April 18, 2025 • 50 mins
The U.S. military teaches recruits to function together as a well-oiled machine—and for young people who dream of joining the most elite forces, it requires discipline, commitment, and loyalty, not to mention the courage to put yourself in harm’s way for the greater good. For the ones with the deepest commitment, there has to be a fire in the belly that drives them to keep their eye on the prize, no matter what the risks. Most of the time this sets the stage for great achievements. But sometimes, the personality type that lends itself to flawless dedication can teeter over the line into feverish obsession. Where’s the line? When you’ve cultivated a “failure is not an option” attitude your entire life, how do you put the brakes on when that determination starts to bleed into your personal relationships? Join us for the story of one of the most infamous killer couples of the 1990s: Diane Zamora and David Graham.
Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE
Sources:
Blind Love by Peter Meyer
Texas Monthly, Skip Hollandsworth: https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/the-killer-cadets/
A&E's "American Justice," 2000: "Duty, Honor, Murder"
Follow us, campers!
Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfire
https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/
Facebook: True Crime Campfire
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=en
Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfire
Email: truecrimecampfirepod@gmail.com
MERCH! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.
Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE
Sources:
Blind Love by Peter Meyer
Texas Monthly, Skip Hollandsworth: https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/the-killer-cadets/
A&E's "American Justice," 2000: "Duty, Honor, Murder"
Follow us, campers!
Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfire
https://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/
Facebook: True Crime Campfire
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=en
Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfire
Email: truecrimecampfirepod@gmail.com
MERCH! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction. Or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
The US military teaches recruits to function together as a
well oiled machine, and for young people who dream of
joining the most elite forces, it requires discipline, commitment, and loyalty,
not to mention, the courage to put yourself in harm's
way for the greater good. For the ones with the
deepest commitment, there has to be a fire in the
belly that drives them to keep their eye on the prize,
(00:42):
no matter what the risks. Most of the time this
sets the stage for great achievements, But sometimes the personality
type that lends itself to that flawless dedication can teeter
over the line into feverish obsession. Where is the line
when you've cultivated a failure is not an option attitude
your entire life? How do you put the brakes on
(01:04):
when that determination starts to bleed into your personal relationships?
This is Killer Cadets the Murder of Adrian Jones, so
campers for this one. We're at the US Naval Academy
(01:27):
in Annapolis, Maryland, one of the most elite selective training
programs in the country, where you can get a bachelor's
degree and begin training for military service at the same time.
August twenty fourth, nineteen ninety six, the summer before their
freshman year, new cadets go through what they call Plebe Summer.
Plebe is the nickname they give the first years, which
(01:47):
sounds like standard issue military hell, an ungodly amount of running, pushups, marching,
and getting yelled at all out in the summer sun.
It was a regiment designed to break you down and
build you back up again as a perfect midshipman, or,
in the case of freshman Diane Zamora and her roommates
Mandy and Jen midship women, the summer was coming to
(02:08):
a close, much to everybody's relief, they'd begin their first
full year at the academy soon. An experience like Plebe
Summer is pretty hellish for most people, but you're also
going to come out of it feeling accomplished, proud of yourself,
and probably pretty close to the people who suffered through
it with you. One night, Diane, Mandy, and Jennifer were
up late having one of those conversations that it's best
(02:30):
to have at two o'clock in the morning. They were
talking about relationships, you know, serious relationships. Love with a
capital L. Diane talked about her fiance David all the time.
They'd gotten together their senior year of high school. He
was at the Air Force Academy in Colorado now, but
he and Diane were still determined to get married once
(02:51):
they were done with their training. They were so young
to be engaged already. Diane's roomies were curious about their relationship.
Diane said David had gotten her through a really rough
time in her life. She'd been in a bad car accident,
almost lost her left hand, and David took care of
her the whole time she was recovering, got her meds
for her, made sure she took the right doses, make
(03:11):
sure she ate enough. When her parents were struggling with
money and Diane was living out of her car, David
took her in. Are you a virgin, Jen asked at
one point, no, Diane said, but sometimes I wish I were.
Things would be a lot easier if I hadn't had
sex with David. Why is that, the roommates wanted to know. Well,
(03:32):
Diane said, I just love him so much. If anybody
else touched him, I'd have to kill them. David had
misused her trust after she lost her virginity to him.
She said it was really bad, but they'd been through
a lot together. Their love was unbreakable. And then Diane
added something strange. David and I have each other's future
(03:54):
in the palm of our hands. If we wanted to,
we could ruin each other's lives. The way she said
it was intense so much that it made the other
two girls kind of uncomfortable. Jen laughed a little and said, Wow,
what did y'all do? Kill somebody? Diane was quiet for
a minute. Then she said, let's just say that somebody's
(04:16):
dead because of me. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Not unsettlingly at all, Diane good recovery.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
The roommate's first reaction was basically ohhaha, right, But then
Diane launched into a story that made their blood run cold.
The girls weren't sure if the story was true. Diane
was a little bit of an odd duck. She hadn't
exactly been a rock star during pleeb summer, She'd struggled
with the physical training, and she seemed kind of checked out.
(04:45):
Sometimes she might just be saying this to seem hard.
Maybe she thought it would sound cool and impressive. But
if her story was true, this pretty girl they'd been
rooming with all summer was a cold blooded killer, and
so was her boyfriend out in Colorado. Obviously, that's creepy
as hell, and you don't want to sleep in the
same room as a murderer. But also, the Naval Academy
(05:08):
has a strict code of honor. If you become aware
of something going on that went against it, you were
supposed to let your superiors know. So after a sleepless night,
the two girls went to the academy chaplain, and the
chaplain called one of the Naval Academy lawyers, who immediately
placed a call to the police department in Diane Zamora's
hometown of Grand Prairie, Texas. Do you guys happen to
(05:31):
have an unsolved murder a teenage girl, the attorney asked
the detective who answered the phone. There was a brief pause,
then yeah, we sure do.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
They'd been trying to solve the murder of sixteen year
old Adrian Jones since December of nineteen ninety five. The
next day, Texas detectives flew to Annapolis to interview this
Diane Zamora. Diane was at a PEP rally for the
Navy football when an officer tapped her on the shoulder
and told her she needed to come with him. He
(06:05):
took her over to the admin building and steered her
into a private office. Texas detectives and Naval officers stared
at her as she took her seat. Diane denied being
involved in any murder. There was a girl killed in
my fiance's hometown last year, she said, Adrian. It was
huge news, but I didn't have anything to do.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
With it, she said.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
She just made up the story to try and look
bad ass in front of the other pleabs. It was stupid,
but Sergeant Brad Geary got a creepy feeling from Diane
from minute one. Later, he told journalist Bill Curtis, I
got no reaction whatsoever. I got what's sometimes referred to
as the thousand miles stare. She just kind of looked
(06:51):
through us, and it's not like they had anything concrete
on her a two am revelation to her roommates wasn't
nearly enough. If missus Zamora wasn't willing to confess.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
That was it.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They'd have to go back to Texas empty handed. Empty
handed but determined to dig into this new lead and
see if it had any legs. Meanwhile, the Navy wasn't
very pleased with Diane. Strangely enough, a murder confession, real
or fake wasn't great press for the academy or the
Navy as a whole, so they suspended her temporarily. They said,
(07:28):
just until this mass gets sorted out. Diane got a
plane ticket back to Texas and a bum rush out
the door, but she didn't fly to Texas like she
was supposed to. She flew to Colorado Springs, home of
the Air Force Academy and Diane's fiance, David Graham.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Diane and David met in the Civil Air Patrol, a
program for high school kids that's kind of like ROTC.
They teach introductory military stuff, and they fell for each
other like only a pair of duf ast teenagers can.
Within weeks, they were each other's whole world. They were
both standouts at their respective high schools about twenty minutes
(08:11):
away from each other when she was just a little kid.
Not long after watching the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on
live TV, Diane had decided she wanted to be an
astronaut someday, and she'd been laser focused on that goal
ever since. She was an overachiever to the max, always
studying and scoring top grades in all her classes. She
(08:32):
was in all kinds of clubs and organizations, and she
played the flute in band Yeah Me Too, Me Three.
She didn't socialize with other kids a whole lot. She
had some friends, other smart, driven kids, but she called
them homework buddies. She was so determined to ace high
school that when her parents were struggling with money and
their electricity got cut off, Diane just studied by candlelight
(08:55):
until it was turned back on.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Until she met David, she'd shown very little interest in guys,
despite the fact that she was gorgeous, with dark hair
and eyes and a megawat smile. One guy who went
to high school with Diane told author Skip Hollinsworth, when
she looked at you, it was hard for you to
stop staring back.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
But Diane preferred staring at her books. A couple of
her cousins had gotten pregnant in high school, and Diane
couldn't believe it. She said she'd never let something as
stupid as that derail her dreams. Plus, her family were
devoutly religious, and she didn't believe in sex before marriage.
She'd briefly dated a guy in her sophomore year, but
when he started pressing her for sex, she'd dropped him
(09:37):
like a hot brick. She had her plan firmly in place.
Study hard, graduate at the top of her high school class,
study astrophysics in college, then apply for astronaut training, and
after that the stars. In a lot of ways, David
Graham was a male version of Diane. Like her, he
seemed a lot older than his years, and he already
(09:58):
had his future mapped out. David had gotten his pilot's
license at age fourteen, and all he'd ever wanted to
do was fly. A career in the Air Force wasn't
just his dream, it was his plan. Ultimately, he wanted
to join the Air Force's elite counter terrorism unit, and
even in high school, he'd already started to cultivate the
kind of military discipline he'd need to achieve it. He
(10:20):
was devoted to the Civil Air Patrol CAP so much
that by his senior year of high school he'd risen
to a command position in the junior division of the organization.
He never mouthed off, or skipped class or snuck outside
to smoke behind the bleachers. He had bizarrely good posture
for a teenage boy. He stood like a soldier already,
and he was always polite and respectful. He was a
(10:43):
nice enough looking kid, tall and dirty blonde, and quite
a few girls gave him a second look. He almost
seemed like a boy from an old black and white movie,
the type who'd take you out for a drive in movie,
buy you a wrist corsage, take you on a picnic.
