There was so much investigators still didn’t understand. “I think when people look at Dan,” Costa Mesa detective Carlos Diaz said, “they just can’t believe that he actually did what he did.”
Diaz noted that if he were to run into Dan at a restaurant or party, his instincts would probably not alert him to the possibility that the smiling actor was dangerous. And Diaz—who’d been hanging around police stations since his teens—believed that he had pretty good intuition about that type of thing.
Growing up in a strict Central American household, Diaz was repeatedly warned to stay away from the Hispanic gangs he saw in Santa Ana. Like fellow detective Jose Morales, Diaz became involved with the Explorer Scouts in high school, training with the Costa Mesa Police Department and assisting with chores such as traffic control and manning parade routes. As he observed the veteran police officers, he was enticed by their sense of mission.
“Nothing was routine,” he said, “and it looked like exciting work.”
After graduating from high school at seventeen, Diaz was hired as a cadet by the Costa Mesa police. Meanwhile, he took classes at Orange Coast College and then Stanford University. By the time he graduated, he was already a full-time police officer.
Very quickly he learned that there was a price to pay for wearing the uniform: “There are people out there who really want to hurt you. But there’s also good people you meet as a police officer, good people dealing with bad situations. You see the whole spectrum of life.
“It’s weird to be twenty-two years old and you’re expected to tell someone forty or fifty years old what to do. You get a domestic call, and you have to make these bold decisions, and you’re a single guy who’s never been in that kind of relationship. It’s just a very eye-opening experience. You really have to earn your keep. It’s a sink-or-swim world.”
Early on, he was privy to homicide investigations because he was one of the few officers at the time who spoke fluent Spanish. It was heart pounding as he looked at a blood-covered corpse and observed the emotionality of the witnesses. But he had to keep himself calm and translate every word properly.
One misinterpreted phrase, he understood, could mean a mistrial or an acquittal.
Because of his awareness of the nuances of the criminal justice system, he was chosen as an investigator in the Crimes Against Persons division without ever working in Crimes Against Property. “I leapfrogged in a way,” he said. “But I felt prepared for this job. It’s not the kind of unit where someone’s going to hold your hand and walk you through things. You’re a homicide detective. You’re in this unit because, obviously, you know what you’re doing. Start doing it.
“I had great partners who helped me the first couple of months get into it and really get on the ground and start running. There’s a lot of unwritten rules. You have to be a hard worker. You have to be a person who’s willing to put in the time. You have to earn your keep on some things—taking cases other people don’t want. And then, you have to sink into it, dive into cases that are hard and complex. You need to get that experience so that when the big one comes you have the ability to solve that case.”
Even when interviewing hardened criminals, Diaz strived to be honest and relatable. “I like to be straightforward,” he said. “People don’t look at me as an abrasive person. I always try to be a good listener. My style is to let people just talk and tell me their story, and then we go back and start going over the facts. I tell everybody from the start, ‘Hey, I expect you to tell me the truth. If you don’t, I’m going to catch you in the lie. I always do. And then, I’m going to really come after you, plain and simple.’ But I do it in a friendly manner.”
In the early days of the Wozniak case, Diaz was guarded about what he could disclose. But it was clear that the investigation was going to be a long, difficult process. “This was pretty strange,” he said. Detectives were particularly bewildered by the logic Wozniak applied to justify killing two people whom he appeared to like. “It’s almost like you can’t write a story like this.”
At first, authorities were hesitant to tell the public why Dan and Sam were together on the day of the murder, how they ended up in a theater on a military base, and why the thespian was driven to homicide. Even the victims’ families were uncertain. Through Miles, Steve had heard the theory that Dan owed money to a loan shark and needed a fast windfall of cash. But Steve wasn’t sure if the story was true or Dan’s associates had planted it with Miles in order to cover up either their involvement or the collaboration of others close to them.
As much as possible, Steve tried to convey his misgivings to law enforcement. In the days after Sam’s body was located, he accompanied Det. Sgt. Ed Everett to the Liberty Theater and ascended to the spot where the murder took place.
“This is where we found Sam,” Everett told the grieving father.
