airfield south of Fort Worth. They went there for weekly meetings of the Civil Air Patrol, an Air Force auxiliary organization that teaches the basics of the military life and leads search-and-rescue missions for downed aircraft. But there was no romance between them in their younger years. Despite her good looks, Diane was careful around guys. She did have a boyfriend during her sophomore year in high school, but the relationship was not particularly heated. When the two went out for dinner on Valentine’s Day, Diane asked to be taken home at eight-thirty because she needed to study. “She kept telling us she wanted to focus on her studies and her goals instead of on guys,” said her aunt Sylvia Gonzalez. “And she always made it a point to tell us she was never going to lose her virginity unless she got married. When two of her cousins got pregnant in high school, she said she couldn’t believe how stupid they were. She swore that nothing like that would happen to her.”
In the world of high school sexual skirmishing, Diane firmly put herself into the camp of “good girls.” A girl who goes too far, she would often say to her family, gets called a slut. When she realized during her sophomore year that her boyfriend was bent on having sex with her, she dumped him.
Diane’s father, Carlos, a kind, soft-spoken man, was an electrician; her mother, Gloria, was a registered nurse. The family was deeply religious. Gloria was the daughter of a minister who led a nondenominational Spanish-speaking church on the south side of Fort Worth. Gloria, her five sisters, and their families never missed Sunday services, and after church, the entire Zamora clan would gather for lunch at a cafeteria. Diane was the eldest of the Zamoras’ four children, and the most driven. When she was nine years old, she announced to her family that she wanted to become an astronaut. She sent off for NASA brochures, and by high school she was keeping a spiral notebook containing a list of achievements she had to accomplish to get a college scholarship. She knew exactly what her grade point average and SAT scores needed to be. She carried a knapsack full of schoolbooks everywhere in case she got stranded and had some time to fill.
