Daniel Wozniak was arraigned the next morning at 8:30. Unlike the Grand Jury, this hearing was a public event, drawing the victims’ relatives, as well as the media.
During the two years he’d been incarcerated, Dan appeared to have gained some weight, lengthened his sideburns, and grown a goatee. Hints of gray could be seen in the twenty-eight-year-old’s beard, as he chatted with his lawyers, Tracy LeSage and Scott Sanders, in a mustard-colored jumpsuit, limbs shackled.
Despite what appeared to be a powerful prosecution position, Dan continued to insist that he had nothing to do with the crime. When the judge asked how he intended to plead, spectators strained to hear the defendant pronounce, “Not guilty.”
It was the first time that Sam’s cousin Leah Sussman had ever seen Dan in person. “Just being in the courtroom, in his presence, I shook the whole time,” she said. “It literally made me sick. I felt nauseous.”
To those who knew Dan from theater, it did not seem implausible to imagine him addressing the court as the main character from Arsenic and Old Lace:
“Well, usually, I’m Mortimer Brewster, but I’m not quite myself today.”
“I’m sorry, Judge. But a thing happened.”
“Even the cat’s in on it!”
But there were no theatrics in the courtroom that day. The entire proceeding took less than five minutes. Then, Dan returned to his cell while the reporters, detectives, and attorneys spilled out into the hallway with curious onlookers and the victims’ loved ones.
The indictment was “long overdue,” Steve Herr told the Orange County Register. “If it can expedite the trial, all the better.”
In Steve’s mind, Dan’s guilt was already determined, and a jury reaching the same conclusion would not be enough for him. Alluding to an upcoming referendum to reconsider capital punishment in California, he said, “If there’s a case for keeping the death penalty in the state, this is it.”
* * *
Once the press published the details of the Grand Jury hearing, Juri’s friends finally understood how easy it had been to set the bait for the considerate girl they knew from dance class. Jessica Wolf could visualize Juri relaxing at her brother’s home with a tiara on her head and receiving an urgent text from a friend. “It was so in her character to run out to help somebody,” Jessica said. “I thought, ‘God, she would totally do that. She would come in the drop of a hat.’”
Recalled Natalie Jameson Sommer, “She always put other people before herself.”
It was the same reaction that Juri’s family had had. “She did what she always did,” her mother, Junko, said, “for friends.” In fact, Junko would later wonder if she’d made a mistake by raising her child to always show kindness.
As they gathered at the dance competition at the Disneyland Hotel to reminisce about Juri, both Jessica and Natalie felt her absence. “You meet a friend who’s never danced and they ask how it’s going, and, you know, it’s awkward,” Natalie said. “It’s so easy with a dancer. Even if you haven’t seen each other in a while, you start talking and it’s like all that time never passed.”
Now they’d never have the opportunity to bump into Juri again, muse over their childhood memories, and laugh about their fellow dancer’s new stories.
But Natalie would never forget the day, five years earlier, when she realized this sad truth. She’d been in her car, going to modern dance class at Orange Coast College, when she was struck with an unsettling feeling. Usually every day she received a text from Juri—nothing specific or detailed, just a friendly reminder that Juri was looking forward to seeing her at school. When there was no message, Natalie’s intuition told her that there was reason for concern.
Then, her friend Faye Creedon texted three cryptic words: “Have you heard?”
A few minutes later, another friend from New York texted: “Have you heard about Julie?”
Now Natalie was truly scared. She’d already parked her car when her phone rang, and she felt a chill run through her body. It was her mother on the other end of the line.
“Natalie, I need you to sit down. I need you to stay calm. And I need you to listen to me.” There were already tears in Natalie’s eyes when her mother continued, “There’s an article in the newspaper about Julie.”
Natalie listened, but the words didn’t fully register. Julie murdered? Who would want to murder Julie? “There was head trauma; that’s all I knew,” Natalie recalled. “I mean, ‘head trauma.’ What does that even mean? Nothing like this had ever happened to someone I knew, and somebody so nice, who everybody loved. I still cry, just talking about it.
“I had a friend die in a motorcycle accident. One of my grandparents died of cancer. Another one of my grandparents died of a heart attack. But how could someone have killed Julie in cold blood? It blows my mind to this day.”
That morning, Natalie was supposed to have a modern dance final. She entered the classroom but quickly realized that she was incapable of functioning. “I’m really sorry,” she told her teacher. “I just found out that Julie Kibuishi was murdered.”
“Julie Kibuishi?” The teacher appeared to be shaken by the news. “Just leave, Natalie. You can’t dance right now.”
After she drove home, Natalie attempted to distract herself by turning on the television. But a fictional crime show was on. The topic: detectives investigating a murder. Now Julie was like one of those characters on television. Julie. Why Julie? Natalie began bawling all over again.
