“Greenish brown female sheep,” the two lovers at the center of 1997’s Swearing Allegiance often tell each other.

It’s their code and only they understand what it means.  It’s not that hard to figure out.

Greenish Brown = Olive

Female Sheep = Ewe

Olive Ewe.

Say it out loud.

I love you.

That seems cute until you really think about it.  David Graham (David Lipper) and Diane Zamora (Holly Marie Combs) are high school sweethearts in Texas.  They go to different high schools but they’re totally in love (or they say).  David is planning on attending the Air Force Academy in Colorado.  Diane is entering the Naval Academy and she hopes to someday be an astronaut.  Diane is so convinced that she and David are going to be together forever that she loses her virginity to him.  David, for his part, seems to be a bit of a lunkhead but he leads the ROTC with an intense determination.  They’ll tell anyone who asks that they’re going to get married and be together forever.

And yet, neither one ever really tells the other, “I love you.”  Instead, they speak through code.  It’s cute.  It’s the sort of thing that I used to do when I was like 12.  But when you’re nearly an adult and you’re still saying, “Greenish Brown Female Sheep,” it suggests that you might not be as ready for life outside of high school as you think you are.

One night, after a teary David confesses to Diane that he cheated on her with one of his teammates on the school’s track team, Adrianne “A.J.” Jones (Cassidy Rae), Diane snaps.  Instead of dumping David, she tells him that the only way they can make things right is by murdering Adrianne, which is what they proceed to do.  They almost get away with it.  With the police focusing their attention on the wrong guy, David and Diane leave town for their respective colleges.  David and Diane swear to themselves that, from now on, they are going to live with honor and loyalty….

This made-for-TV movie was based on an actual crime that happened outside of Mansfield, Texas in 1995.  For years, the crime itself lived on as a cautionary tale that was told to teenage girls (including myself) in order to keep us from sneaking out and sneaking around.  Interestingly enough, in 2005, Zamora’s attorney said that the prosecution deliberately withheld evidence that David Graham had been lying about having sex with Adrianne Jones as a part of twisted scheme to keep Diane from breaking up with him.  I don’t know if that’s true or not but I do know that, whatever may have happened between Adrianne and David Graham, she deserved better than to be murdered and then turned into a cautionary tale.

One thing I do like about the film is that it is clearly on Adrianne’s side.  Cassidy Rae gives a sympathetic performance as Adrianne, playing her as a genuinely nice person who fell victim to David and Diane’s toxic relationship.  David Lipper is a bit blank-faced as David but Holly Marie Combs is appropriately intense as the obsessive Diane Zamora.  The film actually aired before the case went to trial, which shows that, even in the 90s, there was always a thin line between tragedy and entertainment.

Zamora and Graham are currently both in prison.  Zamora took a polygraph in 2007 but the results were tossed out when it was determined that she was trying to alter her breathing to fool the machine.  As Zamora now claims that Graham alone was responsible for killing Adrianne, I imagine they’re no longer speaking about greenish brown female sheep.