At the time of Dan’s arrest, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department was eager for positive publicity.
In 2009, Sheriff Mike Carona—dubbed “America’s sheriff” by national talk show host Larry King—was convicted of trying to convince an aide to lie to federal investigators probing department corruption. Carona, a thirty-two-year veteran, had been one of the most popular public figures in the region, greeting constituents with hugs rather than handshakes and telling a compelling story about growing up in an alcoholic household and finding purpose in law enforcement. When a child killer from Orange County went on the run, Carona looked into the camera and pronounced, “Don’t eat. Don’t sleep. Because we’re coming after you.”
After Carona was elected three times, his name was touted as a possible candidate for lieutenant governor when Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for the state’s highest office.
But, behind the scenes, Carona was exchanging favors with political donors, including one who recorded him for investigators. In 2007, he was indicted on six felony corruption counts. While the sheriff’s wife sat supportively in the courtroom, his mistress stood trial, as well.
Although he was only convicted of one charge of witness tampering, he was sentenced to sixty-six months in a federal prison.
It was one of a series of embarrassments for the department. In 2006, John Derek Chamberlain, an inmate booked at the jail for alleged child pornography possession, was fatally beaten by a group of fellow prisoners who believed that he was a child molester.
One inmate would later claim that sheriff’s deputies ordered him to deliver a “touch up”—or beating—to Chamberlain.
Three deputies resigned after an Orange County District Attorney’s report claimed that guards at the jail were napping, texting, and watching television instead of monitoring—and stopping—the violence.
In the wake of these and other scandals, the department decided to allow a TV crew into the five facilities comprising the Orange County Jail system to interview inmates for the MSNBC TV show Lockup. “In six episodes, the show achieved its mission to air nothing but positive, rehabilitating OCSD imagery,” R. Scott Moxley opined in an OC Weekly blog.
If that was the intention, the effort would later be complicated by the inclusion of Daniel Wozniak in the program.
The producer remembered scouring the jail, marveling at the variety of inmates. “There’s everybody from someone who looks like your neighbor—who’s been arrested for a DUI—to a gangbanger who’s tattooed from head to toe. I didn’t expect that. But when you consider that Orange County is right next to Los Angeles, it does make sense.”
Most of the seventy-thousand inmates in the county’s jail system were awaiting trial for crimes ranging from petty theft to homicide. Some would be released or bailed out within hours of their arrests. Others, like Dan, could sit in jail for years before their cases were adjudicated.
With deputies standing nearby, the producer and associate producer walked from cell to cell, introducing themselves and asking inmates to tell their stories. At one point, the producer said that she briefly met Dan. But her attention had been on other details, and she hadn’t had a chance to speak with him and find out how he ended up behind bars.
Still, she couldn’t forget his face.
Several weeks later, while the show was already in production, the two crossed paths again in the jail. “There was a guy walking past me in a line of inmates,” the producer said. “He was quite tall and really stood out. His jail-issue uniform was way too small for him. He was wearing these pants that were up to his shins. It was completely bizarre. Usually, the jail-issue uniforms are too big. And this guy just looked like a giant in there.
“He smiled and called me by my name. I knew I’d met him before, but we meet literally hundreds and hundreds of people when we’re doing these shows. But he had one of those faces.
“Besides being really good-looking, that smile was unique. He didn’t look like a criminal. Usually, if you meet people who look like him when you’re doing this job, they’re just seeing the inside of a jail for the first time. It’s a pretty heavy experience. They’re depressed, struggling. And he wasn’t like that at all.”
The producer turned to the deputy accompanying her. “What’s that inmate’s name?” she asked.
“Wozniak. Daniel Wozniak.”
With the associate producer trailing behind her, the producer introduced herself. Dan was pleasant, chatting as if they were meeting inside a restaurant or outside a theater. “Would you be interested in being interviewed?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Okay. Let me set that up.”
There was another room where the camera crew had arranged their lights and audio equipment. It was a quiet space, where the subject wouldn’t be distracted by the stares and comments of other inmates. While Dan returned to his cell to shave, the producer told the cameraman and audio engineer to get ready. She’d found someone who looked like he’d make an interesting interview.
Soon Dan came by with a paper bag lunch, provided by the jail. “I usually ask the guys to give me a cell tour,” the producer said. “He was in a, I don’t know, maybe an eight-by-ten room. Just a box in an older part of the jail where there’s metal bars on these long tiers. It’s very depressing. And here he was, acting like he was entertaining guests.”
When he knew that the camera was on, Daniel began his monologue: “Yeah, you just have little things around here. Got the sink, toilet. It’s small, but, you know, it is what it is.”
