In May 2012, a Grand Jury finally convened to consider the evidence that police had spent two years compiling against Daniel Wozniak.
“It’s been long overdue,” Steve told the Patch Web site after learning about the proceedings. “I wanted this to be done a year ago. I just want to find out the whole story. We still don’t know everything that happened.”
In senior deputy district attorney Matt Murphy, Dan was facing an adversary who’d never lost a murder trial. Murphy had started out as a junior clerk in the Orange County District Attorney’s office during the summer after his first year of law school, working on small misdemeanor cases. He never left.
In 2008, he prosecuted a pair of white supremacists accused of fatally bludgeoning and stabbing a clerk during a 7-Eleven robbery. Suresh Dass, fifty-five, was looking forward to visiting his oldest son in India as he worked an overnight shift at the Irvine store on March 2, 2004. “His wife wanted him to stay home with the family, since he was going to be gone in a few days,” his brother, Rejenbra, told the Los Angeles Times. But Shuresh needed the money and decided to go to work anyway.
At 2:30 a.m., Travis Justin Frazier, twenty-five, and Spencer William Fox, twenty-four—both heavily tattooed with racist insignia—entered the convenience store, masked and clad in black. Wielding a heavy metal flashlight, Frazier battered Shuresh seven times over the head, fracturing his skull. As the clerk lay bleeding on the ground, Fox climbed over the counter and stabbed him with a large hunting knife, piercing his heart.
Yet the robbers didn’t know how to open the cash register. While Shuresh lay dying, Fox ordered him to explain how they could gain access to the money. He either refused or was incapable of telling them. Using his knife, Fox attempted to pry the device open but was unsuccessful.
The intruders would leave empty-handed that night, yet they seemed to derive pleasure from stealing the life of a hardworking immigrant. Glancing at the victim on the floor, the two peeled off their layers of clothes and fled, running through the parking lot in hysterics, either too arrogant or obtuse to comprehend that the entire incident had been captured on video.
Several yards away, two security guards in a parked car saw the men running from the crime scene and instantly became suspicious. One raced into the store to attempt to help the clerk. The other drove behind the suspects, pursuing them to an Anaheim apartment complex. Police were immediately alerted and set up a perimeter. A police canine named Rambo followed the discarded clothes to Frazier, while Fox was taken into custody a day later.
As murder cases went, this was far easier for law enforcement than the killings of Sam and Juri. Murphy used the video surveillance to demonstrate the viciousness of the crime to the jury. By June, both Frazier and Fox were convicted and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
In 1999, Vincent Choy Cheung—who, like Daniel Wozniak, occasionally worked as an actor—became irate that his onetime boyfriend, Guy Thomas Whitney, a voice and music teacher at an Irvine conservatory, was now dating Lawrence Wong, an internationally known pianist. On July 27—after failing to ingratiate himself to Whitney with gifts that included one hundred videotapes of Academy Award–winning films—Cheung snuck into his former lover’s home, where Wong was now living. Police would find Whitney at the bottom of his stairs with thirty-six stab wounds, including seven to his face. Upstairs in the master bedroom, Wong had been stabbed twenty-five times.
After learning that Cheung had been stalking the new couple, detectives began investigating him, discovering a diluted water droplet in his car. When forensic experts tested the material, it fluoresced positive for a mixture of blood that could be traced to all three men.
During a five-week trial in 2003, Murphy told jurors how Cheung had “stepped in blood at the crime scene, so there’s bloody footprints all over the house. That’s probably the most compelling evidence we had.”
The jury was convinced.
Murphy would settle for nothing less in the Daniel Wozniak case. The first major hurdle would be persuading a Grand Jury that Dan’s crimes were worthy of prosecution. Although it seemed like a foregone conclusion, prosecutors were unwilling to leave anything to chance.
Grand Juries differ from criminal trials in that the purpose is not determining guilt or innocence but rather if there is probable cause to believe that the defendant may have committed the crime. This is not a miniature trial with the defense calling rebuttal witnesses. In fact, suspects are often unaware that the Grand Jury is taking place. Nineteen Grand Jurors are selected to consider the evidence. If the prosecution is persuasive, twelve of the nineteen will submit a report with the presiding judge calling for an indictment.
On May 3, 2012, Matt Murphy faced the Grand Jurors in the California Superior Court building in Santa Ana—an institutional structure of concrete and glass—and inquired if any had a conflict of interest. “Do any of you know socially or have any of you heard anything about the case or any of the persons named which would cause you to not render an unbiased decision?” he asked.
He looked from person to person. No one appeared to know either Dan or the victims.
“Let the record show,” the jury foreperson announced, “that no member of the jury has retired” from the proceedings.
Det. Mike Delgadillo was then asked to recollect his exchanges with the defendant. Delgadillo assured the panel that Dan had not been coerced into making his confession.
“Was he threatened in any way?” Murphy asked.
“No.”
“Did anybody point a gun at him or hit him or anything like that?”
“No.”
“Okay. So after waiving his Miranda rights, there were no threats or promises made to him to secure any of these statements? Is that right?”
“Correct.”
The detective described how the initial interview with Dan focused on the suspected bank fraud rather than murder. “When we found out through Wesley,” Delgadillo said, referring to the actor’s sixteen-year-old accomplice, “that he was implicated as the orchestrator of this credit card–ATM scam, we felt that there was enough to arrest him on that. When we brought him in, during the interview, this thing basically exploded on us.”
