One Discipline From Murder

Discipline David Graham & Diane Zamora – The Killer Cadets December 1995, Mansfield, Texas a town southeast of Fort Worth. Actually, it’s south and about halfway between Fort Worth and Dallas. Back in 1995, it was still had a small-town feel. On the morning of Monday December 4th, 1995, a farmer was driving along a country road next to a reservoir known as Joe Pool Lake, about 12 miles outside of Mansfield, when he spotted what he first thought was roadkill on the ground behind a barbed-wire fence. But when he stopped to check it out, it turned out to be the body of a teenage girl. Her face was unrecognizable. She had a bullet hole in her left cheek, and another in her forehead. The left side of her skull above her ear was smashed in. She had on flannel shorts, a gray “UIL Region I Cross Country Regionals 1995.” T-shirt and white socks with no shoes. There was no evidence of sexual assault and little signs she had struggled or been restrained in any way. She had some marks on her neck. Detectives didn’t think this was the work of a rapist and that the victim probably knew her killer. It only took a few hours for police to identify her as Adrianne Jones, a popular 16-year-old sophomore from Mansfield High School. Her parents, Bill and Linda Jones, were shocked and horrified. They had moved to Mansfield from Dallas in 1984 with their 3 kids, Adrianne and her 2 younger brothers, thinking it would be a safer place to raise their family. Adrianne, who was also known as A.J., was gorgeous, blonde teen, known as a big flirt, but not promiscuous. Many of the HS boys wanted their chance to date Adrianne. Bill Jones was very protective of his daughter. If she was going to a movie or amusement park with friends, she had to show him her ticket stub when she got home. After Adrianne had been caught sneaking out of the house at night a few times to meet up with friends, Bill nailed her bedroom windows shut. Only recently had she been allowed to stay out past 9pm on the weekends. But Adrianne wasn’t a wild child. She took honors classes at school and was an athlete who played soccer until she had a knee injury and then joined the cross-country team. She even had a part-time job at a local fast-food restaurant. She was extremely friendly said hi to everyone. According to Linda, she would spend hours putting on makeup just to look like she wasn’t wearing any. And when asked why all the effort, Adrianne said, “you never know who you might meet.” Only hours before the police showed up at their door did the Jones family realize Adrianne was missing. Adrianne was not home at 6am when Linda woke up, but she assumed Adrianne gotten up early and gone for a run before school, which was common. But later they were contacted by the school that Adrianne had not shown up, she looked in her room and saw Adrianne’s running shoes were still there. Police had their work cut out for them. Adrianne was a popular teenager who went to school with thousands of other students. Plus, she knew a lot of people thru sports, and she worked in a fast-food restaurant. The list of people she had contact with recently was enormous. She had a boyfriend of a few weeks, Tracy Smith, a student from another school. They had met where she worked. Linda told police that the night before her murder, they allowed Adrianne to speak on the phone with Tracy for a few minutes past her usual 10pm cutoff because he’d been out of town with his family. Linda had been casually listening in to Adrianne on the phone. At one point she heard her answer the call waiting and speak to someone else for a minute or 2 and then went back to Tracy. Once she hung up, Linda asked her daughter who had called in while she was on the phone. Adrianne told her, “It was David from cross-country. He was upset about something.” About 30 minutes later Linda noticed Adrianne getting her clothes ready for school and that she seemed “antsy”. She told her daughter to turn out the lights and go to bed. One of her sons said he was awoken by the sound of a car in the driveway at some point during night, and he looked out the window and thought he saw a pickup truck drive away from the house. When she learned Adrianne didn’t show up for school, Linda called Lee Ann Burke, the cross-country coach, and asked her if there was a David on the team. Coach Burke said yes, there was a senior named David Graham on the team, but she didn’t think they were friends. She had a friend of Adrianne’s ask David if he’d spoken to Adrianne on the phone the previous night. He was confused and said “Talk to Adrianne? No, why would I?” Detectives wanted to speak to Tracy Smith immediately. He was interviewed and passed a polygraph test. He told police that when he and Adrianne were on the phone, she told him it was someone named “Bryan” that had called in on the other line saying he was depressed and asked to meet her later