Once he met Diane, though well, David's strict military discipline
started falling apart. He and his two best friends who
(11:05):
were in CAP with him had always been the three Musketeers,
all one hundred percent committed to their military aspirations. They
were horrified, and they pretty much blamed Diane, who they
called Zamora. But in reality, the change had started a
little bit earlier than that. The summer before he and
Diane started dating, David had gone off to Canada for
(11:26):
a sort of military cadet exchange program, and while he
was there, he'd lost his V card to a pretty
assy Air Force cadet. This made a major impression on
our boy. It was all he wanted to talk about
when he got home, drove his friends banans oh. Brother.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Every high school friend group had one like the one
that had sex once and then wouldn't shut the fuck
up about it. Shush, my guy, shut.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
We had several of those in my high school. It's
like you've decided to make this your entire personality. Congratulations,
it's gonna be great fun for everyone. But then he
and Diane started making googly eyes at each other at
the CAP meetings, and his focus locked onto her like
a fighter jets radar on a missile. And this is
(12:17):
what nerds these two were. Apparently the first thing they
bonded over was that they both loved calculus and physics. Nerd.
That is kind of cute, though I can't lie. David's
CAP friends didn't like it. For one thing, you weren't
supposed to fraternize with other CAP cadets. It was bad
for morale, and they didn't like him dating an NCO
(12:39):
meaning non commissioned officer, which is one of the funniest
damn things I've ever heard. I mean, on the one hand, like,
I get it, there are rules about rank of the military.
It's probably frowned upon to date somebody who ranks slower
than you. I totally understand that. But y'all are high
school kids, for God's sake. Calmed the fun down. Like
these kids are just bizarre, like human beings. They're just
(13:02):
already thinking of themselves as soldiers and they're just babies.
His friends also didn't like the fact that, in the
weeks following the start of his relationship with Diane, he'd
started to slack off his cap obligations. He let his
buzz cut grow out a little parish the thought, he
started dressing differently, wearing jewelry and concert tees, and he
(13:24):
ran up a huge bill on his dad's credit card,
buying a cell phone and a pager and a pricey
stereo for his truck. Andy started drinking, going for joy
rides in his truck on twisty little country roads way
too fast. Basically, he started acting like a normal teenager
for once in his life. But that wasn't going to
work if he wanted to end up at the Air
Force Academy the next year, and eventually he ended up
(13:48):
losing his cap command position, which was a big deal,
the kind of thing that could mess up his career plans,
but none of it seemed to matter more than his
true love with Diane. She felt the same way. Within
a week or two, they were spending every spare moment together. David,
about a foot taller than Diane, always had his arms
wrapped around her. To their friends and family, these two
(14:11):
were less a pair of high school seniors and more
a set of conjoined twins. At this point, Diane talked
about David constantly. All roads led back to him. You
could bring up your freakin' intestinal polyp surgery and she'd
find something to connect it to David.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
You know, David has a call in two like picture
every like uncomfortably close couple in line in front of
you at the amusement park, and this is them, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
The ones that you want to scream get a room at.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, they're like groping each other and it's like, bro,
we are in line for like the Tower of Terror.
Can you chill out? Diane even changed her post high
school plan after they started dating, she applied to the
Air Force Academy just like he did. Unfortunately for her,
she missed the application deadline, so with David's encouragement, she
applied to the US Naval Academy instead. Once I graduate,
(15:10):
she told her parents, I can transfer from the Navy
to the Air Force and David and I can be
stationed together. They got engaged a month after they started dating.
They even set at eight August thirteenth, two thousand, right
after they graduated from their academies. When her family tried
to talk some sense into her about getting engaged so
(15:32):
fast and so young, Diane said her mind was made up.
David was the love of her life. If I can't
be missus David Graham, she said, I will die as
Miss Diane Zamora.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Ew dude.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Their little inside joke was greenish brown female sheep, which
meant all of you, and and the had QC nicknames
for each other. Diane called David tiger because that was
the mascot at his high school, and he called her kittens.
(16:13):
I know, it's so gross, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
And why kittens plural? Like why not kitten? For some reason,
I just hate it even more because of that Essa.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
I'm yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't, It makes zero sense.
Diane's virginity had always been important to her. She bought
one hundred percent into the idea that you should only
have sex with your one true love and only after marriage.
David didn't. He'd already lost his virginity and he was
rarren to go again. He pressured and coaxed and probably
(16:47):
played the whole blue balls card, and eventually, once he'd
put a deposit down on an engagement ring, Diane caved.
This was a huge deal for her, and as much
as she loved David and one to marry him, she
felt guilty about breaking her own rule.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yeah, and I think this really cemented her. Like you
might call it devotion, or you might call it obsession
with their relationship, like once she'd given him her precious
flower of womanhood, like that was it. She had to
make sure the relationship worked or else she'd given away
this priceless jewel for nothing.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
As the weeks went by, Diane and David started their
senior year of high school in a rosy haze of
love and hormones. But then something awful happened. Diane was
driving David's truck one evening and she got into a
gnarly accident. The truck flipped on its side and somehow
her arm got pinned between it and the ground. She
(17:44):
had to be rushed to the hospital and have surgery
to put pins in her left hand. For a while,
they thought she might have to have it amputated. If
Diane needed one more thing to cement her belief in David,
she got it after that car wreck. Stayed right by
her bedside at the hospital, and when she got out,
he was the one who went out and got her
(18:06):
meds and whatever else she needed. He checked on her constantly,
bringing her treats and trying to lift her spirits. One
of her family members later said, I don't think Diane
had ever had that kind of attention.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
And Diane craved attention. She didn't get as much as
she needed at home. Her mom was always working and
her dad, well, her dad had other things on his mind.
As we'll see in a minute. Diane was the oldest
and from about age twelve on she pretty much had
to be mom number two to her three siblings. That's
a lot for a kid, and David could relate. His
(18:39):
parents had split up too, and it was tough on him.
It was part of what bonded him and Diane so
closely together. But despite all this storybook romance, and very
much unbeknownst to Diane, she wasn't the only girl David
had eyes for, At least according to some of his friends.
There was a girl he went to high school with,
Adrian Jones. She and David were on the cross country
(19:02):
track team together, and they liked to hang out. Adrian
Jones was pretty much the platonic ideal of the American
teenage girl. She was blonde and beautiful, flirty and friendly, funny,
and hugely popular. She was a rock star at cross
country and her boss's favorite employee at the Fried Chicken
place where she worked after school. Is a happy kid,
(19:22):
thriving at life. Her friends called her aj. She wanted
to be a veterinarian or a behavioral scientist, although apparently
she never told her best friend about him. Adrian liked
David a lot, which is odd, but I can think
of a couple reasons why she wouldn't tell her bestie.
For one thing, both Adrian and David were dating other people,
so she might have just considered it an embarrassing little
(19:44):
secret that they were starting to get flirty with each other.
But she did tell some people. She told her boss
at the Chicken Place showed her a picture of him,
and some of David's friends noticed that they were spending
a lot of time together. And remember, he and Diane
went to different high schools, so you know, it was
easy to keep a secret.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Now.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
They weren't a thing, at least not yet, but they
sure did hang out a lot. David talked to one
of his work friends about her during his shifts at
Wynn Dixie said he couldn't quite make up his mind
how he felt about her, but at one point he
told his friend he loved her. Not that it stopped
him from proposing to Diane. So so weird. Diane had
no idea that she had any competition, and one Saturday
(20:26):
in early November, the cross country team at Mansfield High School,
David and Adrian school had a meet a couple hundred
miles away in Lubbock. On the ride back, David and
Adrian sat with their heads together, talking and joking, and
when they got back to Mansfield High David offered her
a ride home and At some point along the way,
Adrian suggested that he'd pull off behind an elementary school,
(20:48):
and within a few minutes they were having sex. As
far as we know, Adrian never told anybody about this
little encounter, which isn't that weird. I once made out
behind a curtain with a random guy from my high
school while we were backstage at play rehearsal, and I
never told us all about.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
It, except now to a few thousand of your closest
friends till now.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Absolutely you know, it was just one of those random
bursts of teenage hormones that happens. Those things are firing
off like M eight's at that age. David later wrote,
it was meaningless and painful because I was letting down
the one person I had sworn to be faithful to. Well,
you poor little old thing, it must have been awful.
Why'd you do it? Then? For God's sakes? Oh, but
(21:29):
of course I forgot. It's actually illegal for a man
to turn down a pretty woman's advances. You can do
hard jail time for.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
That, And you know they take that shit seriously in Texas,
like you'll go to maximum security if you're convicted, so.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
You can go to the electric chair for that. The
guilt hit him like a semi truck immediately after he
dropped Adrian off home. What had he done? He was engaged.
He confessed to his best friends right away, told them
I want you to listen, then forget, and he made
them swear up and down they wouldn't tell Diane. If
anybody was gonna tell her, and it was gonna be
(22:04):
a bad conversation, it should be David himself. Now, there's
a little more backstory that I think is important to
know here, namely that Diane's dad had been having an
affair on her mom for years and it pretty much
threw their entire family into chaos, and Diane was right
in the middle of the storm. Her mom would take
her along to go track down the dad and his
(22:26):
mistress and yell at him. Once they barged into the
woman's house together and started trashing the living room, It's like, lady,
I get that you were hurting, but did you really
have to bring your adolescent daughter into this.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
That kind of thing can make a deep imprint on you,
especially when you're a kid. So I think Diane already
had a deep down mistrust of men, which might have
been part of why she didn't show interest in dating
for most of high school. When she met David, she
created this story in her head that they were faded
to be together and their love was so pure that
(23:27):
nothing could ever make a dent in it. It was
an idealistic view of love. One of the things Diane
had learned from her mom was that when a man
cheats on you, you go batshit balls to the wall nuts.
David and Diane had always been possessive and jealous, so
when David started acting a little strange in November, a
(23:48):
little distant, Diane was immediately suspicious.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Always always, for the like three months that they'd been
together at this point, if that.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Right after Thanksgiving, which David spent with Diane's family, she
finally crowbarred the truth out of him. She started prodding
him with about past girlfriends. David had told her she
was his first real girlfriend, but she was starting to
have her doubts. She demanded that he list all the
girls he'd been friends with or gone out with, and
(24:21):
David did. One of those girls was Adrian Jones, and,
in a move that wasn't exactly the smartest thing he
could do at the moment, David tried to change the subject.
