A Bad Actor

Daniel Wozniak was an out-of-work community theater actor in Costa Mesa, California, facing eviction and mounting debts, with his wedding to Rachel Buffett set for May 28, 2010. His neighbor and friend Sam Herr, 26, was an Army veteran who had saved about $62,000 while deployed in Afghanistan.

On May 21, 2010, Wozniak lured Herr to the attic of a theater on the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos and shot him twice in the head. Using Herr’s phone, he texted Herr’s friend Julie Kibuishi, 23, and drew her to Herr’s apartment, where he shot her and arranged the scene to suggest a sexual assault, hoping police would suspect Herr. That evening Wozniak went onstage in a community staging of the musical Nine. He later dismembered Herr’s body and left the remains at the El Dorado Nature Center in Long Beach.

Wozniak had a teenager withdraw money from Herr’s accounts, and that trail helped lead investigators to him. Detectives arrested him at his bachelor party, held at a Huntington Beach sushi restaurant, on May 26, 2010, two days before the wedding, and he admitted the killings. On December 17, 2015, an Orange County jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, and on September 23, 2016, Judge John D. Conley sentenced him to death.