Heat City

Dale Hausner

Live from the courtroom (Updated, 5:51 p.m.): The ex-wife of Serial Shooter suspect Dale Hausner gave bombshell testimony this afternoon about times when the defendant screamed at her, ripped her clothes off in the middle of a city street, and nearly killed her in the desert.

It was a picture of violence that she said took place long before Hausner was accused of murdering eight people and wounding some 17 others in a 14-month shooting spree in 2005 and 2006 the Phoenix area.

“He’s manipulative and he’s cunning,” said Karen Ledford, whose last name was Hausner when the couple were married in the 1990s and early 2000s. “He’s a chameleon and he will show you whatever you want to see. He’s a good actor. He’s probably the most dangerous person I could ever think to be as good of a liar as he is.”

Ledford took the stand for the prosecution in an attempt to rebut the good-guy image Hausner portrayed during his own six days of testimony. However, she did so with the jury out of the room.

Judge Roland Steinle wanted to hear what Ledford was going to say on the witness stand before he agreed to let her testify in front of the jury. At this point in the trial, the prosecution and defense have both rested their cases. Testimony at this point is only allowed to contradict claims made during the earlier parts of the trial.

At the end of Ledford’s testimony, Steinle said he would allow her to repeat most of it for the jurors.

Ledford, who lives in Texas now, was obviously shaken as she took the stand. Prosecutors said she had just arrived in Phoenix after a long drive. She was shaking and in tears as she began to tell her story.

Hausner, too, was rattled by the testimony. He was often seen with his head down on the defense table. Midway through it, he asked to be excused from the courtroom, then stood up and walked out the side of the courtroom. It was unclear at the end of the day whether he would return to court tomorrow when Ledford tells her story to the jury.

‘In the head or the chest’

Ledford and Hausner had a rocky relationship, to say the least. The two met in the early 1990s while they were both working at a grocery store in the Valley. They soon married and moved to Houston for a brief time, then back to Arizona. They were hot and cold, separating multiple times, divorcing once, then reconciling only to divorce again.

During one of their reconciliations, Ledford said Hausner found out about a man she had dated in the interim. “He got very very angry, and he lunged toward me,” Ledford said. When she fell back onto a bed in their home, he raised up like he was going to punch her but stopped short. “And he just stood there and said, ‘Heh, you should have seen your face.'”

She said Hausner then reached under the bed, pulled out a satanic bible and began reading verses from it aloud. Soon, he was dragging her out of the home, throwing her into a car and driving out to the desert near Wickenburg. There, in the desert, she said he pushed her out of the car and pulled out a gun.

“He gets the gun and he asks me whether i want it in the head or the chest,” Ledford said. “I turn around and say you’re going to see what you’re shooting at.”

At that moment, they heard two riders on motorbikes. “They came out of nowhere,” she said. Hausner put away the gun and told her, “It’s too crowded here.” They got back in the car and drove home, she said.

At some point later in their relationship, Ledford said they had another similar incident. The two were separated, and she said she was coming home from a date to her own apartment when she spotted Hausner parked in her parking lot. Rather than getting out of her own car, she drove away from the apartment, but he gave chase, following her through close-by neighborhoods.

Rather than get involved in some high-speed pursuit, Ledford said she stopped in the middle of a neighborhood street and he screeched to a halt in front of her. He walked up to her car, where she had opened her door. “He takes my car keys and pulls me out of the car,” she testified. Seeing that she was wearing a skirt for the date, Hausner “jerks the skirt off of me,” she said.

“He said, ‘You won’t be wearing that for him any more,'” Ledford testified. “‘And he turned and tore the shirt off of me….right in the middle of a residential street.”

Hausner’s sexuality

Hausner himself was on the stand for the past six days of testimony, and during that time, he said numerous times that his former roommate, Samuel Dieteman, was bisexual. It was an issue for the trial, Hausner said, because it related to certain evidence, including his whereabouts around the time of the crimes. (He said at one point he was not with Dieteman at a certain point because he didn’t want to see him kiss a man.)

Dieteman testified against Hausner last month, saying the two of them cruised the Valley in Hausner’s car on numerous nights in the summer of 2006, shooting random victims and killing two people. Hausner also testified that it was impossible for him to be committing many of the crimes in question because on some of the occasions, he was having sex with women elsewhere. As Hausner put it on the stand last week, “I like women and I like a lot of them.” Any other assertion was “slander,” he said.

Because of this, Judge Roland Steinle has allowed prosecutors extra room to explore Hausner’s own sexuality and his claims of being straight.

Today, his ex-wife contradicted Hausners testimony, saying he at least one man while the two of them were separated, and that he confessed to her he was attracted to men. “My reaction was, ‘You’re not gay. That’s absurd,'” Ledford said. “And his reaction was, yes he was.”

“He told me about a date with a guy but it was very vague and he didn’t get into details,” she said.

Never admit to it

Lastly, Ledford told the story of the time that Hausner plotted out what he would do if he ever got arrested for anything. He told her he would stick to his story of innocence and never back off it. “He said you never admit to it,” she said. “You keep with it…They have to prove it.”

Hausner has pleaded not guilty to the 87 crimes he’s charged with and insists he was not involved with any of them.

(Earlier, 3:41 p.m.): Dale Hausner’s ex-wife, Karen Ledford, just gave bombshell testimony about Hausner’s life with her, including two violent incidents, lies and his admission of bisexuality. I’ll give you a full wrap up here shortly.