Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: An Oscar-Worthy Murder Pt. 1

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Dan Wozniak was a charming, talented actor in Southern California with big dreams and a wedding on the horizon, but his finances were falling apart and his taste for the spotlight far outpaced what his life could actually afford. Rather than face the truth, he began to lie, manipulate, and scheme, building a fantasy of the life he wanted on a foundation of deception. In the spring of 2010, that spiral of debt and delusion set the stage for an unthinkable crime. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy traces Wozniak's troubled path from aspiring theater star to desperate con man, the toxic relationships and mounting pressures that surrounded him, and the calculated plan that would soon leave two innocent people dead.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.

It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. Most of us have two families. There's the one we're born into and then there's the one we build as we go.

The friends who slowly become something more than friends. The people you drive across town for at midnight without a second thought. because you know they do the same for you. In a Costa Mesa apartment complex in 2010, a group of young people had built exactly that kind of family. One of them was Sam Hare, an army veteran who'd come home from Afghanistan to start his life over. Another was Julie Kibuishi,

a college student with a gift for fashion and a big heart. They trusted the people in that story. circle completely. They shouldn't have. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon,

and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, the Crime House Original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come at every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early ad-free access to every episode,

subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. This is the first of two episodes on the 2010 murders of Sam Hare and Julie Kibuishi, two friends killed in Southern California in a plot that unfolded like a stage play. Today, I'll introduce you to Sam and Julie.

I'll tell you who they were, how they met, and the close-knit community they were a part of. They'll walk you through the night. A father went looking for his son and walked. into the worst moment of his life. Next time, I'll follow the investigation into what happened to Sam and Julie. I'll take you inside the interrogation room where the whole case finally cracked open, the long road to justice, and what it cost the victim's families. All that and more coming up.

Samuel Hare was born on May 29, 1983, and raised in Anaheim Hills, California by his parents, Steve and Raquel. He was their only child, and they poured everything they had into raising him, even when it was difficult. Sam had learning challenges that made school challenging. That might be why, as a teenager, he drifted toward a rougher crowd. He smoked marijuana. He ran with a small group of guys who called themselves the Brown Familia. He wasn't a hardened gang member, but he was around that world. And by the time he was about 18, that world caught up with him in the worst way imaginable. It started with a killing that had nothing to do with him. On January 15, 2002, a 19-year-old member of the Brown family named Victor Flores was shot dead, and his body was dumped in a riverbed.

According to police records, the group started planning revenge within a dead. They settled on a young man named Byron Benito, who they believed had a hand in the Flores shooting. Prosecutors would later say there was no connection at all, but it seems like the group didn't know that. Prosecutors alleged that Sam was the one who picked Benito up. He drove him to an industrial park where members of the Brown Familia attacked him. Benito died there, and Sam was arrested. and charged with murder. He wasn't the only one.

More than 20 people were accused in connection with the killing, and prosecutors split the defendants into separate trials. Sam sat in jail for nearly two years waiting for his. In that time, his attorney tried to dismantle the case against him. Sam had made incriminating statements during questioning, and there was forensic evidence, but the defense argued that all of it came from a, search made without probable cause.

A judge agreed and ruled that none of it could be put in front of a jury. In 2004, Sam finally went to trial and was acquitted. Several of the other defendants were convicted and sent to prison for life. The prosecutor who tried the case said later that the verdict stunned him, given how strong he believed the remaining evidence was. But Sam's dad has always been firm about what that verdict meant. He said, quote, he was found not guilty, acquitted by a jury of his peers. To Steve, his son had been exonerated, full stop.

And although Sam walked out a free man, the experience changed him. He wanted to leave that version of himself behind and become a better person. In 2006, 22-year-old Sam joined the U.S. Army, but getting in wasn't easy for someone with his kind of record. A lawyer later pointed out that given his history, the Army almost certainly had to sign off on special waivers just to let him join. So Sam didn't simply slide in the door. He had to be handed a real second chance, and he was set on making it count. He trained as a mechanic and shipped out to Afghanistan, and his job put him in some of the most dangerous places a soldier can be. When his unit was in a firefight and their equipment broke down, Sam was the one who ran out to fix it while bullets were flying all around him.

