Photo by Brian Goddard In a maximum-security cell like this one in Maricopa County’s main jail, Jeff Hausner nearly revealed his involvement in the serial shootings to his jailhouse neighbor.

Schwartzkopf is the first to admit that none of this would be enough for a jury to convict Jeff Hausner in the serial murders, which is why he has never been charged alongside his brother. At best, Dieteman’s second-hand knowledge of the 2005 shootings amounts to a bunch of  leads that a detective could investigate. It also helped investigators tie some of the crimes such as the Schoffner murder to the Serial Shooter case in the first place. But without hard evidence, it’s nothing to a jury.

So what kind of hard evidence do authorities have on Jeff Hausner? It’s simple. “We don’t have any,” Schwartzkopf says.

The 2005 crimes have always been the toughest for authorities to prove, mostly because Dieteman wasn’t there. He only heard about the crimes afterward. The bulk of the evidence investigators collected for those crimes only implicates Dale Hausner. For example, they found a number of .22-caliber shell casings in his car that matched others found at several of the crime scenes, and they were also able to place Dale Hausner near crimes because of some of the debit card purchases he had made those nights.

But with Jeff Hausner, they had no such luck. “Sam was never with them, so we don’t have an eyewitness that could put him there,” Schwartzkopf says. “And we’ve never been able to tie Jeff through any financial records to any of these sorts of things.”

Part of the problem is that Jeff Hausner always lived off the grid. He rarely had a steady job and had no real bank accounts to speak of. The only cell phone he owned was bought for him by his brother.Police also never found the .22-caliber rifle that was used in most of the earlier shootings. After Dieteman and Dale Hausner were arrested in August 2006, police searched the cars and homes of both Hausner brothers. In Dale Hausner’s possession, they found the shotguns used in the crimes but never found the rifle. At his trial earlier this year, Dale Hausner claimed he and his brother sawed the rifle in half and dumped the pieces in different parts of the Valley “so that nobody could take it and shoot somebody and then leave it somewhere.”

Another problem is that Jeff Hausner was a well-known liar, Schwartzkopf says. Even if Sam Dieteman always told the truth, it’s impossible to know whether Jeff Hausner had lied to him in the first place. Besides the stories of the 2005 shootings, Dieteman said that Jeff Hausner told him any number of things that were just too farfetched. Dieteman said Jeff Hausner claimed to have been a Glendale police officer and also to have been part of gruesome killings in the military. Schwartzkopf says neither of those claims checked out.

“It’s like one of those shows where you have the town drunk,” Schwartzkopf says. “He says a lot of things, and you believe that two out of 10 of them are probably right but you discard everything else because it’s him. He had no credibility.”

During more than six months of investigating Jeff Hausner’s past, Schwartzkopf says he quickly learned the man had a largely inflated reputation for violence. A number of people told the detective that Hausner had been involved in killings and disappearances years before the Serial Shooter murders began. But no one offered proof, Schwartzkopf says. “It was all rumor and innuendos.”

As part of the investigation, Schwartzkopf also learned that Jeff Hausner was the one who coined the term Random Recreational Violence, which became an iconic phrase of the case. One of Jeff Hausner’s former coworkers from the mid-1990s told the detective it was a term that was twisted around from an old barroom sign that originally read: “Practice random acts of kindness.”

“Jeff changed that one day in front of this particular person and said, ‘Practice random acts of violence,’” Schwartzkopf says. Over the years, the phrase became what it is today.

But Schwartzkopf says Jeff Hausner’s reputation, no matter how inflated, was palpable in any number of dive bars in west Phoenix. Some of Jeff Hausner’s oldest acquaintances refused to go on the record with him in the investigation because they were afraid of it coming back to them.

“They all kind of said the same thing: that Jeff was just nuts. He was kind of a social misfit besides being an alcoholic,” Schwartzkopf says. “And Jeff scared people, a lot of people.”

The good news, if all of these suspicions are true, is that Jeff Hausner will probably not be able to inflict damage on the outside world for at least the next two decades.

