BOILING
When David Viens jumped off a cliff, everyone knew he had something to hide…
I
t was a dramatic police chase that brought a gripping US case to its climax. In a quest to discoverer what had happened to missing woman, Dawn Viens, the authorities had her husband David under surveillance. They suspected he’d played a part in her disappearance two years earlier. As David felt them closing in, he raced off in his car with the police giving chase. He drove to a cliff edge where he leapt over a fence and dived off the 80ft drop. The case could have ended there in his death, but incredibly, David survived. And as he recovered in hospital, he made a shocking confession to the police... David and Dawn met in the 1990’s and after they married, the hard-working couple started running restaurants together. David cooked and Dawn was a friendly waitress. Friends would later claim that their relationship was fiery, and David was prone to violence, but the police were never involved as Dawn always wanted their marriage to work. Despite their problems, they managed to last over 14 years and settled in Lomita, a town in Los Angeles County. In early 2009, they started to run the Thyme Contemporary Café together. People would later testify that Dawn was leaving money with them rather than in accounts. Was she preparing to leave David once and for all? October 18, 2009 was the night that Dawn, then 39, disappeared. The following day, she was
supposed to be accompanying her close friend Karen Patterson to an urgent doctor’s appointment. Karen had just been diagnosed with cancer and Dawn wouldn’t have missed it. She never turned up. David claimed he loved his wife and was desperate to know where she was. In fact, he knew. Friends of David said he suspected Dawn of stealing money from the restaurant they owned. ‘I’ll kill that bitch,’ he was heard saying one day. What happened later has been pieced together from various confessions. David said that he’d got into an argument with Dawn at home and that she was ‘raising hell.’ In order to keep her quiet so he could get some sleep, he’d bound and gagged her with duct tape, then said ‘goodnight,’ before going to sleep. When he woke up, she was dead. In a sick attempt to hide what he’d do took her bod the restaurant, stuffed Dawn in a 55-gallon drum of boil water and weighed it do Then, for f days, he cook her body. He boiled at night and in the
He was violent and she just wanted to escape his wrath
WORDS BY GAIL SHORTLAND IMAGES: GETTY
Was she leaving her husband?
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The face of a true monster
day, when he was serving customers, he wheeled her away into a shed. Eventually, he mixed the liquid remains with waste from the restaurant and poured it down the grease pit, and threw the rest in the rubbish bin. He claimed to have kept her skull, but it’s never been found. Police knew that Dawn was dead. David claimed she’d left him, but she’d taken no clothes or money and there was no trace of her, but then
late , nken night, David confessed the crime to his daughter Jacqueline, 22. At first, Jacqueline helped her dad – even sending texts from Dawn’s phone claiming she was starting a new life in Florida without him. No one believed they were from Dawn. Eventually, Jacqueline found the strength to go to the police. By February 2011, David had a new girlfriend. She was the waitress who’d got Dawn’s old job at the restaurant. When they moved out of the Viens’ former home, the police were able to get access and they ound blood stains in
He boiled her dead body
