Steve was so preoccupied with his son’s disappearance that he visited a doctor and received medical clearance to stay home from work in order to conduct the investigation. As he chatted with Dan, he had the sinking feeling that the actor had more information than he was willing to reveal. “He said Sam told him he had women problems and family problems,” Steve said. “Immediately, I knew Dan was lying.”
At that stage of his life, Sam didn’t have family issues; anyone who’d seen him with Steve knew that. Nor did he have “women problems.” Yes, Katharina was uncertain over whether she wanted to leave her family in Germany and get married, but Sam was letting his life play out. For all he knew, he might be an officer in a few short years, stationed in Turkey or Guam or South Korea. As much as he cared about his girlfriend, he wasn’t plagued by the ambiguity of the relationship.
And even if Sam was consumed by these topics, he wouldn’t confide to Dan Wozniak, not when he had friends such as Ruben and Miles and Gonzo. Sam and Dan were neighbors who lived three floors apart from each other. Despite the fact that they hung out together from time to time, Dan was more of an acquaintance than a real friend.
So why was he making up this story? Although Steve couldn’t prove anything, he sensed that Dan was involved in Juri’s death and might be able to lead police to Sam. As a result, Steve listened with relative passivity—he didn’t want to challenge Dan and scare him into silence—hoping to learn more about the events of the previous week, and Dan himself.
* * *
There was nothing particularly menacing about the actor. Few who knew Dan perceived him as dangerous or even angry. He imbibed copiously at social gatherings—Jack Daniel’s and rum, usually mixed with Coke—and was generally a jolly drunk. Allyson Hathcock, the high school associate whose parents owned the theater where Dan later performed, remembered him as a harmless type, who sometimes tried too hard to impress acquaintances. “I would take him out and, even if he didn’t know the people that well, he’d pick up the tab,” she said. “He’d buy drinks for everybody. He’d buy everybody dinner. Sometimes, the check would run two hundred or three hundred bucks. He would pick it up.”
Occasionally, Dan would slur his words while making a point or annoy another guest by hanging all over the person. But most of Dan’s regular companions just wanted a night of fun and had the same notions about partying as their garrulous friend. “The group he ran around with, that he was buddy-buddy with, every Saturday night, their ritual was to take pictures of everybody passed out and throwing up,” Allyson said. “Then, you’d go on Facebook and see a picture of someone’s head in the toilet.”
To support himself, Dan worked in sales and training positions, but admitted, “I haven’t always been great at it.” Associates recall him working at a Sprint store and Verizon shop. However, the jobs never seemed to last. “He kept getting fired,” Allyson said. “And it would be because he was accused of stealing something here or funds were missing there. He would always blame it on somebody else. But I never understood why he always had money to pay for things, when he was constantly getting fired.” No charges were ever brought.
For close to two years, Dan worked in Daniel Halkyard’s home appraisal business. Halkyard had known Wozniak since he was in high school. In fact, Dan had dated Halkyard’s daughter and contemplated marrying her. To Halkyard, Dan possessed the respectful, responsible qualities the older man sought in both an employee and a son-in-law. “He was like a son to me,” Halkyard told the Orange County Register. “He was always coming over the house, staying the night. He was just the nicest kid.”
Even when he was unemployed, Dan continued performing with local theater troupes and was a known commodity in the so-called storefront theater movement. The first storefront theaters had opened in Orange County in 1996. The venues—among them the Monkey Wrench Collective and Maverick Theater in Fullerton, Chance Theater and STAGEStheatre in Anaheim, and Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble in Santa Ana—were far smaller than professional theaters in the area. Actors were in it for the love of their craft, rather than any financial reward. Unlike community theater companies, the fare was more varied and exciting than the popular musicals and mainstream productions favored by senior citizens and Orange County’s traditional, suburbanized audiences.
