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Thread: Dale Shawn Hausner - Arizona

  1. #21
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Death of Ariz. serial killer last month ruled a suicide, antidepressant meds found in system

    The death of a convicted Arizona serial killer whose body was discovered last month in an isolation cell was ruled a suicide Thursday by a medical examiner who said the gunman who once terrorized Phoenix had overdosed on antidepressants.

    Dale Hausner, 40, was found guilty in a series of random shootings on pedestrians, bicyclists and animals. The former airport janitor was given six death sentences and hundreds of years in prison for killing six people and attacking 19 others in 2005 and 2006.

    Hausner was found unresponsive June 19 in his cell at the Eyman state prison complex in Florence. He was pronounced dead about an hour later at a hospital in Anthem, according to Arizona Department of Corrections officials.

    Forensic pathologist Dr. Gregory Hess, of the Pinal County Medical Examiner’s Office, said the cause of death was “amitriptyline intoxication.” Amitriptyline is one of a variety of antidepressant medications.

    Prison officials said it wasn’t immediately clear how Hausner obtained the antidepressants. DOC officials said the department was conducting a complete investigation into the circumstances of Hausner’s death and the autopsy report was part of that probe.

    Hausner always denied any involvement in the attacks and suggested his former roommate might have carried out some of the crimes.

    Hausner was arrested in August 2006 with his roommate Sam Dieteman at the apartment they shared in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa. Inside, police found guns, news clippings of the killings and a city map marked with the locations of some of the shootings.

    Dieteman, who pleaded guilty in two of the killings and was sentenced to life in prison, testified against Hausner, saying they cruised around late at night looking for strangers to shoot.

    The “serial shooter” attacks and an unrelated serial killer case kept neighborhood watch groups on high alert in the summer of 2006. Families stayed inside and authorities called meetings that drew hundreds of people.

    Police said their big break came when one of Dieteman’s drinking buddies called police to say Dieteman had bragged about shooting people.

    Even though Hausner had denied any involvement, he took an odd turn during the penalty phase of his trial when he apologized to the families of every victim.

    Since his convictions, Hausner had asked that he be executed quickly.

    County authorities have said that while he was awaiting trial, Hausner tried to kill himself with an overdose of cold tablets.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...3ab_story.html
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  2. #22
    Senior Member CnCP Addict Stro07's Avatar
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    This happens when you don't execute volunteers.

  3. #23
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    Letters a window into final days of ‘Serial Shooter’

    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.”

    http://www.azcentral.com/community/p...l-shooter.html
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  4. #24
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Report: convicted Arizona serial killer had stockpiled pills months before 2013 suicide

    PHOENIX – A convicted serial killer who committed suicide in an Arizona prison last year was hoarding antidepressants from a fellow inmate in the months before his death, according to a state prison investigation.

    An Arizona Department of Corrections report released this week says the inmate gave 40-year-old Dale Hausner four to five amitriptyline pills a week over a two-month period at a Florence prison.

    According to documents, the unidentified inmate told the Inspector General's Office that Hausner said he was having trouble sleeping.

    The inmate says he thought Hausner was taking the pills as he received them.

    Hausner was convicted of killing six people and attacking 19 others in a series of random shootings in metropolitan Phoenix in 2005 and 2006.

    In June 2013, he was found unresponsive in his cell.

    http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/06/08...s-before-2013/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
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    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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  5. #25
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    Dale Hausner: Serial Shooter turned poet in final days

    Over 15 months of joyrides in 2005 and 2006, Dale Hausner and his accomplice pointed shotguns and rifles out of the windows of his car and shot 25 people, killing eight of them. Known as the "Serial Shooters," they stabbed two more men and shot and killed at least 10 dogs and horses.

    When law-enforcement officers bugged Hausner's Mesa apartment, they heard him brag about being the best serial killer ever, and heard him mock his victims, laughing coldly about their final *moments of life.

    But in the days before he committed suicide in his cell on death row, he was writing tender goodbye letters and an existential poem to his friends and family, in and out of prison. The letters and poems are contained in recently released documents from his investigative file.

    On June 19, 2013, Hausner died of a massive overdose of the antidepressant amitriptyline, also known by the brand name Elavil, though at that time it was not revealed how he obtained it.

    It took nearly a year for the Arizona Department of Corrections to release its investigation into his death. It revealed very little that wasn't already known.

    The mystery of where he got the drug, however, had been uncovered within a week of the suicide, on June 27, 2013, when prison officials intercepted a letter another death-row inmate had written to his mother. In that letter, the prisoner, whose name was not released, but who had spent time in the same pod as Hausner, confessed he felt guilty and may have contributed to a death because he had shared his prescription.

