Ex-Naval Cadet Guilty of Murder

A former Naval Academy cadet was found guilty Tuesday of capital murder for her role in a salacious case of jealousy, rage and teenage sex that had all the trappings of a soap opera.

Diane Zamora, 20, who was accused of helping her then-fiance “purify” their relationship by killing a 16-year-old girl with whom he allegedly had had a romantic fling, showed no emotion as the jury’s verdict was read in a Fort Worth courtroom. Because her victim’s family did not seek the death penalty, Zamora was automatically sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for at least 40 years.

“She’s a sociopath,” lead prosecutor Mike Parrish said as Zamora was led away. “She had absolutely no reaction, and grown men were crying in this courtroom. . . . She sat there stone-faced.”

Zamora’s onetime boyfriend, former Air Force Academy cadet David Graham, also 20, is expected to be tried on the same charges later this year. Both were honor students and top athletes when they began dating in the summer of 1995, a handsome, ambitious couple on their way to top-flight military careers. She had hoped to become an astronaut and he wanted to be a fighter pilot.

Behind that All-American facade, an obsessive and violent relationship apparently was spiraling out of control. During her emotional two-week trial, Zamora described Graham as manipulative, gun-crazy and sexually abusive. She testified that he demanded sex from her as often as seven times a day, sometimes sticking his 9-millimeter pistol between her legs, or shoving it in her mouth.

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After several months of bizarre liaisons, Graham reportedly told Zamora that he had had a tryst with Adrianne Jones, a high school colleague on his track team. Three days later, in the early hours of Dec. 4, 1995, the couple lured Jones from her house and drove her to a secluded reservoir near Dallas.

In a confession to police after the murder, Zamora admitted to clubbing Jones with a dumbbell, then imploring, “Kill her! Kill her!” until Graham allegedly shot her twice in the head. The couple was arrested nearly a year later, after Graham was enrolled at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Zamora was at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where she bragged to friends about the murder--describing it as a means to purify their relationship.

One roommate, Jennifer McKearney, told jurors that Zamora called Jones “a tramp and a slut.” Another friend, Jay Guild, testified that Zamora told him she would have killed the girl again, if she could.

“She was the moving force behind the death of Adrianne Jones,” Parrish told reporters. “David Graham, once he got the order, the ultimatum--ultimatum is the word he uses--he decided how to carry it out, but the idea was Diane Zamora’s.”

In often-anguished testimony, Zamora called her accusers “liars,” or “confused” or “inaccurate.” She testified that her confession was bogus, a ploy to save her boyfriend. “I wanted to take the blame because I loved him,” she said.

Her lawyer, John Linebarger, tried to show that Zamora was physically and mentally dominated by Graham and scarred by childhood suicide attempts, the result of an ongoing affair her father had with a woman. A defense psychologist, Michael Lobb, tried to bolster that story, analyzing hundreds of letters from Graham to Zamora, written after the crime.

“If you love me at all, then just sit in that cell and wait for my instructions,” one missive said. “You know how many times I told these guys in here that you would never open your mouth against me?” said another. And finally this: “What do you mean, telling me you’re going to listen to your lawyer and not write me? My lawyer cost more than OJ’s.”

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Lobb testified that Zamora was a submissive young woman “who suffered from paternal/maternal abandonment.”

“Do you have an opinion as to whether Diane Zamora is homicidal?” he was asked by her attorney.

“She is not,” Lobb replied.

But under cross-examination by prosecutors, Lobb conceded that Zamora is “a combination of someone who is psychopathically deviant and paranoid . . . angry, resentful and argumentative.” He also said that Zamora’s personality made it possible that she would blame others for her problems.

In a final appeal for justice, Bill Jones spoke movingly of life as a father, robbed of a child. “We will never know what heights she would have risen to because of this animal act,” he told the court. Several of the jurors wiped away tears.

They took six hours to convict.