Without any additional information, Natalie began weaving scenarios in her mind. Maybe Julie met a psychopathic guy who took advantage of her trusting nature. Or maybe she wasn’t really killed at all. “The article said ‘head trauma,” Natalie said. “Maybe she fell.”
Natalie was still obligated to teach her dance classes. “I was driving to the studio in San Clemente, with a heavy heart, just thinking about everything,” she said. “I didn’t know Sam Herr. But the police seemed to think Sam had done it. And now Sam was missing. Where was he hiding? I was so angry at him.”
Prior to leaving her home, she’d copied a link to the article about Juri’s murder and sent it to all the parents of her students, as well as friends and relatives. She wanted everyone in Southern California to be vigilant and help the police find Sam Herr. When she arrived at the studio, her face was streaked with tears. “A couple of my students came up to me, and they just hugged me,” she said. “And I remember just crying. Because when children hug you, they really understand what’s going on. That was a big moment, being comforted by my students. They knew I was hurting inside.
“I was in a funk for weeks. My husband—who was my boyfriend at the time—didn’t know how to make me feel better. Because how do you feel better when something like that happens? You can’t.”
Jessica Wolf was also trying to come to terms with the crime. “The dance world is so small. So I remember my phone just blowing up. Everybody was trying to put the pieces together. And now, with social media, it’s like, ‘boom, boom, boom.’ My sister dances, too. She’s three years older than I am, and teaches at the studio where we trained. So she was hearing her own rumors and theories. And then, we’d get on the phone, and try to figure things out. It was just a roller coaster of emotions.
“I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about it until now. I tend not to vocalize things. I remember keeping things inside, but doing things like choreographing a number, and saying, ‘Do this for my friend, Julie.’ Little things to make me feel better therapeutically. But I could never really think about the details of how she was killed. I didn’t want to think about what actually happened to her. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.”
Whenever Jessica logged on to Facebook, she immediately went to Juri’s cousin Cathy Katagiri’s page to see if the family was providing updates. But Cathy appeared as baffled as everyone else. Jessica also had vivid memories of seeing Juri’s parents at performances and tried to imagine what they were experiencing. “I can’t even fathom going through that as a parent. As a parent myself, it kills me.”
Two years after the double homicide, it still seemed incomprehensible. Yes, the Grand Jury testimony had reinforced the concept that both Sam and Juri were guiltless players in the scheme of a madman. But, to Juri’s friends, Sam was chosen because he had money. Juri provided nothing to Dan Wozniak, they believed, other than a dead body that could help cast suspicion on someone else.
“It was like, ‘I need this other person to cover my tracks,’” Jessica said. “And that just made the whole thing more senseless.”
She had no idea how random Juri’s death had been.
What detectives couldn’t tell the public was that Dan had initially targeted another young woman to divert suspicion to Sam. A few months earlier, Sam and a group of friends had been out together and the veteran ended up going home with a girl named Petra. Dan knew the story and, after the shooting in the attic of the Liberty Theater, he used Sam’s phone to text Petra in an effort to entice her into coming to the victim’s apartment.
Thankfully, Petra never responded. Unfortunately, at that very moment, Juri happened to text, asking: “What’s up, buddy?”
The poor timing turned the kindhearted dancer into the most ill-fated person in Orange County.
“I am convinced that if Dan Wozniak hadn’t been caught, he would have killed again,” Det. Sgt. Ed Everett said. “He couldn’t reach Petra, so he killed Julie. Who thinks like that? Serial killers do.”
As she pored over the detectives’ statements about what they claimed Dan told them in the interview room, Natalie felt like she was reading the synopsis of a movie. Then, she was struck by the fact that Juri was part of a horrible true-crime story. “That’s when the anger would come back,” Natalie said. “Juri was beautiful in every way. She was so sweet and didn’t deserve that. I’ve heard people say that life isn’t fair. But when someone you know becomes the example of that, you just feel helpless.”
Remembering how she was incapable of teaching her dance class after learning about Juri’s murder, Natalie was puzzled by the allegation that Dan stepped out onstage and performed after slaying two people. “How could you have the capacity?” she asked. “I’m getting the chills just talking about it.”
At times, Jessica wished that Juri had lived away from the familiar cocoon of Orange County, where the glow of Disneyland’s lights often lulled residents into believing that danger was elsewhere. “When I’m in LA, I always feel like I need to protect myself,” she said. “When I came to New York to audition, I zipped up my belongings and made sure I was paying attention to where I was going. But maybe this would have happened anyway. You’re never guarded when you’re around the people you’re close to. She thought she was going to help Sam. No one would have imagined that there’s someone on the other side of the door, waiting to kill you.”