While some of the storefront plays were recognizable—The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hedwig and the Angry Itch, Cabaret—the material tended to be more subversive and a disproportionate number of the actors young and exuberant. If someone on the circuit took the time to write an original play, there was a very real possibility that one of the storefront theater companies would perform it. At times, the results were disappointing, but more frequently there were flashes of brilliance in the writing, composing, and acting. And since the prices were palatable, the small crowds tended to be forgiving.
“In any community that’s so conservative, there is a counterweight to that,” said Joel Beers, theater columnist for the OC Weekly and a playwright himself. “Especially in a college town like Fullerton, you’ll find younger, anti-conformist people who support storefront theaters. Some of them are either in college or right out of college. The best and brightest actors eventually seem to go away to LA or New York, and they either make it or they don’t and come back. So you have an interesting dichotomy of people in the theater community here.
“These actors might get paid ten, twenty, thirty bucks a run, sometimes a little bit more, but they’re doing it with passion. At the same time, they’re building up their résumés, making contacts, and always dreaming that the right person will see their show.”
The Orange County Children’s Theatre was different from the storefront showcases around the county. Founded in 1969, the theater was the region’s oldest continuously running institution created particularly for young people. Children could audition at age five, and the theater sought out actors of all economic backgrounds. The goal—in addition to teaching the dramatic arts—was building self-esteem and a sense of belonging.
Halkyard, Dan’s boss at the home appraisal business, directed Dan in The Sound of Music there. “He played Captain von Trapp,” Halkyard said. “He was wonderful with the children. He did a fabulous job. He threw himself into the role.”
Among his friends in the acting community, Dan was perceived as a performer who’d travel virtually anywhere to appear in a play. Some of the venues were as far away as Ventura County, a distance of more than two hours from his home.
The Liberty Theater at the Los Alamitos base, however, was practically walking distance from the place where Dan grew up. It was housed in a building opened in 1942 to provide briefings, host USO shows, and show movies and newsreels to American servicemen about to be shipped abroad. Because of its proximity to Hollywood, the base was also used in feature films about the U.S. military. In 1977, it became a National Guard post.
In the mid-1970s, Jeff Hathcock—the son of Richard Hathcock, the Los Angeles Examiner crime reporter who covered the Bugsy Siegel, Black Dahlia, and Manson Family murder cases, among others–was studying theater at the school Dan Wozniak would later attend, California State University, Long Beach, when he met his wife, Nancy. She’d also been raised in Southern California and was performing in and doing her thesis on the musical The Apple Tree. While others went on to more practical professions after graduation, the pair stayed rooted in local theater. Jeff started a theater guild in 1994, and in 2002 the couple purchased the Liberty Theater.
Clearly, whoever designed the building never foresaw the stage shows that the Hathcocks hoped to present. There was an old, yellowing movie screen at the front of the shoebox-shaped room, and the walls, according to Jeff’s description, were a dismal pea green. But the Hathcocks believed in the venue’s potential and invested ten thousand dollars of their own money into the theater.
The stage was widened eight feet until it was thirty-eight feet long by thirty-eight feet wide. “We put in new seats, new curtains,” Jeff said, “new lighting, and a sound system.” A Cal State Long Beach student painted two large murals on the walls as part of her master’s thesis.
At times, the Hathcocks and their daughter, Allyson, worked side by side in the large room, refining their improvements. Still, Jeff insisted, the family was never truly alone in the building. “It was loaded with ghosts.” Some, he was certain, had come from a morgue that once stood on the base. But there were so many phantoms in the theater, Jeff said, that he came to recognize many of them.
“When I first got here, one of the sergeants said to me, ‘If you see the nurse, it’s nothing.’ I said, ‘What nurse?’ He said, ‘Oh, Edna. Edna Alcorn. She was the nurse here from ’43 to ’48, and people still see her in the building.’ Well, I saw her.”
