[dramatic music]
- Sam Herr was my son.
He was our only child,
so we focused all our attention on Sam.
He got out of the military.
He was going to college.
Things were looking good until the day I found
Julie's body in Sam's apartment.
- It was terrifying to hear what happened to her.
- On the back of her sweatshirt was,
"Eff you, she's all yours."
- I said, Sam could not have done this.
Did he take off? Was he kidnapped? I don't know.
- The suspect had months and months to plan this out.
It was certainly premeditated.
- There is a level of desensitization,
a level of inhumanity that really screams
serial killer-type of crime.
- He hatched this plot to murder
two totally innocent human beings.
This was among the worst, most depraved,
evil murderers I have ever prosecuted
in my 26 years as a DA.
[dramatic music]
♪
- It's another sun-kissed spring day
in Costa Mesa, California,
where 26-year-old Orange Coast College student
Sam Herr plans to spend the weekend with his parents,
who live nearby in Anaheim Hills.
- Sam was supposed to come over our house for the weekend.
He never showed up Friday evening.
And we tried calling. No answer.
I wasn't concerned that much, him being a young man,
going out-- figure he forgot to call.
Then Saturday, we didn't hear from him all day.
We were worried about him.
I had the key to Sam's apartment.
So Saturday evening, I went over there,
got there about 9:00.
I knocked at the door. No answer.
I opened it, turned on the lights.
Everything was spotless.
Then I went into the bedroom.
I saw a woman.
When I touched her, she was cold.
I could see she was dead.
Her head was down, her face was down,
in dried blood.
So obviously, I was stunned.
What happened?
I called 911 immediately.
- I did not know who it was
because I never turned her around.
I didn't know what was going on.
I had no idea.
- Within a couple of minutes, Costa Mesa Police officers
arrived at the scene, along with emergency personnel.
- They confirmed there is
a deceased female in the bedroom,
indicating a possible crime scene.
- With Steve Herr on his way
to the station for questioning,
police take a closer look at the crime scene,
beginning with the victim.
- She appeared to be a young Asian woman.
You could tell that she had severe head trauma,
apparently shot in the head.
But because of her long black hair,
there was no way of knowing the nature of the wounds,
if it was one shot or two that penetrated.
There's a million forensic mysteries at that point
just looking at her.
- Her pants seemed to be pulled down
and cut with scissors.
- Written on the back of her sweatshirt was,
"Eff you, she's all yours."
So that looks like a sexual assault.
It looks like some sort of jealous rage.
When police searched Sam's apartment,
they couldn't find his passport.
His ID was missing, his wallet was missing,
and they didn't know where his car was.
There were no shell casings found,
and there was no firearm found.
On the surface, it looks like Sam Herr was in the wind,
on the run.
- The crime scene indicated that Sam Herr possibly
either sexually assaulted or attempted
to sexually assault this person.
- When the cops first begin
investigating this case,
detectives are well-versed on motive.
And love is a strong motivator, and it's not a far leap
to suspect that Sam ended up
killing the target of his love.
- However, because of what's written on her sweatshirt,
it could be revenge against Sam,
or against somebody else,
like maybe a jilted lover shot and killed her.
But the thought process and the mindset is,
Sam Herr is a murder suspect.
In the apartment during their investigation,
they find a purse in the kitchen.
- When they got into the purse and they looked,
her name was Julie Kibuishi.
She was a 23-year-old OCC student
studying fashion design.
- They also find her cell phone within the apartment as well.
- Once police identify the victim
as Julie Kibuishi,
they immediately notify her family,
and news of her tragic death begins to spread.
- I had never known anybody that had passed away
from being murdered.
[somber music]
♪
She wasn't, like, doing anything nefarious.
Like, she had a job. She went to school.
She was, like, a really smart person.
I--it's just-- it makes no sense.
Like, there's just no reason for this
to have happened to her.
I felt terrible for Julie's family.
She was super close with her family.
- For June Kibuishi, Julie's mom,
it was just absolutely heartbreaking
because her daughter had been taken from her,
but she didn't know why.
- Julie and I were both dancers.
We danced at dance studios.
We went to the same performing arts high school for dance.
We danced at college together.
