Serial Shooter suspect Dale Hausner testifies in his own defense Monday in his eight-count murder trial in downtown Phoenix. Pool photo
Live from the courtroom: Serial Shooter suspect Dale Hausner testified this afternoon that he penned a note that has become one of the most bizarre pieces of evidence in the trial against him. The note read: “He who asks about the $5 bill is a homicidal maniac, arsonist, thief, destroyer of property, drug using god among mortals.” Authorities found the note in his Mesa apartment shortly after his August 2006 arrest.
“I wrote the note,” Hausner said on the witness stand as part of his eight-count murder trial in downtown Phoenix.
He said his former roommate and suspected accomplice Samuel Dieteman came up with the text for the note and planned to use it as some twisted pick-up line at local bars. “Sam Dieteman was a bisexual,” Hausner said. “And he was having a hard time meeting people of the same sex or opposite sex.”
He said Dieteman planned to print the text on a T-shirt and wear it to bars underneath another shirt. He would then pin a $5 bill to his outer shirt and wait for someone to ask about it. “It’s not a very good pick-up line, to be honest,” Hausner said.
Hausner said he wrote the words on a piece of paper to show Dieteman how much it would cost per letter to get the text printed on a T-shirt. “I wrote it out verbatim for what he said,” Dieteman said.
The testimony appears to somewhat contradict what Hausner told a reporter from the East Valley Tribune in 2006. About a month and a half after his arrest, the reporter asked Hausner about the note and he sounded “shocked.”
“Oh my God,” Hausner was quoted as saying at the time. “That’s the worst thing I’ve heard all day. I’m absolutely speechless.”