David Viens, a South Bay restaurateur, kept the true details of his wife’s murder a secret for nearly 12 years. Viens, who was charged for the second-degree murder of his wife, said during his trial in 2013, “I loved my wife, I didn’t cook my wife.” However, he was found guilty of the crime and was sentenced to 15 years to life.
It took him several years to finally admit his inhumane act. During a parole hearing 12 years after he was jailed, he admitted to ‘boiling’ her wife, Dawn, after killing her. He also confessed that he poured her liquified remains down his restaurant’s grease trap.
Viens was the owner of Thyme Contemporary Café and Dawn worked as hostess at the same place. When she vanished in October 2009, Viens told the staff that she left him after he asked her to seek help for her drug problem. However, the suspicion grew when the victim’s car was found at the couple’s Torrance estate. It further multiplied as Dawn hadn’t collected hundreds of dollars she left with a friend in case she left her husband.
A friend also noted that the texts she received from Dawn included the incorrect spellings of her nickname. Further, when Dawn seemed unaware of friend’s cancer, it raised further suspicion. Eventually, Dawn’s sister, Dayna Papin, filed a missing persons report.
David Viens had already been convicted of murdering his wife when he tried to convince a judge that the most revolting aspect of his crime — revealed in a confession to police that reverberated across the country — wasn’t true.
The Lomita restaurateur, in a futile 45-minute…
— Mike Netter (@nettermike) December 16, 2024
When Dawn’s friends asked Viens about her whereabouts, he looked “tired”. It was later revealed that it was because he was busy getting rid of Dawn’s body.
Finally, in August 2010, homicide detectives took over the investigations after they discovered blood marks in the couple’s former house. When Viens found out that he was the prime suspect in the case, he tried to take his own life by jumping off a 80-foot tall cliff at Pelican Cove. His attempt at suicide had failed, but he did break many bones. Eventually, he confessed to killing his wife.
The cops then ripped apart his cafe, hoping to find the remains of the body, but alas, there was no success. Later, while confessing the way he disposed of his wife’s body, Viens said, “I took some, some things like weights that we use and I put them on the top of her body, and I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days.”
He revealed that the bones of his victim were strategically placed among other garbage in the bin outside his cafe. He claimed that he kept her skull in his mother’s attic, which was never found.
Narrating the details of the crime, he told the cops that he duct-taped his wife’s mouth, hands and feet after an argument. He claimed that he did this to stop his wife from “driving around wasted, whacked out on coke, and drinking.” However, he admitted that Dawn said she wasn’t able to breathe, but he kept ignoring her and went to sleep. When he woke up, he found out that Dawn had died of suffocation.
In 2024’s parole panel, he said that he didn’t want to murder her and added that it happened in “drunken rage in the cycle of domestic violence. And my actions – my careless disregard for her life – brought forth her murder.”
After she died, he wrapped her body in plastic bags and began bringing it to the cafe. More than a decade passed and the cops were still not able to find her body. 12 years after he was putting behind the bars, he finally apologized to the victim’s family and gave the long-awaited confession.
In attendance of several relatives, including Dawn’s sister Dayna Papin, he confessed that he boiled his wife and expressed remorse. As per The Mercury News, he told the panel, “I thought about suicide. I went back to the house where Dawn’s body was – the sun was already starting to go down – and I had a panic attack, I was absolutely freaking out.”
He further told, “I was talking out loud to myself, ‘Oh my God, you have to do something. You have to do something.’ “At that moment, that’s when I thought back about something I had seen on TV. I decided right then that I was going to go ahead and boil the body.”
“I was afraid, I was panicked. I was new to LA I didn’t really have any friends. I’d already lied to everybody that morning [about her leaving me]. I did it and I regret it,” he confessed.
Despite his confession, his plea for parole was denied. Meanwhile, victim’s family expressed their desire for him to remain incarcerated.
