For two long years locals wondered what had happened to chef's wife Dawn Viens....
Leafing through the local paper, three words glared out as if they were flashing in neon. 'Person of interest,' read chef David Viens. And his blood ran cold...
The Daily Breeze report revealed that David’s wife, Dawn, who'd not been seen since October 2009, was now presumed dead and that David was a 'person of interest' in her likely murder.
When Dawn disappeared, David, 46, had simply told people that she had upped and gone. He didn’t even report her missing.
But cops had found blood spattered at their old house and now, eighteen months later, on February 22, 2011, the walls of David Viens' world were about to come crashing down....
Married for 15 years, in October 2009, David and Dawn Viens had just opened their new restaurant, the Thyme Contemporary Café, in Lomita, Los Angeles County. David was the chef and Dawn, 39, a smiley redhead, was the hostess.
Behind her warm smile, however, Dawn was hiding the heartache of her increasingly troubled and violent relationship. She confided in her friend Karen Patterson how David had choked her, leaving marks on her neck and on one occasion she had been so scared she'd locked herself in the bathroom.
Karen was increasingly worried about her pretty pal, who was more like a sister than a friend. But soon Karen had her own worries when she discovered that she had cancer. Dawn had vowed to see her through her treatment, so on October 19, when Dawn didn't show up to accompany Karen to a doctor's appointment, she was really concerned. It was completely out of character for Dawn to let her down like that.
Heading to the Thyme Café to look for her mate, she found David there alone, agitated and sweaty, with a bandage covering a burn on his arm. He told Karen that his wife had packed her Louis Vuitton bag and walked out of their flat after a row.
In truth, her dead body was simmering away in a huge pot of water, where it would slow cook for four days. The crazed chef was boiling his wife, like stock for soup!
The night before, the couple had gone out for pizza and beer, after which David dropped Dawn at home while he went to install a pot and pan rack at their restaurant.
Afterwards, back home the couple had a row and, in a blind rage, David bound Dawn's mouth, hands and feet with duct tape. Saying 'goodnight', he left her lying helpless on the living room floor and went to bed.
Four hours later, when he woke, Dawn was dead. He knew she was dead, he said later, because 'she was hard'. Instead of displaying grief, or remorse, he took her body to the Thyme Café, with the express purpose of getting rid of the evidence. He planned to cook her.
Heaving Dawn's 7 ½ stone corpse into a cooking vat, he arranged her face-down, putting weights on top of her, so she wouldn't float to the surface.
'I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days,' he later told police.
During the day, while the restaurant was open, he wheeled the human hot pot to a storage shed outside. Then, when his customers left, he spent the nights cooking his wife until she was 'done'.
Emotionless, he treated the whole process as though he were following a recipe - letting her remains 'cool' then 'straining' off eight pounds of her liquefied body into the restaurant's grease pit.
Bagging up the rest of her remains, he buried them behind the café - everything except for her skull and jawbone. These grisly trophies he planned to hide in his mum's attic.
In the days following Dawn's disappearance, life carried on as usual, with customers coming in to the restaurant and David allocating his wife's job to waitress Kathy Galvin. He also sent Dawn's friends texts from her phone, saying she was fine and would contact them soon.
But Karen Patterson was uneasy; Dawn rarely texted and in one message she'd misspelt her own nickname 'Pixie 'with a ‘y’. Something fishy was going on....
Three weeks after Dawn's disappearance Karen, her husband, Mike Wade, and Dawn's sister, Dayna Papin, filed a missing person's report at the Sheriff's Department.
But David remained unconcerned, telling a newspaper reporter who was sniffing around that he expected her to return home, 'probably after the ski season,’ he said.
Like many neighbouring businesses on Narbonne Street, Joe Cacace, a motorcycle repair man, put a missing person flyer with Dawn's photograph in his shop window. He noticed that David had not stuck any flyers up at the Thyme Café.
David was too busy moving on with his life, for soon the 'abandoned hubby' started a relationship with Kathy, the waitress.
The liaison did not go unnoticed. Police were already suspicious about Dawn's disappearance. There was no trace of her whatsoever - no bank transactions, parking tickets, nothing.
When David and his new love moved to Torrance, five miles away, police searched his old house in Lomita and discovered blood spatter in the bedroom and bathroom.
Suspecting that the chef had killed Dawn, they put him under surveillance, installing a CCTV camera outside the restaurant and bugging his mobile phone.
Then, to see how he would react, they leaked the news about the blood discovery to a reporter from the Daily Breeze.
At the same time, a detective in South Carolina was talking to Jacqueline Viens, 22, David's daughter from a previous relationship. She revealed that, on a drunken night out with her father in 2009, he'd admitted accidently killing her stepmother, telling her that he'd disposed of the body in a rubbish bin.
And she made another chilling revelation....
Her father had once joked that if he ever had to get rid of a body, he would cook it.
But now, as he put down his copy of the Daily Breeze, David felt sure his secret was out. There would soon be nowhere to hide....
The following day, when he was in the car with Kathy, he admitted to her that he'd accidently killed his wife. Then, like a madman, he drove towards the cliffs at Rancho Palos Verdes while, in the passenger seat, a panicked Kathy tried to grab the steering wheel.
But the police were on his tail, and before Kathy could stop him, David had jumped out of the car and headed towards the cliff edge. Suicide seemed to be his only way out.
Screaming herself hoarse, Kathy scrabbled across the rugged coastline after him. 'Don't jump!' she pleaded, reaching out to him, as he teetered on the brink of the 80ft precipice, but he pushed her away.
'Tell my mother and brother that I love them,' he called out before he jumped.
But the fall did not kill him. He suffered a shattered leg and pelvis but no head injuries. The police were right behind him when he jumped, so he was rescued quickly.
In hospital, David finally confessed to cops that he'd killed Dawn - even admitting he had cooked her. But he still pleaded not guilty to murder.
Asked by Sergeant Richard Garcia what had happened that night, he said, 'For some reason, I just got violent.’
During David’s two-week trial at the Superior Court, Los Angeles, which he attended in a wheelchair, it emerged that he had suspected his wife of stealing money from the restaurant, telling a friend, ‘I'll kill the bitch'.
The evidence concerning the fate of her corpse was so disturbing that some jurors had trouble sleeping after hearing it.
Police never found any of Dawn's remains - not even her skull, which was supposed to be in the attic - but the jury was in no doubt that David was guilty. They convicted Viens of second-degree murder, meaning he'll serve anything from 15 years to life in prison.
'My opinion is, if he was innocent he wouldn't have jumped off a cliff,' said juror Tal Erickson.
Wearing glasses and a grey suit, Viens was emotionless as the verdict was read out. And as he was wheeled from the courtroom, he gestured to his mother Sandra that he would call her.
Dawn finally has justice. For her devastated family, however, not only did David Viens kill their loved one, but his sick recipe for disposing of her body means they can never say goodbye.
END