Deborah GardnerLet’s add one thing to Gerald Ford’s legacy: the greatest scandal in Peace Corps history, the freeing of a murderer to save the image of the agency, and to try to preserve Pres. Ford’s reelection hopes in ‘76.
Ford never learned of the scandal, that’s what his office told me when I was writing a book about it a few years back. Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State, also said in 2002 that he had no memory of the case. But Ford’s midlevel political appointees handled the matter, suppressing it and botching any idea of justice.
The murder took place three weeks before the presidential election—on Oct. 14, 1976 on a Martha’s Vineyard-sized island in the South Pacific, Tongatapu in the Kingdom of Tonga. A Peace Corps volunteer named Dennis Priven, then 24, from Brooklyn, murdered a fellow volunteer, Deborah Gardner, 23, of Tacoma, WA., by stabbing her repeatedly in her hut that night. An introverted high school chemistry teacher, Priven had been stalking Gardner, a biology teacher, for weeks. She had rejected his advances. On October 16, her body left the island. Two days after that her funeral took place in Tacoma—with no media attention.
Ford’s appointees at Peace Corps and State had bottled the case up. The director of the Peace Corps, a former Ford crony in the House, moderate Oregon Republican John Dellenback, went campaigning for Ford right after the murder happened, and made sure that no one heard about it. Dellenback had led prayer breakfasts on the Hill to help the government heal after Watergate, but he did nothing for Deborah Gardner. Peace Corps violated its own rules on publicity, making sure not to release news of the murder for 19 days, till November 2—the afternoon of the general election. The story was buried in the newspapers.
Peace Corps and State then threw the American gov’t behind Priven, discouraging the Gardner family from taking any role in the case. “Once out, all out,” political appointees warned Deb Gardner’s mother—a not so subtle suggestion that if the case was aired, her daughter’s privacy would be thoroughly compromised. The U.S. paid for Priven’s defense, and paid for a psychiatrist to come out from Hawaii to examine and then testify for the disturbed young man, all in an effort to spare him the outcome that any Tongan would have experienced: the gallows.
The Tongan government and prosecutors were pursuing Gardner’s interests, but those officials felt totally manipulated by Ford appointees who converged on the island. It was a tiny country of 100,000 people and no traffic lights, and it turned to New Zealand for what limited assistance it got in the case. Priven was found not guilty by reason of insanity in December 1976, and Ford’s appointees, including the Ambassador to New Zealand and Tonga, Armistead Selden, another former congressional buddy, and the charge d’affaires, Robert Flanegin, then went to work to get Priven released.
The Americans promised to put Priven away back here. But these promises meant nothing. Priven came back to Washington in January 1977, days before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, and though Peace Corps mounted a flimsy effort to keep him in Sibley Hospital, Priven declined the offer and within days returned to Brooklyn—a free man just three months after he had stabbed a fellow volunteer 22 times. Not a word in the press. A few years later, he was working for Social Security as a computer dude.
Yes, Gerald Ford was a moderate Republican steward who helped heal the nation after Watergate—fair enough. But he was also a nincompoop on foreign relations who issued vaguely-spiritual bromides while watching out keenly for his own political ambitions. Those presidential attributes, reflected in his appointees, allowed the Peace Corps murderer to slip between the cracks…
[Photo by Frank W. Bevacqua]
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a fascinating and well researched piece of journalism? not.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; In the Peace Corps, Evil Lurked Along With Noble Intentions and Good Works
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 clef 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.
the review continues;…
''Who did this to you?'' the dying Ms. Gardner was asked.
''Dennis,'' she answered.
The book includes pages of nonelectrifying courtroom transcript to establish how Mr. Priven was convicted. Then, at long last, the interesting part of this story arrives. The Peace Corps closed ranks and disavowed its longstanding policy to make volunteers live by the laws of the countries they visited. An American cover-up ensued, and Mr. Priven was allowed to go back to Brooklyn and escape punishment. The book illustrates how protecting the image of the Peace Corps became more important than the fate of this one man.
