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Philip Weiss
Stalking Her Killer
from New York magazine
At 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, I stood on the south side of Montague Street in Brooklyn watching the Social Security offices, waiting for De
Having gotten a primer from a private-eye friend about tailing people, I followed a few fiftyish De
He looked like what he had been then: a Peace Corps volunteer. I followed him down the street and into the subway, then lost him.
I'd first heard of De
I returned to the story several times in the intervening years, learning the killer's name, De
The victim's name was Deborah Gardner. She was twenty-three, a natural girl in a seventies way, with a laid-back Pacific Northwest vibe. In Tonga, in 1976, she rode her bicycle everywhere by herself at night, even when people told her she shouldn't, she didn't wear makeup, she put her thick dark hair up in a rubber band at night and took it down in the morning, washed her clothes by stamping on them barefoot in a basin with a Jethro Tull tape going. She decorated her one-room hut with tapa cloth and native weavings, and lay on her bed all afternoon reading Heinlein or Hesse.
Her hut was on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa, Tonga's capital city, alongside the home of a gangling, humorous Californian named Emile Hons, who was friendly with De
People said she was the prettiest girl in the Peace Corps. She dressed modestly, in denim skirts and men's button-down shirts, but men still noticed her big laugh and the way her body moved. There were seventy other volunteers in the country, and sometimes it seemed like every guy in the capital wanted to go out with her. She had dated two New Yorkers, ethnic exotics to her own western-mixed Lutheran background; and then a third New Yorker had wanted to date her, too.
She was polite to De
Still, he had a few close friends, drawn to him by his humor and intelligence. "[He] succeeds at what he wishes to do," volunteer Barbara Williams wrote home about De
De
The di
When Deb saw a former boyfriend, Frank Bevacqua, later, she was upset. "He must have spent one hundred dollars on this di
"You have to tell him that."
Over the next few months, De
In part to escape him, Deb applied for a transfer to another island. Then in October 1976, the Peace Corps held a dance for a new group of volunteers, and that night seemed to unhinge De
Five nights later, De