Some Kind of Monster: An appallingly incompetent decision by a judge delivers a little girl into the hands of a monster – her own, abusive father.
Do It Again: Patricia had already gotten away with murder once. Now she’s playing the odds again. Double or quits?
Three Little Girls: When three little girls go missing from a summer picnic, a massive search is launched. One of the searchers knows more than he’s saying.
I Was a Teenage Cannibal: A teenager with a macabre obsession lures a little boy into his parents’ basement. What happens next is the stuff of nightmares.
Heartless: She had the looks of a glamor model and a heart of gold. But Kirsty Grabham made her living as a hooker. It would end up getting her killed.
Friendly Fire: When an illicit romance breaks down between two soldiers, the battle lines are drawn – and this is a war zone with plenty of weapons.
The Girl Scout Murders: An enduring murder mystery. Who killed the Camp Scott Girl Scouts? And why has he never been caught?
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Murder Most Vile Volume 29
Murder on the Menu
Lomita, California, is a suburb of Los Angeles, lying some
20 miles south of the metropolis along a beautiful stretch of coastline. It is
a city that takes life at a sedate pace, so sedate in fact that it is sometimes
jokingly called ‘Slow-mita.’ It is also a jurisdiction with one of the lowest
crime rates in the greater Los Angeles area, a peaceful enclave in one of the
nation’s most populous regions. For David and Dawn Viens, it seemed the perfect
place to settle after their move from Florida.
David had met Dawn in Vermont back in the early 1990s. At
the time, the handsome chef was going through a divorce from his first wife and
was immediately attracted to the petite and pretty Dawn. They started dating
and eventually married in 1997 by which time they had moved to the idyllic Anna
Maria Island, off Florida's Gulf Coast. David ran a successful restaurant
there, the Beach City Market and Grille, employing Dawn’s brother as a manager.
Dawn, meanwhile, was the perfect hostess, charming patrons with her naturally
outgoing personality. It was a happy time for all until David was arrested for
selling marijuana and sentenced to a year in prison. After his release, the
couple was on the move again, trekking cross-country to Lomita. There, David
bought a small restaurant called the Thyme Contemporary Café, and he and Dawn
set about rebuilding their lives and livelihood. Unfortunately, it was not to
be. A week after the Thyme Café opened its doors under new management, Dawn
Viens vanished.
David Viens seemed unconcerned about his wife’s
disappearance. He and Dawn had a somewhat volatile relationship, and she’d
walked out on him before. Usually she returned after blowing off steam with her
drug buddies. But this time was different. On the morning of Tuesday, October
20, 2009, David called a meeting and informed his staff that Dawn would no
longer be working at the restaurant. At that same meeting, he promoted
22-year-old waitress Kathy Galvan to take over Dawn’s host duties.
Later that same day, Dawn’s friend, Karen Patterson, arrived
at the restaurant. She and Dawn had arranged to meet for lunch that day, but
Dawn hadn’t shown. She wanted to know where her friend was. David said that he
didn’t know. According to him, he and Dawn had argued the previous night over her
drug use. Dawn had stormed out after he insisted that she check into rehab to
get treatment for her problems. “She’ll be back in time,” he said, although he
insisted that he would no longer allow her to work at the restaurant. According
to him, she’d been drinking as many as 18 beers a day, was rude to staff and
customers, and was costing him money by miscalculating bills. Karen could
accept that. She knew that her friend had substance abuse problems. What she
didn’t understand was why Dawn hadn’t told her where she was going and why her
car was still parked in the lot outside the restaurant. Something didn’t seem
right.
And Karen’s suspicions would deepen later that afternoon
when she received a text message from her missing friend. In it, Dawn said that
she had left David and was moving “back east.” She promised to send Karen her
new phone number once she was settled. The message was signed ‘PIXY’ and this
bothered Karen. Dawn did indeed go by that nickname, but she always spelled it
‘PIXIE.’ How likely was it that someone would misspell their own name?
Someone else who didn’t buy the story of Dawn leaving town
in the middle of the night was Joe Cacace, who ran a motorcycle shop across the
road from the restaurant. Joe had recently befriended Dawn, and she’d given him
$700 to hold for her, saying that she might need it to “get away.” But if that
was the case, why had she skipped town without asking for the money? Over the
next week, Cacace kept a close eye on the Thyme Café. He soon began to notice
something. Within days of his wife’s disappearance, David Viens appeared to
have a new woman in his life. He had become very friendly with Kathy Galvan,
the waitress he’d promoted to replace Dawn. On more than one occasion, Cacace
spotted then walking hand in hand. What he didn’t know was that Galvan had
already moved into David Viens’s apartment.
