A Killing In Paradise

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Edgar Allan Poe said there's nothing more romantic than the death of a beautiful young woman, and I ain't going to quarrel with him.

My name is Phil Weiss, and I've visited Tonga 10 times because I've investigated a murder that happened here.

Tonga is a tiny country.

It's Polynesian.

I first heard this story as a legend.

A beautiful girl who dies because she's been in some kind of love triangle in the South Pacific.

It would have been around 9.45 that night.

Deb had put on her white night dress.

She was preparing to go to sleep.

And he pulled out his knife and just went through the, stabbing her many times.

It's just out of a horror movie.

Deb was fighting for her life in that little house and screaming her heart out.

What happens when a guy gets away with it and no one knows about it?

What are the consequences of that?

Well, you know, the consequences are it eats at people

and it just tears away.

And it doesn't matter if it's two years or eight years, or as it is in this case, 28 years.

This is a story that needs to be told.

Lost in Paradise.

The isolated South Pacific island nation of Tonga is a kingdom unto itself.

Roughly 6,000 miles from the California coast,

2,000 miles from Australia.

A sleepy, generally peaceful place

with a unique culture.

I'm Susan Spencer here in Tonga, which prides itself on being the only South Pacific island group never colonized by a Western power.

There are a lot of Western influences here, though, chief among them the Peace Corps, which has operated in Tonga for decades.

In late 1975, a young Peace Corps volunteer named Deb Gardner came to work here, and so begins a story of adventure and love and ultimately of murder.

I guess I don't, at some level, I don't believe she's gone.

To me it's like this person is still,

it just happened.

Writer Phil Weiss first heard rumors of the murder in the late 70s while backpacking in Samoa.

It haunted him until finally in 2001 he began researching a book about it, American Taboo.

It became everything to me.

And I decided that I was going to drop everything and that I had to find out what had happened to Debbie Gardner.

At some point, I went through the looking glass on this thing.

He quickly discovered that he wasn't the first man to have had that reaction to Deb Gardner.

Were you in love with her?

I suppose I was beginning to be.

Fellow Peace Corps worker Emile Hans remembers the very moment in December of 1975 when he first laid eyes on her at a welcoming ceremony for her group of new volunteers.

Just beautiful.

I mean when she smiled you had to smile.

You didn't necessarily know why she smiled, but you were forced to smile.

You were hoping it was something you had done.

You always hope.

What was your first impression of her?

Wow.

Frank Bavacqua, another Peace Corps worker, dated Deb for a time as well.

Oh yeah, these are girlfriend-boyfriend pictures.

I shot a whole role that day and she just loved it.

You know, there's just something about her that wanted you to be around her.

She could just make you feel like the world world was a better place to be in because of her.

Just about every guy in the Peace Corps wanted to go out with her.

And a lot did, right?

A few did, but I think that she had to turn a lot more away.

And it was the 1970s too, and there was a lot of sexual pressure on the young women.

Earthy, outgoing, friendly, yes.

But Weiss says that Deb, a science major at Washington State University, had a serious side as well.

This road wasn't here, it was was just a dirt track.

To get closer to the culture, she chose to live in a Tongan neighborhood outside of town in a simple one-room house.

That's her house right there, it's been added on to.

But you can see the original contour of the roof line there back under the tree.

It's not exactly the Washington State University sorority house, is it?

No, it's not.

She enjoyed the village life.

She had a good relationship with the Tongan families across the way.

She liked decorating her house with tapa cloth and woven mats from the market.

And she loved her Peace Corps job, teaching science at Tonga High School.

Good teacher?

Very good teacher.

Tellahiva Finney taught with Deb.

You know your fellow teachers sometimes are very close, you like sisters sort of.

You know, and I think seeing that she accepted us, we accepted her, she was just one of us.

A sister.

Yes.

Yes.

But after roughly six months on Tonga, Deb Gardner was beginning to have problems.

