In a pressed button-down shirt, his hair and beard neatly trimmed, Dan Wozniak leaned back in a darkened courtroom, watching a video of himself projected on a screen for the benefit of the jurors.
The prosecution wanted the court to see the actor performing in Nine after Juri Kibuishi was murdered.
“This is not a great moment in my life,” Dan’s character, Guido Contini, was heard saying with a believable Italian accent. “I have a great many things on my mind.”
By contrast, the real-life Dan Wozniak, now thirty-one, appeared carefree, smiling and scratching his beard and occasionally leaning in to exchange a comment with his lawyer Scott Sanders. After five and a half years of delays, Dan was finally on trial, seated at the far end of a long table, facing Superior Court Judge John D. Conley.
At the opposite side of the table, senior deputy district attorney Matt Murphy stood, his hair noticeably grayer than when the proceedings began, leaning on a podium, his eyes transfixed on the image of Dan—bathed in a spotlight on a small stage at the now-defunct Hunger Artists Theatre, singing for the appreciative crowd.
Certainly, the notion of Dan performing in a play after committing a murder was jarring. The videographer testified that Dan—normally a “perfect actor”—seemed “a little bit off” that night, hesitating to the point that some feared he might drop, or miss, a line. Nonetheless, the man onstage exuded so much life, joy, and creativity, it seemed odd that this was the footage that Murphy had chosen to help convince a jury to sentence Dan to death.
But this was not the only video that Murphy planned to show at the trial. And what would follow would be far more damning.
The trial began on December 9, 2015, after prosecutors overcame one final obstacle. On November 13, Conley ruled that Costa Mesa police did not violate Dan’s Miranda rights during his interviews when he mentioned the possibility of speaking to a lawyer before quickly changing his mind and continuing to talk. As a result, Sanders’ request to have the confession thrown out was denied.
Although Dan was pleading not guilty to the two murder counts, the attorney who’d spent so much time focusing on minutiae offered nothing resembling a vigorous defense at the trial, waiving an opening statement and not calling a single witness. Rather, the defense strategy appeared to be saving its efforts for the penalty phase after the inevitable verdict was rendered.
Still, this didn’t deter Murphy from methodically building his case for the jurors.
“It was all about the money,” the prosecutor said in his opening statement. “That was it.”
On the same screen he’d later use to show Dan performing in Nine, Murphy projected a chart outlining the defendant’s plan to acquire the funds he desperately needed:
1. Don’t get a job.
2. Figure out Sam’s PIN, kill him and take his ATM card.
3. Find someone else to withdraw money.
4. Use Sam’s phone to lure a woman (any woman) to Sam’s apartment.
5. Murder her as a decoy for police.
6. Stage the scene to make it look like Sam did it in the midst of a sexual assault.
7. If questioned, use charm and acting skills to make sure police spend all their time looking for Sam.
The evidence against Dan was overpowering, Murphy said. An invitation for Dan’s wedding was found in Sam’s apartment, for example. The handwriting on the envelope matched the scrawl on Juri Kibuishi’s body. And there’d be more: crime scene photos that illustrated just what the handsome actor was willing to do to other human beings, incriminating Internet searches, and video of Dan initially attempting to outsmart detectives and, finally, describing the homicides, as well as Sam’s decapitation, in detail.
By the time that jurors broke for lunch, Murphy was finished with his opening statement. At this pace, it appeared that the trial would end relatively quickly.
* * *
With Miles Foltz, Sam’s friend from Camp Keating, holding Raquel’s hand—and occasionally warning overeager reporters to keep a respectable distance—alongside her sister, Miriam, and her husband, Mike Nortman, Steve took the stand and described the way that he found Juri’s body—stripped and adorned with graffiti—in Sam’s apartment.
Across the aisle, Juri’s parents and other relatives tensed and listened. By now, they’d heard the story so many times. But it never got easier.
Dan didn’t look at the Kibuishis. Throughout the trial, though, he occasionally made eye contact with his blogger, a rainbow-haired woman who sat writing with pencil on to a notepad, several rows behind Sam’s relatives. With the exception of Dan’s attorneys, she was the only person in the courtroom even remotely supportive of the defendant.
