The Texas Cadet Murder Case

"It takes a cold-blooded person to shoot a pretty young girl in the face from two to four feet away."

— A policeman's remark

"I remember that night, I think November 4, 1995 and David showed up at my doorstep." Diane had returned from a movie with her family on that fateful Friday evening. "He had just come back from Lubbock and he had this look in his eyes that was horrible, he looked so scared. He had this red, stuffed animal dog in his hands. I could tell something was wrong, but I figured he was just tired." Nothing more was said about the matter that evening. David spent that night at Diane's place, without telling her what was wrong. Diane would quiz him again, but not until one month later.

While sitting in the car in front of Diane's family home, she questioned David about past relationships. At some point Adrianne Jones's name came up in the conversation. Diane had never met her. In fact, this was the first time that she heard of Adrianne. The threat of the younger girl to her relationship with her boyfriend was very real for disciplined, obsessive Diane.

Diane continued to question David about his relationship with Adrianne. She may have suspected that he had been lying to her and that Adrianne was connected to this in some way. Fishing for information, she told him that she thought it strange that he had told her that she was his first real girlfriend. Diane explained her thinking pattern in her confession: "I thought that was kind of strange because most people have some kind of relationship of one kind or another. I remember he read off a list of names of girls he had known, or gone places with that were kind of significant. I will never forget him mentioning the name Adrianne, because that name kind of stuck in my head. I guess I was asking a lot of questions, for some reason I felt like I needed to ask about Adrianne."

Once inside the house, their argument escalated, according to Diane, because "as always, he was trying to make me study for the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and I didn't want to." However, it is more than likely that Diane wanted her suspicions of David's infidelity confirmed. Their argument was not over yet.

"I could never hold anything from Diane, nor she from me," David mentioned later in his police statement. "She knew in my eyes that something was wrong the moment I decided to confess."

David finally told Diane that he drove Adrianne Jones home the night of the cross-country meet in Lubbock, claiming that Adrianne, to his surprise, asked him to take some turns ending up behind an old elementary school, where he parked the car and they willingly engaged in sexual activities. Predictably, Diane lost control. 

"When I did tell her, I thought the very life in her had been torn away. She was angry, she was violent, and she was broken," David stated.

Diane explained her violent reaction to the police: "All I could do was question him and scream and blame myself for everything. I remember reaching out for this big brass thing, this brass rod, and aiming for him and trying to hit him because I was so upset. He took it away from me and tried to calm me down because I was screaming so hysterically. He was trying to protect himself from getting hurt, but he was also trying to protect me from hurting myself because I kept ramming my head against the walls and when I was on the ground I kept ramming my head into the floor trying to crack my skull, I just didn't want to live with what he had said to me."

David finally comprehended how much pain he had inflicted: "For at least an hour she screamed, sobs that I wouldn't have thought possible. It wasn't just jealousy. For Diane, she had been betrayed, deceived, and forgotten all in that one meaningless instant in November. The purity that she held so dear had been tainted in that one unclean act. Diane had always held her virginity as one of her highest virtues." Knowing Diane's insecurities and playing on them was a way for David to control and manipulate her.

In Diane's state, believing the worst, as far as she was concerned her life was ruined. "I felt like I had lost everything, my hand wasn't working the way it should and my family wasn't in the best financial state and now he was telling me the one thing I prized more than anything else was taken away. I don't think I was thinking, in fact I know I wasn't thinking, I screamed at him, kill her, kill her.'"

"The request of Adrianne's life was, not for a second, taken lightly by me," explained David. "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. I couldn't imagine life without her; not for a second did I want to lose her. I didn't have any harsh feelings for Adrianne, but no one could stand between me and Diane. I was totally in love with her and always will be."

Diane was able to control him, to get him to do her bidding. She claimed, "He was just so scared that he wasn't about to say no to me, I was still banging my head against the floor. All David wanted to do was make everything better. It seemed like him agreeing to do that was the only thing that calmed me down. David promised that he would do that and David never has broken a promise to me before."

David concurred, saying, "When this precious relationship we had was damaged by my thoughtless actions, the only thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life of the one that had, for an instant, taken her place."

They concocted a plan to kill Adrianne Jones.