Within the space of a few short days, investigators had gone from viewing Steve and Raquel Herr as the parents of a killer on the run to victims themselves. When the investigators finally informed the couple that they had Daniel Wozniak in custody for Sam’s death, the news was delivered with sensitivity, as well as a resolve to bring the family justice.
“Underneath, I felt he was already dead,” Steve told the Orange County Register when asked about that painful moment when he learned that his son had been killed, “but when they confirmed it, it was a tough go. Your lives are crushed when you get news like this.”
As Steve and Raquel mourned with their extended family, details about the arrest and double homicide trickled out in small dosages.
* * *
It was chilly when Jeff Hathcock drove onto the Joint Forces Training Base at Los Alamitos in the hours after Dan’s confession. He was planning on a typical day, calling actors and making improvements at the theater. He found a parking spot close to the performing center and exited his car. When he did, he was met by a number of official-looking men in military uniforms.
“We’re going to have to close the theater down.”
Jeff was bewildered. “What, for repairs?”
“No, no, something else.”
“What? What else?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Flustered by the stupefying information, Jeff drove to the security office and asked about what was occurring. This time, the answer was slightly less vague.
“I can’t really tell you, but the police are at your theater. There’s been a murder there.”
It was the last scenario that Jeff expected. “Holy shit,” he blurted.
“My theater!” he later recalled. “I’m praying it’s no one I know. So I got into my car again, and drove to the back of the theater. The Costa Mesa police, the FBI, military security, and other police officers were all there. I told them who I was and asked them what happened.”
Once again, Jeff was informed, “Somebody was murdered in your theater.”
“Oh, my God. I can’t believe this.”
An investigator from the Costa Mesa police introduced himself and asked Jeff for identification. The detective studied Jeff’s driver’s license and nodded.
“Let’s go around to the front of the theater so we can talk.”
The inside of the building was now cordoned off. The two sat down on the steps, and the detective began asking questions.
“Do you know anyone named Dan or Sam?”
“I don’t know anybody named Sam. But I do know a Dan. Dan Wozniak.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He’s a hell of a nice guy. I think he’s a great guy.”
Perhaps pondering the state of Juri’s body at the time she was located, the detective switched topics. “Do you know if the adult males in your cast get along with their wives?”
“As far as I know, they do.”
“What about guns? Do any of them own guns?”
“Well, some of them do.” He explained how actors had occasionally dressed up in Western clothes, complete with rifles, and posed for photos in frontier settings.
The temperature seemed to be dropping, and Jeff was only wearing a T-shirt, so he asked for permission to sit in his car when the interview was completed. The detective agreed. As Jeff studied the activity from the driver’s seat, he saw a gurney being wheeled into the theater. Once again, he told himself that he hoped that he didn’t know the victim.
Who could possibly have died in the Liberty Theater? Jeff tried to visualize what had occurred. He imagined a confrontation in either the theater seats or the aisle and someone producing a gun. After all, the detective had mentioned a firearm.
Exiting the vehicle, Jeff found a member of the base’s security team.
“Where’d the murder take place?” Jeff asked. “Was it in the seats?”
“No, it was upstairs.”
Suddenly the security guard started to cry.
“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked.
“They’re all up there, looking at the body.”
“Did you see it yourself?”
The security guard nodded.
“Well, what did it look like?”
“I don’t know.” The sobs grew louder. “It didn’t have a head.”
Now Jeff started shaking. He needed to talk to his wife. Tracking down the Costa Mesa detective, Jeff asked if he was needed any longer.
“No. Go home. We’ll call you if we have any more questions.”
* * *
It wasn’t always easy to receive news from the States in Afghanistan. But since Sam vanished, Theresa Glowicki felt as if she was in constant contact with people who’d heard rumors or theories. When she finally learned that her friend had been killed, though, she was as puzzled as when she heard that he’d gone missing.
“I knew the kind of person Sam was,” she said, “and I knew that if were in any kind of danger, he’d fight for his life. I could easily see Sam fighting a seven-foot man and coming out the winner.”
Theresa had never met Dan Wozniak and knew little about him. But she felt as if she understood exactly how the murder transpired. “I figured that whoever had done this to him was a coward, and had to have done it fast—and without Sam’s knowledge at all. Because if Sam saw it coming, there was no way that anyone could take him down.”