Steve stood back and studied his surroundings. “It was up in the rafters, a very small area,” he recalled. Looking around, he tried to imagine the last few moments of his son’s life. “I began to think that maybe somebody was up there with Sam, somebody who got Sammy’s attention away, and Dan went behind him and blew his brains out. I truly began to believe that.
“Everybody told me they didn’t think Dan had the brains to do this alone—so somebody had to be in it with him.”
Steve told Everett his theory. After the investigators had mistakenly thought that Sam Herr was the number one suspect, there was nothing that they were going to discount now. Steve wasn’t the only person who’d expressed cynicism about Dan being the lone architect of the crime. Detectives weren’t taking any possibility lightly.
In his mind, Steve wished that he had been lurking somewhere in the theater to help Sam. It was impossible, of course, but the thought was comforting. Any scenario that had Sammy alive and well soothed the agony that tormented the Herrs while they were awake and haunted their dreams when they went to sleep.
“Sam was my child, my strongest link and my weakest link,” Steve said. “When I say ‘weakest link,’ I mean it’s the fear of something happening to our children that’s our weakest link. I’m still thankful I had Sam for twenty-seven years. But I envision how that bastard put two bullets in his head and dismembered him every single day. But you know what hurts me more? As a father, I wasn’t there for him. Logic says I couldn’t have been. I get that. But it still hurts that I couldn’t be there for my son. I just wish I could have protected him, thrown myself in front of the bullets. I think about it all the time.”
Long after the case was adjudicated and the detectives had moved on to other tragedies, Steve would be alone with those pictures playing in his head. He understood why the detectives were hesitant to apprise him of every finding, particularly when there was so much that they were still learning about the events of May 21. But Steve felt like he couldn’t wait for the case to play itself out. He needed to understand every detail right now.
“I want to know the whole story of the murder,” he said. “Why did Dan Wozniak choose Sam? Why did he choose Julie?”
Everyone who’d been following the case had a theory. Online, people who’d never met any of the actual players began to weave their own plotlines. In one, Dan was so desperate for cash that—after killing Sam—he began calling the slain veteran’s friends to shake them down. When Juri refused to provide more money or Sam’s PIN, the premise went, Dan killed her, too.
But it was a flimsy supposition. As a college student, Juri did not have the kind of funds Dan needed. And as much as Sam liked her as a friend, the only person with whom he’d share his PIN was his father.
Plus, if Dan was only interested in money, why did he stage what appeared to be a sexual assault?
In the Internet age, Steve and Raquel were able to read every hypothesis. Indeed, some were provided by readers of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, and OC Weekly directly following the legitimate online stories about the case. At times, Steve stopped and considered the suggestions. More often than not, the dearth of knowledge intensified his frustration.
While friends and relatives were able to offer comfort, Steve realized that the only people who truly related to his feelings were the members of the Kibuishi family. A few weeks after the double homicide, he and Juri’s brother Taka met to compare notes.
Later, when authorities found out, the pair were told not to meet again. Steve was not persuaded by the directive: “Don’t tell me about any rules. There are no rules. My son and Taka’s sister were killed. We want to find out how it happened—and exactly who is responsible.”
* * *
Once Dan was in custody, neighbors said, they’d regularly see his fiancée, Rachel Buffett, and her older brother, Noah, in Dave Barnhart’s apartment. Depending on their opinion of Rachel, observers believed that she was either coming to terms with the crime or strategizing about how to protect herself from law enforcement.
Rachel claimed that she was thunderstruck by the revelation that the man she intended to marry was capable of such cruelty. “After we found out that Dan had actually committed both of these murders, I’m finding out random, different lives,” Rachel told the Dr. Phil show. “Jobs that he never had. People that he talked to on the telephone that never existed. A condo he never owned. Overdrawn bank accounts. On top of everything, I found out that the ring that he had given me was not his grandmother’s. His parents had never seen it before.
“After I’m finding all of this out, I’m starting to question if I’ve ever known him. I absolutely feel like I was duped by Dan.”
