Chef who killed wife denied parole
Restaurateur David Viens admits to murder during hearing, but says he did not boil her body for 4 days
Despite insisting to state parole commissioners that he was “so sorry for what I’ve done,” a former Lomita chef convicted of killing his wife and cooking her body to eliminate the evidence lost his bid Tuesday for an early release from prison.
David Viens, 58, was denied parole during a nearly six-hour hearing where he provided a detailed account of how he killed 39-year-old Dawn Viens during a jealous rage in 2009. But he also backpedaled on his 2011 confession that he boiled her corpse for four days in a 55-gallon drum, a story he called “outlandish.”
“I am so sorry for what I’ve done. I regret it. I will live with it forever,” Viens said during the Zoom hearing attended by Dawn Viens’ siblings, Derrick, David and Dayna Papin. “I don’t expect your forgiveness. … There is no justification for this ugly crime I committed. It was selfish, cruel and cowardly.”
Although Viens and his attorney provided positive reports showing he had attended Alcoholics Anonymous and other counseling programs — and was working toward a bachelor’s degree — while jailed at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran, California Board of Parole Hearings Commissioner Maria Gutierrez and Deputy Commissioner Ryan Hickey took less than an hour to return with their denial.
Gutierrez said Viens had not taken full responsibility for killing Dawn Viens, continued to blame her for provoking him and needed to attend more counseling sessions to make him suitable for early release. Gutierrez said Viens’ history of serving three separate federal prison terms related to drug trafficking in Florida and a criminal background dating to his teens also were considered.
“Your denial is appropriate in consideration of victim and public safety,” Gutierrez said. “Your next scheduled suitability hearing shall be set in five years.”
The hearing also revealed Viens committed two rules violations while incarcerated, including threatening a transgender inmate who ran naked in front of him in a bathroom, and covering a “pod” window despite rules against it. In 2017, records show
Kings County officials charged him with a drug offense committed behind bars, but he was found not guilty.
Convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison in 2012, Viens walked into the hearing for his first attempt at parole. In jail since shortly after he jumped off a Rancho Palos Verdes cliff on Feb. 22, 2011, as law enforcement closed in on him, Viens had earned the hearing with his 10 years behind bars and other credits.
For most of the hearing, Gutierrez and Hickey grilled Viens, asking him questions about his entire life, how he was sexually abused by an older woman when he was 12, mistreated by his tyrannical father, became involved in cocaine dealing as a teenager and landed in prison for marijuana trafficking. He described his two marriages, drug addiction, depression and how he realized in therapy since the killing that he was an abusive, controlling and jealous husband.
Public description of murder
Viens did not testify during his 2012 trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, so Tuesday’s hearing was the first time Viens publicly answered questions about the murder. During his preliminary hearing and trial, witnesses, including his daughter, revealed Viens wrapped tape around his wife’s arms and covered her mouth to keep her quiet because he wanted to sleep.
“It was impulsive,” Viens said. “When I believe she said through the tape, ‘I can’t breathe’ and I said to myself, in my mind, ‘Good, that’s what you get for messing with me,’ at that point it became murder. I did it. I’m responsible. She did nothing to deserve that.”
Viens said the act concluded an October weekend of binge drinking and cocaine use following a long week of work at Thyme Contemporary Café, a small restaurant he had opened six weeks earlier on Narbonne Avenue in downtown Lomita. The stress, he said, of working 80 to 90 hours a week to get the establishment up and running was worsened with his suspicions that his wife, a hostess in the business, had kept tip dollars for herself, cost him money with mistakes on customers’ orders, and took up with the man who installed the pan and pot rack in his kitchen.
Viens said he became enraged and jealous during arguments that continued in their Torrance duplex, especially when, he said, Dawn Viens demanded his mother — who funded the restaurant — write her a check to allow her to leave him.
‘I erupted’
“I erupted,” Viens told the commissioners. “I chased her into the other room and there was some clear packing tape on the desk and we fought. We argued and I ended up wrapping the tape around her arms. At that point, I had no intent to kill her.”
After putting tape over her mouth, he took two Ambien sleeping pills and went to bed, and awakened early Oct. 20.