We need to study for the SATs.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
He said, Oh, honey, honey, no, no, no.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
That convinced Diane she was on the right track, and
she kept poking, and finally David broke, you aren't the
only girl I've been involved with. He admitted, I've had
sex with someone else. Diane was furious, You mean you
weren't a virgin when we got together, She said, no,
(25:00):
now I was, David said, which was also a lie.
By the way, don't you remember your ossie fling at
a summer camp, Dave. It only took a second for
the significance of this to sink in. What he was
saying was he cheated on her. Later, David would say
that when he told her, I thought the very life
(25:21):
in her had been torn away. That's a poetic way
of saying that. Miss Diane kirked the fuck out. It
was an epic, once in a generation meltdown. Diane sobbed
so hard she practically hyperventilated. She screamed and shook. She
bashed her head against the walls and the floor, and
(25:43):
then she took a poker from the fireplace and swung
it at David as hard as she could, she missed.
The freakout lasted for over an hour. David would later write,
it wasn't just jealousy for Diane. She'd been betrayed to
and forgotten all in that one meaningless instant in November,
(26:05):
just an instant, okay.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Right, cell phone.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
The purity in which she held so dear had been
tainted in that one unclean act.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Unclean act. Jesus Jones, these kids are intense. I think.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
When Diane found out David had cheated, it catapulted her
back to that scared, confused little girl who didn't understand
why her parents' marriage was imploding. She'd gone against her
own moral code to have sex with David because she
believed they were meant for each other and only each other.
Now that was falling apart, Diane felt like her whole
(26:42):
world was crashing down.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
There was only one thing she could think of to do.
Kill her. She hissed at David, kill her. She was
banging her head against the hard floor, as she said,
at gritting her teeth in pain. David didn't think she
really meant it at first, kept trying to calm her down,
but she wouldn't. It was the only way her rival,
(27:05):
a girl she'd never met, had to die, and finally
David gave in. He promised he'd do it. He wrote,
Diane's 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. The only
thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life
(27:26):
of the one that had, for an instant, taken her
place womanly vengeance. Holy shit, this is nineteen ninety five.
Remember these kids think they're in some kind of Edwardian melodrama,
and it is disturbing how fast this insane idea of
killing Adrian took off and became a reality for David
(27:47):
and Diane. From the way they describe it in their confessions,
it was basically like kill her for me. Oh, come on, baby,
you don't mean that. Yes, I do kill he, or
I'll dump you. Okay. That's how cheap Adrian's life was
to these two shy little dweebs. David later wrote, I
didn't have any harsh feelings for Adrian, but no one
could stand between me and Diane. He approached the murder
(28:10):
like he would a military operation, join me in an
I roll. I guess that's how he kept himself from
thinking about the moral implications of what he was planning
to do. David later wrote the plan was to break
her young neck and sink her body to the bottom
of the lake with the weights that ended up being
hit into her head her young neck. The way this
(28:31):
dude writes is just too much. He writes, like a
vampire and a bodice ripper gods novel, her womanly vengeance,
her young neck. Man dial it back about seventeen cliques.
I'm begging you. We're up to our knees in it anyway.
So on the night of December fourth, nineteen ninety five,
David called Adrian. We don't know exactly what he said
(28:51):
to her, but when Adrian hung up the phone, she
told her mom that was David from cross Country. He's upset.
Adrian's mom told her to get to bed, But not
long after that phone call, with her family asleep, Adrian
snuck out. What we're about to describe in the next
couple of minutes comes directly from the confessions of both
diane' zamora and David Graham. David picked Adrian up in
(29:14):
Diane's mom's car. He had one of his favorite guns,
a Makarov nine millimeter, tucked away out of sight, and
unbeknownst to Adrian, Diane was hiding in the hatchback, waiting
in the dark. David drove to an out of the
way area and parked the car. Then he made like
he was going to kiss Adrian, and Adrian reclined her
(29:36):
seat back a little, probably so they could have more
room to make out. David wrapped his arms around her,
holding her tight, and then like a killer from a
horror movie, Diane rose up from the back seat. She
had a barbell in her hand. Adrian must have jumped
at the sight of her, and it didn't take her
long to figure out what was going on. You're gonna
(29:57):
kill me, aren't you, Adrian said. David tried to do
what he'd planned, break her neck, but quickly realized that
action movies are not exactly documentaries when it comes to
this stuff, and it was a lot more difficult than
he expected, and by now Adrian, fully aware of what
was happening, was fighting like hell. So as David held
(30:18):
on to Adrian, Diane hit her in the head with
the barbell, but again movies aren't real, and their victim
was still alive. Terrified, Adrian managed to crawl out the
open passenger side window and took off, runnin'. I was panicky,
David wrote later, and just grabbed the Makarov nine millimeter
to follow. To our relief. At the time, she was
(30:39):
too injured from the wounds to go far. She ran
into a nearby field and collapsed. Bless her sweetheart. David's
confession continues, I wanted to just jump in and drive off.
We were both shaken and even surprised by the nature
of our actions in that short instant. I knew I
couldn't leave the key witness to our crime alive. I
(31:00):
just pointed and shot, and then he fired again, just
to make sure. He ran back to the car, and
they peeled out as fast as they could. I love you,
they said to each other. Then Diane said, we shouldn't
have done that. David, Yeah, no, shit, it was your idea.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
No.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Later that night, David's friend John heard a knock at
his bedroom window and found David and Diane standing outside,
shivering and pale as ghosts. Can we come in? David said,
and John said, sure, of course, he'd been sleeping, so
the only light in the room was from a little
mini Christmas tree in the corner. But John could still
see that David and Diane were disheveled and had blood
(31:42):
on her clothes, and Diane was kind of whimpering softly
to herself. When he asked them what the hell happened,
David said, you don't want to know now, See, kiddo,
this is the moment where you tell these two to
get to step in and then you call the cops.
But these were two fellow cap cadets. David was like
a brother to him, and he trusted to him, so
he let him and Diane clean up in his bathroom
(32:03):
and loaned them some fresh clothes. Before they left. Back
out the window, David said, we were never here. This
never happened, nothing suspicious there. John thought it was disturbing,
but he never told anybody.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
In the morning, Adriane's family realized she hadn't slept in
her bed the night before, and when friend after friends
said they hadn't seen her, panic began to set in.
Around that same time, a man found Adrian's body in
the field near his house and called the police. Adrian's
death hit the town like a meteor. She'd been such
(32:39):
a bright light in the lives of everyone around her.
When they made the announcement at the high school, kids
were punching walls and bursting into tears. And for her family,
her parents and her two little brothers, it was unthinkable
pain like most of us can't even imagine. There's no
mystery about who committed this murder. Obviously we've already told you,
(33:04):
but I think it's important to note that another person
came within a hair of getting tried for Adrian's murder,
a kid named Brian McMillan. Brian was kind of a
troubled kid. He had some mental health issues that had
kept him out of school for a while. A sweet kid,
according to several people who went to high school with him,
but unsteady. Brian had an obvious thing for Adrian. Her
(33:26):
work friend said he used to come buy the restaurant
so much that she'd hide from him if she saw
him come through the door. When detectives heard about this,
they understandably wanted to talk to Brian, and the poor
kid didn't do himself any favors in the interrogation room. First,
he denied knowing Adrian, and then he finally admitted he
was lying. He said he couldn't remember if he'd picked
(33:48):
Adrian up. On the night of the murder. He'd gotten
drunk depressed because he was the only one of his
friends who didn't have a girlfriend, and he thought he'd
had a bad reaction to the booze. He thought it
had probably interacted with his anxiety and depression meds. He
said he didn't have any memory of what he did
after that. He might have picked her up, he just
didn't know for sure. Not a great answer. No, the truth,
(34:14):
but not a great answer when you're being questioned in
a murder case. And there were other things that lined
up against Brian. Adrian had been on the phone with
her boyfriend on the night of the murder when David
called and asked her to come out with him, but
of course Adrian didn't want to tell her boyfriend that,
so she told him it was Brian who clicked in
in the middle of their call. But the detectives had
(34:36):
no way of knowing that a neighbor had seen a
pickup truck in the area on the night of the murder,
and Brian had a truck the same color. The police
put Brian under arrest. His only alibi was his dad,
who swore he was home all night. The kid spent
the holidays in jail. Then finally they finished searching his
(34:58):
house and car and clothing and Adrian's clothing and found
zero evidence putting him at the scene of the murder.
He took a polygraph and passed. What David and Diane
thought about the fact that another teenager was twisting in
the wind, accused of the crime they committed, we don't know.
They were both miserable, at least according to them. David wrote,
(35:19):
never had to imagine so much guilt. I saw Adrianne's
mother in the grocery store. I read articles of how
her family was coping in the papers. Diane talked endlessly
about how much she wished they could go back to
December third and do things over again, just leave Adrian alone,
which spare me.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
And As their guilt and fear about the murder grew stronger,
their relationship grew more and more toxic. They were more
controlling and possessive of each other than ever. David was
so controlling that he'd hardly let Diane out of his sight,
even around her family. If her mom tried to get
her alone in the kitchen or something, David would pop
his head around the corner in two seconds flat. It
(36:01):
was weird. On the one hand, they were more devoted
to each other than ever, they spent every waking second together,
But on the other they were getting into terrible fights
and they were getting physical. Diane would later show her
Navy academy roommates a scar on her knee from a
knife fight she had with David and told them she'd
left claw marks on his neck one time trying to
(36:23):
choke him. They beat each other up. Diane said, I
mean that is some next level shit right there. Who
gets in a knife fight with their significant other? Like,
I've never even heard of that. These two were not okay.
I think they blamed each other and each was a
constant reminder to the other of the awful thing that
they'd done and what would happen to them if they
got caught. But from the outside looking in, David and
(36:46):
Diane were two superachievers on their way to the brightest
futures imaginable. When they got their Air Force and Navy
Academy acceptance letters, the newspapers did stories on them. These
squeaky clean, pink cheeked teenagers who wanted nothing more more
than to serve their country and be together the future
fighter pilot and the future astronaut. People ate it up
(37:07):
that summer it was off to their respective academies to
chase those futures. They'd already made a solemn promise to
stay together, talk every day by email and or phone,
and get married after graduation in two thousand. But as
the summer went along, the toxicity in their relationship kept
ramping up. And then Diane started bonding with the fellow
cadet named Jay. They started spending a lot of time
(37:30):
together and there was a definite mutual attraction. Diane talked
to Jay a lot about David, and a lot of
what she said worried Jay. He told her he thought
David sounded really controlling and their obsessive relationship didn't seem healthy.
