Marriage is supposed to be “’till death do us part.” Unfortunately, that death can come from your own spouse, ending the marriage in a horrific way galaxies away from the love a couple used to share. This was the case with former Los Angeles chef David Viens, who admitted to murdering and cooking his wife Dawn following a deadly argument.
The couple were the proprietors of a successful bistro – David was a renowned chef, and his wife ran front of house operations and greeted everyone with a smile. From the outside, things looked great, idyllic even. But underneath there were drugs, stolen money, a botched suicide attempt off a cliff, and ultimately, prison.
Who are Chef David Viens and Dawn Viens?
When David met Dawn he was in the midst of a divorce, had three kids, and desperately wanted to move on with his life. His daughter Jackie said even though he married someone new, he never turned his back on her.
“Every time we would visit him … we would always do fun things. And — we always really looked forward to being with him,” Jackie told CBS News. “I just always really loved him. I think everybody that ever met him thought he was a great person to be around. And I always really liked Dawn. … She didn’t have any kids. So, she treated me like her daughter.”
The couple married in 1997 and eventually settled in Lomita in 2008, a sleepy suburb of L.A. Ironically, it has one of the lowest crime rates in the state. Across the parking lot from the couple’s restaurant there was a motorcycle shop. It was owned by Joe Cacace who, like it or not, was about to be part of a deadly murder investigation.
Joe and Dawn became friends. Joe said Dawn had a “great personality. I just thought she was a lot of fun, and I loved her, she was really cool.”
What people didn’t know was that the restaurant was not Vien’s only source of income. He was also a marijuana dealer on the side. In fact, it made up the bulk of his income. In 1993, he was arrested for distributing cocaine. In 2005, he was arrested for selling marijuana, but he worked with police and only got a year of prison time.
“He was an agent’s dream to work with,” a detective said at the time. “He returned calls … He was there for every deal that we needed for him to be there for. And he was on time.”
Back at the restaurant in 2009, Dawn started to confide in Joe. She said her husband was too controlling. Weirdly, David started to confide in Joe as well, telling him that Dawn had an extreme issue with drinking and that it was becoming problematic.
David’s daughter Jackie said she saw this firsthand:
“I remember waking up and she’d be in the kitchen just chugging a beer at 9 o’clock in the morning and then hide the can under the sink so that he wouldn’t know she’d already been drinking.”
According to Jackie, Dawn was just in a weird place where she had no independence, because she kind of just let David steer the ship.
“I think she was just confused with her life and as to how she got to where she was,” Jackie said. “You know, I think she wanted things to be different … she basically just let my dad take care of her her whole life.”
Turns out Dawn had plans. She started stashing money at Joe’s shop, $700 at first. She asked Joe if she could stash more in the future. He said “Yeah, it’s your spot. You can put anything you want.”
On Oct. 19, 2009, she called Joe and said she had about $1,000 she wanted to hide as well. He did not see her again.
When did Dawn Viens Disappear?
After a few days of not hearing from her, Joe Cacace asked David Viens where his wife was at the time. It was especially weird because Dawn’s car was still there. David said Dawn had gone to rehab for drinking. Joe immediately smelled a rat.
“I’m just stunned. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Did you forget who I am? I’m over your restaurant every night, your wife’s over here every day,'” Joe said. “‘This isn’t flying. You’re – you’re lying to me.'”
Two key things happened next. One was that David immediately started dating a 22-year-old waitress at his restaurant named Kathy Galvan. The second was that Joe noticed David’s daughter, Jackie, and his new lover, Kathy, discarding Dawn’s clothes in a dumpster.
“I knew it was Dawn’s stuff,” Joe said.
After three weeks of nothing, Joe went to authorities and filed a missing person’s report on Nov. 9, 2009. Two days later, detectives questioned David and asked why he never filed a missing person’s report himself. He simply said that he considered it, ringing alarm bells in detectives’ heads.
Later that week, per CBS News, David told detectives that he got “six text messages and a phone call” from Dawn. She purportedly said she wanted to “clear her head for a little while” but she “would return” and that she loved them.
Dawn’s friend Karen Patterson said she also got texts from Dawn signed with her nickname “Pixie,” but it was spelled “Pixy.” There was also no financial activity from Dawn after Oct. 18, which authorities also found odd.
After more investigating, detectives strongly started to believe David had something to do with the murder. He even told a friend that Dawn was possibly stealing money from him and that he would “kill a bitch” if it was true.
Another red flag: a news reporter asked David “Do you love your wife?” and he responded in the past tense. By October 1, 2010, almost a year after her disappearance, the case was officially handed over to homicide.
So how did they catch him if there was no body? He confessed the crime to his daughter and his young girlfriend, and then to police after he tried to kill himself.
How did David Viens Murder his Wife Dawn?
On Feb. 23, 2011, with authorities closing in, David Viens did the unthinkable: He jumped off an 80-foot cliff in Rancho Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles. He was seriously injured, but survived. In the hospital, he told police what happened, a story he’d already told his daughter and girlfriend.
But the clearest account of what happened came from when he was in jail and spoke with CBS Reporter Richard Schlesinger. David said that his wife had been using “hard drugs” like meth and cocaine.
“I came home at about 12:30,” he said. “Dawn still wasn’t home. I assumed she’d gone out to get cocaine and I really needed to sleep. I’d worked 90 hours that week.”
He knew Dawn was high when she got back so he blocked his door to keep her out. She broke through the door and got violent.
“… and now she was over me. She had the light on the night stand in my face and she was slapping my face,” David said. “I kept just saying, ‘Please leave me alone.’ … And this went on it seems like for – forever.”
Eventually he got out of bed and saw cocaine on the table, which he threw down the sink. This set Dawn off, he said. He grabbed some masking tape and “I taped around her arms … her arms down to her side so she couldn’t hit me, she couldn’t … throw anything.”
David said it wasn’t the first time he had to restrain her that way. Usually, she calmed down and he would take her to dinner. That night was different.
“I tried to tell her to be quiet. It was almost 3:00 o’clock in the morning,” he said, “but she’s screaming that I wasted her drugs. I put a piece of tape on her mouth.” When he woke up she was dead.
So how did David Viens get rid of the body?
He bagged it up and put it in his trunk and went back to work. Sgt. Rich Garcia got David’s confession:
“He obtains a large — pot. And … he utilizes the pot to boil her. Places her in the pot, puts some water in it … He put her face down, because he didn’t wanna see her face… … and over a four-day period, he boiled her … He’d do it all night,” Garcia explained. “And then the larger portions, he would break them down, double bag it, no more than eight to 10 pounds per bag, because he didn’t want it to be found … And he put it in the trash bin.”
The pot was 50 gallons. How did other people not notice? He stored the pot outside in a shed during business hours, Garcia said. David later retracted the cooking story, but it was too late. A jury convicted him and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Dawn’s body was never found.