A Cover-Up at the World's End
U.S. officials have much to answer for in a Peace Corps killing in Tonga.
By Philip Weiss

June 15, 2004

The Kingdom of Tonga is a tiny Polynesian archipelago of 100,000 people about 1,200 miles northeast of New Zealand. In 1976, 80 Peace Corps volunteers were posted to the kingdom, most of them working as high school teachers in the Tongan capital, Nuku'alofa. They led a simple life. They rode black Chinese one-speed bicycles to school, spent part of their $2-a-day stipend on beer at the Tonga Club on Friday nights, and now and then had dances with taped rock music on faraway beaches.

Deb Gardner lived by herself in a hut near the bush at the east edge of town. She was a 23-year-old biology teacher from Tacoma, Wash. — dark-haired, outdoorsy and something of a free spirit. One of her many suitors among the volunteers was Dennis Priven, 24, a muscular blond who was considered the best poker player on the island. He was a brilliant, bespectacled introvert from Brooklyn who taught math and chemistry at the leading high school and went everywhere with a dive knife on the waist of his cutoffs. Gardner was polite to Priven but rebuffed his advances, and he grew obsessed with her.

On the night of Oct. 14, 1976, Priven rode to Gardner's hut carrying a metal pipe and his knife, prosecutors said later. He stabbed her 22 times, then rode away on his bike. Neighbors carried her in a pickup truck to the hospital, where she died.

Two days later, by the time Gardner's body had left the island en route to Washington state, a concerted American effort to obstruct the process of justice had already begun. In an apparent effort to protect the image of the Peace Corps, the U.S. government would do its utmost that week and in the months and years afterward to make sure that justice was not done, in a travesty that still rankles the few people who knew about it, one that still begs for resolution.