If, you know, you needed something,
she would be there for you.
I just wanted justice for my friend.
- While Julie's friends and family grapple
with the devastating news,
detectives interview Steve Herr at the station.
- When I found out it was Julie,
I said, Sam could not have done this
because Julie was a friend of Sam
and a couple of the other guys at the apartment complex.
- Steve Herr says Julie was also Sam's tutor
in an anthropology class they were taking.
- I had met Julie one time at Sam's apartment.
She was a charming, enthusiastic,
bubbly young woman.
And I asked Sam, I said, "Sam, is there anything between you?"
He said, "Dad, there's nothing between Julie and myself.
She's like a kid sister to me."
- Parents often, I think, don't know
what their kids are up to, especially,
in a romantic context.
But Steve Herr was insistent
that they weren't dating each other.
This was his tutor. This was a friend.
- Detectives take note of this information,
but then Steve reveals an alarming detail
about Sam's past.
- Sam's background came up very quickly
that he had been charged with a murder himself
towards the end of high school in the city of Los Angeles.
It, essentially, was a gang murder of a young man
that Sam was with when he was attacked by a rival gang.
And the theory was that Sam had set this young man up.
But the jury acquitted Sam of all wrongdoing.
I didn't know what to make of it at that point.
- Despite his son's troubled past,
Steve tells investigators that Sam made an earnest effort
to turn his life around.
- In 2006, Sam enlisted in the Army.
And for 15 months,
Sam was stationed in Afghanistan
in a very volatile area.
[gunfire]
Sam matured immensely when he was in the military.
Did give Sam a purpose and give him focus.
But he would wake up at night from PTSD.
But that's normal, especially from combat.
Sam got out the military July of 2009
and he was doing quite well.
He started college September of 2009.
Things were looking good until the day I found
Julie's body in Sam's apartment.
[tense music]
- Mr. Herr did not believe his son was the primary suspect
in Julie's death.
However, everything else indicates
Sam Herr could be the suspect.
- He's a combat veteran suffering from PTSD,
and he also has had
a significant scrape with the law
where he was accused of murder in his own right,
but he was acquitted.
All of that begins to paint a picture
of somebody who might actually be capable
of doing something like this.
- A bulletin is subsequently issued,
looking for Sam and his whereabouts.
- All the news stations put his picture on there
and saying prime suspect.
It was one hell of a nightmare.
- Long Beach gets their SWAT team together.
There's a helicopter in the air.
- Somebody had come back after she had been dead
for several hours and cut her jeans off.
- This monster had no problem creating a plan
that required a second murder.
[dramatic music]
♪
- When I had gotten home after being questioned by the police,
I had to break the news to his mom, Raquel.
She was shocked.
And the first thing you worry about is, where's my boy?
What's going on?
I'm thinking, something happened to Sam as well.
Didn't know what.
Did he take off? Was he kidnapped?
I don't know. No one knew where Sam was.
- When I heard that he's missing
and they found a dead woman in his apartment,
I said, I'm sorry, what?
Like, you know, it's complete shock
and your brain doesn't know
how to process what it's hearing.
But I was 100% certain
that he didn't do this to this woman.
- Costa Mesa Police have released a photo
and vehicle description hoping to locate a 26-year-old man.
- Neighbors say his bicycle sits outside his apartment,
but his vehicle is gone.
- Police are asking for your help in finding him.
- While the search for Sam continues,
police gain access to Julie Kibuishi's phone,
which was found at the crime scene,
and quickly uncover her final communications.
- It became pretty clear that she stopped talking
to people on Friday night.
And you see this exchange from Sam's phone saying,
"I really need a friend tonight."
"Please. No sex.
I just need somebody to talk to"
about some family problems that he was having.
And the response was, "Ew, Sam, we're like bro and sis.
Of course no sex"...
which was corroborative
of what Steve Herr was telling detectives.
And then detectives started interviewing
their mutual friends.
And their friends started saying the same thing.
Like, this lover's quarrel makes no sense
because they weren't lovers, that this was
a purely platonic relationship.
- Police now begin canvassing the apartment complex
to gather more information from fellow residents
about Sam's potential whereabouts
and actions before the murder.