Although he was living in cramped surroundings, Dan claimed that his spirituality was sustaining him. “It’s small.” He chuckled. “But, yeah, you got the bed. You got the Bible. Coffee, milk. Jesus is with me.”
He also described the jailhouse cuisine. “Bag lunches every day.” He flashed his smile. “Sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs. Most of the time, it’s either bologna or ham.” He looked through the contents of his bag. “Uh-oh. Extra bread today. Look at that.” He chuckled and started performing in earnest. “You get your little carrots like this. And, of course, plenty of mayo. So then, what you do is pretty much eat the carrots and then”—he squirted his mayonnaise packet into a bowl—“you have this … little bowl. You can mix everything up, like egg salad sandwich, stuff like that. You know, on some days, it gets really good. You can put vanilla pudding or chocolate pudding, mix it with your milk, stir it up, you got a milk shake.” He assembled a sandwich together on bread. “So you learn little secrets like that. Bon appétit.” He took a bite.
While this was transpiring, an associate producer had done a Google search on Dan and forwarded a number of articles to the producer. She scrolled through them, astonished that the jokey character in front of her was accused of beheading a friend and scrawling obscenities on the body of a woman he’d shot. “I couldn’t believe it. We sat down for the interview, and just started talking, and it went from there. I think the strangest part for me was trying to connect the charming, affable man with the crimes that he was being charged with.”
Like the investigators and the families and friends of the victims, the producer wanted to know more about what occurred on the weekend of May 21, 2010. But Dan was cautious about what he was willing to divulge.
“He would get uncomfortable when I would question him about certain aspects of the charges,” the producer said. “He didn’t want to incriminate himself, understandably so. He hadn’t gone to trial yet. It’s always tricky doing interviews with people who are in the middle of that phase.”
“I want people to know that I’m a good guy,” Dan stated, then tried to make light of his circumstances with humor. “I’m easygoing. I enjoy long walks on the beach. I’m an Aries.” He laughed.
His manner became slightly more serious. “I just want people to know that, no matter what, throughout all this, I’m a really good guy. Almost everyone in my life will say so.”
At times, the producer wondered if Dan was really as nice as he appeared. “He would kind of slide back and forth, getting agitated and then slipping straight back into actor mode—charming, smiling, maybe feeling a little remorseful. You know, I live in Los Angeles and have grown up around aspiring actors, and there are certain personality traits that seem kind of across the board that you need to succeed as an actor. And one of them is to be able to turn it on. He knew how to turn it on. He knew how to connect with people.”
Not surprisingly, Dan questioned the veracity of news coverage about the case. “The honest truth of what they’re saying I’m not really sure,” he said. “Since I’ve been here, I haven’t been able to read the paper. I don’t know what they’re saying. One time, I turned on the TV in the pod or whatever, and then, I just saw my picture on television. It was a mug shot that they got from the police department. They put together some old YouTube videos of me. I was in theater, so they were just flashing that all over the news.”
When the producer went online to show Dan other news reports, he became tense. Looking at his photo on-screen, he muttered, “Oh, great, that mug. Oh my God.” He shook his head and appeared to tear up. “It makes me look like Satan himself, that I orchestrated and planned all this. This is, that’s, I’m sorry. I can’t.”
The producer showed him an image of Sam. “This is your friend,” she said.
“Yeah,”
“Why did this happen to your friend?”
Dan stammered. “I, I can’t get into that. I can’t get into that. I can’t. I’m, I’m sorry. I can’t. I really can’t. I cannot.”
What he would offer was, “I know his body parts, they say, were found in a park.”
And Dan acknowledged being connected to the theater where Sam was killed and dismembered, but only as an actor. “There were two shows that I did there,” Dan said. “One was Charley’s Aunt, and the other one was Arsenic and Old Lace.” He laughed, at either the memory of being onstage or the irony of appearing in a play about homicide. “Yeah, I played Cary Grant’s character. So a lot of fun.”
Dan emphasized his great affection for Sam and Juri. “The two victims were two of my close friends,” he claimed. “Sam lived in the same complex that me and my fiancée lived at. He had helped me out on several occasions. Just, he was there for me, you know? I needed him, and Julie was just a friend in the group. Just very, two of the nicest people. Two of the nicest people that I’ve ever known.”
While avoiding the fine points of the case, he asserted his innocence. “They were saying that I shot both of them and decapitated one of them.” He shook his head. “That’s not true.”