With Sam Dieteman’s help, authorities were able to send Jeff Hausner to prison for the next 25 years for the stabbings of Raymond McQueen, who was attacked in the strip mall parking lot, and Timothy Davenport, who was attacked near the church.

Hausner pleaded guilty in 2007 to the first attack when it looked like McQueen was going to be able to identify him in court. He was then convicted of the second stabbing in a two-week trial this summer, in part because of Dieteman’s testimony against him.

Through a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Corrections, Jeff Hausner declined to talk to PHOENIX magazine for this story. But in June, in a rare public statement prior to his sentencing for the second stabbing, Jeff Hausner told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Roland Steinle that he had been falsely convicted in the attack. “I do maintain my innocence,” he said, according to a report in The Arizona Republic, “and I hope through the appeal process that I can prove it.”

Some of his family members, too, have spoken up on his behalf, saying they have never seen Jeff Hausner act violently.

Just before his most-recent sentencing, his ex-wife, Brenda Hausner, wrote a letter to the court asking for leniency. She said she has known Jeff Hausner for 20 years and never knew him to have a violent streak. “In all the years I have known Jeff, I have never seen are (sic) heard of him being violent to any of his fellow man are (sic) animals,” she wrote. “He has always been a good neighbor + friend and always there to help in times of need.”

Back in 2007, his daughter Katie, who was 17 at the time, also asked for the judge to take it easy on him. She hinted, however, at seeing at least some kind of violence in his past. “My father has never shown any violence toward anyone, unless they threatened him or someone he loves,” she wrote.

Despite Jeff Hausner’s lengthy prison sentence, authorities say they are unsatisfied without a murder conviction against him.

Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Laura Reckart, who was the lead prosecutor in this year’s stabbing case as well as one of two prosecutors in the larger Serial Shooter case, tells PHOENIX magazine she strongly believes that Jeff Hausner was involved in the murders. “Everybody knows in their heart and in their gut that he did it,” she says. Even her fellow prosecutor, Vince Imbordino, talked about it as a matter of fact in a courtroom in August. “For the most part, the evidence was that he was either acting alone or with his brother, Jeff,” Imbordino told a jury.

Reckart has spent countless hours in a courtroom squaring off against the Hausners. And though she says the brothers are polar opposites in personality – Jeff is calm, Dale is highly manic – both have one thing in common. “They have no conscience,” she says.

Still, with the evidence as it is now, Reckart says that a murder conviction against Jeff Hausner is “a trillion to one” at this point. “We would need the gun,” Reckart says. And moreover, “We’d have to find the gun with a connection to Jeff.”

Barring that, authorities can only hope for luck. Maybe there’s somebody who knows about Jeff’s deeds and hasn’t come forward. Maybe some information will fall into their laps. In her 20 years as a prosecutor, Reckart says she’s learned that anything is possible.

In a way, wishful thinking for a murder charge against Jeff Hausner is all that authorities have had left for a long time. Even when police were finally able to arrest him for the McQueen stabbing, Schwartzkopf says he suspected that good luck would be the only way the case could escalate to something more.

So Schwartzkopf placed his last best hope in a convicted car thief named Aaron Signal*. This summer, Schwartzkopf gave PHOENIX magazine an exclusive look at his efforts to employ Signal as a jailhouse snitch in the hopes that Jeff Hausner would trust the car thief enough to confess his role in the Serial Shooter killing spree. (As part of the exclusive look, the magazine agreed not to publish the informant’s real name. Aaron Signal is a pseudonym.)

Working with Schwartzkopf, jail intelligence officers with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office placed Jeff Hausner in a highly secure cell next door to Signal, who had worked as a snitch before. Signal was well versed in the ways of prison life, and given that Hausner had never been to prison before, the hope was that Signal could teach him something.