that night. There was a teen named Bryan McMillen who would come to see Adrianne at a Subway restaurant where she had once worked. He had a crush on her that turned into a kind of obsession. He would come by often and make her uncomfortable enough that she’d hide in back when she saw him coming. Her friends and family told detectives Bryan had kind of stalked Adrianne. Bryan was interviewed and police learned that he was on several medications for clinical depression. He admitted to having a relapse and had been drinking the night of the murder. He was so intoxicated he couldn’t tell detectives if he had talked to Adrianne that night or if he had picked her up that night. His father insisted his son had been home the entire night. His friends told police Bryan was a gentle soul and would never hurt anyone. On December 15th Bryan was arrested and his pickup truck was impounded. He spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve in jail. But when no other evidence was found and Bryan passed a polygraph with flying colors, he was released and cleared as a suspect. A year before a friend of Adrianne’s named Kristen had been attacked and beaten by a 14 yr old girl with a baseball bat because she thought Kristen had slept with her boyfriend. Kristen ednde up with a concussion and broken cheek bone. The girl also shot and wounded her boyfriend during the attack. Adrianne had testified in court against the girl who attacked her friend. The girl then threatened to “get” Adrianne for testifying against her. But the girl had a solid alibi for the night of Adrianne’s murder and passed a polygraph test. Adrianne’s murder did not get media attention for very long. A month after her murder, 9 yr old Amber Hagerman was abducted from Arlington, Texas, and found dead 4 days later. The media jumped on the search for her killer and her parents’ frustration with the lack of child protection laws. Amber’s murder would lead to the development of the Amber Alert system. By the summer of 1996 police had interviewed nearly 300 teens in the area. With no leads left, Adrianne’s case was put on the back burner. There were all kinds of rumors going around as to what happened to Adrianne. She was grabbed while out jogging. She ran with a rough crowd, knew drug dealers and went to raves in a nearby towns. Bill Jones said, “About the only thing we didn’t hear was that Adrianne had been abducted by aliens.” Linda Jones would frequently drive by the site at Joe Pool Lake hoping to run into her daughter’s murderer visiting the scene. She consulted psychics looking for answers. Bill and Linda kept Adrianne’s room exactly as she left it and would turn the lights on and open the curtains so people passing by could see into her room. Then on August 29, 1996, detectives got a call from an attorney at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland asking if they had an unsolved murder of a teenage girl. ***Break*** 2 freshmen midshipmen (which is what they call a cadet in the Naval Academy) named Mandy Gotch and Jennifer McKearney reported to a Navy chaplin that the previous day - Saturday, August 24 – their roommate, 18 year old Diane Zamora from Crowly, Texas told them an crazy story. The Naval Academy has a very strict honor code requiring midshipmen to immediately report another midshipman who lies, cheats, or breaks the law in any way. The previous night the 3 young women had been questioning Diane as to how serious her relationship was to her boyfriend, 18yo David Graham, who was spending his freshman year at the Airforce Academy in Colorado Springs. Diane said they were so committed to each other, that they would do anything for each other, in fact they had even killed for each other. Mandy and Jennifer thought she was bragging of course, until Diane said that the previous year David had cheated on her so she told him to kill the other girl. And that they killed her together. It was still pretty incredible, but they decided to report it just in case. The detectives from Texas immediately hopped a flight to Maryland to interview Diane. She told them it was a story she made up to make her seem tougher to the other midshipmen. Turned out she had also told a similar story to her squad leader, but he had a crush on Diane and thought she was lying to impress him and didn’t report her. There was no evidence against her, but they didn’t believe her story was a lie. They only thing they knew was that her boyfriend, David Graham, was on the cross-country team with Adrianne. The Naval Academy suspended Diane and she was sent home Crowley, Texas – about 15 miles west of Mansfield. Detectives had spoken to David Graham in the early days of the murder investigation, but he didn’t seem to have any connection with Adrianne other than being on the same team with a number of other students. None of Adrianne’s friends thought the 2 of them were friends. David was 