Diane would burst into sobs if David took too long
to answer one of her emails. When the cadets had
(37:50):
to write an autobiographical paper in class, everybody else wrote
about their accomplishments and challenges, but Diane just wrote about
David and how they were planning to get married after graduation.
Her teacher thought it was weird as hell. At some point,
David got wind of the blossoming friendship between Diane and Jay,
and she confessed that they'd kissed. David wrote Jay a
(38:12):
furious letter, telling him to back off his woman, and
he wrote to Diane, remember what binds us together? Ominous?
Almost you could argue a little threatening. But as much
as Diane obsessed over David, part of her seemed to
want a way out. She told Jay he should be
her boyfriend. She introduced him to her mom at parents weekend.
(38:34):
Her mom thought he was great, much better for her
daughter than David. And then one day Diane told him
about the murder. Jay was stunned, but at first he
didn't really believe it. I thought she was telling me
this to get attention, he told author Peter Meyer, whose
book Blind Love was one of our sources for this case.
But eventually, after lots more conversation about the murder, he
(38:57):
came to realize it might be true. He didn't tell
on her, though, even though she didn't express any regret
whatsoever about the killing. Later Jay said she said she'd
do it again. She also said she'd promised David that
if she ever cheated on him, she'd kill the guy too.
And then, of course came that night in late August
(39:18):
when Diane got into some deep conversation with her roommates
and spilled her secret, and we know what they decided
to do about it the next day. So, like we
told you at the beginning of the episode, Diane got
hauled in to speak with Navy Academy higher ups and
detectives from Texas. She denied everything. They told her she
was suspended until further notice and gave her a plane
(39:38):
ticket home, and she flew instead to Colorado and David
spent a few days with him before she actually flew
home to Texas. And then on September fourth, the Texas
detectives showed up in Colorado Springs to talk to David Graham.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
David made a half assed attempt at denying everything. Then
he took a polygraph and failed it miserably. Eventually he caved.
He asked for a computer, and he wrote a four
and a half page confession. The detectives later said that
it quote read like a Danielle Steele novel.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah, y'all have already seen evidence of that. This dude
could write a trashy romance novel, no sweat.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
I hate to say it, but he would do numbers
on like book talk like no doubt he could write
a smutty book like crate like he would do numbers.
After he finished writing out his confession, David was arrested
and put on suicide watch at the jail. Almost simultaneously,
seven hundred miles away in Fort Worth, a swat team
(40:36):
descended on Diane's grandma's house where she was staying. Diane
was asleep in her grandma's guest room, snuggled up with
some dude. We have no idea who it was, but
I thought that was a fascinating little detail. She is
physically and psychologically incapable of being without a man.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, and it's so weird because she went from like
not even caring to that. It's bizarre.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
They cuffed her, hauled her into the station, told her
David confessed and that was it. She made her own
confession and a flood of tears. The detectives didn't buy
for a second she wasn't sorry. They felt she was
sorry she got caught. The DA made the decision that
David and Diane would be tried separately, and while they
sat in jail waiting for their respective days in court,
(41:19):
the two lovebirds wrote syrupy, high drama letters back and forth.
I miss you like I miss ice cream, David wrote,
you were both rich and creamy for what sweet and
ice cold, milky and tasty and bad for you?
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Man? That metaphor was fighting for its life by the
end of that sentence.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
But the hell my ey was started twitching. I just
don't I don't know like milky, milky and tasty, Diane
wrote back to David. When will my love come find me?
When will I get to walk out of these bars
for good? I just wish I had a remote control
(42:06):
for time. That would rock.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
She doesn't have.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
She doesn't quite have the panache that David does.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Does she doesn't have gift.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
That would rock. I could just see the bubble letters
now I can see her handwriting. In another letter, she
told him she'd been banging her head against the bars
of her cell, trying to kill herself. The jail intercepted
the letter and put her on suicide watch for a
couple days until the jail medical staff examined her and
(42:35):
found zero evidence of any head injuries and zero evidence
of suicidal ideation. They also communicated through the press, throwing
I Love us at each other via the reporters that
were swarming all over the courthouse. But finally, by the
time Diane went to trial, she realized that her only
hope was to try and blame the whole thing on David.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
I'm so disappointed. I thought their love was eternal.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Diane's attorney said, Look, David was manipulative, he was controlling,
he was violent. You couldn't even see it in their
nicknames for each other. He was the tiger, she was
the kittens. Diane only confessed to protect him. DNA Adrian's
found all over Diane's card begged to differ not to
(43:22):
mention the confessions she'd made to her Navy academy boyfriend
in her roommates and the creepy notation in her day
planner with Adrian one thirty eight am scribbled on December fourth.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Oh boy, screepy.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Diane's roommate Jen took the stand and testified that Diane
didn't express any remorse for Adrian's murder. She said that
everyone knew that that girl was a tramp and a
slut and she deserved to die. Wow, well, tell us
how you really feel. Diane took the stand in her
own defense. Of course, she copped to being there on
(43:57):
the night of the murderer, but said that David was
the one who actually killed Adrian. She hadn't been involved
in any of the actual killing, and she hadn't really
wanted it. She made a show of weepy remorse on
the stand, but it came across as fake and bloodless,
and when the prosecutor took over questioning, she got nasty,
calling one witness a liar.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
After six hours of deliberation, the jury let Diane know
what they thought of her. Guilty of capital murder. She
was sentenced to a mandatory life sentence with a minimum
of forty years before any chance of parole. She's lost
her appeals and she's still there, forty seven years old.
Now she doesn't interview every now and again and swears
(44:39):
up and down she's not a killer, just a woman
who fell for the wrong man. I mean, the country
song practically writes itself. David's trial came next. His defense
argued that David wasn't even there at the murder scene.
It was all Diane, Yeah, yeah, man, whats problem with that?
Was all the evidence corroborated his confine. The investigators had
(45:02):
found the barbells and the gun at David's house. The
trial wasn't especially dramatic, but there was one strange thing.
One of Adrian's friends took the stand to testify that
she was the one who drove Adrian home from that
track meet, the one David said he'd driven her home
from on the night of their one night stand. She
was one hundred percent sure, she said, Now this was
(45:24):
a huge surprise for me, and it raises an interesting question.
Is it possible David was lying about having sex with Adrian?
And if so, why would he do that? So, as
I see it, there are a few possibilities here. One
David was lying or maybe just mistaken about when the
sex happened, could have just gotten his nights mixed up,
(45:46):
or he could have wanted it to seem like it
was just a crime of opportunity. You know, we were
just on our way home from the track meet and
it just kind of happened, as opposed to like he
asked her out and it happened something like that. Two
there sex and David just made it up maybe just
to flex with his friends initially, and then maybe it
morphed into hey, I could make Diane really jealous if
(46:08):
I told her I slept with somebody else, And then
Diane's reaction was just way, way more nuclear than he
could have imagined, and it got out of control after that.
Or maybe, and this is the darkest possibility, maybe he
lied to Diane because he knew she would react like that.
Maybe he wanted something that would bind them together forever,
(46:28):
an insurance policy against Diane ever, leaving him a murderer.
Might do that. We have no way of knowing for sure,
but it's a tantalizing little detail, isn't it, And David
jumped on it after Adrian's friend testified and later told
the press that he hadn't actually slept with Adrian. They
were just casual acquaintances. His story seems to evolve quite
(46:49):
a bit from one telling to the next, so anyway,
the evidence was more than enough for the jury. David
Graham was convicted of the murder of Adrian Jones and
sentenced to life in prison, same as Diane. By the
time David appeared on the TV show American Justice a
few years later, from prison, he changed his tune about Diane,
said the one silver lining of being in prison is
(47:11):
that he doesn't have to be around her anymore. Dang,
that's a burne.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
You know we're all embarrassed about people we wrote flowery
poetry about in high school, don't.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
It's definitely true. He also said that prison is a
lot like the military, so he's suggesting pretty well he'd
found Jesus by then. Evidently the detectives who arrested him
believe he's a cold blooded killer, totally conscienceless. Adrian's mom, Linda,
told the press that she felt for David and Diane's parents.
(47:44):
Three young lives, not just Adrians, have been taken because
of senseless violence. She said. She talked about what bright
futures all three kids could have had. Now it just
all lay in ashes. It was the intervention of Linda
and her family that saved Diane and David from the
death penalty. Linda said it made no sense for two
more kids to die. Despite all David's claims of innocence,
(48:07):
at trial in the year two thousand, he finally admitted
he'd killed Adrian Jones to prove his love for Diane.
Everyone in David and Diane's lives were stunned that they
did this. Diane's people blamed David, and David's people blamed Diane,
which we've seen plenty of times before with killer couples.
It was his fault, it was hers, But the reality
is it was both of them. They drove each other on,
(48:30):
fueled each other's obsession. They've both moved on with their
lives now, albeit behind bars. They've pursued education, kept in
touch with loved ones, participated in prayer groups. They'll most
likely see freedom again someday. Meanwhile, what we have left
of Adrian is the memorial tree her school planted for her,
with a plaque that reads strength, Unity, courage, and, as
(48:54):
her mama put it, a box of ashes waiting to
be buried. That's all I have left of my baby.
So that was a wild one, right, Campers. You know,
we'll have another one for you next week, but for now,
lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until
we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. If
you haven't booked your spot on the Crime Wave True
(49:15):
Crime Cruise from November three through November seventh, get on
at y'all, join Katie and Me plus last podcast on
the Left, Scared to Death and Sinisterhood for a Rock
and Good Time at Sea. You can pay all at
once or set up a payment plan, but you got
to have a fan code to book a ticket, So
go to Crimewave at seed dot com, slash campfire and
take it from there. And as always, we want to
(49:36):
send a grateful shout out to a few of our
lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Miranda Viblet, Janet,
Melissa b and Mistress Ogg. And I gotta ask, is
it og like Nanny Ogg from the Terry Pratchett books?
