American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps

In 1975, thirty-three Peace Corps volunteers landed in the island nation of Tonga. It was an exotic place -- men wearing grass skirts, coconut-thatched huts, pigs wandering the crushed-coral streets -- governed by strange and exacting rules of conduct. The idealistic young Americans called it never-never land, as if it existed in a world apart from the one they knew and the things that happened there would be undone when they went home.

Among them was a beautiful twenty-three-year-old woman w…