2 years older and a senior. Still, they asked around about David and Diane and talked to a friend of the couple who told them that in the early morning hours of December 4, 1995, David and Diane showed up at his house, knocked on his bedroom window and he let them in thru the window. They very agitated and had blood on their clothes. They wouldn’t say what happened, but they changed into clean clothes and then laid on his floor and held each other while praying for forgiveness together. They swore the friend to secrecy. Detectives flew out to Colorado Springs to speak with David. At first he said he couldn’t explain why Diane would make up something so horrible. They gave him a polygraph test and he failed. Then the detectives told David what they learned from his friend. David broke down and typed out a 4-and-a-half-page confession. David Graham and Diane Zamora met in 1991, 4 years before Adrianne’s murder. They both attended weekly meetings of the Civil Air Patrol, an Air Force auxiliary unit that teaches kids 12-18 years old the basics of the military life and leads search-and-rescue missions for downed aircraft thru their cadet program. David was the youngest of 4 children. His parents were both educators. He excelled at school, was well-mannered, and athletic. He was tall, blonde and handsome. He was a battalion commander in his high school's Junior ROTC program. Even as a little boy he knew he was going to the Air Force Academy after high school and eventually becoming a fighter pilot. Diane was just as serious and driven. She was the oldest of 4 children, her father was an electrician and her mother was a nurse. She was a member of the National Honor Society, shebelonged to several clubs at her high school and dreamed of going into the Air Force Academy, and eventually becoming an astronaut. Diane was pretty, petite with dark hair and eyes. Unlike other girls her age, she wasn’t interesting in dating, fashion or makeup. She was laser-focused on her future. In fact, she looked down on other girls who let their boy-craziness distract them. But everything changed when David and Diane met. They had similar dreams and ambitions. They started dating in August of 1995, just before the beginning of their senior year, just a few months before Adrianne’s murder. They were immediately inseparable. But to the point of an unhealthy obsession. When they were around each other they had to be touching. David would put his arms around her like he was holding on to her or protecting her. After only a month, they announced their engagement to their families. They had a plan to get married August 13, 2000, right after they graduated from the Air Force Academy. David had sold several of his hunting rifles to buy Diane an engagement ring. Diane had been brought up in a very religious family and planned to wait until marriage to have sex. But she changed her mind once they were engaged. That just fueled the jealous and possessive side of their relationship. But Diane missed the deadline to apply to the Air Force Academy. So she applied and was accepted to the Naval Academy. They made a plan to keep in constant contact thru phone calls and letters to ensure their love could endure the distance from Colorado to Maryland for 4 years. And after graduation, Diane would transfer her commission to the Air Force they could be stationed together. But according to David’s typed confession, just a few months into their relationship, in November of 1995, he gave Adrianne Jones a ride home after a cross-country meet in Lubbock, Texas. Rather than give him directions to her house, she directed him to an empty school parking lot where they had sex before he took her home. Apparently guilt and shame ate away at David, and he eventually told Diane what happened. Quote from him confession: She “screamed sobs I wouldn’t have thought possible” for an hour. And said she felt “betrayed, deceived, and forgotten.” While she was screaming and sobbing, Diane slammed her head repeatedly into the wall and floor. The only way David could make up for what he did, would be to kill Adrianne. And if he didn’t, he would never see Diane again, and she might even kill herself. His confession also included the quotes: “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.” “I didn’t have any harsh feelings for Adrianne. But no one could stand between me and Diane.” "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." The plan was to convince Adrienne to come out of her house and get into a car with David, either by saying he wanted to talk or suggest they hookup. Diane would be hiding in the car. They’d drive out to Joe Pool Lake, break her neck and then sink her body to the bottom of the lake using weights. It was David who had buzzed in the night of December 3rd while Adrianne was on the phone with her boyfriend. Later that night Adrianne managed to sneak out wearing the tshirt