Random Recreational Violence: Phoenix's Serial Shooters

By then, the killers were already notorious. Hausner clipped stories about the killings and kept them as trophies.

Phoenix Detective Clark Schwartzkopf alleges that the Serial Shooters and another area criminal, the Baseline Killer, were egging each other on. The Baseline Killer rampaged through south Phoenix, sexually assaulting, robbing, and even murdering his victims. As of this writing, Mark Goudeau was on trial for nine 2006 Baseline murders and has already been found guilty of a 2005 attack on two south Phoenix sisters.

Police were under intense pressure to solve both cases and make Phoenix safe again. They got the decisive break in the Serial Shooter case when Ron Horton called them.

Horton and Dieteman were drinking buddies. He and his wife, Debbie Dryer, occasionally gave Dieteman a ride homeand they heard Dieteman's drunken confession. Horton died in 2008, but Dryer would later testify.

Police trailed the men as they cruised the mean streets, and tapped their phones. Dieteman and Hausner bragged about their crimes on these taped calls, listing their favorite ways to shoot people and arguing about the body count.

In August of 2006, police arrested both men in Hausner's Mesa apartment. Investigators found not only a collection of news clippings about the killing, but a map detailing the shootings.

Dieteman's mother, Mary Monagham, found out when her sister called her at work, telling her that her son was on TV and had been named as a Serial Shooter.

Phoenix police Detective Clark Schwartzkopf initially assumed that the seemingly sharper Dieteman was the brains behind the operation, manipulating the volatile Hausner. Accordingly, he interviewed Hausner first, only to be mocked by the surly criminal. Dieteman, though, indeed proved smarter: he confessed and provided evidence against Hausner.