Original subtitles

(Richard Shepherd) When a murder is committed,

it's always a race against time to find the truth,

to separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer,

and to make sure that justice is served.

But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?

I'm Dr Richard Shepherd, and I've spent

my entire career as a forensic pathologist,

performing nearly 23,000 autopsies.

I've learned that the dead don't hide the truth and they never lie.

Through me, you'll be hearing directly from the victim.

With the aid of a state-of-the-art laboratory,

using ground-breaking technology, I'll be investigating a series

of intriguing crimes, where, from the victims' bodies,

are revealed to you the truth behind these murders.

On the 22nd of May, 2010, in Costa Mesa, California,

the body of a young woman was found in the apartment

of war veteran Samuel Herr.

The victim was 23-year-old Julie Kibuishi,

and she'd been brutally murdered.

Costa Mesa in Orange County, California.

Concerned father, Steve Herr, was trying to reach his son, Sam.

(Steve Herr) Sam was supposed to come over that weekend,

and he never came.

So on Saturday, I went to Sam's place.

I went to check, make sure everything is OK.

(Matt Murphy) So he went to his son's apartment.

Steve had a key.

They were basically best friends.

So he's very, very close to his son, Sam.

I walked into the apartment, and everything was neat.

And then when I walked into Sam's bedroom, I turned on the light.

Then I saw a body.

(Richard) Steve immediately called police on 911.

(Sean Emery) The body was half on the bed, kind of half

off, clothes kind of dishevelled, pants off, underwear down.

Her sweatshirt was on, but her pants were ripped off

and she was fully exposed on the bottom.

She may have been sexually assaulted.

Her jeans had been cut off of her lower body.

Her buttocks were exposed.

(Richard) A message was scrawled across the young woman's sweater.

Words "all yours, fuck you" were written

on the back of her sweatshirt.

This looked like, on the surface,

every other domestic violence murder.

(Richard) And Steve's son, Sam Herr,

was mysteriously missing from the scene.

(Richard) Police raced to Sam's apartment.

Costa Mesa police arrived within minutes.

And they walked in,

responding officers walked into the apartment,

and to the left was Sam's bedroom.

And at the time, all they could see was blood,

and bent over Sam's bed, face down, was the body.

Police look at the scene.

They find a driver's licence that identifies the woman as Julie.

(Richard) Julie Kibuishi was a friend of Sam Herr.

And an initial search of Julie's phone

pointed towards Sam as a suspect.

When police looked at her phone, they saw a series of text messages

from the cell phone of Sam Herr indicating that he was having

some problems with his family.

These texts make it sound like Sam is having this kind of crisis.

Like, I need someone to talk to.

I'm having these problems.

You know, please come,

begging to come over to Sam's apartment.

There are messages in there saying,

I need a friend to talk to.

Can you come over tonight?

(Richard) Julie Kibuishi and Sam Herr had met at college.

(Matt) Sam was a veteran of Afghanistan.

He was at a place called Camp Keating in the Nuristan

Province of Afghanistan and saw, at one

point, 83 days of constant combat.

I think there was three different medals

of honour that were awarded.

So Sam Herr came back truly a war hero in every respect.

A lot of activity, a lot of action.

And when he got out, he signed up for college.

He started his college.

His plans were to get a four-year degree.

Once you have a four-year degree, you

can apply to become an officer.

His goal is to go to officer candidate school

and go back into the Army as an officer.

So he's going to OCC in order to get his degree so

that he can rejoin the Army and be an officer

and a better leader of men.

Julie had studied dance.

And she was going to Orange Coast College at the time

to study design, basically.

She wanted to be kind of a clothing designer.

Those who knew her described - she was a very friendly, bubbly,

outgoing person.

He and Julie met because they were in the same class.

And it was a class that Sam was kind of struggling in,

and Julie kind of stepped in as a tutor.

And they became friends.

There were certain clues left around the crime scene

from which the detectives believed that Sam

Herr had committed a sexual assault of Julie Kibuishi.

(Richard) But Julie's autopsy

raised questions about the scene presented to detectives.

Julie's body was found on the bed,

and because she was partially clothed,

it was assumed that she'd been sexually assaulted.

But intriguingly, the postmortem didn't support that.

What you sometimes see with a sexual assault are

physical injuries, like bruising to the arms or the wrists,

or other signs of a struggle.