For Ruben Menacho, the situation was even more confusing. Although he didn’t like Dan, the actor never had appeared menacing or violent. Plus, Dan and Sam seemed to be friends.
“When I found out it was Wozniak, I wanted to know why,” Ruben said. “I didn’t think he had anything against Sam. Sam had helped him out a bunch of times. And the way Julie was killed, it was horrible. I found it hard to believe that Dan Wozniak would do something like that to her. I’m not saying I thought he was innocent. It was just hard to believe. It didn’t make any sense.
“I was thinking, ‘There has to be more to this story.’”
* * *
Over and over again, Jessica Wolf Googled Dan Wozniak’s name, hoping to find a new clue that would explain why her friend Juri Kibuishi was taken so suddenly.
“I was looking up his name, and then I found his fiancée’s name and started Googling her,” Jessica said. “I looked on Facebook because I wanted to see what their deal was, just trying to put all the pieces together myself.
“Already, there were people on the fiancée’s Facebook page, bashing her. And her brother was on there, arguing with people, saying; ‘She had nothing to do with this.’ I felt so stupid, creeping on these people. But I wanted to know who they were, and what happened. Because it was just so baffling to me.
“It still is.”
At a press conference, Juri’s mother, Junko—or June, as her American friends called her—recalled how her daughter always communicated with the family. On the night she died, Junko’s concern had been nothing more serious than Juri’s commute to her brother Taka’s home. “I told her she better leave early because traffic is hard in Long Beach,” Junko said before dissolving into tears.
Juri’s father, Masa, could barely muster the energy to tell the assembled reporters, “I don’t want to say too much. Still, I don’t believe this has happened.”
Each member of the family continued rerunning the events of May 21, wishing they’d done something to prevent Juri rushing to the Camden Martinique apartments. Taka said that, if he could do the night over, he would have ensured that Juri was too drunk to drive and forced her to stay at his home.
“It is horrible to think that anyone in the world can derive this kind of plan,” he said, “and take innocent victims.”
In her mind, Junko continued to replay the moment when police informed her that her daughter was found murdered in the apartment of the man she’d described as a friendly, helpful “teddy bear.” Junko had shaken her head from side to side, telling herself, “No. No. That’s not my daughter.”
On both the storefront theater and the karaoke networks in Orange County, people who’d considered Dan a friend were reevaluating their assessments of him.
“I found him charming,” actor and costume designer Molly Dewane told the Orange County Register. “He was really good with little kids. He was always on time. He had a great sense of humor. I went to a karaoke bar with him and had a wonderful time. I never saw a temper.”
A blogger who called herself “A Mad Mom” wrote about her two daughters meeting Dan while auditioning for The Music Man. Like so many others, they were instantly enchanted.
“The lead role, the Music Man himself, was played by Dan Wozniak,” the writer said. “The now-infamous Dan Wozniak. You know, the freak from Costa Mesa who just murdered two people … perpetually happy guy with the aw-shucks personality and gentle disposition, the guy who everyone loved and admired, including both my daughters, was not the gentle soul he pretended to be.… Who would have known?”
She described Dan as a person who always smiled and joked, elevating the moods of the people around him. Children, as well as parents, admired Dan, the blogger said. Once, she recalled, she approached him in the green room, praising him for both his dramatic skills and the positive energy that he seemed to spread everywhere.
“It makes me wonder,” she continued. “Was Dan harboring those psychopathic thoughts when he was sharing the stage with all those kids?… What was he thinking when he put his arms around my two daughters and posed for one picture after the next.”
Her final encounter with Dan occurred when he was directing her children in the musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress. She wrote, “I had this feeling we’d be hearing a lot more from Dan in the future. I was right. I just didn’t expect the news to be so grisly—and so disappointing.”
Readers of the blog were equally as stunned. “The story is still so heavy on my mind,” wrote one anonymous respondent. “Dan was a fellow karaoke singer.… You couldn’t help but smile or laugh when Dan was around.”
Two days before the murder, the writer said that she texted Dan to invite him to her birthday party. He sent back a characteristically amiable message. “I still cannot believe what he did and am soooo saddened to think that a person I admired could be capable of such a heinous crime.”
