From A Killer's Confession
It was a stifling hot July evening, but Ron Horton was comfortable inside one of his haunts: Stingers pool hall in suburban Phoenix. A 47-year-old construction superintendent, Horton was raising three young sons on his own and liked to spend the little free time he had with fellow bikers at a few bars in the area.He was a favorite among the crowd—a stand-up guy you could count on. Horton's modest home, close to downtown Phoenix, was a place where friends could find a beer or a bed anytime. "We are all closer than blood," Horton says of his biker buddies. "Any one of them would give me their life's savings if they thought I needed it, and I'd do the same thing for them."
On this night, two summers ago, Horton was chatting by the bar with a few of those friends when one of them said to the others, "You heard about that guy shooting people? Isn't it nuts?"
Horton perked up. "What's going on?" he asked.
"There's some wacko who's killed a bunch of animals, and now he's shooting people—about a dozen shot and six dead. And the police don't have any idea who this guy is."
Another buddy chimed in. "Two people got shot Saturday night, and another guy on Monday night," he said. They discussed the murderer's MO: random gunshots at anyone unlucky enough to find themselves in his crosshairs—men on bicycles, women walking alone, anyone.
"Where are these shootings happening?" Horton asked, dreading that he might already know the answer.
Phoenix Valley, one of the guys said, "mostly on the west side." Horton's stomach knotted as he thought back to a bizarre conversation he'd had four months earlier over beers with an old friend—a conversation he'd dismissed as twisted barroom humor but now realized may have been the confession of a killer.
Buddies for Life
Up to that moment, Horton's life was gratifyingly calm and steady, especially compared with his hard-partying days as manager of the Mason Jar rock bar. Back then, he often returned home with the sunrise, and, he says, "I was medicating myself to stay awake."
But then Horton met Debbie at a bar across the street, and the two wound up building a life together—until Debbie stunned Horton by moving out, leaving him to care for their three children. Horton quit the Mason Jar and took work as a construction contractor, a job that allowed him regular hours so he could be with his sons. He spent as much time as possible with them, coaching their Little League teams, helping with homework and even trying his hand at chicken soup if one of the boys got sick. His mother warned him that his devotion was too consuming. "Have a life of your own or you're going to resent your kids," she said, and Horton listened to her.
"I ventured out slowly," he says, and he began to forge new friendships. On one of those first outings, six years ago, Horton struck up a conversation at a local bar with Samuel Dieteman, a husky guy with an easy smile who was serving drinks. Sammy to his friends, Dieteman liked to laugh, tell stories and pull pranks, and his playfulness appealed to Horton. So did Dieteman's commitment to his friends. "If you gave him a ride or bought him a drink, he was your buddy for life," Horton says. "He'd fall all over himself to pay you back." Horton brought Dieteman into his expanding circle of friends, and though Dieteman didn't have a motorcycle, he was embraced by the biker group as one of the family.
As difficult a stretch as Horton had experienced, he discovered that Dieteman had faced even more: He married young, divorced early and tangled with the law—everything from bar fights to doing jail time.
Waiting for the Punch Line
Dieteman told Horton it was his chance for a fresh start when he moved to Phoenix in 1999 to live with his mother and stepfather. Trained as an electrician, the 24-year-old landed a high-paying job at Honeywell and also took part-time work at a neighborhood pub in downtown Phoenix—the hangout where he met Horton.
But it didn't take long for life to turn sour again. He lost his job at Honeywell in 2005, and the pub closed. He told Horton that, later that year, tensions with his parents boiled over and his stepfather kicked him out of the house. Now 30, Dieteman was both jobless and homeless. "He didn't want a handout, but he needed help," Horton says. "I told him he could stay with me and put in my ceiling fans as a trade. He liked that idea, and I trusted Sammy. He got along with my kids, and that means a lot to me."
Before long, though, Dieteman "was spending all his time at bars, the first one there and the last one to leave," says a mutual friend, Gary Gang. "He'd hit rock bottom." He was also pushing his friends away and had decided to move out of Horton's home, telling him, "I don't deserve to live in a house. I don't deserve to live."
"He didn't think a lot of himself," Gang says. "I never knew why he felt that way. But you wanted to help him. You wanted him to succeed."
By December 2005, Dieteman had disappeared. For months, no one saw him or heard from him. And then in May, Horton received a phone call out of the blue. Dieteman asked if he could meet Horton at a restaurant called the Rib Shop.
