TABOO (n) [Tongan tabu]

1: a prohibition against touching, saying, or doing something for fear of immediate harm from a supernatural force.

In 1975, thirty-three Peace Corps volunteers landed in the island nation of Tonga. It was an exotic place -- men wearing grass skirts, coconut-thatched huts, pigs wandering the crushed-coral streets -- governed by strange and exacting rules of conduct. The idealistic young Americans called it never-never land, as if it existed in a world apart from the one they knew and the things that happened there would be undone when they went home.

Among them was a beautiful twenty-three-year-old woman who, like so many volunteers before her, was in search of adventure. Sensuous and free-spirited, Deborah Gardner would become an object of desire, even obsession, in the small expatriate community. On the night of October 14, 1976, she was found dying inside her hut, stabbed twenty-two times.

Hours later, another volunteer turned himself in to the Tongan police, and many of the other Americans were sure he had committed the crime. But with the aid of the State Department, he returned to New York a free man, flown home at the Peace Corps's expense. Deb Gardner's death and the outlandish aftermath took on legendary proportions in Tonga; in the United States, government officials made sure the story was suppressed.

Now Philip Weiss unravels the truth about what happened in Tonga more than a quarter century ago. With bravura reporting and vivid, novelistic prose, Weiss transforms a Polynesian legend into a singular artifact of American history and a profoundly moving human story.

American Taboo

A Murder in the Peace CorpsBy Weiss, Philip

HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN: 0060096861

Chapter One

A Legend of the South Seas

No one forgets his first foreign country. The light, the architecture, the way theydo their eggs. Red money. The dreamy disorientation. The smell of aviation fuel.

I didn't choose Samoa, John did. We were both 22 and starting out on a longbackpacking trip, and he bought tickets in Los Angeles with six stops downthrough the Pacific. Samoa was after Hawaii. We got there in January 1978. Westayed at a Mormon family's house in the capital, Apia, climbed through jungle toRobert Louis Stevenson's grave, then set out for the bigger western island. ThePeace Corps volunteer was on the ferry, a redheaded guy with half a Samoan marriagetattoo on his back. Of course it turned out Bruce and John had grown up afew miles away from one another in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, so he hadus back to his seaside village. We met his Samoan wife Ruta and stayed two orthree nights.

It rains harder in Samoa than anywhere. The rain against the metal roofmade a throaty song that rose and fell, and under a kerosene lantern, as we dinedon one of his chickens, Bruce told us about the murder.

A year or so back in the neighboring country of Tonga, a male Peace Corpsvolunteer had brutally killed a female volunteer by repeatedly stabbing her. Therehad been some kind of triangle, a Tongan man was involved. Then the Americanman was gotten off the island. The case had caused all kinds of tension betweenthe Peace Corps and island governments.

Bruce didn't know more than that, didn't know names or dates. The story hadpassed from one island to another as stories always did in Polynesia, by word ofmouth. The only difference between this story and others was that it involvedAmericans.

And already then, when I heard the legend in my first foreign country, therewas a sense that something was wrong. That the original wrong had been compounded.

Ten years went by. I started working as a journalist in New York, and onenight at a bar I met another writer, who said that he had been in the Peace Corps."Where?" "Tonga. I was in Tonga, the first group of volunteers to the Kingdom."

I asked whether he had heard Bruce's story.

"Oh, yes," Fred said. "Later volunteers told me something. Elsa Mae Swenson,that name comes back. That was the victim."

Her name was Deborah Ann Gardner. The next day in the New York PublicLibrary I found the one article about the case that appeared in the New York Times,an inch or two at the bottom of page 7 in January 1977. The wire story was basedon an account from the Chronicle, the government newspaper of Tonga, and saidthat the male volunteer was from New York and a Tongan jury had found him tobe insane when he killed her.

Of course I looked him up in the New York phone book, and there he was.He had been listed from a couple of years after the murder.

I called the Peace Corps. Privacy law would be an important factor in any disclosure. "His rights are basically uppermost at this time," a lawyer explained. So I made aformal request under the Freedom of Information Act, and a few months later a packageof old records arrived at my apartment with a lot of the pages blacked out.

Deborah Gardner was 23 and a teacher. She lived in a one-room hut in a villageat the edge of the Tongan capital of Nuku'alofa. She had been there nearly tenand a half months when she died in October 1976. The older volunteer chargedwith her murder faced possible hanging. The American government went to considerablelengths to defend him. A lawyer came from New Zealand and a psychiatristfrom Hawaii. It was the longest trial in Tongan memory.

After the insanity verdict, the two governments went back and forth. Then the King of Tonga and his cabinet released the man on written assurance from theAmericans that he was to be hospitalized back in the United States.

He refused to enter a hospital. The Peace Corps had lacked the power tomake him do so, or the will. The case quietly disappeared.

The key was Deborah Gardner's family. Why had they never come forward?Their names and addresses were blacked out of the file on privacy grounds, andthough she was from the Tacoma area, there were hundreds of Gardners listed inthe local phone books. I made a few calls and sent a few letters, but before long Igot on to something else and, telling myself I would return to this story someday,I put the file away in its big rough brown envelope, put the envelope in a box, andput the box in the attic.

Someday turned out to be 1997. I was hiking with a writer friend when hesaid that Travel and Leisure magazine was sending him to, of all places, the Kingdomof Tonga because it would be the first country in the world to see sunrise onthe millennium and had announced a giant celebration.

"That's funny, I have a Tonga story," I said, and told him about the murder.

Michael stopped in the path. "Why are you working on anything else?"

I dug out the old file and searched for any clues to the identity of DeborahGardner's family. A fellow volunteer had accompanied her body home. Thoughthe name of the "boy escort" was blacked out on privacy grounds, some of theblackouts were sloppy and it was possible to piece his identity together. EmileHons of California.

An Emile Hons was listed in San Bruno. I called a few times and left messages,finally got him.

Yes, he'd been in Peace Corps/Tonga. Now he ran the big shopping mall inSan Bruno. He was guarded, and questioned my information ...

Continues...

Excerpted from American Tabooby Weiss, Philip Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.