Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: An Oscar-Worthy Murder Pt. 2

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

In the days after two of his acquaintances went missing in Costa Mesa, California, Dan Wozniak played the part of the grieving friend to perfection, comforting others while concealing a monstrous secret. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation that slowly stripped away the aspiring actor's performance, from suspicious ATM withdrawals and staged text messages to the gruesome truth about what he had done and how far he had gone to cover it up. As detectives closed in, Wozniak's carefully rehearsed innocence gave way to a chilling confession, and a courtroom drama that revealed just how coldly he had orchestrated it all.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. An actor's whole job is to make you believe something that isn't true. To put on a face, hit a mark, and sell you an emotion he doesn't feel.

When it works, you forget you're watching a performance at all. Most actors leave that skill on the stage. But every so often, someone carries it out the door and into real life. They learn that if they smile at the right moment and say the right words, they can get away with almost anything. In 2010, a community theater actor named Daniel Wozniak gave the performance of his life inside a police interrogation room. He nearly walked out of it a free man.

What tripped him up wasn't a confession at all. It came down to a single detail he never should have known. 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. Carter Roy. And this is murder, true crime stories, the Crime House original powered by Pave Studios.

New episodes come out 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, add 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 second 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. Last time, I introduced you to Sam and Julie and their circle of friends at a Costa Mesa

apartment complex, I walked you through the night Julie was lured to Sam's apartment and killed in the days that followed when police hunted Sam as a fugitive. That search ended in an interrogation room with a neighbor named Dan Wozniak sitting across from detectives telling them a story. Today I'll take you into that interrogation room where one careless sentence changed the direction of the entire case. Then I'll walk you through what came next. Years of legal fighting that kept this case out of a courtroom and a scandal that reached far beyond it.

And I'll tell you about the reckoning that finally came for Dan and the people who helped him. All that and more coming up. By the last week of May 2010, Julie Kibuishi had been dead for five days. She'd been found shot to death in her friend Sam Hare's bedroom and Sam had vanished. Police believed he had killed her and run,

and that's who they were hunting. Then a trail of ATM withdrawals from Sam's bank account led them to a frightened teenager, and the teenager led them to Sam's neighbor, a community theater actor named Dan Wozniak. On the night of May 26, 2010, Costa Mesa detectives pulled Dan out of his own bachelor party and brought him in for questioning.

For hours, He handed them a version of events in which Sam Hare was the killer, and he was just the friend who had helped Sam disappear. It was a good story, and it fit everything the police already believed. Then the detectives bluffed. They told Dan they had found his DNA on Julie's body. It wasn't true, but it worked, and his story changed. He admitted he had been inside Sam's apartment. He said he had walked in and found Julie dead on the floor.

Then he described what he saw. He said she had been shot twice in the head. To most people in that room, it would have sounded like just another detail. But to Sergeant Ed Everett, it stopped time. Only one gunshot wound had been visible at the scene. The second was found later on the autopsy take. table, and the police had made a deliberate decision to bury it. It never went out to the press. It wasn't in any report. There was no way for a bystander, a neighbor, or a helpful friend to know

that Julie Kibuishi had been shot two times. Only one person could have known that, the one who pulled the trigger both times. And the margin here was razor thin. If the medical examiner hadn't caught that second wound, or if Dan had simply said, shot in the head, and left the number out of it, there would have been nothing for him to trip over. He probably would have walked out of that room and gotten married two days later. Instead, his whole elaborate plan came apart over a single word. From that moment on, the detectives had something to pull on. They knew with certainty that the friendly man across the table wasn't a witness. He was the killer, and they pressed.

They kept at him, and the smart, tidy story he'd walked in with began to buckle. Every time Dan tried to steer them back to Sam, the detectives came back to the one thing he could never talk his way around. He had known there were two shots. and eventually the performance ended. Dan Wozniak confessed. He told the detectives, quote, I'm crazy and I did it.

