72 | Murder on a Tropical Island: The True Crime Case of Deborah Gardner

Deborah Gardner joined the Peace Corps in 1976, hoping to make a positive impact in Tonga.
She embraced the local culture and formed close bonds with the community.
But one volunteer, Dennis Priven, developed a disturbing fixation.
What followed would lead to tragedy and lasting controversy.

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Music:
"Long Note Three", “Constance" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

"Melancholia" - Credit: Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

ES_Maximum state - murder

Sources:
Weiss, Philip, ‘American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps’, 2004, HarperCollins
Crimelibrary.org
‘November Member Spotlight: Emile Robert Hons’, FriendsofTonga.org, https://www.friendsoftonga.org/cpages/emilehons
‘Remembering the murder of PCV Deborah Gardner (Tonga)’, March 2023, Peace Corps Worldwide, https://peacecorpsworldwide.org/remembering-the-murder-of-pcv-deborah-gardner-tonga-2/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Emil Hons was twenty three when he left California with
a sense of purpose and possibility. He'd graduated from art
school in the early seventies and started teaching pottery and
jewelry making at Pepperdine University, but it wasn't enough for him.
One evening, he told his mother he wanted to do

(00:22):
something more meaningful, something that used his skills for good.
She suggested the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps is a
volunteer program run by the United States government aimed at
promoting international understanding and sustainable development through service in partner countries.

(00:46):
Volunteers are typically American citizens, often with a college degree,
who undergo around three months of intensive training before serving
abroad for two years in a school, NGO, nonprofit organization,
government office contributing to the social and economic development of
low to middle income countries. After his training, Amil was

(01:11):
posted to the Kingdom of Tonga, a tropical archipelago in
the South Pacific consisting of one hundred and seventy one
islands with a population of just over one hundred thousand.
Most Tongans live on the main island of Tonga, Tapoo,
centered around the capital Nukualofa, the country's lush, isolated and

(01:34):
culturally rich, surrounded by lagoons and limestone cliffs. Amil was
captivated in Tonga. Amil befriended another volunteer, Dennis Priven, twenty
two years old and originally from Brooklyn, New York. Priven
was a tough, talking mass prodigy whose brilliant mind was

(01:58):
as sharp as his biting with Where a Meal was
warm and easy going, Dennis was cool and condescending. Intellectually
gifted were often emotionally remote. His skills were valuable in Tonga,
as the country had a long farming tradition, but not
enough fertile land to go around, and there was a

(02:21):
shortage of science and math teachers to prepare young Tongans
for the technical and engineering jobs of the future. Despite
their contrasting personalities, the two men would go hiking together
through the islands, jungles and coastline, then drink and play
cards long into the humid evenings. A Meal soon learned

(02:46):
that his new friend was something of a card sharp
who used his mathematical mind to read his opponent's hand,
detecting patterns with unnerving precision. But a Meal didn't mind
and content with the camaraderie and the beauty of island life.

(03:06):
That harmony shifted two years into their service with the
arrival of twenty three year old Deborah Gardner. Deborah had
just completed her degree at Washington State University, and from
an early age she had been committed to public service,
volunteering in hospitals and dreaming of making a difference. She

(03:30):
was posted to Tongua High School, where she taught science
and economics. Tall, athletic and self assured, Deborah had an approachable,
earthy charm. She dressed simply in denim and khaki, reserved
makeup for formal occasions, and embraced the tongue and culture wholeheartedly,

(03:52):
washing her clothes by stomping on them in a basin,
decorating her hut with native crafts, and zipping around the
island on her bice. Her warmth made her popular both
with fellow Peace Corps volunteers and the local community, but
she also drew the attention of Dennis Priven. Dennis quickly

(04:16):
became infatuated. He lingered outside the school where Deborah taught,
attempting to create accidental encounters. Despite her polite but firm disinterest.
She eventually agreed to dinner at his home, but what
she found on arrival was deeply unsettling. She had expected

(04:38):
a casual meal between friends, but Priven had prepared an
overly romantic setting, with luxury food, flickering candles, and an
expensive gift laid out on the table. What he had
hoped would be an intimate evening was uncomfortable for Deborah.
She understood what others had described him as serious, weird, brooding,

(05:03):
and romantically oafish. She left abruptly, pedaling off into the
night on her bicycle. Later, she told a friend he
must have spent close to one hundred dollars on the meal.
Doesn't he know I don't want to go out with him,
she asked. Her friend replied, you have to tell him that,

(05:27):
but Deborah didn't know how she could have been clearer.
Priven's behavior was already alarming. He carried a serrated diving
knife on his belt wherever he went, and he avoided
eye contacting conversations, radiating unease. Still, Priven persisted, turning up

