By TERRI VERMEULEN KEITH
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.
David Robert Viens was denied parole for three years on Thursday, April 2, marking the third time a state parole board panel has rejected his bid for release from prison.
After just over 20 minutes of deliberations, Commissioner David Long said the two-person panel had concluded that Viens is “not yet suitable for parole.”
Viens — who is 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 said he was ashamed of himself for lying during his first parole hearing in 2021.
“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.”
Viens described himself as “perpetually angry at that time,” and said he snapped when she told him to “tell your mommy to write me a check and I’ll leave,” saying that he restrained her with tape as he had done twice before.
He said he now believes she was justified in her request.
He said he was “devastated” and “couldn’t believe what I had done in my rage” when he woke up and found his wife dead. He said he initially didn’t think he would get away with it and then thought maybe he would as time went on.
“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.”
He described his judgment as being impaired at the time, and acknowledged that he knows he can never drink or use drugs again.
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, where he works as a peer support mentor for fellow inmates.
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, 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,” 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 near 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 — with who he acknowledged becoming involved a few weeks after his wife’s death — grabbed his clothes in an unsuccessful effort to stop him from plunging from the oceanfront cliff.
He told the panel he jumped from the cliff to “avoid taking responsibility, saying that he “didn’t want society to know what I did.”