- And among the people they interviewed
was a man named Daniel Wozniak
and a woman named Rachel Buffett,
who was his fiancée.
They learned that Dan and Rachel
were friends with Sam,
at least to some degree, and also Julie.
Wozniak told detectives that he'd seen Sam on Friday.
And, essentially, what he said was
that Sam was going to spend some time with his parents
that weekend.
He did say that he mentioned having some problems
with his family, which appeared to corroborate
the text messages that were found
on Julie Kibuishi's phone.
- But in interviewing
Steve Herr, Sam's dad,
there was no indication whatsoever
there were family problems between Sam and anybody else.
- There are no family problems with Sam and ourselves.
We were as close as close can be.
- Maybe the family isn't aware that he's having some issues
at home, but they were-- again, they were
very, very insistent and pretty persuasive
that that also made no sense.
It became pretty clear that some of the puzzle pieces
on this case did not fit.
But Wozniak, and also Rachel Buffett, his fiancée,
said that they last saw Sam get into a black Mazda
with a young man wearing a baseball cap.
- While police attempt to track down
additional information on the black Mazda,
an autopsy is performed.
The results are surprising.
- At the crime scene, there was no way of knowing
how many times she'd been shot in the head
because of her hair.
What they were able to determine very clearly
was that Julie had been shot twice in the head,
each round probably fatal.
Also, there had been no sexual assault.
- Just because there's no evidence of sexual assault,
it doesn't mean that that wasn't at least attempted
by whoever killed Julie, but it didn't occur
based on the autopsy examination.
- Another thing that was really interesting about it is,
she had what's known as blanching on her buttocks.
Blanching are just white areas of skin,
usually caused by pressure.
And that usually takes several hours
for blanching to break in.
But we had blanching on the upper part of her body,
specifically her buttocks area, and it was in the shape
of the pockets of her jeans.
- This indicates that Julie was laying
on her back with her jeans on after she was killed.
- It means that somebody had come back
after she had been dead for several hours,
staged the scene, and cut her jeans off.
And this soon morphed into something far more diabolical.
[dramatic music]
- After receiving the autopsy results,
police now know Julie Kibuishi
was shot twice in the head, and then hours later,
someone staged the scene
to make it look like a sexual assault.
While their prime suspect, Sam Herr, remains missing,
both police and his father, Steve,
are desperate to find him.
- We had to find Sam.
I had to find Sam. That's my son.
- So as the detectives are performing
the official investigation, Steve Herr is also
monitoring Sam's bank account.
He was calling Sam's friends.
That sometimes can complicate a murder investigation.
In this case, it helped because the first real clue we got
was the use of Sam's ATM card in Long Beach.
- I saw on Saturday the 22nd,
there was a withdrawal of $400.
On Sunday, I think it went to $500 withdrawn.
And also, there's a charge of pizza
called Ecco's Pizza.
There's--money's being taken out of one bank in Long Beach,
and this Ecco's Pizza is within very close to that bank.
- Steve immediately notifies police
about Sam's bank records.
- They then contact the bank, obtain surveillance footage
to see who this individual is.
- And it was not Samuel Herr.
Detectives had no idea who this person was
that was taking the money out of Sam's account.
- No one close to Sam can identify the young man either.
- At this point in the investigation,
Sam's in the wind.
We don't know where he is.
We don't know where his car is.
His passport is missing.
So the next thought was, well, Sam must have some sort
of confederate here who's helping him
take money out of his own account.
- To gather more information, investigators quickly focus
on the charges from Ecco's Pizza.
- Detectives made contact with this pizza parlor
to find out who's making these purchases,
which leads them back to a residence
in the city of Long Beach.
Costa Mesa Police then made contact
with the Long Beach Police Department
and asked for their assistance.
- The police, you know,
they've got a guy on the loose,
a combat vet in God only knows what kind of mental condition
who very well may be armed and dangerous,
and that's a scary thing.
- So Long Beach gets their SWAT team together.
There's a helicopter in the air.
- They hit this house, and when they go in,
I was expecting that Sam Herr would be sitting on a couch
and sending somebody out to the ATM
because he was laying low.