On November 1, 2009, David’s 19-year-old daughter, Jackie,
arrived from South Carolina to help out at the restaurant. Jackie had always
liked Dawn, so she was somewhat surprised to find her gone and a woman barely
older than she was now living with her father. But Jackie was aware that her
dad and Dawn had a frequently explosive relationship, and so she readily bought
his story about Dawn’s sudden departure. When he asked her to pack up some of
Dawn’s stuff, she did so without question. Most of the missing woman’s
belongings ended up in a dumpster behind the restaurant.
Dawn Viens had now been missing for nearly two weeks. Yet no
one had thus far thought of reporting her disappearance. This may have been
because she was still in touch. Several of her friends received text messages,
all bearing the misspelled name, ‘PIXY.’ It was Dawn’s sister Deena who
eventually decided to take action. She had concluded by now that the messages
were not from Dawn but from some imposter. On November 9, she took her
suspicions to the police.
One of the first steps detectives usually take in the case
of a missing adult is to subpoena the person’s bank records. Inactivity is
usually an ominous sign since no one gets very far without cash. In Dawn’s
case, her bank card had not been used since October 18. She had also made not a
single call from her cell phone, despite the suspicious texts sent to her
friends. Detectives next interviewed David Viens who trotted out the same story
he’d been telling all along, that Dawn had stormed out during an argument and
that he had not heard from her since. With no way to prove otherwise, the
police were forced to accept his version of events.
But when the investigators followed up with Viens a month
later, he had a different story to tell. He now said that he had seen Dawn since her disappearance.
She’d appeared at his door, dirty and disheveled about a week after she
initially went missing. Quite obviously under the influence, she’d begged him
to give up the restaurant and to “move with her to the mountains.” David had,
of course, refused and had asked her again to go into rehab. To his surprise,
Dawn had agreed. Thereafter, she’d stayed at the apartment for two days before
she left again, while he was asleep, taking some of her belongings with her.
After that, Viens claimed, he’d texted Dawn several times and had spoken to her
on the phone, before she had broken off all contact.
By August 2010, Dawn Viens had been missing for ten months.
No one on the force believed that she was still alive, and the decision was
therefore made to transfer the case to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Homicide
Division, where it was assigned to Sgt. Richard Garcia. After reviewing the
case, Garcia was certain that David Viens knew a lot more about his wife’s
disappearance than he was saying. Garcia dearly wanted to conduct a search of
Viens’s apartment but lacked probable cause to obtain a search warrant. Then, in
October, he caught a break. Viens had decided to move. Seizing this
opportunity, Garcia sent in a CSI team ahead of the cleaners. They soon hit pay
dirt. Tiny flecks of blood were found on the bedroom wall and in the bathroom.
It seemed like the breakthrough the police had been waiting for, but the
optimism would be short-lived. The blood was too degraded to be any good as
evidence. Garcia was back to square one.
Over the months that followed, the police continued to keep
David Viens under surveillance and also obtained a wiretap on his phone. When
that proved unproductive, they decided on a different strategy. On February 21,
2011, two L.A. County deputies arrived at the Columbia, South Carolina, home of
David Viens’ daughter, Jackie. Jackie had, of course, spent six weeks working
at the Thyme Café in the immediate aftermath of Dawn’s disappearance. The
investigators were hoping that she might have seen or heard something that
would help them in their inquiries. But Jackie would do more than that, much
more. To the surprise of the deputies, she suddenly blurted out that her father
had killed Dawn.
According to Jackie, her father had confessed the killing to
her just a week after her arrival in California. He’d told her that Dawn’s
death had occurred in the early morning hours of October 19, 2009, and had been
an accident. David had been out drinking with friends that night and had
returned to find that Dawn was not at home. He’d then taken a sleeping pill and
gone to bed. Before doing so, he’d placed a chair under the door handle to
prevent Dawn entering the room. He’d done this, he said, because Dawn was often
aggressive and abusive when she’d been drinking and taking drugs. He did not
want her to bother him when she got home.
