Diane Zamora: 'I’m not a killer'

David Graham:  Diane said she was going to fly up there to see me the next day, so I went to pick her up at the airport....

When we spoke to David Graham in 1998, we asked him about Zamora’s trip to see him at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, after she had spoken about the murder back in Maryland and put police on their trail.  

Stone Phillips, Dateline anchor:  Did you talk about the murder?

Graham: Yes. And she told me what she wanted me to say.  And I went along with her.

Phillips: David says you went there—

Diane Zamora: To see him.

Phillips: —to tell him what to say.

Zamora: No.

Phillips: To get your stories straight.

Zamora: I went there cuz I missed him.  I hadn’t seen him for two months.

Phillips: But you’ve just been telling me that you wanted out of the relationship.  That you were afraid of him.  That he was sending you threatening e-mails.

Zamora: And I also said I’m in love with him. It was a dysfunctional relationship and it was constantly like that...

Zamora insists the only thing she told Graham in Colorado was that if they were caught he should deflect some of the blame onto her by saying she’d ordered him to do it. She believed being a year younger than Graham, she’d be protected from prosecution as an adult.   

Zamora: I was 17.  I told him blame it on me because I was a minor at the time.

Phillips: How in your mind was that gonna help David Graham?

Zamora: ‘Cause people would blame me.  And since I thought I was a minor, I thought “Well, he’ll be alright.  And no one would be able to touch me.” And I was wrong. 

After Zamora returned home to Texas, Graham was called in for questioning.  Through more than eight hours of interrogation, he denied knowing anything about the murder.  But the Air Force demanded he take a lie detector test.  He is said to have failed... and that’s when he wrote his now famous confession.

Graham: One of the Air Force investigators said, “Just sit down, I’ve seen some of your English papers” ‘cause they searched my room, you know. I know you can write, so just do that for us, just write. “And I just wrote.”

Sgt. Allan Patton: I was just in awe of the detail and how overly articulate this man was in his description of this murder.

Sgt. Allan Patton had never seen anything like it: Graham’s confession read like a romance novel, blaming Zamora for demanding the murder, and himself for being too much in love to say no.

“The request of Adrianne’s life was, not for a second, taken lightly by me.  I couldn’t even believe she would ask that of me. Well, Diane’s beautiful eyes have always played the strings of my heart effortlessly.”

“The only thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life of the one who had, for an instant, taken her place.”

A copy of Graham’s confession was on its’ way from Colorado, when Patton knocked on the door at Zamora’s grandparents’ house where she was sleeping.     

Sgt. Patton: We arrested her like 1 a.m. and by the time we got back here and had booked her in, we had a faxed copy of his statement.

Phillips: What was her reaction when she heard that she was being charged with capital murder?

Sgt. Patton: She didn’t say a thing. 

Phillips: Did she looked surprised?

Sgt. Patton: Not at all.

Zamora: I remember when they came to the door.  Being terrified.  And then, my little brother was asleep in bed next to me.  And I just reached out and  I wrapped my arms around him, and I was like—I was like, “Baby, pray.  I’m so scared.”  I was terrified.

Phillips: Sergeant Patton said you showed very little emotion at the time.

Zamora: Well, and that’s how I usually am.  To me, emotion is already being kind of weak.  And I do my best to keep tears from falling if I can help it.

And she did her best to keep from saying anything when she was questioned later that morning.  In one of the strangest twists of all, Zamora says when Patton brought her to his cubicle at to the grand prairie police department and read aloud from graham’s confession to murder, she was moved. To her, it sounded like a love letter.   

Zamora: It did.  It really did. The parts that called to me were about how he was always in love with me and the way he goes on talking about how pretty much I’m the only one in his heart and it broke my heart to hear it.  And I almost felt like he was telling me, “Go along with him,” and I did.                         

The 17-year-old decided to waive her right to an attorney and give Patton her statement. Though she would later call it a pack of lies, Patton says the story she told him flowed from her lips. 

Phillips: So you’re sitting at the typewriter and she’s talking.

Sgt. Patton: Yes, sir.  Just sittin’ in front of me at my desk, leaned over, talking.

Phillips: How would you describe her as she gave you this confession?

Sgt. Patton: Very relieved.  It was as if she was dying to tell what had happened.

MORE ON THE CASE Examiner's analysis of the lie detector test results Confronting Zamora with the results, analysis Read Diane Zamora's 1996 confession to police

The story she told was strikingly similar to Graham’s. Patton says that’s what happens when people tell the truth.

Sgt. Patton:  I think two very smart people gave two very bright statements about the truth.  That’s the way I see that. I’ll stand by this until the day I die, that although you can look at it and wonder if there was embellishment or fabrication, I believe it’s the truth on both parts.  I really do.    

But Zamora says the reason their stories matched isn’t because it was the truth, but because she was merely parrotting Graham... and able to do it because Patton read her more of Graham’s statement than he should have.  

Phillips: She claims you read the whole statement to her.

Sgt. Patton: Yes, she’s claimed all along.  I read a sentence, flipped to the next page, read a sentence, flipped to the next page, read a sentence, flipped to the next page.  Showed her his signature.  Showed her his initials on the corners of the other pages.

