On the night of July 30, 2006, Robin Blasnek, twenty-two, was shot dead in Mesa, Arizona, by a man in a passing car. Ron Horton had reason to think he knew who did it. A friend of his, Samuel Dieteman, had told him while drinking that he was one of the people the papers were calling the Serial Shooter, and Horton had not known whether to take him seriously. Blasnek's death changed his mind; he said later it affected him deeply because he might have prevented it by going to the police sooner. He went now. Dieteman and his roommate, Dale Shawn Hausner, were named as suspects on July 31 and arrested outside their apartment in Mesa on August 3.
Hausner was thirty-three. Since 1999 he had worked as a custodian at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, and he also photographed and wrote about boxing for RingSports and Fightnews.com; a few weeks before his arrest he had interviewed Mike Tyson, who later described him as a small guy but a nice guy. Dieteman, thirty-one, had moved from Minnesota a few years earlier with a record of shoplifting and drunk driving.
For more than a year the two had driven the Phoenix area at night, most often high on methamphetamine, shooting at people on foot and on bicycles and at animals. David Estrada, twenty, was killed on June 29, 2005, in Tolleson. Nathaniel Shoffner, forty-four, was shot on November 11, 2005, while trying to protect a dog from being shot. Jose Ortiz, forty-four, and Marco Carillo, twenty-eight, were killed on December 29, 2005. Claudia Gutierrez-Cruz, twenty, was shot by Dieteman on May 2, 2006, in Scottsdale while Hausner drove. Robin Blasnek was the last. Paul Patrick, shot on June 8, 2006, while walking to a Maryvale supermarket for cigarettes, lived another twelve years and died on November 13, 2018, of causes attributed to his wounds. Hausner's brother Jeff took part in some of the shootings. The pair were also linked to two fires set forty-five minutes apart at Walmart stores in Glendale on June 8, 2006, which did between seven and ten million dollars in damage.
The case ran alongside another. The police were at the same time hunting the Baseline Killer, Mark Goudeau, who was committing random murders and sexual assaults in the same city. For months they believed the Serial Shooter was one man responsible for four killings and twenty-five shootings since May 2005 and that a second run of thirteen shootings was someone else's; on July 11, 2006, they announced that the two series were connected.
Hausner was charged in five indictments with eighty-eight crimes: eight murders, eighteen attempted murders, seventeen aggravated assaults, twenty-six drive-by shootings, four firearms counts, ten counts of animal cruelty and two of arson of an occupied structure. On March 13, 2009, a jury convicted him on eighty of them, including six of the murders. He told his lawyers not to fight a death sentence, saying his execution would help the victims' families heal, and in a half-hour statement to the jury he apologized to several people, his family among them, and compared himself to Charles Manson. On March 27 he received six death sentences. Dieteman pleaded guilty to two murders and conspiracy in others and was sentenced in July 2009 to life without parole. Jeff Hausner received twenty-five years.
Two earlier deaths are still laid to the pair, though never charged to a verdict: Tony Mendez, thirty-nine, shot on May 17, 2005, and Reginald Remillard, fifty-six, shot on May 24, 2005. After the mandatory appeal Hausner waived all others and asked to be executed as soon as possible. On June 19, 2013, he was found unresponsive in his cell and died that day. The medical examiner found no injury and ruled that he had killed himself with an overdose of an antidepressant.