The Killer Cadets
(Page 4 of 6)
At Crowley High School, Diane was not one of the social girls who gathered between periods in the school’s chalky-smelling hallways to swap gossip. While she was not considered unfriendly, she was known around school as someone who kept to herself. “She didn’t have a whole lot to say,” one student said. She preferred associating with the smart kids at school—“homework buddies,” she called them—and she was determined to become an academic star. Late in her junior year, when she posed for her high school graduation picture, she asked that she be allowed to wear the special tassel for being in the top 10 percent of her senior class—even though she had no idea at that time whether she would achieve that honor. Diane said she wanted to have the photograph as a way to keep her motivated.
Diane did end up in the top 10 percent of her senior class. Gloria Zamora told her friends that the reason Diane worked so diligently was because she knew her parents could not afford to send her to a good college. When her father got laid off from work, Diane watched Gloria take on two nursing jobs a day and then sell Mary Kay cosmetics on the side to help pay the family’s bills. At one point, the electricity was cut off in their small house for more than a week. Diane studied by candlelight. But even with her ambition, Diane was still a teenager, filled with the same impulses and longings as any other girl her age. While she kept Civil Air Patrol military fatigues in her closet, she also had a collection of teddy bears on her bed. She took an after-school job at Fast Forward, a store oriented to teenage girls, because she liked the discount she could get on hip clothes. She listened to both contemporary Christian music and popular groups like Pearl Jam. “Diane was a really sweet girl,” said one former neighbor, Dale Rogers. “But I thought she was a little naive and sheltered from the outside world. She was really a virgin in life, you know? She hadn’t really experienced anything. She didn’t know all the things that could happen between people.”
And then, in August 1995, just before the start of her senior year, her life changed. She told her parents that she had fallen for a boy: David Graham. He was just like her, she said breathlessly. It was not only that they had known as children what they wanted to do with their lives. They both loved calculus, physics, and government, and they talked on the phone late into the night about their homework. Their feelings, well known to any adolescent, were a mixture of adoration and total possessiveness. When they were together, they never stopped touching. Diane would put her arm around his waist, sliding one finger into a belt loop, and David would encircle her with his arms. “He always had both arms around her, like he was afraid she was going somewhere,” said Diane’s aunt Sylvia. “The two of them looked like they were wrapped up in one another.”
It was not difficult for David and Diane to be swept away by the romantic grandeur of their relationship. By then, they were the stars of the Civil Air Patrol—David was a cadet-colonel in the CAP’s youth division, the highest accolade given, and Diane was the wing secretary—and they saw themselves as the top guns of the twenty-first century. David saw himself becoming a great fighter pilot, Diane a famous astronaut. Abandoning her plans to study physics at an academically elite major university, Diane applied to the Air Force Academy, where David was set on going. After she learned that the deadline had passed for applications, she applied to the U.S. Naval Academy with the intention of transferring her commission after graduation from the Navy to the Air Force so she could be stationed with David.
Diane’s family knew that David’s personality was a little different. He had a collection of hunting rifles, which he once brought over to their house. When he came to church with Diane, he wore his combat boots, pants, and a T-shirt, and he kept his arms closely around her through the service. He once showed up at the Zamoras’ house with a couple of his ROTC buddies from Mansfield. For entertainment, David took them out to the front yard and ordered them to march back and forth. “Diane was laughing, thinking it was funny,” said Sylvia, “but I think the rest of us wondered a little when David said, ‘I can get these guys to do whatever I want.’”
Still, no one could say that David was ever impolite around Diane or her family. On weeknights he drove the eighteen miles from Mansfield to Crowley and quietly sat in the Zamoras’ living room to do homework with her. When her parents couldn’t afford a pair of $100 combat boots for Diane, David bought them. After Diane had a serious wreck driving David’s pickup truck, requiring pins to be put into her left hand, David spent entire nights at the hospital with her. “Unlike that other boyfriend of hers who just wanted to go all the way,” said a relative, “David genuinely cared for Diane. I don’t think Diane had ever had that kind of attention.”
That September, about a month after they started dating, they told Diane’s parents that they were engaged. David had sold a couple of his hunting rifles to make a down payment for an engagement ring. They were going to get married, they said, on August 13, 2000, after they graduated from their military academies. They already had the wedding planned. They were going to charter a bus to carry their relatives in Texas to the famous Cadet Chapel on the Air Force Academy’s campus. There, David would wear his uniform, Diane a white wedding dress, and at the end of the ceremony, they would walk under crossed swords held by other cadets.
Not long after they announced their engagement, her family confirmed, Diane lost her virginity to David—an act that had a dramatic impact on her life. “After it was over, she was real confused by what had happened,” one relative said. “I know she felt guilty because she had wanted to wait. But once she went through with it, she became more committed than ever to David. I remember her saying, ‘If I can’t be Mrs. David Graham, then I will die as Miss Diane Zamora.’”
Indeed, they were hopelessly in love, focused as laser beams on each other. In that classic teenage way, they developed their own secret love code. She called him Tiger (the Mansfield High School mascot was a tiger), and he called her Kittens. And they ended many of their telephone conversations with the words, “Greenish brown female sheep.”
Greenish brown is the color olive. A female sheep is a ewe. Olive ewe. I love you.
When this precious relationship we had was damaged by my thoughtless actions, the only thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life of the one that had, for an instant, taken her place.
ON THE FIRST WEEKEND IN NOVEMBER, david traveled to Lubbock with other members of the Mansfield High cross-country team for the regional meet. Both the boys’ and girls’ squads had qualified, and the school provided them a large van for the trip. One of the students who went on that trip was Adrianne Jones.
In many ways, Adrianne was Diane Zamora’s polar opposite, an ebullient girl who knew how to charm guys and get them to look twice at her. When she posed for one studio portrait, she made sure to show some cleavage. Although she was far from sexually naive, she wasn’t overtly promiscuous in a way that would make her an outcast among the more popular girls. Diane, on the other hand, rarely put on makeup for school, and except for David, she thought most high school guys were immature. It is not known if anything happened between Adrianne and David in Lubbock. No one can remember whether they sat next to one another on the van or stayed up late talking at the motel. Some of Adrianne’s friends think she would have kept her distance from David. As one friend pointed out, Adrianne had her standards: She would never sleep with another girl’s boyfriend.
But something did happen when they returned to Mansfield. For whatever reason—perhaps Adrianne looked at David on that van and saw the kind of guy that even her father would like—she asked him to give her a ride home. They didn’t go straight to her house. Adrianne surprised him by asking him to take some turns that he knew were out of the way. They ended up behind an elementary school, where David parked the car, and he and Adrianne had sex—a brief but truly fatal entanglement.
Apparently they told no one. Their encounter seemed to have been an impulsive, one-night fling. But a month later, late in the evening, a friend of David’s who lived in the nearby town of Burleson heard a tapping at his window. David and Diane, their clothes bloodied, came through the window. According to the friend, David begged him to ask no questions. But the friend noticed that both David and Diane were upset. They lay on the floor and held each other. It was the same night Adrianne Jones disappeared from her home and was murdered.