    By July 18, 2013, the inmate confessed to Corrections Department investigators.

    Investigators also found a letter Hausner wrote to one of his cell neighbors, in which he thanked the neighbor for his friendship. "I am sorry I have to go, but you know how I feel and I am doing what is best for me," he wrote, without being more specific.

    He had written similar, vaguely worded letters to his family and a friend in the days before his death, without coming right out and saying what he was doing or why. His brother Randy speculated to The Arizona Republic at the time and again earlier this month that he would have expected his brother, who was fond of grand gestures, to have savored the platform and the spectacle that an execution would provide. Suicide was a surprise.

    Hausner, 40, had been trying to speed up his execution, which is harder than one might imagine. As soon as an inmate says he would rather die than live in prison, his sanity is questioned, and defense attorneys try to block the execution.

    That was Hausner's situation.

    He also had written in letters to The Republic and others, and one of his cell neighbors reported to the newspaper, that he was afraid of several inmates housed on a tier of cells above his and thought they would try to kill him, perhaps by shanking him through the food-tray doors of their cells when he was being taken to the showers.

    None of that is included in the unredacted portion of the investigation's report.

    Hausner and his roommate, Samuel Dieteman, were arrested at their Mesa apartment in August 2006.

    Dieteman, who confessed and was eventually sentenced to life in prison, had participated in two murders during the last few months of terror. Dieteman testified that Hausner's older brother, Jeff, had participated in many of the early crimes, but in the end Jeff Hausner was convicted of only two non-fatal stabbings he committed while joyriding with Dieteman and Dale Hausner.

    Dale Hausner was sentenced to death six times. He resigned himself to execution, and apparently when that didn't come fast enough, he killed himself.

    At the time of his death, the Department of Corrections insisted that Hausner was found "unresponsive" in his cell and that he was pronounced dead at a hospital, as if he were clinging to life at some point.

    Indeed, in the investigation file, there is a 30-minute video showing Hausner, blood trickling from one corner of his mouth, being pulled from his cell and flopped onto a gurney. He nearly slipped off a couple of times as correctional officers in riot gear wheeled the gurney down the length of the pod, through secured entries to a medical clinic, all the time doing chest compressions.

    They continue the chest compressions as medical staffers insert IV catheters in an arm and a leg and apply a defibrillator to Hausner's chest as Florence Fire Department and Southwest Ambulance EMTs wheel him down a hallway, outside and into the back of an ambulance.

    Despite the measures, several of the correctional officers told investigators that Hausner's arms were blue and his skin was cold to the touch from the moment they found him lifeless on the bed in his cell. He never recovered a pulse during the whole trip from cell to ambulance, "indicating he may already have been dead," they said.

    The evidentiary photos in the report are testament to the grim confines of death row, a rare look inside the belly of the beast: three close walls and a perforated metal door, a bunk, a desk, a sink, a toilet. Hausner's only belongings: a TV and a row of bankers boxes stuffed under the bunk.

    Prisoners talk through the walls and vents. They exchange letters, books, coffee, tea bags and other things by unraveling threads from clothing to make "fishing lines." The letter to a neighbor in an adjacent cell on the other side of an impermeable wall was emotional.

    "I wish we would have known each other on the streets," Hausner wrote. "That would have been so much fun. Imagine all we could have done together. You are like a crazy little brother to me. ... You are smart, funny and a little insane. But then, so am I.

    "Since I have been here, I have tried to make this place better for you. I hope when you look at our friendship, you will remember the fun and laughs we have shared. Remember that I was your friend and that I was always there for you. When you speak of me to others, please tell them I was your friend.

    RELATED: Republic reporter's brush with Dale Hausner

    "Thinking about this place, the only thing I will miss is you. (And maybe the pizza.)"

    Hausner included a poem with the letter.

    "Death is only the beginning.

    In Death I find hope,

    the hope of better times,

    of no memories,

    of forgiveness, gotten and given.

    In Death I can see my kids,

    I can tell them that I am sorry

    and that I love them.

    No more pain, guilt or shame.

    In Death, I will be able to

    Breathe Again.

    Death is welcomed, is needed

    is longed for.

    Death is only the beginning."


    He signed it, "An original poem by Dale S. Hausner."


    http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...days/11205905/
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  6. #26
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    Hausner's case will be featured tonight at 9:00 p.m. EDT on LMN's Monster in My Family episode Phoenix Serial Shooter: Dale Hausner.

    Randy Hausner reveals how his brother terrorized the city of Phoenix in a killing spree.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  7. #27
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    I don't know how to link it, but Hausner's case was featured in Netflix's series Catching Killers, season 2, episode 2.

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