A former Lomita restaurateur who told sheriff’s detectives that he bound his wife with duct tape, panicked when he awoke to find her dead and “cooked” her body for four days to get rid of her remains lost his latest bid for parole Thursday.
David Robert Viens was denied parole for three years, marking the third time a state parole board panel has rejected his bid for release from prison.
Viens — who is now 62 and behind bars at the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran — is serving a 15-year-to-life state prison sentence for the October 2009 killing of his wife, Dawn, whose remains were never found.
During the latest hearing, Viens acknowledged via a video link that he used a very large hot pot to liquefy his wife’s body, saying that what remained of her was mixed in with the garbage at his restaurant and dumped in a trash bin.
He had made a similar acknowledgement at his last parole hearing in 2024, but acknowledged that he wasn’t forthcoming during his first parole hearing in 2021.
“I’ve never admitted to anybody that I boiled the body until the beginning of 2024,” he told the panel.
“I took Dawn’s life,” Viens said, noting the impact that the killing has had on her family. “I know they’re hurting every day because of what I’ve done.”
He said he is “solely responsible for everything that happened” and said “there’s no one to blame but me.”
“… I feel horrible for what I’ve done…,” he said. “I know the harm that I’ve caused … I believe I’m no longer a threat to anybody.”
Deputy District Attorney Steven Weiss told the parole board panel that he didn’t think Viens was suitable yet for parole, while Viens’ attorney contended that his client has changed during his stay in state prison.
Viens has lost a series of appeals in state and federal courts seeking to overturn his second-degree murder conviction.
In a 2016 ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Frederick F. Mumm wrote that there was “little reason to believe that the jury would have reached a verdict more favorable to petitioner than the one it actually reached” if jurors had not heard about Viens’ confession while he was hospitalized and under the influence of numerous medications after attempting suicide by jumping off of a cliff.
Mumm’s ruling noted that the defendant had also confessed to his daughter and his 19-year-old new girlfriend.
“After killing his wife, petitioner disposed of her body. Although petitioner maintains that he could not have, as he told police, boiled her body in his restaurant, that fact is inconsequential because, one way or another, he disposed of her body in a manner that prevented her body from ever being found,” Mumm added in his ruling.
A three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal had earlier rejected Viens’ contention that there was insufficient evidence to support his murder conviction, finding in a July 2014 ruling that he “disposed of Dawn’s body in a particularly grisly manner” and that he “engaged in an elaborate cover-up of her death.”
The California Supreme Court rejected a defense petition asking it to review the case in October 2014.
During Viens’ trial, jurors heard tape-recorded interviews in which he told sheriff’s detectives in March 2011 that “for some reason I just got violent” and that he bound his wife’s mouth, hands and feet with duct tape. He said he had taped her up “probably twice” on other occasions because he “didn’t want her driving around wasted, whacked out on coke and drinking.”
Viens, who ran the now-shuttered Thyme Contemporary Cafe that had been leased by his mother, told investigators he woke up four hours later and panicked once he discovered that she was dead.
“I cooked her four days. I let her cool, I strained it out as I, as I was in there, O.K.,” he told sheriff’s detectives in a March 15, 2011, interview, adding that he dumped the remains in the trash.
In an interview two weeks before that, he told sheriff’s detectives that “for some reason I just got violent.”
He said it “seemed like it had to do with her stealing money” from the restaurant and that he snapped and duct-taped her before he fell asleep, then woke up and panicked to find her dead.
Just before being sentenced in March 2013, Viens disputed that he had killed his wife over a few hundred dollars, saying it was “ridiculous to think I would harm my wife for that.”
He also denied cooking his wife, saying that he loved her and had undergone “two major surgeries” in the hours before he was recorded speaking to sheriff’s detectives in March 2011 and didn’t even remember talking to them while hospitalized at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance.
During his 45-minute statement at his sentencing hearing, Viens said he was “hallucinating” when he spoke to sheriff’s detectives and does not know how he could have called them to his bedside when he was handcuffed to the hospital bed.
Viens attended his trial in a wheelchair as a result of injuries suffered when he jumped 80 feet down Inspiration Point in Rancho Palos Verdes on Feb. 23, 2011, after learning that his wife’s disappearance was being investigated as a homicide. Viens’ girlfriend grabbed his clothes in an unsuccessful effort to stop him from plunging from the oceanfront cliff. He told the panel he jumped off the cliff “to avoid taking responsibility.”