Apparitions aside, under the Hathcocks’ stewardship the Liberty Theater quickly became a welcoming place. In addition to established plays, both Jeff and Allyson wrote shows with the sensibilities of the audience in mind. “Because we were on a military base and, really, because of the type of people we are, we weren’t the type of theater that would put on a show like Hair,” Nancy said. “We wanted to do something that everyone would enjoy. Kids were our specialty. We wanted you to bring your kids.”
Not only did Dan perform on the Liberty Theater stage, but his cousins, Justin and Rachel Brown, also appeared in the group’s plays. “They were very nice,” Jeff said. “Different personalities than Dan, didn’t look like him at all. Dan had dark hair, and theirs was kind of reddish. Rachel’s roommate was also in some of our shows.”
It was exactly the kind of atmosphere that the Hathcocks wanted to create: a family running a theater featuring another group of relatives acting alongside a close friend—for an audience consisting of parents and kids.
At the time, Dan was living at home with his family. His parents, Daryl and Mary Anne, were observant Catholics who seemed to be much older than Dan and his two brothers. His father, in particular, was overweight, with circulation problems in his legs, and once fell over in one of the rocking theater seats—feet thrust into the air—as Dan was acting onstage. But both parents continued coming to the theater and remained extremely supportive.
Their names appeared on donor lists at various theaters in the area, including the Huntington Beach Playhouse and Musical Theatre West, a Long Beach location that claimed to “bring the best of Broadway to your backyard.” “If Dan was in thirty performances of a show, they were at every single one,” Allyson said.
“He was an ideal son,” Daryl would tell the Daily Mail. “He went out of his way to help everybody.”
The affirmation that Dan received at home added to his confidence, a quality that he was able to use to make other people feel better. “When I first met the guy, I thought, ‘This is a young man who’s going someplace,’” Jeff said. “He had everything going for him—good looks, charisma. He just seemed great. He was one of those people you’d look at and go, ‘This guy’s marked for success.’”
By Dan Wozniak’s estimation, the Liberty was the “Mayberry of theaters,” a reference to the fictional small town that was the setting for the 1960s TV program The Andy Griffith Show.
“So homey, so folksy,” Nancy remembered. “He’d say it with a smirk, but we would laugh it off because we were happy with what we did.”
Once, when they were talking about the concept of family, Jeff asked Dan if he was related to computer pioneer Steve Wozniak.
“No,” Dan answered with his ever-present sparkle. “I wish I was. I wouldn’t mind some of his money. But I’m not.”
Onstage, though, Dan seemed as dedicated to his vocation as the man who developed the first Apple computer. “It was weird the way Dan would take on a role and live the part,” Allyson said.
One character he particularly relished was Harold Hill, who materializes in a small Iowa town in The Music Man, selling musical instruments and band uniforms while pledging to form a children’s marching band. But Hill is neither a musician nor a bandleader. He’s a flimflam artist who intends to leave town with the ill-gotten funds.
It would be years before Nancy saw the irony in Dan’s portrayal. “Harold Hill is a con artist,” she said. “But Dan was like, ‘Whoopie, this is the role for me.’”
During The Music Man’s run at the Liberty Theater, Dan began using an e-mail address beginning with MusicManDan. Every week, he’d lead his cousins and other friends to Mr. B’s Sports Bar and Grill or the Starting Gate in Los Alamitos for karaoke sessions. When it was Dan’s turn to sing, he invariably requested Broadway show tunes, particularly The Music Man’s signature song, “Seventy-Six Trombones.”
“He became Harold Hill,” Allyson said. “He’d get carried away, and have everybody up, singing ‘Seventy-Six Trombones.’ He was a blast. He just totally got into it.”
Sometimes, Jeff wondered if Dan was enjoying himself as much as his companions were. “He always had to be the center of attention,” Jeff said. “Whatever group he was in or whatever the occasion, Dan had to be in the middle of everything. He was always one of the tallest people in the room, and because of his loudness, his joking, his smile, he’d make sure everyone was focusing on him. And his laugh wasn’t just ‘ha, ha, ha.’ It was ‘aha! aha! aha! aha!’ The sweat would pour off, and there’d be very big movements. That’s how he operated. He’d move from place to place, drink in hand, telling a joke, slapping people on the back.”
