American Taboo - Will there Ever Be Justice for Deborah Gardner?

I was interested to read this article about the bill sent to the President to expand AmeriCorps. It's certainly not a bad thing to encourage and incentivize national and community service (particularly now when we are living in Narcissist Nation -- two atomic middle fingers up to all you Ayn Rand-worshipping motherfuckers, by the way), but I was drawn immediately to the story because lately I've had the Peace Corps on my mind.

I spent the weekend reading this book about a Peace Corps Volunteer named Deborah Ann Gardner who in 1976 was murdered in Tonga by another Peace Corps Volunteer, Dennis Priven. Since I read the book initially (last year), I haven't been able to get Deb Gardner, nor her killer, out of my mind).

Deb Gardner was called "the most beautiful girl in the Peace Corps," and was pursued by many of the men she met while doing her service in Tonga. One of these men was Dennis Priven, a genius mathemetician and introvert, whose advances she gently rebuffed, telling him she only wanted to have a friendship with him. Enraged by this rejection, Priven decided "if I can't have her, no one will." One night, after a party on the island, he went to her hut with those classic tools of seduction, a 6-inch knife, a length of pipe, syringes, and a jar of cyanide.

A neighbor boy, who heard Deb's screams as Dennis Priven was stabbing her 22 times and was running to assist her, witnessed Dennis Priven open the door of her hut and try to drag her out. Realizing he had been spotted, Priven dropped her face down on the ground, jumped on his bike, and rode away, leaving her to die.

Deb's neighbors loaded the expiring girl into the bed of their truck and rushed her to the hospital. On the way, they asked her, "Who did this to you?" and she responded, "Dennis."

*********

So here you have your basic open-and-shut murder case, right? Well, actually, no. As I read the book, what I found most disturbing is how the US Government and the Peace Corps closed ranks around Dennis Priven, protecting him and basically overlooking the fact that at his hands, a girl was dead.

Dennis Priven, a brilliant sociopath, completely manipulated the Peace Corps country director, the Tongan government, the US Government, and even the other volunteers who thought of him as a friend. He told his friends who visited at the Tonga jail before the trial enough about the night of October 14, 1976, that I think they could be considered accessories after the fact. A Tongan jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity (a verdict that if you read the book you learn he completely manipulated -- he essentially counted the cards of the Tongan criminal justice system), and three months after he murdered Deb Gardner, Dennis Priven walked off a plane in the United States, collected his last Peace Corps paycheck, and walked away a free man. He then returned to his parents' Brooklyn home, got a job WITH THE GOVERNMENT, retired a few years ago, and still lives there, as far as anyone knows.

Guiltiest of all, I believe, is Mary George, the PC country director, who was more concerned with protecting the image of the Peace Corps than finding justice for Deb Gardner. Protect the Peace Corps at any cost, is how she approached the case. Mary George, may your soul burn in hell for eternity for this. Deborah Gardner's blood is forever on Mary George's hands, too, not just Dennis Priven's.

I remain flabbergasted by this case. It's a case of poisonous groupthink gone murderously, tragically wrong. A murderer, whom everyone knew to be a murderer, walked free and lived his life. How could the US Government let this happen and why can no one do anything to bring justice on this small and evil man Dennis Priven?

I have to wonder if Dennis Priven's neighbors and co-workers knew they were living and working next to a cold-blooded murderer? Did his ex-wife know that he was a murderer when she married him or did she divorce him when she found out? I have to wonder if this sociopath has killed again (NYPD -- any unsolved murders on the books? Check out Dennis Priven, or just frickin' bring him in on ALL of them, can't you? Just to harass him for the hell of it?). Don't ask me why this is so haunting to me -- it just is.

What do we need to do to get some sort of justice for Deb Gardner?