He admitted that he had killed both Julie Kibuishi and Sam Hare. That confession undid far more than Julie's murder. It answered the question that had been tormenting Sam. Sam's parents for days. Sam hadn't killed anyone. Sam hadn't run. The reason no one could find him, the reason a stranger was draining his bank account, the reason none of it added up, was the simplest and most awful explanation of all. Sam Hare had been dead the entire time. For Steve and Raquel Hare, this was the answer they'd been desperate for and terrified of. Steve had never for one second believed his son was a killer.

He'd pushed back on that story from the very first day, run his own investigation, and refuse to let anyone write Sam off. Now, he had proof he'd been right all along, but the price of being right was learning that the son he'd been to offending was already gone. There's no relief in a truth like that, but the confession had opened a door. The detectives were about to learn exactly what Dan Wozniak had done and how far he'd been willing to go to get away with it, and it was so much worse than anyone could have imagined.

This hadn't been a crime of passion. It wasn't a fight that spiraled or a single-tenth, terrible moment of weakness. It was cold, deliberate, and worked out far in advance, something Dan had been building toward for a long time. Investigators learned that before the murders, Dan had sat at a computer and searched for things like, quote, how to hide a body, along with fast ways to kill a person. Those aren't the searches of a man who snapped in the moment. They're the searches of a man doing. his homework, preparing, shopping for a method. And the reason behind all of it is almost hard

to believe. Dan was broke. He had no steady job. He was about to be evicted. And he had a wedding and honeymoon on the calendar that he had no way to pay for. What he did have was a neighbor, a friend who happened to have mentioned in the casual way friends do that he'd put away. around $62,000 in combat pay from his time at war. To Dan, that savings account wasn't a friend's hard-earned future. It was a convenient way to pay for a wedding, and he decided Sam Hare had to die so he could get at it. And the arithmetic of it is chilling. In that same recorded interview when asked what his motive had been,

Dan said it was money and insanity. He said he didn't know why he did it, that mostly it was the money and that it had seemed so easy. And he had been working toward it for months. The searches, the method, the timing, none of it came together overnight. It was all in place long before Sam had any idea something was wrong. On May 21st, 2010, Dan put that plan in motion. He lured Sam to a theater at the Los Alamitas Joint Forces Training Base,

the Liberty Theater, stage Dan knew well, because he had performed on it himself. The pretext was simple and cruel. Dan told Sam he needed a hand moving something heavy, and Sam, generous as always, came to help a friend without a second thought. then Dan directed him to bend down and lift something just as Sam started to lift Dan raised a gun and shot him in the back of the head the first shot didn't kill Sam

Dan later told detectives that Sam was still conscious still talking even then wounded on the floor of that theater he was describing what he felt and asking for help and Dan Wozniak, standing over a pleading dying man he had called his friend, reloaded the weapon, and fired a second time. He left the body of a decorated combat veteran in the attic of that theater, and only a couple of hours later,

Dan Wozniak walked onto a stage and played the lead in nine. He set his lines, he hit his mouth, marks, he took his bow in front of a full house, and no one watching had any idea that the man in the spotlight had just committed a murderer. It was maybe the purest expression of who Dan really was. He could kill a friend and then go straight on stage and make it look like nothing at all, and he still had one more performance to give before the morning. On the after the After noon of May 21st, 2010, Dan Wozniak shot Sam Hare inside a theater on a military base and hit his body in the attic. That same night, he walked on stage and played the lead in a musical.

But he wasn't finished. Killing Sam was only half of the plan. He still needed the whole world to believe Sam was a killer on the run. And to sell that story, he needed a second body to pin on him. That's the entire reason Julie Kibuishi died. She wasn't a target because of anything she'd done. To Dan, she was just a prop in his cover story. Using Sam's phone, Dan sent Julie those late-night messages,

posing as Sam saying he was upset and needed her. By some accounts, Julie's sense something was off. She and Sam were like brother and sister, and the tone of that midnight text didn't quite sound like him. But she went anyway, because even when it didn't add up, the thought that Sam might be hurting was enough. That was simply who Julie was. When someone she loved needed her, she showed up.

