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Death of Phoenix 'Serial Shooter' Dale Hausner ruled a suicide

By Michael Kiefer The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Jul 11, 2013 9:44 PM

Serial Shooter Dale Hausner committed suicide by taking antidepressants, according to an autopsy report released today by Pinal County authorities.

Hausner, 40, was found unresponsive in his cell on Death Row at the Eyman Prison in Florence on June 19. He was taken to a hospital in Florence where he was pronounced dead. The autopsy said that there was a suicide note, but a prison spokesman said he was unaware of it and that it would be part of an investigation into the death and therefore not available to the media.

Randy Hausner, Dale Hausner’s brother, said, “It’s a shame it happened this way rather than the victims getting a final say at his execution, but either way, it’s over.”

Friends and family and Hausner’s lawyers were surprised that the usually flamboyant Hausner would quietly commit suicide rather than make a bold public statement. He had been battling in court to waive his appeals so that he could be executed as soon as possible, and people who knew him assumed he would use that moment to speak his mind.

But the process dragged on. Hausner was supposed to have hearingsthis week to determine if he were mentally competent to waive the appeals, but he did not wait

Hausner had attempted suicide before, in jail in December 2006, four months after he and his codefendant, Samuel Dieteman, were arrested at their Mesa apartment and, between them, charged with more than 80 crimes stemming from a 14-month shooting spree in 2005 and 2006, including eight murders. In 2009, Hausner was sentenced to death for six of them; Dieteman is serving life sentences in prison for two of the murders. Another Hausner brother, Jeff, was also sent to prison for two stabbings he committed while joy-riding with Dieteman and Dale Hausner

According to the autospy report, Dale Hausner died from an overdose of the antidepressant, amitriptyline, which is known under the brand name Elavil. The toxicology report noted that he had more than 50 times the therapeutic dose in his blood stream.

A prison spokesman said that he could not say whether Hausner had a prescription for the drug because of the investigation and because he could not release medical information.

Randy Hausner said that, to his knowledge, his brother was not being treated with the drug. Tim Agan, who was one of Hausner’s defense attorneys during his trial, said, “He’s been thinking about suicide for years.

Agan said it was an open secret on Death Row that Hausner was hoarding drugs.

“My understanding is the other inmates knew it was coming,” Agan said.

And a friend of Hausner’s from outside the prison told The Arizona Republic, “He told me a few times that he was able to get things in there.”

Death of 'serial killer' who terrorized Mesa and Valley ruled suicide

Death of 'serial killer' who terrorized Mesa and Valley rules suicide

Posted: Thursday, July 11, 2013 5:30 pm

Tribune

The Pinal County Medical Examiner has ruled the recent death of convicted “serial shooter” Dale Hausner a suicide.

According to a press release, the examiner’s report indicates the 40-year-old Hausner’s June 19 death was caused by amitriptyline intoxication. Amitryptiline is an antidepressant used to treat depression and pain. Hausner was discovered unresponsive in his cell on June 19 and was treated Arizona Department of Corrections staff and medical responders attempted life-saving measures before he was transported to Florence Hospital in Anthem, where he was pronounced dead.

The examiner's report is part of an ongoing investigation into Hausner's death.

Known as the “serial shooter,” Hausner was convicted of 80 crimes — consisting of six first-degree murder counts, attempted murder, cruelty to animals and others — in 2009 for a series of random attacks on pedestrians, cyclists, dogs and horses that began in May 2005 and ended in August 2006. The “serial shooter” spree came at the same time as an unrelated serial killer case, which became known as the case of the “Baseline Killer,” that kept Valley watch groups on high alert during the summer of 2006.

Letters a window into final days of ‘Serial Shooter’

Letters a window into final days of ‘Serial Shooter’

By Michael Kiefer The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Jul 25, 2013 7:34 AM

During the last two weeks of his life, convicted “Serial Shooter” Dale Hausner focused on life and death. ∙ He contemplated what he wanted done with his body after his execution and whether he was headed for heaven or hell. ∙ He dealt with the more immediate threats to his life and sanity in a cell pod on Arizona’s death row. ∙ And he reassured friends that everything was fine. ∙ Then, on June 19, he died from a massive overdose of antidepressants.

The autopsy report prepared by the Pinal County Medical Examiner’s Office said that he left a suicide note. The Arizona Department of Corrections will not comment on the letter’s contents, pending an investigation.

An eyewitness account from another death-row prisoner claimed Hausner was in obvious distress for an hour and half to two hours before prison officials took him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

“The suicide death of inmate Dale Hausner remains under investigation,” DOC spokesman Bill Lamoreaux wrote in an e-mail to The Arizona Republic. “The Department will not discuss further details until the investigation is concluded.”

