66 | The Murder of Dawn Viens: Hidden Without a Trace

When Dawn Viens vanished in 2009, her husband David claimed she’d left after an argument.
Two years later, he confessed to killing her — and offered a chilling explanation.
Despite no body being found, he was convicted of second-degree murder.
This true crime episode investigates control, violence, and a shocking confession.

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Sources:
Altman, Larry, ‘Lomita restaurateur who killed wife, allegedly cooked her body denied parole’, June 2021, Daily Breeze, https://www.dailybreeze.com/2021/06/08/lomita-restaurateur-who-killed-wife-disposed-of-body-denied-parole/

Powers, Ashley, ‘Chef says he cooked wife’s body for four days’, September 2012, Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2012-sep-18-la-me-restaurateur-20120919-story.html       

‘Yelp Users Review Thyme Cafe, Restaurant Owned By Chef Accused Of Killing And Cooking His Wife’, September 2012, Huffington Post, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/david-viens-lomita-chef-killed-cooked-wife-yelp-review-thyme-cafe_n_1900990

Music:
"Long Note Three" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
When Dawn Peppin found a new job as a server
at a restaurant, she never expected to find a husband
at the same time. The chef, David Veians, was ten
years her senior and was a dad of three going
through a divorce. But he looked younger than his age,
and when he wasn't wearing his chef's hat, he covered

(00:22):
his thinning hair with a baseball cap. He was instantly
attracted to his young employee, with a warmth of character,
vivacious nature, auburn hair, and tan skin. Romance began to
simmer in the kitchen, and it soon became apparent that
love was very much on the menu. The pair married

(01:07):
in nineteen ninety seven, and after moving around a few times,
they settled in Florida, where they opened a restaurant together
called the Beef City Marketing Grille. Dawn's brother was given
the prestigious role of restaurant manager, and business was booming.
After twelve years of marriage, David and Dawn relocated to

(01:30):
Lemita in Los Angeles, where they opened the time contemporary Cafe.
By now, Dawn was thirty nine and David was forty nine,
and between them they had gained years of valuable experience
in the hospitality sector, so it wasn't surprising that they
quickly attracted positive reviews of their simple but tasty dishes,

(01:51):
which included burghers, sandwiches, salads, tacos, and pasta, all made
with locally sourced ingredients. David was the head chef, assisted
by some kitchen staff, while Dawn was manager, helped by
two servers who waited on tables. To their customers and
the outside world, it looked like life was perfect for

(02:14):
mister and missus Vean's, But in August two thousand and nine,
Dawn's friend Karen Patterson noticed some bruises on Dawn's neck
that concerned her. Dawn reluctantly revealed that her husband had
grabbed her by the neck and choked her, but assured
her friend that he had just gone too far and

(02:34):
wouldn't do it again. Just a few weeks later, Dawn
secretly went to speak to a man called Joe, who
ran a motorcycle store opposite the time Contemporary cafe and
with whom the couple had become friendly. Dawn confided in
him that she'd been skimming small amounts from the restaurant
takings and had accrued seven hundred dollars in cash, which

(02:58):
he wanted Joe to take care of for her so
that David wouldn't find it. Joe agreed, wondering why Dawn
was so furtive. Was she trying to save enough money
so she could leave her husband. It seemed hard to believe,
as the couple looked very happy on the surface. Dawn's

(03:20):
only vague explanation was that David was losing control of money.
But Joe was even more confused when David visited him
separately and disclosed that Dawn had a drinking problem. Whoever
was telling the truth, it was only a matter of
time until the bubbling conflict reached boiling point. David was

(03:43):
reviewing the day's receipts on eighteenth of October two thousand
and nine after closing time when he discovered that money
was going missing. A workman installing some new kitchen equipment
overheard his angry outburst and was startled to hear him
say that bitch is stealing from me. Nobody steals from me.

(04:04):
I'll kill that bitch. The workman thought little of it
at the time, assuming it was just a figure of speech,
but the events that came later cast a more troubling
light on the chef's furious words. That same day, Dawn
called Joe and asked if he could hold some more

(04:26):
money for her, telling him that she would drop it
off the following day. When she didn't arrive, Joe thought
she had just changed her mind, who had been too
busy in the restaurant to come over and see him.
But after a few days he decided to visit the
bistro to check that everything was all right. There was

(04:46):
no sign of Dawn. David claimed that he had begged
his wife to go to rehab as a drinking was
spiraling out of control, and that his request had angered
her so much that she had left him. Joe was
disturbed by this story, as he couldn't reconcile it with
his own knowledge of Dawn. Even more disconcertingly, he had

(05:10):
seen her jeep parked at the restaurant over the weekend.
David shrugged and explained that she had grabbed her person
disappeared on foot without coming back for her car. To Joe,
something about this apparent chain of events didn't ring true.