Now, the absence of injuries like this doesn't rule anything out.

But in Julie's case, there was no evidence of any injuries

anywhere on her body to suggest she'd

been the victim of a sexual assault.

Internal swabs confirmed that there had been no sexual activity.

Friends and family of Sam and Julie also believed this was unlikely.

From the beginning, Steve was adamant with the investigators

that this could not have been him, this could not

have been his son that did this.

You know, he did not have that type of relationship with Julie.

They were not-they were not in a sexual relationship.

They were not in a dating relationship.

They were just, you know, a platonic relationship.

She looked at Sam like her big brother, a big Teddy bear.

That's how she described him to her parents.

And Sam described Julie to me as like a kid sister.

(Richard) So outwardly, there appeared no motive for Sam

to carry out such an attack.

And there were more clues from Julie's body that puzzled police.

The postmortem also revealed something else.

On Julie's buttocks, investigators could

see a process called blanching.

This is where the skin goes white because the blood is

literally squeezed from that part of the body

by some kind of pressure.

When somebody dies, for example, on their back,

it's very common that you will see, like, on their buttocks,

where the buttocks would have the most pressure on them,

there'll be blanching.

(Richard) But the position Julie was found in

didn't tie in with what her body told detectives.

Julie was bent over face down on the bed.

But on her buttocks, which were up, there were

blanching where you could see the imprint of her jeans.

That didn't make sense.

(Richard) This told police Julie's jeans were ripped

off long after she was dead.

Blanching doesn't set in usually for at least 30 minutes,

if not hours.

So the scenario where Sam freaks out

and murders Julie and cuts off her jeans

as a part of some sexual assault was contradicted by that.

That made no sense.

(Richard) The evidence showed

no sign of a sexual assault. So perhaps the scene

had been staged to make it look like one.

But detectives were faced with clues left behind that still

implicated the brave war veteran.

There's also a bizarre sketch that

had been left at the scene with what appeared to be an Asian woman

naked, and there had been the imprint of a hand

on that and the words, "I'm done."

And also there appeared to be maybe hell

or, like, flames of hell on it.

(Richard) Police knew they had to investigate

the most likely scenario.

They had some sort of quarrel, perhaps over another man,

and that he lost it, murdered her, and then fled.

(Richard) Sam Herr's father was now left

protesting his son's innocence.

So police were now looking for Sam.

Everybody who knew Sam - not just me -

everybody who knew Sam said Sam didn't do that.

You can see a big guy getting into a fight in a bar

or something like that, but he would

never wantingly ever hurt a woman.

The police suspected it.

The media blurted it out that Sam was

the prime suspect in the murder.

But we all knew it was wrong.

(Richard Shepherd) In Costa Mesa, California, the body of 23-year-old

Julie Kibuishi was found in the apartment of war veteran,

Samuel Herr.

Having recently finished a tour of duty in Afghanistan,

26-year-old Army private Samuel Herr was a trained killer.

So for police, he was their number one suspect.

This looked every bit like your traditional run-of-the-mill,

bread-and-butter domestic violence homicide.

His passport was gone.

His car wasn't there.

So there was a big hunt on for Sam.

(Richard) Julie's autopsy pointed towards the identity

of the killer.

Julie had an entry wound in the back of her head

that could only have been caused by an object

with a high enough velocity to penetrate through the thick bone

of the skull.

The wound suggested that this was caused

by a bullet measuring around 9 millimetre in diameter,

probably fired by a small handgun.

With gunshot wounds to the head, we expect

to see crushed and lacerated brain tissue along the trajectory

of the bullet.

But it's not just the bullet that causes damage.

If you look carefully, you can see what happens

when a bullet hits the skull.

The shear force and velocity caused dozens of tiny shards of bone

to move out and cause massive damage to the soft brain tissue.

For police, the lethal shot to the back of Julie's head

put combat trained Army veteran, Sam Herr, clearly in the frame.

From their perspective, you know, this guy is a suspect.

And he's on the run. He's a fugitive at this point.

And they want to track him down.

At the same time, they realise

that there's things that don't seem

right about this crime scene.

There doesn't appear, through the autopsy,

to be any signs of a sexual assault.

There's no indication that Sam had a gun.

And there's all these things that just aren't really adding up.

