Illustration by Pat Kinsella

Four floors up, inside the maximum-security unit of Maricopa County’s main jail, a friendship was blooming in one of the most isolated places imaginable. It was late 2006, and Jeff Hausner had just arrived as an inmate. He was facing the bleak likelihood of going to prison for the first time in his life for stabbing a man outside a strip mall about seven months earlier.

Prison is a scary prospect for anyone, even for the toughest of guys. And the kind of prison that Hausner would likely end up at is filled with gangs divided along racial and ethnic lines with very little room for a peaceful existence in between.

But Hausner was lucky. He had been placed in a cell next door to a guy who had been there before, a white supremacist prison gang member named Aaron Signal* who offered to show him the ropes.

Signal was a repeat convicted car thief who had been in and out of the justice system since 1988 and knew his way around a prison. In lockup, he had a record of discipline long enough to show for it, too. Through the years, prison officials had punished Signal for disobeying orders, being caught with drugs, giving or receiving tattoos (records don’t say which) and destroying property, among other things. In other words, his jailhouse credentials were solid.

Signal befriended Hausner over the next few months, mentoring him in the ways of jailbird life. It helped that Hausner was white. His skin color would help ingratiate him with Signal’s pals once he was sent to the state Department of Corrections to serve out his term.

Signal taught him a few tricks, too, including how to communicate in code. The codes were fairly simple, but they would allow Hausner to write letters or send messages without prison officials being able to figure out what he was saying. If he wanted to, say, brag to a fellow inmate about a crime or make some kind of illicit deal with someone on the outside, he could do it with one of these codes.

Along the way, Hausner began opening up to his newfound ally. He told Signal about his girlfriend, Celeste, and about his brother, Dale, who also was in jail. But during that time, according to Signal, Hausner also said something that would be his boldest statement yet. He called himself “a serial shooter.”

Which, it turns out, was all part of the plan.

Little did Hausner know, but the budding relationship was all a setup. It had been part of a mission by Phoenix police Detective Clark Schwartzkopf – an intense, focused cop who believed Hausner was more than just someone who had stuck a knife in somebody’s gut for fun. Schwartzkopf believed that Hausner was no less than the third gunman in the Serial Shooter case, one of the worst killing sprees in Arizona history.

Schwartzkopf had become the lead investigator in the case earlier that year, and his work had already helped lead to the arrests of two gunmen in the case: Hausner’s younger brother, Dale Hausner, and a good friend of both brothers named Sam Dieteman.

But while the detective had mountains of evidence against the other two men by November 2006, he had been unable to tie Jeff Hausner directly to the murders. In fact, even today, the older Hausner has never been charged with any of the shootings, despite Schwartkopf’s certainty that he took part in as many as six of the killings.

Now, in an exclusive series of interviews with PHOENIX magazine, Schwartzkopf talks for the first time about his investigation into Jeff Hausner, including what went wrong at the Maricopa County Jail just six weeks after Signal, the informant, came forward – a mistake that may have ruined the best chance authorities had at charging Jeff Hausner with murder.

“There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was involved,” says Schwartzkopf, who calls the fact that Jeff Hausner has never been charged with murder “very frustrating.”

He believes all of the shootings that were part of the killing spree in 2005 “were committed with the accompaniment of Jeff involved in some manner.”

Photo by Brian Goddard Phoenix police Detective Clark Schwartzkopf revisits a bleak spot on Van Buren Street where one of the serial shooters gunned down a woman.

Schwartzkopf’s suspicion about Jeff Hausner goes far back in the timeline of case. It first arose a little more than three years ago, just hours after Sam Dieteman and Dale Hausner were arrested in connection with the serial murders.

The pair had been taken down on August 4, 2006, by a heavily armored SWAT team, which broke through the front door of Dale Hausner’s small apartment in central Mesa. Investigators had only been on the men’s trail for a few days, but they had collected enough evidence through secret audio recordings and surveillance to make the arrests. Hausner and Dieteman had been placed in separate rooms at nearby Mesa Police headquarters. Schwartzkopf and other investigators took turns grilling the two men for information.

In one of the interrogation rooms, Hausner sat bare-chested, wearing only a pair of shorts and complaining of the cold air. He denied everything, saying the murders were probably either “gang related” or the work of another serial killer who was roaming the Valley at the time, nicknamed the Baseline Killer. “That guy’s sick,” Hausner told investigators. “It could easily be him.”

In the other room, however, Dieteman was confessing. Coming down from a combination of methamphetamine and alcohol, he sometimes did little more than nod his head while answering questions. But he managed to eke out some details of the shootings.

