The Killer Cadets
(Page 6 of 6)
Diane paused. “We have,” she said. Then she told them the story about Adrianne—whether out of guilt or pride, no one is sure. Initially, the two roommates were skeptical about what they had heard, but the next day, they nervously told a Navy chaplain about the conversation. The chaplain contacted a Navy attorney at the Academy, who then began calling police departments in the Dallas—Fort Worth area to ask if they had an unsolved murder of a teenage girl. On August 29 he contacted the Grand Prairie police department. The next morning, detectives were on a flight to Annapolis.
I just wanted it to be a dream.…I wanted to be able to drive Adrianne back home, to go to sleep, and to wake up back on December 3, free to make my decisions all over again.
THEY PULLED HER OUT OF THE FIRST pep rally of the season for Navy’s football team, the first night when the plebes were allowed to mingle with upperclassmen and feel a part of the Academy. Across the Yard came the sound of pounding drums and cheering midshipmen as Diane was escorted down a long hallway in the administration building and then was led into a room where several detectives and Navy officials waited.
She admitted to nothing. She said only that she had been insecure throughout plebe summer, and she thought such a tale about murder would make her look tougher in the eyes of other plebes.
The cops weren’t buying it, but what could they do? They had no evidence against her. Navy officials told her they were temporarily suspending her and sending her home until the matter was straightened out. They gave her an airplane ticket that took her from Baltimore to Atlanta and then on to Dallas. When Diane reached Atlanta, however, she changed planes and flew to Colorado Springs, where she went to see David.
No one knows what was said between them. But the two did have their photographs taken by a friend of David’s. David was wearing his Air Force uniform, Diane her all-white Naval outfit. In that one moment, they looked at the camera with a nearly desperate look, as if they knew that this was their last time together—that the fairy tale was over.
When the detectives arrived in Colorado Springs, David insisted that he couldn’t imagine why Diane would tell such a blatantly false story. But the cops told him they had found his friend in Burleson and had heard the story of the bloody clothing. Then the Air Force officers told the young cadet that he had a duty to reveal the truth. Finally, David broke. He sat down at a word processor and typed a four-and-a-half-page confession (reprinted in part in the Dallas Morning News) that one forensic psychologist would later equate with a Danielle Steele novel. David wrote that for a month after his evening with Adrianne, he was tormented by “guilt and shame.” The “perfect and pure” relationship between him and Diane, he added, had been defiled by “the one girl [who] had stolen from us our purity.” Eventually, he told Diane about his tryst. “For at least an hour she screamed sobs that I wouldn’t have thought possible. It wasn’t just jealousy. For Diane, she had been betrayed, deceived and forgotten.” He then said Diane gave him an ultimatum: kill Adrianne. David agreed. “I didn’t have any harsh feelings for Adrianne,” he wrote, “but no one could stand between me and Diane.”
And so, David admitted, he called Adrianne on the night of December 4, 1995, and said he wanted to see her. He picked her up in a Mazda Protege owned by Diane’s parents. Diane was hiding in the hatchback. They drove out to a secluded country road, and Adrianne reclined the passenger’s seat, no doubt hoping for another romantic interlude. According to David’s confession, while he held Adrianne, Diane raised up from her hiding place and hit her in the head with a dumbbell that belonged to David. Adrianne, however, did not die. “I realized too late that all those quick, painless snaps seen in the movies were just your usual Hollywood stunts,” David wrote. “Adrianne somehow crawled through the window and to our horror, ran off. I was panicky, and just grabbed the Marakov 9mm to follow. To our relief (at the time) she was too injured from the wounds to go far. She ran into a nearby field and collapsed .…In that short instant, I knew I couldn’t leave the key witness to our crime alive. I just pointed and shot…I fired again and ran to the car. Diane and I drove off. The first things out of our mouths were, ‘I love you.’” And then Diane said, her thirst for revenge suddenly slaked, “We shouldn’t have done that, David.”