(Richard) Sam's father, Steve, also had

his doubts his son was the killer.

He, too, was on the desperate hunt for Sam to find answers.

That night I got home and I had a few of Sam's friends' numbers.

And at 1:00, 2:00, I'm calling these people up.

(Richard) One friend had interesting news.

He said, I called Sam, and somebody answered the phone,

but it wasn't Sam.

And he said, what's going on.

Then he got hung up.

So I knew somebody had Sam's phone.

Then Monday is when I was able to get into Sam's account.

There was movement on his ATM card.

The first few times, it was at the ATM machine in Long Beach.

(Richard) This was barely 20 miles and just

a 30-minute drive from Sam's apartment.

(Steve) And then there was activity that

pizza was purchased in Long Beach.

And I googled it, and they were all within close proximity.

So Monday evening, I went to the pizza joint.

Let me see if I see Sam's car.

So I stayed there for about two hours.

There was nothing there.

(Richard) But Steve passed on this significant new lead

to detectives.

(Matt) He told the police, somebody keeps withdrawing

money from my son's bank accounts.

So the police then set up a group of different teams

to monitor ATM machines where these withdrawals

were being taken.

They had teams ready to go just waiting for this card to be used.

So the initial breakthrough was they got the image of somebody

withdrawing money, which is great.

Now we're going to find out where Sam is because, you know,

Sam's going to be withdrawing his own money.

And the problem was it wasn't Sam.

It was a young man that nobody recognised.

They're continuing to keep an eye on these withdrawals,

and they managed to see one that's a pizza

order to a home in Long Beach.

(Richard) Armed response units

raced to the Long Beach address.

(Matt) So they come in helicopter overhead.

"Get down. Get down.

Get down." The police are walking in...

I think they had MP5s, which are automatic machine

guns that SWAT teams use here in Southern California.

And it's a bunch of 16-year-old kids

who, in fact, had Sam's ATM card.

And they had a lot of explaining to do.

(Richard) Police started interrogating the youngsters.

In the meantime, Steve had been calling his son's friends.

One, in particular, claimed he'd seen him,

Sam's neighbour, an actor -

Dan Wozniak.

I said, Dan, can you tell me about Sam?

Yeah.

Because you said you saw him. He said, yeah.

He said, Sam was really nervous that time.

I said, do you have any idea why?

He said, no.

He did tell me he had girl problems

and he had family problems.

And let me clue you in on something.

The one thing there is no problems with Sam is family problems.

We are so close.

So as soon as he told me that, in my head, I said,

that bastard knows something.

OK?

He's dirty.

He was interviewed by the police, and he

said that he'd asked Sam to help him move some stuff that day.

And he essentially provided information

to the police that didn't appear to be of much use initially.

(Richard) Meanwhile, police had turned up at Steve's home.

Sam's still their prime suspect at the time.

They want to know if he had a gun, he wanted to do this,

or if he had this or that.

And I said, I've got information for you guys.

(Richard) Steve told them about his conversation

with Dan Wozniak.

And then when I told them, he's telling me Sam told him

he had family problems.

I absolutely knew he was lying.

So when I told the cops that, I'll never forget, one of them said,

we might be looking for the wrong guy.

(Richard) At the murder scene,

there was another clue leading to Dan.

Among the items that they find inside the apartment,

there was a wedding invitation to a woman

named Rachel Buffett and her marriage to Daniel Wozniak.

They're neighbours inside the building.

And they were a bunch of college students, so they would hang out.

They would party. They would spend time in the Jacuzzi and pools.

And Sam and Wozniak had had at least

one conversation in the Jacuzzi.

So they knew each other sort of socially within Camden Martinique

apartment complex.

(Richard) One of the boys found holding Sam's ATM card

had an interesting story to tell.

He immediately cooperated, and he said, yes, it was me.

I was taking money out.

And then there was the $20,000 question.

And some of us were expecting him to tell us where Sam was.

And instead he said, I got the card from Daniel Wozniak.

(Sean) He said that he had met Wozniak six years earlier.

They had both been acting in the same production.

And then, out of the blue, Wozniak had called him up

and asked him to do this, asked him to use this card

and go to these ATMs and withdraw this money.

(Matt) So this is now the second or third time

that Daniel Wozniak's name has come up in relation to this.

Dan Wozniak had already been interviewed,

and he didn't say anything about getting Sam's ATM card.