If there was any common ground that Jessica could find with Dan, it was experiencing the pressure of planning a wedding. Jessica and her husband, Mark, had married six months after the dual murder and were living some of the same anxieties as Dan and Rachel. “Weddings are hard and expensive,” Jessica said. “We wouldn’t have had a honeymoon if my husband’s parents hadn’t gifted us one. But is it worth killing someone to have the money for a honeymoon? I mean, we live in Southern California, five minutes from the beach! Was it really that important? It’s crazy to think that that would be a motive to kill people.”
* * *
Like Juri’s friends, Steve was also digesting the Grand Jury testimony, hoping to find some hidden truth in the statements uttered by the detectives and the senior deputy district attorney. Along with Jessica and Natalie, Steve wished Juri had been more cynical and realized that the texts that she was receiving from Sam’s phone were being sent by someone else. “When she got the message ‘Please, no sex. I need to talk to someone,’ she had to know that wasn’t Sam,” Steve said. “She did kind of laugh it off, and say, ‘What are you talking about? You’re like my brother.’ But Sam would never talk to her like that. That all came out of Wozniak’s mind. I wish she’d stayed away. Then, at least she’d be alive today.”
Just as Steve felt survivor’s guilt for outliving his son, he was burdened with a sense of responsibility for Juri’s death. If she hadn’t befriended Sam when she started tutoring him, nothing bad ever would have happened to her. At Orange County College, she would have continued with her classes, then graduated and ended up in the fashion industry while teaching dance to children. Maybe she would have married her boyfriend in the Marines and started a family, giving her parents joy instead of sorrow. As Steve attempted to decipher the details of the case, he was determined to see justice served—for his own family, as well as the Kibuishis.
The problem was that, even after the indictment, Steve continued to feel closed out of the investigation. “The cops don’t tell me much, and neither does the DA,” he complained in 2012. “I want to know more, but they won’t let me. I just wish I could look at the evidence, but I know that’s not going to happen.”
What Steve did have was the phone records from the day his son died. In Steve’s living room, he’d pull them out of a file and read them over, desperately trying to re-create the final hours of Sam’s life.
At 10:32 a.m., the documents indicated that Dan called Sam and asked him to assist with moving some objects at the Liberty Theater. At 11:28, Sam phoned Dan, possibly to confirm the appointment. At 12:12 p.m., Dan called Sam, probably to tell him where specifically to meet.
Steve pictured the two of them leaving together a few minutes later, with the rugged Army vet naïve to the fact that the actor was about to end his life in the playhouse.
At 12:25, Raquel, who’d been assisting Steve at his school, phoned her son. Sam sounded happy but kept the conversation short. “I’m helping somebody,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”
The casual exchange marked the final time that Sam—with his murderer positioned beside him—would talk to his mother.
Spreading out the phone records in front of a writer, Steve wanted to continue dissecting the case. But he couldn’t. Authorities had told him that he was going to be a witness at the trial and needed to choose his words carefully. Nonetheless, he continued talking to reporters. Maybe a member of the media could pass on a piece of intelligence that he hadn’t heard. At the very least, he hoped that the press would continue to advocate for the family.
“I feel I need friends in the media,” he said. “I’m being left out of the investigation of my son’s murder, and I’m being treated unfairly. If they take Dan’s word as gospel, and don’t investigate other possibilities, they’re making a mistake. A lot of times, I feel that the people involved in the investigation aren’t competent. I might be absolutely wrong. I hope I am. I’ve given them a lot of information, and they don’t tell me what they’ve followed up on. So I vent to these newspeople.”
Detectives regularly assured Steve that they were dedicated to ensuring that anyone involved in the crime was punished. But in an area as populated as Orange County—there were more than three million residents in 2012—other cases constantly arose, and resources were spread thin.
In the meantime, Steve continued talking to Sam’s friends and neighbors, hoping to discover something that hadn’t been uncovered. “I knew Sam and I knew his friends,” Steve said. “Friends tell the father more than they’re going to tell the police.”
Sam’s acquaintances were not always as forthcoming. “When you speak to certain people, you can feel their discomfort,” Steve said. “If someone tells me, ‘Well, I don’t feel comfortable talking about this,’ I have to ask if he’s hiding something. Then, I go back to Sam’s true friends, and see if they’ve felt the same bad vibe from this person. If they do, then something’s amiss.”
Although authorities suspected that Dan had learned about the money in Sam’s account directly from the victim, Steve wasn’t so sure. Perhaps Sam had mentioned his savings to another associate who then conveyed the information to Dan. Whether the person had simply made an innocent remark or been in on the plot Steve wasn’t sure.
Steve knew that he sounded paranoid. But when he considered the way that his son had died and the manner in which Juri was lured to her death, Steve believed that the mistrust was justified. “I know that there are more people involved,” he said. “I don’t know the reason they got involved. All I can do is speculate, and hope that the police and the DA are doing the same thing.
“I want answers, and I’ve been promised that they’ll go over every question I have. But when? I want them to do it now. And I want arrests. I want more arrests.”