Crazy In Love: How An All-American Teenage Romance Spiraled Into Murder
Crazy In Love: How An All-American Teenage Romance Spiraled Into Murder
High School sweethearts David Graham and Diane Zamora seemed to have everything going for them. Both were high achievers who had already planned a future together until fate intervened
Background
At first glance, it didn’t look like much: just another empty patch of dirt and grass lined by barbed wire and elm trees.
But residents of sleepy, suburban Mansfield, Texas, know better. This is where Adrianne Jones, once the queen bee of Mansfield High School, met her untimely end.
There used to be a memorial here.
Jeff Lackey, a close friend of Jones’s, skipped class after hearing of her death to plant a simple cross made of sticks and red wire on the site. But it was quickly confiscated by police, who thought that it may have been placed by Jones’s killer instead.
Still, Lackey, along with his friend Jessica Ramon and Jones’s mother Linda, continued to scour the site in the days and months following the December 1995 murder, hoping to turn up some clue that the police had missed: the diamond stud earring that was missing from Jones’s ear when her body was found, or her favorite gold necklace.
However, their searches did not yield any results apart from some long, blonde hair–matching Jones’s–tangled in the barbed wire, and the small depression in the earth where her head came to rest.
In the months following the killing, many of Jones’s grieving classmates theorized that her killer likely wandered the very same halls between classes. And, while they were correct in that regard, none of them ever would have suspected the true nature of the culprit–or, to be more precise, the culprits.
All-American Sweethearts
David Graham cried at Jones’s funeral.
To his classmates’ knowledge, the two had never met, apart from brief interactions at track and field meets.
However, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Graham– who was known for being stern, straightforward, and somewhat old-fashioned–might simply have been touched by the tragic loss of someone so young.
But there were many things Graham’s classmates didn’t know about him–for one, that he had a fiancée.
Probably the only girl who could’ve matched Graham’s natural drive, Diane Zamora had not made herself a popular student at Mansfield High. She was known for being aloof and judgmental; as one of Graham’s classmates in the ROTC commented, “She was very cold, standoffish, and snooty, and she made David cold and standoffish.”
Even if her peers couldn’t see what he did, Graham was drawn towards Zamora’s ambition, studious nature, and disinterest in high school social politics. Less than a month after they started dating, Graham sold off several prized hunting rifles to pay for an engagement ring.
Following graduation from their respective military academies, Graham and Zamora announced to their families that they would be getting married.
After two of her elder cousins became pregnant in high school, Zamora had steered clear of boys, swearing that she wouldn’t have sex before marriage.
Nothing and nobody was going to derail her from her dreams.
But deep down, Zamora was not so different from any other teenager: she wanted to be loved.
Not long after their engagement, Zamora lost her virginity to Graham.
The experience left her severely distraught, her family later recalled. She seemed guilty and confused about the incident, which flew in the face of the identity she had built for herself.
In the end, it seemed to reinforce the already obsessive relationship between Zamora and Graham.
“If I can’t be Mrs. David Graham,” she told one relative, “then I will die as Miss Diane Zamora.”
Infidelity
It’s unclear exactly what happened between Adrianne Jones and David Graham.
All anyone knows for sure is that about a month before the murder, Graham offered Jones a ride home after they represented their school at a regional track meet together.
In his typed confession, which broke the case a year later, Graham claimed that, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, he and Jones had sex.
This statement has been contested by friends of Jones, who insisted that she would never get involved with a boy whom she knew had a girlfriend, and by investigators, who presented evidence in court that Graham had fabricated the account to make Zamora jealous.
But regardless, when Graham returned home to Zamora, he confessed to her that he’d cheated, and she believed him.
Devastated by the betrayal of what she had once believed to be the perfect, pure relationship, Zamora demanded that Graham prove his love for her in the most drastic way possible: by killing Jones.
Murder of Adrianne Jones
The pair hatched a simple plan.
Graham would call Jones and convince her to sneak out late at night. With Zamora hiding in his hatchback, they’d drive her out to the lake on the edge of town, break her neck, and dispose of the body deep underneath the water, where nobody would ever find it.
At first, it seemed to them that everything would go off without a hitch.
Graham called up Jones, claiming to be stressed about problems with his girlfriend, and Adrianne listened sympathetically. Her mother recalled that she seemed stressed after the brief conversation.
Regardless, Adrianne did sneak out of her home later that night to go for a drive with Graham.
During their drive to the lake, an irate Zamora popped out of the hatchback and began interrogating Jones. The confrontation escalated, and Zamora hit Jones in the head with one of the weights that Graham kept in his trunk.
The couple assumed that the blow would be enough to knock Jones unconscious. But the terrified Jones managed to slip out of the car window and attempted to flee through the nearby field.
Graham then pursued her with another item he habitually kept in his car: a 9mm Makarov pistol.
Two gunshots rang out, and it was all over.
According to Zamora’s confession, Graham’s first words after returning to the car were, “I love you, baby. Do you believe me now?”
Investigation And Initial Suspects
Immediately after the murder, Jones and Graham fled to a friend’s house, where they demanded to be left alone before collapsing to the ground. They held each other for hours, sobbing, and professing their love to each other–all while splattered in blood.
