Part 1 of 2: The fact that no juror was tossed from the seven-month trial of serial killer Dale Hausner was a remarkable feat. Last month, Judge Roland Steinle even commented that neither he nor the attorneys in the case “in our wildest dreams ever believed” that all the jurors would still be around by the time testimony wrapped up. It is common, particularly in high profile trials, for jurors to regularly get thrown off a case. Yet somehow, this trial was the exception.
The jury’s experience has been one of the untold stories of the Serial Shooter trial. Barred until last Friday from talking to even their family members and closest friends about it, the group of Maricopa County residents spent more than half a year commuting back and forth to the downtown Phoenix courtroom. They listened to gruesome testimony. They took hundreds of pages of notes. And eventually, they convicted Hausner of 80 crimes, including six murders, and sentenced him to death for the killings.
Now, in an exclusive interview with Heat City, one of the jurors has opened up about his experience. He revealed why the jury acquitted Hausner on two of the eight murder charges. And why, even though he believes Hausner is a dangerous killer, he also thinks the former airport janitor is no criminal mastermind.
I met up with the juror on Sunday morning at a coffee shop here in the Phoenix valley. As part of our 2-hour interview, I agreed to keep his name, juror number and personal details confidential. He had several reasons for this request. One of them was safety from some of Hausner’s associates. But mostly, he just didn’t want the notoriety. “None of us want to go on Oprah,” he told me. “Do I want this on my epitaph or my obituary? No.”
It was less than 48 hours after he and 11 other people had sentenced Hausner to death. The details were fresh in his mind, and he was willing to answer any question I threw at him. Nothing was off the table.
“I don’t think he was a brilliant criminal,” the juror said of Hausner. “He thought he had this loophole, that police would do a half-assed effort at looking at all these crimes, which obviously isn’t true because detective (Cliff) Jewell and detective (Clark) Schwartzkopf went to town on these crimes. But he thought they wouldn’t.”
Hausner often targeted people who appeared down on their luck. Some were homeless. Some were prostitutes. But many were simply walking alone at night when they found themselves in Hausner’s gunsight. The way this juror saw it, Hausner had targeted people he believed the system had forgotten about. The killer figured police would just ignore the random bodies.
Jewell and Schwartzkopf were the main investigators of the Serial Shooter case for the Phoenix Police Department. Numerous officers testified throughout the trial, but jurors heard most often from the two detectives who were responsible for tying together the loose ends of the investigation through their testimony.
Even with the extensive evidence they had against Hausner, however, neither the detectives nor the prosecutors were able to prove to the jury he was guilty of every crime he was charged with. In the end, the 12 jurors who decided his guilt acquitted him of the murders of Tony Mendez and Reginald Remillard, the two men authorities alleged were the earliest victims of the Serial Shooter.
Even though the crimes matched Hausner’s pattern, the juror I spoke to said there just wasn’t enough evidence to link him to the crimes with any certainty.
“Compared to the other murders and other crimes, there was never obviously a smoking gun,” the juror said. “There was never any proof that put Dale Hausner at the location of those crimes.”
With most of the other murders, evidence such as cell phone records and bank statements put Hausner near the crime scenes. For the murders that took place in 2006, jurors also had the statements of Samuel Dieteman, who testified that he accompanied Hausner for many of the shootings that year. But for the earliest crimes, even prosecutors later admitted that their cases were thin.
“When you hear ‘not guilty’ four times to begin with, it’s a little unsettling, even though we had anticipated that some of the cases were stronger than others,” Maricopa County prosecutor Vince Imbordino said earlier this week about the day the verdict was read.
Indeed, investigators never recovered the .22 caliber rifle that was used during the earlier shootings. And though none of Hausner’s friend or family members could provide an alibi for him at the times of the murders, that alone was not enough to convict, the juror said. “Most of us wanted to make it beyond reasonable doubt in our minds,” the juror said. “We wanted to prove each and every crime.”
The juror also said he hopes the acquittals show he and the others took their job seriously. Though he knew it was little consolation, he said he wanted the family members of Mendez and Remillard to know that “each victim was thought about.”
As for Hausner, the juror said the 36-year-old didn’t do himself any favors by testifying in his own defense earlier this year. Hausner spent five on the witness stand, explaining why it would have been impossible for him to commit the crimes. He said he was often spending the night at the homes of various women when the crimes were taking place. (The women all later denied it.) He also took jurors on a sort of verbal tour of his life in the Valley during 2005 and 2006 when authorities said he was out killing people.
“He incriminated himself more by testifying,” the juror told me. In fact, Hausner “potentially” could have been acquitted of the November 2005 killing of Nathaniel Schoffner if he hadn’t admitted to being near the crime scene when the murder took place, the juror said. Hausner testified he was in the area that night to confront a local boxing promoter over a business deal gone bad. “Dale put himself there,” the juror said. “He put himself near the scene on the night of the crime.”
Reporter’s note: This is the first of two stories about the jury in the Serial Shooter trial. Check back with Heat City later this week for more from the exclusive interview with the juror, including his thoughts about accomplice Samuel Dieteman, and what others have said about the 12-person panel that decided Dale Hausner’s fate.