[indistinct radio chatter]
And instead, what they find is
a 16-year-old kid named Wesley Freilich
sitting inside his mom's house.
And he immediately tells police he got the ATM card
from another man that he used to work in plays with,
and that man's name was Daniel Wozniak.
This was, obviously, pretty big news to detectives
who had only recently talked to Daniel Wozniak,
Sam Herr's neighbor, who didn't tell them anything
about having Sam's ATM card.
- Police press Wesley for more details
about Daniel and the ATM card.
- Wesley said that Daniel Wozniak approached him
and said that he was working for a bail bondsman,
and that he-- he needed his help.
He basically says that when people skip out on their bail,
we have access to their bank accounts to get the money.
- And Wozniak gave him this ATM card,
explaining to him that he was withdrawing the funds
to get money paid back to him from Sam.
- He says that you're doing your public service.
And Wozniak would pay him a small fee
for using the ATM machine, and that he could also
use the card to order pizzas.
You know, it was obvious to everybody at that moment
that Wesley, who is terrified, has been duped.
And it appeared that Daniel Wozniak has
lied to them about something very important,
and that's the existence of this ATM card.
- After speaking with Wesley, investigators quickly dig
into Daniel Wozniak's background.
- They learned that he grew up
in a nice family in Long Beach,
went to good schools, and that he was
a community theater actor.
They learned that he had a DUI from the year before,
and then he never took care of it.
So he never showed up to court so there's a bench warrant out.
And now they learned that he has lied to them
about something very important.
So they need to get to the bottom of that immediately.
[touch tones beeping]
- Detectives contact Daniel Wozniak
and ask if he will come down to the station
to answer a few questions.
- And his response was, yeah, I can't come down.
I got my bachelor party tonight at a place called
Tsunami Sushi in Huntington Beach.
So you can imagine how that goes over
with a bunch of homicide detectives,
you know--not very well.
So they go and they crash his bachelor party,
as they should, and they arrest him
for the lies that he told them in the previous interview.
That's obstruction of justice.
That's a crime in the state of California.
They take him to the Costa Mesa Police Department,
and they sit Daniel Wozniak down for an interview.
[dramatic music]
[tense music]
- Four days into the investigation
of Julie Kibuishi's murder,
Costa Mesa police arrest Daniel Wozniak.
And he immediately admits to lying
during his first interview.
Now, he says he actually saw Sam Herr
the day after Julie was killed.
- He says, I drove him to the Los Alamitos Military Base
so that he would have someplace to think.
- Sam indicates to him that he was looking at pictures
of Julie, thus initiating the text
for her to come over to his apartment
to meet up with him.
- Wozniak then tells police that part of this scheme
of withdrawing the money was for Sam to then escape.
- He dropped him off at this mall in Long Beach,
put Wesley up to it.
He's a juvenile,
so juveniles have to be treated differently.
- He says, I don't know where Sam is now,
and, you know, I'm sorry that I lied.
- His interview, he was very confident,
very matter-of-fact.
But during the investigation, Steve Herr and Raquel Herr
were insistent that they weren't having
any family problems.
These are really experienced homicide investigators,
and they remain suspicious.
And at one point, they perform
what's known as a ruse.
It's a completely legitimate investigative technique
where they take his DNA.
They swab his DNA.
You know, a lot of people have watched "CSI,"
and they think that DNA comes back
in, like, five minutes.
And in reality, it--
on a very rushed job,
it's going to take a couple of weeks,
and Wozniak didn't know that.
- And they give him the bad news
that his DNA is found on Julie's body
to see what he would say.
- And at that point,
Wozniak changed his story substantially.
- Now, that was a very significant moment
in the investigation, because every single person
that had been to the crime scene knew
there was no way you could tell
how many holes were in her head.
It was impossible.
- Police press Wozniak for the truth.
And after another hour in the hot seat,
he maintains he had nothing to do with the murder.
He only helped Sam get away after Julie was already dead.
- And they took Wozniak to a cell,
and they let him call Rachel Buffett,
his fiancée.
- And there's a whole exchange between the two of them
where, in effect, he says, I didn't kill anybody.
I helped Sam get away.
That's all I did.
- Tim is Wozniak's older brother.
