Exclusive: 'Killer Cadet' speaks out from behind bars; 'Lie Guy' weighs in
11/09/2016 11:15 am PST
Diane Zamora wants to set the record straight in this Crime Watch Daily exclusive. She claims this will be the first time she's told the real side of her story.
In her first interview in nearly a decade, Diane Zamora offers explosive new information about that murderous night. And "human lie-detector" Stan Walters analyzes Zamora's interview and tell us what he thinks.
Jealousy can be a powerful emotion. In the case of former Naval Academy cadet Diane Zamora, it can be a reason to kill.
Dubbed the "Cadet Killers," Diane Zamora and her boyfriend David Graham killed her love rival, Adrianne Jones. Now after nearly a decade of silence, she wants to tell her side of the story and she's offering up new shocking details about that fateful night.
Convicted murderer Diane Zamora confessed to killing 16-year-old Adrianne Jones, whom she believed to be her romantic rival in a love triangle with then-boyfriend, David Graham.
"I was 17 when this happened, and it's just crazy how different things are," Zamora told Crime Watch Daily in an interview in prison.
She went from the fast track to a successful military career, to life behind bars.
"I know I made bad decisions, a lot of bad decisions. A lot of bad judgments," said Zamora.
In early December 1995, after only two months of dating, a then-18-year-old David Graham makes a salacious confession to his 17-year-old girlfriend, Diane Zamora: He had been unfaithful to her with Adrianne Jones, 16, a beautiful blonde track student at Mansfield High School in Grand Prairie, Texas.
And when Graham tells Zamora he had sex with Jones?
"She went nuts," said reporter Ron Zimmerman, who covered the story. "She banged her head against the floor and she kept yelling 'Kill her, kill her, kill her.' And David agreed to kill Adrianne."
The couple wrote confessions to cops. Diane's confession states the plan was for Graham to break Jones's neck and sink her body to the bottom of Joe Pool Lake.
In Graham's confession, he writes, "The only thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life of the one that had, for an instant, taken her place."
According to their own testimony, around 1 a.m. on Dec. 4, 1995, Graham picked up Jones. Zamora was hiding in back. He drove to a remote area, where Zamora surprised Jones from the back seat.
According to Graham's and Zamora' confessions to police, Adrianne Jones is beaten in the head with weights and the butt of David Graham's gun. But somehow Jones escapes the car and runs into a field, where she collapses. Then Graham shoots her twice in the head at point-blank range.
"Texas Rangers were called into the case and there were police from two different jurisdictions looking at it," said Zimmerman. "But they simply didn't have a lot to go on at all. It was a real mystery to the police."
Diane Zamora left Texas behind for the hallowed halls of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Nearly a year passes, and the teenage killers are adults and successful military cadets: David Graham at the Air Force Academy outside Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Diane Zamora at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
"Diane let the word out to her roommates that in fact she had killed somebody," said reporter Ron Zimmerman.
Once word got out, Zamora and Graham are arrested and charged with the murder of Adrianne Jones. They are flown back to Texas to stand trial.
The prosecution called to the stand several people who Zamora confessed to.
And there were Zamora' own words. "I screamed at him 'kill her, kill her.' He was just so scared that he wasn't about to say no to me."
In separate trials, the former teen flames are convicted of capital murder.
Now, in her first interview in a decade, convicted killer Diane Zamora, who has spent the majority of her life behind bars, is speaking out.
Zamora claims she's not a cold-blooded killer. In fact, she now says she played no real physical role in Adrianne Jones's death.
And she claims there was no love triangle, that the motivation for the killing wasn't sex. It was violence.
So what's the truth? Crime Watch Daily brought in a man who is essentially a "human lie-detector" to watch Diane Zamora's interview and tell us what he thinks.
Interview and interrogation specialist Stan Walters has more than 35 years' experience. They don't call him the "Lie Guy" for nothing. Watch the video above for his analysis.
Along with fighting to get her story out there, Diane Zamora has joined another battle, adding her name to the list of people who would like to see juvenile justice reform and get rid of mandatory sentences like the one she received. She is currently not eligible for parole until 2036.