Most of the replies to the blog were composed in the same spirit. Although no one defended Dan, everybody seemed to wish that the perpetrator had been another person. “My mind keeps coming back to Dan, too,” another reader wrote. “Total disbelief. Do you think he was psychopathic all the time?”
Dewane told the Register that she was disappointed over not being able to detect the dangerous side of Dan. But she knew that she was far from alone: “I suspect he was one of those people who was really good at holding things in. Still, it’s very difficult to reconcile what I know about Dan with this awful … crime.”
Forensic psychologist Michael Perrotti, Ph.D., speculated that Dan’s actor friends might have disregarded some of his curious behavior as simple nonconformity. “I think because of the nature of their work, actors can be more sensitive to human emotion. They are probably more accepting and less critical … because of the process they go through when working on roles. He may have been showing signs of trouble and people saw it, but dismissed it or minimized it.”
Perrotti estimated that those who’d shared dressing rooms with Dan—and relied on him while performing—might not come to terms with his role in the crimes for months or even years.
Dewane said that she intended to cope by thinking of Dan in the past tense. “It’s like he died. You want to remember the person that was. How could I have possibly worked with someone who could do something like that? I just can’t wrap my mind around this. It’s impossible to.”
As OC Weekly drama critic Joel Beers probed the sentiment in the local theater community, he heard a number of statements that he considered justifications for the extreme brutality that claimed the lives of Sam and Juri. “Some people said things to the effect of, ‘Well, we all possess this inside us. There’s nothing surprising. Theater people are screwed up,’” Beers recalled. “And that’s bullshit. We don’t all possess the ability to kill two people. This was unbelievably gruesome. And two people who are your friends? What the fuck?”
As he attempted to comprehend Dan’s mentality, Beers combed the actor’s social media pages. For Dan’s last birthday, in March, there had been dozens of Facebook greetings. That alone was fairly routine. What Beers found interesting was the tone of the messages. “They weren’t just, ‘Happy birthday, blah, blah, blah,’” he said. “I mean, it was like, ‘You’re one of my best friends.’ ‘You’ve done nothing but support me and help me.’ ‘You’re the greatest guy.’ There seemed to be a lot of genuine affection and love for the guy. And after the murders, people started posting more critical things, and one that really stood out to me was somebody saying that Dan always had a smile on his face, and it bugged the person. And he always offered everyone beer at parties, and this guy said he was trying too hard. You know, it was one of those twenty-twenty hindsight things. Like, ‘No one can be in that kind of a mood all the time.’”
Unlike Dan’s acquaintances, who knew him in social settings, the one time that Beers had observed the suspect was when the actor was starring in Nine. Now the similarities between Daniel Wozniak and Guido Contini were unmistakable. “Here’s the megalomaniac in the play who basically gets away not with murder, but he cheats and he lies,” Beers said, “and everybody loves him because he’s so talented and brilliant and all of that. And by the end of the play, he looks at all the things that make him unhappy and he has this redemptive moment. And I wrote about just how weird it was that here’s the actor who played Guido Contini also dealing with issues of his own doing.”
When the media visited the Starting Gate, part of the circuit of bars where Dan and his friends sang karaoke, one of the customers drew a parallel between the suspect and Anthony John, the central character of the 1947 film A Double Life. Like Dan, Anthony is an actor who appears to lack the barometer to measure the difference between fictional and actual violence. While playing Othello on Broadway, Anthony fatally strangles his mistress and later attacks his press agent.
Ronald Colman received an Academy Award for his portrayal of Anthony. But there’d be no such prize in Daniel Wozniak’s future. As he sat in a jail cell and police continued investigating the double homicide, the pinnacle of his theatrical success was behind him.
The only distinctions that he’d garner would come from his newfound infamy.
Jeffrey Kociencki knew Dan from high school and college and feared that he was destined for some kind of clash with the law. Around Halloween, Dan had texted his old friend about a possible insurance scam. Kociencki unambiguously turned Dan down. Then, a week or so before the double homicide, Dan called Kociencki and mentioned that there’d been a murder at the Camden Martinique apartments. At the time, Dan insisted, he was taking a serene walk by a duck pond. But because no one had seen him there, he wondered if Kociencki was the type of guy who’d be interested in providing an alibi.