- At the end of that conversation,
Wozniak alerted detectives
that he had more that he wanted to say.
[dramatic music]
♪
[dramatic music]
- 14 hours after his arrest, Daniel Wozniak comes clean,
telling Costa Mesa Police
he killed Julie Kibuishi and Sam Herr.
- Wozniak goes on to explain that these murders
had been placed in action months and months before this.
- Daniel Wozniak was friends with Sam,
and also Julie, because Dan and Rachel,
their apartment was very close to Sam's apartment.
Sam trusted him.
And Sam Herr, he had $62,000 in a bank account
in hard-earned combat pay,
and that became known to Daniel Wozniak.
And one of the things that they learned
over the course of the investigation
was that Daniel Wozniak was in pretty dire financial straits.
He had been served with an eviction notice.
He wasn't working.
It did not appear that his fiancée,
Rachel Buffett, had been working.
And they were--they were struggling financially.
And so he hatched this plot
to get at Sam Herr's combat pay.
- What Wozniak tells detectives
is that he got Sam's ATM PIN number.
We don't know how he got the PIN number.
But Wozniak is a weaselly dude who Sam trusted,
and I'm sure he turned his back on him at an ATM.
And then he lured Sam to the Liberty Theater
at the Los Alamitos Military Base.
[gunshot]
- He describes how he took his wallet, took his car keys.
- And then he describes how he took his cell phone.
Posing as Sam, he sent a text message to Julie.
- He asked Julie to come over, which Julie does,
so further sets Wozniak's plan into place.
[gunshots]
- He's very clearly a psychopath.
Part of this personality disorder is,
you don't experience the normal emotions
that make us human, like guilt, shame, remorse.
This monster not only set out to kill an innocent person
for his personal gain, he had no problem
creating a plan that required a second murder
because he doesn't care.
- As he described what he had done to detectives,
he also got far more gruesome.
- In the backyard of the family of Rachel Buffett, his fiancée.
- For him to be able to pull this much violence off,
there is a level of desensitization,
a level of inhumanity,
that really screams serial killer.
- I was notified that he'd confessed
and that he'd provided a location
for the body of Sam Herr.
So at that point,
detectives went to the Liberty Theater.
And when they got up there, sure enough, there he was.
And then there was this arboretum in Long Beach
where then police had to go
on a search for Sam Herr's head
and his right and left hands, which they find.
Meanwhile, Rachel Buffett called detectives
about evidence in the possession of Tim.
The investigation revealed that after the murder of Sam Herr,
Wozniak had given his brother, Tim,
this backpack full of evidence.
And Tim was supposed to get rid of it.
And he looked in it and, basically,
what he did is, he took it to his parents' house
and threw it over the fence.
So the detectives went to serve a search warrant
on Wozniak's parents' home.
And on the other side of the fence,
there was a backpack,
which was a cornucopia of evidence.
Inside were bloody clothes belonging to Sam Herr,
Sam's wallet, his ID, shell casings
from both murder scenes.
The firearm was missing, but it was everything
you could ask for as a prosecutor
to prove that this guy committed these murders.
- Police also retrieve the ax and saw
from the Buffett residence.
And as investigators work
to obtain additional search warrants
for Daniel's apartment and his electronic devices,
they must also share the tragic news
with Sam Herr's family.
- When the police came over and told us
that Sam had been murdered, I suspected that.
Raquel lost it.
My wife lost it.
And then the police said Sam was dismembered.
[somber music]
I lost it then.
Nothing in this world--
you want anger?
You really want to hate somebody?
You hate somebody for doing something like that.
♪
I'll carry that for the rest of my life.
- While Sam's family grapples with their loss,
detectives turn their attention to Daniel's laptop,
searching for hard proof of premeditation.
- You can literally read his mind through Google,
because he would go from things like,
how loud is a gunshot,
a particular caliber of bullet,
and then it would go to,
what are the best honeymoons in Mexico?
You know, what cruise lines?
What vacations are great for actors?
So it literally would be from, like,
how do I accomplish this killing
to, um, bitchin' honeymoon ideas.
So it's just--it's--it's sick.
- For an extended period of time
prior to Julie and Sam's murder,
Wozniak had months and months to plan this out,
premeditatedly looking into the computer.