The two men were placed in one of the most isolated areas of the county jail system imaginable. The Special Management Unit, or SMU, is the county’s top maximum-security unit, where the inmates who are considered the worst of the worst are housed. The cells there are tiny and covered in eggwhite drab with only a small window to see out into the similarly drab hallway.

For one hour a day, inmates of the SMU are allowed individual access to a small room where they can make a phone call or talk to their neighbor. It’s not much, but it was in this hour a day that Schwartzkopf hoped a friendship between Hausner and Signal would pick up.

By December 21, 2006, the plan was working perfectly. The two men had been talking for several weeks, and Signal had taught Hausner a lot about prison, including how to write letters using a complex cryptograph and a cheat sheet. “He was grooming Jeff for his life at DOC,” Schwartzkopf says.

At some point, unsolicited, Signal came forward to Schwartzkopf saying he had information about Hausner.

“You want this guy,” Signal wrote in a letter after meeting the detective. “I want/need out of jail, and of course, I’ll testify.”

Signal told Schwartzkopf that Hausner had recently been asking about how to organize a contract killing. The target: Raymond McQueen, the man Jeff Hausner had stabbed about eight months prior. McQueen had found his own way into the prison system, and the informant said Hausner was looking to stop him from testifying.

Schwartzkopf and Signal set up a plan to catch Hausner either confessing to the previous murders or else trying to put the hit out on McQueen. “I wanted some hard evidence, some direct evidence that you could take into court,” Schwartzkopf says.

As part of the plan, Signal was given a small digital audio recorder that he would use any time he and Hausner were talking. Schwartzkopf also agreed to send Signal letters, pretending to be an inmate who could take out McQueen. He used the penname R.R. and sent the letters from a state prison complex in Florence. “I would act like I was one of his prison cellies writing him from Florence,” says Schwartzkopf. “So he would get a Florence letter from me that he could show the envelope to Jeff.”

By January 29, 2007, the relationship between Signal and Hausner had continued to blossom. “It was working wonderfully,” Schwartzkopf says. Signal sent the detective another letter, this time detailing numerous conversations with Hausner, but saying he hadn’t been able to get it on tape:

He has spoke(sic) quite a bit about the hit on McQueen. He has also made the statements referring to himself as a ‘serial shooter’ – He also says ‘we shot someone at the apartment complex I was livin’ at.’ Goes on to say he was the maintenance guy & he had a good thing going – until people got wind that he was a serial shooter.

In the next day or so, Schwartzkopf says he pulled Signal out of his cell to talk to him about the recordings and the importance of getting Jeff Hausner on tape saying something incriminating. While the two were meeting, they were unaware that jail guards were conducting searches of the cells in the SMU.

Apparently not knowing about the covert operation underway, the officers uncovered the audio recorder in Signal’s cell. They pulled it out and placed it on a table in full view of Hausner. The gig was up.

By the time Signal returned to his cell, every inmate in the SMU knew he was a snitch. “It was a disaster,” Schwartzkopf says. “He was completely burned to any law enforcement agency because of what occurred.”

And what did Hausner say to Signal? Not a word, says Schwartzkopf. To this day, as far as Schwartzkopf knows, Hausner has never spoken to anyone so freely. He doesn’t even trust his fellow inmates.

“When that happened, the balloon just deflated,” Schwartzkopf says. “We all kind of looked at each other and said, ‘That was our last shot.’ Unless somebody independently comes forward and just says something, it was really our last shot at getting him to admitting to anything.”

Since that day, authorities have had amazing success in the Serial Shooter case. Dale Hausner received six death sentences this March in addition to being sentenced to more than 400 years in prison. Sam Dieteman, who testified against both Hausners, was spared the death penalty by a jury for his cooperation and given three life sentences.

But the inability to get Jeff Hausner on anything more than the stabbing charges is something that continues to stay with many of those in law enforcement.

Schwartzkopf is writing a book about his experience and is hoping to find a publisher this fall. Meantime, he says he hopes that anyone who knows something about Jeff Hausner, no matter how insignificant it seems, will come forward.

It just might be the break he’s been hoping for.