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Teen murder case goes on TV before it goes to court
Movie beats real-life courtroom challenge
February 6, 1997
Web posted at: 11:55(CNN) -- Adrianne Jones was murdered in Texas in December, 1995, and last September teenagers David Graham and Diane Zamora confessed to killing her.
A TV movie about the murder airs during prime-time Monday night on NBC, months before the first suspect goes to trial.
The case has become known as "The Cadet Murder" because the love-struck 18-year-olds had just begun their first year at different military academies when they were charged with murdering a popular 16-year-old from a neighboring town.
"One of the producers made a deal with NBC to do this movie two days after the arrest," says Skip Hollandsworth, a writer for Texas Monthly magazine. "They knew it was the kind of story of teen love and twisted violence that was going to captivate a lot of people's attention."
It is no accident that "Love's Deadly Triangle: The Texas Cadet Murder" will air during sweeps month, a time when TV overflows with the steamy, the sexy and the ripped-from -the-headlines movies.
"We had a scene of Diane Zamora and David Graham's prom and it said 'Prom, Class of '96,' and we thought one of our directors made a terrible mistake," says Steve White, executive producer of the film. "Then we realized it wasn't a mistake. They had been at their prom in June of '96, and in December we were making a movie about them."
Movie beats real-life courtroom challenge
To make the movie, producers hustled up a script from local news accounts and Graham's published confession, and lined up a cast.
David Lipper, who plays David Graham, says he got a call from the producers on a Friday. "On Saturday, I read the script," he says. "On Sunday, we negotiated the deal, and the next day I was off to Wilmington, North Carolina, to shoot the movie."
"I've never done anything that was true, that could have repercussions," says Cassidy Rae, who plays Adrianne Jones. "... it was a challenge."
Another challenge came in a real-life Texas courtroom where Zamora's lawyers claimed the film could taint the potential jury pool, and asked that it be barred from airing in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. A judge denied their request.
"David (Graham) went ahead and confessed categorically to the killing of this woman," says David Lipper. "All we did was take this kid's confession and basically put it into a movie."
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