(05:49):
unexpectedly at her home and loitering at the school until
the vice principal eventually had to ask him to stay away.
One morning, Deborah discovered that some disturbing sketches of skulls
had been scribbled on the door of her hut overnight.
Realizing the threat he posed, she requested a transfer to

(06:11):
another island, but her request was denied by Mary George,
the Peace Corps director in Tongua. By now, Priven's obsession
had moved from being an irritation to presenting a serious danger,
but Deborah was left to navigate the threat alone. Despite this,

(06:33):
she refused to let him ruin her experience. She had
grown close to her Meal, enamoured by the dark haired
young man with his slightly scruffy beard and genuine smile,
and the two began a discreet relationship. Fearful of Priven's reaction,
when Dennis spotted them walking home together after a Peace

(06:56):
Corps party, laughing and pushing their bikes through the darkened,
his jealousy became rage. For all Priven's mathematical prowess, he
couldn't calculate how Deborah could be attracted to a Meal
over him, believing himself to be far more handsome and intelligent.

(07:18):
Though he didn't confront them that night, his behavior escalated
and the stalking became more aggressive. A Meal and Deborah
became aware that sometime before Deborah had arrived on the island,
Priven had been smitten with another female Peace Corps volunteer
and had crept into her bungalow one night and cut

(07:38):
off a chunk of her hair with his diving knife.
A Meal once his friend began watching him carefully, sensing
that something was building. They could all feel it, even
if no one yet knew what was coming. Happened less

(08:00):
than a week after a Meal in Deborah was seen
walking together. On the evening of Thursday, fourteenth of October
nineteen seventy six, a Meal had gone to watch a
film with friends when he was suddenly alerted that something
had happened at Deborah's hut. He raced back on his
bike and was met with a chilling scene. Blood smeared

(08:23):
across the floor and walls, with bloody handprints trailing along
the plaster. Deborah was gone. A neighbor told him she
had been taken to the hospital. A Meal peddled furiously,
confused and horrified, with no idea what had transpired. Earlier

(08:46):
that evening, a local boy had heard screaming running to investigate,
he saw a tall, western looking man dragging Deborah's limp
body out of her doorway. When the man noticed the
boy watching, he dropped the body and fled on a bicycle.
Neighbors placed Deborah in the back of a truck and

(09:08):
rushed her to hospital. On the way, someone asked, who
did this to you. Her reply was simply Dennis Priven.
They would be her final words. Deborah died on route,
having suffered twenty two stab wounds to her neck, back

(09:30):
and torso, with defensive wounds on a hands and blunt
forced trauma to the head. Police found a metal pipe,
a bloodied sandal, and a serrated diving knife at the scene,
all later linked to Priven. There hadn't been a murdering

(09:52):
tonguea for nearly a decade, and local authorities quickly ruled
out any tongue and involvement. Suspect was undoubtedly an American
and a member of the Peace Corps. Deborah had been
loved by the locals and volunteers alike, and the community
was shaken by her murder. Her openness, her dedication to

(10:16):
her students, and her ready smile had made her a
part of tongue and life, but now she was gone.
The grieving Emial went to Priven's home, suspicious that he
was involved. He found the lights off and an open
bottle of pills on the floor, so he gathered other

(10:38):
volunteers and began searching the coastline. Uncomfortably torn between desire
to ensure priven faith justice and concern that he might
have tried to harm himself. They searched a local cliff
side lookout where Priven was known to go, and a
meal peered over the edge into the dark sea but

(11:00):
saw nothing. Then word came Priven had walked into the
police station. He was covered in blood, shaking, with superficial
cuts on his wrists and signs of a drug overdose.

(11:21):
He claimed he had taken Darvin, a painkiller, and was
treated under god. When questioned, he remained silent until he
finally asked for pen and paper, on which he wrote
I have nothing to say. Emil visited him at the
station and asked, simply, why did you do it? Priven

(11:47):
looked at him with an unreadable expression, refusing to meet
his eyes, then said coldly, it proves I'm insane. More
than a few hours had passed since the murder, and
he was already laying the groundwork for a calculated insanity defense.

(12:11):
Two days after Deborah's death, her body was quietly shipped
back to the United States. There was no media presence,
no press releases, and no public memorial by the Peace
Corps in Nukualofa. The evidence was damning. A witness had

(12:31):
seen Priven dragging Deborah's body, had dying words named him.
His diving knife and sandal were found at the scene,
and his fingerprints weigh in her hut. Under Tongan law,
he faced a sentence of life imprisonment or execution by hanging,

(12:51):
but the Peace Corps had other concerns. Peace Corps director
Mary George and to telegram to her superiors in Washington.
In it, she deliberately omitted the fact that Priven, an
American volunteer, was the suspect. Instead, she implied that local

