When the World Calls

by Stanley Meisler

  Vice President Walter Mondale swore in Celeste at a White House ceremony on May 23, 1979. Sargent Shriver attended, his gesture of support for the return of Peace Corps autonomy. President Carter was supposed to be busy elsewhere, but he made a surprise appearance. “Today, the Peace Corps has resumed its priority in our government,” Mondale said. “President Carter has rekindled the dream of Hubert Humphrey and President Kennedy.”

  That was a blatant exaggeration—there was not enough time left to rekindle anything. President Carter, who would be defeated for reelection a year and a half later, had already wasted his opportunity. By keeping the Peace Corps within ACTION at the beginning of his term and allowing a territorial war between Sam Brown and Carolyn Payton to paralyze the agency, President Carter had ensured that the Peace Corps would remain for the rest of his term in the minor place to which it had been shunted by Richard Nixon.

  Chapter Twelve. Mayhem and Illness

  From the beginning, Peace Corps staff knew they would have to deal with death. There surely would be bus accidents, jeep crashes, motorbike mishaps, and drownings. But the nature of some of the deaths surprised the staff. During the first fifteen years, for example, two Volunteers died in an earthquake, one was killed by a crocodile, two succumbed to malaria, five died of gastrointestinal disease, one died of rabies, nine killed themselves, and four were murdered. On top of this, there were two sensational trials, one in Tanzania, the other in Tonga, of Volunteers accused of murdering other Volunteers. Both trials unsettled and confused the Peace Corps.

  On Sunday, March 27, 1966, twenty-four-year-old Bill Haywood Kinsey and his twenty-three-year-old wife, Peverley Dennet Kinsey, both Volunteer teachers at the Binza junior high school in Maswa, bicycled out of the town until they found a shady and rocky hill that looked ideal for their lunch. The picnic spot, like their school, was in the region of Shinyanga near Lake Victoria in northern Tanzania. The couple had met at Syracuse University, where Peverley, from Riverside, Connecticut, was training for Tanzania and Bill, from Washington, North Carolina, for Malawi. Bill quickly obtained a transfer to the Tanzania program and married Peverley at the end of training. They had now been married a year and a half.

  Villagers, watching from afar, were shocked that Sunday to see what looked like a scene of terrible violence: Bill pounding his wife as she lay sprawled amid the rocks on the hill. As he rushed away, the villagers grabbed him and held him for the police.

  Bill protested that the villagers were mistaken. Peverley, he said, had fallen onto the rocks from a cliff twenty feet above. When he scampered down to her, he found her flailing her arms in hysteria. Fearful that she would hurt herself more, he had held her down until she stopped flailing. He had rushed away, not to escape, but to seek help. When the police arrived, they found it was too late to help Peverley. She was dead. They arrested Bill and charged him with murder.

  Peace Corps Volunteers have no diplomatic immunity. There are no extraterritorial agreements that allow Volunteers to be tried by U.S. courts if accused of committing a crime. Volunteers are subject to the laws and customs of the lands in which they serve.

  This limited what the Peace Corps could do for Bill Kinsey. Under the law setting up the Peace Corps, it could not pay for his defense, but it could arrange for his family to hire the most highly regarded defense lawyer in East Africa. As Paul Sack, director of the program in Tanzania, wrote to the Volunteers, “Peace Corps is taking every step possible to help Bill with assistance in securing legal counsel, providing medical attention and support while under detention, maintaining contact with his family and—most important—ensuring protection of all his rights.”

  Tanzanian officials were proud of their judicial system, which developed under British colonialism, and they resented any hint of what they regarded as Peace Corps interference. Mark Bomani, the Tanzanian attorney general, showed his annoyance when he thought a Peace Corps official was raising the issue of bail for Kinsey even after it had been denied. The official quickly pleaded that he was misunderstood. The Peace Corps, as Sack put it in a letter to Washington, was trying to demonstrate to the Tanzanians “that the Government of the United States is not interfering in the judicial process here.”

