Desperate Housewife
A lonely woman looking for love, a handsome Army sniper, and a husband murdered in cold blood
The next few days, Michelle says, were agonizing. She was questioned several times by Clinkscales and other detectives, first at the parking lot, later at her home, and then at the police station. It soon became apparent that she and her lover, John Diamond, were the primary--and only--suspects. Police and military investigators began building a case. From the beginning, they never bought her story, or Diamond's. It was all an act, they concluded, conceived by a woman who used her wiles to get her lover to kill her husband.
The plot, the investigators believed, was hatched months before. Criminals, no matter how careful, always make mistakes, Clinkscales says, and in this case, the killers outsmarted themselves. For starters, Michelle was at the scene, meaning that in the ordinary course of police work, she had to be cleared as a suspect. "I wanted to treat her as a grieving widow," Clinkscales says, "but on the other side of your mind, you realize that she has not been cleared yet." In her initial interview, on the night of the murder, Clinkscales says, Michelle told detectives that her marriage was fine, and she didn't mention the affair with Diamond. After she was pressed, however, she acknowledged the affair, Clinkscales says, but said she had broken it off.
There were other gaffes. Perhaps the most critical, certainly in the early stages of the investigation, came when Clinkscales and Mitrisin questioned Michelle at the police station on December 20. Asked whether she had talked to Diamond on the day of the murder, Clinkscales says, Michelle replied that she had last spoken to him around 4 p.m. But when Mitrisin said that they would check her cellphone records, she suddenly remembered that she had called Diamond's cellphone, from the restroom at the Fox and Hound Restaurant, just before leaving to go back to Fayetteville the night of the murder. Diamond, she said, didn't answer the phone. Her response, Clinkscales says, made the investigators suspicious. The cellphone call from the Fox and Hound, the investigators concluded, was Michelle's signal for Diamond to position himself outside her office and wait for the kill.
At the time of the call, Diamond was at the home of his estranged wife, Lourdes. He quickly put on some warm clothing and left, according to Lourdes Diamond's account to authorities.
Investigators tracked the movements of Michelle and Diamond, in the months before the murder and in the months after. They learned, among other things, that on the morning after the murder, Diamond had practiced firing a handgun at a local indoor target range. This was part of the coverup, they said--if they had tried to test whether he had fired a gun, he would have good reason for having gunpowder on his hands.
Investigators also discovered the lovers' trip to Saba. Neighbors then reported seeing Diamond parking his teal Pontiac Firebird near her home in the weeks after Marty was killed. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations put a six-member surveillance team on Michelle. Investigators also installed two video cameras in a neighbor's house so they could watch her comings and goings. Ballistics tests showed that two shell casings found in the parking lot, and three slugs recovered from Marty's body, could have come only from one of two Smith & Wesson 9-mm handguns--model 639 or model 5906. Investigators traced Diamond's cellphone records and found that he had called an Army buddy, a man named Peyton Donald, who lived in Fayetteville and had served in Panama with Diamond. A day or two before Marty was killed, it turned out, Diamond had borrowed Donald's gun--a Smith & Wesson model 5906.
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