He served as a private first class and came home a decorated combat veteran. All told, he gave the army about three years. Years later, Sam's father would stand in a courtroom and read a letter from Sam's troop commander in Afghanistan. The commander called Sam good-natured. He said Sam had talked about wanting to become an officer someday, and he said he had no doubt Sam would have made a good leader, the kind who instilled loyalty in his men. Sam was honorably discharged in 2009. He came home to his parents in Anaheim Hills and enrolled at Orange Coast College on the GI Bill.

But he wasn't the same person anymore. After seeing combat, Sam was living with post-traumatic stress. So most of the people around him, he was still the same, warm, easygoing guy he'd always been. But the war had left its mark, and he rarely let anyone see how deep it went. One of the more positive things Sam took home from the war was financial. Across his years of service, he'd save somewhere around $62,000 in combat pay.

He didn't flash it around. He just sat there in the bank, untouched. Money he'd earned the hard way, waiting for the future he was building. He'd mentioned that nest egg to a few people he trusted the way anyone might. One of those people was a young woman named Julie Kibuishi, whose full name was Jury. She was 23 years old and still living at home with her parents, Masa and June in Irvine. She was one of four children. She had graduated from the prestigious Orange County School of the Arts, where she'd trained as a dancer.

Her jazz instructor there remembered her as graceful and strong on stage. the kind of performer everyone loved to watch with a kindness that spilled over into everything she did and by 2010 she brought that same warmth to Orange Coast College where she was studying fashion design that and music were her whole world she sang out loud at concerts she couldn't wait to get her design portfolio back from her class

so she could show it off to her older brother who was hoping to help her land an internship at an Orange County action sports company. But more than dancing, more than fashion, the thing that defined Julie was that she showed up for the people she cared about. No matter what, Sam Hare was no exception. From the moment he and Julie met on campus, they just clicked. Julie tutored him, helping them get through a class in anthropology. Given Sam's learning challenges, that kind of patient, steady help would have meant a lot. But it was more than that.

People who saw them together sometimes assumed they were dating, but the truth was they landed somewhere between best friends and family. Sam's dad once asked him directly whether there was anything more going on. Sam told him, no, that Julie was like his little sister. That relationship meant Julie saw a sight of Sam that most people didn't. She knew all about his PTSD and didn't judge him for it. If anything, she just wanted to be there for him. She and Sam were also part of a wider group of friends, one centered on the apartment complex where Sam lived.

It was called Camden Martinique near campus in Costa Mesa. And it was full of people in their 20s. Students, young workers, people still figuring out what their lives were going to be. They threw parties and stayed up late, and they borrowed each other's stuff and ate each other's food. And over time, a core group of them turned into something real, a chosen family. Sam fit into that world as a kind of steady older brother figure. He was a little further along than the rest of them, a veteran who'd already seen more than most people his age could imagine. He was generous with the people he cared about and quick to help.

If someone was a few bucks short before payday, Sam was the guy they called. In a place like that, people don't lock every door behind them, they lend out spare keys, they answer the phone. at odd hours, they show up when a friend says they need them. That kind of trust is a beautiful thing. It's also the easiest thing in the world to use against someone. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now. How does a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without a trace? This is History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Adapted from the hit TV show, every episode dives into one of the world's greatest enigmas,

the vanishings, the myths, the lost relics, and the unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers, we separate fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to bury, treasure to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures. These are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath the legend and the truth gets far stranger. Follow history's greatest mysteries, available now wherever you listen to podcasts. Sam Hare and Julie Kibuishi were part of a tight-knit group of friends in that Costa Mesa apartment complex, a chosen family who looked out for one another and rarely thought twice about it.

One member of that circle was a man named Daniel Wozniak. Everyone called him Dan. He was 26, the same age as Sam, and lived in the same building, three floors down. Dan was a community theater actor. He was engaged to a woman named Rachel Buffett, who was also an actress. Rachel had worked as a costume princess performer, playing characters like Ariel and Alice in Wonderland. that spring, the two of them were both in the cast of a local production of the musical Nine. It was staged by the Hunger Artists Theater Company,

an alternative company that spent more than a decade building reputation for taking on difficult, ambitious material. Nine was exactly that kind of show. Based on Federico Fellini's film Eight and a Half, it follows a celebrated film director named Guido Contini, Dan, had the lead. He played Contini, and Rachel was in the cast alongside him. Dan was easy to like. He was a performer, both on stage and off. The kind of guy who ends up at the center of the group without even trying. He was also, by nearly every account, always a little

short on cash. He borrowed money from friends. He fell behind on his bills. He and Rachel were staring down the cost of a wedding and a honeymoon they couldn't really afford. And Dan was facing eviction with no steady paying job. None of that raised any red flags. A broke actor with a big wedding to pay for was nothing out of the ordinary. To the people in that complex, Dan was just Dan. And to Sam, he was a friend, the kind he would go out of his way to help. Sam was in the only one who thought that way. Julie did too, and everyone in that circle knew it. It was a small world that ran on trust, and it had never once let them down.