  Some Volunteers felt the Peace Corps was limiting itself too much. “When we joined the Peace Corps,” a twenty-two-year-old Volunteer told the Associated Press, “we didn’t realize that if we got into trouble, we were on our own. We thought the American government would do something for us.” He proposed that an indicted Volunteer like Kinsey should face trial in a U.S. court. But that, of course, would show contempt for foreign justice, an attitude that would mock what the Peace Corps was all about.

  The Peace Corps staff and Volunteers acted throughout as if sure Bill were innocent. Justice would be served, in their view, only if a court acquitted him. But the evidence at the trial, which began after Bill had spent almost six months in prison, was not as clear cut. British-born Judge Harold Platt called the evidence “intriguingly elusive” and admitted that his verdict rested “upon a narrow margin of circumstances.”

  The judge tended to discount the testimony of the eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen Kinsey beating his wife. Their accounts were too inconsistent and unreliable. Yet police found a metal pipe and a stone at the scene covered in blood and bits of hair. They could have been used to hit Peverley, or they could have been stained by Peverley falling and bleeding on them.

  Kinsey had copied into his journal passages from a novel that the prosecution insisted proved he believed his wife was unfaithful. According to the prosecution, he intended to confront her with his suspicions, as the copied passages put it, “about the 27th of the month”—the date of the picnic. But the judge dismissed the importance of this; it was normal, the judge said, for a student of literature to copy passages of literary value. Moreover, Peverley’s mother testified that her daughter had told her there were no problems in the marriage. The judge, in the end, was most impressed by medical testimony that Peverley’s wounds were more consistent with a fall than with blows to the head by a metal pipe and a stone.

  A sort of jury of two assessors—one American, the other Tanzanian—sat through the trial and found Kinsey not guilty. Under Tanzanian law, however, their verdict was only advisory. The only verdict that mattered was that of the judge.

  In his concluding statement, Judge Platt scolded the Tanzanian police and prosecution for a slipshod performance. If they had been more thorough and careful, he said, they might have come up with conclusive evidence proving Kinsey’s guilt or innocence. Absent this, the judge went on, “the weight of the evidence seems to me to be fairly evenly divided.” That, of course, worked in Kinsey’s favor since the prosecution had to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “While the accused must, therefore, carry with him the suspicion that he may have been responsible for his wife’s death,” Judge Platt ruled, “he must, in justice, be acquitted and set free . . . .” The Peace Corps welcomed the verdict. It would have been a nightmare for the Peace Corps if a Volunteer had been sentenced to hanging or a long prison term in Africa while some Americans back home clamored for his release.

  Kinsey was assigned to headquarters in Washington, where he worked for a few months before returning home to North Carolina. Peverley was listed as the twenty-third Volunteer fatality in the history of the Peace Corps, killed by an accidental fall.

  The second murder trial took place in Tonga, a South Pacific island kingdom with a population of 100,000 or so. In this case, there was little dispute about the evidence. Dennis Priven, twenty-four, a Volunteer science teacher from Brooklyn, New York, stabbed twenty-three-year-old Deborah Gardner, a fellow Volunteer science teacher from Tacoma, Washington, twenty-two times with his long knife on the evening of October 14, 1976.

  The Peace Corps reacted in a disconcerting manner, evidently caring more about protecting the murderer
than seeking justice. The full shame was hidden in Peace Corps files until journalist Philip Weiss’s remarkable book about the case, American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps, was published almost thirty years later. Weiss recreated the atmosphere and events in meticulous detail.

  The Peace Corps assigned more than eighty Volunteers to Tonga, mostly as teachers and mostly clustered in and around the capital, Nuku’alofa. The Tongan translation of Peace Corps was Kau Ng_ue ‘Ofa, literally “They work for love.” The Volunteers worked hard in their schools but had lots of free time to socialize with each other. Volunteer life in this South Pacific paradise featured lots of Peace Corps parties, dinners, card games, movie excursions, couplings, and de-couplings, mostly among the Volunteers themselves.

  Deborah, beautiful and vivacious, was one of the most popular women, and she had fallen in and out of love with two or three of her fellow Volunteers in her little more than a year on Tonga. Dennis was one of her suitors, but not a successful one. He pestered her so much that she went out with him on occasion but allowed no intimacy to develop. His frustration reached explosive heights when he believed that a good friend of his was having a sexual affair with her. He arrived in Deborah’s hut with his knife and a jar of cyanide, evidently intent on killing her and then himself.

