The Murder of Deborah Gardner (Tonga)
WHAT I GAVE MY HEART TO Within me, an intruder who is not me, and is a part of me.…
The murder of Deborah Gardner in 1976 in Tonga still haunts the Peace Corps agency and particularly those who were in Tonga during this terrible time when the agency did not do justice to one of their own.
I have written about this murder several times over the years and Jan Worth Nelson (Tonga 1976-78) wrote the 2006 novel Night Blind based on the murder. She alerted me to the recent documentary. It is part of a series called “Passport to Murder” produced for Discovery ID TV. The segment on Deborah Gardner was entitled “The Devil in Paradise.” It was aired on July 29, 2016.
Jan, who was interviewed for the segment wrote me after it aired, “I have come to believe there probably isn’t any closure to be had. But unlike Emile Hons (Tonga 1974-76), I didn’t really know her AND, most importantly, I didn’t walk into that cursed hut to see all the blood, as he did. Nor did I see her sliced-up dead body on the gurney, like he did. He has had to find ways to cope with the effect of what he saw that terrible night. Nonetheless, as you could see in the show, even now the emotion of all that still feels painfully fresh. It doesn’t take much for me to cry even now at the thought of what happened. Now, as a 66-year-old woman, I am struck anew by how young we all were, how basically innocent we all were, including and especially, of course, Debbie. I think we all thought of ourselves as somewhat cosmopolitan to be there, having our worldly adventure. But really we were essentially young, eager, good-hearted middle-class American kids. Nothing prepared us for what Dennis did. “
If you missed the documentaryit, here’s a link: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4mghgm_passport-to-murder-the-devil-in-paradise_school
Photo by PCV Frank Bevacqua
This is a fine statement including the ending of how we were good-hearted kids who believed in the ‘core’ part of our youthful Peace Corps beliefs. And that is part of the never ending wound in our memories. And this might cover other tragedies and disappointments.
But none of this belittles our loving commitments to help others. Here is a piece about our going on with our lives and not forgetting our source and how it necessarily must sour and how we bend and break.
VERTIGO PIVOT: this November
Childhood desire turns life’s wheels,
these large hoops, propelling them with sticks
under the tall park elm trees. Movement of wheels.
Everyone there is here now within you and all of your
kin and all of your kith are here now and it will take a lifetime to
flower and to fly and to sail this sea of thickening light.
Room-tone, mouth-feel, a reordering of parts, rationing of emotions. I hear voices:
they live here now without forgetting the way back under
a surface of consciousness, the bungled aspirations, with leprosy as a model, and grim ire as life pushes, photography wins over
time, and over the mind a brown shale. Again this November we pass through our river of life
In Dante Alighieri’s THE DIVINE COMEDY, the River Styx” borders life & death where the ferryman Charon takes our souls across and the Styx is for the
greatest damned living their wrath cursing.
Our mischances shape our apprenticeship-muscles.
When you are young you don’t know what’s coming
Life is not the same poetry now, just verse
Our inner sanctums let joy become lost in Cairo
and we grasp failure through our lengthy histories.
Wanting to learn dying before severing life’s link
welcome the far shores before you miss them
notice the far one before you reach it’s pivot come November.
© Copyright 2 August 2016 Edward Mycue
I watched the documentary and then reread the classic book about the murder: “American Taboo,” by Phillip Weiss. The documentary missed the most important part of the verdict rendered by the jury in
Tongo. The documentary said that the killer was found “not guilty”, the actual verdict was “Not Guilty Because He Was Insane at the Time When He Did the Act,” according to a letter written by the judge and reported in Weiss’s book.
“American Taboo” is an extremely well documented book. Weiss’s. exhaustive list of references, resources, and interviewees is a road map on how to do Peace Corps history. Among many others, he thanks Jan North and “the conservator of Peace Corps legend, John Coyne”.
THEY SPOKE THE SAME LANGUAGE AND AS A FAMILY
WANDERING FOR A LAND THEY FOUND.
& BEGAN TO CHANGE IT INTO A GREAT CITY WITH DECORATED WALLS, COURTYARDS & A TOWER.
FAMOUS.
TODAY A PROUD PEOPLE OVER-STRIVING IN A CURSE OF VOICES. WHOLE SYSTEM GOING PIANO.
© COPYRIGHT Edward Mycue 12/VIII/2016
WHAT I GAVE MY HEART TO
Within me, an intruder who is not me,
and is a part of me.
We co-exist as I exist.
He swallows, I drink,
who’ll die when I die.
Or so I think. My hair
was severely brushed
and my damp face looked pink,
painted-over and blotched.
I had a young, firm face
then wide-eyed as if waiting
to catch-it, whatever “it”
was, to catch-it and take it
apart to understand
what the virus Life was presenting
to me, me who couldn’t then have
seen myself or my kind
as a virus swarming out of our planet
attempting to conquer, perhaps
colonize stars. Last week
early I sat at a window looking
at the large, heavy cones attacked
by huge awkward crows disturbing all
other life on that tree. Recalling
Grammy Delehant warning
against following the crows before
you die, the way rodents do
who pick-up the crows’ leavings,
I now see I became a kind of crow.
Though part of a system, I begin
to be conscious with a bad conscience.
Sometimes I think I’ll never learn
spelling, which is sorting surrendered
henscratches called letters.
Good law. Misspelling’s
legal breakdown. Anarchy’s
an alteration from a rule –
breakdown and a change
(transformation, mutation) –
some sort of alteration seen
both as reason and result —-
pink burning to purple—-
the Blade Runner’s girl Rachel who
though biologically-engineered
gets conscious —-or Pinocchio
crying and becoming a “real live boy”:
such transformations and misleadings
are revolutions
of accepted arrangements
umlauting different drummers’
dancings of “can’t” and “change”
(as if missed spelling). Here
then, there, remains, what I gave my heart to. © Copyright Edward Mycue 14 May 2013