(05:30):
David wasted no time in replacing Dawn at the restaurant.
He called his youngest daughter, Jackie, who was now nineteen,
and asked her to fly over from South Carolina to
help him out. Jackie had a good relationship with her father,
and although she loved Dawn and saw as part of
the family, she naturally believed David's story. Everything went quiet

(05:54):
for a couple of weeks, and the time contemporary cafe
continued to thrive, with only a few casual inquires as
to Dawn's whereabouts. Joe, however, was suspicious. If it hadn't
been for Dawn asking him to keep the money safe,
he would have been less likely to question it, But
now he couldn't help wondering if there was more to

(06:16):
the situation that met the eye. For one thing, he
had noticed David holding hands with twenty two year old
waitress Kathy Galvin, just two weeks after Dawn had supposedly left,
and Kathy had now been promoted to a managerial role.
Worse still, Joe spotted David dumping Dawn's clothing into the

(06:37):
bins at the back of the restaurant early one morning,
assisted by Kathy and his daughter Jackie. Dawn's family were
also starting to worry that they hadn't heard from her
in a while, so her brother called one day and
heard the same story from David about her leaving in
a cloud of anger. He was not convinced, and the

(06:59):
Peppins missing person's report, but the police took little action,
and several months passed without any progress. It seemed that
David Veerans had moved on very quickly after his wife's
sudden exit from his life, and he focused on remodeling
the cafe and creating a new outdoor patio. Eventually, Jackie

(07:24):
asked her father if he had heard from Dawn since
she left, and was surprised when he said he hadn't
spoken to her. She noticed that her question seemed to
upset him to the extent that he began to cry.
Within minutes, he confessed to his daughter that Dawn was dead.
He claimed it was an accident, and that she had

(07:46):
come home one evening intoxicated by alcohol and cocaine. She
had started yelling at him, and, in his desperation to
get some sleep after working a ninety hour week at
the restaurant, he had tied her arms and feet together
and taped her mouth shut. Through his tears, he told
Jackie that in the morning he had discovered she was dead.

(08:10):
He wouldn't tell his daughter where the body was, but
assured her that it would never be found. David persuaded
Jackie not to tell anyone what had happened, convincing her
that he loved Dawn and would never have deliberately hurt her.
Jackie accepted her father's explanation, but he had one more

(08:31):
distasteful burden to place upon her. He asked her to
use Dawn's phone to send text messages to her friends
and family to make them believe she was still alive.
Jackie was unhappy about covering up Dawn's death, but she
believed her dad's story about it being an accident, and

(08:51):
she didn't want him to go to jail, so she
reluctantly agreed. She sent two messages to Dawn's friends stating
that she was opa and starting a new life in Florida.
She signed off the message with Dawn's nickname Pixie. When
Dawn's friends received the message, they became suspicious. They knew

(09:15):
immediately that the message could not have been written by
the Dawn they knew and loved, because her nickname had
been misspelled as Pixy. Perturbed and fearful that something had
happened to her, they pleaded with the La County Sheriff's
Department to reignite the investigation into her disappearance. Her family

(09:36):
also contacted the media to try and spread the word
of the public in case anyone had seen something that
might offer a clue to what had happened. The story
was picked up by a reporter, Larry Aortman, whose interest
was piqued by the details of the case. He interviewed
David Vian's and was struck by the fact that he

(09:57):
referred to his wife in the past tense, unlike most
family members of missing people, who cling on to hope
until the very last moment. It also seemed strange that
she would abandon her kind the parking lot and lead
the house on foot. Altman's morbid curiosity led him to
surreptitiously dig into David Viann's past, and what he found

(10:22):
there was unpalatable. Vianns had several major drug chargers on
his rap sheet for selling marijuana and cocaine while living
in Vermont in nineteen ninety three. He turned informant for
federal agents to avoid a long prison sentence and fed
them enough information to help break up a larger narcotics operation.

(10:45):
In return, he received just one year in jail. A
decade later, while living in Florida, he received a four
month sentence on more drug chargers, but fled to Mexico
before turning himself in. Two years later, in two thousand
and five, he was convicted in Florida for mariana distribution.

