friends had had in Tonga, that he would do anything for you, was mine. A couple of times he stopped me in a brotherly way to tug the zipper up on my knapsack. It was his mind that was most interesting. It was strange, and it could go anywhere. And he was funny.
When we hit Union Square, he pulled out a folded piece of paper and read me a proposal. He said I could convey his terms to my editors, so I will report its fuzzy outline here: Dennis had no interest in my book coming out, but if I waited a few years to publish he would tell me everything.
I should have anticipated such a gambit. Emile had described to me a chilling visit to Dennis in jail after the murder when Dennis had unfolded a grand double-jeopardy scheme in which Emile wouldcomeforwardatthelastminuteofthetrialandtaketherap, freeing Dennis-after which Dennis would come forward during Emile's trial. In this way, Dennis had theorized, they would both go free.
What I told Dennis was that he should come forward because of the havoc the case had left in the minds of a hundred or so people who knew about it, the idea that a person could kill someone and walk away from it. I reminded him of what Tongans had said to him many times, that he must apologize to the girl's family and ask their forgiveness. I reminded him of the scene in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya the prostitute and says, What should I do? and Sonya says, Go to the crossroads and kiss the ground in four directions and say I have sinned, and God will give you life again.
It was my own form of bluff. The Gardners didn't want to talk to Dennis. If Dennis went to Deborah's mother in Idaho on bended knee, Wayne would know what to do with him and it wasn't listen. Wayne wanted Dennis imprisoned, or hanged back in Tonga. He wanted justice.
I didn't tell Dennis that. What was his idea of justice, anyway? I'd learned that he was too interior a person to believe in justice, his imagination too crazy and elaborate. He lacked any superego. This was just some misunderstanding that had happened between a couple of people. 'She deserved it,' he had said in Tonga, and maybe he still believed that, and in that sense he seemed to me evil. He had treated the murder and his release as a form of accomplishment, not something to be regretted.
He'd maintained a poker face for three months in Tonga. He had almost killed himself with hunger strikes two or three times so as to be kept in the jail in downtown Nuku'alofa, near his friends, rather than at the isolated prison farm. And while Emile had refused to play the double-jeopardy game, other friends had helped him. He'd made a kind of confession to Barbara Williams, in order to gain admission back into the human family, but Barbara's loving expectation that he would be incarcerated in a mental hospital meant nothing to him. Another friend had given him a Bible that he had read thoroughly in jail, and he had then told Dr. Stojanovich that he was Deb's Jesus Christ and savior and she was possessed by the devil-or he had allowed Stojanovich to say as much on the stand. Then, in the States, Dennis had told Dr. Lebensohn that Deb had led him on and crushed him. Two different stories, each the key to its respective legal doorway.
Believing it pointless to cite a larger social good, I appealed to Dennis's grandiosity. I said that what he had pulled off was actually a stunning addition to the annals of crime. There was a brilliance to it, a negative brilliance, for sure, but most surprisingly, the story was unsung.
I was going to change that; didn't he want to help?
'Okay, if I'm as smart as you say I am, then how come it's not me with the big house by the lake in Seattle?'
'You're as smart as Bill Gates, you just care about different things,' I said.
I'd pictured this encounter for years, and always with explosive scenes. He did get angry a couple of times, and I had the underlying sense that he was deeply dissociated, but all in all it was a civilized meeting. He was a free man in Soho. We were two middle-aged cerebral New Yorkers, lost in conversation, tied together by intense feelings about a beautiful loner of a woman whom he had prevented from ever growing old, and whose crystalline girlhood had trapped me, too, in seventies amber.
We went back to Dean and DeLuca. I got a bottle of juice and he got a lemonade, and we walked south. 'I want to show you my pictures,' I said.
We sat on a rusted iron stoop on Grand Street and I showed him one hundred or so of the images I'd collected. He flipped impassively through the pictures of Deb, broke down when he saw a picture of his old friend Paul Boucher, lost it for a few minutes, had to walk off down the street. The narcissistic monster, only thinking about his own bloody life.
Then he carefully drew something from his knapsack he'd brought along, a stiff card with a blue edge, his membership in the Royal Nuku'alofa Martini Club, a group founded by expatriates in 1975. It was an artifact from before Deborah, before his life had fallen apart.
In the months that followed our meeting, Dennis was to quit his job at Social Security and change his phone number again. Having gotten away with murder twenty-eight years ago, he was condemned to preserve that terrible achievement. He was still on his bicycle, rushing into the dark forever. He could put the thing away in a box, but the box never went away. For the time being, though, Dennis put away his card, and I put away my pictures of Deb. We got our knapsacks on, had a moment's small talk, then he headed toward Broadway, I headed toward Lafayette. He didn't look back, I'm sure of that, but then neither did I.
Philip Weiss is a NewYork author. This piece is drawn from his book, American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps. He has worked for many years as a journalist, writing a column in the New York Observer. He has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and Esquire. He is at work on a book about the army in Australia and New Guinea during the Second World War.