(13:13):
police were investigating a tongue and neighbor. Behind the scenes,
US officials scrambled. The director of the Peace Corps at
the time, John Delenback, appointed by President Ford and closely
tied to the political scene, was more focused on campaigning

(13:34):
than confronting scandal. The organization sat on news of the
murder for nineteen days, only releasing a short statement on
second of November, coincidentally, just hours before the presidential election.
The story barely made a ripple in American newspapers. The

(13:55):
priority in Washington wasn't justice for Deborah, it was content aignment.
While Priven awaited trial, he proposed the bizarre legal scheme
trying to convince Emil Hons to confess to the crime
during the trial, ensuring Priven's acquittal. Priven promised he would

(14:19):
later admit to the murder so both would be protected
under double jeopardy laws. Sensibly, Emil declined to have anything
to do with it. Meanwhile, Mary George, who was a
born again Christian, claimed to have had a vision in
church that Priven was innocent. From that moment on, she

(14:43):
bent the rules in his favor, manipulating local process and
lobbying for his release. While Tonguan authorities prepared for the trial,
the Peace Corps dispatched a crackerjack lawyer at breakneck speed
and flew in a psychologist from Hawaii who examined Priven

(15:04):
and concluded he was suffering from latent paranoid schizophrenia. Tongue
and prosecutors were dubious but had no funds to provide
an independent psyche evaluation in the absence of any contradictory evidence.
The jury deliberated for just twenty six minutes before finding

(15:25):
him not guilty due to reason of insanity. Though cleared
in court, the Tongue and Justice system hesitated to release
him outright. Under pressure from the US, a deal was
struck which meant Priven would be deported to America and
committed to the Sibly Memorial Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, d C.

(15:51):
It was a promise made to appease Tonguan authorities, but
it wasn't a promise that would be kept. In January
nineteen seventy seven, Dennis Priven was deported and returned to
American soil. But after just two days of psychiatric evaluation,
doctors found that Priven showed no signs of schizophrenia and

(16:15):
he was no longer deemed a threat to himself or society.
He was quietly discharged and returned to his old life
in Brooklyn, where he secured a government job as a
computer supervisor for a salary of eighty thousand dollars a year.
The Tongue and prosecutor was perplexed and concerned by the incident, saying,

(16:39):
it appeared to me that all pity was with Priven
and none was shown to the dead girl. I find
this very strange justice. For decades, Deborah Gardner's family believed
that their daughter's killer remained institutionalized. It wasn't until author

(17:00):
Philip Weiss began investigating the case in the early two
thousands that they discovered the truth. Dennis Priven had walked
free after just forty eight hours in hospital. Deborah's mother, Alice,
felt that in the eyes of the Peace Corps and
the government, her daughter had never existed, except as an

(17:21):
inconvenient truth that could threaten the future of the program
and its leader's political aspirations. Vice arranged an interview with
Priven and found that the intervening years had done nothing
to activate his conscience, as the unpunished killer told him
that Deborah had deserved it. Vice was horrified by the

(17:46):
man's attitude and wrote he treated the murder and his
release as a form of accomplishment, not something to be regretted.
A panel of psychiatrists who discussed them in two thousand
and five as a case study, concluded it was highly
unlikely Priven had ever suffered from schizophrenia, latent or otherwise,

(18:10):
and probably had narcissistic personality disorder. A nineteen ninety four
law allowed federal prosecutors to file chargers against US citizens
who kill fellow Americans overseas, but this was not in
effect at the time of Deborah's death. Even if Congress

(18:31):
had amended it retroactively, it wouldn't have applied because Priven
had already been tried in Tonga. He had slipped through
a legal loophole, and the peace Caps reputation had been
preserved at the expense of a young woman's life. Priven
lived out the remainder of his years in relative obscurity,

(18:54):
and so far as anyone knows, avoided killing anyone else.
He died on first of April twenty twenty three, aged seventy.
When Emil Hans heard the news, he said, the world
is a little brighter today. The tragedy left an indelible

(19:16):
mark on Deborah's family, friends, and everyone in Tonga who
had known her. The island community was left baffled by
the judicial gambits of a world leading nation which was
supposedly spreading its knowledge to developing countries, yet seemed to
care little for justice. Had Peace Corps program leader Mary

(19:38):
George agreed Deborah's request to transfer to another island due
to priven stalking, this story of a passionate young woman
who wanted to make a positive impact on the world
might have had a very different ending. You've been listening

(19:58):
to Prassia's Murder Map, I just want to say a
big thank you to everyone who has been supporting the
show by listening, commenting, and leaving me a thumbs up.
Also a warm welcome to all the new subscribers who
have joined me recently. I'll be keen to hear your
thoughts on this tragic murder where the killer, Dennis Priven,

(20:19):
escaped justice. Let me know in the comments, and I'll
be back again very soon with another true crime episode.