(11:07):
It seemed that the couple's relocation to California had come
shortly after this incident. It wasn't until February twenty eleven
that the case was transferred from missing persons to homicide.
Detective Richard Garcia placed a wire tap on David Viann's

(11:27):
phone and brought Jackie in for an interview. She was
questioned on twenty first of February, and without prevarication, she
disclosed the father's confession to the investigators. But it wasn't enough.
David had told her about Dawn's death while drunk, and
no body had been found to prove it. Garcia concocted

(11:50):
a masterful plan and called reporter Larry Altman, teasing him
with the suggestion that blood had been found in Viann's
home in the hope that Atman would write about it.
If they were lucky, Vian's might read the article and
make a panic induced the mistake, unwittingly leading police to
the body. The plan worked. Two days later, Aldman printed

(12:17):
the piece in the Daily Breeze, stating that police now
considered it a homicide investigation, and it didn't take much
reading between the lines to work out that the police
suspected David Vian's. Later that day, Jackie told her dad
about the confession she had made. By now, David had

(12:39):
read the news article and was in a state of
frenzied agitation. He broke down in tears to Kathy Galvin,
the waitress with whom he now shared an apartment, and said,
I'm really sorry. She's not coming back. It was an accident.
He then jumped into his Toyota, but moments before he

(13:00):
accelerated away, Kathy managed to open the passenger door and
throw herself inside, not willing to let him drive away
alone in his hysterical state, Kathy tried to calm him down,
but Vian's was in a world of his own, his
fear and shame spilling out after months had been kept
inside like a pressure cooker. He drove to the point

(13:23):
of Vicente Lighthouse in Rancho Palace Verdes, and ran towards
the thin railing, which was all that separated him from
the one hundred foot drop over the cliffs and into
the ocean below. By now, a deputy sheriff was on
his way towards the stricken man, having spotted the Toyota
driving erratically at more than eighty miles an hour, and

(13:45):
followed him to the lighthouse. He saw Kathy clinging on
to David by his clothes to try and stop him.
Edging closer to the brink, the officer shouted out to him,
asking him to come back so they could talk. Van's
yelled back, you know who I am. The deputy assured

(14:06):
him he didn't and that he just wanted to help.
Van's pushed Kafee away and flung himself over the railing
feet first, leaving a staring over the edge in horror
as he tumbled down to the treacherous rocks below. If
Van's had genuinely intended to die that day, he was

(14:27):
to be disappointed. He shattered his legs and ankles in
the fall and suffered a broken hip, but an air
ambulance flew him to hospital wavers rushed straight into the
operating theater. The doctor said that had he jumped head first,
he would have died instantly. Van's suicide attempt only served

(14:48):
to make him appear more guilty. Dawn's brother remarked, nobody
on the planet is going to take their own life
for something they didn't do. Detective Garcia interviewed Van's at
his bedside and was told much the same story that
Jackie had heard. Dawn had come home shouting and wanting

(15:11):
to take drugs. There had been an argument about the
missing money. David had pushed her to the ground, taped
her mouth, hands and feet, and found her dead in
the morning. He refused to give a straight answer to
where her body was, but he gave hints that led
Garcia to believe she was somewhere in or around the
time contemporary cafe. Taking note of the recently laid patio,

(15:35):
investigators tore up the concrete searching for Dawn's remains, but
even with the help of jackhammers, pickaxes, and dogs, they
found nothing. Detectives were confident they had sufficient evidence even
without the corpus delecti, so they charged Van's with murder
on first of March twenty eleven. A week or two later,

(15:59):
Van's requested to speak to Detective Garcia again, announcing that
he was finally ready to explain how he had disposed
of his wife's body. This time, Garcia was treated to
an extraordinary tale that was hard to digest and even
harder to believe. Although Thean's was on heavy doses of

(16:21):
pain medication at the time, Garcia was certain that he
was completely lucid throughout this grisly description the murderous restauranteur,
so that after he discovered he had accidentally killed his wife,
he transported her to the cafe, where he placed her
into a fifty five gallon pot. As she only weighed

(16:42):
one hundred and five pounds, this would not have been
a particularly difficult task. He positioned her in a way
that prevented him from having to look at her face.
Then he filled the pot with water and placed weights
on top of her body to prevent it rising to
the surface. Cook the corpse for the next four days.

(17:04):
At the end of each day, once the potter and
its contents had cooled, he fished out as many parts
as he could, discarding smaller pieces in the kitchen's greasepit
and larger portions in the dumpster. Finally, little by little,
there was nothing left but the skull, which he claimed
to have hidden in his mother's attic, although investigators never

(17:28):
found it. Some people were reticent to swallow his story,
as it sounded too far fetched, too awful, and too
callous to be true, but detective Garcia accepted every word,
arguing that it was too elaborate to have been fabricated.

