One day after the confession, a reporter contacted Dan’s father, Daryl. Stunned by the recent chain of events, Daryl Wozniak said that his son was in a coma.
A Costa Mesa police spokesperson told the press that Dan had been taken to Western Medical Center on Thursday, May 27, with self-inflicted head injuries. Authorities believed that, when Dan was alone in his cell, he’d attempted to commit suicide.
Whatever rage Dan had been hiding had now been unleashed on himself. To those who’d seen him onstage, it was easy to imagine him uttering a line by Guido Contini in Nine: “Nothing in my life makes sense.”
It was a statement that not only applied to Daniel Wozniak. Friends and family of both Sam Herr and Juri Kibuishi were experiencing the same feelings.
Sam Herr’s friend Ruben Menacho wondered if Dan had been trying to kill himself—or take himself out of commission before his words got other people in trouble. Like Miles Foltz, Ruben suspected that those close to Dan might be part of the plot. “I was thinking, ‘There has to be a reason why Dan Wozniak tried to commit suicide,’” Ruben said. “’Maybe the cops aren’t doing the right investigation.’”
In the OC Weekly, Joel Beers wrote that he’d wished the public was more interested in the loss of Sam and Juri than the killer himself. Yet Beers—like almost everyone else following the case—could not contain himself from analyzing the alleged perpetrator. That the accused was also an actor—an actor many in the community knew and considered a friend—made the crime even more mystifying and, Beers admitted, more tantalizing.
“Making the accused murderer rather than his victims the focus of any conversation about a crime is an unfortunate reality,” Beers wrote. “Victims of violent crime can be anyone; perpetrators are the agents who break our collective social covenant, exposing the rank currents that lurk beneath the apparent placid surface of daily reality. As such, they are fascinating, if wholly unsavory, train wrecks.
“… It’s tempting for creative-minded people to look at this story as a case study of a highly talented actor obviously wrestling with deeply disturbed and submerged issues finally snapping during a well-received run in a challenging play and on the verge of marriage. A case of self sabotage to an unimaginably horrible degree.”
Beers speculated over a legal strategy that might depict Dan as
a young man with serious psychological issues and under economic and emotional strain … led to the breaking point through the process of laying his emotions bare by crawling into the skin of a greatly tortured egomaniac (on stage).
Not inconceivable perhaps, but it would be really shitty. Because the simple truth is if Wozniak indeed did commit the murders, he deserves no empathy, analysis or explanation.… Those who choose to take the stuff of dramatic fiction out of the theaters and into the sunlight are not tragically flawed heroes. They’re just evil fucks.
Head scars and bruises notwithstanding, Dan rallied in the hospital and his health quickly returned. After two days, he was sent back to the Orange County Jail while investigators continued to use the suspect’s words to piece together the circumstances surrounding the double homicide.
On Friday, May 21—the day after Dan ran into Sam and Juri by the elevator—he told detectives that he lured Sam to the Liberty Theater on the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base. The theater was empty that day, and Sam thought that he was going to help Dan move a few items. But when they were alone, Dan said, he shot Sam in the head, stole his ATM card, wallet, and cell phone, and left him in the building.
On the same day that Dan was smashing his head against the hard surfaces of his cell, police found Sam—naked and headless—upstairs in the theater’s loft area, near the lighting booth. His hands had been chopped off, as well as the upper portion of his left arm, in a bizarre effort to camouflage the victim’s identity.
“It’s a very cold, calculating and heinous crime,” Det. Sgt. Ed Everett told the Los Angeles Times. “He probably took some time to plan it.”
Later, the sergeant would remember the conversation: “I told the reporter that it was very heinous because it appears to have stemmed from a financial gain kind of thing. The fact that we have our first victim and then the second victim is lured to the location … I just can’t fathom that.”
But what he did sense was that there was more to the story. Police were continuing to question Dan’s associates to determine who “may potentially have assisted in it or may have helped him after the fact,” Everett said. “My guess is that there’ll probably be some future arrests.”
* * *
When Ruben learned the details, he reexamined everything he had done that Friday. Early in the afternoon, he’d been invited to Huntington Beach with Sam’s neighbors Jake Swett and Dave Barnhart. “I asked if they were with Sam,” Ruben said. “And they told me, ‘No, just come over.’”
Ruben thought that the group was going to meet Sam at some point. “We started driving to the beach,” he said, “and I get a text message from Sam’s phone, saying, ‘Some issues with my family.’ Issues with his family? That was kind of weird. And something else—Sam always called me ‘Rube,’ but in the text message he was calling me ‘bro.’”
Confused by the digital exchange, Ruben attempted to call his friend. “The first time, no one answered. I called back and someone picked up. You could hear a lot of wind over the phone. And it’s like, ‘I’m dealing with some stuff with my family. I’ll call you right back.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ And he hangs up.
“I knew it wasn’t Sam.”
At the beach, Ruben again inquired about Sam. “Dave tells me, ‘Oh, Sammy’s helping Dan set up some tents.’ For the wedding. So we had a regular beach day—hot dogs, beer.”
As the afternoon was winding down, the group struck up a conversation with a beachgoer who’d come on his bicycle and gave him a ride home. Eventually, the trio ended up drinking at the Goat Hill Tavern in Costa Mesa. “We’re talking in the bar,” Ruben said. “Everything was normal. But it just didn’t seem right that Sam wasn’t answering and he didn’t call me back all day.”
