Imprisoned South Bay restaurateur comes clean in bid for parole: He cooked his wife’s body

David Viens had already been convicted of murdering his wife when he tried to convince a judge that the most revolting aspect of his crime — revealed in a confession to police that reverberated across the country — wasn’t true.

The Lomita restaurateur, in a futile 45-minute attempt to delay his sentencing and reopen his case without a lawyer, claimed he was suffering from hallucinations caused by painkillers when he told detectives he had boiled his wife’s body, poured the liquified remains down a grease trap and tossed her bones in a trash bin.

“I loved my wife,” he said emphatically in court that day in 2013. “I didn’t cook my wife.”

The judge waved off Viens’ denial and sentenced him to 15 years to life in prison for second-degree murder in the death of his wife, Dawn.

‘Thought about suicide’

Nearly 12 years later, in a losing effort to convince a three-member California Parole Board panel that he is remorseful and worthy of early release, Viens has come clean. He recently admitted that after killing his 39-year-old wife in their Torrance home, he panicked and indeed had desecrated her remains in exactly the manner described in his confession.

A transcript of his Sept. 26 parole hearing provides sobering insights into Viens’ state of mind in the aftermath of his wife’s death in 2009 and several details about his actions that have previously been undisclosed.

“I thought about suicide,” Viens told the panel. “I went back to the house where Dawn’s body was — the sun was already starting to go down — and I had a panic attack, absolutely freaking out. And I was talking out loud to myself, ‘Oh my God, you have to do something. You have to do something.’

“At that moment, that’s when I thought back about something I had seen on TV a decade earlier. I decided right then that I was going to go ahead and boil the body. I was afraid. I was panicked. I was new to L.A. I didn’t really have any friends. I’d already lied to everybody that morning, and I did it and I regret it.”

Viens’ confession stunned Dawn Viens’ family members listening to the hearing over the phone. The proceeding from the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran was Viens’ second attempt at trying to convince a parole board panel that he was ready to go home.

“I extend my deepest apologies to all of my victims who have been and continue to suffer because of my selfish and destructive actions, especially to my wife, Dawn,” Viens told the panel. “I apologize sincerely for murdering Dawn and then callously lying about it. I wish that I could reverse the pain I have caused and bring her back to you.”

Although Viens described himself as “deeply remorseful” and sickened by what he had done, his words were not enough to convince the panel that he deserved his freedom.

The Parole Board members quickly ended Viens’ hope for early release, telling him he could try again in three years.

How the mystery unfolded

One of the most shocking crimes in the South Bay in several decades, the story behind Dawn Viens’ disappearance and murder has become a regular subject for true-crime programs, from CBS’s “48 Hours” to Oxygen’s “The Real Murders of Los Angeles.”

Not only did Viens jump from a Rancho Palos Verdes cliff when police were closing in on him, his later mystifying revelation of how he covered up the crime continues to draw interest.

The crime occurred in October 2009, when Viens’ wife of 17 years vanished. David Viens told friends and his staff at the Thyme Contemporary Cafe on Narbonne Avenue — where his wife worked as a hostess — that she had left him because he demanded she seek help for drug abuse.

But something was odd. Dawn left her car behind in the driveway of their Torrance home. She failed to collect hundreds of dollars she had stashed with a friend in the event she and her husband split. She failed to pick up a close friend with a cancer diagnosis for a doctor’s appointment, and later texted her to say she needed time to think. In the text, Dawn Viens misspelled her own nickname and never asked about her friend’s health.

By November, Dawn’s sister, Dayna Papin, filed a missing person’s report and friends Karen Patterson and her husband, Mike Wade, confronted David Viens at the restaurant. They found him tired and sweaty, his arm covered with a bandage.

No one could have imagined what he was doing in his kitchen.

“He was extremely agitated,” Patterson recalled. “I said, ‘David, what happened to your hand?’ And he said, ‘I burnt myself.’ ”

Authorities close in

Months passed. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department missing persons investigators found no sign of Dawn, no bank activity, no credit card usage.

Viens told the panel that he believed the police were going to come for him at any time.

“Honestly, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been arrested,” Viens said. “As time went by, I started to think, well, maybe I might be able to get away with this.”

Viens said he continued to tell friends his wife had “gone off on a drug binge, that she was probably with one of her previous boyfriends on the East Coast.”

With increasing news coverage of Dawn’s disappearance, two sheriff’s homicide detectives took over the case in August 2010. In early 2011, they revealed to The Daily Breeze that they had found blood in the Viens residence, believed Dawn was dead, and considered the restaurateur a “person of interest” in her killing.

Hours after an article with that news appeared the next morning, Viens broke down at home, admitted his crime to his new girlfriend, jumped into his sport utility vehicle and raced with her in a harrowing ride to a Rancho Palos Verdes cliff. As his girlfriend tried to stop him at the cliff’s edge, Viens broke free from her grasp and jumped.

Surviving the 80-foot fall, a heavily medicated Viens confessed to the killing in the hospital, telling detectives he had cooked the body in his restaurant kitchen over the course of four days “until it was done.” According to a transcript of his original confession, he said he poured the water and remains into his grease trap to mix it with his restaurant waste. Her bones, he said, were placed strategically among other garbage in the bin outside. Her skull, he said, remained intact, so he hid it in his mother’s attic with the intention of leaving it somewhere later.

Detectives searched the attic, but couldn’t find it.

Viens’ ghastly confession remained a secret until former Deputy District Attorney Deborah Brazile played a recording of it to the jury at Viens’ murder trial in 2012. The restauranteur did not take the stand to defend himself. Jurors convicted him of second-degree murder after Viens’ attorney convinced them the crime was not premeditated and Viens did not intend to kill her.

