An Officer and Vixen

An Officer and Vixen The Air Force's star female pilot falls from grace enmeshed in a tale of passion

U.S. Veteran Dispatch staff and wire report
June/July/August 1997 Issue

Lt. Kelly Flinn, the female Air Force pilot who in May accepted a less-than-honorable discharge rather than face adultery and other charges in a military criminal trial, was facing as many as 9 1/2 years in prison had she been tried and found guilty on all charges.

Flinn, 26, who was hailed as the first woman to pilot a B-52 bomber for the United States Air Force, had been charged with adultery, disobeying an order, making a false statement, conduct unbecoming an officer and fraternization, this last offense the result of a brief fling with an unmarried airman not in her chain of command. The adultery charge stemmed from an affair she had with Marc Zigo, a soccer coach, who she said had lied to her about being legally separated from his wife, an Air Force junior enlisted woman.

In a letter sent to Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, Flinn claimed that her only crime was to fall for the wrong guy. "I truly fell deeply in love with a man who led me down this path of self-destruction and career destruction . . . I only want to serve my country and be forgiven for my human faults."

When the Air Force refused to back away from its plans to court-martial Flinn, she submitted a request to resign in lieu of a court-martial on the condition that it be an honorable discharge. The petition was rushed up the Air Force chain of command in three days. The Air Force brass remained adamant that an honorable discharge was out of the question. They would not bend the rules for someone entrusted with a plane carrying 70,000 lbs. of nuclear bombs. They believed there would practically be a mutiny in the senior officer corps if Flinn was given such blatant favoritism.

A public relations battle ensued with public opinion running heavily in Flinn's favor. Letters to her local newspaper in North Dakota chastised the Air Force. One said: "I'd like to see you print an article about the next male pilot charged with adultery. Print his name and ruin his life before he has been found guilty."

Connecticut Republican Representative Nancy Johnson complained in a May 19 letter to Widnall, "It is disgraceful that Lieut. Flinn's career as a [bomber] pilot will be over simply because overzealous prosecutors targeted her case over numerous others with more egregious circumstances." New York Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney wondered "if an equally accomplished male pilot had made the same mistakes, how many high-ranking Air Force members would have looked the other way?"

Senate majority leader Trent Lott jumped into the fray. He said the Pentagon was clueless. "I mean, get real: You're still dealing with human beings. I think it's unfair." Flinn is being "badly abused," Lott said, and at the very least deserved an honorable discharge. Lott's remarks drew a stinging pen from Washington Post columnist George F. Will, who wrote that Lott was making a "spectacle" of himself "doing his act as a Sensitive Nineties Man and sounding like a Valley Girl doing an impression of former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder.

"Chivalrous as a former Ole Miss cheerleader should be," Will wrote, "Lott, who has the same amount of military experience as most members of Congress -- none -- and who evidently shares Schroeder's itch to make the military culture less military, was in high dudgeon about the Air Force's treatment of Lt. Kelly Flinn."

The public relations battle took a bad turn for Flinn. Airman Gayla Zigo, the deceived wife stepped publicly into the controversy. A letter she had written to Secretary Widnall about her husband's affair with Flinn had been leaked to the press; it gave the story a new twist. Gayla wrote that when she discovered Flinn's love letters to her husband, she complained to her supervising sergeant. When the affair continued, she felt outmaneuvered and overwhelmed. "How could I compete with her?" the wife wrote. "She had power, both as an officer and academy graduate. She also had special status as the first female B-52 pilot." Clearly frustrated, Gayla continued, "I am tired of Lieut. Flinn acting as if she is the victim, when she is the one who committed the crimes." Flinn responded: "Airman Zigo is not a victim of me, but she is a victim of Marc."

Secretary Widnall said no to Flinn's request for an honorable discharge. Flinn's lawyer, Frank Spinner, warned Flinn who still remained determined to fight it out with the Air Force, "You have to think about jail," he said to Flinn. A short time later, Flinn retreated and agreed to resign with a general discharge.

