Daniel Wozniak is accused of an elaborate plot to kill two people. He was to be married Friday. (AP / May 27, 2010)
Alarmed that he hadn't been answering his calls over the weekend, Steve Herr drove to his son's Costa Mesa apartment last Saturday night and opened the door, calling his name. In the bedroom he found the body of Juri Kibuishi, a 23-year-old Irvine woman he said had been tutoring his son in anthropology.
She had been shot in the head, and the circumstances in which the body was found — partly clothed and hanging off the bed — suggested that she had been raped.
Police quickly turned their attention to the son, a 26-year-old Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and was attending Orange Coast College. Not only was Samuel E. Herr's apartment a crime scene, but he was nowhere to be found, and police uncovered text exchanges between his cellphone and Kibuishi's that showed she had gone to his apartment in response to one of the messages.
The elder Herr said he knew his son was no killer or rapist. "I said, 'This is not Sam, this is not my son.' "
He was right. On Friday police announced that a community theater actor had killed Herr, dismembered his body and then killed Kibuishi, staging the scene as a sexual assault. They said the actor was the one who had invited Kibuishi to the apartment, using Herr's cellphone.
Daniel Wozniak, 27, who lived three floors below Herr, had recently wrapped up a nearly month-long performance of the musical "Nine" at the Hunger Artists Theatre Company in Fullerton and was to be married Friday at a park in Long Beach, police said. He had financial problems, owed money to several friends and was about to be evicted from his apartment, said Costa Mesa Sgt. Ed Everett. The case broke when they linked Wozniak to ATM withdrawals from Herr's account, police said.
On May 21, Wozniak and Herr drove to the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base, where Wozniak had once performed at the base's theater, police said. He shot Herr inside the theater and then dismembered his body, leaving part of it in the theater's attic and taking the remaining parts to El Dorado Park in Long Beach, where he discarded them, police said.
Wozniak then reportedly used Herr's cellphone to send a text message to Kibuishi, asking her to come to Herr's apartment. When she arrived, Wozniak allegedly shot her and then removed some of her clothing. Police speculated that he hoped police would assume Herr was the killer.
"It's a very cold, calculating and heinous crime," Everett said. "He probably took some time to plan it."
About a week before the killings, Wozniak was arrested in Costa Mesa on suspicion of driving under the influence. He was booked at the Orange County Jail and released a day later after posting bond, according to Sheriff's Department records. He was behind on his rent and in the process of being evicted, police said.
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