David soon drifted off to sleep. But then he was awakened by
Dawn, yelling and banging on the bedroom door, demanding to be let in. David
shouted back that she should sleep in the other room, but she started kicking
the door, eventually forcing her way in. She then continued screaming insults
at him until he got up and confronted her. The two of them had tussled, with
David quickly gaining the upper hand. Having subdued Dawn, he dragged her to
the living room. There he bound her wrists and ankles with duct tape and placed
a strip of tape over her mouth. This, he explained, was the only way to control
Dawn when she was in “one of her moods.” He’d done the same on two previous
occasions. Having thus restrained his wife, he went back to bed.
But the makeshift restraints would have tragic consequences
on this occasion. When David got up that morning, he found Dawn cold and
unresponsive. It was obvious that she wasn’t breathing, and he found the cause
when he removed the gag. Dawn had thrown up during the night and had choked on
her own vomit.
Having made this confession, Viens had begged his daughter
to keep his secret. He’d even roped her in to cover up the death, persuading
her to send texts to Dawn’s friends. It was she who was behind the ‘PIXY’
messages. The investigators then asked Jackie if she knew where Dawn’s body
was, but Jackie said that she did not. All she knew was what her father had
told her. He’d said that he’d disposed of the body in such a way that it would
never be found.
With direct testimony now implicating Viens in the death of
his wife, lead investigator Garcia decided to turn up the heat. He contacted a
local reporter, Larry Altman, and told him that the police were about to
publicly name David Viens as a person of interest. Altman then went to the
Thyme Café hoping to get a statement from Viens but was shown the door by Kathy
Galvan. Next Viens received a call from Jackie, who told him that she had
spoken to the police and told them everything she knew. “They’re going to be
coming after you,” she warned, as detectives listened in on the wiretap.
On the morning of Wednesday, February 23, David Viens left
his apartment early and drove to a newsstand where he picked up a copy of the
local paper, the Daily Breeze. He then returned home to read the front page
article that named him as a suspect in the murder of his wife. The effect of
those words had a devastating effect on Viens. Tearfully, he admitted to Kathy
Galvan that the story was true. He had killed Dawn, albeit by accident. He then
stammered something about killing himself and ran from the house.
Fearful of what David might do, Kathy chased after him. When
he got into his truck, she slipped into the passenger seat. She was convinced
that he wouldn’t do anything stupid while she was in the vehicle with him. She
was wrong. Viens quickly navigated a path towards Palos Verdes Drive, a scenic
road that winds its way along the Pacific coast. There are steep cliffs here. That
was where Viens was headed.
By now, Viens’s flight had been picked up by a patrol
officer who’d radioed for backup. Soon a convoy of police cars was trailing
Viens as he followed the coastline. Eventually, he pulled over at a scenic
overlook and jumped from the truck. With police vehicles screeching to a halt
behind her, Kathy tried desperately to hold Viens back. But he shrugged her off
and sprinted away. Without so much as a backward glance, he launched himself
over the edge and plummeted to the earth 80 feet below.
Had Viens ended up on the rocks or hit the ground head
first, he would undoubtedly have been killed. Instead, he avoided the sharp
outcrops and landed on his feet. Still, the injuries were horrific – severe
fractures to both legs, serious hip injuries, ruptured organs, internal
bleeding. Airlifted to Harbor UCLA Medical Center, he underwent emergency
surgery. That he survived is nothing short of a miracle. Viens was placed into
a medically induced coma to speed his recovery. He would remain under sedation
for eight days.
On the afternoon of March 1, 2011, Viens was finally able to
talk to detectives. And he was in a confessional mood, relating to officers the
same story he’d told his daughter Jackie and his lover, Kathy Galvan. Yet one
key question remained unanswered. Where was Dawn’s body? The answer that Viens
gave was shocking. He had cooked her.
According to Viens, he had decided that the best way to
dispose of the corpse was to boil all of the flesh from the bones and then
dispose of the remains along with other kitchen waste. He had crammed the
entire body into a 55-gallon steel pot, filled it with water and got it
boiling. This process continued for four days. He’d boiled the body at night
and wheeled the pot with its grisly contents into a shed during the day, when
his staff were around. The remains had been consigned to the dumpster behind
the restaurant and had been carted away to the dump.
The trial of David Viens got underway at L.A.’s Superior
Court on September 12, 2012. Since Viens did not deny killing Dawn, the issue
for the jury was whether he was guilty of first-degree or second-degree murder.
The defense claimed the latter, saying that Viens had not intended to kill. The
prosecutor offered a different view, insisting that Viens had killed his wife
because she had been stealing money from his business to feed her drug habit.
Viens had apparently said as much to a friend of his, adding ominously, “Nobody
steals from me. I’ll kill the bitch!”
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