Noah had been at his sister’s side almost from the moment that Dan was handcuffed. After her first interview with police, Rachel had a friend drive her to Noah’s home. “She wanted to let everybody know that the wedding was off,” Detective Jose Morales would testify at a pretrial hearing. “She notified her parents of what happened with Dan and the arrest. And they were trying to make plans to cancel their wedding.”
With her friend, Rachel said that she then drove to the Wozniak family home in Long Beach to inform his parents of their son’s legal predicament.
“They were there for about an hour or two, I believe,” Morales said. “And on the way out, they came across Tim Wozniak, Dan’s brother. It appeared that he was driving to the parents’ house. [Rachel] … had a brief conversation with him where she notified Tim that Dan had been arrested.
“She said that Tim had gotten very nervous and was fumbling with his phone … and said that, he, Tim, had some kind of weapon. She told me that she didn’t want to stick around any further for any other information and left.”
Perhaps Rachel was worried because she knew that Tim Wozniak might soon be arrested, as well. The weapon he’d mentioned turned out to be the gun used in the murders. Some members of law enforcement believed that Tim might not have initially been aware of the precise way that the pistol had been utilized. But he knew that Dan hadn’t taken the gun from the family home to shoot sparrows.
Just putting his hands on the gun tied Tim to a very serious crime.
After the murders, Dan had apparently given his brother a box—along with explicit instructions not to open it. But the next morning, Dan purportedly became upset when his brother called to ask about the contents in the box.
From Sam’s extensive travels, he’d accumulated quite a bit of foreign currency. Dan had stashed a backpack in the box that included the wallet containing the foreign money—along with the killer’s bloody clothes, the murder weapon, and the tools used to dismember Sam.
Once Dan was in custody, detectives discovered that Tim had possession of the incriminating items. As a result, police charged Tim and his girlfriend, Lisa Golledge, with being accessories to a murder after the fact—or helping Dan hide or dispose of evidence. Both would plead not guilty.
Tim was released on twenty thousand dollars bail. Lisa’s bail was higher, since there were unrelated charges pending against her, but she was soon home, as well.
* * *
When the story of Tim’s arrest appeared in the local media, Steve’s brother-in-law brought over a newspaper and pointed to a photo of the captive. Steve studied the picture and immediately recognized the face.
On the night that he’d been staking out Ecco’s Pizza in Long Beach, hoping to catch the person who’d been withdrawing Sam’s money, Steve had seen Tim Wozniak in the restaurant. He was the guy who’d been highly agitated, speaking into a cell phone and pacing in the aisle by the bar.
The pizzeria was close to the Wozniak family home, and Steve surmised that Tim had been on the phone with his brother. Whatever Tim was hearing on the other end wasn’t making him happy.
It was one of the few pieces of the story that Steve believed actually made sense.
* * *
Noah Buffett would draw the attention of law enforcement, as well.
The day after Sam’s murder, police said that Dan visited Noah’s home and left with a saw, an axe, and a number of garden tools. Dan then “drove to the Los Alamitos base, where Sam’s body was,” Morales testified, “and he proceeded to cut his head off, cut off the hands and the forearm, the left forearm of the body,” in an attempt to make the cadaver less recognizable.
Not only had Dan used Noah’s tools to dismember the body; the killer was also seen driving his future brother-in-law’s pickup truck.
In fact, during the weekend of the murders Noah had complained on social media about Dan keeping the truck too long—so long that Noah joked about possibly de-Friending his sister’s fiancé on Facebook.
When Noah realized what Dan had done with the vehicle, he allegedly deleted the post. Nevertheless, police were able to tie him to the crime. Like Tim Wozniak, Noah was arrested on suspicion of accessory after the fact, or assisting in the disposal of evidence.
Noah pleaded not guilty, and the charges were eventually dropped. He’d later contend that both he and his sister had been misled by Dan. As with Wesley Freilich, Tim Wozniak, and his girlfriend, Noah had gotten too close to the actor, he’d argue, becoming just another character in the tragedy Dan scripted.
“It’s bewildering to find out that you don’t really know somebody,” Noah told Dr. Phil. “He duped all of us.”