Investigating the murder of Deborah Gardner took me four years, 2000-2004. For those years it was the most important thing in my life, as it had to be if I were going to dig out the facts in the case. I was willing to go anywhere to talk to anyone who had information about what had happened in Tonga in 1976. I visited Tonga ten times, New Zealand half a dozen times,Australia three times, in addition to half the States. The book that came out of that reporting ended an oral legend that had eaten at people in the South Pacific and the United States by documenting a shady and shameful episode of politicized murder, in which the Peace Corps and State Department worked to free a disturbed young American Peace Corps volunteer who had stalked and then killed another volunteer on a remote island.
It was a great story. And I'm embarrassed to say that it took me a long time to get around to it.
The Peace Corps volunteer who told me about the murder, so long ago, in 1978, didn't know Deborah's name, nor the name of her killer, Dennis Priven, but he conveyed an awareness of a distant drama and justice that I could never get out of my head. Over the years I made halfhearted efforts to learn more. I found out that the government had suppressed the case and that the killer had been freed in the United States not four months after the murder. I found out that Deb Gardner was a spirited and generous person. Poe said that the death of a beautiful young woman was the most poetical topic in the world and I was not about to disagree. In April 2000, I finally saw her photograph, and I stopped wondering about what had happened and committed myself to investigating the case.
That project caused pain to a number of people, even Deb's family, whom the Peace Corps had lied to about the case. But it was worth it. A burden was lifted from people who were close to the matter and had always needed to say something, including a number of Tongans who had fought for Deb.
It appears now that there will be some official action in the case. Norm Dicks, the congressman from Deb Gardner's home district in Washington State, has called for an investigation. The U.S. Attorney's office in Seattle is looking into the matter, though he has indicated that it may be too late for an indictment, to which Deb's father, Wayne, at last fully engaged by the case, has responded, 'So-I have to stomp my own snakes?' The Peace Corps has continued to circle the wagons. It meets all inquiries about the Gardner matter with bromides about how much it 'mourns' Deborah Gardner. It has made no real effort to look at the facts and recommend changes in policy, or maybe even offer an apology to the Gardner family.
Dennis Priven continues to live in Brooklyn, New York. He has made no statement about the case.
Debra Miller Landau
Social Disgraces
from Atlanta magazine
He wore his dead uncle's underwear so he wouldn't have to buy his own, then spent freely on tailored suits. He'd tell his wife to keep the air-conditioning off to keep the bills at bay, and would tightly budget groceries, then turn around and throw luxurious dinner parties. His former in-laws say he'd tell new acquaintances his father worked in the Hearst publishing empire, then deny it when the truth came out that his dad was a typesetter who struggled to make ends meet.
A South Boston kid who grew up playing stickball in his blue-collar neighborhood, James Sullivan made it his life's mission to become something, or someone, else.
Eager to shed his working-class roots, Sullivan, a onetime Macon liquor distributor, married an Atlanta socialite, made millions and began grasping at the rungs of whatever social ladder he could reach.
In 1998, the Fulton County District Attorney's Office indicted James Sullivan for his alleged role in the shooting death of his wife, Lita. At the time of the indictment, Sullivan simply vanished. For four years he led authorities on an international manhunt that went from Atlanta to Florida, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, and finally Thailand. At the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list, Sullivan's photo flashed around the world. His biographical sketch portrayed a man who loved the good life, who frequented fancy resorts and restaurants, most likely with an attractive woman on his arm.
The FBI also noted that Sullivan was likely to be spotted swiping condiments from restaurants he visited.
What drove a man who buried his fortune in complex offshore accounts to burrow away sugar packets and swipe saltshakers? Fear he'd lose everything? Or was his penurious personality ingrained, reflecting a hardscrabble upbringing?
The conflict between Sullivan's social aspirations and his scabrous persona will be front and center early next year when he stands trial-again-for allegedly masterminding and financing Lita's death. As the facts of Lita's death and her tumultuous relationship with James are examined once more, it is certain that her onetime husband-and the man sitting at the defense table-will be scrutinized just as hard.
Growing up in the Irish Catholic, rough-and-tumble streets of Dorchester, a South Boston neighborhood, Sullivan learned early that if he ever wanted out, he'd have to be shrewd, smart, and different. Despite his working-class roots, young Sullivan gained an impressive education. He went to high school at the academically challenging Boston Latin School and won an academic scholarship to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated with an economics degree in 1962 and later studied finance at Boston University. Three years after completing school, he married Catherine Murray and the couple had four children in short order. Sullivan worked in the comptroller's department at Jordan
Marsh, a Boston department store, and later at Peat, Marwick and Mitchell accounting firm.
Sullivan moved to Macon in 1973 when his childless uncle, Frank Bienert, asked him to help run Crown Beverages, a successful wholesale liquor distribution company Bienert founded in 1962.
In Macon, Sullivan's swagger, charm, and ambition helped him carve a niche among the city's movers and shakers. Although many Maconites found his brashness offensive to their old-boy approach to business, Sullivan gained headway in the community by working with the Chamber of Commerce and charitable organizations.