Then, in the middle of the interview, Dieteman said something about Dale Hausner that caught Schwartzkopf by surprise.

“I know his brother knows,” Dieteman said.

“His brother, Jeff, knows?” Schwartzkopf asked.

“Yeah.”

Dieteman had only been part of the killing spree since May of that year and had no real knowledge of what took place in 2005 before the Hausner brothers had really befriended him. But he said the Hausners had bragged to him about killing people and animals during that time. “It was probably those two,” Dieteman said.

After the interview, undercover officers were assigned to follow Jeff Hausner, who was not in custody. For the next month, investigators tailed him everywhere he went. They spied on his townhouse. They posed as patrons of his favorite bar. They were ubiquitous.

“He even made comments to friends that he was going to be arrested any day and he was sure of it,” Schwartzkopf says.

But by that point, after the arrests of his brother and good friend, Jeff Hausner was extra cautious. He didn’t say or do anything to implicate himself in the crimes, at least while the police were watching. “It just wasn’t going to work,” Schwartzkopf says. “He was too paranoid.”

After weeks of following Jeff Hausner full time and coming up empty, the undercover officers were pulled off. Investigators would have to work the case from a distance.

To envision how the Serial Shooters operated, it takes little more than getting in a car just after dusk and cruising down the long, arterial streets of central Phoenix.

There, along Camelback Road, Indian School Road or Van Buren Street, on nearly any stretch of road, you can find loners making their way to the nearest bus stop or heading home from work. They are slowed by the summer heat but still headed somewhere. For somebody with the will to murder, these lonely souls make pretty easy targets – stick a gun barrel out the window and let ’er rip. Like a surreal video game. The bodies fall down, and the game goes on.

For the Serial Shooters, it now seems, that’s exactly what the killing spree was – carnal entertainment. They even had a title for it: Random Recreational Violence, or RVing for short.

The phrase first showed up in police documents shortly after Sam Dieteman and Dale Hausner were arrested in 2006. To those living in the Phoenix metropolitan area, it became instantly iconic for the way it summed up, in just those three words, why the Serial Shooters had killed and maimed so many people. They did it all for fun.

But even today, it’s still not clear what launched the killers on their spree in the first place.

The earliest killing linked to the case was that of Tony Mendez, a 39-year-old who was found May 17, 2005, tangled up in his bicycle on the side of a road in west Phoenix. When emergency crews arrived at the scene, they thought Mendez had been hit by a car. They soon found the bullet wound in his upper torso, the work of a single .22-caliber bullet that was later recovered from his body.

At the time, the killing was unlike any other random body found on the streets of Phoenix. There was no obvious suspect or motive in the case. Mendez wasn’t robbed, and he didn’t have any enemies that investigators could find. His death was as mysterious as they came, a whodunit in the strictest sense.

Today, Schwartzkopf believes this was likely the first of six murders carried out by Dale and Jeff Hausner together.

During the next seven and a half months, five more people would be killed in the same manner, all but one with a .22-caliber rifle.

• Reginald Remillard was shot on a bus bench.

• David Estrada was shot near a freeway on-ramp.

• Nathaniel Schoffner died trying to save a dog from the gunmen. He was the only man killed with a shotgun instead of a .22.

• Two homeless men, Jose Ortis and Marco Carillo, were shot within minutes and blocks of each other, both walking alone on the streets of central Phoenix.

During that time frame, two others were wounded and 10 animals were shot. The sheer magnitude of bloodshed from May 17 to December 30 of that year is staggering. Equally amazing, no bystander saw the murders and neither of the survivors saw who shot them. As drive-by shootings go, these were as stealthy as could be.

Those characteristics – the well-handled execution and the high body count – are two of the reasons Schwartzkopf believes at least two people were involved. “It was a team effort,” Schwartzkopf says. “It had to be a team effort or they wouldn't have been successful nearly as long as they had been.”

As a 13-year veteran of the Phoenix Police Department’s Violent Crimes Bureau, Schwartzkopf has seen his share of drive-by shootings. Crimes of this precision, he says, are rarely done by a single gunman. “To shoot from a vehicle is a very difficult thing,” he says. More often, one person is driving and another is pulling the trigger. It also helps to have two sets of eyes watching out for potential witnesses, security cameras and getaway routes.

So far, Dale Hausner has been the only one charged with the 2005 shootings. (Bank records put him in the area of some of the crimes, and .22-caliber shell casings that were found in the back seat of his car matched those at several of the scenes.) But Schwartzkopf is sure he had an accomplice.

“I think that almost every one of those, if not every one of those .22-caliber crimes, were committed with the accompaniment of Jeff involved in some manner,” Schwartzkopf says.