Because I love it. We appreciate y'all to the moon
and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you
are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode
(49:57):
add free at least a day early, sometimes more. Are
plus tons of extra content like patron's only episodes and
hilarious post show discussions. And once you hit the five
dollars in up categories to get in more cool stuff
a free sticker at five dollars, a rat enamel pin
or fridge magnet, while supplies last at ten virtual events
with Katie and Me, and we're always looking for new
stuff to do for you, so if you can, come
(50:19):
join us at patreon dot com, Slash True Crime Campfire
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction. Or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
The US military teaches recruits to function together as a
well oiled machine, and for young people who dream of
joining the most elite forces, it requires discipline, commitment, and loyalty,
not to mention, the courage to put yourself in harm's
way for the greater good. For the ones with the
deepest commitment, there has to be a fire in the
belly that drives them to keep their eye on the prize,
(00:42):
no matter what the risks. Most of the time this
sets the stage for great achievements, But sometimes the personality
type that lends itself to that flawless dedication can teeter
over the line into feverish obsession. Where is the line
when you've cultivated a failure is not an option attitude
your entire life? How do you put the brakes on
(01:04):
when that determination starts to bleed into your personal relationships?
This is Killer Cadets the Murder of Adrian Jones, so
campers for this one. We're at the US Naval Academy
(01:27):
in Annapolis, Maryland, one of the most elite selective training
programs in the country, where you can get a bachelor's
degree and begin training for military service at the same time.
August twenty fourth, nineteen ninety six, the summer before their
freshman year, new cadets go through what they call Plebe Summer.
Plebe is the nickname they give the first years, which
(01:47):
sounds like standard issue military hell, an ungodly amount of running, pushups, marching,
and getting yelled at all out in the summer sun.
It was a regiment designed to break you down and
build you back up again as a perfect midshipman, or,
in the case of freshman Diane Zamora and her roommates
Mandy and Jen midship women, the summer was coming to
(02:08):
a close, much to everybody's relief, they'd begin their first
full year at the academy soon. An experience like Plebe
Summer is pretty hellish for most people, but you're also
going to come out of it feeling accomplished, proud of yourself,
and probably pretty close to the people who suffered through
it with you. One night, Diane, Mandy, and Jennifer were
up late having one of those conversations that it's best
(02:30):
to have at two o'clock in the morning. They were
talking about relationships, you know, serious relationships. Love with a
capital L. Diane talked about her fiance David all the time.
They'd gotten together their senior year of high school. He
was at the Air Force Academy in Colorado now, but
he and Diane were still determined to get married once
(02:51):
they were done with their training. They were so young
to be engaged already. Diane's roomies were curious about their relationship.
Diane said David had gotten her through a really rough
time in her life. She'd been in a bad car accident,
almost lost her left hand, and David took care of
her the whole time she was recovering, got her meds
for her, made sure she took the right doses, make
(03:11):
sure she ate enough. When her parents were struggling with
money and Diane was living out of her car, David
took her in. Are you a virgin, Jen asked at
one point, no, Diane said, but sometimes I wish I were.
Things would be a lot easier if I hadn't had
sex with David. Why is that, the roommates wanted to know. Well,
(03:32):
Diane said, I just love him so much. If anybody
else touched him, I'd have to kill them. David had
misused her trust after she lost her virginity to him.
She said it was really bad, but they'd been through
a lot together. Their love was unbreakable. And then Diane
added something strange. David and I have each other's future
(03:54):
in the palm of our hands. If we wanted to,
we could ruin each other's lives. The way she said
it was intense so much that it made the other
two girls kind of uncomfortable. Jen laughed a little and said, Wow,
what did y'all do? Kill somebody? Diane was quiet for
a minute. Then she said, let's just say that somebody's
(04:16):
dead because of me. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Not unsettlingly at all, Diane good recovery.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
The roommate's first reaction was basically ohhaha, right, But then
Diane launched into a story that made their blood run cold.
The girls weren't sure if the story was true. Diane
was a little bit of an odd duck. She hadn't
exactly been a rock star during pleeb summer, She'd struggled
with the physical training, and she seemed kind of checked out.
(04:45):
Sometimes she might just be saying this to seem hard.
Maybe she thought it would sound cool and impressive. But
if her story was true, this pretty girl they'd been
rooming with all summer was a cold blooded killer, and
so was her boyfriend out in Colorado. Obviously, that's creepy
as hell, and you don't want to sleep in the
same room as a murderer. But also, the Naval Academy
(05:08):
has a strict code of honor. If you become aware
of something going on that went against it, you were
supposed to let your superiors know. So after a sleepless night,
the two girls went to the academy chaplain, and the
chaplain called one of the Naval Academy lawyers, who immediately
placed a call to the police department in Diane Zamora's
hometown of Grand Prairie, Texas. Do you guys happen to
(05:31):
have an unsolved murder a teenage girl, the attorney asked
the detective who answered the phone. There was a brief pause,
then yeah, we sure do.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
They'd been trying to solve the murder of sixteen year
old Adrian Jones since December of nineteen ninety five. The
next day, Texas detectives flew to Annapolis to interview this
Diane Zamora. Diane was at a PEP rally for the
Navy football when an officer tapped her on the shoulder
and told her she needed to come with him. He
(06:05):
took her over to the admin building and steered her
into a private office. Texas detectives and Naval officers stared
at her as she took her seat. Diane denied being
involved in any murder. There was a girl killed in
my fiance's hometown last year, she said, Adrian. It was
huge news, but I didn't have anything to do.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
With it, she said.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
She just made up the story to try and look
bad ass in front of the other pleabs. It was stupid,
but Sergeant Brad Geary got a creepy feeling from Diane
from minute one. Later, he told journalist Bill Curtis, I
got no reaction whatsoever. I got what's sometimes referred to
as the thousand miles stare. She just kind of looked
(06:51):
through us, and it's not like they had anything concrete
on her a two am revelation to her roommates wasn't
nearly enough. If missus Zamora wasn't willing to confess.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
That was it.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They'd have to go back to Texas empty handed. Empty
handed but determined to dig into this new lead and
see if it had any legs. Meanwhile, the Navy wasn't
very pleased with Diane. Strangely enough, a murder confession, real
or fake wasn't great press for the academy or the
Navy as a whole, so they suspended her temporarily. They said,
(07:28):
just until this mass gets sorted out. Diane got a
plane ticket back to Texas and a bum rush out
the door, but she didn't fly to Texas like she
was supposed to. She flew to Colorado Springs, home of
the Air Force Academy and Diane's fiance, David Graham.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Interesting.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Diane and David met in the Civil Air Patrol, a
program for high school kids that's kind of like ROTC.
They teach introductory military stuff, and they fell for each
other like only a pair of duf ast teenagers can.
Within weeks, they were each other's whole world. They were
both standouts at their respective high schools about twenty minutes
(08:11):
away from each other when she was just a little kid.
Not long after watching the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on
live TV, Diane had decided she wanted to be an
astronaut someday, and she'd been laser focused on that goal
ever since. She was an overachiever to the max, always
studying and scoring top grades in all her classes. She
(08:32):
was in all kinds of clubs and organizations, and she
played the flute in band Yeah Me Too, Me Three.
She didn't socialize with other kids a whole lot. She
had some friends, other smart, driven kids, but she called
them homework buddies. She was so determined to ace high
school that when her parents were struggling with money and
their electricity got cut off, Diane just studied by candlelight
(08:55):
until it was turned back on.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Until she met David, she'd shown very little interest in guys,
despite the fact that she was gorgeous, with dark hair
and eyes and a megawat smile. One guy who went
to high school with Diane told author Skip Hollinsworth, when
she looked at you, it was hard for you to
stop staring back.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
But Diane preferred staring at her books. A couple of
her cousins had gotten pregnant in high school, and Diane
couldn't believe it. She said she'd never let something as
stupid as that derail her dreams. Plus, her family were
devoutly religious, and she didn't believe in sex before marriage.
She'd briefly dated a guy in her sophomore year, but
when he started pressing her for sex, she'd dropped him
(09:37):
like a hot brick. She had her plan firmly in place.
Study hard, graduate at the top of her high school class,
study astrophysics in college, then apply for astronaut training, and
after that the stars. In a lot of ways, David
Graham was a male version of Diane. Like her, he
seemed a lot older than his years, and he already
(09:58):
had his future mapped out. David had gotten his pilot's
license at age fourteen, and all he'd ever wanted to
do was fly. A career in the Air Force wasn't
just his dream, it was his plan. Ultimately, he wanted
to join the Air Force's elite counter terrorism unit, and
even in high school, he'd already started to cultivate the
kind of military discipline he'd need to achieve it. He
(10:20):
was devoted to the Civil Air Patrol CAP so much
that by his senior year of high school he'd risen
to a command position in the junior division of the organization.
He never mouthed off, or skipped class or snuck outside
to smoke behind the bleachers. He had bizarrely good posture
for a teenage boy. He stood like a soldier already,
and he was always polite and respectful. He was a
(10:43):
nice enough looking kid, tall and dirty blonde, and quite
a few girls gave him a second look. He almost
seemed like a boy from an old black and white movie,
the type who'd take you out for a drive in movie,
buy you a wrist corsage, take you on a picnic.
Once he met Diane, though well, David's strict military discipline
started falling apart. He and his two best friends who
(11:05):
were in CAP with him had always been the three Musketeers,
all one hundred percent committed to their military aspirations. They
were horrified, and they pretty much blamed Diane, who they
called Zamora. But in reality, the change had started a
little bit earlier than that. The summer before he and
Diane started dating, David had gone off to Canada for
(11:26):
a sort of military cadet exchange program, and while he
was there, he'd lost his V card to a pretty
assy Air Force cadet. This made a major impression on
our boy. It was all he wanted to talk about
when he got home, drove his friends banans oh. Brother.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Every high school friend group had one like the one
that had sex once and then wouldn't shut the fuck
up about it. Shush, my guy, shut.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
We had several of those in my high school. It's
like you've decided to make this your entire personality. Congratulations,
it's gonna be great fun for everyone. But then he
and Diane started making googly eyes at each other at
the CAP meetings, and his focus locked onto her like
a fighter jets radar on a missile. And this is
(12:17):
what nerds these two were. Apparently the first thing they
bonded over was that they both loved calculus and physics. Nerd.