In fact, people who’d once meant a great deal to Dan were lining up against him.
Now a young adult who’d developed interests in photography and film, Wesley Freilich was called to the stand to talk about how he met Dan at age ten while performing in a play at the Liberty Theater. Six years later, Wesley said, Dan phoned him “out of the blue” and offered to pay him a small fee to withdraw money with someone else’s ATM card.
Dan’s brother Tim also appeared in court. Like Dan, Tim was tall, broad chested, and ruddy skinned, but with a goatee and wavy sandy-blond hair. Before his testimony, Tim made an effort to look over at Steve—now seated with his wife in the front row—tighten his face, and give the grieving father a purposeful nod.
As Dan gave his sibling a wide-eyed gaze—periodically making subtle head gestures—a visibly uncomfortable Tim admitted to battling alcohol addiction, which resulted in a number of arrests and clouded his memory. He also acknowledged that accessory after the fact charges were still pending against him. However, his lawyer had pointed out that, as long as Tim cooperated with authorities, he was unlikely to serve any time.
Shortly after the murders, Tim said, he met Dan at a 7-Eleven near the Camden Martinique apartments, where the actor had promised his sibling a few dollars for gas money. It was there that Dan handed his brother a crate and asked him to transfer it to his vehicle. A few days later, Tim said, he and his brother were at Rachel’s brother Noah’s home, where Dan removed the tools used in the dismemberment from the crate.
A backpack inside the box contained a gun that Tim believed had been taken from their father—as well as Dan’s bloody crime scene clothes, Sam’s wallet, and spent shell casings. According to Tim, Dan claimed that the items were tied to a murder that “someone else” had committed.
Within hours of Dan’s arrest, Tim told the court, he ran into Rachel outside his parents’ house. “She said Danny was in trouble, and he needs an attorney,” Tim said. “He’s in big trouble.”
Too frightened to approach authorities himself, Tim said, he handed the gun to a friend, who turned it in to the Long Beach Police Department—providing authorities with a key piece of evidence against Dan.
When he completed his testimony, Tim fleetingly looked over at his brother. Appearing more amused than angry, Dan stared back at Tim, who quickly averted his gaze and walked briskly out of the courtroom.
* * *
In addition to the testimony of the people he once trusted, Dan was being sabotaged by his online searches. These included “quick ways to kill people,” “making sure a body is not found,” “head gunshot wound,” “how far away to hear a gunshot,” “how loud is a gunshot,” and “how to make a fake thumb print.” But the groom-to-be apparently also had his mind on his honeymoon. Among the other items typed during this same time frame were “Mariner of the Seas cruise deals” and “Puerta Vallarta all-inclusive day rates.”
In the Internet age, online communication had become such a factor that the judge even incorporated it into the jury instructions. Before being discharged at the end of each day, jurors were warned not to have any discussions “or do any kind of research” about the case.
* * *
The one person conspicuously absent from the courtroom was Rachel, still facing her own accessory charges the next month. But her presence was very much felt. In fact, at one point it appeared that Sanders was trying to lessen Dan’s culpability by suggesting—like Steve Herr and certain members of law enforcement had suspected—that Rachel had played a larger role than she admitted.
When former detective sergeant Ed Everett—now a lieutenant—testified, Sanders seized on an opinion he’d expressed indicating that Rachel belonged next to Dan at the defense table. Pressing the investigator, Sanders managed to get Everett to say that if a person helps a killer plan a murder that cohort is responsible. The lieutenant immediately qualified the statement by saying that he couldn’t prove that Rachel had anything to do with plotting either of the homicides.
“She was being untruthful to us,” he explained. “I don’t know why.”
In particular, he noted that both Rachel and Dan deliberately avoided telling detectives about Chris Williams, the visitor to their apartment who saw Dan and Sam leave together.