If Horton was surprised by the call, he was completely unprepared for Dieteman's new swagger and confidence. "He told me he'd met a guy who offered him a job and also had a room for him. I thought, That's great—Sammy had landed on his feet," Horton says. Life, Dieteman said, was good.
Over drinks, the two caught up and shared some laughs. At one point, Dieteman leaned in close and said to Horton, "Do you know what it's like to kill a man?"
"How would I know?" Horton responded.
"I didn't know either until a couple of months ago," Dieteman said and then launched into a story about a brutal murder he claimed he'd committed. Horton listened, assuming it must be a bizarre attempt at humor. He played along and waited for the punch line.
"Why'd you do it?" Horton asked.
Losing Sleep
It was this new thing with him and another guy, Dieteman told him. "We call it random recreational violence—RVing." The two drove around town targeting people for no particular reason. "We use a .410 shotgun because the pellets are hard to trace," he said.
Horton felt sure it was all drunken nonsense and tried to dismiss the odd conversation. But some of the details lodged in his brain, particularly Dieteman's story about a woman whom he'd mistaken for a man and had shot in the back. "Sammy said that bothered him," Horton says. "He told me he lost sleep over that one."
Soon after, Horton recounted the conversation to Gary Gang, who agreed that it had to be Dieteman's idea of a sick joke. Sammy, a cold-blooded murderer? Not possible.
Horton didn't see Dieteman again for several weeks, until he got a text message from him on June 19, suggesting they meet up at the Rib Shop once again.
There, Horton found Dieteman drunk and irate. He'd had a fight with his roommate and gotten kicked out. Dale Hausner, his roommate's younger brother, was on his way to get him and would put him up in his apartment in Mesa, on the east side of Phoenix. Dieteman's tirade ended abruptly when Dale came into the bar, and the two left with barely a word. It was half past midnight. Horton recalls that "everyone at the bar said [of Hausner], 'That was one scary-looking dude.' " He remembers the night clearly because of the ominous text message he received from Dieteman minutes after he left the bar. It read simply, "I'm angry, and someone is going to get hurt."
It was a few weeks later that Horton heard from his friends in Stingers pool hall about a murderer on the loose in Phoenix. At home later that night, Horton made a point of turning on the news. He was transfixed by a map plotting the attacks of the man cops were calling the Serial Shooter. The locations formed a large circle, and the area of town where Dieteman now lived was dead center.
Horton telephoned Gang, who had also been monitoring the news. "He knew why I was calling," Horton says. Both of them were heading toward the same mind-boggling conclusion: Sammy was responsible for the violence terrorizing Phoenix.
The next day, Horton missed work after a sleepless night struggling with his conscience. He sat in his living room for hours with his cell phone in one hand and, in the other, a slip of paper on which he'd scribbled the number of a witness tip line he'd gotten from a newscast. The police promised anonymity for the caller. What should he do?
"Blood on My Hands"
He thought about how it was still possible Dieteman was just telling tales and that by calling the cops, he would be stirring up needless trouble for a friend. Plus, there was an unspoken code among bikers: You never snitch on someone you know.
But then Horton thought about all those innocent people dying and told himself that if Dieteman was the killer, he might be able to stop him.
"I sat there and went over all of it a long time," Horton says. "I knew I could lose my friends for doing this to Sammy. But I have to be able to put my head in my pillow at night."
He finally dialed. After an operator assured him that his number was not being recorded and no one would call him back, he provided Dieteman's name, along with the disclaimer that he wasn't certain he was the Serial Shooter. Horton also said there could be at least two shooters out there.
After the call, he felt a combination of dread and relief. "I wash my hands of this," he told Gang. "It's on the cops now to track down my lead."
Except they didn't. Horton spent a good part of the next several days in his car, driving to different work sites, and he listened to the news nonstop. "I watched the news all night, too, looking to see if the cops moved on my tip." But the police were reporting they still had no suspects. Horton thought maybe he'd been so worried about getting involved that he'd been too vague with his information. In fact, he'd given the cops too little to go on—not much beyond Dieteman's name—and his tip was buried in a stack of thousands of others.
Meanwhile, the Serial Shooter struck again, targeting three new victims in downtown Phoenix. All were hit from behind—one in the head, the other two in the back. Amazingly, they managed to survive. When he heard about these shootings, Horton felt responsible. "I knew something that might have stopped them," he says. "I had blood on my hands."