and flannel short she slept in, and socks with no shoes, and got into a car David was driving. The car was a green Mazda Protégé hatchback that belonged to Diane’s mom. Diane was hidden under a blanket in the hatchback. When they arrived at the lake Adrianne reclined her seat and David leaned over like he was going to kiss her. Then Diane popped up from the back and Adrianne freaked out and David held her down and both tried to get a hold of Adrianne’s neck but she was fighting them and it was harder than they thought it would be. Diane asked Adrianne if she had slept with her boyfriend and Adrianne admitted she had but she felt really guilty about it. Diane began screaming at David again and he tried to hold Adrianne down and grab her neck. That’s when Diane grabbed one of the 25-pound weights they had brought with and swung at Adrianne. She missed twice but struck her on the 3rd try. The side of her head was smashed in, and she was bleeding profusely, but she didn’t die instantly or even lose consciousness. To their surprise she crawled out of the open car window and started stumbling away. Badly injured and in shock, she stumbled over the barbed wire fence and was lying on the ground when. David got out of the car and walked to where Adrianne had collapsed on the ground, still alive. He went back to the car and told Diane she was dead. But Diane insisted he shoot her, so David went back with the 9mm gun he had brought in case and shot Adrianne in the face, twice as he stood over her. Then he got back in the car, David and Diane said “I love you” to each other and drove off. A few minutes later Diane said “We shouldn’t have done that.” On September 6, David and Diane were arrested on capital murder charges. While they waited for their separate trials, they wrote thousands of letters to each other. They both acted as though being in jai was a temporary inconvenience and that they’d still get married and have their dream careers. David even started taking college courses from jail. The 9mm gun and the weights were found in David’s father’s attic. Diane eventually confessed and her story was fairly consistent with David’s. Detectives found her datebook and found a few interesting entries. On November 4th she had written “Lubbock” which turned out to be the day of the cross-country meet when David drove Adrianne home. On December 1st she wrote “confession”. And on December 4th she wrote “1:38 am Adrianne” Diane’s trial was scheduled first. But before it began a made for TV movie aired in 1997 called Love's Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder. Diane was played by Holly Marie Combs. Diane’s trial began in February 1998. Adrianne’s mother, Linda, asked the court to not seek the death penalty for either defendant. Diane pled not guilty. She admitted to being present at the murder, but not participating in it. She only wanted to meet Adrianne and talk to her, because she thought David had made the story of their sexual encounter up to make her jealous. She said she initially confessed to take the blame in order to save David’s career. And that she was scared of him because he was abusive. The jury found her guilty and was given a life sentence, eligible for parole after 40 years. David’s trial began in July 1998. He also pled not guilty and had recanted his confession. But later said he felt pressured to do so by his lawyer. He was also found guilty and received the same sentence. David and Diane’s relationship did not last. In 2003, Diane began dating a fellow inmate, Steven Mora, via prison mail. They never met in person but decided to get married anyway and petitioned for a marriage license. In June 2003, Diane’s mother and a male friend stood in for Diane and Steven and it became the county’s first proxy marriage. Sadly, they divorced in 2008. In 2007 she was interviewed on Dateline and maintained that she was only an accessory to the murder. She agreed to let them give her a polygraph on the show. She started exaggerating her breathing – which she blamed on hyperventilating due to nerves. But that is also a known countermeasure for polygraph tests. The test administrator believed she failed the question “did she intend to kill Adrianne”. But 2 other independent administrators said the test was inconclusive due to her exaggerated breathing. In 2010 David also got married in prison, he earned a bachelor’s degree in criminology, and was working to become a pastor and start his own ministry in the prison. Both David Graham and Diane Zamora will be eligible for parole in 2036 when they are 58 years old. Sources: Texas monthly .com Dallas News .com Lori A Johnston .medium .com Caselaw .findlaw .com Murderpedia .com Wikipedia .com Something I found odd: When doing my research only Diane Zamora had a Wikipedia page or a Murderpedia page. If I googled David or Adrianne, I kept getting redirected to articles featuring Diane.