Lieutenant Everett also expressed his judgment that Rachel appeared “cold and callous” shortly after Dan’s arrest, trying—in Everett’s view—to distance herself from her fiancé. In fact, Rachel had told detectives that Dan had a small penis and was an inadequate lover—strange, self-serving behavior, investigators concluded, when they expected more concern about two dead acquaintances. Although she claimed to love Dan and hoped that the marriage would work, she also apparently said that, if it didn’t, at least she’d get a nice honeymoon out of the arrangement.
While Murphy may have shared some of the detective’s cynicism about Rachel, now was not the time to articulate it. The goal was to prove Dan’s guilt. And so, after Sanders was finished with his query, the prosecutor had the lieutenant admit to three factors that suggested that Dan alone was blameworthy. Rachel spoke about the case to her fiancé on the telephone after his arrest—even though she knew that the call was being recorded and could implicate her if she was involved. She also told police about the backpack containing evidence. And shortly before Juri was killed Rachel was scanning the Internet for topless dancer jobs—a sideline she likely would not have considered if she knew that a windfall was on the way.
* * *
During breaks from the proceedings, Dan was handcuffed and taken to a holding cell. When the trial resumed, he’d be marched back into the courtroom, bouncing from leg to leg with a grin on his face, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the jury’s findings could send him to the death chamber.
Relieved that the case had finally come to trial, the Kibuishis and the Herrs were generally relaxed outside the courtroom. After so many years of exchanging information and attending the same hearings, the parents interacted as friends, sometimes exchanging jokes. One afternoon, Masa Kibuishi returned from lunch with a visible stain on his shirt. As his wife urged him to button his jacket, Steve intervened. “Wear it proudly,” he proclaimed as both couples laughed.
After Everett’s testimony, Raquel’s sister, Miriam, chatted outside the courtroom with Allyson Hathcock, who’d come to court to try to make sense of the man who’d obliterated her family’s dream by committing a murder in their theater. Meanwhile, Steve admitted that this was the first time that he’d ever heard the story about Rachel telling detectives about her fiancé’s small penis.
Steve’s face lit up with a grin. “I hope Raquel doesn’t say that about me if I ever get into trouble,” he said, chuckling.
It was the kind of line he knew that Sammy would have appreciated.
* * *
Whatever levity there was at the courthouse, however, ended the moment that prosecutors decided to play the tapes surrounding Dan’s confession. Although the family knew many of the details of what had been recorded, this was the first time that anyone outside of law enforcement received the opportunity to see and hear Dan describing what he did to Sam Herr and Juri Kibuishi.
On the first tape, Dan—dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and khakis after being picked up by police at his bachelor party—was seen attempting to engage in a genial exchange with Detectives Mike Delgadillo and Mike Cohen. At first, the investigators maintained a cordial, nonjudgmental tone, ensuring that Dan remained calm and conversational.
Hoping to explain away his circumstances, Dan admitted to engaging in a credit card scam with Sam—a plot hatched, he said, while the two were drinking. “I was getting married,” Dan said. “I definitely needed some money, so I fell victim to that.” He sighed for effect.
Why Sam would participate in a scheme that involved tapping money from his own account was bewildering. But Dan spoke with the earnest tenor of a very convincing salesman.
Dan claimed that he told Sam to wait on the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base and use his cell phone there—in order to create a record verifying that he was nowhere near the spot where the money was withdrawn. But Dan said that he was close by in Long Beach when his former theater student Wesley went to the bank machine. “I said, ‘What you’re going to do is grab your skateboard, go over there, enter the PIN number, take out four hundred dollars.”
Once Dan had the cash, he said, he drove to the base to pick up Sam. But if police were wondering why there was video of Dan departing the grounds alone, he offered this account: “As we were leaving, I said, ‘Oh, shit. There’s a camera. Duck down.’ So he cuddled up into a little ball in the corner, and we drove off the base.”
