A Southern California restaurant owner who has spent more than a decade in prison for killing his wife has finally described what he did with her body. David Viens, convicted in 2013, told a parole board last September that he boiled her remains for four days. The confession came nearly 12 years after she vanished, and it only deepened the horror of a case in which her body was never found.
A wife who vanished
Dawn Viens worked as a hostess at her husband’s restaurant, Thyme Contemporary Café in Los Angeles. She disappeared in October 2009. Viens told his staff she had walked out after an argument about medication.
Other details did not fit his story. Her car was still at the couple’s home, and several hundred dollars in emergency savings were untouched. A friend also received text messages supposedly from Dawn that misspelled her nickname and showed no awareness of the friend’s cancer diagnosis.
Dawn’s sister, Dayna Papin, filed a missing persons report.
The investigation closes in
In August 2010, homicide detectives took over the case after blood spatter was found at the couple’s former home. When Viens learned he was a suspect, he jumped from an 80-foot cliff at Pelican Cove in a suicide attempt. He survived, but with multiple fractures.
After the fall, he admitted his involvement. Police pulled up floorboards and walls at his restaurant, yet Dawn’s body was never recovered. At his 2013 trial, a recording of that early confession was played in court. Viens claimed he had been hallucinating, telling jurors, "I loved my wife, I didn’t cook my wife." He was sentenced to 15 years to life.
A confession at the parole hearing
At the hearing last September, Viens gave a very different account. He said he had duct-taped Dawn’s mouth, hands and feet after an argument, claiming he wanted to stop her "driving around wasted, whacked out on coke, and drinking." She told him she could not breathe, and he ignored her. After taking Ambien and sleeping through the night, he woke to find she had died of suffocation.
"I wasn’t trying to murder her," he told the panel, describing a "drunken rage in the cycle of domestic violence."
He said he panicked when he returned to the house that evening. Remembering something he had seen on television, he decided to boil the body. "I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days," he said. He told the board he emptied the pot into a grease disposal at the restaurant.
Viens claimed her bones were mixed in with ordinary rubbish in the outdoor trash bins. Her skull, he said, stayed intact, so he hid it in his mother’s attic. It has never been found.
How things stand now
Viens apologised to Dawn’s family and said he felt "horrible, ashamed, deplorable."
Dayna Papin was among the relatives who heard him speak. They did not find him credible and believed he was trying to persuade the three-person panel to let him out early. The board denied his request, and the family say they want him to remain behind bars.
Image credit: Real Crime Psychology/YouTube
Source: Daily Express US
Leave a Reply