During the first interview, Murphy told the Grand Jurors, Dan “kind of said, ‘Yeah, I know, Sam is on the run, and he is taking money out, and I am sick of covering for him,’ and things like that. And then, the interview ended. He went down to his jail cell and said, ‘I want to talk to you guys again.’ He informed the jailer, and the jailer brought detectives back in.
“… At which point, Mr. Wozniak told [Delgadillo]…, ‘Okay, here is the deal. I murdered Sam. I took him to this theater and I shot him in the head.’”
The deputy district attorney asked Delgadillo how Dan had described the murders.
The suspect initially “indicated to me that he lured Sam,” Delgadillo said. “They both drove together to the military reserve base at Los Alamitos. The location on the base was the theater.… [Wozniak] had done rehearsals there at the theater on the base.
“They both arrived at the theater. There is an attic, with a ladder leading up to the attic. And he told Sam, ‘I need you to help me move some stuff up in the attic.’
“They both walked up to the attic together. Sam walked up to a piece of furniture in the attic, and Wozniak indicated to him, ‘I need you to help me move this.’
“Sam went down and started moving this article. Wozniak had a .38-caliber, semiautomatic pistol with him, pointed it at the back of Sam’s head, and shot him once in the back of the head. At that point, Sam fell to his knees, looked up at Mr. Wozniak, and said…, ‘Something happened. I just got electrocuted.’”
Realizing that Sam was still alive, Dan attempted to fire a second time, Delgadillo testified. But when Dan pulled the trigger, the weapon apparently jammed.
“He reached for the slide,” the detective said, “pulled the slide back, ejected the jammed round out of the gun, and shot Sam one more time, as he looked up at him, in the temple. At that point, Sam fell to the ground.”
Although Dan appeared to have accomplished his goal, police said that he now shifted tactics from committing murder to purging the crime scene of evidence. With blood pooling around Sam’s body, “Mr. Wozniak said he attempted to find the discarded shell casing, but he couldn’t find it,” Delgadillo told the Grand Jurors.
Thinking about the next series of crimes that he hoped to commit, Delgadillo said, Dan rifled through Sam’s pockets for his ATM card, keys, and cell phone, utilizing the device to convince Juri to make a late-night stop at the victim’s apartment.
Playing off of Juri’s consideration for others, Delgadillo said, Dan had little trouble setting a trap for the talented fashion student. “He had taken Sam’s telephone, and had made contact with Julie Kibuishi,” the detective said. “He was texting her, leading her to believe that Sam was texting her.”
Investigators said that the texting had begun while Dan was backstage at the theater where he was performing hours after he left the scene of Sam’s death. In essence, he was singing and dancing while orchestrating a second murder.
“Okay,” Murphy replied. “And what did he tell you about those texts? What did he say the purpose was? Take us through that.”
“The following night, he had texted Julie, who was at her brother’s house in Long Beach. Julie believed that the texts she was receiving were coming from Sam.… ‘I need you to come to my apartment. Stuff going on. I am having family problems.’”
Dan told detectives that he’d been downstairs in his own apartment, trying to get Rachel Buffett to go to sleep. When Juri arrived, Dan claimed that he came upstairs and met her at Sam’s front door, using the veteran’s key to enter the residence. In the living room, Dan apparently said that Sam was anxious to talk to her about some problems. While Juri waited for Sam, Dan went into another area of the apartment and loaded his gun. He then supposedly summoned Juri into the bedroom to look at something. When she did, she was shot twice in the head with a .38 that Dan said he’d stolen from his parents’ closet approximately two years earlier.
According to authorities, Dan explained that his motive had been “to basically make it look like Sam had been involved in a love triangle situation,” Murphy said, “that he murdered Julie as a result of this love triangle, and that that would explain why nobody could find him, and why money was being taken from his account.”
Dan told his interviewers, “I killed Sam first, and then, I killed Julie,” Delgadillo testified to the Grand Jurors. “He said it was all about the money. It was one hundred percent about the money.”
Delgadillo elaborated about Dan’s monetary issues. “He was a financial mess,” the detective testified. “He had a pending marriage coming up. He had bills to pay. He was in arrears on his rent for two months. He had no way of paying for the wedding or the reception. He wanted to go on a honeymoon or a cruise, and he had no way of paying for it. He basically had no money to his name at all.”
Hoping to underscore Dan’s intentions for the Grand Jurors, Murphy queried, “Okay. And did he say that in the context of his motivation for the murder?”
“Yes.”
Even before Juri was killed, Delgadillo said, Dan was trying to procure Sam’s funds. After the murder of Sam, the detective claimed, Dan “left the base. He ended up going and picking up Wesley … and they went and withdrew money from Sam’s account.”
The plan was to siphon off the cash in small increments, according to police—from the sixty-two thousand dollars Sam had received from the Army. “Mr. Wozniak was aware of that, and he planned on eventually draining that account and making withdrawals every other day for four hundred dollars,” Delgadillo said.
Before he was captured, Dan had acquired approximately two thousand dollars, the district attorney’s office reported.
It was a number that would plague Steve Herr’s thoughts. “I cannot believe that somebody would do something like this to a young man and a young woman just for a few thousand dollars,” he’d say. “My boy is gone, and I’m thinking, ‘What a waste. What a waste.’ He saved all his money so he could buy a house, go to college, and get married, and this guy takes it all away.”