* * *
That night couldn’t have gone better for Dan, he remembered. He performed in Nine with Rachel and returned to their apartment. “I took a shower,” he said. “We had sex and then, we went to sleep.” The next morning, on Saturday, May 22, 2010, Dan asserted that he received a knock on his door. “It was Sam. ‘Hey, man, what’s going on? Is everything okay?’ He’s like, ‘Not good. We’re in trouble.’ ‘What do you mean, we’re in trouble? What happened?’ He’s like, ‘I can’t talk about it here. We need to get the fuck out of here.… Please, can you get me out of here?’”
Furtively, Sam allegedly handed his neighbor a laptop. “It’s sitting in my apartment right now,” Dan told the detectives in a voice that suggested that he really wanted to assist them, “on the top shelf of the bookcase with the power cord.… It’s at my apartment, D110.”
The two left the building to go for a ride, Dan said. For some convoluted reason, Dan claimed, they decided that he should drive his friend’s car. They were on the freeway, Dan continued, when Sam disclosed that there was a dead body in his apartment. “Literally, I pulled off to the side of the road.” Dan seemed to draw into himself, expressing his dismay in physical terms for the investigators. “I was, at that point, on the 405 going southbound.” He shook his head from side to side. “I don’t even remember what exit it was. But I pulled off the freeway and I’m like, ‘What the fuck? What have you gotten me into … I don’t feel comfortable with this at all. This is not me. What did you do?’”
According to Dan, Sam needed to be taken someplace where he couldn’t be found. Dan agreed to assist, he said, because he realized that he was a “partial accessory” by virtue of being in the same car as a murderer.
Once again, Dan said, they returned to the base at Los Alamitos, this time with two six-packs of beer, to talk privately. According to Dan, Sam had been looking at photos of Juri on the Internet. High and drunk, the veteran became “just emotionally upset,” Dan said, and invited her to his apartment. “He asked her for sex. He was pretty fucked up. She said no, and he just shot her twice in the head.”
If Dan ever told anyone about the murder, he said, Sam threatened, “I know where you live.… I’m going to kill you. And better yet, I’m going to start with your wife.”
Listening to the tale in the courtroom, Juri’s mother, Junko, shook her head. Across the aisle, Miriam raised her eyebrows and looked at Raquel with disbelief. At the defense table, Dan took on an officious demeanor, slowly turning the pages of the interview transcript while glancing at the screen.
Continuing his story, Dan said that he drove Sam to the Los Altos Shopping Center in Long Beach, where he’d previously worked in the Verizon store. That’s where Dan said Sam exited and disappeared into the Southern California landscape. Then, Dan claimed, he found a nondescript street and ditched the vehicle. “His car is a white Pontiac.… It’s on the corner, not on the corner. It’s on a little inlet street.” He looked across at detectives, making exaggerated hand gestures. “If you go down Baker, it’s the second street in on the left-hand side. That’s where I parked it.” He asked for permission to stand. “Where Camden is, it’s here.” He moved sideways toward the door of the interview room. “You have Harbor running this way.” He stepped forward. “If you take Harbor up, you get to Baker.” He held his hands apart, then shifted his body to the right. “Turn right on Baker.” He gestured forward. “You go two streets in.…” He sat. “I parked it along the curb.”
Like the laptop, the keys were in Dan’s apartment. “You can get those, by all means. Absolutely. They’re fully at your disposal.”
When police came to question Dan, he said, he was anxious to distance himself from the crime. So he made up the story of Sam’s mysterious companion with the black baseball cap. Sounding sad, Dan lamented that he lied about the incident to Rachel and his friends. Lowering his voice to an even more contrite tone, Dan added, “I lied to you.… I feel like a miserable piece of shit right now.”
The goal for detectives at this point was to keep Dan talking. When Delgadillo left the room, Dan turned to Cohen. “I’m so sorry,” Dan said. “I’m so sorry.”
Delgadillo returned with a drink for the suspect and asked to take a DNA swab to “eliminate” Dan from any involvement in Juri’s death.
“Eliminate?” Dan asked. Detectives thought that he seemed a bit nervous.
Dan opened his mouth, and detectives quickly inserted a Q-tip into his mouth. “That’s it,” Cohen said.
“Oh,” Dan replied, forcing out a laugh.