Even after Jones’s body was discovered on the side of the road the next morning, that friend never came forward to police.
There were other suspects.
For starters, a girl who had gone to trial once before for violently attacking another girl she suspected of sleeping with her boyfriend–but she had a solid alibi and passed a polygraph test.
Investigators then moved on to Bryan McMillen–a high school dropout, rumored around the school to be suffering from depression, who had recently become infatuated with Jones.
He was known to drop by the Subway restaurant where she worked so frequently that she’d started ducking under the counter when she saw him approaching the door.
What’s more, when Graham called Jones the night of the murder, he had unknowingly interrupted a call with her boyfriend, Tracy Smith. When she took Smith off hold to return to their conversation, he asked her who’d called.
Jones, fearful of Smith’s jealousy if he discovered she’d taken a call from a handsome and accomplished classmate like Graham, lied and claimed that it was the non-threatening McMillen–information that Smith later passed on to the police.
McMillen, though, had a solid alibi backed up by his father, who claimed he hadn’t left the house that night. After passing a polygraph test, he, too, was released from police custody.
Six months after the killing, investigators didn’t seem any closer to breaking the case.
The mystery of Adrianne Jones’s murder had gone cold.
Loose Lips
Everything seemed to be going right for Graham and Zamora.
In February, they announced their engagement in ROTC class. By summer, they’d graduated from high school and gone off to their respective military academies–Graham, the Air Force, and Zamora, the Navy.
But perhaps unsurprisingly to all who knew the obsessively codependent nature of their relationship, Zamora and Graham didn’t take well to a long-distance relationship.
Zamora would break into crying fits when Graham failed to promptly reply to her emails and constantly feared that he was cheating on her with female cadets at the Air Force Academy.
Her squad leader, Jay Guild, observed, “She often talked about him very strangely, as if she didn’t trust him, but she still wanted to be with him.”
Guild and Zamora became increasingly close, so much so that upperclassmen reprimanded them for “excessive fraternizing.” Graham, of course, did not take this well and reported to Naval officials that Guild was sexually harassing Zamora.
At one point later that summer, Guild, in an attempt to understand what tied Zamora and Graham so strongly, asked her whether Graham had ever cheated on her.
She said yes.
Guild then recalls asking Zamora what she did about it, “All she said, is that she told him [Graham] [to kill the girl], and she saw him do it.”
However, Guild never reported their conversation, violating the Naval Academy’s strict honor code. But when Zamora repeated the story in a late-night conversation with her two roommates, as if to prove the extent of Graham’s love for her, they did report it.
Confessions And Sentencing
Under initial interrogations, Zamora wouldn’t talk. However, Graham did.
Air Force officers informed him that he had a duty to tell the truth. Knowing that he could write well, they sat him down at a computer, and over the next four and a half hours, Graham typed out a lurid confession detailing his supposed affair with Jones, his confession to Zamora, and the plan they’d formulated together.
The murder of “The one girl [who] had stolen from us our purity.”
Graham and Zamora were both sentenced to life in prison, with eligibility for parole in 2036. Prosecutors didn’t seek the death sentence, upon the request of Jones’s family.
Later evidence would call the extent of Zamora’s involvement in the murder into question. The police investigator who persuaded Zamora to eventually confess did so by reading Graham’s own confession to her, which Zamora now claims allowed her to lie and corroborate his report in order to protect him.
Graham killed Jones, Zamora claims, not to compensate for a past sin, but to keep her from breaking up with him. By killing Jones together, They would create a bond between them that neither could ever break.
More tellingly, Jones’s head injuries were consistent with those that would be left by the butt of a rifle rather than by a hand weight.
But regardless of how much of her confession was true, Zamora protected Graham–and, perhaps, herself–to the bitter end, causing Jones’s family months of grief and confusion.
In 2003, Zamora married Steven Mora, who had been sentenced to four years in prison for theft and burglary.
The couple had never met in person at the time of their marriage.
Sources:
Bardwell, S.K. “Inmates who never met say they want to marry.” Chron, 13 March 2003, https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Inmates-who-never-met-say-they-want-to-marry-2108440.php
“Former Air Force cadet gets life in Texas teen's slaying.” CNN, 24 July 1998, http://edition.cnn.com/US/9807/24/cadet.trial.03/
“Infamous love triangle murderer, 40, serving life sentence for 1995 slaying of her boyfriend's high school lover, loses appeal.” Daily Mail, 24 July 2018, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5987673/Woman-fatal-Texas-teen-love-triangle-loses-court-appeal.html?ito=link_share_article-image-share#i-c5c94fb230494e38
Cardona, Claire Z. “What you need to know about the teenage love triangle that sent the Texas 'Cadet Killers' to prison 20 years ago.” The Dallas Morning News, 24 July 2018, https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2018/07/25/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-teenage-love-triangle-that-sent-the-texas-cadet-killers-to-prison-20-years-ago/
Pierce, Ellise. “Love is a Killer.” Dallas Observer, 17 October 1996, https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/love-is-a-killer-6403303
Hollandsworth, Skip. “True Crime: The Killer Cadets.” Texas Monthly, December 1996, https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/the-killer-cadets/
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