NBC Playing Judge and Jury in Airing ‘Texas Cadet’

David Graham and Diane Zamora murdered Adrianne Jones. Diane crushed Adrianne’s skull, and David finished her off with two bullets to the head.

How do we know this? Because NBC Entertainment says so in “Love’s Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder.” The TV movie convicts Graham and Zamora tonight by showing these two outwardly exemplary 18-year-olds doing the deed in grisly detail. It also shows them plotting it after David admits to his fiancee, Diane, that he had sex with Adrianne, 16, in the back seat of his car. Adrianne must “suffer the consequences,” Diane says icily, after erupting angrily. “She will have to die.” And she does. Case closed.

So authorities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area should thank NBC. Now they don’t have to hold the trials.

Being sticklers for legal tradition, they plan to anyway, of course. And they’re armed with a detailed confession that David gave police.

A judge last week rejected a request by Diane’s lawyer for a temporary restraining order against showing the movie in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, from which juries in the trials will be chosen. The concern was obvious, for airing the movie there presumably would make it infinitely harder to impanel an impartial jury.

That issue became moot, however, when KXAS-TV, the NBC station in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, later did the responsible thing and decided not to air the movie, saying that having a legal right to do so is “separate from . . . whether it was appropriate to show the film locally.”

Indeed, it isn’t appropriate to show it locally. Nor is its national exposure defensible. If only NBC would learn from its affiliate’s example. Just because a network can do something legally doesn’t necessarily mean that it should.

In justifying the decision to air the movie, NBC legal counsel Richard Cotton likens it to news stories about crime. And it is true that the legal process inevitably must contend with excessive, sometimes unfair or distorted media coverage of sensational crime cases.

Beyond this, though, the similarity screeches to a halt, for the condemnation of Graham and Zamora in this movie makes what many in the media did to Richard Jewell in the Atlanta bombing case, for example, look almost Victorian in comparison. And NBC News has already reached a financial settlement with Jewell for unfairly seeming to implicate him in that crime, as has CNN.

But now comes “The Texas Cadet Murder,” which, far beyond hinting at guilt, delivers a flat-out indictment via two separate, detailed depictions of the murder--going much further than a 1995 Fox movie about the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman that shrouded the guilt or innocence of O.J. Simpson in inky ambiguity.

The undisputed facts behind the homicide depicted in “The Texas Cadet Murder” are that David and Diane, former honor students and cadets at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy, respectively, are charged with slaying Adrianne, whose body was discovered along a country road early in the morning of Dec. 4, 1995.

Although David’s confession is significant, NBC is yet to confess to slamming its own bullet into the legal process by airing its movie now--deployed in February, an important ratings sweeps month--before either of Adrianne’s accused murderers has gone to trial.

If everything in this case were as tidy as the movie makes it appear, perhaps no problem. But rats--the defendants and their lawyers just won’t cooperate. David and Diane have pleaded not guilty, and David’s lawyers are reportedly planning to fight admission of his confession as evidence.

Perhaps David did it. Perhaps Diane did it. The confession, some of which was published in Texas and is repeated in the movie as David’s narration, appears devastating and, if admitted, potentially lethal to their defense. This may be nit-picky, though, but the usual progression in murder cases--even in the media-accelerated ‘90s--is for juries in courtrooms to have their say before network docudramas deliver their own verdicts. It’s a nice tradition worth preserving, although NBC obviously disagrees.

In addition to published excerpts of the confession, NBC bases its movie on an extensive but highly subjective article (“The Killer Cadets”) by Skip Hollandsworth in Texas Monthly and “other news articles [and] independent research.”

The movie tells a seductively bizarre story that’s well directed by Richard Colla, opening with the murder, then flashing back to show the intense romance of teen lovers David (David Lipper) and Diane (Holly Marie Combs)--a high-achieving poster couple--and David’s brief fling with high school sophomore Adrianne (Cassidy Rae), who is unaware of his relationship with Diane. Hormones rage, and there’s some heavy smooching, touching and writhing here en route to sex in the kind of gratuitously steamy scenes that NBC obviously hopes will heat the movie’s ratings.

Adrianne is warm and likable, David very smart but weak, and Diane also smart, but cold and ambiguous. Still, there is no rational motive at all for her execution order. And the murder--a vividly gory depiction of Diane bashing Adrianne in the head with a barbell as David tries to break her neck before shooting her when she tries to crawl away--is utterly inexplicable and profoundly disturbing.

As is NBC’s decision to go forward with this.

Lindy DeKoven, NBC senior vice president for movies, was unavailable to speak about it, but has told the New York Times that she hoped teenagers would watch the movie “because there are a lot of relatable things going on that could make an impact on them.”

In other words, the movie is a public service that may deter young lovers from murdering rivals? That excuse collapses under the weight of its own zits.

A printed message at the conclusion of the movie informs viewers that the defendants have not been tried, that lawyers for both maintain they are innocent and that David’s lawyer may oppose admission of his confession. After nearly two hours of painting them as murderers, moreover, NBC also ends by referring to “their alleged crime.”

But “alleged” is omitted from the title of “The Texas Cadet Murder,” so just who is NBC trying to fool?

* “Love’s Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder” airs at 9 tonight on NBC (Channel 4).