Dale Hausner, left, speaks to his attorney, Ken Everett, during opening arguments of his eight-count murder trial. His supposed co-conspirator in the Serial Shooter killing spree testified against Hausner on Wednesday in Maricopa County Superior Court. Pool photo
Authorities have long said that Dale Hausner acted alone for almost a year before Samuel Dieteman joined in the killing spree for its last three months. And that’s what Dieteman has said on the stand today, too.
It leads to a couple natural questions: How was Dieteman convinced to join in the killing spree? And what did that conversation sound like?
The answer, we learned today from Dieteman, is there was no conversation. Dieteman’s involvement, according to him, happened somewhat unexpectedly and spontaneously on the night of May 2, 2006.
As Dieteman tells the story, it was a fairly normal night for him. He spent the evening having dinner and hanging out with his newfound friend, Hausner, whom he met just a month before. As the evening wore on, the two toured around in Hausner’s four-door sedan, driving seemingly nowhere.
Dieteman
“I was basically along for the ride,” Dieteman testified today. “I figured, whatever. I didn’t know what he was doing.” They just drove along, joking around, “just the usual stupidity of our conversations,” he said. The pair headed east down Van Buren Street, through one of Phoenix’s red light districts.
Sometime around then, Hausner, who was behind the wheel, hung a left and headed north on 44th Street. He reached into the back seat and pulled out a long gun, which Dieteman said he assumed was nothing more than a pellet gun. They pulled up behind a man walking on the sidewalk and slowed. Hausner, Dieteman said, rolled down the windows and told him, “Lean back for a moment.” Hausner rested the barrel of the gun on the car’s windowsill, reaching it across Dieteman’s large body.
Dieteman said Hausner squeezed the trigger. “From the pop I heard there, I knew it wasn’t a pellet gun,” he said. “I looked and saw the guy holding his stomach and then he was yelling something like he was angry.” But Dieteman didn’t think the man was hurt, he said. He thought maybe the shotgun blast had missed and only startled the man.
A small, dark figure
The pair pulled away and joked about the shooting, “It didn’t appear that the person was that injured, so it was just kind of funny, as horrible as that is now,” Dieteman said. They continued on, winding around the East Valley, talking and joking until they pulled onto Camelback Rd in west Scottsdale.
Along the road, near 54th Street, they saw what Dieteman described as “a small, dark figure” walking alone on the sidewalk. That’s when Hausner, according to Dieteman, handed him the shotgun and said, “Your turn, dude.”
He considered it. He thought the gun had done no real damage to the other person, so what could be the harm? Dieteman mimicked Hausner’s action. He took the gun and steadied it on his own windowsill. When the car came parallel to the dark figure, Dieteman said he pulled the trigger.
Neither man knew what happened to the victim, so they drove down the street and circled back to look. At first, Dieteman said, they assumed he had missed. Hausner “got a little bit angry at me for missing,” Dieteman testified. “But then we saw someone in the grass.” The dark figure was laying by the side of the road, not moving.
Aftermath of a crime
The two men stopped at a grocery store to pick up some booze after the shooting, then drove to Hausner’s Mesa apartment to unwind. There Dieteman poured himself a strong glass of rum and coke and kept drinking until he passed out. “I thought that, well, that was the first person that I killed,” Dieteman said. “I started freaking out. I can’t describe it.” The alcohol numbed his troubled thoughts until he couldn’t keep his eyelids open anymore.
More than a day later, Dieteman was back at the west Phoenix town home of Jaff Hausner, Dale’s brother, when Dale showed up holding a ripped out story from a newspaper. It was about a woman who was shot on Camelback Road in Scottsdale the night of May 2, 2006, marking the city’s first homicide of the year. “He called me outside and said, ‘Here, man. Here’s the article.’ He was sort of jovial,” Dieteman said. “He said, ‘Oh dude, you got the first murder of the year in Scottsdale. I’m jealous.'”
By that point, Dieteman testified, there was no turning back. He was afraid of backing away from Hausner for fear of being outed to the police some day. “After the first person I shot died, I felt I was kind of stuck with it,” he said. “I just kept kind of going along with it.”
Hausner has insisted he is innocent ever since he and Dieteman were arrested in August 2006. His defense team plans to say that Dieteman acted alone in the killings and is using Hausner as a scapegoat. Dieteman agreed to testify against Hausner to try to avoid the death penalty.
Reporter’s note: This story was amended from a previous version to clarify the time that Hausner and Dieteman met at Jeff Hausner’s west Phoenix home.