The police recovered the handgun along with several dumbbells from the attic of the Grahams’ home. They also confronted Diane, who by then was back in Texas. She stared at the officers. Then she quietly went to the station to give her own confession. She was put in a solitary cell on a separate floor from David—she looked like a harmless teenage girl in a sleeveless shirt and blue jeans. Every day, she did push-ups and sit-ups in her cell. She asked her mother for history and government textbooks so she could continue her studies. She said little to the guards or to her fellow female inmates, except for one prisoner who regularly cried because she missed her children. Diane sang her a contemporary Christian song she had memorized back in high school titled “Faith.”
In Mansfield, as everywhere else, the question on everyone’s mind was, Why? It was one thing, residents said, to read about urban gang kids shooting it out over a rivalry, but how did the culture of the streets—where loyalty and vengeance are valued above life and law—infect upstanding small-town kids? There were the usual discussions about teenagers’ values being shaped more by shabby movie violence and the angry lyrics of their favorite singers than they were by moral lessons from their parents. Other citizens were shocked to learn that more than one of David’s closest friends suspected that David was involved in Adrianne’s murder, yet never said anything to the police. It was as if the most important thing among these teenagers was not “narc-ing” on a friend.
After the initial wave of national publicity over the arrests, Anna Barrett, a reporter for the Mansfield News Mirror, began looking for positive stories to write about the high school to help the community’s morale. “But something has changed in this town,” she said. “You can feel it.” Indeed, within a month after the arrests, a junior at Mansfield High was shot in the face with a shotgun and killed. A girl who had been on the cross-country team hanged herself because of personal problems. As for Bill and Linda Jones, they changed their phone number to avoid the phone calls from reporters, television shows, and movie producers. One producer, explaining why David and Diane’s would be a great miniseries, said in an interview, “It’s a modern-day Romeo and Juliet—only they kill someone else instead of each other.”
What remained unfathomable was how David and Diane could convince themselves that only death could eliminate the one blot on their perfect teenage love affair. How could they imagine that sexual betrayal was a far worse crime than murder? It seems clear that David convinced Diane that Adrianne was a seductress who lured him behind the elementary school. According to one police source, just before Diane hit Adrianne in the head, she looked at her and said, “I know who you are! I know what you’ve done!”
Perhaps a trial will provide the definitive answer to why they did it. The district attorney’s office has not determined whether it will seek the death penalty for the two eighteen-year-olds. There is an outside chance that David’s attorney, Dan Cogdell of Houston, will get David’s confession thrown out of court because he had been confined to his quarters at the Air Force Academy for more than thirty hours before the police took the confession. If a judge rules that the confession is admissible, however, then it is possible that Cogdell and John Linebarger, a prominent Fort Worth defense attorney who has been hired by Diane’s family, will try to position their clients to point fingers at each other. “If I think attacking the Zamora girl is the appropriate line of defense, I will do it,” said Cogdell, who added that he believes Graham wrote his confession to cover for Diane. A couple of investigators agree with him, believing that Diane had a Lady Macbeth—like control over David’s life, coaxing and taunting him into letting his impulses and desires overcome his scruples. But others suggest that David, who brought guns and violence, sex and betrayal into Diane’s sweet and studious life, exercised his spell over her by enlisting her as a partner in murder—using death to bind them together for life. There is even a third police theory that David, wanting to prove that he cared nothing for Adrianne, took one shot, and Diane, consumed with fury, took the other.
Still, it is difficult to imagine that David and Diane will someday turn into adversaries in court. When David was being escorted to the county jail in Fort Worth, a television reporter asked if he had anything to say to Diane. David looked at the camera and said, “I love you.” As for Diane, one afternoon she motioned toward a guard and asked if she would pass on a message to David.“
“What is it?” the guard asked.
Diane paused. “Tell him, ‘Greenish brown female sheep.’”
