On the morning of May 22, 2010, Steve Herr let himself into his son's Costa Mesa apartment to check on him. Sam, a 26-year-old Army veteran who had served in Afghanistan, hadn't answered his phone in a day, and his father was worried. What Steve Herr found instead was a young woman he didn't recognize, dead on the floor, shot twice in the back of the head. Someone had scrawled an obscenity across her sweater. Her name was Juri "Julie" Kibuishi, a 23-year-old Orange Coast College student who had been tutoring Sam. Sam himself was nowhere to be found.

For the next several days, investigators and Sam Herr's own father worked from the same assumption: that Sam had killed Julie Kibuishi and fled. What neither of them yet understood was that Sam Herr was already dead too, dismembered and scattered across a Long Beach nature reserve by the one person everyone had trusted without question: Daniel Wozniak, Sam's friend and neighbor, an actor loved by his local theater community, engaged to be married in five days.

Evidence Log · Trial record & investigative reporting
A — Sam Herr shot at a theater attic May 21, 2010; Julie Kibuishi shot hours later
B — Motive: $62,000 in Herr's combat pay, needed for Wozniak's wedding/honeymoon
C — Backpack recovered with shell casings, victim's ID, and bloody clothing
D — Convicted of 2 counts first-degree murder Dec. 16, 2015; sentenced to death Sept. 23, 2016

A neighbor with a nest egg

Daniel Patrick "Danny" Wozniak was born March 23, 1984, in Long Beach, California, and by 2010 had built a modest local reputation as a community theater actor, well liked by castmates and directors around Orange County. He lived in a Costa Mesa apartment complex with his fiancée, Rachel Mae Buffett, also an actress in the same theater scene. Beneath the charm, Wozniak was unemployed, deeply in debt, and facing eviction, all while planning an expensive wedding and honeymoon he could not afford.

His neighbor and friend in that same complex was Samuel Eliezer "Sam" Herr, a 26-year-old Army private first class who had returned from a deployment in Afghanistan with roughly $62,000 in saved combat pay. Herr had also befriended Julie Kibuishi, a 23-year-old dancer and student at Orange Coast College, who had taken to tutoring him. Wozniak knew both of them well enough to know exactly what he needed and who had it.

Prosecutors later told the jury that Wozniak's internet search history in the weeks before the murders included queries for "how to hide a body" and "quick ways to kill people," alongside searches for Sandals Resorts, the honeymoon destination he could not otherwise afford.

The show must go on

On May 21, 2010, Wozniak lured Sam Herr to the attic of the Liberty Theater in Los Alamitos, where Wozniak was performing that same night in a production of the musical Nine. He told Herr he needed help moving supplies. When Herr turned his back, Wozniak shot him. The first shot did not kill him. "I need help," Herr said, according to Wozniak's later account to detectives. "Something hit me. It sounded, it felt like an electric shock." Wozniak reloaded and fired again, killing him.

Then Wozniak went onstage. Castmate Deborah Kennedy would later recall watching him perform that night without a hint of what had just happened a few feet above the audience's heads: "I remember getting goose bumps and goin', 'Yeah, Daniel, nail it.'"

A tiara and two bullets

Killing Sam Herr solved only half of Wozniak's problem: a body, and a debt he still needed to erase in a way that pointed away from himself. Using Herr's own cell phone, Wozniak texted Julie Kibuishi that night, luring her to Herr's apartment. She had just had dinner with her brother, and was still wearing a tiara for his upcoming wedding.

Wozniak later described how he got her to lower her guard once she arrived: "I said, 'Oh, by the way, did you see this in Sam's bed?'" He led her toward the bedroom. "When she was leaned over, I put two bullets in the back of her head."

He staged the scene to frame the man he had already killed hours earlier. He wrote an obscenity across her sweater and cut her pants to suggest Herr had raped and murdered her before disappearing. To the detectives who arrived the next morning, and to Julie Kibuishi's grieving family, it looked exactly like what Wozniak intended: a decorated soldier snapping, assaulting a friend, and running.

