| Schools for scandal Time; Chicago; Sep 23, 1996; Thompson, Mark; THE THREE FEMALE FRESHMEN WERE late getting to bed, and lay for a time in their darkened dorm room at the U.S. Naval Academy, murmuring of their loves and dreams. Diane Zamora spoke of her boyfriend, David Graham, a handsome, clean-cut freshman at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, whose photo nearby gazed upon the trio. "He'll always be faithful," Zamora said, "because Ill always have something on him." "Oh? What did you do? Kill somebody?" a roommate asked. Several long seconds of silence ensued, followed by more questions and then a confession. As her roommates told the story to academy officials in Annapolis, Maryland, and later to Texas police, Zamora admitted that she and her boyfriend had indeed killed someone: a high school girl with whom he had had a sexual fling. Ever since her Aug. 25 dorm revelation and the couple's confessions to police, their admirers at the service academies and in the Fort Worth suburbs where they lived have been unable to believe that these two could be naturalborn killers. Graham and Zamora, both 18, were a golden pair with outstanding academic and athletic records. They had grown serious since meeting four years ago, and planned to marry right after college. They beat the odds to win coveted places at the military academies, where they planned to study physics. Zamora dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and Graham longed to fly warplanes. In the meantime, though, Graham, a senior, met Adrianne Jones, 16, a cute sophomore. Like Graham, she was on the Mansfield High School track team. They often chatted during the long bus rides to meets held across the north Texas prairies. According to Graham, on Nov. 4, after a track meet 250 miles away in Lubbock, Graham and Jones left the school bus in Mansfield and got into his car. On the way home, they detoured behind an old elementary school for a quick sexual romp. After enduring nearly a month of guilt, Graham says, he confessed his infidelity to Zamora, a student at nearby Crowley High School. She told Graham, he says, that her rival must die. "When this precious relationship we had was damaged by my thoughtless actions," he later told police in a written statement, "the only thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life of the one that had, for an instant, taken her place." The couple's plan was simple, he said: he would break Jones' neck, and weight the corpse with barbells before sinking it in Joe Pool Lake in Grand Prairie. On Dec. 3, Graham picked Jones up at 10:30 p.m. for what she thought was a date. Zamora lurked in the trunk, tilting the rear seat forward just enough to see Graham behind the wheel. After the car slowed to a halt on a lonely road near the lake, he motioned to Zamora, who clambered into the passenger compartment screaming at Jones. Graham lunged to try to break Jones' neck with a twisting motion. "I realized too late that all those quick, painless snaps seen in the movies," he wrote in a self-typed confession obtained by the Dallas Morning News, "were just your usual Hollywood stunts." Zamora brandished a barbell weight and smashed it with a sickening thud on the younger girl's head, according to police. To the horror of her attackers, Jones crawled out through the car window. But the blow had fractured her skull and lacerated her brain. She staggered only a little way to a barbed-wire gate before collapsing. "I knew," Graham told police, "I couldn't leave the key witness to our crime alive." Armed with a Russian-made Makarov pistol, he fired twice. One bullet caught her right between the eyes. The entire episode was over in about two minutes. Shortly after dawn the next day, police found Jones' body. She was wearing a gray T shirt emblazoned with REGION 1 CROSS COUNTRY REGIONALS 1995, commemorating the Lubbock track meet that ended in her fateful assignation with Graham. An autopsy revealed that either the crunching blow or the bullet could have killed her. The case, the first time either academy has had a student charged with murder, marked the latest trouble for the nation's military academies, which have been racked by cheating, sex and car-theft scandals in recent years. But academy officials note defensively that the killing took place months before Graham and Zamora learned, in June, that they would be attending their schools starting in July. Texas Democratic Representative Pete Geren, who nominated Zamora, a constituent, for Annapolis, sees the case as "a horrible aberration" that should not change the academies' selection process. "There aren't too many accomplished people," he says, "able to hide such dark sides." That's what's so haunting about this case: if found guilty (attorneys say the pair will plead innocent), it will appear that the same determination that brought success in classrooms and on athletic fields led them to view Jones as just another obstacle to what they wanted, another obstacle to be removed |