“I was feeling for her in bed. She wasn’t there,” Viens said. “I went into the living room and I saw her laying on the floor. I touched and her body was hard. I said, ‘Oh God, what have you done?’ I just couldn’t believe that she was dead.”
Viens said he sat on the floor next to her for 20 minutes trying to collect himself. He didn’t call 911. Instead, he covered Dawn Viens’ body with a sheet and went to work.
He returned later, wrapped the body in three clear plastic trash bags, put it in an antique cedar trunk, loaded it into his sport utility vehicle and drove to work early the next morning. When no one was looking, he took the body out of the trunk and threw it in a trash bin.
In the days that followed, neighbors and friends questioned her disappearance. Viens claimed she had left him. Her Jeep, however, remained parked in her driveway and $640 she had stashed with a friend in case her husband left her went unclaimed. A close friend with cancer confronted Viens with her husband at the restaurant and found him sweaty in the morning with a bandage on an arm.
Then, despite saying she would accompany that friend to a doctor’s appointment, Dawn Viens failed to show up. The friend later received an odd text from Dawn’s phone. It said she was taking time to think, but oddly spelled her own nickname “Pixie” as “Pixy.” That raised concerns from friends. Viens also took up with his new hostess, a younger woman who moved into his home.
By February 2011, Viens daughter, Jackie, had told detectives her father had confessed his crime to her, telling her he had killed his wife and had once joked that if he ever had a body to get rid of, he would cook it. At the same time, this news organization reported that investigators had found blood in Viens’ home and considered him a person of interest in her disappearance.
On Feb. 21, 2011, the night before the story was published in the morning paper, Viens said a reporter confronted him at the restaurant, telling him what was about to become public.
“I think I had a nervous breakdown then,” Viens told the parole commissioners. “I knew that I was going to be arrested. Rightly so. I was afraid to take responsibility. I was afraid of what everyone would think. I was afraid to let down my mom and stick her with a restaurant she never wanted.”
The next morning, he saw the newspaper article.
Tried to commit suicide
“I decided I didn’t want to live,” he said. “I didn’t want to go to prison. I did not want to take responsibility for the harm I had caused. I tried to kill myself jumping off that 80-foot cliff.”
Viens survived the fall but was severely injured. During his hospitalization, he confessed to detectives, calling them to the hospital and admitting he had boiled her remains in a large drum over four nights on his kitchen stove, disposing of her flesh in the restaurant’s grease pit. During the day, Viens stored the drum in a small shack behind the restaurant and continued with business. The bones, he said, were thrown in the dumpster, but her skull was placed in his mother’s attic. It was never found.
Although Viens now denies that story, as he did on a 2013 “48 Hours” broadcast on CBS that profiled the murder, the shocking confession was recorded and played for his jury. His conviction has since been upheld on appeal.
No one will ever know if Viens’ account is true and what became of Dawn Viens’ remains. The commissioners questioned, for example, Viens’ account of how a body in rigor mortis could fit into a trunk.
‘Worked hard’ to change
Viens told the commissioners he had worked hard to change and “I am no longer the person I was in October 2009.”
“I lived after jumping off that cliff for some reason,” he said. “It was a pivotal moment. I really worked hard at becoming a better person. I see myself being in service to others. I’d really like to become a certified counselor in anger management that specializes in domestic violence.”
Asked by Gutierrez what he would say to Dawn Viens, Viens said, “I’m just so sorry.”
“My God, I’m sorry I didn’t treat you better,” he said. “I’m sorry that I murdered you. I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to you, didn’t appreciate you, didn’t get help. I’m going to live the rest of my life in regret, remorseful for what I’ve done. It was horrible.”
Dawn Viens’ family members were not available for comment following the commission’s decision. During the hearing, however, David Papin called Viens a pathological liar.
“I hope you, the state of California, keep this man in prison for the rest of his life,” Papin said. “He killed my sister. And more and more and more and more, he’s just admitting and admitting what he’s done.”
Tuesday’s refusal to grant Viens parole will go to the full Board of Parole Hearings for a final decision.