Then came the evening of May 21st, 2010. That night, Julie went out to dinner with her older brother, Taka, and his fiancé, at a restaurant near his home in Long Beach. The couple's wedding was coming up, and they gave Julie a tiara to wear for it. She loved it so much, she kept it on for the whole drive back to Takas place. The trio was still hanging out when Julie's phone lit up. Shortly before midnight, she got a string of text messages from Sam. The message is said he was upset and needed to talk.

He asked her to come over right away and to come home. alone. That was all it took. Julie said good night, cut her evening short, and drove over to Sam's apartment. Around midnight, Julie texted Taka to let him know she'd made it. And she stood outside Sam's door, waiting to be let in, and sent one more message to Sam's phone. She wrote, quote, Hey, buddy, where are you? I'm freezing. It was the last. anyone would hear from her. By Saturday morning, two families were trying to find their loved ones. At the Kibuishi house in Irvine, June noticed the door to Julie's room standing open and her bed still made.

Julie hadn't come home. Her friends were already trying to reach her. Prosecutor Matt Murphy would later describe the pile up of messages on her phone, one after another asking if she was okay and telling her that her mother had been calling around looking for her. Every one of them went unanswered. By that point, June was frantic. She called the police and told them she didn't care where they found her daughter. She just needed them to find her.

And in Anaheim Hills, Sam was supposed to visit his parents that weekend. when he didn't show, his father started calling him. But Sam's phone was off and it kept going to voicemail. That wasn't like Sam. He never turned his phone off. So Steve kept dialing over and over all through the day. By the time the sun was setting, Steve still hadn't heard from his son, so he got in his car and made the 30-minute drive down to Costa Mesa.

He had a key and he let himself inside. At first, nothing looked wrong. The apartment was clean and orderly. Nothing had been knocked over. Nothing had been torn apart. And Sam's things were sitting where they belonged. But the place was quiet in a way that felt wrong. Steve moved through the rooms, calling Sam's name,

waiting for him to answer. No one did. He kept going, deeper into the apartment, telling himself there was some ordinary explanation for all of it, and then he stepped into the bedroom. There was a young woman on the floor slumped against the bed. There was blood, and Steve could see it had come from her head. her pants had been pulled down and there were two strange details across the back of her shirt someone had scrawled a message in marker the words all yours followed by a curse

she was also wearing a tiara but steve didn't recognize her he crouched down and reached out some part of him still hoping there was something he could do. He would later say, quote, When I touched her, she was cold. She'd been gone for hours. His mind went where any father's mind would go. There was a dead woman in his son's bedroom and his son was nowhere to be found. Steve knew exactly how that was going to look to the police.

But he also knew. Deep down, that Sam wasn't responsible for whatever had happened to her. So he called 911 and told the operator there was a body in his son's apartment. Costa Mesa police responded and the case landed with a team that included Detective Jose Morales, Sergeant Ed Everett, and Detective Mike Cohen. They identified the young woman quickly. it was Julie Kibuishi. And now, investigators had to do one of the hardest things the job asks of them.

They had to drive to the Kibuishi home and tell Masa and June that their daughter was dead. Then June and Masa had to turn around and carry that same news to the rest of the family. There was no soft way to do any of it. And back at the apartment, the seam seemed to tell its own story. There was no broken lock and no sign of a struggle. Whoever killed Julie hadn't forced their way in. And the man who lived there, Sam Hare, was gone, along with his wallet, his phone, and his car. In those first hours, the detectives read the scene the obvious way.

A love affair gone wrong. It's the kind of story they'd seen a hundred times, and it pointed at one person. Sam. Steve Hare kept telling them they had that part wrong. Julie wasn't his son's girlfriend. She was his tutor and his friend. Matt Murphy would remember how insistent Steve was about it. Then they learned more about him, and the theory got darker.