- Daniel Wozniak is a psychopath,
but he's a very interesting kind.
Every 1 out of 100 people is a psychopath.
And that's an unpopular thing for me to say
because many people associate psychopathy with crime.
Nope, most of them are not criminal.
They're goal-driven. Very different.
So if your goal is not criminal,
then you become a pro-social psychopath,
and they are everywhere.
That's who he was before his goal became
a lavish wedding and a lavish honeymoon.
- Wozniak is charged
with two counts of first-degree murder,
and the district attorney decides to seek
the death penalty.
But then the case takes an unexpected turn.
- Wozniak has pleaded not guilty.
- They were saying that I shot both of them.
It's not true.
- 5 1/2 years after the senseless killings,
Daniel Wozniak stands trial for the murders
of Julie Kibuishi and Sam Herr.
Despite his initial confession,
Wozniak pleads not guilty
and now faces the death penalty.
- He confessed.
He had a myriad of evidence,
and it should have been over immediately.
But then he said he was not guilty.
So we went to trial.
- Although Wozniak claimed innocence to the media,
it's soon clear he lacks an adequate defense.
But his hope is to avoid the death penalty.
- In California, capital cases are bifurcated.
So what that means is,
there's a guilt phase of a trial,
then there's a penalty phase of a trial.
And the defense didn't want to waste a whole lot
of credibility on the guilt phase,
because we had a full-blown confession top to bottom.
- The defense put up no defense.
They pretty much said, yeah, he did the murder.
[dramatic music]
♪
- The trial lasts five days,
and the jury quickly reaches a verdict.
- Within two hours, the jury found Dan Wozniak
guilty of first-degree murder.
And then they have another mini trial.
And that mini trial encompasses,
should he get the death penalty or life without parole?
- The jury had heard everything they needed
and came back with what I believe to be
the correct verdict.
- It is the order of this court
that you shall suffer the death penalty.
- It gave me some solace.
Huge relief.
You know, weight is off our shoulders.
- This was absolutely among the worst, most depraved,
evil murderers I ever prosecuted
in my 26 years as a DA.
- There's no word to describe our pain and anger
and frustration we have been going through.
- My only regret, that this state
won't let me kill this coward myself.
- With the sentencing of Daniel Wozniak complete,
those who aided and abetted his crimes
also face their day in court.
- Investigators looked very closely at Rachel Buffett,
and what they were able to determine
was that she had lied to detectives
about this mystery man in the hat
and the black Mazda.
In a murder case, it's a crime to provide false information,
especially when that is corroborating
the story of your fiancé,
who has committed two horrific murders.
So she was prosecuted separately as an accessory
after the fact, and she was convicted of that.
- Found guilty of covering up a depraved double murder
committed by her fiancé.
- Wozniak's older brother, Tim, he was--it should be noted,
was totally cooperative with us,
and he wound up testifying against his brother,
which isn't an easy thing for anybody to do.
But he was charged criminally, and he was prosecuted
as an accessory after the fact to murder.
Wesley Freilich was never charged
and he was never tried because he was a juvenile.
He was a victim in this.
He was another person whose life was
negatively affected by everything
that Daniel Wozniak did.
[somber music]
- Julie and Sam had so much potential,
and they gave their lives,
thinking they were helping a friend.
Sam thought he was helping Dan Wozniak.
He got killed for that.
Julie thought she was helping Sam,
and she got murdered for that.
Finding Julie's body in Sam's apartment
and finding out that Sam had died
were the hardest things in my life.
I wouldn't wish that upon anybody.
- I miss how full of life Julie was.
She had the biggest smile.
You know, I always say she had the biggest heart.
- Being a veteran, Sam was entitled to a military funeral
with full military honors.
[gunshots]
- It was beautiful to see
how the military had honored him that day.
Sammy, I think, would have been proud of that too.
- I go to the cemetery every week.
I go there and I sit there for anywhere
between 45 minutes and an hour.
Every week when I do leave, I'll say, love you, Sammy.
I'll see you next week.
And it gives me a lot of solace.
You see, it's my time with Sam.
I'm with my boy as best as I can be.