Dale Hausner
Live from the courtroom: She couldn’t remember. Was it 1985 or 2005 when Serial Shooter suspect Dale Hausner moved into the next-door apartment? Now, what type of shotgun did he own? What kind of truck did Hausner tell her he drove?
“What,” said Cynthia McGillvray, who took the witness stand this afternoon, “you expect me to know guns or trucks?”
McGillvray was on the stand to talk about her experiences living next door to Hausner, but she did more to make the room laugh than anything else. And it really wasn’t clear whether her funny comments were intended to be that way or whether it was just a product of her nervousness.
“I believe it was April-ish of ’85,” said McGillvray, when asked approximately when Hausner moved into the apartment complex near McKellips Road and Mesa Drive in Mesa.
“You say ’85?” asked prosecutor Vince Imbordino, sounding a little confused.
“Oh, um, ’05,” McGillvray said. “Two-thousand-five. I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m sorry.”
McGillvray’s testimony provided some much-needed comic relief after nearly two weeks of testimony involving Hausner’s alleged co-conspirator, Samuel Dieteman, in which he told long stories of death and remorse.
McGillvray said Hausner was friendly and outgoing in the beginning. He knocked on her door shortly after moving in and introduced himself. He told her he was a photographer and gave her family some tickets to a wrestling match. Or was it boxing? She couldn’t remember.
Over the months, they would chat out on their shared porch, where their screen doors would hit if they both opened them at the same time. He was likable and outgoing, she said. An ideal neighbor.
There was one time, she testified, when Dale Hausner showed off his vehicle to her. It wasn’t the four-door gray Toyota that authorities say he owned. It was a big black truck, she said. He never got in it, just pointed it out in the parking lot and told her it was his. “What kind of truck was it?” one of the prosecutors asked.
“A truck,” she replied. “A truck, a truck. I don’t know, just a truck.”
Sometime in 2006, McGillvray’s husband borrowed a shotgun to use for some recreational shooting. “What kind of gun was it?” asked defense attorney Ken Everett.
“A shotgun or a 401 or something,” McGillvray said.
Everett was confused. That’s not a standard number for a shotgun. “A .410?” he asked.
“OK” she responded.
He couldn’t hear her. “What?”
“Sure. A 401 or whatever.”
The jury laughed. “What, you expect me to know guns or trucks?” she said. Everett rested his arms on the lectern in the center of the room, and balanced himself. He was laughing, too.
McGillvray said she was upset that her husband, Mike, had borrowed the shotgun. He even had to hide it from her because he didn’t want to be caught with it, she said, or else he would really know her outrage. Why she was so upset that he had borrowed a gun from a neighbor?
“You don’t go out and shoot other people’s guns,” she said. “You don’t know where they’ve been.”
In August of that year, Hausner and his roommate, Dieteman, were arrested on suspicion of shooting numerous people and killing two of them using that very shotgun.