Phillips: So you didn’t read the entire confession to her?

Sgt. Patton: No sir, I did not.  Excerpts is all I read of the confession. 

Phillips: Had you read the entire confession, I mean clearly that would have been a problem.

Sgt. Patton: Yes sir it would have been.  You do not wanna do that.

Zamora: But he did. And I don’t really care if anyone believes me.  I know the truth.  And he has to live with that.

Patton says in 1996 the Grand Prairie police didn’t record interrogations, so it’s impossible to go to a tape and prove how much he read.  He acknowledges what he did share was key, that sometimes that’s necessary, and accepted practice, to get suspects to talk. 

Phillips: How much of a sense of his version would she have gotten from what you read?

Sgt. Patton: Basically that he’d shot her.  And that Diane had hit her with the bar bells.  I mean I read sentences that were dynamic sentences—didn’t just, you know, pick any sentence. 

Zamora: Even if he wants to just claim he only read parts, you shouldn’t have shown it to me, and he shouldn’t have even read me factual parts.

Phillips: Well, the courts have ruled on that and said  what he did was within the bounds of police work and ethics.

Zamora: Well, they teach them to lie a lot in police training.  They do.  That’s one of their tactics.  They’re allowed to lie and do all sorts of things.  As long as they can get someone convicted, that’s what matters. And that’s not right.

But if anyone learned to lie, it was Zamora.  And if you believe her now, she learned from a master.  How good a liar is David Graham?  He may have failed an Air Force polygraph, but during our interview, he looked me in the eye and claimed that on the night of the murder he wasn’t even there. 

Phillips (1998 interview):   So Diane drove her to the lake that night, Diane shot her, Diane killed her?

David Graham: That’s right.

Phillips: You weren’t there?

Graham: I was not there.

It was a blatant lie.  And Graham admitted as much years later in a British documentary, when he owned up to being there and to pulling the trigger.

Graham (interview by a British documentary): I picked up the gun which was now down on the floor in the car and went out there to her an just kind of vaguely pointed the gun and shot once and got back in the car. Diane said “Is she dead? Are you sure she’s dead? Shoot her again, make sure she’s dead.” Then I went back out, got a little closer, fired two  more times, got back in the car.

Sgt. Allan Patton believes Graham and Zamora are both guilty of murder, with one crucial distinction:

Phillips: You believe she has a conscience.

Sgt. Patton: Yes, sir. I do.

Phillips: And David Graham?

Sgt. Patton: A cold-hearted killer.

Phillips: Had Diane Zamora not spoken about this crime, this murder, to those fellow midshipmen—

Sgt. Patton: It would still be unsolved.

Phillips: If you’re not guilty of murder, what are you guilty of?

Zamora: Well, a whole lot, like I know maybe obstruction of justice ‘cause I know I didn’t come forward. I never said I was just totally innocent of any kind of wrong-doing whatsoever, but I did say I didn’t intend to kill her.  And I didn’t kill her.  And I didn’t hit her in the head.  And I didn’t force David to go out there and kill her.

If Zamora really did take the blame for a murder she neither ordered nor carried out, one question remains: What theory of the crime does she want us to believe instead?

Phillips: Why do you think David killed her?

Zamora: I mean, I can’t read his mind.  But I feel like she rejected him. 

Phillips: But if this was about David feeling rejected by Adrianne -- 

Zamora: He didn’t take rejection well.

Phillips: —and not because you were jealous beyond control, and ordered him to do this.  Why would he take you out there?  Why would he involve you in murdering someone out of a sense of rejection?

Zamora: I feel like he wanted to hold me to him.  I really feel like he did.  Because like I said, we were breaking up.  I wasn’t gonna stay with him.  And you know, I know it was stupid.  Now, looking back, I know it was very stupid for me to go out there. But you know, when you’re a teenager, you do stupid stuff.

Phillips: What do you say to people who say even if you didn’t hit her in the head, even if you didn’t go there planning to murder her, even if you weren’t the one who pulled the trigger. You were there, you knew what happened, you didn’t come forward. You helped cover it up… you got what you deserved.

Zamora: But I didn’t... I’m here not because I cleaned up the car, and that was wrong.  And I’m not here because I didn’t tell anyone anything, and that was wrong, too, I know that.  What they convicted me of was intent. Because it was my intention that mattered, and the jury believed my intention was to kill her. That’s why they convicted me.

Phillips: Based on your own confession.

Zamora: That was a lie.                        

It will be 30 years before Diane Zamora is eligible for parole. It has been plenty of time to contemplate what might have been, the mistakes she has made, and the girl whose life ended before her eyes.

Phillips: Do you feel any remorse?

Zamora: I think about her all the time, yeah.  And I felt remorse even then. Because I know Adrian’s mom can’t see her.  But my mom can see me. And I know it must hurt, you know, ‘cause I know it hurts my mom. I see the pain. (crying)

Phillips: Are these tears for Adrianne and her mother or are they for yourself and your mom, Diane?

Zamora: For all of it. I wish I could have made different decisions.  But I didn’t.  And I’m not saying that I was right.  And I’m not saying it made any sense. And I wish I could take it back, but I can’t.

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