It appeared that Dan believed that the police were accepting his tale. Even after the DNA test, he seemed confident and loose. Maybe he really would get away with this. When investigators asked him for the spelling of his name for a form they needed to send along with the DNA swab, Dan joked, “I’m changing it to ‘Smith’ next week.”
Then, the mood abruptly changed. “There’s more to this than you’re telling us,” Delgadillo stated. “There’s a whole lot more.”
But Dan maintained that all he wanted to do from this point forward was cooperate: “I’m done playing games. No bullshit.”
Asked if he’d seen Juri’s body, Dan countered, “I did not see Julie dead in the apartment. I didn’t.”
“Were you there when she was shot?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I don’t even know when she was shot.”
Delgadillo offered his own theory, “For all we know, you capped Sam after you capped Julie?”
“Excuse me?” an apparently piqued Dan shot back.
At this stage, detectives were sure that Dan had played a direct role in at least one of the murders. “You’re telling us this story about taking Sam here, there, and everywhere else,” Cohen said. “And it doesn’t jive.”
“… Because why?”
“Why do you think?”
“I don’t know, Officer,” Dan replied, indignantly raising his voice.
“You’re an actor,” Delgadillo cut in. “But you’re not that good of an actor.”
Dan contemplated the words, rubbing his beard. Eventually, he repeated his contention that he only had assisted Sam out of fear.
“How was your life in danger?” Delgadillo asked.
“He threatened it,” Dan shouted.
Time dragged. At one point, Dan was given a lie detector test and failed. But he still seemed convinced that he was going to be able to talk his way out of police headquarters—until investigators told him otherwise.
“So I’m staying here?” he asked in disbelief.
“Absolutely,” Cohen said. “You’re arrested for murder, okay?” He clarified the charge. “Accessory to murder. That’s what you’re being arrested for.”
No longer composed, Dan frantically tried cutting a deal. “I will talk to you about anything if it gets me to my wedding on Friday. That’s what I will promise.” He jerked his head, shifting his gaze from Delgadillo to Cohen. “Anything you want.”
“The truth?” Delgadillo challenged.
Dan scratched the back of his head. “Oh my God,” he muttered, bringing down his arm and slapping his thigh.
In the midst of the turbulence, Detective Sergeant Everett entered the room and joined the conversation. “This is your chance to clear the air,” he flatly told Dan.
“For what? If I’m not going to be there on Friday, my life is over.”
The detectives appeared unmoved. “Where is Sam?” Everett demanded.
“Not without a bargain that I am out on Friday.”
“We’re not in a position to bargain.… There aren’t any bargaining chips at this point.”
Dan rested his head against his hands. “Here’s what I’m saying,” he declared. “I’m saying that each one of you and Sam has killed my chance of happiness.”
* * *
Ultimately, Dan conceded, “Yes, I saw the goddamn body. Is that what you want to hear?”
Detectives were uncertain whether their suspect was being honest or sarcastic.
“We want to hear the truth,” Everett answered.
“That is the truth.”
“Then, tell us what happened.” The sergeant decided to take some creative liberty and pretend that he already had the results of Dan’s DNA test. “How’d your DNA get on her?”
“’Cause I was right over her body.”
“… DNA doesn’t just fall off.”
“I don’t know.”
According to Dan, Sam had led him into the apartment and pointed out what he’d done to Juri. Dan said that he noticed two bullet wounds.
Everett quickly noted that even the detectives would not have been able to tell how many times the victim had been shot; all they would have seen was bloody, matted hair.
Yet Dan was thinking quickly. He’d noticed two shell cases, he pointed out, and advised Sam to dispose of them.
Over the course of several hours, Dan entered and left the interview room numerous times. Jurors watched the drama unfold on the screen in the courtroom, taking particular interest in an exchange between Dan and his fiancée.
Police had brought Rachel there, hoping that she might encourage Dan to speak. But because of her monotone delivery and dramatic background, it was unclear whether the pair was engaged in a genuine interaction or theatrical performance.
“We’re not getting married,” a dismayed Dan told Rachel.