During the first two weeks of June, Hausner wrote notes and letters to family and friends, and even fellow death-row prisoners, detailing his thoughts, fears and complaints. Some of them were received the day he was found unresponsive in his cell and later pronounced dead. The Republic has obtained several of the last letters written to various people in Hausner’s life; not all of those people want their names used.

In those letters, Hausner never once wrote that he intended to kill himself. Rather, he was hoping that the judge in his upcoming court date would find him mentally competent to waive all further appeals of his six death sentences, which stem from his infamous 14-month murder spree in 2005 and 2006.

Scratched out in Hausner’s unmistakable scrawl, some bore vaguely worded expressions of gratitude, that after the fact seemed like goodbyes.

“Thanks for sticking by me, even though I didn’t deserve it,” said one letter to a loved one that was dated June 17, two days before he died. “I appreciate all you have done for me. Try to remember the good times.”

Hausner’s brutal legacy

Hausner, who was 40 when he died, was arrested in August 2006 in the Mesa apartment he shared with his accomplice Samuel Dieteman.

The shootings began in May 2005: horses and dogs at first, then people, mostly shot in drive-bys from the windows of Hausner’s Toyota.

By August 2006, eight people had been killed by the “Serial Shooters,” as they were called. Nineteen people were wounded in shootings or stabbings, and at least 10 animals had been killed, from the far West Valley all the way to Mesa. Dieteman, who confessed to his participation, was not involved in the 2005 shootings, and only became involved in May 2006. He was present at two murders and several shootings. Hausner was convicted from Dieteman’s confessions, and so was Hausner’s brother Jeff, who committed a pair of non-fatal stabbings while joyriding with Hausner and Dieteman.

Dieteman described the attacks as “random recreational violence.” Dale Hausner had vague notions of social cleansing, thinking he was killing illegal immigrants, bums and prostitutes. He kept newspaper clippings of his crimes — and clippings of the murders carried out during the same period by Mark Goudeau, the “Baseline Killer,” as if he were competing with the other serial killer. When police tapped Hausner and Dieteman’s apartment in the days before their arrest, they heard Hausner brag that he wanted to be the best serial killer ever.

Dieteman was sentenced to life in prison. Jeff Hausner was sentenced to more than 25 years in prison for the two stabbings.

In 2009, Dale Hausner was convicted of six murders and was sentenced to death for each. After the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the convictions and the death sentences, Hausner announced that he wanted to waive further appeals and be executed as soon as possible. He had court hearings scheduled for July 10 and July 11 and was so confident that he would be found mentally competent to waive his appeals that he told friends he might not even be sent back to his cell pod in Florence. Instead, he thought he would go right to death watch, the holding cell where condemned inmates spend their last 35 days.

“I want to be cremated,” he wrote a few weeks before his death. “I want some of my ashes scattered where the boys are buried,” he added, referring to his two young sons who died when a car they were riding in plunged into a river in Texas in 1994. Hausner was unable to get them out of their car seats, and they drowned.

“I want some of my ashes given to (a friend) and to be scattered on the grounds of the International Boxing Hall of Fame in New York,” he wrote.

Hausner was a boxing fan, had boxed some himself and had worked as a freelance boxing photographer.

In the same letter, he said that he hoped to go to heaven after he died.

“I have tried to repent for my sins as best as I can,” he wrote. “I asked for forgiveness and that the Lord could change my heart. The Bible states that if you believe in Jesus and call to Him, you will be saved. So I think I will make it to Heaven, even though I don’t deserve it. I can’t imagine why they would want me, but Saul (who was renamed Paul) was a murderer and he was forgiven, so that gives me hope.” Up to that point, that was as close as Hausner got to confessing to any murders.

But in the June letter to a loved one, he indirectly answered a question as to whether serial killers felt remorse.

“Very, very few have remorse for their crimes or actions,” he wrote, reflecting on his conversations with others in Maricopa County jails and on death row, including Goudeau. “Psychopaths don’t feel sympathy for the victims. Most wish they could have killed more.”

And as to whether he “would come completely clean,” perhaps in a posthumous letter, he replied, “Maybe. We’ll see.”

In fact, he left such a letter — separate from the suicide note, apparently — with a family member who turned it over to law enforcement.

Phoenix police Detective Clark Schwartzkopf, who was the lead detective on the “Serial Shooter” case, told The Republic that in the letter, Hausner admitted to a 2005 non-fatal shooting that police suspected he had carried out because they found a news story about it among Hausner’s scrapbooks. The rest of the letter detailed petty acts he had committed against fellow employees at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport who he felt had slighted him.

Hausner’s friends and court observers were surprised that the usually bombastic Hausner would kill himself.