Chief among them, another Peace Corps volunteer, a 24-year-old Brooklynite named Dennis Priven.

Dennis was very shy, very intelligent, but a lot of people found Dennis to be weird, introverted, bizarre.

Well, he was really intense.

Barbara Wilson went through Peace Corps training with Dennis.

He was a combination of kind of New York aggressive and quite shy.

And he had one trademark quirk, a six-inch diving knife, usually strapped to his belt.

I don't know if that was training from New York or what, but almost all the time he had that on him.

You know, it was just Dennis's knife.

He sometimes offended people, not from any desire to offend people, but because he really didn't care what they thought.

But it soon was clear he cared a great deal what Deb Gardner thought.

We all knew he had a crush on her.

He so wanted to impress her that at one point he surprised her with an intimate and unwanted candlelight dinner.

Eventually, Dennis made a clean breast of all his deep feelings for her, feelings which she did not reciprocate.

She ended up leaving there in a hurry.

She was upset.

She was very upset.

She was sad.

I wish he wouldn't do that.

He just doesn't seem to understand that, you know, it's not, nothing's going to happen.

But Dennis Priven just wouldn't take a hint.

He started hanging around the Peace Corps office at about the time that Dev Gardner picked up her mail.

He would follow her occasionally and even show up uninvited at Tonga High School where she worked.

She actually asked me if Dennis will come around asking for her to tell her that she's gone somewhere else.

She's not at school.

Do you think she was afraid of him?

Yeah, I think I can say that she was.

Back in 1976, people weren't really talking about stalking.

Is that too strong a word to use when you think back at this situation?

Not now, no.

It was definitely stalking.

Friends had begun to notice changes in Dennis.

Early the second year, he had a pretty serious time of depression.

And some, including Emile Hans, were concerned enough to alert the Peace Corps director of Tonga.

I went and talked to her about it, that I thought he might be losing it a little bit.

But the director of the office, a 46-year-old ex-model and political appointee named Mary George, did nothing.

No surprise to those who knew her.

I mean, she was a perfectly well-intentioned woman who was perfectly ill-suited.

to be the director of the Peace Corps program in Tonga.

Former volunteer Rick Nathanson says Mary George had no feel at all for her job.

She walked around Tonga in high heels, frilly dresses, matching outfits, scarfs around her head.

She always looked like she was going to high tea.

How did she get along with Deb Gardner?

No, they didn't get along at all.

You almost felt there was a sense of jealousy.

She felt that Deb was too sexual, made a spectacle of herself.

Their friends say Deb Gardner wanted a transfer off the main island, partly to get away from Dennis.

And Dennis wanted another year in Tonga, partly to be be near Deb.

Whatever her understanding of the situation, Mary George said no to both.

There was tension between Mary George and Deb Gardner.

Mary George and Dennis did not get on at all.

It was in this tense and angry environment that the Peace Corps threw what became a wild party for new volunteers.

Deb Gardner, among others, got very drunk.

One volunteer shot film at the dance.

Deb Gardner in a new white dress flits by.

The beers were very strong there so we were having a good time.

We started dancing and she slipped and fell.

I picked her up.

We kind of laughed about it.

Maybe the second dance she slipped again.

I understand Mary George was not too happy with what she saw.

At that point I suggested we go outside, get a little air.

About 10 o'clock, Deb left the party with the meal.

We walked the bikes home and

I don't know for a fact, but I think Dennis followed us home.

I don't know if that was a turning point, but he was pretty angry about it.

Angry because

I was with her, I guess.

And he wasn't.

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Dennis wanted a relationship with Debbie Gardner that he couldn't have,

and he was angry and he was jealous.

The days following the Peace Corps party saw Dennis Priven slowly unravel.

Even Peace Corps Director Mary George noticed.

People in the outer office certainly heard them screaming at each other and even heard a thud as of a desk being pushed or maybe Mary being pushed by Dennis.

