6 minute read
The cruel chef who cooked his
from picluk s3y
by loopedsaxe3
BOILING
When David Viens jumped off a cliff, everyone knew he had something to hide…
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It 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 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 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 Was she leaving her husband? He was violent and she just wanted to escape his wrath The face of a true monster
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
ONSTER Making of a
He showed no remorse for his crimes
the bedroom and bathroom.
David’s past was about to catch up with him.
Police leaked details to a local paper so that they’d run a story claiming they had a ‘person of interest’ in Dawn’s case.
And Jacqueline was told by the police to phone her dad and tell him she’d confessed.
When David got the call and saw the local paper, he panicked.
He broke down and told Kathy. They drove to a quiet spot Rancho Palos Verdes to talk.
ave chase and in , David threw lf off the cliff. mazingly, even a shattered leg, n pelvis and various s, he lived. king hospital bed errogation, he his crimes. wly cooked it and I oking her for four stated. He was harged with firstdegree murder and his confession was played in his trial in 2013 in LA.
Meanwhile, customers from the now closed restaurant discovered their meals had been prepared in a kitchen where a corpse was cooking.
During the two-week trial, David appeared in a wheelchair – but at one point leapt out of the chair, questioning his real need for it.
Karen Patterson testified that when Dawn went missing, she’d gone to find Dawn at the Veins’ restaurant.
She’d seen David looking agitated with a burn on his arm – he claimed Dawn had left him for good. He was actually boiling her body.
David’s recorded confession was the highlight of the damning evidence.
‘For some reason, I just got violent,’ the court heard him say.
After two Dawn was a kind woman
Dawn’s friend Karen knew something was wrong
weeks, David Viens, then 49, was convicted of second-degree murder, as jurors didn’t find enough evidence to suggest that it was a premeditated attack.
While Dawn’s sister sobbed, Viens made no reaction except to motion to his mum that he’d call her from his prison cell.
Karen Patterson told reporters outside of the court; ‘He treated her like a piece of meat and he got rid of her.’ Jurors claimed they
Vigils were held for her
had trouble sleeping at night with the horrors in their mind of what he’d done to his wife.
Viens was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
He said he was confused and said; ‘I loved my wife. I didn’t cook my wife.’
Thankfully, Veins’ kitchen is well and truly closed for business.
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