Dismemberment in a theater attic

The following morning, Wozniak returned to the Liberty Theater, where Sam Herr's body still lay in the attic, and dismembered it with an ax and a saw. He scattered the remains across El Dorado Nature Center in Long Beach. Sam's head would not be recovered until weeks later, on what would have been his 27th birthday. His hand was never found. He was eventually given a military burial with full honors, once investigators understood he was the second victim rather than a fugitive killer.

Detective Ed Everett, one of the investigators who interviewed Wozniak after his arrest, later described his reaction to hearing Wozniak recount this part of the crime: "To hear the grizzly part of the dismemberment and then discarding the body parts in the park, and then his, just overall, attitude was just chilling for me." Wozniak himself told detectives he had found the act darkly funny in the moment: "I was actually smiling and laughing. It reached a point to where I couldn't even believe that I was doing this."

The manhunt for a dead man

With Julie Kibuishi dead in Sam Herr's apartment and Herr himself unreachable, investigators launched a manhunt for a man they believed was a murderer on the run. Detectives Ed Everett, Mike Cohen, and Jose Morales worked the case from the crime scene outward. Detective Morales would later describe what he saw when he first entered the apartment: Julie "was wearing a tiara. Very dark. Full head of hair, just covered in blood."

Julie's mother, June Kibuishi, made her own plea to investigators in the earliest hours of the search, not yet knowing her daughter was already dead: "I don't care where you find her. But I need to find her."

It was Sam Herr's own father who did much of the legwork that cracked the case open. Steve Herr noticed daily ATM withdrawals from his son's bank account at a Chase machine and a pizza restaurant called Eccos, all while Sam remained unreachable. He began calling his son's friends directly. One of them gave him a phone number for Daniel Wozniak, the up-and-coming actor everyone assumed was simply as worried as they were.

The bachelor party arrest

The ATM trail led investigators to Wesley Freilich, a 17-year-old actor Wozniak had once mentored in theater. Wozniak had asked Freilich to withdraw cash using Herr's ATM card, spinning a story that he worked for a bail bonds agency and needed help collecting from a client who had skipped out. Freilich, who had no idea what he was actually involved in, was never charged. When police tracked him down through ATM surveillance footage, he told them plainly that Wozniak had asked him to do it.

That was enough to point detectives toward Wozniak himself, just two days before his own wedding. They found him at his bachelor party. "You could see the blood drain from his face," Detective Everett recalled.

A bonanza of evidence

Under questioning, Wozniak's story shifted repeatedly. He first claimed he was helping Sam Herr, who he said had confessed to killing Julie and had threatened him into silence: "I know where you live. You rat me out, I'm going to f---ing kill you." He said Herr had forced him to help withdraw the cash.

But the physical evidence was already closing in. Wozniak had given his brother, Tim, a backpack to get rid of. When police recovered it, they found the shell casings from Julie Kibuishi's murder, Sam Herr's wallet, his identification, his checkbook, and his bloody clothes. "This is a bonanza of evidence," lead prosecutor Matt Murphy said afterward. "He knows he's done."

Detectives also caught Wozniak in a detail that gave him away before the confession did. He told them he had seen "two gunshots" in Julie's head, a fact that had not been released and that investigators themselves had only found one visible wound for at the scene. An autopsy later confirmed the second wound existed, meaning Wozniak could only have known about it by being there.

"I'm crazy and I did it"

After roughly 14 hours in custody, and a recorded jailhouse phone call in which Rachel Buffett mentioned the backpack and the weapon inside it, Wozniak asked to speak to detectives again. Detective Mike Cohen recalled him as emotionally drained: "He just started speaking to us."

"I'm crazy and I did it. I killed Julie, and I killed Sam."

— Daniel Wozniak, in his confession to Costa Mesa detectives

He led investigators to where he had discarded Sam Herr's remains. Sam Herr, the man an entire manhunt had been built around finding as a fugitive, had been Wozniak's first victim all along.