And Dennis came running out of the office red in the face, bolted out of here and jumped on his bicycle and got out of here.

Dennis had been turned down for a third year by Mary George.

He felt that Emile, his good friend, had taken advantage of Deb and Deb had continued to turn him down.

He snapped.

October 14th, fellow teacher Barbara Wilson remembers seeing Dennis at school and he came out of class

and he just looked pale and looking away and

just gone.

That evening, Frank Bavakwa remembers being outside the town movie theater when Dennis rode up on his bicycle.

And I remember walking back into the theater saying, well, I I just had one of the weirdest conversations with Private I ever had.

And it was something spiritual.

It just gave me the creeps.

And off he went.

By nine o'clock that night,

the devil's on his bicycle and finds his way to Nyaliya, which is Deb's little village at the outside of town.

Dennis was armed with a metal pipe, a syringe, two bottles of cyanide, and his six-inch diving knife.

This knife.

It would have been around 9.45 that night.

Deb had put on her white night dress.

She was preparing to go to sleep.

And Dennis appeared.

He went berserk.

He hit her with a metal pipe and then just started stabbing her.

The first wound is to her side and it cuts through a rib, it cuts the aorta and nicks the kidney.

Deb Gardner fought for her life.

Her white nightgown was drenched with blood.

He stabbed her 22 times and began to drag her to the door at which point her screams had called the neighbors from the bush.

I heard a scream.

I know there's something happening there.

Toa Pasa, just 16 at the time, came running from his house across the road.

I was very scared.

I was thinking, you know,

myself, there's someone there inside

trying to rape you.

Suddenly the door opened.

And Dennis appeared in Deb's front door, dragging her into the doorway.

Toa recognized Dennis as a friend of Emile Hans, Deb's next-door neighbor.

You could see him very well.

Yeah, it was full moon.

When Dennis realized that he was being seen, he dropped Deb

face down in her doorway and bicycled off through the rugby field and into the night.

Left behind was this knife as well as a flip-flop, a pipe, syringe, and cyanide.

What he had planned was to kill Deb and then to kill himself with the cyanide.

Weiss thinks Dennis's plan was derailed when he saw Toa, who cried out for help.

Among those who came running was a Peace Corps driver.

He said, Debbie, who did this to you, Emilie, Emil?

And she said, no, Dennis.

She was lying on the doorway.

Toa's brother, Aleki, was there as well.

She said to me, please, take me to the hospital.

Their father cleared the yams out of his truck and lifted Deb into the back.

The brothers, their father, and several neighbors took off for the hospital as fast as their rickety pickup truck would go.

Alecki says he tried to cradle Deb Gardner's head in his arms as they bumped along.

I lay the bullet's head in my left hand and then I grabbed the wrist

so to know that

she's still alive or

causes bleeding.

In our trucks, keep on bleeding.

I was sitting there and look at her.

I was crying myself seeing someone like that

trying to get her life back.

At the emergency room, doctors did their best.

She was perforated all through her body.

She was a mess.

But they couldn't save her.

An emergency room doctor told me, studying the autopsies, if this had happened outside the Mayo Clinic, they couldn't have saved her.

She had a half-inch cut to the renal aorta, so she was going to die wherever she was.

Emile Hans raced to Deb's house the minute he heard Dennis had hurt her.

I came to the door.

It was open about two inches.

The light was on.

I pushed the door open and there was blood everywhere.

It just shocked my soul.

Then I saw Dennis's backpack, his knife, his flip-flop, his glasses, all in the blood.

There was a handprint down the wall.

It was blood.

And I just stared.

The initial reaction of Peace Corps when they heard that Deb Gardner's body had turned up at the hospital was basically, we got to find Dennis.

Peace Corps volunteers, neighbors, strangers, the police, everyone was out searching that night, scouring the island.

The fear was that having killed Deb Gardner, Dennis Priven next would kill himself.

Dennis went home.

