Rachel and Dan moved into the Camden Martinique apartments in February 2010, some two years after they began dating and three months before Juri’s body was found in Sam’s apartment.
In March, they visited the Liberty Theater to see the show King Arthur. Some of Dan’s former child students were performing, and he wanted to wish them luck. Immediately Jeff and Nancy Hathcock noticed that the perennially lively actor appeared strangely reserved, formally introducing Rachel to the cast.
“He had markedly changed from the last time I saw him,” Jeff said. “He was hesitant. He was more reticent to be the jolly fellow. You could tell it was because of her. He used to be the one leading the group in. Now, she went ahead and he walked behind.”
Nancy had the sense that Rachel was controlling Dan in some way. “He was like a puppy dog. I thought, ‘Oh, this guy is really, really crazy about her.’”
The wedding was scheduled for Friday, May 28. The two planned to get married on the sand in Long Beach and have a reception overlooking the water. “He was bragging to everybody that they were going to have a big wedding, and then he was going to take Rachel on this special honeymoon,” Allyson said. “But he wasn’t working, so—like with everything else—I didn’t know where he was getting the money. As far as I knew, he didn’t invite any of his family to the wedding. His cousins weren’t coming. The only guests I knew about were a couple he babysat for.”
Although he didn’t have a formal job, Dan and Rachel were in the midst of a three-month run of the musical Nine at the Hunger Artists Theatre Company.
“See me and Rachel in Nine at the Hunger Artists!” Dan wrote on Facebook. “Hope to see you all there. For those who have come … Thank You! It was amazing seeing you all! Have a good one everyone!”
The theater was named after the 1922 Franz Kafka short story “A Hunger Artist,” about a performer who fasts for the public in a cage, observed by special minders who ensure that he isn’t sneaking in food. “It’s always been a very literate company,” said OC Weekly drama critic Joel Beers. “A more sophisticated kind of literary fare was its trademark. Every storefront has its own niche. They’ve done Chekov. Obviously, they’ve done Kafka’s productions. Over the years, they’ve had a lot of turnover, but they’ve always stood out.”
The production of Nine—based on the Federico Fellini film 8 ½—contained the kind of psychologically complex plot that appealed to the Hunger Artists crowd. The winner of the 1982 Tony Award for Best Musical, Nine is the story of Guido Contini, a self-possessed film director attempting to conceive the plot of his next work as he’s pursued by various captivating women. As he flashes back on his life, he decides to recreate the Casanova story as a musical, an endeavor that forces Guido to experience a number of emotional upheavals.
It was one of the most exciting shows that the venue had staged. Originally, the theater was located in Santa Ana. But when Dan and Rachel appeared in Nine, it had moved into an industrial park setting, off South State College Boulevard in Fullerton, past a small shopping center that included businesses such as Burger Records, Future Tattoo & Body Piercing, and the Kayla Spa massage parlor. Unless you were truly a fan, the Hunger Artists Theatre would have been easy to miss, tucked into a corner of the complex alongside such businesses as Joe’s Cabinets and Cortez Coral Saltwater Aquarium Suppliers.
“Every one of the storefront theaters has kind of a base of actors that they use quite a bit,” Beers explained. “But because people have jobs or families or whatever, those people can’t be in every play, but they’ll all reconvene every so often. This wasn’t one of those plays where a lot of the Hunger Artists stable was involved. There were a lot of people I didn’t recognize.”
That included Dan. “I wasn’t aware of him until I saw Nine because he did a lot of musicals and dinner theater type of stuff, and that’s not something we review,” Beers said. “We’re an alternative weekly. The light operas and stuff like that we don’t really touch. It did turn out that he added me as a friend on Facebook maybe a few weeks before, but that’s just random.”
There was much that Beers didn’t like about the production. “It was a small theater and the production standard wasn’t great, and there was a very uneven field of actors. It happens a lot in storefronts. But I thought Dan Wozniak was very convincing in the role of Guido. It’s not an easy performance to pull off. I mean, he’s the lead. He’s onstage ninety percent of the time. He was definitely the best thing in that play, and my review pointed it out.”