When Julie knocked, Dan opened the door. He greeted her like a friend who was just as worried as she was and told her to come in and wait for Sam. And as she leaned over to look at something on the bed, he shot her twice in the back of the head. Then he went to work, staging the scene. He pulled down her clothing to fake a sexual assault that never happened. He scrawled a vicious message on her body.

All of it was meant to make it look like Sam had attacked Julie and run. The next day, Dan went back to the theater, And using an axe and a saw, he dismembered Sam's body. I won't dwell on the details. What matters is that he was calm enough and methodical enough to spend a day taking apart the body of a friend in order to slow down anyone who came looking for him. He left the torso hidden at the base and he drove pieces of Sam out to El Dorado Park and Long Beach and scattered them there. Then, to complete the illusion that Sam was alive and on the run, he needed to make it look

like Sam was still spending his own money. So he turned to a teenager who idolized him, a 17-year-old from his theater world, and handed him Sam's bank card. He sent that boy to pull cash out of ATMs, wearing sunglasses and a beanie, a disguise that would read on grainy security footage as a young. man who could plausibly be Sam, the kid had no idea he was helping cover up a double murder. He just trusted the man who asked him. Every single piece of it, the theater, the second body, the staging, the dismemberment, the disguise was engineered toward one goal to keep everyone

chasing a dead man while Dan got married and spent the money. After Dan confessed he led investigators to what was left of Sam. On May 27th, 2010, police recovered Sam Hare's torso from the theater at the Los Alamitos base. But that was only part of him. The search that followed was enormous. Costa Mesa Police and Long Beach Police worked it together, joined by the FBI. Investigators from the Los Angeles County coroner's office and search and rescue teams from Orange, Los Angeles, and Ventura counties. Day after day, they moved across El Dorado Park with cadaver dogs, recovering what Dan had scattered. The last piece of Sam they were looking for was his head. They found it on May 29th,

Sam Hare's birthday. So on the day his son should have been turning 27, Steve Hare got a phone call telling him the last piece of his body had been found in a park. Nothing could soften a phone call like that. It was a brutal end to everything Sam had built. He had clawed his way up from a jail cell to a war zone to a college classroom to a future he'd earned. And the man he called a friend ended all of it. then tried to erase his name from the world to help pay for a party. Two days after his arrest, on the Friday, he and Rachel were supposed to be getting married

in a Long Beach park. Dan was charged with two counts of murder. When Steve and Raquel Haer saw the man accused of killing their son in court for the first time, Steve didn't hide his feelings. He told reporters, quote, give me five minutes with him. What the hairs wanted now was a trial. And with a confession that detailed, backed by that much physical evidence, they should have gotten one quickly. They didn't. It took more than six years.

Some of that was just the ordinary grind of a capital case, which moves slowly by design. But most of the delay came down to something far bigger than Dan Wozniak himself. His lead defense attorney was an Orange County, assistant public defender named Scott Sanders. At the same time he was defending Dan, Sanders was also representing another infamous client, Scott DeCry, who had shot and killed eight people at a Seal Beach salon in 2011. Working the two cases side by side, Sanders kept running into the same man. His name was Fernando Perez, a jailhouse informant and a former Mexican mafia leader. Perez had been placed near both of Sanders' clients, and he had collected incriminating

statements from each of them. What Sanders had pulled on became known as the Orange County Jailhouse informant scandal. He alleged that for years, Sheriff's deputies had secretly planted informants next to defendants who already had lawyers, worked them for confessions, then hid the records. Sanders filed motion after motion to delay Dan's trial and remove the entire district attorney's office from the case, arguing it couldn't be trusted to play fair. Judge John Conley denied him and the trial went ahead, but the fight didn't stop at the verdict. Orange County's own public defender's office would later estimate that more than 50 felony prosecutions, most of them murders, had been touched. by the practice. Sanders had called out one of the largest informant scandals in the country's history.