He called the tip line again, but he couldn't provide the kinds of details the police needed. Dieteman's cell phone no longer worked—Horton had tried that number already—and he had no idea where in east Phoenix Dale lived. He didn't even know Dale's last name.
In Dangerous Waters
Horton's anxiety only grew when, on July 12, he heard on the radio about yet another victim, who was targeted on a deserted street the night before. Racking his brains to think what he could do next, he suddenly remembered a detail he hadn't revealed in the earlier calls to police. He phoned the tip line once again and said that Dieteman had told him his murder weapon was a .410 shotgun. The operator was silent for a moment and then asked Horton if he was willing to speak to an officer. Now his answer was yes.
"This is Officer Darrell Smith," said a voice on the phone. He proceeded to tell Horton that police had intentionally kept the media in the dark about the suspected weapon, so Horton's knowledge really got their attention. The two agreed to meet at a Mexican joint where no one who knew Horton would see them and get word back to Dieteman.
Obscured by the restaurant's dark lights, Horton sat down with Smith and the lead investigator on the case, Detective Clark Schwartzkopf, and shared everything he knew. The detectives took in the details of Horton's two bizarre encounters with his friend, then asked him to step out to their car. There they showed Horton a heavily pixelated photo. "Is this Sammy?" they asked. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was investigating fires deliberately set in two local Wal-Marts in June—near an area where the Serial Shooter had struck that same day. Horton stared at the photo. It was Sammy. Peering closer, Horton thought he could recognize the second man in the photo, too: Dale, Sammy's friend who'd picked him up from the bar in late June.
"At that point, I was certain," Horton says, and he told the cops that he'd do everything he could to help them catch Dieteman, even though he still didn't know Dale's address or last name.
Horton's biggest concern was how to investigate Dieteman's whereabouts without raising suspicions. He knew he was now wading into dangerous waters, and decided to send his sons to live with their mother, in case Dieteman heard about Horton's calls to the police and responded in a ruthless way.
"A Real Heartbreaker"
The obvious place to start the search for Dieteman was at the various bars where his crowd hung out. Horton buttonholed every friend he could find and casually asked about Dieteman. No one knew anything—he had done another disappearing act. Phone calls to other buddies came up empty as well.
Horton talked to Smith constantly, too, reviewing again and again all that he knew about Dieteman. On Sunday, July 23, he got an upsetting call from Smith: The previous morning before dawn, the Serial Shooter had injured a man who was riding his bike. "This thing was urgent," Horton says. "People weren't going out after dark in Phoenix. It changed damn near everyone's life."
It took a week more, but on Friday, July 28, Horton finally hit pay dirt. A fellow biker had gotten a text message from Dieteman and, knowing Horton had been looking for him, passed the number on. Right away Horton sent Dieteman a greeting. "Hi, Sammy—it's Ron. Are you alive?" No response. After several more unanswered text messages, Horton was about to give up. Finally, on Sunday night Dieteman responded. He'd been in Vegas, he wrote to Horton. Anxious to continue the conversation, Horton quickly typed, "Did you win or lose?" About 45 minutes later, Dieteman sent a two-word response. "I lost." After a few more attempts to engage Dieteman, Horton wrote, "You're obviously busy. Call me when you're free."
Horton phoned Smith and said, "He's up to something. Sammy always responds right away to text messages, writes a whole book." Stay on it, Smith told him, because Sundays and Tuesdays were big days for the Serial Shooter. Seven of the past 17 victims had been shot on one of those days.
The next morning, Smith called with news. The shooter had murdered a 22-year-old woman in the bedroom community of Mesa. She'd been shot in the back while walking to her boyfriend's house. "The scene was a real heartbreaker," Smith said quietly.
Even now, Horton can't talk about this death without breaking down. "He was hunting her when he was texting me," Horton says. "I could've stopped him from shooting her if I'd been more aggressive."
Horton fired off a text message to Dieteman that was like a friendly taunt. "What? Are you too good for your old friends?" A couple of more digs along those lines were followed by a suggestion that they meet for a beer. Sammy finally sent back a one-word response: "Can't." Horton asked him what was going on. Dieteman told him he was eating. They texted back and forth, Horton offering to pick him up and let him crash at his place that night if a ride was the obstacle. After a half hour, Horton got the response he'd wanted. Yes, Dieteman would meet him, but no, he didn't need a ride. They'd meet at the Stardust Bar in one hour.
Horton immediately got Darrell Smith on the phone. "It's on."
