Philip Weiss

Stalking Her Killer

from New York magazine

At 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, I stood on the south side of Montague Street in Brooklyn watching the Social Security offices, waiting for Dennis to come out. I wasn't sure what he looked like. I had a number of photographs of him at age twenty-four, a thickly built blond guy with thinning hair and broad heavy planes in an intelligent face. Bearded, introverted. But what use were the pictures? They were from 1976. Dennis had lately turned fifty.

Having gotten a primer from a private-eye friend about tailing people, I followed a few fiftyish Dennises down the street. None of them seemed right. Then it got to be 5:20 and I was heading home myself when a man came out of the office door and everyone else on the rush-hour block seemed to vanish. Most of his hair was now gone, but the beard was still there, and so was the inward intensity, the determined anonymity. Dennis's oddball spirit was so distinct and strong that it had passed unchanged from the old pictures I carried. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, carried a knapsack, wore photo-gray glasses, as he had worn jeans and a T-shirt and carried a knapsack and worn photogray glasses twenty-six years before, on the night that Deb in one of her last acts had knocked his glasses off, breaking them. He had left them in the blood on the floor of her hut, got on his bike, bicycled off into the darkness.

He looked like what he had been then: a Peace Corps volunteer. I followed him down the street and into the subway, then lost him.

I'd first heard of Dennis more than twenty-five years ago. In 1978, I was twenty-two and backpacking around the world when I'd crashed with a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa named Bruce McKenzie. He said that a year or so back in the Kingdom of Tonga, a tiny island nation in a crook of the dateline, a male Peace Corps volunteer had killed a female volunteer. There had been some kind of triangle. He was a spurned or jealous lover. He had stabbed her many times. The American government had moved heaven and earth to get him out of Tonga. Bruce didn't know any names, but he said the case had caused considerable friction between the Peace Crops and Pacific-island governments, and hearing this by the light of a kerosene lamp, with the heavy rain clattering on the roof, I formed a romantic idea of a story out of Maugham or Conrad, of something terribly wrong that had unfolded in an out-of-the-way place. A true idea, as things would turn out.

I returned to the story several times in the intervening years, learning the killer's name, Dennis Priven, and something of the government machinations that had given him his freedom. It became an occasional obsession, something that nagged at me all my adult life.

The victim's name was Deborah Gardner. She was twenty-three, a natural girl in a seventies way, with a laid-back Pacific Northwest vibe. In Tonga, in 1976, she rode her bicycle everywhere by herself at night, even when people told her she shouldn't, she didn't wear makeup, she put her thick dark hair up in a rubber band at night and took it down in the morning, washed her clothes by stamping on them barefoot in a basin with a Jethro Tull tape going. She decorated her one-room hut with tapa cloth and native weavings, and lay on her bed all afternoon reading Heinlein or Hesse.

Her hut was on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa, Tonga's capital city, alongside the home of a gangling, humorous Californian named Emile Hons, who was friendly with Dennis. Deb taught science and home economics at the leading educational institution in the country, Tonga High School.

People said she was the prettiest girl in the Peace Corps. She dressed modestly, in denim skirts and men's button-down shirts, but men still noticed her big laugh and the way her body moved. There were seventy other volunteers in the country, and sometimes it seemed like every guy in the capital wanted to go out with her. She had dated two New Yorkers, ethnic exotics to her own western-mixed Lutheran background; and then a third New Yorker had wanted to date her, too.

She was polite to Dennis Priven. He lived a mile or so away from her and taught chemistry and math at the leading Methodist high school. Most volunteers were wary of him. He was the best poker player on the island, and took everyone's money, and they did not understand why he didn't look anyone in the eye and carried a large Seahorse dive knife with him everywhere.

Still, he had a few close friends, drawn to him by his humor and intelligence. "[He] succeeds at what he wishes to do," volunteer Barbara Williams wrote home about Dennis. "Since he has a beard and usually wears cut-off blue jeans, the Tongans think he's sloppy- which he isn't. Keeps his desk, bookshelves, home very nearly neat as a pin. The students are scared of him, not knowing that beneath that gruff exterior lies a tender heart of the sort that rescues fair damsels in distress. He'd hate to think so, though, disliking sentimentality. All in all he's too good to waste-I keep wanting to match him up with some fluffy little wisp of a girl with a will of iron. They'd live happily ever after."

Dennis pined for the voluptuous girl with the Kelty backpack from Washington State. One night, he awkwardly invited Deb to come over to his house for dinner, and she accepted. His friends helped him put the meal together. Emile thought of it as a high-school gambit, and other friends of Dennis also saw the date in high-school terms. Perhaps implicit in the planning was a judgment of Deb-Dennis was a serious soul, Deb was a party person. He'd be good for her.

The dinner went badly. Dennis had high expectations and had gotten Deb a gift, spending real money. He was full of awkward feeling, and the situation became unpleasant. She ran out of his house, got on her bicycle, rode into the night.

When Deb saw a former boyfriend, Frank Bevacqua, later, she was upset. "He must have spent one hundred dollars on this dinner. Doesn't he know I don't want to go out with him?"

"You have to tell him that."

Over the next few months, Dennis's thoughts about Deb became more sinister. It upset him that she skinny-dipped in violation of tapu, or taboo (the word is originally Tongan), and did not thank him enough after he had put in a sink for her. She found it impossible to escape him. He came to her school on his bike every day to visit, even after her vice-principal had told him that he was not welcome there. And though his behavior-the knife he always carried, some bizarre and menacing statements-drew the official attention of the small Peace Corps staff, he somehow managed to hang on into the last months of his two-year service.

In part to escape him, Deb applied for a transfer to another island. Then in October 1976, the Peace Corps held a dance for a new group of volunteers, and that night seemed to unhinge Dennis. Deb got drunk, and fell twice on the dance floor, and then Emile took her home, accompanied her into her hut.

Five nights later, Dennis arrived there himself. He had his dive knife with him, and also a syringe, a metal pipe, and two jars containing cyanide. Later his friends would learn that he intended a surgical murder, in which he would club Deb with the pipe and make her unconscious, then destroy her. But Deb started fighting him, fending off his knife with her hands, leaving horrible wounds; ultimately, Dennis stabbed her twenty-two times. Her Tongan neighbors discovered him dragging her out the front door. He jumped on his bicycle and fled into the dark, and the neighbors brought her to the hospital in the back of an old green truck. Doctors worked valiantly, but the damage to her aorta and carotid artery was so severe she would have died if Vaiola Hospital had been the Mayo Clinic.