Desperate Housewife
A lonely woman looking for love, a handsome Army sniper, and a husband murdered in cold blood
Linking Diamond to that gun was key. On the afternoon of February 12, two months after the murder of Marty Theer, Clinkscales, an Army criminal investigator named David Rudd, and Air Force special agent Vincent Bustillo interviewed Donald at his home. He had lent the handgun to Diamond again, in January, Donald told the investigators, but Diamond hadn't returned the weapon. The investigators asked him to call Diamond and get the gun back. Donald spoke with Diamond twice and told him that the authorities wanted to test the gun as part of their inquiry. Both times, Diamond said he no longer had the gun. The investigators started to leave Donald's house, but, suddenly, Donald's phone rang, and he motioned for them to stop. Diamond was on the line. "Donald advised that he spoke with Diamond, and Diamond had the gun in his car," Rudd wrote in a report, "and that he would bring the gun to Donald tonight."
Diamond was at Michelle's house when he called Donald. They had just returned from a four-day trip to Florida. Around 6 p.m., at Fort Bragg, Diamond reported to military police that his Firebird, which he said had been parked at Fort Bragg for four days, had been broken into. Someone, he said, had busted in the passenger's window and taken a gun--Donald's 9-mm Smith & Wesson--from under the seat. That was a big mistake--and part of the continuing coverup, investigators said. For one thing, Diamond's car had been in Florida and on the road during the four days when he said it was parked at Fort Bragg. For another, the Air Force surveillance cameras, placed down the street from Michelle's home, caught her and Diamond leaving in separate cars at 5:17 p.m., shortly before he reported the theft at Fort Bragg. The videotape showed that the passenger window on Diamond's car was intact. Investigators said Diamond had broken the window in his car so that he could explain why he no longer had Donald's gun. Diamond was in trouble.
One month later, the Army charged him with premeditated murder, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. Michelle was named a coconspirator, but the Army, with no jurisdiction over a civilian, could not charge her. Army officials pressed local civilian prosecutors to pursue charges against her. That would come in another year. Meanwhile, Diamond, jailed, was court-martialed in the summer of 2001.
TRIAL AND ERROR
Diamond never had a prayer. At the court-martial at Fort Bragg, his lawyer, Coy Brewer, claimed that Diamond was "set up" by his lover. He charged, in his closing argument, that Michelle was the shooter, yet he had produced no evidence during the trial to support that claim. The Army's chief prosecutor, Randall Bagwell, calling Diamond "a cold-blooded killer," laid out the circumstantial evidence--the trysts, the borrowed Smith & Wesson, how Michelle had lured the "target" to the "kill zone"--the second-floor landing at the back of her office building--Diamond's skill with guns, and so on. He explained how a sniper works: "When you're setting up a kill zone for an ambush, you want the enemy to have absolutely no place to go, and that's what the accused left Captain Theer, absolutely no place to go. He was receiving fire from below, and the door up above [on the landing] is locked. All he can do is stand there and get shot." Bagwell could never put Diamond at the scene, but it didn't matter--the six-member court-martial panel had heard enough.
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