He was a combat veteran who knew his way. around a firearm, and he was living with PTSD. Investigators started to wonder if the war had followed him home, and he'd snapped. Every new piece of information seemed to push them further in that direction. They pulled the messages off Julie's phone and found the midnight text luring her over from Sam's number. That sharpened their focus on him. Then they ran his background and turned up that old murder. murder charge from his teenage years.

Even though a jury had cleared him in the moment, it looked to detectives like a pattern rather than a tragedy. Piece by piece, Sam was turning into a suspect. So they issued an all-points bulletin. Sam Hare's name and face went out to law enforcement as a wanted man. In their eyes, he was a killer who could be anywhere by now, armed and on the run. Words spread fast through the complex.

The friends and neighbors who'd known Sam as the steady older brother of the group were now being told he'd murdered a young woman and fled. 30 minutes away in Anaheim Hills, Steve and Raquel Hare were living a different nightmare. Their son wasn't answering his phone. and the only search underway was a search for a suspect. Every instinct the investigation had was pointed at Sam Hare, and every one of them was wrong. Hi, ghouls and goblins.

I'm Vanessa Richardson. It's officially our favorite time of year at Crime House, spooky season. Every Sunday this month, we're dropping a bonus episode on Crimehouse 24-7, where true crime becomes spruce. paranormal, a ghost hunt that ends with an innocent man dead in the street, a skeleton sealed inside a hollow tree nameless for 80 years, a ghost testimony that puts a killer in prison and a murder defense built on demonic possession. Listen every Sunday on Crimehouse 24-7 or join Crimehouse Plus for all four right now ad-free. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or at Crimehouse Plus.

By the last week of May 2010, the investigation had settled on a single conclusion. Sam Hare had murdered Julie Kibuishi and fled, and a full manhunt was underway to find him. But even as that search widened, the physical evidence was starting to tell a very different story. Beginning with the autopsy. Julie had been shot twice in the back of the head, not once, but twice. And the medical examiner could tell that the first shot had been the fatal one. That means the second shot wasn't fired in a panic, in the middle of a fight. It was fired into a young woman who was already dying or already gone.

And there was more. When police examined the scene again, they realized several details didn't hold up. Julie's pants had been pulled down to make it look like a sexual assault. But the medical examiner found no evidence that any assault had happened. And the forensics turned up something stranger still. Julie's pants had stayed on for hours after she died. That meant someone had shot Julie and then left the apartment entirely. Hours later they came back, moved her body, pulled down her clothing, and wrote on her shirt.

to the police, it was clear. Someone had staged the whole scene to look a certain way. The detectives filed those findings away, and they made one deliberate, careful choice of their own. They kept the detail about the two gunshots out of the public eye. It never went into a press release. It wasn't shared with witnesses, as far as the outside world knew Julie had been shot, and that was all.

And the detectives were certain that the person who had fired the gun was Sam. His parents refused to accept any of it. But Steve Hare didn't just tell the police his son was innocent and leave it there. He started digging on his own, trying to prove it. He knew his boy. He had watched his son rebuild his whole life from the ground up, one hard step at a time. This was a young man who'd spent years earning back a good name. And now, with Sam unreachable and unable to defend himself, that name was being rewritten, one assumption at a time, into the veteran who finally cracked.

Steve wasn't going to let that. stand. While the police were building a case against his son, Steve was running his own quiet investigation. He shared a bank account with Sam and he started watching it like a hawk. Day after day, he saw the same thing. Money coming out of an ATM in Long Beach, roughly 20 miles from Costa Mesa. Somebody was steadily draining his son's savings. A little more of it vanishing every single day, while the entire police department was somewhere else entirely hunting for Sam himself. Steve had no idea who was withdrawing the money, but he knew in his bones that it wasn't Sam. To Steve, the withdrawals weren't proof that his son was on the run. They were proof that something

had happened to him. He took what he was seeing straight to the detectives, and the police started tracking the account too. The activity on the car didn't add up. Someone had made four ATM withdrawals and ordered a pizza delivery all in Long Beach, taking about $2,000 in total. So detectives pulled the security footage from the ATM. If Sam really was on the run, here was their chance to catch him on camera, standing right at the machine.

