Sniper on the Loose (page 4 of 8)

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One mans confession led to another mans realization.

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We are all closer than blood ... 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.

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?

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