“Yeah, obviously,” she responded.
In a soft voice, Dan reiterated that he and Sam were involved in a fraud scheme. “Sam came down and knocked on our door Saturday morning,” he said, “took me upstairs, and I saw Julie and her body and everything.”
Everett cut in, informing Rachel that police suspected that her fiancé might have caused Juri’s death. “It’s not a production,” the sergeant stressed. “It’s not a play. It’s real life. There’s a twenty-three-year-old girl dead, and I don’t know if he’s responsible for it.” Rachel had been brought into the interview room, Everett said, “as a courtesy,” to hear the facts directly from Dan.
“Thank you,” Rachel told the investigator in a measured voice.
The conversation seemed to go nowhere. Rachel accused Dan of lying to her, and Dan did not elaborate on anything he previously told detectives. “Is there anything else you want to say to me?” Rachel asked Dan.
“Don’t hate me,” he whispered.
Rachel looked at the investigators. “There’s nothing he can do at this point to make it better?”
“Absolutely,” Everett responded. “He can be truthful with us and truthful with you and truthful with everyone.”
All Dan was willing to divulge was, “I fucked up.”
“Yeah, you did,” Rachel concurred. She again focused on the investigators. “What if, I mean, if he does everything that you guys want…?”
“It doesn’t change anything,” Everett answered. “I can explain to Julie’s parents what happened. I can explain to Sam’s parents what happened. I can explain to Wesley’s mom what happened. I can explain to whoever, his parents, what happened. He doesn’t care.”
“This is a dream,” Rachel said softly.
“It’s not a dream,” Dan pointed out.
When the conversation ended, Rachel left police headquarters while Dan was escorted back to his cell.
* * *
A short time later, Dan called her cell phone from jail. In court, jurors listened to the audiotape. At times, it sounded as if Rachel was cognizant that the conversation was being recorded, particularly when she lectured Dan that people were more important than money— “We never need money,” was her exact line. “We need to be good people and just have each other”—and he never should have gotten involved in a credit card scheme with Sam.
“What did you do?” Rachel pointedly asked.
“I helped Sam cover up some stuff and get some drugs. I didn’t murder anybody.”
But Dan appeared to become unglued when Rachel mentioned that she was going to tell detectives about a recent discussion with Tim Wozniak.
“Tim says that he had evidence with him, or he knew where it was or something.”
“Then, I’m doomed,” Dan replied, almost whispering.
“What?”
“Tim said that?”
“Yeah. Do you know that Tim has some evidence?”
“Yeah.” There was silence for a moment. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
If the items were turned over, Dan said, “I’m dead. I’m really dead.”
“Babe,” Rachel replied, “you’re already dead.”
Once again, Rachel asked Dan to tell her exactly what he had done.
“I think you know what I did.… Babe, listen to me. I’m going to do something, and you’re not going to see me for the rest of my life. Do you understand that?”
“No, no.”
Dan told Rachel that when she found out the truth she was going to hate him. “I’m not a good person.”
She promised to return to the jail to see Dan another time. Before hanging up, she told him, “I love you.”
* * *
Jurors next saw footage of Daniel in the interview room again. He was still wearing his Hawaiian shirt and khakis, but the clothes were wrinkled and he appeared disheveled and disheartened.
When detectives had picked Dan up at his cell, he was staring through the bars with his blanket slung over his head. “I want to talk to you guys,” he promised, “and tell you guys everything.”
By now, Delgadillo seemed weary of the suspect and anxious to finally learn what had occurred. “Pull yourself together,” the detective demanded. “Pull yourself together right now.”
Once again, he read Dan his rights.
“I’m crazy and I did it,” Dan said.
“You did what?” he was asked.
“I killed Julie and I killed Sam.”
“Okay. All right,”
“I killed them both.”
No longer double-talking, Dan systematically explained the way he shot Sam with Daryl Wozniak’s .38. “Sam is decapitated. He’s at the military base. In the theater.”
“In the theater,” Cohen repeated.
