True Crime Campfire - Killer Cadets: The Murder of Adrianne Jones

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

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/CAMPFIRESources:Blind Love by Peter MeyerTexas 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/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

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. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. 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 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 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 U.S. Naval Academy 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 24, 1996. 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 sounds like standard issue military hell, an ungodly amount of running, push-ups, 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 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 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 fiancé 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 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 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, 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 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 dead because of me. Yeah, not unsettling at all, Diane. recovery. The roommate's first reaction was basically, oh, ha ha, 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 Plebe Summer. She'd struggled with the physical training, and she seemed kind of checked out 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 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 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. They'd been trying to solve the murder of 16-year-old Adrian Jones since December of 1995.

The next day, Texas detectives flew to Annapolis to interview this Diane Zamora. Diane was at a pep rally for the Navy football team when an officer tapped her on the shoulder and told her she needed to come with him. He 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 fiancé's hometown last year, she said, Adrian. It was huge news, but I didn't have anything to do with it.

She said she just made up the story to try and look badass in front of the other plebs. It was stupid, but Sergeant Brad Geary got a creepy feeling from Diane for minute one. Later, he told journalist Bill Curtis, I got no reaction whatsoever. I got what's sometimes referred to as the thousand. mile stare. She just kind of looked through us. And it's not like they had anything concrete on her. A 2 a.m. revelation to her roommates wasn't nearly enough. If Ms. Zamora wasn't willing to confess, that was it. 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, just until this mess 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 fiancé, David Graham. Interesting.

Diane and David met in the Civil Air Patrol, a program for high school kids that's kind of like ROTC. They teach introductory and military stuff and they felt for each other like only a pair of doofest teenagers can. Within weeks, they were each other's whole world. They were both standouts at their respective high schools, about 20 minutes away from each other. When she was just a little kid, not long after,

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 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, 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 until it was turned back on. Wow.

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 megawatt 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. 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 dropped him 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 trading.

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 had his future mapped out. David had gotten his pilots license at age 14, 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 counterterrorism unit. And even in high school, he'd already started to cultivate the kind of military discipline he'd need to achieve it. He 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 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, David's strict military discipline started falling apart. He and his two best friends, who were in cap with him, had always been the three musketeers, all 100% 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 a sort of military cadet exchange program, and while he was there, he'd lost his V-card to a pretty Aussie 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 bananas. oh brother 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 up we had several of those in my high school it's like you've decided to make this your entire personality congratulations it's going to 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 on to her like a fighter jet's radar on a missile. And this is 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 cat cadets. It was bad for morale.

And they didn't like him dating an NCO, 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 lower than you. I totally understand that. But y'all are high school kids, for God's sake. Calm the fuck down.

Like, these kids are just bizarre, like human beings. They're just 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, perish the thought. He started dressing differently, wearing jewelry and concert teas, and he 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.

And he started drinking, going for joyrides 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 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 were. 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 freaking intestinal polyp surgery and she'd find something to connect it to David. You know, David has a colon too. Like, picture every like uncomfortably close couple in line in front of you at the amusement park.

And this is them. Yeah. The ones that you want to scream, get a roommate. 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 U.S. Naval Academy instead. Once I graduate, she told her parents, I can transfer from the Navy to the Air Force, and Dave and I can be stationed together. They got engaged a month after they started dating. They even set a date, August 13, 2000, right after they graduated from their academies. When her family tried to talk some sense into her about getting engaged so fast and so young,

Diane said her mind was made up. David was the love of her life. If I can't be Mrs. David Graham, she said, I will die as Miss Diane Zamora. Ew, dude. Their little inside joke was greenish-brown female sheep, which meant all of you. And they had cutie nicknames for each other. Diane called David Tiger because that was the mascot at his high school. and he called her

kittens. I know. It's so gross. I'm sorry. And why kittens, plural? Like, why not kitten? For some reason, I just hate it even more because of that s on me. Yeah, I'm with you. I don't, it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't, it makes zero sense.

Diane's virginity had always been important to her. She bought 100% 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 raring to go again. He pressured and coaxed and probably 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 wanted to marry him, she felt guilty about breaking her own rule. 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. 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 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. He stayed right by her bedside at the hospital.

And when she got out, he was the one who went out and got her 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. 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 12 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 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 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. Just a happy kid, 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 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. Now, 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 Win 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 in early November, the cross-country team at Mansfield High School, David and Adrian's 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. And within a few minutes, they were having sex. As far as we know, Adrienne 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 it. Except now to a few thousand of your closest friends.

Until now, absolutely. You know, it was just one of those random bursts of teenage hormones that happens. Those things are firing off like M80s at that age. David later wrote, it was meaningless and painful because I was letting down the one person. and I had sworn to be faithful to. Well, you poor little old thing. It must have been awful. Why did you do it then?