(17:48):
He also pointed out that in times of height and
stress and anxiety, people tend to return to what they
are familiar with. Given that Vian's was a chef, it
made a ghoulish kind of sense that he would use
a cooking method to dispose of the body. By the
time the trial began in September twenty twelve, Vian's had

(18:11):
retracted his statement and claimed he had been hallucinating at
the time of the interview. His defense team focused on
the unintentional nature of the death and suggested it was
unlikely that he could have cooked a corpse at the
restaurant for several days without anyone noticing. Along with the

(18:31):
fact that no skull had been found at the home
of Vian's mother, they posited that he had most likely
disposed of the body in the dumpster, and that their
client should only be charged with manslaughter. The prosecution, on
the other hand, continued to push for a first degree
murder charge. They argued it was possible that Van's had

(18:52):
cooked the body during the night when nobody else was
on the premises, and then used a wheeled cart to
transfer it to a locked shed before opening time. Kathy Galvin,
who was no longer romantically involved with Vian's, testified that
up until the moment David had thrown himself off the cliff,
she had believed every word of his story about his

(19:14):
wife leaving him. When not why she had helped her
lover discard Dawn's clothes, She explained she was worried he
would reconcile with his wife, so she happily throughout her
rival's belongings. She was certain that she would have noticed
if David had been cooking his wife at work, but
she clarified that she only began dating him after Dawn

(19:35):
went missing. Called to the stand, Jackie Vans confessed under
oath to sending the fake text messages at her father's request,
and told the court that he had sometimes joked in
the past that if he ever committed murder, he would
boil up the body to hide it. As investigators had

(19:57):
still not found any part of Dawn Van's it was
impossible to know whether David really had murdered his wife
or if he had simply produced this story under the
influence of pain medication and extreme stress. Either way, it
was clear that David was guilty of killing Dawn. After

(20:17):
an eight day trial, the jurors deliberated for just thirty
minutes and convicted him of second degree murder. At his
sentencing hearing six months later, Vian's apologized to Dawn's family
and insisted that he had never meant to hurt her
and that he did not cook her body. He was

(20:38):
sentenced to fifteen years behind bars. Whether the body disposed
or story was true or not, it's unsurprising that following
the extensive media coverage of the trial, the Time Contemporary
cafe received a spate of one star reviews on Yelp.
One simply said, I hope the owner didn't serve his

(20:59):
slow cooked water to any of the patrons, while another
remarked out of time but just as well. Yes, sad
to see a neighborhood business go under. It had potential,
but was not always consistent with its food. Better to
have an empty storefront than to support the friendly neighborhood killer.

(21:20):
One more sanguinary reviewer took the opportunity to quote Hannibal
Lecter stating it was served with father beans and a
nice ki ante, while the owner of the neighboring pet
salon accused Vian's of being an awful businessman who had
reneged on an agreement to purchase their lease and expanded

(21:40):
into the salon as part of his remodeling project without
paying a penny to the owner. Over the years, David
Vian's half baked story matured in his mind until it
developed a few extra touches of flavor. In an interview
he gave to Dateline from prison for years after his sentencing,

(22:02):
he garnished the events with extra details, stating that Dawn
had returned home at three am and pounded on the
bedroom door, leaping on top of him and slapping his
face while he was trying to sleep. She then went
downstairs to take drugs, so he followed her and poured
her cocaine down the sink, sparking the argument which resulted

(22:22):
in David tying her up and taping her mouth. He
then took two sleeping pills, which she had failed to
mention at the time of his trial, and went to bed,
before discovering in the morning that Down had died after
vomiting and afphyxiating behind the tape. He then claimed to
have transported her body inside an antique cedar trunk and

(22:44):
thrown it into the dumpster at work. At a later
parole hearing, he elaborated that his reaction to the stress
of working almost ninety hours that week had been worsened
by suspicions that Dawn had been keeping tip money for herself.
He also claimed she had lost profits for the business

(23:05):
by making mistakes with customers orders, and that she'd been
having an affair with the man who installed a pott
and pan rack in the kitchen. He added that he
became enraged and jealous when Dawn demanded money from his
mother to allow to leave David. It seemed that the
finances in the Vian's household were not as healthy as

(23:25):
a restaurant's performance would suggest, and David's mother had been
the one bank rolling the business. It also emerged during
the parole, hearing that Van's had been sexually abused by
an older woman when he was twelve, and that he
had been terrified of his father, who ruled with an
iron fist. After undergoing therapy in jail, Van's expressed regret

(23:49):
for his behavior as an abusive, controlling, and jealous husband.
He was denied parole in twenty twenty one and remains
behind bars. He had committed several rules violations while incarcerated,
including a suspected drug offense and threatening a transgender inmate

(24:10):
around naked in front of him in a bathroom. Although
Dawn's family are relieved that her Quille has been removed
from society, they still have many unanswered questions. To lose
a loved one to murder is a trauma no one
should ever have to face. But to be denied the
chance to lay Dawn, to rest, or even to know

(24:32):
what happened to her body is unthinkable. In the words
of her sister Dana, there's no happy ending. Two families
have suffered tremendously. This is the man of known for
twenty years, who was like a father to me.