“I couldn’t help him out with that,” Kociencki later testified. Believing the tale about the murder at the complex, he told Dan to talk to the police and be honest with them. If he was telling the truth, Kociencki assured Dan, it would all turn out fine.
Still, there was something about the conversation that just didn’t feel right.
At the Liberty Theater, the members of the Hathcock family finally understood why Dan had played such a convincing Harold Hill in The Music Man. All the hints about the peculiarities in his personality were forming a larger picture.
When she wasn’t busy at the theater, Nancy Hathcock earned money by managing a real estate office. After hearing about the commissions that some of the brokers were earning, Dan made an appointment to see her. “I was telling him that he had to get licensed,” Nancy said, “and he let me know that he was already doing real estate with another broker, and he was doing it without a license. He’d make the deal, and the broker would pay him under the table and call it a referral fee.
“Well, if somebody goes out and actually shows you a home, even if they don’t sign the contact—they’ll fill the contract out, and the broker or agent signs it—that is so illegal. The broker can go to prison for allowing that. If Dan was involved in that kind of activity, he’d never get a license in the state of California.
“The way he was talking to me, I realized that this was one guy I wasn’t going to recruit into my office. I didn’t even tell him, ‘Go and get your license, then talk to me.’ We don’t need that type in the real estate business.”
Dan never noticed the disapproval. When the Liberty Theater tried to expand its base, Allyson remembered Dan being eager to assist. One day, he walked into the building with a disc containing the mailing list for the Orange County Children’s Theatre. “He’d done some work for them,” she said, “and I guess he just took it.”
After the arrest, Jeff recollected his interactions with Dan in and out of the theater. “We talked about how jolly he was, and his charisma,” Jeff said. “But now, when I think about it, there was always an underlying tension.” At times, Dan’s inner turmoil worked for him, Jeff said, particularly when the actor was able to channel it into a character onstage. “I’ve directed almost five thousand actors in over one hundred and seventy-five plays. And in Dan’s case, that tension was always there. You could feel it. It was a very palpable thing.”
In December 2009, six months before the murders, the Liberty Theater was presenting Babes in Toyland. Each night after the performances, the family would lock the doors to the lower level of the theater. But if someone was really determined to access the stage, he or she could enter the balcony, where there was a ladder leading to an unlatched trapdoor. This led to a loft, from which one could enter the backstage area.
One day, when the family arrived to prepare for rehearsals, they discovered that someone had come into the theater after it had closed, removing set pieces and costumes. An extension ladder was spread over the seats. “We had two wooden nutcrackers in the show, beautifully painted,” Jeff said. “And those nutcrackers were missing. There was a hole in the ceiling where someone had started to fall through, probably drunk, and plaster on the seats. Someone had tried to pull the Plexiglas off of our control room up there.”
At the time, the family concluded that some of the Marines from the base had invaded the space. Then, in March, while the cast was rehearsing for King Arthur, the Hatchcocks heard footsteps on the catwalk—about thirty-five feet up. Jeff contacted security at the base. “They went up there and found some cigarette butts, Coca-Cola, and a half-consumed bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” Jeff said.
“Jack and Coke. That was Dan’s drink. That’s when I remembered that Dan knew how to get into the theater through the balcony, and began to think that he was the one who went up there.”
Both invasions occurred within days of Dan’s visits. “The two times when he came to the theater, he was on edge, like he was thinking about something,” Jeff said. “And the costumes that were stolen, those were male costumes. Also, why would someone just take set pieces? So I began to think, no, it wasn’t a soldier who broke in. It was an actor. It had to be somebody in theater.” Remembered Allyson, “Dan kept coming in, and then things would disappear.”
When Allyson saw Dan again, she’d mentioned the thefts. “By the way,” she told him, “there was some stuff missing after you were here that last time.”
Dan replied by flashing her a sly smile. “Ya, ha, ha,” he said dramatically. “You caught me.”
Allyson smiled, as well. But she felt that Dan was hiding the truth. “The attitude I got was, ‘Let’s see you try to prove it.’”