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Overview
In 1975, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers landed on the island nation of Tonga. Among them was Deborah Gardner—a beautiful twenty-three-year-old who, in the following year, would be stabbed twenty-two times and left for dead inside her hut.
Another volunteer turned himself in to the Tongan police, and many of the other Americans were sure he had committed the crime. But with the aid of the State Department, he returned home a free man. Although the story was kept quiet in the United States, Deb Gardner’s death and the outlandish aftermath took on legendary proportions in Tonga.
Now journalist Philip Weiss “shines daylight on the facts of this ugly case with the fervor of an avenging angel” (Chicago Tribune), exposing a gripping tale of love, violence, and clashing ideals. With bravura reporting and vivid, novelistic prose, Weiss transforms a Polynesian legend into a singular artifact of American history and a profoundly moving human story.
“This meticulously deconstructed tale of a Peace Corps volunteer murdering another in Tonga and basically getting away with it has to be one of the most exotic true-crime books of recent years, and one of the saddest.” —The Washington Post
“[A] compelling and disturbing exposé . . . even novice true crime readers will find this a gripping and deeply sad story that will do little to bolster faith in the U.S. government’s ethical priorities.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061969928 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 402 |
| Sales rank: | 57,253 |
| File size: | 882 KB |
About the Author
Philip Weiss has been a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor to Esquire, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Observer. He lives in upstate New York.
Read an Excerpt
American Taboo
A Murder in the Peace Corps
Chapter One
A Legend of the South Seas
No one forgets his first foreign country. The light, the architecture, the way they do their eggs. Red money. The dreamy disorientation. The smell of aviation fuel.
I didn't choose Samoa, John did. We were both 22 and starting out on a long backpacking trip, and he bought tickets in Los Angeles with six stops down through the Pacific. Samoa was after Hawaii. We got there in January 1978. We stayed at a Mormon family's house in the capital, Apia, climbed through jungle to Robert Louis Stevenson's grave, then set out for the bigger western island. The Peace Corps volunteer was on the ferry, a redheaded guy with half a Samoan marriage tattoo on his back. Of course it turned out Bruce and John had grown up a few miles away from one another in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, so he had us back to his seaside village. We met his Samoan wife Ruta and stayed two or three nights.
It rains harder in Samoa than anywhere. The rain against the metal roof made a throaty song that rose and fell, and under a kerosene lantern, as we dined on one of his chickens, Bruce told us about the murder.
A year or so back in the neighboring country of Tonga, a male Peace Corps volunteer had brutally killed a female volunteer by repeatedly stabbing her. There had been some kind of triangle, a Tongan man was involved. Then the American man was gotten off the island. The case had caused all kinds of tension between the Peace Corps and island governments.
Bruce didn't know more than that, didn't know names or dates. The story had passed from one island to another as stories always did in Polynesia, by word of mouth. The only difference between this story and others was that it involved Americans.
And already then, when I heard the legend in my first foreign country, there was a sense that something was wrong. That the original wrong had been compounded.
Ten years went by. I started working as a journalist in New York, and one night at a bar I met another writer, who said that he had been in the Peace Corps. "Where?" "Tonga. I was in Tonga, the first group of volunteers to the Kingdom."
I asked whether he had heard Bruce's story.
"Oh, yes," Fred said. "Later volunteers told me something. Elsa Mae Swenson, that name comes back. That was the victim."
Her name was Deborah Ann Gardner. The next day in the New York Public Library I found the one article about the case that appeared in the New York Times, an inch or two at the bottom of page 7 in January 1977. The wire story was based on an account from the Chronicle, the government newspaper of Tonga, and said that the male volunteer was from New York and a Tongan jury had found him to be insane when he killed her.
Of course I looked him up in the New York phone book, and there he was. He had been listed from a couple of years after the murder.
I called the Peace Corps. Privacy law would be an important factor in any disclosure. "His rights are basically uppermost at this time," a lawyer explained. So I made a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act, and a few months later a package of old records arrived at my apartment with a lot of the pages blacked out.
Deborah Gardner was 23 and a teacher. She lived in a one-room hut in a village at the edge of the Tongan capital of Nuku'alofa. She had been there nearly ten and a half months when she died in October 1976. The older volunteer charged with her murder faced possible hanging. The American government went to considerable lengths to defend him. A lawyer came from New Zealand and a psychiatrist from Hawaii. It was the longest trial in Tongan memory.
After the insanity verdict, the two governments went back and forth. Then the King of Tonga and his cabinet released the man on written assurance from the Americans that he was to be hospitalized back in the United States.
He refused to enter a hospital. The Peace Corps had lacked the power to make him do so, or the will. The case quietly disappeared.
The key was Deborah Gardner's family. Why had they never come forward? Their names and addresses were blacked out of the file on privacy grounds, and though she was from the Tacoma area, there were hundreds of Gardners listed in the local phone books. I made a few calls and sent a few letters, but before long I got on to something else and, telling myself I would return to this story someday, I put the file away in its big rough brown envelope, put the envelope in a box, and put the box in the attic.
Someday turned out to be 1997. I was hiking with a writer friend when he said that Travel and Leisure magazine was sending him to, of all places, the Kingdom of Tonga because it would be the first country in the world to see sunrise on the millennium and had announced a giant celebration.
"That's funny, I have a Tonga story," I said, and told him about the murder.
Michael stopped in the path. "Why are you working on anything else?"
I dug out the old file and searched for any clues to the identity of Deborah Gardner's family. A fellow volunteer had accompanied her body home. Though the name of the "boy escort" was blacked out on privacy grounds, some of the blackouts were sloppy and it was possible to piece his identity together. Emile Hons of California.
An Emile Hons was listed in San Bruno. I called a few times and left messages, finally got him.
Yes, he'd been in Peace Corps/Tonga. Now he ran the big shopping mall in San Bruno. He was guarded, and questioned my information ...
American TabooA Murder in the Peace Corps. Copyright © by Philip Weiss. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Table of Contents
| 1 | A Legend of the South Seas | 1 |
| 2 | Tonga 16 | 8 |
| 3 | Swearing In | 16 |
| 4 | The Tonga Club | 29 |
| 5 | Steilacoom | 43 |
| 6 | The Perfect Volunteer | 48 |
| 7 | Stranded | 61 |
| 8 | The Dance at the Dateline | 72 |
| 9 | Prayers in the Bedford Truck | 81 |
| 10 | The Search | 92 |
| 11 | Tapu | 102 |
| 12 | "Help Me Tell the Untold Story of the Murder of Deborah Gardner" | 110 |
| 13 | Next of Kin | 113 |
| 14 | The Sendoff | 126 |
| 15 | A Vision in the Cathedral | 137 |
| 16 | Funerals | 150 |
| 17 | The Jail | 163 |
| 18 | Extraterritoriality | 178 |
| 19 | "A Flick of the Tip" | 189 |
| 20 | Once Out, All Out | 200 |
| 21 | Wayne's Appeal | 209 |
| 22 | At Sea | 215 |
| 23 | Tonga in the Dock | 232 |
| 24 | Tevolo | 246 |
| 25 | The Verdict | 257 |
| 26 | Privy Council | 273 |
| 27 | Never-Never Land | 285 |
| 28 | The Earthquake | 299 |
| 29 | American Taboo | 308 |
| 30 | Condolence Calls | 316 |
| 31 | The End of the Legend | 322 |
| 32 | Behind the Bricks | 330 |
| 33 | Getting Away with It | 340 |
| A Note on Sources | 349 | |
| Acknowledgments | 363 |