David Viens, a Southern California restaurant owner, was convicted of murdering his wife Dawn in 2013. At a parole hearing in September 2024, he admitted to cooking her remains for four days before pouring them down a grease disposal.
Hidden truth for nearly 12 years
Viens had long insisted during his 2013 murder trial: "I loved my wife, I didn't cook my wife." He was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. It was only at the parole hearing, more than a decade into his imprisonment, that he confessed to boiling his wife's body.
Dawn, who worked as a hostess at Viens' Thyme Contemporary Café in Los Angeles, vanished in October 2009. Viens initially told employees she had left after a row about medication. However, clues such as her abandoned car at their home and several hundred dollars in untouched emergency savings pointed to something more sinister, according to ABC.
Investigation and suicide attempt
Another red flag emerged when a friend received text messages purportedly from Dawn, featuring misspelt variations of her nickname and showing unexpected unfamiliarity with her friend's cancer diagnosis. Dawn's sister, Dayna Papin, filed a missing persons report. Friends Karen Patterson and Mike Wade recalled that when they confronted Viens at his restaurant, he seemed "tired"—apparently because he had disposed of his wife's mutilated remains.
In August 2010, murder detectives took over the missing persons investigation after blood spatter was found at the couple's former home. Upon learning he was a suspect, Viens threw himself from an 80-foot cliff at Pelican Cove. The fall left him with multiple fractures. After his suicide attempt, he confessed, prompting police to tear up floorboards and walls of his restaurant and deploy sniffer dogs in a search for remains, but Dawn's body was never recovered.
Chilling confession at parole hearing
At the parole hearing, Viens described the disposal method: "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 claimed her bones were scattered amongst waste in the bin outside the diner, and her skull—which remained intact—was hidden in his mother's loft, where it has never been recovered.
Viens told police that on the day of the killing, he bound his wife's mouth, hands and feet with duct tape following an argument, which he claimed was to stop her from "driving around wasted, whacked out on coke, and drinking." Dawn told him she was unable to breathe, but he ignored her pleas. After taking Ambien and sleeping through the night, he woke to find she had suffocated.
"I wasn't trying to murder her," Viens told the parole board, describing the crime as the result of a "drunken rage in the cycle of domestic violence. And my actions - my careless disregard for her life - brought forth her murder." His initial confession, made two years after the killing, was replayed during the trial, prompting him to claim his statements were untrue and that he had been hallucinating.
Apology and parole denial
At the September hearing, Viens admitted to his wife's family that he felt "horrible, ashamed, deplorable" and apologised to the victim's relatives. Dawn's sister, Dayna Papin, was among those present, but family members remained unconvinced of his sincerity, suspecting he was trying to persuade the California Parole Board panel to grant him early release. His application was rejected.
"I thought about suicide," Viens told the three-person panel, according to a transcript from The Mercury News. "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. 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."
Following his confession, the victim's relatives told the Mercury News they wish for Viens to remain imprisoned.