Now, during his recent parole hearing, Viens said he was ready to tell all.

Day of the murder

Dawn, he said, arrived home in a drug-induced rage as he tried to sleep following a long work week in the restaurant. Drunk himself, he accused Dawn of failing to make a bank deposit. As they battled, he grabbed packing tape to keep her from hitting him, tied her arms to her sides and covered her mouth to keep her from waking the neighbors. Dawn, he said, told him she couldn’t breathe.

Viens said he took an Ambien sleeping pill and went to bed. When he awakened in the morning, he discovered Dawn had suffocated.

“I wasn’t trying to murder her,” Viens told the panel. “I was in a drunken rage in the cycle of domestic violence. And my actions — my careless disregard for her life — brought forth her murder.”

Viens, who had previously served time for drug trafficking in Florida, wrapped his wife’s body in plastic bags and went to work, stopping at Target to buy a burner phone. He called a lawyer, who wanted $150,000 to represent him. Viens said he didn’t have the money to hire him.

“I kept saying to him, ‘It was an accident. … This was an accident,’” Viens told the panel. “He actually said to me, ‘No, you’re not listening. You need to hire someone like me and do the right thing,’ and ‘They’re going to crucify you.’ At that precise moment, employees walked in the back door. I didn’t know that Dawn had scheduled a meeting that morning for the floor staff.”

Viens said that was when he told his first lie. He advised his employees that Dawn was on a binge and wouldn’t be into work.

He said he thought about turning himself in, but “as the day went on, you know, my criminal thinking just kind of, you know, came to the forefront and it seemed, uh, less and less likely that I was going to go that route.”

Numbed emotions with vodka, pot

By late afternoon, Viens went home, removed the plastic bags containing his wife’s body and stuffed her into a cedar-lined antique steamer trunk his grandfather had refurbished and given to them as a gift.

Viens said he had a panic attack, took another Ambien and went to sleep.

The next day he drove the trunk to the restaurant and began his effort to eliminate the evidence. Parole panel members, convinced by Viens’ attorney that it was unnecessary to go deeper, did not ask for details, including asking what he had seen on television to give him the idea to do something so horrific and why he never reconsidered what he was doing during those four nights.

Viens said his actions left him feeling “horrible, ashamed, deplorable.”

“I didn’t feel like I deserved to live, but I numbed all those emotions with vodka, with pot,” Viens said. “I had depression. But I continued to lie. I knew I was on borrowed time.”

Within weeks, while Dawn’s friends and family posted missing persons fliers and sought media help to find her, Viens went about his business. His much younger new girlfriend quickly replaced Dawn in her job and at home.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘You’re going to go to hell, David,’ ” Viens said. “I wasn’t planning that. I didn’t even think it was possible, but it ended up happening because we worked together. We were around each other.”

As months passed, Viens declined to join Dawn’s friends in their quest to find her. According to court testimony, Viens’ daughter and girlfriend threw Dawn’s clothes into the same trash container where her bones had been dumped. Sitting with his daughter in a hot tub one night, he told her he had killed Dawn and placed her body into the trash.

She kept it to herself until revealing her father’s secret to a detective the night before he jumped from the cliff.

During his parole hearing, Viens said it was finally time to tell the truth. What he had told detectives while recovering in the hospital was indeed what occurred.

Therapy revealed who he was

Asked to explain his transformation, Viens said he had learned during his prison therapy program that he was an abusive husband, initially to his first wife and later to Dawn. Therapy made him realize he was a murderer.

“For the longest time, I had convinced myself through denial that this was an accident,” Viens said. “But now that I understand that I was an abuser, that I was horrible, that I’m responsible for this.”

Viens told the panel it was “absolutely shameful to destroy a body, and to deprive her and her loved ones of a proper burial.”

Telling the truth, he told the panel, helped him to feel liberated.

“I’m ashamed of what I’ve done, but at least I’m not lying about it,” he said. “I know that the family needs closure. I didn’t have any diabolical plan to do this. I was in a panic and fear, and I regret doing it.”

Following Viens’ testimony, the Parole Board wasted little time denying his request for release, ruling he continued to pose an unreasonable risk to public safety.

“This was an incredibly callous and calculated crime,” Commissioner Emily Sheffield told him. “Over the course of days, you disposed of your wife’s body — dear wife of 17 years — in a grotesque manner. And you did also continue to make the choice every day to lie to your family about Dawn’s whereabouts.”

Family ‘forever fractured’

Dawn’s sister, Dayna Papin, said she had difficulty from the very beginning believing the account Viens gave detectives of how he disposed of her sister. She thought it was too outrageous. After hearing his latest confession, she doesn’t know what to think.

“He’s already given us several different stories about the events of that night,” Papin said. “I think he probably has been plotting the right things to say so he gets out of jail.”

Her brother, David Papin, said he doesn’t believe Viens.

“I think if he’s trying to get penance for telling the truth or not telling the truth, I don’t believe a word he says,” David Papin said.

The family members, including David Papin’s wife, Karey, said they receive phone calls regularly from true crime television show producers seeking to retell the story. David and Karey Papin said they would prefer the focus shift from David Viens’ actions to the life he took.

“Every time she was away from him, she got better,” Karey Papin said. “What he did was destroy her before he took her life. The last time I spoke to her, she was sober, healthy, happy, and wanted to meet her brand-new niece. That’s who he stole. He took my daughter’s aunt away from her.”

Meanwhile, they hope Viens remains behind bars.

“This whole family will forever be fractured because they never got to see her free of him,” Karey Papin said. “Even now, she’s dead and a prisoner to this.”