He grabbed a jar of Darvon.

The cyanide was a little too scary for him at this point.

So he tried to overdose on the painkiller.

By midnight, three hours later, he bicycles to a friend's house and says we have to go to the police.

In the early morning hours of October 15th, Dennis Priven turned himself in.

and was promptly charged with murder.

We're approaching a moment where there is going to be the biggest crisis in the history of Peace Corps.

Tonga's mysterious network of whispers and rumors, the Coconut Wireless,

was on fire with the news the night Deb Gardner died.

Police had Dennis Priven in custody.

Emile Hans confronted him at the jail.

I only had one question.

I said, Dennis, why?

He said,

this just proves I'm insane.

Did that make sense to you?

What he did.

He had to be insane.

Apart from the obvious tragedy of Deb Gardner's death, for the Peace Corps, this situation was a nightmare.

In Tonga, murderers hang.

And what possibly could be more scandalous than for one volunteer to be hanged for the murder of another?

Mary was hoping against hope that Dennis hadn't done it.

In fact, in her first telex to Washington that very night, after Dennis was in custody, she implies that Deb's Tonga neighbors might be involved.

Never was that a valid assumption on anyone's part.

Mike Basil was Mary's second in command.

There was never any doubt that that was the person.

Circumstances are being investigated

as if this were a mystery.

It wasn't a mystery.

Even after everyone knew it was Dennis, already that effort by the Peace Corps to put the blame somewhere else and to make the thing go away, that impulse has seized Peace Corps within, you know, moments of Deb's death.

Later that day, a Peace Corps official from Washington contacted Deb Gardner's mother, Alice.

You need to call me at work.

She remembers standing at the cash register when a friend handed her the phone.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, Alice.

It was a lousy way because

there you were.

They just said that there had been a confrontation and...

They said there had been a confrontation.

Yeah.

Deb Gardner's parents were divorced.

Her father, Wayne, got the news while hunting in Alaska.

He said he had bad news for me.

He told me my daughter is dead.

But I didn't know how she died or what.

And what did you think might have happened?

I wasn't thinking much of anything.

I was in shock.

The parents learned some of the specifics over the next few days.

They learned that Deb was stabbed many times.

They learned that a chemistry teacher did it.

There is very little information beyond that.

That's the flag that was on our casket.

The flags inside?

Yeah, go ahead and open it.

Depp's friend Emile Hans was pressed into service to take her body home.

It obviously shocked me.

I didn't even think of that.

I felt, you know, Mary George would take her home or Mike or someone, but...

You then become the representative of the Peace Corps at 25?

There's no class you can take.

All I could do is wing it and hope I did it right.

Yeah.

Deb Gardner's ashes were scattered in the waters off Puget Sound.

And shortly thereafter, Mary George wrote Deb's mother, first offering condolences and then urging sympathy for Dennis.

I tell you this because I hope that your sorrow will not be tinged by any hatred toward him.

I know.

Isn't that ridiculous?

And she goes on, whether or not he is guilty.

He is a young man in great need of our help and our prayers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not very good, no.

And that we have to protect Dennis, you know, poor Dennis, you know.

Mary's defense of Dennis had grown even stronger after an experience she told friends she'd had at Mass.

She had asked God to reveal to her who the real murderer was.

She said, I prayed and prayed, and behind the statue of the Virgin, the face of the real murderer appeared to me.

It was Maya Kapha, who was a Tongan police official.

Wait a minute.

She's telling you that she's had a vision?

Yes.

And that the murderer isn't Dennis.

Yes.

That it's this Tongan police officer.

Yes.

And what did you make of that?

She's gone over.

She's over the edge.

Concerned, Mike Basil reported these visions to the regional office.

And she never left.

I mean,

she stayed in place, right?

She stayed in her position.

That's right.

And all along, Mary was frantically telexing Washington about Dennis.

Send psychiatrist immediately, she demanded.

We need help.