"The closer you get to the courthouse steps, the more the reality sets in," Spinner told TIME magazine later. "And in a criminal trial, the closer you are to the courthouse steps, the closer you are to the jailhouse."

By taking the general discharge, Flinn left the Air Force with a stigma on her service record. By military definition, an honorable discharge is down graded to general discharge when a person's "service has been honest and faithful," according to military regulations, but the "significant negative aspects of the member's conduct or performance of duty outweigh positive aspects of the member's military record." Because she resigned so soon after graduation, Flinn will have to repay about 20% of the cost of her Air Force Academy education, or about $19,000.

Spinner told Flinn later that in all his adultery or fraternization cases, none of his clients had got off so lightly.
The Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps have court-martialed nearly 900 men and women in the past five years on charges that include adultery. The branches handled hundreds of other adultery cases administratively, or through closed-door proceedings known as nonjudicial punishment.

The key factor in whether an adultery case reaches the court-martial stage is whether additional serious charges exist or if the defendant requests a trial by jury in lieu of nonjudicial punishment.

The following are excerpts from a June 2nd issue of Time detailing Flinn's fall from grace:

The Air Force version of events starts not with Zigo but with a wine-tasting party Flinn gave last June for her soccer team. According to a prosecution report made available to TIME, among the guests was Senior Airman Colin Thompson, whom Flinn had met a few months before. During the party, the report alleges, Flinn and Thompson had sex on the lawn of her residence; then Thompson spent the night. According to the report, Thompson claimed that Flinn, his superior in rank, told him that she knew what they did was wrong but that no one would ever find out about it. It was this encounter that gave rise to the fraternization charge against her.

Just days after that party, Airman Gayla Zigo arrived at the Minot Air Force Base with her husband Marc, who was hired as the base youth sports director. Marc and Flinn met when he too joined a soccer team. Gayla says she and Marc had dinner with Flinn and Thompson and another couple after a soccer game on June 30. She recalls Flinn and Thompson flirting, joking about marriage. "She said, 'Where's my ring?' and held out her hand," Gayla remembers. Thompson fashioned a paper ring out of a napkin, and he put it on Flinn's hand. Gayla says Thompson had drunk too much to drive home, so after dinner Flinn drove him. Flinn's mother says Kelly had dated a lot but had never really fallen in love. That all changed with Zigo. On July 3, about three days after Marc and Kelly met, the report alleges, Marc and Gayla had an argument. Marc telephoned Flinn, who invited him to her house. "Less than a week after we arrived to the base," charges Gayla, "Lieut. Flinn was in bed with my husband having sex." Flinn insists the relationship was not "consummated" until August. But Gayla's fears were magnified when she found a letter alluding to that July day. "I want to spend the rest of my life beside you, walking through life hand in hand," Kelly wrote to Marc. She even enclosed a picture taken the next morning, July 4. "You have my heart, soul, mind and body...you are my soul mate. You make me whole." Flinn explains that the love notes were a signal of her affection for Marc--a signal that he demanded in exchange for his own sentiments.

A week later, Flinn helped the Zigos move into their new home. In the weeks that followed, Gayla says, she often came home to find Kelly there. "I began to wonder if she ever went to work because she was always there," Gayla says. On July 11, she says, Marc came home drunk from a bar, and they got into a fight. Marc called Flinn, who offered to come pick him up. While she sat crying on her stoop, Gayla says, the bomber pilot drove up in her Honda Accord and whisked Marc Zigo away.

After Gayla found one of Kelly's love letters to Marc in his car, she felt she had to act. She took the letter, along with others (one of which had come with a key to Flinn's apartment attached), to her supervisor, First Sgt. Kathleen Blackley. It was at this stage that Flinn was offered her first escape hatch. Blackley confronted Flinn with the evidence and warned her that if she didn't break off the affair, Blackley would report it to Flinn's commanding officer. Prosecutors claim that Flinn told Blackley she knew she was in the wrong and promised to "cease contact" with Marc. Blackley decided to let the matter drop.

