The Murder Of Deb Gardner

In 1976, Deborah Gardner, a beautiful young American Peace Corps volunteer from Tacoma, Wash., was stabbed to death in her hut in the isolated South Pacific island nation of Tonga, located 6,000 miles from the California coast.

Gardner, a science major at Washington State University, loved her Peace Corps job, teaching science at Tonga High School.

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

"She [Deborah] enjoyed more of the village life," says author Phil Weiss. "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."

Fellow Peace Corps worker Emile Hons first met Gardner in Dec. 1975 at a welcoming ceremony for new volunteers. Hons took Gardner's remains back to the United States days after her murder.

Dennis Priven was a 24-year-old Peace Corps volunteer from Brooklyn, N.Y. "Dennis was very shy, very intelligent," says Weiss. "But a lot of people found Dennis to be weird, introverted, bizarre."

"He [Dennis] was really intense. He was a combination of a kind of New York aggressive and quite shy," says Barbara Wilson, who went through training with Priven. "He sometimes offended people, not from any desire to offend people, but because he really didn't care what they thought."

Priven, also a Peace Corps teacher, had one trademark quirk: a 6-inch diving knife, usually strapped to his belt.

The night of the murder, Priven followed Gardner to Ngele'ia, her village outside of town. He was armed with a metal pipe, a syringe, two bottles of cyanide, and his 6-inch diving knife.

Gardner fought for her life. Priven stabbed her 22 times and began to drag her body to the door. Her screams alarmed the neighbors from the bush. When neighbors came to help, Priven dropped Gardner face down in her doorway and bicycled off.

The doctors did their best to save Gardner, who died after the attack. "She was perforated all through her body," says Weiss. "She was a mess."

Priven turned himself in on Oct. 15, 1976, and was charged with murder. A jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. The Peace Corps sent Priven home and insisted on a psychiatric evaluation. He was found to be no longer a threat, and was free to go and returned to Brooklyn. Today, Gardner's family and friends wonder if he was really mentally ill or used the insanity defense to get away with murder.