Case unprecedented.

The jail used to be right over here.

It was an old wooden building falling apart.

Dennis, meanwhile, was refusing to talk either to his lawyers or to the police.

But his friends dropped by the jail frequently to chat.

Even played frisbee out in the yard.

Every day, his friends came with American food and with ice cream.

I believe he killed her.

I mean, I had no doubt about that.

Among those friends, Barbara Wilson, who thinks she knows what happened.

Dennis's understanding of the situation situation was that Debbie Gardner had gone out with a lot of guys and she had discarded them.

She had hurt them as she had hurt him and she wouldn't stop and she had to be stopped and he would do that.

He would stop her

and he was willing to die doing that.

If we had wanted experience, we would have kept Richard Nixon in the White House.

I don't concede a single vote.

Meanwhile, back in the States, the 76th presidential campaign dominated the news.

Deb Gardner's death in faraway Tonga went unreported.

He is totally inaccurate.

Not until November 2nd, Election Day, did the Peace Corps issue its first press release, 19 days after she was murdered.

Oh, there's no doubt in my mind that there was a lot of effort to

protect the agency here.

The last thing the Peace Corps needs, they tell themselves, is for this to get out.

Is for this to get out because, you know, that means volunteers face dangers.

But there was no hiding it in Tonga.

I think the Tongans were very angry that we had brought this terrible thing into their country.

So this is the maximum security unit.

Yes.

Angry, too, that Dennis Priven suddenly seemed to be calling the shots.

Oh boy, no wonder he didn't want to be here.

Yeah, it's fairly grim.

It's depressing.

Going on hunger strikes every time the Tongans tried to move him to the maximum security prison outside of town.

As the Tongan officials understood, he's manipulating us.

But we can't let him die on our watch because we'll be blamed.

So back to the comfortable jail he went.

It would soon be clear that when it came to manipulation.

This is where Dennis's trial happened in 1976.

Dennis Priven was just getting started.

He played people like a poker player.

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It was a major event in the life of Tonga and the history of Tonga too, and great spectacle.

Tonga wasted no time.

Dennis Priven was in the dock less than two months after Deb Gardner's brutal murder.

It was a great curiosity, and the courthouse here was jammed with students of Dennis's, students of Debbie's.

But no Peace Corps volunteers.

Mary George made her wishes clear.

Stay away.

But Mary George was at the trial every day?

As far as I know, she was there every

minute.

Was this the first article you wrote about the murder?

Yes, uh-huh.

Volunteer Rick Nathanson was in the courtroom as part of his Peace Corps job at the Tonga Chronicle.

The story was sent out on the APY, which is how many people found out about it.

He was the only reporter at the trial, which was one too many for Mary George.

Mary George didn't want him going near the story.

And some of Dennis's friends didn't want Rick telling the world either.

They jumped on me about my coverage of the trial, that it was no good for the Peace Corps program.

It certainly wasn't good for Dennis.

After all, Dennis is one of us.

And my response was, well, what about Debbie Gardner?

You know, wasn't she one of us too?

Well, she's gone.

It's unfortunate.

We have to worry about Dennis.

Although prosecutor David Tupeau never had tried a big murder case, how confident you were of winning this case.

I'd say we're confident.

After all, he had the metal pipe, flip-flop, cyanide, and Dennis's knife all left at the crime scene.

Eyewitnesses even had seen Dennis leaving Deb's house.

They thought they had a slammed dunk.

But the defense had its own secret weapon.

They had the greatest criminal defense lawyer who's ever set foot in Tonga, Clive Edwards, who is a crafty, wonderful criminal defense attorney.

Clive Edwards, paid by the Peace Corps to defend Dennis Priven.

First, of course, he wanted Priven's version of events.

Priven refused to speak to me.

Wait a minute.

He never talked to you the whole time you were preparing the case?

That's right.

During the entire trial?

That's right.

What did you make of that?

I thought there was something wrong with him.