  The evidence against Dennis was overwhelming. Tongans had seen him struggling with Deborah and slashing her at the door of the hut. When Tongans rushed Deborah to the hospital, she told them that Dennis had stabbed her. The murder weapon was his. He had rushed by bicycle from the scene, leaving the cyanide behind but later making a half-hearted attempt to cut his wrists. He hid while police searched for him. He finally turned himself in after midnight. But he would not acknowledge his guilt or, in fact, say anything else about Deborah to the police.

  Despite the evidence, Mary George, the Peace Corps director in Tonga, persisted in believing Dennis was innocent. George, a model who had run the Barbizon School of Modeling and a lobbyist with good Republican contacts, was also a born-again Christian. According to Weiss, she experienced a vision in church one Sunday that persuaded her that a Tongan had murdered Deborah and the Tongans were framing Dennis for the murder.

  But this was a lonely opinion. Peace Corps officials in Washington had no doubt that Dennis had killed Deborah, but they felt an obligation to make sure Dennis received proper representation and a fair trial. Legislation had changed since the Kinsey trial, and the Peace Corps was now required to pay for the defense of a Volunteer in a court trial. The prime concern of Washington officials, however, was to make sure that the murder and the trial hurt the Peace Corps as little as possible.

  As a Washington agency, the Peace Corps was weak and lackluster at that time. The Peace Corps was barely visible within ACTION and had survived only because President Richard Nixon became too busy with Watergate and his resignation to worry about getting rid of Kennedy’s Peace Corps. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, was defeated by Jimmy Carter a few weeks after the murder, and many top Peace Corps officials were more worried about their jobs than about a trial in Tonga.

  Although the Volunteers were horrified by the killing, a small group decided they could not turn their backs on Dennis. Nothing could be done for Deborah, they reasoned. But Dennis was alive, and something should be done to salvage or rehabilitate him. These Volunteers, whose thinking paralleled that of officials in Washington, brought him food and visited him often in the weeks before the trial.

  The Peace Corps hired the best-known Tongan lawyer to defend Dennis. Faced with the damning evidence, the lawyer, who often practiced in New Zealand, soon decided that the best defense was a plea of insanity. The Peace Corps paid for a psychiatrist to come from Hawaii. He interviewed Dennis and pronounced him a schizophrenic for most of his life. Recent stress had led to depression, the psychiatrist testified, that caused “a breakdown, a state of acute paranoid schizophrenia.”

  Tonga had been a British protectorate, and its trial procedures were familiar to the Peace Corps. The judge was British-born but, unlike his counterpart in Tanzania, he did not have final say. A jury of seven Tongans would render the verdict. It did not take them very long to agree that Dennis was not guilty because “he was insane at the time when he did the act.” The judge recommended “long-term, if not permanent” incarceration.

  The Tongans expected that Dennis would now spend many years in confinement, but they did not have suitable medical facilities for the criminally insane. So the Tongan government agreed to turn Dennis over to the United States for incarceration there.

  The United States handed several letters to the Tongan government. The most important, approved by the Peace Corps in Washington and signed by Robert Flanegin, the U.S. Consul General in Fiji, who had responsibility for Tonga, pledged that Dennis would be sent to Sibley Hospital in Washington “for detention and treatment . . . until Mr. Priven is declared by competent medical authority that he is no longer a threat to the community and himself.”

  The Tonga government was also assured, “All relevant jurisdictions in the United States, including Washington, New York, and Maryland, have involuntary commitment procedures. And Mr. Priven’s parents would file necessary commitment papers in the event Dennis refused voluntary commitment.” A handwritten aerogram from the parents said, “Please be assured that in the event Dennis does not voluntarily sign himself in to be treated, we, the family, will so sign.”