When they finally got the footage, they realized Steve had been right all along. The man on the screen wasn't Sam. He was young in sunglasses and a beanie, and nobody recognized him. When the prosecutor and the detectives looked at the images, the reaction was immediate and unanimous. This wasn't their suspect. Sam's own parents couldn't identify. the young man. Nobody could. A total stranger was calmly draining a missing man's bank account,

and no one had the faintest idea who he was. The pizza delivery was the thread that finally pulled loose. A face on an ATM camera hidden behind glasses is just a face, but a pizza has to be delivered to a door, and a door comes with an address. Investigators traced the order to a home in Long Beach the first solid lead the case had produced, and on May 26th, they went and knocked. The person who opened the door was a frightened 17-year-old boy. He quickly admitted that he'd made the withdrawals,

but he said he had no idea who Sam Hare even was. He only had the card because a guy he knew from the theater world had handed it to him and asked him to make the withdrawals. That man was Dan Wozniak. That name stopped the detectives cold because they'd already talked to Dan Wozniak. He was Sam's neighbor and friend, part of the same circle Sam and Julie belonged to,

and when investigators canvassed the complex, he'd been happy to help. He told them he'd last seen Sam on the afternoon of May 21st, getting into a car with another man. His fiancé, Rachel Buffett, packed him up, describing a stranger in a black hat. It turned out that man didn't exist. Dan had sat across from detectives, pointed them toward a person he'd invented and walked away clean. And now, a frightened teenager holding Sam Hare's bank card was pointing straight back at him. They needed to talk to Dan again and get to the bottom of the story.

And it turned out he wasn't hard to find because at the very moment, he was in the middle of a celebration. His wedding to Rachel was just days away. And that night, he was out at his bachelor party at a restaurant. in Huntington Beach, surrounded by friends and family, toasting to the life he was about to start. The wedding was set for that Friday at a park in Long Beach. Sergeant Ed Everett walked into the bachelor party, and Everett watched what happened to Dan Wozniak's face the second their eyes met across that room. He described it later. He said, quote, you could see the blood drain for him.

from his face. That same night, police brought Dan in for questioning. And it's worth being clear about what the detectives believed they had in front of them. They didn't think they were sitting across from a killer. As far as they knew, Sam Hare had murdered Julie Kibuishi and disappeared. And Sam was still the man they were hunting. Dan was a loose end. He was the neighbor whose teenage friend had been caught,

running a missing man's bank account, and they wanted to know why. So, Dan gave them an explanation, a good one. An investigator would later describe what he did in that room as a performance worthy of one of his own plays. He told them he was Sam's friend and that everything he'd done was to help. He said the bank card was part of a scheme that two of them had come up with together, an insurance job meant to bring in some money. And then the way Dan told it, everything went wrong. Sam had come to him in a panic and admitted he'd killed Julie,

high and not in his right mind, and said he had to disappear. Dan said he hadn't felt like he could refuse that Sam had threatened him if he talked. In his version, he wasn't a murderer at all. He was a frightened friend who'd been. pulled into somebody else's nightmare, and the man who did it was still out there somewhere. It was a smart story. What made it dangerous was how neatly it fit. Every piece of it slotted into the picture the detectives had already built.

Sam was guilty. Sam had run, and Dan was just the friend who'd made the mistake of covering for him. It even accounted for the boy at the ATM. him, all he had to do was hold that line for a few more hours. Then he could walk out of that room and go get married. But the detectives didn't let him leave. They kept Dan in that room, walking him back through his story again and again, picking at the edges of it, asking the same things in slightly different ways.

Eventually, they tried something else. They told him they'd found his DNA on Julie's body. It wasn't true, but it was legal, and it put Dan in a position where he had to explain how any trace of him could have ended up in that apartment. So he adjusted the story. He said Sam had asked him to come over that night and that he'd walked in and found Julie already dead on the floor.

and in describing what he'd seen in that bedroom, Dan Wozniak mentioned a detail that only Julie's killer could have known. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on the murder of Sam Hare and Julie Kibuishi and all the people that affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram.

Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your murder true crime stories listening experience, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus add-free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month to join. Go to Crimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try-free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Thursday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave

Studios. This episode is brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protofsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara della Rosa, Claire Swartzland. Nicolette Tavallero, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit.

A new Crime House original with Sabrina DeAnna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you.

Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube.