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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
23-year-old Deb Gardner was brutally murdered in Tonga in 1976 by a fellow American volunteer who to this day walks free -- thanks to a disgraceful coverup by the Corps and the U.S.
Jul 20, 2004 | Whenever America -- its citizens, its representatives, its officials -- paves over an injustice with seemingly impenetrable silence, it matters and it matters a lot, because sooner or later what's beneath that silence, in its rise back toward the light, will shake the earth, and by that I mean our humanity itself will be shaken by the disgrace and indignation that good people will feel when the truth is finally known.
On Oct. 14, 1976, a beautiful, vivacious, altruistic 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer from the state of Washington, Deborah Gardner, died in the island nation of Tonga in the South Pacific, the 11th Peace Corps fatality of that year. What distinguished her death from the other 10, and from every other Peace Corps death before or since, is the fact that Deb Gardner was murdered, savagely hacked to death, by a fellow volunteer, Dennis Priven, then a 24-year-old science teacher from Brooklyn, N.Y.
With his Seahorse diving knife, Priven stabbed Deb Gardner 22 times, and -- here's the point, here's why we're obliged to talk about this 28 years later -- this coldblooded killer walked away from the crime scot-free, aided and abetted by the Peace Corps and the U.S. government and their subsequent coverup of the atrocity. In the aftermath of her slaying, Gardner was treated like garbage, not by the traumatized Tongans but by her own heartless and chillingly naive countrymen, as though her life had no value and her death no meaning.
Since 1977, Priven has lived in Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up, without censure or scorn or any limitation placed on his liberty. When it was clear to Priven that Philip Weiss' "American Taboo" would be published this year, he changed his phone number and took early retirement from his job at the Social Security Administration. The only real punishment he has endured for his crime is abstract, existential: to live his days as a lonely sociopath, presumably haunted by his brutal act and pitied by his deluded friends. Gee, poor monster.
"American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps"
By Philip Weiss
HarperCollins
384 pages
Nonfiction
If justice had been served, if the Peace Corps itself and even some of its volunteers, despicable champions of Priven, had not skewed that process with lies, evasions, threats, indefensible silence, ugly distortions of the victim's character, misrepresentations and outright cowardice, Priven would have been executed in Tonga long ago, and good riddance.
The subject, I must admit, is highly personal. I never knew Deb Gardner, but I've known about her for almost three decades, and we have at least one thing in common: We both experienced the dark side of the Peace Corps. As Peace Corps volunteers in 1976, we were, at opposite ends of the world, both victims of knife attacks in our own homes. She died, I obviously survived. She was assaulted by a colleague, a brooding, introverted but, by all accounts, brilliant young man who obsessed about being her lover. I was assaulted by a stranger during a break-in, who was sentenced to seven years of hard labor.
Every government agency is sensitive to public image but none so much as the vaunted yet often-controversial Peace Corps, where the balance between damage and damage control has frequently been a high-wire act determining its very existence. In October 1976, as I sat in Peace Corps headquarters in Washington making arrangements to return to my host country in the Eastern Caribbean to testify at the trial of my assailant, that administrative challenge was formidable. The building whispered with news of a homicide in the South Pacific, something about a ménage à trois gone bad. My region, the West Indies, was focused on more run-of-the-mill turmoil: the evacuation of volunteers from mayhem in Jamaica, the psychological counseling of one of my fellow volunteers from the islands who had been gang-raped and beaten by local thugs. That summer, one of my closest Peace Corps friends on St. Kitts had died in a freak accident, and my roommate, a scruffy biker from California, conned me out of the few hundred dollars in my bank account and vanished back to the States.
