Peace Corps’ Murder, and Coverup, Mark 30th Anniversary

by on October 13, 2006 8
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Deb Gardner in Tonga, photo by Frank Bevacqua

Thirty years ago tomorrow Deborah Ann Gardner, a 23-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer from Washington state serving on a remote island in the South Pacific, was murdered by a man who had become obsessed with her, a fellow volunteer, Dennis Priven, 24, who turned himself into the police three hours after stabbing Gardner 22 times in her hut. Three months passed and then Priven was freed from the custody of Tongan authorities, who wanted to hang him, through the tender offices of the State Department and the Peace Corps. In Jan. 1977, Priven came back to Brooklyn a free man and went to work for Social Security before long, becoming a computer guy. His incarceration had lasted three months, in Polynesia. I exposed this case in a book called American Taboo two years back. At that point he was living in his late parents’ former apartment in Sheepshead Bay, lonely and bizarre. Notwithstanding its repeated recent claims that it was going to investigate the case, the Peace Corps has never come to terms with the coverup it initiated, which involved smearing Deb Gardner, trying to blame a Tongan for the murder, and giving a gold star, Completion of Service, to a scary guy it had failed to screen and then allowed to go free on the streets of New York. Nor has it ever apologized to Deb Gardner’s parents.

I’ll have more to say tomorrow.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in US Politics

{ 8 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. brooklyn says:
    October 13, 2006 at 5:04 pm

    I would be inclined to believe that there is something to this story, except that Weiss is diong the reporting. This means that it is filled with inaccuracies and distortions- twisted to his version of the truth.

  2. LAX says:
    October 13, 2006 at 8:10 pm

    I would be inclined to believe that there is something to this story, except that Weiss is diong the reporting. This means that it is filled with inaccuracies and distortions- twisted to his version of the truth…said the bitter, ethnocentric Jewish Brooklynite

  3. brooklyn says:
    October 15, 2006 at 4:27 am

    bitter, ethnocentric???

    Not quite, Weiss prides himself on being "Wrong Again" about his facts.

  4. moby sedjwick dong says:
    October 21, 2006 at 11:52 pm

    She was a beautiful person and creature and it is wonderful that you brought part of her back to us–the living.

  5. thewiseking says:
    October 25, 2006 at 8:56 pm

    gee whiz, maybe i should read little phils book. on second thought…
    3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

    A sad, intriguing story, poorly told, February 6, 2006
    Reviewer: Anonymous "booksandcookies" (Charleston, IL USA) – See all my reviews
    This book seems to have been published before being proofread or edited in any way. Based on radio interviews heard with this author, I bought this book, but it has been a very frustrating read. It almost appears to be the rough draft/writer's notes for the book, rather than a finished work. The writing is bizarre and strange, disjointed, rambling, nonsensical much of the time. A reader keeps wondering: are these the author's rough notes? The writer's stream of consciousness? Some cognitive problem? We are told this was written by a journalist,an editor no less, yet over and over as I read I kept asking myself: what? when? who? huh? where? huh?
    The story itself is a very sad one, but also frustrating. It leaves the reader feeling angry and disgusted by the crime committed by the murderer and by the consequent atrocities committed by the various and many people in authority – and also by the fellow "volunteers" who, at least as portrayed in this odd book, were complicit in the foul results of the trial which enabled the murderer to go scot-free. It seemed that those fellow volunteers displayed so much concern and assistance for the murderer and little to none for the victim, just as the Tongans observed. This book certainly does taint the Peace Corps in its, supposedly, most idealistic hayday and even contemporarily as a result. What a horrendous shame and what a horrendous embarrassment, but most of all, what a vicious, horrible criminal went free and presumably remains free – after a long career working for the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT in the SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION!! – yet another crime of this awful case, told in this awful book. I regret not giving this book a positive review because the author must have devoted much time and travel to the effort, but more time to editing would have been a good idea. I do appreciate that he has brought this very disturbing case to wider public attention.

  6. thewiseking says:
    October 25, 2006 at 9:00 pm

    i dunno, doesnt seem to be such a good read…

    Lurked Along With Noble Intentions and Good Works
    Print Single-Page Save

    By JANET MASLIN
    Published: June 21, 2004

    AMERICAN TABOO
    A Murder in the Peace Corps
    By Philip Weiss
    Illustrated. 369 pages. HarperCollins. $25.95.

    The place: Manhattan. The year: 2002. The setting: a coffee bar in SoHo. The meeting: long-awaited. Philip Weiss has been working up to it for years. Readers of his ''American Taboo'' have been waiting for 340 pages that only feel like years.

    Mr. Weiss is there to confront Dennis Priven, who was once a Peace Corps volunteer in the South Pacific island kingdom of Tonga. ''American Taboo'' has assembled considerable evidence that Mr. Priven murdered one of his fellow volunteers and got away with it. In preparation for this showdown, Mr. Weiss has hired a private investigator who wrote a book called ''Your Secrets Are My Business.'' The investigator has taught Mr. Weiss how to wear a baseball hat and to practice following people around.

    When the two men finally have their encounter, readers learn how Mr. Priven helps Mr. Weiss adjust the zipper on his knapsack. There is talk about whether this conversation will be off the record. Mr. Priven says he doesn't want to discuss the case until 2007. One of them drinks juice; the other has lemonade. And nothing else happens.

    ''He didn't look back, I'm sure of that,'' Mr. Weiss writes. ''But then neither did I.''