“The first thing I thought was that it must have been natural causes, knowing what I know of his personality,” said Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Vince Imbordino, who was the lead prosecutor in the cases of the Hausner brothers and Dieteman.

Imbordino, like many, felt Hausner would use his execution as a platform to put himself back in the spotlight.

“If he did take his own life, he must have gotten tired of what he thought would be a lengthy delay,” Imbordino said.

But one of Hausner’s former defense attorneys said that his death was not unexpected.

“My understanding is the other inmates knew it was coming,” attorney Tim Agan said.

Agan said it was an open secret that Hausner was hoarding pills. One of Hausner’s neighbors on death row vacillated in his letters to The Republic and others as to whether Hausner wanted to kill himself or not.

And Dustin Fehlhaber, another of Hausner’s friend on the outside, told The Republic, “He told me a few times that he was able to get things in there.”

Department of Corrections officials would not comment on the allegations.

Fear in prison

Arizona death-row cells are arranged in pods of eight, stacked four on top and four on the bottom. Ventilation ducts run vertically down the cell walls, from the bottom of the lower cell to the top of the upper; the fronts of the cells are like security doors: plate metal perforated with air holes, bearing a small trap door through which the prisoners are fed.

And though the prisoners cannot see each other, they use the ventilation ducts like intercoms, and they pass notes, tea bags, coffee and other things to each other by “fishing,” or attaching objects to strings and slipping them under the cell doors. In one letter, Hausner described how he made his “fishing line” by unraveling his boxer shorts.

As much as Hausner wanted to die, he wanted to choose the manner in which it would happen.

In early June, Hausner fished a letter to an inmate in an adjacent cell in which he detailed his fears about other inmates on his cell pod, particularly a violent few housed upstairs from him.

“These guys know how to open the trap doors and I listen to their conversations in the vent when they think I am sleeping,” he wrote. “They are talking about stabbing one of us in the stomach if we go upstairs to the shower.”

Hausner wrote about how those prisoners would get cellphones and sandwiches from correctional officers.

“These guys get drugs mailed in from the outside (...) and then are up all night, high as a kite, talking in the vent, which I can hear and making it hard to sleep.”

Some of the prisoners upstairs were trying to make Hausner pay extortion money, which he refused, Hausner wrote, and he had said as much to Agan.

And, Hausner wrote, the upstairs tormentors would pour excrement down the vents as retaliation to make the lower cells stink.

Death-row prisoner Homer Roseberry, who occupied the cell next to Hausner’s, wrote in a letter to The Republic that Hausner was being extorted, though Roseberry did not know if he paid any money. Roseberry also heard the “thugs” yelling on the phone and screaming while they did exercises.

According to Department of Corrections documents obtained through public-records requests, Hausner had requested numerous meetings with prison officials and his current attorney, Julie Hall, to talk about his fears and to ask that he be moved to a different cell pod. Those meetings are also referenced in the letter to the fellow inmate; the last was scheduled for June 13.

Hall did not return numerous phone calls.

Hausner wrote a flurry of letters on June 17.

He complained to prison officials because a money order that was supposed to be deposited into his account was “contrabanded” — held by the prison — because someone had written on it to correct his misspelled name.

Then he wrote letters to family and friends. Some contained cartoons he had drawn, some casual comments and then cryptic expressions of gratitude for that person’s help or friendship.

His friend Fehlhaber commented on the “vibe” at the end of the letter he received, which after the fact, may have been a goodbye.

The letter to his mother was more explicit, the words printed out in block letters:

“Mom, Please remember that I love and miss you. Thank you for all your love and support. You are the best! I appreciate all you do.”

The letters arrived the day Hausner died, June 19.

That same day, Roseberry wrote to an Ohio woman named Doris Bercot, who maintained correspondence with Hausner as well.

“Sis, got some really bad news,” he wrote. “I’m 99.9 percent sure Dale killed himself this morning.”

He described how Hausner was making a strange snoring sound, that his breathing was loud and labored.

It was “a disturbance that could have been heard 100 feet away,” he told The Republic in a separate letter. “I tried for hours to get the guard to wake him up. ... When nurse made rounds ... the nurse looked in, yelled a couple times and said ‘He’s still breathing,’ then left. Dale lived about another hour.”

His autopsy report showed that he had more than 50 times the therapeutic dose of the antidepressant amitriptyline in his bloodstream.

Imbordino, the prosecutor, was philosophical about what Hausner’s death meant to his living victims.

Some of them were ambivalent about whether Hausner should be sentenced to death, he said, though all wanted him put away.

“For those victims who are still alive, his death would bring as much closure as possible,” Imbordino said, “because most of them thought this was going to take a long time. They won’t have to worry about him anymore.”