For God's sakes. Oh, but 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 that. And, you know, they take that shit seriously in Texas. Like, you'll go to maximum security if you're convicted, so. 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 going to tell her and it was going to be 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 diana was right in the middle of the storm. Her mom would take her along to go track down the dad and his 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? 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 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 bat-shit, 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 little distance, Diane was immediately suspic. Always, always for the like three months that they'd been together at this point, if that. And right after Thanksgiving, which David spent with Diane's family, she finally crowbarred the truth out of him. She started prodding him 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 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 can just study for the SATs, he said. Oh, honey. Honey, no. No, no. 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, I was. David said, which was also a lie, by the way. Don't you remember your Aussie 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 in her had been torn away.

That's a poetic way of saying that Ms. Diane curked 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 then she took a poker from the fireplace and swung it at David as hard as she could. She missed. the freak out lasted for over an hour

David would later write it wasn't just jealousy for Diane she had been betrayed, deceived and forgotten all in that one meaningless instant in November just an instant okay cell phone the purity in which she held so dear

had been tainted in that one unclean act unclean act Jesus Jones these kids are intense. I think 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 world was crashing down. 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 it, gritting her teeth in pain. David didn't think she really meant it at first. He kept trying to calm her down, but she wouldn't. It was the only way. Her rival, 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. her. Not for a second did I want to lose her. The only thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life of the one that had, for an instant, taken her place. Womanly vengeance. Holy shit. This is 1995. 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 and Diane. From the way they describe it in their confessions, it was basically like, kill her for me. Oh, come on, babe, you don't mean that. Yes, I do. Killer or I'll dump you.

Okay. That's how cheap Adrian's life was to these two shitty little dwebes. 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 like he would a military operation. Join me in an eye 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 dude writes is just too much. He writes like a vampire in a bodice ripper goth novel. Her womanly vengeance. Her young neck. Man, dial it back about 17 clicks. I'm

begging you. We're up to our knees in it. Anyway, so on the night of December 4, 1995, David called Adrienne. We don't know exactly what he said 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. And 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 Diane's mom's car. He had one of his favorite guns, a Makarov 9mm, 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 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 going to 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 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 running. I was panicky, David wrote later, and just grabbed the Makarov 9mm to follow.

To our relief at the time She was too injured from the wounds to go far She ran into a nearby field and collapsed 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 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 no 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 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 him. So he let him and Diane clean up in his bathroom 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. In the morning, Adrienne's family realized she hadn't slept in her bed the night before. And when friend after friend 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 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. this murder, obviously. We've already told you. 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 work friend said. He used to come by 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 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. Ugh. Not a great answer. No. The truth, 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. 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 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 house and car. in clothing, in 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, Never had I imagined so much guilt. I saw Adrian'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 3rd and do things over again. Just leave Adrienne alone, which spare me. 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, like, tried to get her alone in the kitchen or something, David would pop his head around the corner in two seconds flat. It 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 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 Diane were two super achievers 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-cheek teenagers who wanted nothing more than to serve their country and be together. The future fighter pilot and the future astronaut, people ate it up. 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 2000. 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 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 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 furious letter telling him to back off his woman. And he wrote to Diane, Remember what binds us together. Ominous.

Almost you could argue. 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. 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 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 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 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 4th, the Texas detectives showed up in Colorado Springs to talk to David Graham. 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. Yeah, y'all have already seen evidence of that. This dude could write a trashy romance novel, no sweat.

I hate to say it, but he would do numbers on, like, book talk. 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, 700 miles away in Fort Worth, a SWAT team 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.

Yeah. And it's so weird because she went from like not even caring to that. It's bizarre. They cuffed her, hauled her into the station, told her David confessed, and that was it. She made her own confession in a flood of tears that 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, the two lovebirds wrote syrupy, high drama letters back and forth. I miss you like I miss ice cream, David wrote.

You are both rich and creamy. For what? Sweet and ice cold. Milky and tasty and bad for you. Man, that metaphor was fighting for its life by the end of that sentence. What the hell? I started twitching. I just 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 for time

that would rock she doesn't have she doesn't quite have the panache that David does does she doesn't have his gift 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 found zero evidence of any head injuries and zero evidence of suicidal ideation. They also communicated through the press, throwing, I love you, set 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. I'm so disappointed. I thought their love was eternal. Diane's attorney said, look, David was manipulative. He was controlling. He was violent. You can'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, Adrienne. found all over Diane's card begged to differ.

Not to mention the confession that she'd made to her Navy Academy boyfriend and her roommates and the creepy notation in her day planner with Adrian 138 a.m. scribbled on December 4th. Oh, boy, how creepy. 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 the night of the murder, 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 lie. 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 47 years old now she doesn't interview every now and again and swears 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, what-ofs. Problem with that was, all the evidence corroborated his confession. The investigators had 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 her home from on the night of their one-night stand. She was 100% sure, she said. Now, this was a huge surprise for me, and it raises an interesting question. Is it possible David was lying about having sex with Adrienne? 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, or he could have, like, 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 was no 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 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, an insurance policy against Diane ever leaving him.

A murder 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 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 that he doesn't have to be around her anymore. Dang, that's a burn. You know, we're all embarrassed about the people we wrote flowery poetry about in high school, David. It's definitely true. He also said that prison is a lot like the military, so he's adjusting 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.

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 at trial, in the year 2000, 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 blame David, and David's people blame 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, 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 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 Crime Cruise from November 3rd through November 7th, get on it, 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,

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