While Dan was playing Harold Hill, an impressionable teenager named Wesley Freilich portrayed Winthrop, the introverted, self-conscious boy whom the Music Man is able to draw out. Like Winthrop, Wesley had his challenges. He was being raised by a single mother, a schoolteacher who relied on her parents to assist with his upbringing. The Hathcocks considered Wesley a gifted young actor. But it was Dan Wozniak who instilled a new self-assurance in him.
“My impression of Wesley?” Allyson said. “Honestly, I thought he was a good kid who was looking for a father figure.”
Dan had experience teaching drama to children and knew how to step into that position. For extra money, he’d occasionally babysit for people associated with the theater, and the parents felt fortunate to have Dan in their children’s lives. Occasionally, Dan invited Wesley to activities away from the Music Man setting, and the teen’s mother seemed both relieved and grateful. “She thought of Dan as a mentor,” Nancy said.
When Allyson had a birthday party with a murder mystery theme, Dan came with both Wesley and his mother—as well as a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Dan showed up at the beginning of the party, left to do something, and came back at the very, very end of the party,” she recounted. “He was so drunk, I wouldn’t let him drive home.”
But Wesley looked at his older friend and saw no wrong.
On Thanksgiving, 2007, Allyson and Wesley were both invited to the home of Dan’s cousins, the Browns. In one photo, the collection of thespians are seen doing a synchronized Macarena. In another, Wesley poses, bending over the turkey and sweet potatoes, as the food comes out of the oven. In a third, Dan sits with an arm draped over the knee of the theater’s musical director, grinning as if modeling for a billboard.
Onstage, Dan’s continued acquiring accolades, especially for his portrayal of Mortimer Brewster, the male lead in Arsenic and Old Lace, a black comedy about a homicidal family. Mortimer, a drama critic, appears to be greatly alarmed by his two spinster aunts—and their fondness for poisoning lonely old men.
“Insanity runs in my family,” Mortimer observes. “It practically gallops.”
But the eeriest section—taken in the context of later events—occurs when Mortimer reminisces about a show he’d seen the previous week. “Yeah, what a play,” he says. “When the curtain goes up the first thing you see is a dead body. The next thing…” He opens a window seat and finds not one but two cadavers. “Ye gads, there’s another one.”
After watching Dan onstage so often—and socializing with him at gatherings where the alcohol was abundant—Allyson accepted his invitation to go out on a date. “I thought he was cute, so we went out a few times,” she said. “We went out on three actual dates. It seemed like every time we went out, we ended up doing karaoke with his cousins. And on the third date, we finally attempted to kiss, and it was nothing. Totally unromantic. He sweated like a damp mop. There was nothing sexy there at all, no sex appeal on his end. It was like kissing Mickey Mouse. That’s the only thing I can equate it to.
“He dated a few of the girls at the theater, and it would always end up with them saying, ‘Oh, he’s just a big teddy bear of a friend.’
“It made me think about some of his performances. When he played Harold Hill in The Music Man and you tried to convince him that Harold was supposed to be seducing Marian the librarian, he had a hard time. You had to really say, ‘Dan, turn here. Look this way. Show a little oomph.’ He couldn’t seduce a fly. He just didn’t have that.
“He did Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and there’s a scene in there where Adam is on his wedding night and his wife kicks him out of the bedroom. And he’s trying to get back in the bedroom to be with his wife. And when I saw that play at Golden West College, and the wife was finally inviting him to come into the bed, he looked back at her with a look of horror. That was Dan—neutered.”
On MySpace, Dan described his ideal woman: “adventurous, bold, caring, different, energetic … goal-oriented, helping, interesting, jovial, kind, lively … personable, quick, radical, sweet, tender … yearning and zany.”
By the time the body was found in his building, he’d informed his social media associates: “I’m really glad that I found her.”