That is kind of cute, though I can't lie. David's
CAP friends didn't like it. For one thing, you weren't
supposed to fraternize with other CAP cadets. It was bad
for morale, and they didn't like him dating an NCO
(12:39):
meaning non commissioned officer, which is one of the funniest
damn things I've ever heard. I mean, on the one hand, like,
I get it, there are rules about rank of the military.
It's probably frowned upon to date somebody who ranks slower
than you. I totally understand that. But y'all are high
school kids, for God's sake. Calmed the fun down. Like
these kids are just bizarre, like human beings. They're just
(13:02):
already thinking of themselves as soldiers and they're just babies.
His friends also didn't like the fact that, in the
weeks following the start of his relationship with Diane, he'd
started to slack off his cap obligations. He let his
buzz cut grow out a little parish the thought, he
started dressing differently, wearing jewelry and concert tees, and he
(13:24):
ran up a huge bill on his dad's credit card,
buying a cell phone and a pager and a pricey
stereo for his truck. Andy started drinking, going for joy
rides in his truck on twisty little country roads way
too fast. Basically, he started acting like a normal teenager
for once in his life. But that wasn't going to
work if he wanted to end up at the Air
Force Academy the next year, and eventually he ended up
(13:48):
losing his cap command position, which was a big deal,
the kind of thing that could mess up his career plans,
but none of it seemed to matter more than his
true love with Diane. She felt the same way. Within
a week or two, they were spending every spare moment together. David,
about a foot taller than Diane, always had his arms
wrapped around her. To their friends and family, these two
(14:11):
were less a pair of high school seniors and more
a set of conjoined twins. At this point, Diane talked
about David constantly. All roads led back to him. You
could bring up your freakin' intestinal polyp surgery and she'd
find something to connect it to David.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
You know, David has a call in two like picture
every like uncomfortably close couple in line in front of
you at the amusement park, and this is them, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
The ones that you want to scream get a room at.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, they're like groping each other and it's like, bro,
we are in line for like the Tower of Terror.
Can you chill out? Diane even changed her post high
school plan after they started dating, she applied to the
Air Force Academy just like he did. Unfortunately for her,
she missed the application deadline, so with David's encouragement, she
applied to the US Naval Academy instead. Once I graduate,
(15:10):
she told her parents, I can transfer from the Navy
to the Air Force and David and I can be
stationed together. They got engaged a month after they started dating.
They even set at eight August thirteenth, two thousand, right
after they graduated from their academies. When her family tried
to talk some sense into her about getting engaged so
(15:32):
fast and so young, Diane said her mind was made up.
David was the love of her life. If I can't
be missus David Graham, she said, I will die as
Miss Diane Zamora.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Ew dude.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Their little inside joke was greenish brown female sheep, which
meant all of you, and and the had QC nicknames
for each other. Diane called David tiger because that was
the mascot at his high school, and he called her kittens.
(16:13):
I know, it's so gross, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
And why kittens plural? Like why not kitten? For some reason,
I just hate it even more because of that Essa.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
I'm yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't, It makes zero sense.
Diane's virginity had always been important to her. She bought
one hundred percent into the idea that you should only
have sex with your one true love and only after marriage.
David didn't. He'd already lost his virginity and he was
rarren to go again. He pressured and coaxed and probably
(16:47):
played the whole blue balls card, and eventually, once he'd
put a deposit down on an engagement ring, Diane caved.
This was a huge deal for her, and as much
as she loved David and one to marry him, she
felt guilty about breaking her own rule.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yeah, and I think this really cemented her. Like you
might call it devotion, or you might call it obsession
with their relationship, like once she'd given him her precious
flower of womanhood, like that was it. She had to
make sure the relationship worked or else she'd given away
this priceless jewel for nothing.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
As the weeks went by, Diane and David started their
senior year of high school in a rosy haze of
love and hormones. But then something awful happened. Diane was
driving David's truck one evening and she got into a
gnarly accident. The truck flipped on its side and somehow
her arm got pinned between it and the ground. She
(17:44):
had to be rushed to the hospital and have surgery
to put pins in her left hand. For a while,
they thought she might have to have it amputated. If
Diane needed one more thing to cement her belief in David,
she got it after that car wreck. Stayed right by
her bedside at the hospital, and when she got out,
he was the one who went out and got her
(18:06):
meds and whatever else she needed. He checked on her constantly,
bringing her treats and trying to lift her spirits. One
of her family members later said, I don't think Diane
had ever had that kind of attention.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
And Diane craved attention. She didn't get as much as
she needed at home. Her mom was always working and
her dad, well, her dad had other things on his mind.
As we'll see in a minute. Diane was the oldest
and from about age twelve on she pretty much had
to be mom number two to her three siblings. That's
a lot for a kid, and David could relate. His
(18:39):
parents had split up too, and it was tough on him.
It was part of what bonded him and Diane so
closely together. But despite all this storybook romance, and very
much unbeknownst to Diane, she wasn't the only girl David
had eyes for, At least according to some of his friends.
There was a girl he went to high school with,
Adrian Jones. She and David were on the cross country
(19:02):
track team together, and they liked to hang out. Adrian
Jones was pretty much the platonic ideal of the American
teenage girl. She was blonde and beautiful, flirty and friendly, funny,
and hugely popular. She was a rock star at cross
country and her boss's favorite employee at the Fried Chicken
place where she worked after school. Is a happy kid,
(19:22):
thriving at life. Her friends called her aj. She wanted
to be a veterinarian or a behavioral scientist, although apparently
she never told her best friend about him. Adrian liked
David a lot, which is odd, but I can think
of a couple reasons why she wouldn't tell her bestie.
For one thing, both Adrian and David were dating other people,
so she might have just considered it an embarrassing little
(19:44):
secret that they were starting to get flirty with each other.
But she did tell some people. She told her boss
at the Chicken Place showed her a picture of him,
and some of David's friends noticed that they were spending
a lot of time together. And remember, he and Diane
went to different high schools, so you know, it was
easy to keep a secret.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Now.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
They weren't a thing, at least not yet, but they
sure did hang out a lot. David talked to one
of his work friends about her during his shifts at
Wynn Dixie said he couldn't quite make up his mind
how he felt about her, but at one point he
told his friend he loved her. Not that it stopped
him from proposing to Diane. So so weird. Diane had
no idea that she had any competition, and one Saturday
(20:26):
in early November, the cross country team at Mansfield High School,
David and Adrian school had a meet a couple hundred
miles away in Lubbock. On the ride back, David and
Adrian sat with their heads together, talking and joking, and
when they got back to Mansfield High David offered her
a ride home and At some point along the way,
Adrian suggested that he'd pull off behind an elementary school,
(20:48):
and within a few minutes they were having sex. As
far as we know, Adrian never told anybody about this
little encounter, which isn't that weird. I once made out
behind a curtain with a random guy from my high
school while we were backstage at play rehearsal, and I
never told us all about.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
It, except now to a few thousand of your closest
friends till now.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Absolutely you know, it was just one of those random
bursts of teenage hormones that happens. Those things are firing
off like M eight's at that age. David later wrote,
it was meaningless and painful because I was letting down
the one person I had sworn to be faithful to. Well,
you poor little old thing, it must have been awful.
Why'd you do it? Then? For God's sakes? Oh, but
(21:29):
of course I forgot. It's actually illegal for a man
to turn down a pretty woman's advances. You can do
hard jail time for.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
That, And you know they take that shit seriously in Texas,
like you'll go to maximum security if you're convicted, so.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
You can go to the electric chair for that. The
guilt hit him like a semi truck immediately after he
dropped Adrian off home. What had he done? He was engaged.
He confessed to his best friends right away, told them
I want you to listen, then forget, and he made
them swear up and down they wouldn't tell Diane. If
anybody was gonna tell her, and it was gonna be
(22:04):
a bad conversation, it should be David himself. Now, there's
a little more backstory that I think is important to
know here, namely that Diane's dad had been having an
affair on her mom for years and it pretty much
threw their entire family into chaos, and Diane was right
in the middle of the storm. Her mom would take
her along to go track down the dad and his
(22:26):
mistress and yell at him. Once they barged into the
woman's house together and started trashing the living room, It's like, lady,
I get that you were hurting, but did you really
have to bring your adolescent daughter into this.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
That kind of thing can make a deep imprint on you,
especially when you're a kid. So I think Diane already
had a deep down mistrust of men, which might have
been part of why she didn't show interest in dating
for most of high school. When she met David, she
created this story in her head that they were faded
to be together and their love was so pure that
(23:27):
nothing could ever make a dent in it. It was
an idealistic view of love. One of the things Diane
had learned from her mom was that when a man
cheats on you, you go batshit balls to the wall nuts.
David and Diane had always been possessive and jealous, so
when David started acting a little strange in November, a
(23:48):
little distant, Diane was immediately suspicious.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Always always, for the like three months that they'd been
together at this point, if that.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Right after Thanksgiving, which David spent with Diane's family, she
finally crowbarred the truth out of him. She started prodding
him with about past girlfriends. David had told her she
was his first real girlfriend, but she was starting to
have her doubts. She demanded that he list all the
girls he'd been friends with or gone out with, and
(24:21):
David did. One of those girls was Adrian Jones, and,
in a move that wasn't exactly the smartest thing he
could do at the moment, David tried to change the subject.
We need to study for the SATs.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
He said, Oh, honey, honey, no, no, no.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
That convinced Diane she was on the right track, and
she kept poking, and finally David broke, you aren't the
only girl I've been involved with. He admitted, I've had
sex with someone else. Diane was furious, You mean you
weren't a virgin when we got together, She said, no,
(25:00):
now I was, David said, which was also a lie.
By the way, don't you remember your ossie fling at
a summer camp, Dave. It only took a second for
the significance of this to sink in. What he was
saying was he cheated on her. Later, David would say
that when he told her, I thought the very life
(25:21):
in her had been torn away. That's a poetic way
of saying that. Miss Diane kirked the fuck out. It
was an epic, once in a generation meltdown. Diane sobbed
so hard she practically hyperventilated. She screamed and shook. She
bashed her head against the walls and the floor, and
(25:43):
then she took a poker from the fireplace and swung
it at David as hard as she could, she missed.