The moral indignation of ''American Taboo'' is accompanied by a comma-happy, affected primitivism that takes the form of frequent run-on sentences. (''Deb dressed modestly, in denim skirts and men's button-down shirts, still men noticed her big laugh and the way her body moved.'') Such syntax is one more indication that Mr. Weiss would have fared better with a forthright, baloney-free true-crime story rather than one that even regales the reader with the killing of a 1,200-pound moose. Why the moose? Because Ms. Gardner's estranged father was hunting in Alaska when he learned of his daughter's death.
''I broke my daughter's heart,'' Mr. Weiss writes with artificial intimacy, seeming to inhabit the mind of this man. Then Mr. Weiss simply repeats the word nothing 11 times to express guilt over Mr. Gardner's lack of closeness to his daughter. In the process, ''American Taboo'' itself earns another nothing or two.
What Maslin thinks of Weiss's writing style is a non sequitur. There is nothing in this excerpt from Maslin's review that challenges the facts that Weiss has assembled here.
Wow, this is amazing to hear about this story. I heard about a murder that happened in the Vava'u islands area. About a man killing a white woman but was said to have taken her to a little island in which they call now, Treasure Island. It was said that her body was buried in a cave and never was found. It's a popular little island just across from Kapa island. I know, because I was just there in July '06. But I guess as the years went by the people of the islands still think this mystery lady, who I know now would be Deborah Gardner. From my own state of WA.
I only read your book last year and I thank you. I was a student of Ms Gardner in 1976 at Tonga High School where she taught. I remember well how everyone expected Dennis to get a fair trial on return to the States and that justice will prevail with such a horrific tragedy. And then we heard that he was a free man not too long after returning… WOW
We expected and looked up to the United States' justice system…but to our surprises Dennis was a free man to go at the cost of a life of our dear teacher, of a Peace Corp volunteer who came to our home country to help us develop and grow to be what we are today.
We remember Debbie and we thank God for her life.
Thank you, Seini and "female Tongan" for taking the time to put down some of your feelings about this tragic affair. Your words as Tongans carry a lot more weight on this subject than what most of us Americans have to say about it. Malo aupito, pea ta'u fo'ou monu'ia to you both!
From the accounts upthread, the Peace Corps seems to have been more interested in protecting its institutional reputation than in aiding Ford's election campaign.
I don't see how this murder and the handling of Piven's trial, no matter where it might have been held, made the slightest difference to voters. So saying the Peace Corps disgraced itself to help Ford seems pretty far-fetched.
The Peace Corps disgraced itself but I doubt the election had much to do with it. her murder is a tragedy but it would not have had electoral implications.
Auto – I would probably agree with you if it weren't for the fact that the decisions to set Dennis Priven free and suppress public knowledge of his murder of Deb Gardner were made by State Dept. operatives above the Peace Corps level. Their motives for doing these shameful deeds ("un-deeds" might be more appropriate) have never been clear, but they were clearly political at least, intended to make no waves and leave no repercussions for the officials and organizations involved. Orders came down from a high place to "make this whole mess go away" and sure enough, that's what happened. Nothing new about that, and it still happens all the time. Luckily, we have some constitutional rights in our country such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., to keep 'inconvenient truths' (apologies to Al G.) like this from going away all the time. Thanks to Philip Weiss for his dogged persistence that resulted in American Taboo!
Weiss,
This story is disturbing. I remain hopeful that karma, if not justice, will catch up with Dennis and his fellow accessories…from his pc "buddies" down to the responsible drivers of the pc machine itself.
Thank you for keeping her memory alive.
I'm afraid that I caught this story only after it went mainstream and appeared on "48 Hours". Philip, I'm sure that you are deluged with leads on stories, but have you ever considered working on the Ginny Kirsch murder? She was a "donut dollie", a Red Cross volunteer killed by a soldier at Cu Chi in 1970. The murder was swept under the rug, he was honorably discharged and sent back to the States to a psychiatric hospital.
What happened to that psyco that murdered and got away with it? Where is he? How about Miss Mary of the amazing visions? Where is she? Does she sleep well? What a mess!
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