The Texas Cadet Murder

An obsessive teenage love leads to the brutal murder of a fellow student.

Lori Johnston
32 min readNov 29, 2021
Victim Adrianne Jones (photo source)

“There are not any winners in this case.”

Judge Joe Drago

The field (photo source)

The Body in the Field

It was around 7 a.m. on the morning of Monday, December 4, 1995, just light outside, when Gary Foster left his home, headed to a row of mailboxes to deposit an envelope before starting his day. Foster was a farmer and made daily checks on the southern edge of his property on Seeton Road, where dilapidated buildings were. He stored tools there and made it a practice to watch for vandals.

Foster’s farm was located on the outskirts of Cedar Hills, a suburb of Dallas, 16 miles and seemingly a world away. Often called the “hill country of Dallas,” its nearly 36 square miles is dotted with native evergreen trees and antennas — its elevation makes it a prime location for the antennas of local television and radio stations. Boasting a much slower pace of life than Dallas, Cedar Hills was known for a deadly 1856 tornado and a 1932 bank robbery committed by a sidekick of the infamous Bonnie and Clyde.

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Lori Johnston

Writer, reader, margarita drinker. Currently looking for a “dare to be great” situation.