Desperate Housewife
A lonely woman looking for love, a handsome Army sniper, and a husband murdered in cold blood
Later that year, Marty and Michelle decided they had been apart too long. On June 1, two days after he graduated from the Air Force Academy, they were married in the academy chapel. A wedding photo captured two beaming young newlyweds--Marty, ramrod straight in his dark-blue Air Force dress uniform; Michelle, a pretty brunette in a white, long-sleeved, full-length dress.
Over the next six years, the couple bounced around: Enid, Okla., where Marty went to flight school--"Eeeenuud, Oklahoma, the armpit of Oklahoma," Michelle said with undisguised contempt; Colorado Springs, where Michelle got her undergraduate degree in psychology; a summer in Texas; and then Melbourne, Fla., near Patrick Air Force Base, Marty's next assignment.
"Nightmare stories." By then, the marriage was beginning to crumble. Michelle insists that Marty had an affair while in Florida. When he was transferred in 1997 to Moody Air Force Base, in Valdosta, Ga., she declined to go along. Marty often flew overseas, spending a lot of time in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Michelle remained behind in Melbourne, working on her master's degree at the Florida Institute of Technology. She did a year's residency at the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Medical Center, in Auburn, Ala. She also, she says, got involved with a man she met surfing the Internet. She returned to Melbourne and got her doctorate degree in the summer of 1999.
Marty, meanwhile, was transferred to Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville. Michelle rejoined him there later that summer. The long separation, Michelle's lawyer, Kirk Osborn, would later say, "was a tremendous stress on their marriage." Living in Fayetteville didn't help things. Fayetteville, she says, was right up there with Enid. Working at the veterans' hospital, "I had heard nightmare stories about this place from all the Vietnam vets who had been through here on their way to Vietnam," she recalls. ". . . I mean I heard about Fayette-Hell, Fayette-Nam, Fatal-Ville. I mean I just heard nightmare stories about this place."
LOVE ON THE NET
Fayetteville, population 125,000, suffers gang crime, random violence, and murders like other urban areas. Every few years or so, however, some spectacular crime grabs the town by the throat. Locals still talk about Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor convicted of the 1970 murders of his pregnant wife and two daughters. The case was the subject of a famous book, Fatal Vision.
But the city also enjoys a storied military history. It is home to Fort Bragg, the sprawling Army compound from where elite paratroopers deploy for dangerous missions around the globe. Fort Bragg also serves as the headquarters for the Special Forces, the men who carry out classified missions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The Airborne & Special Operations Museum, opened in 2000, sparkles in an otherwise drab downtown. Fort Bragg was home to Staff Sgt. John Mickael Diamond, an Army Ranger assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division. "John always wanted to be in the Army," says Deborah Dvorak, his younger sister.
Now 32, Diamond was born in Louisiana and lived a nomadic life as a young man. His father, Bobby Diamond, a construction worker, traveled from job to job, state to state. "Every time a job finished," says Deborah Dvorak, "we would go somewhere else." She ticks off the states: California, Arizona, Washington State, Wyoming, Colorado, Arkansas, Texas. "We had a motor home, so we would travel in that," she recalls, "stay in that until my parents got an apartment or rented a house." It was tough, she says, "but we weren't ever without food or clothing." The family finally settled down in Killeen, Texas, in John's senior year of high school.
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