    In a real work of investigative journalism, this might qualify as a whopping anticlimax. But in ''American Taboo,'' it's just more of the same. The whole book is padded with repetitions, nonevents, paragraphs full of sawdust, marginal details, purplish flights of fancy and not-too-quotable quotes. To the extent that he has happened upon a never-told story of sex, scandal and cover-up, Mr. Weiss has done a remarkable job of sapping the life out of it.

    Part of the problem lies with the book's iffy provenance. It came about because Mr. Weiss, no Tongan himself, with no ties to anyone involved, got wind of this decades-old killing and decided to investigate and imagine all its details. So as ''the smell of ripening guavas filled the air,'' and the murder of Deborah Gardner looms closer, Mr. Weiss pictures her dancing. He does it with characteristic overkill: ''Her mouth was open in laughter, her cheeks were dark with color, and thick strings of hair slapped around her face, slicked by saliva, sweat, life juice.'' Life juice? ''American Taboo'' would have been a much better book if it weren't drippy with the stuff.

    ''Why did you feel that you should write a book about something for which my family never sought any attention?'' Ms. Gardner's brother quite reasonably asks Mr. Weiss. Well, the answer has something to do with how attractive Ms. Gardner looks in old photographs. Then there are justice unserved, journalistic integrity to uphold and the apparent hot-stuff marketability of this material.

    ''Do you want me to give you a letter from my publisher?'' Mr. Weiss asks when he tries to persuade participants to talk to him. (Many refuse.) He often refers to Deborah Gardner's story as a legend, mostly because other written accounts (including a roman à £lef by a fellow Peace Corps worker) have found no takers. They provide some of the life juice that is recycled here.

    The story of the crime is so simple that it appeared in a recent magazine excerpt, compressed to a few pages without the loss of anything important. Among the Peace Corps volunteers who landed in Tonga in 1975, quite a few had crushes on Ms. Gardner. She was a free spirit, as recalled by many anecdotes of varying interest.

    One admirer remembers the sight of her squeezing a pimple. ''No chick had ever done that right in front of him,'' Mr. Weiss writes. ''But Deb didn't care.'' Another admirer remembers thinking: ''Boy, is that Debbie Gardner gorgeous, and why is it that the lives of the beautiful are so often tragic?''

    Ms. Gardner flirted freely enough to rattle Mr. Priven, a Peace Corps worker teaching math to Tongans. (The book includes sine-cosine mnemonics for trigonometry formulas, because no detail is too small.) He scared the others by painting a diabolical image on his door. He was said to smell like a bat (a very bad thing by Tongan standards — consider what happens to the excrement of a creature that sleeps upside-down). And he was seen grappling violently with Ms. Gardner on the night she was stabbed many times, as eyewitnesses would later testify at his Tongan trial.

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  7. thewiseking says:
    October 26, 2006 at 3:54 pm

    phil weiss, failed journalist and "observer";
    from the New York Times Janet Maslin;
    In a real work of investigative journalism, this might qualify as a whopping anticlimax. But in ''American Taboo,'' it's just more of the same. The whole book is padded with repetitions, nonevents, paragraphs full of sawdust, marginal details, purplish flights of fancy and not-too-quotable quotes. To the extent that he has happened upon a never-told story of sex, scandal and cover-up, Mr. Weiss has done a remarkable job of sapping the life out of it.

  8. Another RPCV says:
    October 26, 2006 at 9:45 pm

    All comments to date except for maybe one seem to have some kind of axe to grind against Philip Weiss for writing the book, American Taboo. I'm one of many who can tell you that this book was a carefully researched treatise about justice long denied, based on interviews with scores of people who were directly involved in the tragedy. I challenge anyone to refute the truth and accuracy of events surrounding that murder as described in American Taboo. Since several of the commenters above quoted from published reviews of the book, I'll end this comment by quoting from another review which may balance the scales of criticism to some degree:

    Philip Weiss' meticulously researched investigation into a Peace Corps murder in Tonga is a compelling account that leaves one infuriated — both by the injustice of the outcome and by the complicity of the Peace Corps bureaucracy itself in thwarting justice. This book, in its way, starts to redress that injustice and calls the murderer (and, for that matter, the Peace Corps) to account in ways that Tongan and, especially, American legal systems did not.

    As a two-time Peace Corps volunteer who has a lot of pride in the goals and accomplishments of the agency, I can report that the programs in which I served were far better managed, with far better Peace Corps country directors, than the Tonga program in the '70s.

    And as a volunteer who served since the publication of TABOO, I can also say that it has indeed been read by many people in the agency. (A new generation of staffers, as outraged as any of us by the events Weiss details.) All the staff with whom I have talked say — forcefully — that this kind of Peace Corps meddling could never happen again, that changes have been made, that local legal systems are now more fully respected. Well, "never" is a long time, but at least, at Peace Corps headquarters, some lessons seem to have been learned from this tragedy, thanks in large part to Weiss' book.

    In any event, AMERICAN TABOO serves to tell a story that had been suppressed for far too long, to expose a murderer to the light of public scrutiny, to hold Peace Corps and the greater US government responsible, in some small measure, for past failings, to serve as a cautionary tale for future Peace Corps administrators — and, finally, to serve as a monument to one Peace Corps Volunteer who was, in life, very much like the thousands of other Volunteers before and since: motivated, sincere, and dedicated to helping … while trying to make sense of a perplexing new life being lived far, far away from America.

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