In describing the arrest at his bachelor party, Dan tried to affect a comedic air, as if he were telling a story about receiving a parking summons. “You know, our meal was over. We paid the bill. And all of a sudden, this. It was a swarm. It was a swarm of police. Came in, grabbed me, pulled me up, put me in handcuffs, and dragged me out of the back of the restaurant. And I said, ‘Uh, ok-aay? Hello? How are you? My name is Dan. What can I…’” He chuckled. “You know?”
Once he got to jail, though, he said he realized the gravity of situation and felt the compulsion to end it all. “I was alone in a room and there was, there was a wall. And I, they’re all stone, so I saw the corner and I said, ‘If I jump and hit my head, maybe all this will go away.’ And, um, it’s still here.”
Among the most difficult aspects of his incarceration, he maintained, was the separation from Rachel. “If I was given the opportunity to talk to my fiancée right now, I’d either say, ‘Can I be with you out there?’ ‘Can you be with me in here?’ Just, I mean, the bond, I just love her. Like, that’s, that’s the hardest part about getting through my day is just knowing that I can’t be with her, period. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it says: ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ It does. It really does.”
But, according to Dan, God would help him weather this challenge. Opening his New American Bible, he read from Psalm 39: “‘Lord, let me know my end, the number of my days, that I may learn how frail I am.
“‘You have given my days a very short span; my life is as nothing before you.…
“‘Turn your gaze from me, that I may find peace before I depart to be no more.’”
He looked at the producer. “It’s one of my favorite ones,” he said of the verse.
“Why?”
“It just touches home. It, to me, it’s just exactly just how short life really is, you know. It makes it a lot easier in here, knowing, you know, our time here is just so short, you know. Life is just a short time, but eternity’s forever.”
Nevertheless, he told her, he intended to fight the government’s effort to convict and sentence him to death. “The death penalty is something that they are seeking,” he said. “Whether it happens or not … I have full faith in the truth, and the truth will set me free. And everything will come to be. I just pray daily. That’s it. And not so much for myself, but for all the lives that have been shattered through this event.”
After the interview ended, the producer was uncertain about how to interpret Dan Wozniak’s words or behavior. “Another bizarre interview with another bizarre inmate,” she said. “We try not to judge. It’s really hard to know.”
But, because she’d conducted so many jailhouse interviews before, she realized that she couldn’t part company with Dan without having him sign a release, allowing the production company to use his words and image on television. When the task was complete, the producer took a photo to match his face with his name. “It was as though he was posing for headshots,” she said. “I noticed it. The whole crew noticed it.
“Most people will go through phases in a situation like this. They’re trying to escape from the horror of being arrested. Somebody who’s an actor has found a way to be somebody else who can take him away. I don’t know if reality had landed for him yet.”
* * *
Dan’s story was broadcast on MSNBC on March 26, 2011. At the time, there was much that the public didn’t understand about the details of the crime. After the episode ended, the uncertainty persisted.
But those who’d known the suspect were largely certain of one thing: in customary fashion, Dan Wozniak was lying.
The Hathcocks were particularly surprised by the sight of the actor reading the Bible out loud. “He used to make fun of his parents’ Catholic faith,” Allyson claimed. “It was kind of like, ‘Oh, aren’t they quaint in their beliefs?’”
To Jeff, Dan’s talk about Jesus being in his cell was almost laughable. “He was not sincere about it at all. I guess they all get religion in jail, when the chips are down, don’t they?”
Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas had seen that type of behavior before. “He’s an actor who considers himself to be a star, and all other people to be living props in his play,” the prosecutor told OC Weekly.
Sheriff’s department spokesperson John McDonald had a similar reaction. “I thought it showed Wozniak is a bad actor,” he said, noting that his sympathies were not with the inmate’s struggles behind bars but the victims’ families.
In Anaheim Hills, Steve and Raquel Herr studied every gesture as they watched Dan on the screen, attempting to elicit compassion. “It made great television,” Steve told the newspaper. “But it’s not fair and balanced to let Wozniak say anything he wants before the trial, and not have the Costa Mesa police, a prosecutor, or me on the show even for a minute to tell the public the truth. This monster killed my son and Julie. That’s the truth.”
As Steve sighed heavily, tears formed in his eyes as he looked at reporter R. Scott Moxley. “Do you know how hard it is to watch him smiling and laughing on that show after what he’s done? He decapitated my son. Let him say he’s innocent. He’s an actor. He knows how to fake emotions.
“… My whole life is now dedicated to winning justice for my son. That show wasn’t about justice. It was about letting Wozniak perform. Everyone who saw it thought it was very sympathetic to him.”
In reality, though, many viewers shared Steve’s cynicism, as well as his conviction about the fate that Dan deserved.
“I don’t want him to escape with life in prison,” Steve said. “I want revenge. I want Wozniak dead.”