Dale Hausner
Live from the courtroom: The lead defense attorney in the trial of Dale Hausner said today that prosecutors had three “main gaps” in their case against the serial killer suspect. Considering that, he said, the case against his client had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
The theory has turned out the be the central theme in attorney Ken Everett’s final plea to the jury to find his client innocent of all 87 crimes with which he has been charged. The jury is hearing closing arguments this week after hearing five months of testimony in a downtown Phoenix courtroom.
The first supposed gap, according to Everett, was the “time gap.” The crimes in the Serial Shooter case took place at apparently random intervals. For example, the first two murders, according to authorities, took place just seven days apart. But the third murder took place more than a month later. In another instance, more than five months of peace took place between crimes that authorities connected to the case.
Everett used the randomness to question whether each of the crimes should have even been connected to the Serial Shooter case in the first place. “The evidence shows that several of the crimes they’re trying to add to this series and add to this group of shootings because they think it fits,” Everett said. He told jurors some of the case may have presented police an opportunity to simply take a crime “off their desk.” During the trial, he presented no evidence for the suggestion.
Each time Everett has pointed out the number of days, weeks or months between crimes, he shouted “time gap!” to grab the jury’s attention. When he pointed out the five-months standing between two of the crimes, he called out: “time gap to the max!”
The second supposed gap, Everett said, “I’m going to call a snitch gap.” This dealt mainly with Samuel Dieteman, the star witness in the prosecution’s case against Hausner. Dieteman testified that he and Hausner went on a shooting spree together in the summer of 2006, leaving two people dead and several others wounded during the course of a little more than two months.
Everett tried to discredit Dieteman as a witness, reminding jurors of the confessed killer’s drug addiction, alcoholism and homelessness. “Sam tells you that he was bouncing around dumpsters, bouncing around couches,” Everett told the jury. “Who knows where Sam Dieteman was in ’05 and ’06?” The implication is that Dieteman could have been the lone Serial Shooter long before he met Hausner.
The final gap, according to Everett, is in the weapons. Out of the three types of weapons police believe were used in the crime spree, investigators were never able to locate one of them, a .22-caliber rifle. Moreover, many of the shootings were carried out using shotguns, which are impossible to link together based on ballistics evidence alone.
Police found shotguns belonging to Hausner when they searched his apartment after his arrest but could not link them to the killings. “Possessing a gun and possessing ammo does not a killer ,” Everett said.
Given these three gaps, Everett said the prosecution did not make its case against Hausner beyond a reasonable doubt. He asked the jury to consider them “in a Crucible-like way,” referring several times to the Arthur Miller play about the Salem Witch Trials.
“Thank you very much for putting up with me for these months,” Everett said in closing. “And thank you very much for believing in the criminal justice system the way that I do.”