A couple of years ago I looked in the paper one day and realized that Philip Weiss would be signing copies of his book at Elliott Bay Books. I thought it would be too awesome to get a book signed, To Philip Weiss, from Philip Weiss
. I’d never heard of the guy before. Unfortunately I didn’t find out about the event until too late. I know, I should pay better attention to my monthly email of Elliott Bay events.
Last year I stumbled onto Philip Weiss’ blog, which I began reading. He was a reporter and blogger for the New York Observer at the time. His blog deals mostly with issues of Jewish identity. I am not Jewish, so far as I know. Definitely not matrilineally. He’s usually a good writer though so I paid attention to it. Then he moved to philipweiss.org and I kicked myself for not checking if the domain was available. So I made a comment to that effect on his blog post announcing the move. After which I got an email from him. At first he had thought I was a crank, but he’d checked out this site. And he recommended his own book to me, noting that the murder victim is local to the Seattle area (Steilacom). I figured, why the hell not? How often does a reviewer review an author with the same name?
On October 16th, 1976 Dennis Priven, a Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga, murdered Deborah Gardner, another Peace Corps volunteer. Deborah had turned down Dennis’ advances over the course of a few months. He was upset and hurt that she’d been free with her affections for several other men (particularly a close friend of his) but not for him, and something in him snapped. In a fairly calculated plan, he set out to her shack and stabbed her 28 times.
The Tongan police botched the investigation. They didn’t have the equipment or the training. Still, it was pretty clear who did it. Dennis Priven mounted an insanity defense, and it took the jury only a few minutes to return that verdict. But Tonga had no facilities for dealing with the criminally insane. On assurances from the U.S. that he would be committed on his return, they released him to the U.S. Priven almost walked away from the airport. After being seen by one psychiatrist he refused further treatment and the Feds let him walk.
Until 25+ years later when Philip Weiss began pursuing the story, almost no one outside those involved knew about it.
This is the first true crime book I’ve read in years, so I can’t really write from experience with the genre. Other than wishing that Weiss had cut out more of the extraneous people at the beginning, I found myself quite engaged. (It’s pretty clear from his notes at the end he had material on a lot more people he included as well, so he cut a lot of them.) In particular, I loved everything having to do with Deborah Gardner’s relationship with her parents, a divorced Alice and Wayne Gardner. I also would have liked to have better gotten into the heads of the Tongans involved as well. The only one profiled enough for that was the minister of police.
Weiss does a great job of illustrating the culture clashes for all involved. That of the Peace Corps volunteers who arrived in Tonga. That of a Tonga society in transition and isolation on the edge of the world. The conflicts of culture between the Tongans and volunteers. Differences of outlook toward Dennis Priven between the Tongans and the white residents. Though I thought it was odd that while Tongans were the ones who excoriated the Americans for caring for Dennis Priven’s rights, ultimately it was a jury of Tongans who found him insane on fairly flimsy grounds.
Lastly, I was very frustrated by the chapter Weiss wrote about his encounter with Priven. At the start, Priven took his conversation off the record. A huge reason why a number of people got involved with the book was so they could see Priven acknowledge what he had done, if not repent. Knowing that Priven got away with it from the beginning of the book, I wanted to see some effect on him. Some point where the truth of his actions stared him in the face. We don’t get that. Though, in a way, we got to see he was cold and calculating until the present day. He could stare the truth down and force Weiss into including but a shell of the scene we all wanted to see.
Title: American taboo: a murder in the Peace Corps
Author: Philip Weiss
Imprint / publisher: HarperPerennial / HarperCollins
Format: Paperback
Length: 369 p.
Publication date: 2005
ISBN-10: 0-06-009687-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-009687-8
Subject: Gardner, Deborah, d. 1976
Subject: Peace Corps (U.S.)–Biography
Subject: Murder–Tonga
Subject: Murder–Investigation–Tonga
Subject: Volunteer workers in community development–Crimes against–Tonga
Subject: Americans–Crimes against–Tonga
Subject: Scandals–Tonga
Subject: Tonga–Politics and government
LC classification: HV6535.T65 W45 2004