At the very least, he withheld information from police

during a murder investigation.

That is a crime in and of itself.

They reached out to him.

I believe they called him on the phone,

and he said, yeah, I can't meet with you.

Sorry, I'm going on my bachelor party.

Which, as you can imagine, is not something that when you've got

potentially a crazed murderer on the loose

and you have the murder of a beautiful,

innocent 23-year-old woman,

that's not something that the police are going to care about.

So the police, they track Wozniak down.

They find him at his bachelor party, actually,

at a sushi place in Huntington Beach,

which is not far from Long Beach.

And they arrested him.

And it caused quite the kerfuffle among his party guests.

And I think they might have even-if I recall,

I think they handcuffed a couple of the guys that were protesting

his arrest, if I remember.

But anyway, they transport Daniel Wozniak

to the Costa Mesa Police Department

for a very formal interview.

Initially, Wozniak tells the detectives

that he was involved in some sort of bank fraud with Sam.

Then he changes his story.

What he essentially says, in a nutshell,

is, OK, OK, OK, I lied to you before.

I'm sorry I lied.

What really happened was Sam came to my apartment

and said he needed my help

and that there was a body in his apartment,

and he needed my help to get money out of his bank account.

He tells them, well, you know, Sam

had told me that he had killed Julie because she

wouldn't have sex with him.

And he was in this drug fuelled rage is what he claimed.

And he threatened me, and so I agreed to help him

get money out of his bank account.

OK, so there are about 20 things in that story that made

absolutely no sense to detectives.

As detectives are kind of poking holes in these stories,

he's not kind of holding up very well under this questioning.

At one point, one of the detectives tells him,

you know, you're not that good an actor, man.

And when they start saying, well, hey, what about this,

and they begin confronting him, Wozniak's story begins to change.

And he says, OK, I'm sorry, I saw, quote unquote, "the goddamn body."

"I saw the goddamn body.

Is that what you want to hear?

I saw the goddamn body.

I didn't kill her.

You know, Sam killed her.

But then I helped him afterwards."

(Richard) But the discovery on Julie's body

undermined Wozniak's testimony.

In Julie's case, the postmortem confirmed that the cause of death

was a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

But there's something else her body revealed.

She'd been shot not once, but twice.

The second wound was hidden by her hair.

And so at first, that second gunshot wound

was known only to the pathologist who performed the examination,

and, of course, to the person who pulled the trigger.

(gun shots)

Wozniak said, I stood over her and I looked at her.

All I saw was two bullet holes in her head.

Julie was a young woman with a beautiful head

of thick black hair.

You couldn't see the bullet holes in her head.

This is a .380 calibre handgun, so this is a very small bullet.

And you couldn't see that.

It was impossible to see.

One of the detective sergeants, actually,

who was monitoring this interview, interrupted the interview

at that point and came in and said, wait a second,

did you say you saw two gunshot wounds in her head?

You couldn't see that.

So they caught him in a gigantic lie.

(Richard Shepherd) May 2010, Costa Mesa, California.

Police were investigating the discovery

of a body in the apartment of war veteran Sam Herr.

The body was that of 23-year-old Julie Kibuishi.

Julie's body was found on the bed, and she'd been brutally murdered.

26-year-old Sam Herr was missing.

Nobody knew if he was alive, dead, or on the run.

But detectives had now arrested his neighbour, an actor,

Dan Wozniak, for withholding information

during a murder investigation.

Wozniak tells police that he saw two gunshot wounds

in the back of Julie's head.

Detectives realised there's no way he could have seen that.

So they're pushing him on this, and they can tell he's rattled.

And he's struggling to come up with explanations.

The interview ends.

He then goes back to his holding cell.

(Richard) Meanwhile, Wozniak's bride to be,

Rachel Buffett, had begun cancelling their wedding plans.

Rachel, his fiancee, went to Daniel's parents' home.

And she informs his mum that Dan has been arrested

and doesn't appear that he's going to be out in time for the wedding.

And while she's there, she has contact

with Tim, who is Wozniak's older brother, who begins to freak out

and says, oh, my god, oh, my god.

I have evidence.

(Richard) Unwittingly, Wozniak's brother, Tim,

had been given a backpack.

It contained Sam's clothes covered in blood,

his mobile phone and his wallet.