Rachel Buffett

Wozniak's fiancée, Rachel Mae Buffett, was arrested in November 2012 and formally charged on December 20, 2012, with three felony counts of accessory after the fact, accused of lying to investigators to protect Wozniak. Prosecutors said she told detectives 19 separate lies, echoing Wozniak's own invented story about Herr's family troubles and a mysterious man in a black hat.

Buffett appeared on the Dr. Phil show maintaining her innocence, a decision that outraged Sam Herr's father. "I was aghast when I get a call saying you're going on TV," Steve Herr said. "My son is dead. He was cut up into pieces, and you come on here and go on the TV stations."

Nearly eight years after the murders, in September 2018, a jury convicted Buffett on two of the three counts against her. On November 8, 2018, she was sentenced to 32 months, minus time served and credit for good behavior, and was released the following year.

Five and a half years to a two-hour verdict

Wozniak's own case took five and a half years to reach trial. Prosecutor Matt Murphy built much of his case around the physical evidence recovered from the backpack, the ATM footage, and Wozniak's own confession, alongside the internet search history that showed the murders had been planned, not impulsive: searches for how to kill quickly and hide a body, run alongside searches for the honeymoon resort he was killing to afford.

The jury took just two hours to convict Wozniak on two counts of first-degree murder on December 16, 2015. In the penalty phase that followed, jurors deliberated a little over an hour before recommending the death penalty, on January 11, 2016.

Sentencing

Judge John D. Conley formally sentenced Wozniak to death on September 23, 2016. Conley noted that Wozniak had shown no visible emotion throughout the proceedings, appearing, in the judge's words, to seem entirely at ease even in theatrical recordings played during the trial. Wozniak, the judge said, "was willing to kill two young people" simply to fund an extravagant wedding.

Public Defender Scott Sanders, representing Wozniak, tried to bar the death penalty entirely, citing a broader scandal then unfolding in Orange County's justice system involving undisclosed jailhouse informant logs kept by sheriff's deputies, misconduct that had already led a separate judge to bar the Orange County District Attorney's office from prosecuting another major death penalty case. Judge Conley rejected the argument as irrelevant to Wozniak's sentencing and allowed it to proceed.

Steve Herr addressed his son's killer directly in court. Eight veterans who had served alongside Sam in Afghanistan attended the hearing to support him.

"You, Dan, are a coward and a poster boy for the need of the effective death penalty in California. My only regret? That this state won't let me kill this coward myself."

— Steve Herr, victim impact statement, Sept. 23, 2016

Julie Kibuishi's mother, June Kibuishi, spoke through tears, her husband silently holding a photograph of their daughter beside her: "You took her precious life and then you disgraced her. Why? What did she do to you? How could you do anything like that to my baby?"

Where he is now

Wozniak was initially held at San Quentin State Prison and was transferred to Salinas Valley State Prison in July 2021 under California's Condemned Inmate Transfer Pilot Program. His death sentence has not been carried out. In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a statewide moratorium on executions, affecting more than 700 death row inmates including Wozniak, a decision Steve Herr has publicly opposed. Automatic appeals of Wozniak's conviction and sentence continue to work through the California courts.

An ordinary complex, an ordinary friendship

Nothing about the Costa Mesa apartment complex where Sam Herr, Julie Kibuishi's tutoring sessions, and Daniel Wozniak's engagement all overlapped marked it as the site of a plotted double murder. Herr and Wozniak were neighbors and friends; Kibuishi was simply a young woman trying to help a veteran with his coursework. The manhunt that followed treated the actual second victim as a killer for days, while the real one took the stage that same night to a round of applause. What finally undid him was not a slip of conscience but a trail of ATM receipts, a backpack he thought his brother had discarded for good, and a detail about a second gunshot wound that only the killer could have known.

Sources

Trial, sentencing, and appellate proceedings referenced above are matters of public record in Orange County, California (People v. Daniel Patrick Wozniak). Wozniak was convicted at trial in December 2015 and sentenced to death in September 2016; his sentence remains unenforced under California's ongoing moratorium on executions, and automatic appeals continue.