The freakout lasted for over an hour. David would later write,
it wasn't just jealousy for Diane. She'd been betrayed to
and forgotten all in that one meaningless instant in November,
(26:05):
just an instant, okay.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Right, cell phone.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
The purity in which she held so dear had been
tainted in that one unclean act.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Unclean act. Jesus Jones, these kids are intense. I think.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
When Diane found out David had cheated, it catapulted her
back to that scared, confused little girl who didn't understand
why her parents' marriage was imploding. She'd gone against her
own moral code to have sex with David because she
believed they were meant for each other and only each other.
Now that was falling apart, Diane felt like her whole
(26:42):
world was crashing down.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
There was only one thing she could think of to do.
Kill her. She hissed at David, kill her. She was
banging her head against the hard floor, as she said,
at gritting her teeth in pain. David didn't think she
really meant it at first, kept trying to calm her down,
but she wouldn't. It was the only way her rival,
(27:05):
a girl she'd never met, had to die, and finally
David gave in. He promised he'd do it. He wrote,
Diane's 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. The only
thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life
(27:26):
of the one that had, for an instant, taken her
place womanly vengeance. Holy shit, this is nineteen ninety five.
Remember these kids think they're in some kind of Edwardian melodrama,
and it is disturbing how fast this insane idea of
killing Adrian took off and became a reality for David
(27:47):
and Diane. From the way they describe it in their confessions,
it was basically like kill her for me. Oh, come on, baby,
you don't mean that. Yes, I do kill he, or
I'll dump you. Okay. That's how cheap Adrian's life was
to these two shy little dweebs. David later wrote, I
didn't have any harsh feelings for Adrian, but no one
could stand between me and Diane. He approached the murder
(28:10):
like he would a military operation, join me in an
I roll. I guess that's how he kept himself from
thinking about the moral implications of what he was planning
to do. David later wrote the plan was to break
her young neck and sink her body to the bottom
of the lake with the weights that ended up being
hit into her head her young neck. The way this
(28:31):
dude writes is just too much. He writes, like a
vampire and a bodice ripper gods novel, her womanly vengeance,
her young neck. Man dial it back about seventeen cliques.
I'm begging you. We're up to our knees in it anyway.
So on the night of December fourth, nineteen ninety five,
David called Adrian. We don't know exactly what he said
(28:51):
to her, but when Adrian hung up the phone, she
told her mom that was David from cross Country. He's upset.
Adrian's mom told her to get to bed, But not
long after that phone call, with her family asleep, Adrian
snuck out. What we're about to describe in the next
couple of minutes comes directly from the confessions of both
diane' zamora and David Graham. David picked Adrian up in
(29:14):
Diane's mom's car. He had one of his favorite guns,
a Makarov nine millimeter, tucked away out of sight, and
unbeknownst to Adrian, Diane was hiding in the hatchback, waiting
in the dark. David drove to an out of the
way area and parked the car. Then he made like
he was going to kiss Adrian, and Adrian reclined her
(29:36):
seat back a little, probably so they could have more
room to make out. David wrapped his arms around her,
holding her tight, and then like a killer from a
horror movie, Diane rose up from the back seat. She
had a barbell in her hand. Adrian must have jumped
at the sight of her, and it didn't take her
long to figure out what was going on. You're gonna
(29:57):
kill me, aren't you, Adrian said. David tried to do
what he'd planned, break her neck, but quickly realized that
action movies are not exactly documentaries when it comes to
this stuff, and it was a lot more difficult than
he expected, and by now Adrian, fully aware of what
was happening, was fighting like hell. So as David held
(30:18):
on to Adrian, Diane hit her in the head with
the barbell, but again movies aren't real, and their victim
was still alive. Terrified, Adrian managed to crawl out the
open passenger side window and took off, runnin'. I was panicky,
David wrote later, and just grabbed the Makarov nine millimeter
to follow. To our relief. At the time, she was
(30:39):
too injured from the wounds to go far. She ran
into a nearby field and collapsed. Bless her sweetheart. David's
confession continues, I wanted to just jump in and drive off.
We were both shaken and even surprised by the nature
of our actions in that short instant. I knew I
couldn't leave the key witness to our crime alive. I
(31:00):
just pointed and shot, and then he fired again, just
to make sure. He ran back to the car, and
they peeled out as fast as they could. I love you,
they said to each other. Then Diane said, we shouldn't
have done that. David, Yeah, no, shit, it was your idea.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
No.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Later that night, David's friend John heard a knock at
his bedroom window and found David and Diane standing outside,
shivering and pale as ghosts. Can we come in? David said,
and John said, sure, of course, he'd been sleeping, so
the only light in the room was from a little
mini Christmas tree in the corner. But John could still
see that David and Diane were disheveled and had blood
(31:42):
on her clothes, and Diane was kind of whimpering softly
to herself. When he asked them what the hell happened,
David said, you don't want to know now, See, kiddo,
this is the moment where you tell these two to
get to step in and then you call the cops.
But these were two fellow cap cadets. David was like
a brother to him, and he trusted to him, so
he let him and Diane clean up in his bathroom
(32:03):
and loaned them some fresh clothes. Before they left. Back
out the window, David said, we were never here. This
never happened, nothing suspicious there. John thought it was disturbing,
but he never told anybody.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
In the morning, Adriane's family realized she hadn't slept in
her bed the night before, and when friend after friends
said they hadn't seen her, panic began to set in.
Around that same time, a man found Adrian's body in
the field near his house and called the police. Adrian's
death hit the town like a meteor. She'd been such
(32:39):
a bright light in the lives of everyone around her.
When they made the announcement at the high school, kids
were punching walls and bursting into tears. And for her family,
her parents and her two little brothers, it was unthinkable
pain like most of us can't even imagine. There's no
mystery about who committed this murder. Obviously we've already told you,
(33:04):
but I think it's important to note that another person
came within a hair of getting tried for Adrian's murder,
a kid named Brian McMillan. Brian was kind of a
troubled kid. He had some mental health issues that had
kept him out of school for a while. A sweet kid,
according to several people who went to high school with him,
but unsteady. Brian had an obvious thing for Adrian. Her
(33:26):
work friend said he used to come buy the restaurant
so much that she'd hide from him if she saw
him come through the door. When detectives heard about this,
they understandably wanted to talk to Brian, and the poor
kid didn't do himself any favors in the interrogation room. First,
he denied knowing Adrian, and then he finally admitted he
was lying. He said he couldn't remember if he'd picked
(33:48):
Adrian up. On the night of the murder. He'd gotten
drunk depressed because he was the only one of his
friends who didn't have a girlfriend, and he thought he'd
had a bad reaction to the booze. He thought it
had probably interacted with his anxiety and depression meds. He
said he didn't have any memory of what he did
after that. He might have picked her up, he just
didn't know for sure. Not a great answer. No, the truth,
(34:14):
but not a great answer when you're being questioned in
a murder case. And there were other things that lined
up against Brian. Adrian had been on the phone with
her boyfriend on the night of the murder when David
called and asked her to come out with him, but
of course Adrian didn't want to tell her boyfriend that,
so she told him it was Brian who clicked in
in the middle of their call. But the detectives had
(34:36):
no way of knowing that a neighbor had seen a
pickup truck in the area on the night of the murder,
and Brian had a truck the same color. The police
put Brian under arrest. His only alibi was his dad,
who swore he was home all night. The kid spent
the holidays in jail. Then finally they finished searching his
(34:58):
house and car and clothing and Adrian's clothing and found
zero evidence putting him at the scene of the murder.
He took a polygraph and passed. What David and Diane
thought about the fact that another teenager was twisting in
the wind, accused of the crime they committed, we don't know.
They were both miserable, at least according to them. David wrote,
(35:19):
never had to imagine so much guilt. I saw Adrianne's
mother in the grocery store. I read articles of how
her family was coping in the papers. Diane talked endlessly
about how much she wished they could go back to
December third and do things over again, just leave Adrian alone,
which spare me.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
And As their guilt and fear about the murder grew stronger,
their relationship grew more and more toxic. They were more
controlling and possessive of each other than ever. David was
so controlling that he'd hardly let Diane out of his sight,
even around her family. If her mom tried to get
her alone in the kitchen or something, David would pop
his head around the corner in two seconds flat. It
(36:01):
was weird. On the one hand, they were more devoted
to each other than ever, they spent every waking second together,
But on the other they were getting into terrible fights
and they were getting physical. Diane would later show her
Navy academy roommates a scar on her knee from a
knife fight she had with David and told them she'd
left claw marks on his neck one time trying to
(36:23):
choke him. They beat each other up. Diane said, I
mean that is some next level shit right there. Who
gets in a knife fight with their significant other? Like,
I've never even heard of that. These two were not okay.
I think they blamed each other and each was a
constant reminder to the other of the awful thing that
they'd done and what would happen to them if they
got caught. But from the outside looking in, David and
(36:46):
Diane were two superachievers on their way to the brightest
futures imaginable. When they got their Air Force and Navy
Academy acceptance letters, the newspapers did stories on them. These
squeaky clean, pink cheeked teenagers who wanted nothing more more
than to serve their country and be together the future
fighter pilot and the future astronaut. People ate it up
(37:07):
that summer it was off to their respective academies to
chase those futures. They'd already made a solemn promise to
stay together, talk every day by email and or phone,
and get married after graduation in two thousand. But as
the summer went along, the toxicity in their relationship kept
ramping up. And then Diane started bonding with the fellow
cadet named Jay. They started spending a lot of time
(37:30):
together and there was a definite mutual attraction. Diane talked
to Jay a lot about David, and a lot of
what she said worried Jay. He told her he thought
David sounded really controlling and their obsessive relationship didn't seem healthy.
Diane would burst into sobs if David took too long
to answer one of her emails. When the cadets had
(37:50):
to write an autobiographical paper in class, everybody else wrote
about their accomplishments and challenges, but Diane just wrote about
David and how they were planning to get married after graduation.