Dennis did nothing to correct that impression, sitting stone-faced, as his lawyer now simply dismissed the evidence as meaningless.

There was no clear-cut evidence that he was actually responsible for the stabbing.

What about his knife?

His knife was produced,

but his knife had been left there on other occasions.

The defense had help from a bumbling police investigation.

They took crime scene photos the next day and failed to check the old camera, and they were empty.

They took crime scene photos with no film?

Apparently, yeah.

These are the only crime scene photos taken six days after the crime and after friends had cleaned up the blood-soaked hut.

Did the police really mess this up?

I don't think they did a good job.

But the prosecution did have its eyewitness.

And how hard did the defense go after him?

Very hard.

The defense tried to shake him.

He's been trying everything to me and I say, no way.

It's him I saw.

Toa Pasa was 16 at the time of the trial.

I won't change my mind, because that's the truth.

It was the most dramatic moment in the trial, and he was unswerving throughout in his knowledge that that was Dennis Pritham.

Faced with a convincing eyewitness, the defense suddenly changed its strategy.

And the defense said, okay, he was there.

But he was possessed by devils.

He was crazy.

Yes.

Dennis would plead insanity, although no lawyer ever ever had argued an insanity defense in a Tongan court.

They don't even have a word for schizophrenia.

They use words like possessed by devils because the jury was a group of seven Tongan farmers with elementary school education, largely.

They didn't speak English.

With the Peace Corps footing the bill, the defense even brought in Dr.

Costa Stojanovich, a psychiatrist from Hawaii, with a resume a mile long.

The most educated person that Tongans have ever seen in their lives.

And he was a very convincing fellow.

In a nutshell, the renowned psychiatrist testified that Dennis suffered from latent schizophrenia with episodes triggered by stress.

He said that Dennis was delusional, that he thought Deb Gardner was an evil force who had to be destroyed.

But he said Dennis had absolutely no recollection at all of having killed her.

You didn't buy this?

No way.

You never bought this.

No way.

You never for one second have thought that Dennis Pruven was insane.

Never for one second thought that he did not know what he was doing.

He knew what he was doing.

But the Tongans didn't have the money to bring in their own psychiatrist to say that.

And I felt myself alone, outside.

I'm not being helped.

And these are two Americans, both Peace Corps.

They are helping one, but not the other.

How could they forget about Deb Gardner?

She was a Peace Corps volunteer too.

Ask that to them.

The trial lasted nine days.

The verdict took 30 minutes.

The courtroom was jammed.

This whole area was jammed.

Students of Dennis were crouched at the windows staring at Dennis's face.

And a policeman came to this door and said,

Hao Oku Nehau, he has been saved.

Dennis Priven was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The Peace Corps was just dancing in the streets at that point.

I mean, it was, you know, jubilation.

We won.

We won, yeah, and this nightmare is over.

Clive Edwards never will forget what happened next.

Dennis would not speak to me and acknowledge me anywhere, and then all of a sudden he comes and thanked me.

And that's all he said.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

It was the first time Dennis Priven ever had spoken to his lawyer.

I almost fell down and

I was surprised.

Making him wonder if Dennis really was crazy or simply crazy like a fox.

So with the passage of time, which of those do you think is true?

I think he could have been very shrewd.

But shrewd enough to outwit officials in two countries?

This guy is a genius in his own mind and he pulled off one of the greatest crimes in Polynesian history.

I was certain either he'd be in a prison in Tonga or in a mental institution in the United States.

I mean, he had killed Debbie Gardner.

The insanity defense spared his life, but it left Dennis Priven's fate in limbo.

The Tongans had assumed that he would be theirs to deal with, but Tonga had no mental hospital.

And so, literally within hours of the verdict, the Peace Corps began its tug of war to get Dennis Priven off this island and home.

The professionals in the Tongan government said, we are not going to let go of this guy until we have promises.