  The assurances proved worthless, if not bogus. Sibley was not a mental hospital, but a general hospital to which the Peace Corps sent its Volunteers with medical problems. Dennis, in fact, refused to go to Sibley at first, and the Peace Corps did not have the power to force him. Dennis finally bowed to all the cajoling and entered the hospital. He was interviewed by the head of the psychiatry department for many hours. This psychiatrist decided that Dennis was not psychotic at all. He had exploded in Tonga out of frustration over a love that seemed close but always lay beyond his reach. He was not now a danger to himself or others. The psychiatrist had no authority to commit him anywhere.

  Neither did the Peace Corps. All its assurances to the Tongans about “involuntary commitment” were blather. So was the promise of the family to commit him to a hospital even if he didn’t want to go there. They did not have the authority. Dennis was an adult, not a child. He had no intention of allowing himself to be confined in a mental institution. Dennis drew out his last paycheck, received a certificate for completing his Peace Corps service, and left Washington.

  The Peace Corps had told Deborah’s family that Dennis would be committed to a mental hospital. But the family was never told this had not happened. For years, they believed the killer of their daughter was languishing in an institution. They discovered the truth only when Weiss, the author of the book, came to interview them. Weiss found Dennis in Brooklyn more than twenty-five years after the killing of Deborah. He was working as a computer specialist for the Social Security administration.

  From 1961 to 2009, twenty-two Volunteers were victims of homicide. Since the Tonga trial, however, there was no other case in which one Volunteer was accused of murdering another. Despite the drama of the Tanzania and Tonga trials and the exotic nature of some other deaths, the Peace Corps did not look on safety and illness as debilitating problems in the early days. I do not recall a single Volunteer complaining about safety during my many trips overseas as an evaluator. Only a handful expressed worries about tropical diseases.

  Parents, of course, did fret about disease and crime in unknown developing countries. But the Peace Corps medical office would try to reassure them with periodic statements that “incidence of serious illness or death in the Peace Corps has been no greater than that of a comparable age group in the U.S.”

  The Peace Corps seemed to grow complacent over the issues. It was not until 1990, in fact, that the Peace Corps started compiling annual records on the numbers of rapes, assaults, and robberies suffered by
Volunteers—victims of nationals of the countries the Peace Corps was trying to help. And it was not until more recent years that some critics derided the Peace Corps for alleged inadequacies in caring for the safety of Volunteers.

  The first rebuke came from the General Accounting Office (GAO), an investigative arm of Congress, in July 2002. It noted an increase in the incidence of major physical assaults against Volunteers from eight per thousand Volunteers in 1991, to seventeen per thousand in 2000. While the incidence of rapes and other major sexual assaults actually decreased from ten per thousand in 1991, to eight per thousand in 2000, the GAO also noted that a 1998 survey revealed that women were not reporting 60 percent of rape cases to the Peace Corps.

  The GAO rebuked Peace Corps staff for failing to ensure that all houses supplied by the overseas governments were secure before assigning Volunteers to them. The staff was also criticized for failing to verify that real jobs existed before new Volunteers arrived. An idle Volunteer was in more danger of criminal attack than a Volunteer busily at work.

  The GAO attributed a large part of the staff failures to the five-year rule that harked back to the days of Sargent Shriver. Under this rule, now part of the legislation, most staffers had to leave the Peace Corps after working there five years. This caused a good deal of staff turnover every year, and it meant that staffers in their fifth year of work spent much of their time seeking another job outside the agency.

  In response to the report, Peace Corps Director Gaddi Vasquez agreed to hire several new officers who would concentrate on safety problems and would not be subject to the five-year rule. But the rule itself, designed to prevent the Peace Corps from becoming an ossified bureaucracy, was too sacrosanct to give up.

  The Peace Corps was castigated in much harsher tones more than a year later when the Dayton Daily News in Ohio published a weeklong series of articles detailing murders, suicides, rapes, and other mayhem in the Peace Corps. The writers of the series, Pulitzer Prize winner Russell Carollo and Mei-Ling Hopgood, culled examples from more than forty years of Peace Corps history. By stringing many of these tales together, the Dayton Daily News left readers with a lurid, frightening, and surely exaggerated picture of the dangers of serving overseas for the Peace Corps.