Had that been the last of it, the affair might have ended like most adultery cases, privately, discreetly, without official sanction. Of the 67 Air Force court-martial cases in 1996 that involved adultery, only one did not include other counts, like sexual assault or disobeying orders. When an affair involves an officer messing around with a civilian marriage, officials tend to look the other way. If Marc and Gayla had been separated--as Marc had convinced Kelly they were--there would probably have been little intervention. But once Gayla, an enlisted airman, told a superior that an officer was trying to steal her husband, the Air Force had to go on alert.

The affair boiled over in November, when another officer, First Lieut. Brian Mudery, was brought up on charges of sexual misconduct and assault, and proceeded to point the finger at other officers for similar misdeeds. None of his accusations panned out--until investigators got to Flinn. She made a pact with Zigo to deny their affair and gave base police several sworn statements that she and Marc had no sexual relationship. She didn't know that Marc was busy making a statement of his own.

By the time Marc was done, he had given investigators the full tour of Flinn's privacy, a map of where and how and how often they had had sex. Four days later, on Dec. 1, he tried to kill himself by taking sleeping pills and stuffing a rag in the exhaust of his car. But he left the garage door open and called Gayla from the car phone. In the hospital, he finally admitted the affair to her, and she announced that she was through with him. When Kelly went to see him, says Ann Dell Duncan, a clinical psychologist who evaluated Kelly later in February, Marc told Kelly, "If you leave me, I'll hurt you and I'll kill myself." When Zigo left the hospital, Flinn took him in. She bought a new car--the Jeep he'd always wanted. He was living in her house on Dec. 13 when Flinn's commander, Lieut. Colonel Theodore LaPlante, ordered her to have no further contact with Marc. Flinn signed a statement acknowledging she understood the order. A week later, Kelly took him to Georgia for Christmas to meet her parents .

It was not until the end of January that Flinn finally learned how much Marc had told the investigators. She learned a lot more about him too. It turned out that four months after he married Gayla, he was charged with beating her, in a case that never went to trial. He had lied about where and when he was born, his life, his career, nearly everything.

Flinn threw Marc out of the house and found herself a lawyer. Lieut. General Phillip J. Ford, commander of the Eighth Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, approved a recommendation that she be court-martialed. Ford could have slapped her with a "nonjudicial," or administrative punishment, such as a reprimand or reduction in rank, which is what senior Air Force officials in the Pentagon now wish he had done. Instead, on Feb. 25, Flinn was ordered to stand trial.

Flinn was in the middle of a three-day psychological evaluation with Duncan, which was recommended by her lawyer, when she heard about the court-martial. "She was devastated," Duncan says, especially because the Air Force p.r. officer had apparently released the information without advising Flinn first. "She hadn't thought the Air Force would treat her that way." Duncan viewed Flinn as "competent, careful, capable of handling external emergencies and unequipped from her training in the Air Force Academy to deal with personal emergencies. I think the academy prepares pilots and military personnel. What they don't do is prepare people," says Duncan, who designed family-advocacy centers for the Air Force in the 1980s.

Gayla Zigo is on her own. To supplement her pay, she took a second job--working the front desk at the Holiday Inn, where the Flinns have been staying. Meanwhile, Peyton Place has become a sort of informal clearinghouse for Flinn's civilian-job offers, which have been pouring in from all around the country. On Friday, the Air Force ordered her to relinquish the locker containing her survival gear. Flinn ended the week deluged with book and movie inquiries, and certainly she has a story that bears retelling. Or that is too much to bear. "I just want to get in my Jeep and go," she told TIME. "I'll probably throw some outdoor gear in the Jeep, put the top down, get myself a dog and go."

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