But maybe the process of putting up tents took longer than Sam realized, and then he’d rushed over to his parents’ house to work out whatever family difficulties they were having. Only later did Ruben dissect the terminology of the text message and the fleeting phone call—but that was after he knew that, while he was drinking beers and walking along the surf, Sam was being murdered at the Liberty Theater.
Ruben would also ponder Dave and Jake’s motives that day. Were they simply being friendly by inviting an acquaintance to the beach, or did they purposely want to isolate Sam from a friend who would have intervened before Wozniak’s plan could be carried out?
“I mean, everything is questionable,” Ruben said. “Out of anger, I wanted to blame everybody.”
Before detectives ruled out accomplices, though, they had to question not only the members of Dan’s social circle but everyone associated with the theater—in order to ascertain that nobody assisted Dan with the murder.
They discovered that no one was more shocked by the details of the macabre scene than the Hathcock family.
They remembered walking across the base one night while the investigation was under way and running into Wesley Freilich—the teen accused of siphoning Sam’s funds back to Dan—and his mother.
“What are you doing here?” Allyson asked.
“Well,” the mother answered. “Wesley’s going to join Sunburst.”
The Sunburst Youth Academy was a military-style program run by the National Guard and the Orange County Department of Education. Over a period of five and a half months, students lived on the base in a disciplined structured environment while developing academic and leadership skills, as well as badly needed self-esteem.
The program’s motto: “Change your life and be proud of yourself.”
Most of the attendees were falling behind in school and struggling socially. Wesley hadn’t visited the theater in a while. As he aged, he’d developed something of an attitude. But since he’d been such a prodigious young actor, Allyson was surprised that he required this type of regimentation. She lowered her voice.
“I wouldn’t expect Wesley to be involved in something like Sunburst,” she told the mother. “What happened?”
“Oh, don’t worry,” the mother answered. “You’ll hear all about it on the news.”
At the time, because of his age, Wesley’s name was not being released to the public. Det. Sgt. Ed Everett had told the press that the teen was not considered an accessory to murder. Nevertheless, it was possible, the sergeant said, that Wesley might be charged with other crimes.
The Hathcock family’s befuddlement over Dan’s involvement in a double murder eventually gave way to anger. Not only had he snuffed out the lives of two people, but he also had greatly complicated the life of the teenager who idolized him.
“I don’t think Wesley knew that Dan had killed anybody,” Nancy said. “But here he was, just a kid, and now he’s mixed up in a murder case. Maybe Dan said, ‘I have a source of money here. Don’t worry. It’s nothing at all.’ He was a habitual liar, and the Pied Piper leading Wesley.”
As the particulars of the crime were being slowly filtered to the public, Nancy became convinced that Dan never thought about the impact that Wesley’s participation would have on the boy—the same way that the suspect hadn’t bothered to consider the way that the arrest would hurt the doting parents who’d turned up at his every performance. “Dan was the golden child. The sun rose and set on him. He didn’t talk to his parents for months, and then this. They weren’t in the best of health, and something like this could have killed them. But I don’t think he cared.”
Contemplating the events that had occurred at the Liberty, Allyson noted that Dan never realized how close he’d come to leaving an extra body behind: “When Dan chopped Sam up, he missed the live wires by centimeters. There were live electric wires back up there. So Dan could have electrocuted himself.”
From what the family understood, after Dan shot Sam he left the body in the theater but returned a day later to begin dismembering it. At one point, Allyson said, Dan entered a barbershop located near the theater space and borrowed a pair of scissors. “He came back a few minutes later and said, ‘I need a bigger pair.’”
After authorities removed Sam’s body from the building, the Hathcocks walked along the crime scene in an effort to retrace the chronology of the incomprehensible crime. In the ceiling above the lighting booth, they noticed a series of round, recessed lights. “When we looked up,” Allyson said, “one of the lights was covered with blood. So that was off-putting. It was eerie when we realized that.”
* * *
Just across the border from Los Alamitos in Los Angeles County sits El Dorado Park. Bordered on the east by the San Diego Freeway and on the north by the Long Beach Towne Center mall, the park appears to be self-contained. Molded largely from soil used to create the San Gabriel Freeway, the 450-acre oasis includes a campground, soccer and baseball fields, basketball, volleyball, roller hockey and tennis courts, a skate park, rock walls, a one-hundred-acre nature center and three lakes where visitors can ride pedal boats, race remote-control sailboats, and fish for trout, catfish, carp, largemouth bass, bluegill, and redear sunfish, among other species.
* * *
On the northern end of the park, the Long Beach Police Academy trains its new recruits. After Dan’s arrest, a contingent from the Long Beach Police Department—as well as agencies from Costa Mesa, Orange, Los Angeles, and Ventura Counties, the FBI, and the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office—converged on El Dorado to find the body parts that Dan claimed to have discarded there. For two days, they searched the grass with cadaver dogs, finding an arm and a hand in a shallow hole covered by leaves on Friday, May 28.
It was the day Dan and Rachel were supposed to get married.
It wasn’t until June 5 that authorities discovered the final missing body part: Sam’s severed head. Like the arm and hand, it was partially decomposed and had been scavenged by animals.
“Our son was cut into pieces,” Steve told the Web site Patch. “He was just a guy, a regular guy. He was a guy going to college and a decorated combat veteran. He died just before his twenty-seventh birthday.”
Despite the gruesome findings, Raquel was relieved that Sam’s body had been located. Finally, indisputably, the authorities knew that her son was a true victim, not a suspect who had chosen to go on the run.