One of the few consolations for the Herrs was the concern that Sam’s friends expressed for their well-being. Even as they struggled with trying to pry information from investigators and prosecutors, their son’s Army companions regularly called and visited.
“As a matter of fact,” Steve said in an interview one Friday afternoon, his features relaxing into a smile, “two more are coming on Sunday. And another one just flew in. He was with Sam his last few months in the Army. He’s on leave from Hawaii, and he wants to come down. They come all the time. They’ll call up and say, ‘Look, I’ll be in town soon, so could I come and spend a few days?’”
In particular, the couple had grown close to Miles Foltz and Ruben Menacho. “Miles is just the opposite of Sam,” Steve said. “Miles is very quiet and laid-back. Very introverted, but he’s the sweetest guy. We love him. He’s like our adopted son. Just like Ruben. But Ruben’s a very different type. He’s a big tough Marine who’s just a knucklehead like Sam.”
Every day, it seemed, another soldier was Friending Steve Herr on Facebook. When the number exceeded twenty, the group decided to form a page called Sam’s Buddies, featuring photos of Sam in Afghanistan and Germany, updates about the murder probe, military humor, and holiday greetings. “You look at the camaraderie,” Steve said, “and you realize that these guys are going to carry Sam’s memory the rest of their lives. People can say whatever they want about the case, but when you go through Sam’s friends, you’ll get the true story.”
Despite the passage of time, Sam’s friends remained loyal. On Valentine’s Day, Raquel received flowers. When a veteran graduated from college, the Herrs were invited. Another former soldier invited Steve to be the best man at his wedding “to fill in for the real best man, Sam.”
* * *
The murders not only impacted the lives of the people close to the accused and the victims. In Los Alamitos, the Liberty Theater received more attention for the murder and decapitation than it ever had for its plays.
The building had been the realization of a dream that Jeff and Nancy Hathcock had harbored since they’d met as idealistic drama students at Cal State Long Beach. With their daughter, Allyson, assisting, the two enjoyed a status about which many in their position fantasized: parents and an adult child laboring at a mutual love together and succeeding.
Now they had to fight to stay in business.
“We had pictures in the lobby of all our shows,” Nancy said. “All the ones that had Dan in them, we took them down.”
As she did, her anger rose at the actor who’d once mockingly called her facility the “Mayberry of theaters.” “We’d been so nice to Dan over the years,” she said. “And he had to choose our theater to do something so terrible. The gall, the nerve. He killed two innocent people, destroyed their parents’ lives, broke his own parents’ hearts, and then did this to us with no regard for the work we put into the theater. It just added insult to injury.”
After the police investigation began, the family painted over the white plywood where Sam’s blood had splattered. But they could never erase the horror of what had transpired in a space that had been designed to teach children the art of theater and bring joy to the families in the audience.
Nancy claimed that visitors to the Liberty heard noises that completely unnerved them. The family already believed that the place was haunted by ghosts. But those had largely been benevolent spirits, they said. The new creatures, according to the Hathcocks, were more menacing and represented the gruesomeness that had occurred on the grounds.
“One lady told us she saw them and they were about nine feet tall and dark,” Allyson said. “They just kept popping up, making growls and screams.”
The Hathcocks consulted a psychic and met with a priest from St. Hedwig, the Roman Catholic church on Los Alamitos Boulevard, near the base. He asked Allyson to gather a group of friends who shared her Catholic beliefs, then led them to the scene of the murder to pray.
The ritual seemed to calm the family’s nerves about dark forces lurking in the theater. But in the secular world, reports of the murder continued to distress actors and patrons.
“One thing we were grateful about was that, when there were news reports about Dan, they never showed a sign for the theater on TV,” Nancy said. “But everyone knew what happened, and it greatly disturbed our child actors and kids who came to our shows. The old ghost stories about the theater never bothered them. Those were old ghosts, not fresh, harmful ghosts. It was like Casper for them. But this was so different. Some parents told us their kids didn’t want to come back after the murder. And it made it worse that Dan—Mr. Personality—was the one being accused of killing these people.”
Like Wesley Freilich, another teen actor had viewed Dan as a mentor. When others began referring to Dan as a murderer, the boy would react with rage.
“He refused to believe that Dan would have anything to do with that,” Jeff recalled. “He was very adamant about it. Several of the other kids sided with him.”
As the troupe attempted to perform their next play, the young man was “very surly, very rude,” Allyson said. “He had a personality change, and caused a lot of trouble. All he wanted to do was get back at anybody who talked badly about Dan.”
Every two years, the commander of the Joint Forces Training Base changed, leaving the Hathcocks nervous about the new regime’s receptiveness to their endeavor. After the murders, though, the family was burdened with an even greater cause for concern. Although they’d done nothing to cause the crime, the Hathcocks were treated differently than they’d been before.
“The military was angry about the media attention,” Jeff explained. “The murders were giving negative publicity to the base. Every story mentioned that Dan was an actor. They were trying to build up that angle. He was an actor, and he committed a murder in the theater. But the base was mentioned over and over again because that’s where the theater was.”
From that point forward, the once-hopeful aura of the theater changed. Even when people came to the shows, they couldn’t resist looking up and pointing, trying to discern where Sam Herr had been killed and decapitated.
“It wasn’t fun anymore,” Allyson said.
To Jeff, “it was like a pall was over the theater. It had lost its innocence.”
As it was, the aging building needed retrofitting. The roof leaked. The Hathcocks wanted a new stage floor. The military began to consider other uses for the venue once used to host USO dances.
In 2012, the Liberty Theater closed—one more victim, the Hathcocks insisted, of Dan Wozniak’s self-centered explosion of violence.