In a call Wozniak made from gaol, his fiancee asked him about it.

She says, hey, I'm about to tell the detectives

that Tim has evidence.

He says, you can't do that. You can't do that.

If you do, I'm done for.

Baby, baby, baby, no, no, no, don't do that, don't do that.

And she says, well, I'm going to.

I have to.

And by the way, this is a recorded line,

and you're being a complete ass if you're going to continue to lie.

Wozniak then informs the gaoler, I want to talk to the detectives.

(Richard) Wozniak then revealed

how he led Sam to his death.

Wozniak says he goes to Sam.

He asks him for help moving boxes at this theatre

on the Joint Forces Training Base, which is this

military base in Los Alamitos.

He says he lured Sam into the attic of a theatre

called The Liberty Theatre under this guise

of helping him move some stuff.

Wozniak had been in a production out there, so he knew it.

Wozniak rifles through Sam's pockets, grabs his cell phone,

grabs his debit card, and takes off.

(Richard) With this news, police

raced to The Liberty Theatre.

(sirens)

They finally found Sam Herr's body in the attic.

It revealed he'd met a gruesome end.

When the police first found the body, the head was gone.

The right hand was missing.

And the left forearm and hand were missing.

Now, the first thing you want to do with a body like this

is to work out who it belonged to.

It was impossible to use either fingerprints or dental records.

But this body could still reveal the truth.

On the chest was a distinctive tattoo of a heart and a rose.

And using that, the police were able to identify him as Sam Herr.

For Sam's father, Steve, his worst fears had come true.

The police called and said they identified

Sam's body from the tattoo.

It was a heart and a rose-big one-and it had "mum and dad."

I knew it was my son.

(Sean) Like a lot of young men who were in the Army

during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,

he also had just a series of tattoos

that were reflective of his military deployment.

So his tattoos were unique and very easy to identify.

Plus, we knew that it was Sam Herr at that time

because we already had Wozniak's confession.

It's a shock when you find out your child is dead.

When they confirm it, the shock is complete.

However, I remember saying, OK, they found Sam's body.

And I remember thinking, well, at least he's not been dismembered.

So the next morning, the police call and say,

Steve, before you find out from the media,

we have to tell you Sam was dismembered.

That's when anger - everything - and to this day, 13 years later,

it's there.

It's there.

That's where I go. That's the dark place.

I don't want to go there, so I try to avoid it.

(Richard) Police needed to work out how and why

Sam's body was dismembered.

Was it a moment of madness or part of Wozniak's plan?

To remove the head and two limbs from a body,

you have to cut through bones.

And I can tell you, that takes a lot of physical effort.

A closer look at the edges of the bones that are being cut

can be very revealing and can tell us what was used to cut them.

An axe would leave a V-shaped trough,

whilst the saw leaves specific ridge patterns

on the cut ends of the bone matching the saw tooth

pattern on the edge of the blade.

And in this case, the tell-tale marks on Sam's bones

revealed that the killer had used a saw to decapitate him.

With this new lead, police uncovered the tools the killer

had used for his grisly crime.

He used a combination of a hatchet and also a wood saw.

Wozniak discovered that it was far more

difficult to dismember a human body, I think, than he thought.

We believe that was to make identification more difficult,

by removing the head and hands, which is not very well thought

through because this is a former member

of the United States military and there's DNA in a database.

So eventually, this body is going to be identified.

The blood at the scene by itself would

be probably run through the system and would have identified him.

So I don't know exactly what he was thinking.

(Richard) But time was running out

to find Sam's missing body parts for the sake of his family

and for police to build a watertight case.

He had cut off the head and hands and thrown them

in this Long Beach nature park.

We have coyotes.

We have a lot of animals.

And they use the storm drains to access suburban areas.

So if a body is not discovered quickly and it is off a fire road

or off a hiking trail, you can guarantee that it's going

to be what's known as scavenged.

That's when animals find the body, and they

will oftentimes eat anything of forensic value from that.

So there was a grid search conducted

of this Long Beach nature park.

On May 29, which happened to be Sam's birthday,

they found his head.

That upset me.

You know, he was dismembered, and here it was on his birthday,

when we should have been celebrating his 27th birthday,

I'm praying that they find his head.

The police scoured El Dorado Park.

There was still a hand they never found.

There's never forgiveness for Dan Wozniak in my mind.