“If you go up the ladder from the theater, his head and hands have been decapitated, as well as his arm that had a tattoo.”
“And you did it?” Delgadillo questioned.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Are the body parts there?”
“No.
“Where are they?”
“The Nature Center in El Dorado Park, in various locations … I decapitated the body so it wouldn’t be found.”
Sam had been killed, Dan said, while bending to help Dan lift an object. “I shot him once, and then, he was still alive.… He was still talking, saying, ‘I need help.’”
Instead, Dan admitted, he fired a second time. “He started bleeding. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t talking. He was in a pool of blood, started to form.”
On the screen, Dan’s head dropped and he appeared to weep. But it seemed that no one in the courtroom felt sorry for him. The victims’ families watched the confession with a mixture of melancholy for their loved ones, hatred for the killer, and resentment that the whole process had taken this long.
“I’m sorry,” Dan told the police. “The truth is I’ve been slowly going crazy and becoming a pathological liar, and I find it hard to tell the truth.”
Dan recalled meeting Juri outside Sam’s front door, where they each expressed concern for their friend. Once they went inside, Dan asked her to enter the bedroom. “Did you see this in Sam’s bed?” he asked the unsuspecting victim. “He was really freaking out over it?”
When Juri leaned forward to contemplate the imaginary item, Dan said, “I put two bullets in the back of her head.”
He noted that Juri “was wearing like a crown tiara” when she died.
Listening to the recitation of the manner in which her daughter was killed, Junko Kibuishi quietly cried in her seat as a relative rubbed her shoulders.
Bizarrely, Dan told detectives that he smiled and laughed when he returned to the base and cut off Sammy’s head. Asked why, he responded, “I don’t know. I reached a point where I couldn’t even believe I was doing this.”
In another era, men like Delgadillo and Cohen might have grabbed the suspect and thrown him against the wall, administering a minuscule dose of justice of behalf of the Herrs, who had had to endure the suspicion of authorities when their son was simply guilty of helping the wrong person move some items, and the Kibuishis, whose pure-hearted daughter was sacrificed in the most evil manner possible. But this was 2010, and everything was videotaped. So on camera, Cohen awkwardly attempted to give Dan some sort of positive reinforcement for admitting his crimes. “For once in your life, you can say you told the truth and feel good about it,” the detective said.
Before elaborating on how he obtained plastic bags from a café to transport Sam’s body parts, the killer released a squeal that sounded like a blend of a laugh and a sob.
* * *
When the confession tape ended, the families and jurors poured out of the courtroom. Miriam went around a corner and buried her head in another woman’s shoulder, crying loudly. Jurors gingerly passed her on the way to the bathroom.
Several reporters had tears in their eyes. One stared straight ahead and mumbled, “I don’t believe in the death penalty, but he should fry.”
Steve paced the hallway with flushed skin. “This is what we had to wait for?” he raged. “This trial should have happened three years ago. Look at the tape. It’s all there. And we had to wait.”
He took a breath. “When this is over, I want to talk to Sanders, let him know personally what he did to us.”
* * *
On December 16, a week after the trial started, the verdict came in. As the victims’ relatives held one another and cried, Dan stared straight ahead, betraying no emotion when the courtroom clerk announced that he was guilty on all counts.
Matt Murphy said that he was looking forward to the penalty phase, when he could describe the victims “as people” to the jurors considering whether to sentence Dan to death. As Murphy stressed in his closing arguments, “There’s nothing wrong with his head. It’s what’s wrong with Daniel Wozniak’s heart.”
Tracy LeSage, the lawyer who’d try to convince the court to spare Dan’s life, pledged to place the emphasis on subtleties. “Everything is more complicated than it is,” she said. “Nothing is cut and dry.”
As Dan was led out of the courtroom—with no sign of his parents in court, and his brother, fiancée, and even the kid who once idolized him as a theater teacher firmly in the enemy camp—Steve returned home and posted the following Facebook message: “Raquel and I want to thank all Sam’s Buddies for their support these past five and one half years.… What can we say, guys? Raquel and I love you all! Great big hugs!”