So the State Department made promises, promises in writing, pledging that if released to U.S.

custody, Dennis Priven would be committed to a mental hospital until he no longer was a danger.

In January 1977, two friends and a Peace Corps doctor escorted Dennis to Washington, D.C.

And I wrote the last story.

Dennis leaves the kingdom.

Sayonara, I'm on to other stories, and that's the end of it.

And he's headed for treatment in some

facility somewhere.

I assume then.

I think everybody else did.

Well, not everybody.

Dennis had no intention of going into treatment.

Well, Dennis is demanding his ticket back to New York, and the Peace Corps lawyer is calling the police in D.C.

and the police are laughing at him.

You can't do anything.

What court order do you have?

Nothing.

And Dennis sure exploited

the incompetence that they demonstrated.

The Peace Corps did convince him to see a psychiatrist, assuming that Dennis again would be found insane, giving them leverage to commit him.

But to everyone's shock, the doctor concluded that at least on that day, he was a danger to no one.

This psychiatrist came to the belief that Dennis was not a paranoid schizophrenic.

He was just a really

somewhat disturbed guy who was led on and she shut the door and he snapped and experienced a situational psychosis.

He could not be committed against his will and there were no legal grounds to hold him.

So Dennis Priven simply went home to Brooklyn.

They were just hoping this went away and just praying that Dennis didn't kill anybody again.

The new administration happily closed the books on the whole case after helping him one last time.

He's getting a passport a month after he gets back.

He gets a completion of service, which is what any volunteer who completes a service gets.

Just like anybody else.

Just like anybody else.

We found Dennis Pruven in Brooklyn.

I believe it's been a small anonymous life since then.

Dennis didn't drive, apparently still doesn't drive.

He went back to the fraternity poker game.

which he had played in before.

Friends said, just keep sharp objects away from him.

The man the defense predicted might erupt like a volcano apparently has led a very ordinary existence.

Divorced, he retired in 2003, ironically, after working for decades for the U.S.

government.

12 years after Deb's death, he was working for Social Security and ultimately was their top computer guy in the Brooklyn office.

Excuse me, Dennis Priven.

I want to talk to you about Deb Gardner.

He refuses to talk about this case at all.

A lot of people think you've got away with murder.

Dennis?

Dennis' former boss, Mary George, now in her 70s, sent word that she too has nothing more to say.

She left the Peace Corps and government in 1977.

An event such as this is like a death in the family.

Beyond that, Patrick Hogan, the head of security for the Peace Corps today, begs begs off answering questions about this case, saying records are just too incomplete to pass judgment on officials back then.

The fact that the United States government promised the Tongans that this person would be committed, it never happened.

How could they not have known that they'd have no control over what happened to him once he got home?

I don't know what they knew.

I don't know what they said.

I don't know what agreements or assertions they made to the government of Tonga.

I simply don't know.

Do you think the Peace Corps owes the Gardner family an apology?

We are very sorry for the pain caused the Gardner family, which I'm sure continues today as if it were 28 years ago.

Today, he insists the family would have the support of a very different agency.

Welcome news to the Gardners, the Peace Corps never even bothered to tell them that Dennis was free.

Our understanding was he would be in an institution in Washington, D.C.

No doubt about it.

No doubt about it, Tim.

And when did you find out that he had never set foot in an institution?

When Phil came to the door.

Not until then.

No.

What did you think?

I

have very nasty thoughts about that.

What I write now is angry at my government.

I trusted them.

How would you put into words what he took from you?

I couldn't.

I couldn't.

In the end, everyone who knew him back then asks the same question.

Was he truly crazy or was he

disturbed and coldly calculating?

Which was it?

Back in Tonga, the tiny kingdom Deb Gardner so loved, long memories are a part of tradition.

I still believe.

You know, he'll live with it till the end of his days.

If you commit a crime on the soil of Toma,

it will eventually find you out in the end.

In April 2023, Dennis Pribbin died.

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