(Richard) Back at the police station,

Wozniak revealed how, just hours after killing Sam,

he murdered Julie.

At this point, police have this confession.

They have forensics that puts him at the scene, the backpack

with the clothes in it, the murder weapon,

and Wozniak is formally charged with the murder.

Daniel Wozniak was charged with two counts of murder

for financial gain, which in the state of California

carries a potential sentence of death.

In May 2010, in Orange County, California,

Daniel Wozniak was charged with two counts of murder

after confessing to killing Julie Kibuishi and Sam Herr.

Wozniak had shot and dismembered Sam Herr

to steal his bank card and his money,

then gunned down Sam's friend Julie so it

seemed he had fled on the run.

But the law had caught up with the killer.

The case enters the court process,

and there was a lengthy delay between the charges

and the actual trial.

There's motions.

There's many hearings.

It stretched out over months, more than 100 hearings.

For Sam's family, for Julie's family,

they're having to kind of wait through their pain,

through their need for some kind of closure.

So you can see our frustration with the judicial system.

We finally went to trial December

of 2015.

That was 5 1/2 years after the crime.

(Richard) As Wozniak entered the dock,

the families came face to face with the killer.

(Sean) You could tell he kind of had that air as an actor.

He kind of carried himself in a certain way in the courtroom,

for the most part.

Wozniak, at the very correct advice of his attorneys, remained

pretty stone-faced throughout.

I'm sure they advised him not to show much emotion.

And he didn't. He showed almost no emotion the entire time.

(Richard) Despite the evidence stacked against him,

Wozniak pleaded not guilty to Sam and Julie's murders.

Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy

led the case for the prosecution.

We played his confession.

We laid out all the evidence so the jury understood what he did,

how he did it, and why he did it.

(Sean) Prosecution was obviously

coming in with a very strong case.

I mean, they had a confession.

They had a videotape confession.

It's hard to have...

come stronger than that, unless you get someone on video

actually committing the act.

(Richard) Prosecutors painted a picture

of an actor who was hard up.

Wozniak never really broke through

to move up the ladder above community Theatre

to become kind of a professional.

(Richard) His fellow actor and fiancee,

Rachel, was also penniless.

He and Rachel, I don't think they were getting paid anything.

And neither of them had actual employment.

Community Theatre is not something that's

really going to pay the bills.

They would act together, but they were

also always struggling for money.

The problem is they didn't pay their rent.

I think they owed several thousand dollars in rent,

and they were in the process of being evicted.

And despite that, they were also trying to plan this wedding.

They wanted to do a beach-front wedding and reception -

obviously, a honeymoon.

And they're trying to figure out ways to pay for all this.

And Wozniak learns

that his neighbour Sam had earned,

through his military service, more than $60,000 in combat pay.

And he decides he's going to find a way to get that money

no matter what it takes to get it.

And that's where the plan -

this horrific diabolical plan -

begins to come clear.

(Richard) Evidence from Wozniak's internet browsing

revealed plans to kill Sam Herr in the weeks

leading up to his murder.

You go through their search history,

you can see what's going on exactly in his head.

His mind was focused on the honeymoon

and being able to pay their rent.

And then 10 seconds later,

there are searches on Google, "making sure a body is not found,"

"how to hide a body," "quick ways to kill people."

He's doing searches for, you know, how to commit the murder.

So he took this antique pistol, which is a .380 that I believe

was actually manufactured in the 1930s,

I think it was used in the Spanish Civil War,

that his father had.

God only knows the last time this thing was cleaned.

God only knows if Daniel Wozniak has ever used it before.

(Richard) The court heard how Wozniak

lured Sam to The Liberty Theatre.

But could Sam Herr's body reveal more

evidence that Wozniak killed in cold blood

and not in a moment of panic?

We know that Sam's body was dismembered after he was killed.

But what was his actual cause of death?

The answer to that lay in his skull.

The wounds to his head show us that, like his friend Julie,

he was shot twice.

The fatal shot was here.

The bullet entered through the left-hand side of the skull

and continued its destructive course right across the brain.

The bullet ended here, on the other side of the head,

having caused catastrophic injuries.

There is no way he could have survived

this second lethal gunshot.

Not one, but two shots were delivered from Wozniak's gun.

There was no coming back from that for Sam.

(Matt) The way he does it is so ruthless.

