Los Angeles A chef who told police he cooked his wife’s body in boiling water has been sentenced to 15 years of life in prison for second-degree murder in Los Angeles. Unhappy with the outcome, David Viens, the accused, told the court he didn’t get a fair trial and wanted a chance to testify.
On Saturday, David dismissed the D.A.’s allegations that he disposed of his wife, piece by piece. “It was very damaging of them to go ahead and portray that I abused my wife. I love my wife. I didn’t cook my wife,” he said. The man, when suspected of his wife’s murder two years later in 2011, had jumped off a cliff in a botched up suicide attempt. He had to undergo intensive surgery, and in the hospital itself, the police recorded the interrogation series. There, David told the cops how his wife died in a drug-induced frenzy, and then how he “cooked” her remains for four days to get rid of the evidence.
He later claimed that the recording was just babble and he was disoriented at the time, as he was on a heavy dose of painkillers. “It is ridiculous to think that after 17 years, I would harm my wife at all,” he said in the court. David attended his court proceedings in a wheelchair as a result of injuries suffered when he jumped 80 feet down Inspiration Point in Rancho Palos Verdes on February 23, 2011, after a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy tried to stop his vehicle and his girlfriend tried to stop him from plunging from the oceanfront cliff by grabbing his clothes.
His Defense attorneys argued that David did not intend to kill his wife. Meanwhile, court papers showed that David was previously arrested for the manufacture of hallucinogens and had served time for drug dealing. The victim’s sister, Dayna Papin, said, “He’s going to continue to fight for his freedom, which I hope you don’t give to him for a very long time.” Papin told the court that she had known the man since she was a teen. “I love him, very much. He was like a father to me. But I don’t feel any sympathy or pity or kindness toward him in any way whatsoever.”
‘I cooked my wife’ incident
Dawn Viens was reported missing by friends and family three weeks after she was last seen at the couple’s Lomita restaurant in October 2009. In 2011, after cops suspected her husband David of killing her, he jumped off a cliff in a suicide bid. In an interview in hospital, David told police that he suspected his wife was stealing from the restaurant.
He claimed that on the fateful night, they did cocaine together and she was not letting him sleep. He then used duct tape on her mouth and binds her hands and feet to keep her still. By next morning, she was dead. A “panicked” David then proceeded to “cook” his wife for the next four days to get rid of her remains and dumped them in a grease pit at the restaurant, but kept her skull in his mother’s attic.
