Police estimated that it could be two or three years before Dan went to trial. The suspect’s father had had a good career in the aerospace industry, and detectives imagined that he’d hire one of the region’s better attorneys. However, investigators heard that while Daryl Wozniak initially took this proposition seriously, he eventually determined that the weight of the evidence was so strong against his estranged son that Dan’s guilt was a foregone conclusion.
Dan’s parents had assisted him his entire life. But this time, they were not going to jeopardize their savings to protect a murderer. There had also been a rumor that Steve Wozniak might contribute to the legal fund. Although Dan had told Jeff Hathcock that he wasn’t related to the Apple co-founder, he’d apparently boasted to others about a family tie. But this, like so much else about Dan Wozniak, turned out to be fiction.
* * *
Before Juri’s body was cremated, her family asked that she wear the tiara that her brother gave her on the night that she died. In August 2010, the Kibuishis traveled to Japan with Juri’s ashes. A fund drive, sponsored by the Orange County Register, had raised approximately four thousand dollars for the family, who subscribed to the Japanese belief that the remains of unmarried children should be reunited with those of their ancestors.
“This was definitely an emotionally challenging, but needed, trip for the family to take,” Juri’s brother Taka told the newspaper. “Our pain and our sorrow will never go away, but this trip will be the closing of the first chapter of our lives after Julie was taken away from us.”
Juri’s mother, Junko, also placed some of her daughter’s ashes in an urn and surrounded it with flowers, photos, and another tiara to remind her of Juri’s spirit. Junko said that she planned to keep the item in her bedroom for the rest of her life. After her death, she specified, she wanted the ashes of mother and daughter to be mixed together.
Because of the way that Juri’s body was found, investigators naturally assumed that the killer had some kind of an emotional—or, at the very least, sexual—connection to the victim. Very quickly this notion was obliterated.
“At first thought, it was, ‘Okay, we have a homicide,’” Det. Jose Morales recounted. “‘Must be some kind of boyfriend involved.’ Then, the case started taking so many other turns. I think we were all kind of surprised, just scratching our heads. Bizarre? Yeah, very bizarre.”
In June, a special circumstances committee had gathered at the Orange County District Attorney’s office to consider the details of the case. Under California law, the death penalty could be considered if aggravating factors outweighed mitigating factors. Mitigating factors were conditions that diminished the defendant’s guilt and supported a more lenient punishment. Aggravating factors were defined as “any facts above and beyond the circumstances of crime that increases the wrongfulness of the defendant’s conduct, the enormity of the offense, or the harmful impact of the crime.”
Based on the nature of the double homicide and the vulnerability of the victims, among other factors, the committee instantly and unanimously decided to pursue the death penalty.
“Some murders are committed with such a depraved heart and in such a callous manner that the only punishment that fits the crime is the death penalty,” District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said in a statement.
The Wozniak investigation was now designated a Special Prosecutions Case, supervised by Rackauckas and a team he’d selected. Among other trials handled by the same unit was the largest medical fraud prosecution in the United States, the Unity Surgical Outpatient Center case. According to prosecutors, healthy people were enlisted from all over the country for unnecessary surgeries, including tummy tucks and hysterectomies, enabling the medical center to bill insurance companies approximately $154 million.
The Special Prosecutions team also targeted Alejandro Avila, who, in 2005, was sentenced to death for killing five-year-old Samantha Runnion in the city of Stanton in western Orange County. She’d been playing a board game in her yard with a friend on July 15, 2002, when Avila approached the girls and asked for help finding his Chihuahua. Samantha’s interest was piqued. “How big is it?” she asked.
Avila quickly grabbed her and threw her into his green Honda. The girl tried to hit and kick her abductor but couldn’t escape. As Avila drove away, the child screamed out to her friend, “Tell my grandma! Tell my grandma!”
The next day, Samantha’s nude body was found in an isolated area near Lake Elsinore, sixty miles away. It had been posed conspicuously to display the killer’s handiwork. An autopsy would reveal that Samantha had been sexually assaulted, as well as strangled.
The death inspired California to implement a statewide Amber Alert program.
Avila had been on police radar after being accused of molesting an ex-girlfriend’s nine-year-old daughter and her cousin. Although he’d been acquitted in the case, investigators continued to view him as a sex offender and found his DNA on Samantha’s body and Samantha’s DNA in his vehicle.
Detectives believed that the genetic material might have come from the little girl’s tears.
“For the heinous crime he committed against Samantha Runnion, the only appropriate punishment is death,” Rackauckas said when the penalty was imposed, “although it still falls short of justice.”
For the Herrs and Kibuishis, though, the thought of hearing a judge pass sentence on Daniel Wozniak both motivated and comforted them. Yet almost from the beginning, they realized that that day would be a long way off.