Wozniak shoots one round into Sam's head

that doesn't penetrate his skull.

He has an opportunity still, after shooting

him once, to do the right thing.

It was a survivable wound.

But Wozniak shoots again and kills him.

And right after murdering Sam Herr, Wozniak

went and acted in Hunger Artists' Theatre production of "Nine"

because they had a performance that night.

He goes out, sings, dances, does his whole routine.

Nails it. Gives quite a performance.

Then, at the end of that performance,

uses Sam's cell phone to lure Julie to Sam's apartment.

Dan is now texting as Sam.

"I need to see you.

I have bad family crap."

Dan, acting as Sam, was very explicit and to say,

I need you to see you alone by midnight.

And Julie, being sweet and a friend, saying, don't worry, Sam.

I'm there for you.

We're family.

Dan goes up and meets her, and then he

lets Julie into Sam's apartment.

And she went to Sam's room, and then

he put two bullets in her head.

And then he disrobed her and made it look like she was raped.

(Richard) But the court heard

how Julie's body exposed the truth that there was no sexual attack.

Prosecutors revealed how the blanching of Julie's skin

with an imprint of her jeans showed Wozniak

had removed Julie's clothes after her murder

to make Sam look like the killer.

He lured her in there, to her doom, to her death.

She was thinking she was helping a friend.

She was going to be there for him.

And then this guy just destroys everything good.

(Richard) Wozniak's own brother, Tim,

testified against him about the backpack

he was given containing Sam's bloodied clothes, wallet and

phone, and even the murder weapon.

It was an open-and-shut case.

(Juror) We, the jury, find the defendant

Daniel Patrick Wozniak guilty of the crime

of murder in the first degree.

The jury found Wozniak guilty of murder in less than two hours.

(Richard) In the new year, Wozniak returned

to court to hear his fate.

The elected district attorney decided

to seek the death penalty in this case because it was so horrific.

Danny Wozniak treated him like trash.

He treated Julie like trash.

So the question that I ask you to answer in your verdicts, are they?

(Richard) Sam's father, Steve,

and mother, Raquel, were there to help the jury make up their minds.

I addressed Dan Wozniak.

What I did, with Raquel at my side, and eight of Sammy's combat

buddies standing behind me.

You, Dan, are a coward.

I told Wozniak he was looking at real men behind me.

I told his lawyer and the judge that Daniel Wozniak was a poster

boy for the death penalty.

My only regret, that this state won't

let me kill this coward myself.

The thing I will never forget for the rest of my life

was June Kibuishi, that's Julie's mum,

who came in and she testified.

(June Kibuishi) You took my beautiful,

caring, loving daughter's precious life to cover

up your heinous and planned crime.

Did I ever see you any remorse?

No.

Not even once.

That was a moment that I will never forget.

The jury has listened to the family.

They go back to deliberate, and they are back

in a little less than one hour.

(Juror) We, the jury, determine that the penalty

to be imposed upon defendant

Daniel Patrick Wozniak to be death.

It was the shortest death verdict in the history of Orange County.

(Richard) Wozniak's bride to be, Rachel Buffett,

was later sentenced to 32 months in gaol

for lying to police to protect the killer.

This was cold blooded.

It was calculated.

And the amount of grief that this stupid plan

exacted upon those families is morally wrong in every way.

(Sean) There's kind of a very tragic irony that, you know,

Sam had been in some of the most dangerous places on Earth.

Served heroically and valiantly for his country in the war

in Afghanistan without a scratch.

(Sean) Only to come back and be killed in Orange County, which,

you know, is, in most people's estimation,

an incredibly safe place.

Hopefully, these families can walk away

from this with some semblance of peace

and know that justice has been done.

So I don't want them to be forgotten.

I don't want Sam helping a friend-he paid his life for that.

And Julie helping a friend, paid for it with her life.

The villain of the story is Dan Wozniak.

The man doesn't deserve to be alive.

Julie Kibuishi and Sam Herr were lured to their deaths

by a man they trusted, Daniel Wozniak.

Not only did he shoot them both in the head.

He also dismembered Sam's body.

But despite Wozniak's attempt to set Sam up as Julie's killer,

their bodies didn't lie.

The double gunshot to Julie's head was

evidence enough to put Wozniak in the frame

and help prosecutors get justice.

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