Her teacher thought it was weird as hell. At some point,
David got wind of the blossoming friendship between Diane and Jay,
and she confessed that they'd kissed. David wrote Jay a
(38:12):
furious letter, telling him to back off his woman, and
he wrote to Diane, remember what binds us together? Ominous?
Almost you could argue a little threatening. But as much
as Diane obsessed over David, part of her seemed to
want a way out. She told Jay he should be
her boyfriend. She introduced him to her mom at parents weekend.
(38:34):
Her mom thought he was great, much better for her
daughter than David. And then one day Diane told him
about the murder. Jay was stunned, but at first he
didn't really believe it. I thought she was telling me
this to get attention, he told author Peter Meyer, whose
book Blind Love was one of our sources for this case.
But eventually, after lots more conversation about the murder, he
(38:57):
came to realize it might be true. He didn't tell
on her, though, even though she didn't express any regret
whatsoever about the killing. Later Jay said she said she'd
do it again. She also said she'd promised David that
if she ever cheated on him, she'd kill the guy too.
And then, of course came that night in late August
(39:18):
when Diane got into some deep conversation with her roommates
and spilled her secret, and we know what they decided
to do about it the next day. So, like we
told you at the beginning of the episode, Diane got
hauled in to speak with Navy Academy higher ups and
detectives from Texas. She denied everything. They told her she
was suspended until further notice and gave her a plane
(39:38):
ticket home, and she flew instead to Colorado and David
spent a few days with him before she actually flew
home to Texas. And then on September fourth, the Texas
detectives showed up in Colorado Springs to talk to David Graham.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
David made a half assed attempt at denying everything. Then
he took a polygraph and failed it miserably. Eventually he caved.
He asked for a computer, and he wrote a four
and a half page confession. The detectives later said that
it quote read like a Danielle Steele novel.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah, y'all have already seen evidence of that. This dude
could write a trashy romance novel, no sweat.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
I hate to say it, but he would do numbers
on like book talk like no doubt he could write
a smutty book like crate like he would do numbers.
After he finished writing out his confession, David was arrested
and put on suicide watch at the jail. Almost simultaneously,
seven hundred miles away in Fort Worth, a swat team
(40:36):
descended on Diane's grandma's house where she was staying. Diane
was asleep in her grandma's guest room, snuggled up with
some dude. We have no idea who it was, but
I thought that was a fascinating little detail. She is
physically and psychologically incapable of being without a man.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, and it's so weird because she went from like
not even caring to that. It's bizarre.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
They cuffed her, hauled her into the station, told her
David confessed and that was it. She made her own
confession and a flood of tears. The detectives didn't buy
for a second she wasn't sorry. They felt she was
sorry she got caught. The DA made the decision that
David and Diane would be tried separately, and while they
sat in jail waiting for their respective days in court,
(41:19):
the two lovebirds wrote syrupy, high drama letters back and forth.
I miss you like I miss ice cream, David wrote,
you were both rich and creamy for what sweet and
ice cold, milky and tasty and bad for you?
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Man? That metaphor was fighting for its life by the
end of that sentence.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
But the hell my ey was started twitching. I just
don't I don't know like milky, milky and tasty, Diane
wrote back to David. When will my love come find me?
When will I get to walk out of these bars
for good? I just wish I had a remote control
(42:06):
for time. That would rock.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
She doesn't have.
Speaker 3 (42:09):
She doesn't quite have the panache that David does.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Does she doesn't have gift.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
That would rock. I could just see the bubble letters
now I can see her handwriting. In another letter, she
told him she'd been banging her head against the bars
of her cell, trying to kill herself. The jail intercepted
the letter and put her on suicide watch for a
couple days until the jail medical staff examined her and
(42:35):
found zero evidence of any head injuries and zero evidence
of suicidal ideation. They also communicated through the press, throwing
I Love us at each other via the reporters that
were swarming all over the courthouse. But finally, by the
time Diane went to trial, she realized that her only
hope was to try and blame the whole thing on David.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
I'm so disappointed. I thought their love was eternal.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Diane's attorney said, Look, David was manipulative, he was controlling,
he was violent. You couldn't even see it in their
nicknames for each other. He was the tiger, she was
the kittens. Diane only confessed to protect him. DNA Adrian's
found all over Diane's card begged to differ not to
(43:22):
mention the confessions she'd made to her Navy academy boyfriend
in her roommates and the creepy notation in her day
planner with Adrian one thirty eight am scribbled on December fourth.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Oh boy, screepy.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Diane's roommate Jen took the stand and testified that Diane
didn't express any remorse for Adrian's murder. She said that
everyone knew that that girl was a tramp and a
slut and she deserved to die. Wow, well, tell us
how you really feel. Diane took the stand in her
own defense. Of course, she copped to being there on
(43:57):
the night of the murderer, but said that David was
the one who actually killed Adrian. She hadn't been involved
in any of the actual killing, and she hadn't really
wanted it. She made a show of weepy remorse on
the stand, but it came across as fake and bloodless,
and when the prosecutor took over questioning, she got nasty,
calling one witness a liar.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
After six hours of deliberation, the jury let Diane know
what they thought of her. Guilty of capital murder. She
was sentenced to a mandatory life sentence with a minimum
of forty years before any chance of parole. She's lost
her appeals and she's still there, forty seven years old.
Now she doesn't interview every now and again and swears
(44:39):
up and down she's not a killer, just a woman
who fell for the wrong man. I mean, the country
song practically writes itself. David's trial came next. His defense
argued that David wasn't even there at the murder scene.
It was all Diane, Yeah, yeah, man, whats problem with that?
Was all the evidence corroborated his confine. The investigators had
(45:02):
found the barbells and the gun at David's house. The
trial wasn't especially dramatic, but there was one strange thing.
One of Adrian's friends took the stand to testify that
she was the one who drove Adrian home from that
track meet, the one David said he'd driven her home
from on the night of their one night stand. She
was one hundred percent sure, she said, Now this was
(45:24):
a huge surprise for me, and it raises an interesting question.
Is it possible David was lying about having sex with Adrian?
And if so, why would he do that? So, as
I see it, there are a few possibilities here. One
David was lying or maybe just mistaken about when the
sex happened, could have just gotten his nights mixed up,
(45:46):
or he could have wanted it to seem like it
was just a crime of opportunity. You know, we were
just on our way home from the track meet and
it just kind of happened, as opposed to like he
asked her out and it happened something like that. Two
there sex and David just made it up maybe just
to flex with his friends initially, and then maybe it
morphed into hey, I could make Diane really jealous if
(46:08):
I told her I slept with somebody else, And then
Diane's reaction was just way, way more nuclear than he
could have imagined, and it got out of control after that.
Or maybe, and this is the darkest possibility, maybe he
lied to Diane because he knew she would react like that.
Maybe he wanted something that would bind them together forever,
(46:28):
an insurance policy against Diane ever, leaving him a murderer.
Might do that. We have no way of knowing for sure,
but it's a tantalizing little detail, isn't it, And David
jumped on it after Adrian's friend testified and later told
the press that he hadn't actually slept with Adrian. They
were just casual acquaintances. His story seems to evolve quite
(46:49):
a bit from one telling to the next, so anyway,
the evidence was more than enough for the jury. David
Graham was convicted of the murder of Adrian Jones and
sentenced to life in prison, same as Diane. By the
time David appeared on the TV show American Justice a
few years later, from prison, he changed his tune about Diane,
said the one silver lining of being in prison is
(47:11):
that he doesn't have to be around her anymore. Dang,
that's a burne.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
You know we're all embarrassed about people we wrote flowery
poetry about in high school, don't.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
It's definitely true. He also said that prison is a
lot like the military, so he's suggesting pretty well he'd
found Jesus by then. Evidently the detectives who arrested him
believe he's a cold blooded killer, totally conscienceless. Adrian's mom, Linda,
told the press that she felt for David and Diane's parents.
(47:44):
Three young lives, not just Adrians, have been taken because
of senseless violence. She said. She talked about what bright
futures all three kids could have had. Now it just
all lay in ashes. It was the intervention of Linda
and her family that saved Diane and David from the
death penalty. Linda said it made no sense for two
more kids to die. Despite all David's claims of innocence,
(48:07):
at trial in the year two thousand, he finally admitted
he'd killed Adrian Jones to prove his love for Diane.
Everyone in David and Diane's lives were stunned that they
did this. Diane's people blamed David, and David's people blamed Diane,
which we've seen plenty of times before with killer couples.
It was his fault, it was hers, But the reality
is it was both of them. They drove each other on,
(48:30):
fueled each other's obsession. They've both moved on with their
lives now, albeit behind bars. They've pursued education, kept in
touch with loved ones, participated in prayer groups. They'll most
likely see freedom again someday. Meanwhile, what we have left
of Adrian is the memorial tree her school planted for her,
with a plaque that reads strength, Unity, courage, and, as
(48:54):
her mama put it, a box of ashes waiting to
be buried. That's all I have left of my baby.
So that was a wild one, right, Campers. You know,
we'll have another one for you next week, but for now,
lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until
we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. If
you haven't booked your spot on the Crime Wave True
(49:15):
Crime Cruise from November three through November seventh, get on
at y'all, join Katie and Me plus last podcast on
the Left, Scared to Death and Sinisterhood for a Rock
and Good Time at Sea. You can pay all at
once or set up a payment plan, but you got
to have a fan code to book a ticket, So
go to Crimewave at seed dot com, slash campfire and
take it from there. And as always, we want to
(49:36):
send a grateful shout out to a few of our
lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Miranda Viblet, Janet,
Melissa b and Mistress Ogg. And I gotta ask, is
it og like Nanny Ogg from the Terry Pratchett books?
Because I love it. We appreciate y'all to the moon
and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you
are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode
(49:57):
add free at least a day early, sometimes more. Are
plus tons of extra content like patron's only episodes and
hilarious post show discussions. And once you hit the five
dollars in up categories to get in more cool stuff
a free sticker at five dollars, a rat enamel pin
or fridge magnet, while supplies last at ten virtual events
with Katie and Me, and we're always looking for new
stuff to do for you, so if you can, come
(50:19):
join us at patreon dot com, Slash True Crime Campfire
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Herd with Colin Cowherd
The Herd with Colin Cowherd is a thought-provoking, opinionated, and topic-driven journey through the top sports stories of the day.