I had no idea the machine that would swing into motion," Horton says. There were officers in the bushes outside the bar, police tracing Dieteman's phone through his text messages and undercover officers at every cross street leading to the Stardust. Part of that intense police cover was protection for Horton. "I've never lost anyone in 28 years, and I don't want to start with you," a detective said to Horton.
The Evidence Couldn't Be Better
Uncomfortable facing Dieteman alone, Horton brought Gary Gang with him to the Stardust. Standing nervously at the bar, the two finally caught sight of Dieteman walking toward them. He was his old self, full of jokes and happy to see his friends. Dieteman wanted to know about the others from the old crowd, how they were doing, and he talked of his recent visit with his kids. Horton tried to seem relaxed as they talked, but he noticed that the bar was filling up with undercover agents who looked too much the part. "One guy had this big cop mustache and was drinking water instead of beer and just staring at Sammy," Horton says. "Gary and I kept exchanging looks. We were sure Sammy had to see these guys. What would he think?"
When Dieteman excused himself to go to the bathroom, Horton placed a hurried call to Smith and demanded that he get the most obvious cops out of the bar right away. A minute later, Horton saw a nearby cop touch his hand to the wire in his ear, pay his bill and leave.
In another quick conversation, Smith asked Horton if he could find a way to get Dieteman and Hausner together at the end of the night. They couldn't risk grabbing them before they had certain proof of their guilt or a judge might just let them walk, Smith explained. The killers needed a bit more rope to hang themselves.
Horton had already offered to let Dieteman crash at his house, so he had to quickly come up with a new plan. After more drinks, Horton casually suggested that the three of them hit a casino across the valley—a spot that would put Dieteman far closer to his own home. That sounded good to Dieteman, but Gang decided not to join them. Having arrived on his motorcycle, Horton rode it back to his home and returned soon after with his truck to take Dieteman to the casino. It was a very odd feeling, Horton recalls, when he stepped into his truck with his old friend, knowing that hundreds of police officers would be aware of every turn his vehicle took but that none of them would have a clue about what was happening inside.
Horton was glad he'd thought to put a .32 under the driver's seat that night, just in case. When they were inside his truck, he instinctively reached down and touched the hidden weapon. "I was tempted to end Sammy's shooting spree right there," Horton says, "and save everyone in Phoenix the trouble of settling the matter in court." Reason prevailed, and he drove them on to the casino, where they spent several more hours gambling. At one point, Dieteman was playing slots and, after several losses, complained that they were all cold. Horton put his dollar in the same machine and pulled the lever, instantly winning $300. "Lady Luck isn't smiling on you tonight," Horton said.
After a few hours, at about 2 a.m., Horton told Dieteman he needed to head home to get a few hours of sleep before going to work. Could someone pick Sammy up and give him a lift home? Just as Horton hoped, Dieteman arranged for Hausner to come get him. They said their goodbyes and Horton walked out, relieved that the tense charade was over. Within minutes he had dialed Smith again. "I put them in one place," he said to the officer. "Now don't lose the sons of bitches."
Two more days passed, with Horton nervously awaiting word. Had the police screwed it up somehow? Then his phone rang at 3 a.m. "We got 'em!" Smith said. The cops had put Hausner's apartment under 24-hour surveillance from a next-door apartment. When they moved in, they found an arsenal of weapons, spent gun casings, a map with every shooting pinpointed, Serial Shooter news clippings and gunpowder residue. The evidence couldn't be better.
"You saved a lot of lives, Ron," Smith said. "You let people walk the streets again." He then added that there'd be a press conference in the morning.
His mind spinning, Horton knew he'd never get back to sleep, so he turned on his TV. In an hour, a ticker ran along the bottom of the screen: "The police made two arrests in the Serial Shooter case—Dale Hausner, 33, and Samuel Dieteman, 30."
It was August 3—almost 15 months after the Serial Shooter had claimed his first victim in Phoenix and four weeks since Horton had first called the tip line. At long last, the rampage was over.
Today, Samuel Dieteman and Dale Hausner are being held in jail without bond. The Maricopa County Attorney's office is seeking the death penalty against them, charging Dieteman with 53 felony counts and Hausner with 83. Both men have been charged with shooting 15 people and killing two. Hausner has also been charged with an additional five murders and shooting two other people. Police continue to investigate earlier unsolved crimes.
Both men deny any wrongdoing and have entered not-guilty pleas to all charges. Since the arrests, however, the streets of Phoenix have been free from any killings that fit the pattern of the Serial Shooter.