Live from the courtroom: Throughout his testimony in the past two days, Serial Shooter suspect Dale Hausner has relied on a series of day planners to corroborate his testimony. The day planners, three of them representing the years 2005 and 2006, are filled with detailed, handwritten notes about appointments Hausner says he kept during those years. Many of the notes are simply initials. For example, the initials SNAML, according to Hausner, stand for “spent night at Marianne Lescher’s.”
The notebooks, according to Hausner, help him prove in many occasions that he was nowhere near the scenes of the crimes he’s accused in. On May 17, 2005, the night the first Serial Shooter victim was shot to death in east Phoenix, Hausner’s planner reads “SNAML.” It’s the same with May 24, 2005, the night the second victim was killed in north-central Phoenix. In other words, Hausner’s own record keeping shows he was spending the night at his girlfriend’s house, several miles east in Gilbert while the first two murders were taking place.
The notebooks themselves, however, are a bit of a mystery. Police never found any such planners when searching Hausner’s Mesa apartment after his arrest in August 2006, and neither Hausner nor his attorney, Ken Everett, have explained to the jury where the notebooks came from.
The mysterious appearance of the planners apparently got the jury wondering: Are the notebooks simply a work of fiction? Judge Roland Steinle said this morning that he had received that very question from the jury. “Did Dale have access to his day planners after his arrest?” Steinle said, reading from the note the jury sent him. “Did he have the ability to write in them?”
Hausner and his attorney soon tried to reassure the jury that his notes were accurate. “Did you write in them or change them at all after the arrest?” Everett asked.
“No, sir,” Hausner said, explaining there was no way he could have manipulated the notes from jail because he didn’t have access to all the various types of writing instruments used in the books. “Red pen, Sharpie, marker, purple, pencil,” Hausner recited. “There’s probably 20 different kinds of writing.”
Hausner said he began keeping the notebooks as a way to track his photography assignments. Eventually, though, he began using them to keep all of his many girlfriends straight, he said. He didn’t want to land in hot water with a woman by talking to her about a date he had with someone else.
No one ever saw these mysterious day planners during the years he kept them. Hausner said he kept them hidden in his bedroom dresser inside his Mesa apartment. “These were undercover,” Hausner said. “No one even knew they existed. I wouldn’t want to leave them out so someone could thumb through them.”
When prosecutors finally get their chance to question Hausner — likely beginning on Wednesday — they are expected to grill him about the day planners. We will see then whether they’ll be able to poke holes in his extensive note keeping.