I got to work, trying to reconstruct the past few years of Nordahl's life. I was happy to save string, see how things turned out. What I really wanted was an interview with Nordahl himself, which took forever to arrange. Finally he agreed. Then he changed his mind. Then he changed his mind again, but with conditions. By the time I finally sat down with him at a federal prison in Ohio, I knew more about Nordahl than I know about some of my own siblings. (This isn't as strange as you might think; there are eight of us, and some of the facts are pretty murky.) Nordahl was, without question, one of the dullest interviews I've ever conducted. His story was terrific, but he wasn't the guy to tell it. He was too arrogant, too paranoid, too controlling. The story came from Lonnie Mason and Cornell Abruzzini, from Bobby Eisler and Tom Fort, generous gentlemen each of them, and a small army of others.
Early one morning, soon after Nordahl jumped bail, went on a burglary tear, and got busted again, Lonnie Mason called me. He said that two of Nordahl's friends-the people he was staying with when he was arrested, and who had in fact set him up-were killed in a one-car crash. Police suspected the brake line was cut. Mason thought that Nordahl had arranged from jail to have them killed, to eliminate potential witnesses. He couldn't ever prove it; knowing Lonnie, he's probably still trying.
A few months after this article was published, Law & Order: Criminal Intent ran an episode based on Nordahl. Lonnie and I both happened to be watching. During commercials, we chatted on the phone. We couldn't believe how thoroughly they had lifted the story: every detail, every twist, every idiosyncracy. It made sense, of course. A story about a thief, which began in thievery, should surely end in thievery. It was a good episode, one of my favorites.
Philip Weiss
Stalking Her Killer
from New York magazine
At 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, I stood on the south side of Montague Street in Brooklyn watching the Social Security offices, waiting for Dennis to come out. I wasn't sure what he looked like. I had a number of photographs of him at age twenty-four, a thickly built blond guy with thinning hair and broad heavy planes in an intelligent face. Bearded, introverted. But what use were the pictures? They were from 1976. Dennis had lately turned fifty.
Having gotten a primer from a private-eye friend about tailing people, I followed a few fiftyish Dennises down the street. None of them seemed right. Then it got to be 5:20 and I was heading home myself when a man came out of the office door and everyone else on the rush-hour block seemed to vanish. Most of his hair was now gone, but the beard was still there, and so was the inward intensity, the determined anonymity. Dennis's oddball spirit was so distinct and strong that it had passed unchanged from the old pictures I carried. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, carried a knapsack, wore photo-gray glasses, as he had worn jeans and a T-shirt and carried a knapsack and worn photogray glasses twenty-six years before, on the night that Deb in one of her last acts had knocked his glasses off, breaking them. He had left them in the blood on the floor of her hut, got on his bike, bicycled off into the darkness.
He looked like what he had been then: a Peace Corps volunteer. I followed him down the street and into the subway, then lost him.
I'd first heard of Dennis more than twenty-five years ago. In 1978, I was twenty-two and backpacking around the world when I'd crashed with a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa named Bruce McKenzie. He said that a year or so back in the Kingdom of Tonga, a tiny island nation in a crook of the dateline, a male Peace Corps volunteer had killed a female volunteer. There had been some kind of triangle. He was a spurned or jealous lover. He had stabbed her many times. The American government had moved heaven and earth to get him out of Tonga. Bruce didn't know any names, but he said the case had caused considerable friction between the Peace Crops and Pacific-island governments, and hearing this by the light of a kerosene lamp, with the heavy rain clattering on the roof, I formed a romantic idea of a story out of Maugham or Conrad, of something terribly wrong that had unfolded in an out-of-the-way place. A true idea, as things would turn out.
I returned to the story several times in the intervening years, learning the killer's name, Dennis Priven, and something of the government machinations that had given him his freedom. It became an occasional obsession, something that nagged at me all my adult life.
The victim's name was Deborah Gardner. She was twenty-three, a natural girl in a seventies way, with a laid-back Pacific Northwest vibe. In Tonga, in 1976, she rode her bicycle everywhere by herself at night, even when people told her she shouldn't, she didn't wear makeup, she put her thick dark hair up in a rubber band at night and took it down in the morning, washed her clothes by stamping on them barefoot in a basin with a Jethro Tull tape going. She decorated her one-room hut with tapa cloth and native weavings, and lay on her bed all afternoon reading Heinlein or Hesse.
Her hut was on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa, Tonga's capital city, alongside the home of a gangling, humorous Californian named Emile Hons, who was friendly with Dennis. Deb taught science and home economics at the leading educational institution in the country, Tonga High School.
People said she was the prettiest girl in the Peace Corps. She dressed modestly, in denim skirts and men's button-down shirts, but men still noticed her big laugh and the way her body moved. There were seventy other volunteers in the country, and sometimes it seemed like every guy in the capital wanted to go out with her. She had dated two New Yorkers, ethnic exotics to her own western-mixed Lutheran background; and then a third New Yorker had wanted to date her, too.
She was polite to Dennis Priven. He lived a mile or so away from her and taught chemistry and math at the leading Methodist high school. Most volunteers were wary of him. He was the best poker player on the island, and took everyone's money, and they did not understand why he didn't look anyone in the eye and carried a large Seahorse dive knife with him everywhere.
Still, he had a few close friends, drawn to him by his humor and intelligence. "[He] succeeds at what he wishes to do," volunteer Barbara Williams wrote home about Dennis. "Since he has a beard and usually wears cut-off blue jeans, the Tongans think he's sloppy- which he isn't. Keeps his desk, bookshelves, home very nearly neat as a pin. The students are scared of him, not knowing that beneath that gruff exterior lies a tender heart of the sort that rescues fair damsels in distress. He'd hate to think so, though, disliking sentimentality. All in all he's too good to waste-I keep wanting to match him up with some fluffy little wisp of a girl with a will of iron. They'd live happily ever after."
Dennis pined for the voluptuous girl with the Kelty backpack from Washington State. One night, he awkwardly invited Deb to come over to his house for dinner, and she accepted. His friends helped him put the meal together. Emile thought of it as a high-school gambit, and other friends of Dennis also saw the date in high-school terms. Perhaps implicit in the planning was a judgment of Deb-Dennis was a serious soul, Deb was a party person. He'd be good for her.
The dinner went badly. Dennis had high expectations and had gotten Deb a gift, spending real money. He was full of awkward feeling, and the situation became unpleasant. She ran out of his house, got on her bicycle, rode into the night.
When Deb saw a former boyfriend, Frank Bevacqua, later, she was upset. "He must have spent one hundred dollars on this dinner. Doesn't he know I don't want to go out with him?"