The critique was effusive in its praise of Dan. “Dan Wozniak’s Guido is superb,” Beers wrote. “Though his character should be an unlikeable pig—he’s self-obsessed, egotistical and a liar who uses women as checkers pieces—Wozniak somehow manages to make Guido eminently likeable and even sympathetic. This is a man absolutely into himself—both his virtues and his flaws. And Wozniak captures the angst of a man staring into the abyss of his own being and seeing his own frailty.”
As with Harold Hill in The Music Man and Mortimer Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace, Dan was able to deliver lines in Nine that seemed to come from his soul. “I would like the universe to get down,” he sang. “on its knees / And say, ‘Guido, whatever you please, it’s okay / Even if it’s impossible, we’ll arrange it / That’s all that I want.”
Because of his habit of losing himself in roles—and the fact that he was the only man in the cast—Dan would have been an object of fascination for the actresses in the ensemble. But, backstage, Rachel managed to stay close to him. Some interpreted their constant proximity as possessiveness on Rachel’s part. Others believed that they were simply in love.
Still, there were rumors that all was not well between them. When Dan and Rachel were out with friends, he’d reportedly flare over her spending habits, prompting companions to take him aside and calm him down. At the time, both were unemployed. After Dan wrote several checks for funds that he couldn’t cover, he had a negative balance in his bank account. Recently, the couple had borrowed money to pay the rent. But they were on the verge of being evicted.
One night Ruben Menacho was visiting Sam at the Camden Martinique apartments and was introduced to several of his friends in the building. “Let’s hit the Jacuzzi,” someone suggested. When the group arrived, Dan and Rachel were in the hot tub with some other acquaintances.
Ruben had never met Dan before. After they shook hands, Dan mentioned his sales background. “But I’m really an actor,” he stressed.
The way Ruben interpreted the comment, Dan was acting boastful, not a way to endear himself to someone who’d fought for his country.
“Well, I’m in the military,” Ruben shot back.
He’d later remember, “I didn’t like Wozniak from the second I saw him. He was pretty fake, the way he smiled. He seemed like a liar to me.”
But Sam was acting friendly to Dan and Rachel, so Ruben looked away and tried to chat with the other people lounging around. Yet every time Ruben’s eyes turned back toward Dan, there he was with that annoying grin. After a while, Ruben nudged Sam.
“Hey, let’s go, bro.”
Sam shrugged. He could see Ruben wasn’t having a great time. “Yeah, let’s go.”
As they walked back to Sam’s apartment, Ruben shook his head and motioned back at the Jacuzzi area. “I don’t like that bastard.”
Sam laughed out loud. “Ruben,” he said, “you don’t like anybody.”
From that point forward Ruben, on the one hand, made an effort to avoid Dan during visits to the apartment complex. Sam, on the other hand, had the attitude that, unless someone did something egregious to him, that person was his friend.
“That was the problem with Sam,” Ruben recalled. “He just trusted everybody. He was very open. And he made friends so fast. I mean, he just walked up to me in a classroom and decided he was my friend. That’s the way he was. It was hard to keep up with Sam because people always wanted to be around him.”
On May 15, Dan was arrested for DUI in Costa Mesa. The police brought him to the Orange County Jail, where he began calling friends, looking for help. At some point, a mutual acquaintance contacted Sam, asking for his assistance. That’s when Dan apparently learned about the significant amount of combat pay that Sam had acquired from the U.S. government. In the end, though, Dan managed to raise enough from other sources to post bond.
When he next saw Sam, they were both at the Jacuzzi again. Allegedly, Dan began complaining about his brief incarceration.
“I know all about being in jail,” Sam replied, recounting his brush with the criminal justice system as a teenager.
Dan looked at Sam and listened. The actor’s knowledge of the two hidden aspects of his neighbor’s life—the past that Sam wanted to forget and the money he’d earned in the military—are said to have sparked a series of malevolent thoughts.
It was at this point, police would later hypothesize, that Daniel Wozniak formulated the scheme that ended Sammy’s life.