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Two weeks ago, when Serial Shooter suspect Dale Hausner was spotted extending his middle finger in court toward several of his alleged victims, he wrote it off as “simply a misunderstand(ing).” He was just “scratching an itch,” he said at the time, not flipping the bird.
Today, the man suspected of killing eight people and wounding at least 17 others wrote a letter to Judge Roland Steinle saying he had observed one of the prosecutors “literally laugh at me” when his ex-lover was on the witness stand. This time, no way, no how; “it could not be a ‘misunderstanding,'” he wrote.
The letter was given to the judge this morning and placed in Hausner’s case file with the clerk of Maricopa County Superior Court. The file is open to the public, and HEAT CITY obtained the letter through a standard public records process.
In the letter, Hausner accused county prosecutor Laura Reckart of laughing at him “albeit quietly” while a witness testified on Tuesday. The witness was Hausner’s former lover, Linda Tarrence, and much of her testimony made Hausner visibly and audibly agitated. At one point, Hausner even spat out a harsh expletive, heard by all on the courtroom, when he disagreed with Tarrence’s testimony.
The prosecutor “was taking great joy at my expense, at what was being said about me up on the witness stand,” Hausner told the judge in the letter. “I fear the jury may also be witnessing this extreme lack of professionalism by Ms. Reckert (sic).” He asked the judge to take some sort of action against the prosecutor.
Hausner’s accusations could not be verified — I was in the courtroom during the testimony and didn’t see anything like it — and Reckart has generally not been allowed to speak publicly about the case. However, Judge Steinle this morning refused to get involved, saying this was essentially a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In fact, he warned Hausner about some of the visual and verbal things he has been spotted doing during the trial.
“(You) constantly shake your head no no no when a witness says something you don’t like,” Steinle told Hausner.
“When a witness is testifying, nobody will make facial gestures, agreeing or disagreeing,” he said later. “I expect everybody to be on their best behavior.”