The Killer Cadets
(Page 5 of 6)
But the friend never reported the incident to the police, and soon David and Diane were back to their old ways. Using his father’s credit card, David bought Diane and Gloria leather coats as Christmas presents. He got Diane’s engagement ring out of layaway so she could begin to wear it. On Valentine’s Day, he gave her a teddy bear and flowers.
Diane’s family could not help but wonder about the relationship as it progressed. David and Diane seemed so absorbed in one another’s lives . . . so obsessed. “No matter what we were talking about, Diane brought up David’s name. She was always talking about David this or David that,” said Diane’s cousin Ronnie Gonzalez. One night when they were apart and David didn’t call, Diane tearfully begged her mother to call his house to see if anything terrible had happened to him. David was no different. He came over every afternoon to run with Diane, and some nights he would stay so late that he would fall asleep on the couch. His father would call, demanding that he come home, but David would dawdle for hours before leaving. Whenever Diane would go to a school function at night, David would phone every hour from his home until she got back.
That spring, they learned within days of each other that they had been accepted to their academies—David to the Air Force, Diane to the Navy. At special ceremonies at their high schools, they were presented with their academy acceptance letters. The Mansfield students gave a long ovation to David, who had Diane at his side. “I know this sounds strange to say now,” recalled Becki Strosnider, the former editor of the Mansfield Uproar, “but we thought it was so cool that he had followed his dream.” For her part, Gloria was so proud of what her daughter had done that she called the Hispanic-oriented La Estrella section of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and suggested a story. When she spoke with David and Diane, the reporter, Rosanna Ruiz, asked them if they were being realistic about being married in five years, considering they would be so far apart. But the two insisted that they would stay in touch daily through e-mail. “I was surprised at how adamant they were,” Ruiz recalled. “They said they were certain the marriage was going to happen and that there were not going to be any outs. Then they stopped and looked at one another.”
In the summer of 1996, after nearly three hundred interviews, detectives put the case on what they called slow-down mode. Bill and Linda Jones sank deeper into despair. Bill had to restrain himself to keep from interrogating every teenager he saw in town. Linda would get into her car at night and drive to the site where Adrianne was found, hoping she might come across the killer. Some students continued to see counselors about Adrianne’s death. April Grossman painted a portrait of Adrianne in art class to honor her. She showed it to David, who sat behind April in government. He looked at it, paused, and then said, “You did a good job, April.”
We realized it was either her or us…I just pointed and shot.
ONLY 1,239 YOUNG PEOPLE WERE ACCEPTED out of the 8,736 who applied to enter the Air Force Academy for the fall 1996 semester. Of the nearly 10,000 who applied to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, only 1,212 were accepted, 200 of those being women. Just by getting into their academies, David Graham and Diane Zamora had become part of a select group of American teenagers. To stay there, however, they had to survive grueling summer boot camps designed to eradicate their civilian habits and teach them the exacting discipline of military life. For the freshmen at the academies—known as plebes at the Naval Academy and Doolies at the Air Force Academy—the six-week summer sessions were humid days of nonstop marching, push-ups, running, and taking orders. Upperclassmen belittled them every time they made a mistake. At meals, the freshmen were required to keep their eyes focused on their plates at all times except when questioned by a superior. They had to be prepared to answer a barrage of questions and recite long passages about academy rules from memory. The system was unnerving and often demoralizing, and it was not unusual to see a cadet or midshipman resign his or her commission before the summer was over.
By all indications, David successfully completed his Basic Cadet Training in Colorado Springs. According to relatives who read them, Diane’s letters home indicated that she was capably enduring “plebe summer” in Annapolis. She wrote in detail about her daily schedule, from the ninety-minute calisthenic sessions at six in the morning to the evening drill period in which they marched with M16 rifles. She wrote that she was going to church again at the Naval Chapel and that she had joined the glee club.
But her squad leader, Jay Guild, a good-looking plebe from suburban Chicago, said Diane was not physically keeping up with the other plebes and seemed emotionally distracted. “She liked to talk about David,” Jay said. “She missed him a lot. She often talked about him very strangely, as if she didn’t trust him but she still wanted to be with him. It was very odd.”
Jay said Diane went on “crying fits” when David wouldn’t answer her e-mail. She told him she suspected David was cheating on her with a female cadet at the Air Force Academy. Apart from David for the first time since they began dating, Diane became plagued with jealousy, and she decided, in turn, to make David jealous. According to one source, Diane stopped sending David e-mail for several days, telling him that her computer had broken. A few weeks into the plebe summer, Jay added, Diane told him that she was considering breaking up with David, and she suggested that the two of them become boyfriend and girlfriend. She then sent David an e-mail telling him that Jay had kissed her.
David and Diane, who once had found such security in their all-consuming devotion, seemed to be whirling out of control. When David heard about Diane and Jay, he attempted to contact Naval officials to inform them that Jay was sexually harassing Diane. He sent threatening e-mail to Jay, demanding that he have nothing more to do with Diane. One person close to the investigation said that David wrote Diane letters begging her not to deceive him. In the letters, David would write such lines as, “Remember what binds us together.”
It was clear that Jay was captivated by Diane. When Diane’s parents and Jay’s mother arrived in Annapolis for Parents’ Weekend on August 9, they were told that Jay and Diane had been reprimanded by upperclassmen for excessive fraternizing. He had been seen sitting on the edge of her bed at night at Bancroft Hall, the coed dormitory where all the midshipmen lived. The truth was that Gloria was relieved to hear the news about Jay and Diane. “I got the very strong feeling that Diane’s parents felt the relationship between Diane and David had become an unhealthy one,” said Jay’s mother, Cheryl Guild. At one point in the weekend, Diane and her parents went to lunch with Jay and his mother. During that lunch, Diane got up to call to David. Cheryl could see Diane across the room, talking on the phone, and she noticed the girl was physically shaking. Gloria leaned toward Cheryl and said, “I wish Diane had met Jay first.”
Jay said that at one point in the summer, he asked Diane if David had ever cheated on her before. “She said yes, and I said, ‘What did you do about it?’ She told me that she had asked David to kill the other girl.”
Stunned, Jay listened as Diane told him that she had watched David kill a girl named Adrianne. She never said she had participated. “All she said is that she told him to do it and she saw him do it,” Jay said.
Although the Academy’s strict honor code, known as the Brigade of Midshipmen Honor Concept, states that a midshipman must immediately report another midshipman who lies, cheats, or breaks the law in any way, Jay told no one—and would eventually be asked to resign from the Academy because of his silence. “I didn’t want to believe it,” he said. “I thought maybe she was trying to get attention.”
But in late August, Diane told the story again, this time to her two roommates, Mandy Gotch and Jennifer McKearney. They were having a late-night conversation, and one of the girls mentioned how Diane and David seemed so in love. According to an investigator in the case, one roommate said to Diane, “I bet you two would do anything for one another.”
Diane replied, “Yes.”
“Even kill for one another?” the roommate asked.
