Later, much would be made of the fact that, among her other jobs, Rachel Mae Buffett—the pretty blonde Daniel Wozniak intended to marry—had played Princess Ariel, the title character from The Little Mermaid, at Disneyland.
Rachel grew up in Seal Beach—on the border of Long Beach and Los Angeles County—the starting point, city boosters liked pointing out, to Orange County’s forty-two miles of coastline. In 2011, a year after Juri’s death, Seal Beach would be the site of the deadliest mass killing in Orange County history, an incident whose ramifications would impact the Daniel Wozniak case as it ground its way through the preliminary hearing process.
When Dan was being investigated, Rachel would tell police that she and her three siblings grew up in a “sheltered” Christian household. Her favorite Bible passage, she said, was Psalms 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (King James Version).
Apparently, Dan was trodding the same path. After all, he’d listed “God” as one of his heroes on MySpace. And, like Rachel, his need to appear onstage was a compulsion as well as a calling.
Rachel’s role at Disneyland—as well as another job, playing a princess at Medieval Times, a family dinner theater featuring jousting, sword fighting, and other games from the Middle Ages—reflected Rachel’s theatrical zeal. After Dan’s arrest, rumors would circulate about Rachel inciting unnecessary friction at the theater companies where she performed, while others described her as sweet natured and oblivious to her boyfriend’s social manipulations.
“I first met Dan while doing a play,” she’d tell the Dr. Phil show. “My first impression of Dan was he was a nice person.… He was eager to please and he always seemed like the guy who was going to give you the shirt off his back. Several years later, he started hanging out with me on pretty much a daily basis, and I quickly fell for him.”
Rachel and Dan wanted to live together but feared the way her conservative parents would react. Instead, they came up with a scheme to delude her parents. Rachel told them that she was residing with her older brother, Noah. In fact, Noah and Rachel did live together—along with Dan. If the parents decided to stop by during the day, Dan was never there. He’d only come at night when he knew that he could be alone with Rachel in the room that they shared.
In 2008, Dan and Rachel became engaged. “He gave me this gorgeous, vintage ring that he said had come from his grandmother and was intended for him to give to whoever he was going to marry,” Rachel said. “I looked at it as though we were going to have an awesome future.”
Their fellow actors viewed the pair as a storefront theater version of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and playfully dubbed them “The Royals.” The same year, the two appeared together in the farcical play Every Christmas Story Ever Told at the All American Melodrama Theatre in Long Beach. In the plot, the couple, along with fellow performer Paul Villano, portrayed actors attempting to stage Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. “This is definitely not a lavish production,” the blog What the Butler Saw reported. “The most extraordinary thing you can say about it is that it’s non-stop funny. Divert your eyes from the stage to the audience and you’ll see faces that beam like kids ripping open presents.”
The actors, the review continued, “don’t take themselves seriously … they have so much fun that the maintenance of character is next to impossible.… Take a gander. You’ll be glad you did.”
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On New Year’s Day, 2009, the couple was invited to a party at Dan’s cousins’ apartment. In photos from that day, he and Rachel bake cookies together, cuddle, and mug for the camera.
The two appeared just as close when they made a promotional video for their play, The Green Room, at the Orange County Theatre Company. Looking flawlessly coiffed, Dan grinned brightly into the camera and introduced himself: “Hi, my name is Dan Wozniak. I’ll be playing the role of John Davidson—” Suddenly Dan became tongue-tied, laughed, and looked off-camera.
“Okay, take it again,” said a disembodied voice.
“I’ll be playing the role of John Davidson at the Orange County Theatre.…” He appeared to become confused another time and laughed again. “Goddamn.” While others chuckled off-camera, Dan shook his head. “I’m just saying Orange County…” His eyes twinkled, and he laughed more.
The sequence then abruptly cut to Rachel standing with another actor in the play. Looking svelte and exuding a bubbly, youthful demeanor, she tried to pick up where Dan finished. “Hi, my name is Rachel Buffett. We’re playing…” Now she started laughing and waved her hand. “Do it again please.”
“Come see us!” shouted the other actor as Rachel giggled and raised two thumbs.
“Oh, this is sad,” the actor joked while Rachel made the sign to cut.
Next, Dan, Rachel, and two other actors were seen on-screen as music played in the background. “Come see us!” one of the performers urged. While Rachel and the rest of the cast cheered the successful delivery of the line, an exuberant Dan thrust a fist into the air.
No group of people ever seemed more jovial and optimistic about life’s prospects. But theater associates asserted that all was never as blissful as it appeared.
Although Dan and Rachel had visited his cousins on New Year’s Day, Dan’s old crowd apparently resented the woman Wozniak intended to marry. “I heard they wouldn’t see him for months,” Allyson Hathcock said. “They did not like Rachel. They thought she’d driven a wedge between them and Dan.”
Six months before the murder, Daryl Wozniak claimed that his son stopped taking phone calls from his family. The elder Wozniak was bewildered. There’d been no argument or history of resentment directed at the parents who loyally attended every play.
“He just disappeared,” Daryl told the Daily Mail.
According to Allyson, Daniel’s family had grown suspicious of the influence that his fiancée was alleged to exert. “They’d only met her, I think, once or twice. They didn’t know he was engaged. They’d been so close to Dan, and they found out he was getting married after everybody else did.
“Everything changed after he was with Rachel. He dropped out of Cal State Long Beach. He didn’t see his cousins anymore. And he wouldn’t even talk to his parents.”
While being interviewed by detectives, Dan claimed that his parents disapproved of Rachel because “they wanted me to be with like a doctor or a lawyer.” But when police probed further, they uncovered a different story. The separation in the Wozniak family occurred, they said, after Dan was caught stealing money from his parents.
Still, before the ties were severed Dan made a visit to his family’s Long Beach home to procure an item that would change his future and obliterate the lives of so many others.
He took his father’s .38 and moved it to Apartment D110 at the Camden Martinique apartments—less than fifty yards from Sam Herr’s apartment.