The U.S. Department of Justice eventually opened an investigation and concluded that informants had been used illegally as tools of law enforcement to pull statements out of defendants. Years later, in 2022, the Sheriff's Department and the District Attorney's Office reached an agreement with the Justice Department. they committed to changing how informants are used and how those records are kept. For the families of Sam and Julie, every one of those delays meant another year of living inside the worst thing that had ever happened to them with no ending in sight. Birthday, holidays, and the anniversary of the murders all passed while the case crawled forward. The prosecutor, senior deputy district attorney Matt Murphy, said out loud what the families were feeling.

He pointed out that they had already waited six years and that at some point, the legal maneuvering simply had to end. And while they waited, Dan Wozniak did something that poured salt directly into the wound. Back in 2011, while he sat in the Orange County Jail waiting for his case to move, Dan agreed to be interviewed for an episode of the television series Lockup, filmed inside the jail. And the man who showed up on camera was not someone crushed by guilt or grief. He proclaimed his innocence. He talked warmly about his faith. He came across his upbeat, easygoing, even serene, a nice guy caught up in some terrible misunderstanding.

For the relatives of the people he had killed, watching that broadcast was a fresh kind of agony. They had buried the people they loved. They knew this man had confessed. And now here he was on the screen, relaxed and likable, performing for a national audience like he was the one who'd been wronged. It was the exact same act he'd put on in the interrogation room. And on stage, the night he killed Sam. man. Dan Wozniak was right to the end, a performer who believed he could talk his way out of anything. But a performance can only carry you so far when the facts are what the facts are.

And in this case, they were beyond dispute. In 2012, an Orange County grand jury indicted Daniel Wozniak on two counts of murder, but these weren't ordinary murder charges. They came loaded with what the law calls special circumstance enhancements, murder for financial gain, multiple murders, and personally firing the gun that killed his victims. Simply put, those enhancements are the legal factors that turn a murder case into a capital case. There are how prosecutors put the death penalty on the table. And given what Dan had done and how carefully he planned it, The district attorney's office was determined to seek exactly that. Prosecutor Matt Murphy had gone to the grand jury for a reason.

Dan's attorneys kept telling the court they weren't ready for a preliminary hearing and an indictment meant they didn't need one. When the trial finally arrived, the outcome was never seriously in doubt. There was a confession, there was physical evidence. There was the money trail, the backpack, the searches on his computer. On December 16th, 2015, a jury found Dan Wozniak guilty on both counts of first-degree murder. Then came the penalty phase, where those same jurors had to decide the hardest question a juror can face, whether a man should live or die.

They didn't eat long. In about an hour, they came back with their recommendation, death. In December 2015, a jury convicted Dan Wozniak of killing Sam Hare and Julie Kibuishi. Weeks later, they recommended that he be put to death for it. But the last decision belonged to the judge. On September 23rd, 2016, more than six years after Sam and Julie were killed, Daniel Wozniak was formally sentenced to death. The judge, John Conley, put it plainly.

He said Dan was a man who'd killed two people. just because he didn't want to scale down his wedding budget. Matt Murphy had pushed hard for that outcome. He'd pointed the jury toward Dan's complete lack of remorse, the contempt he'd shown for the two people he'd killed, and the suffering he had caused both families. And then the people who'd loved Sam got to speak. Steve Hare was there, so was Sam's mother, Raquel,

and so were some of Sam's fellow Afghanistan veterans who came and stood with a family in that courtroom. Six years on, they were still turning up for him. Steve read a letter from Sam's troop commander, the officer who'd called Sam good-natured and said he had no doubt Sam would have made a fine leader one day. It was Steve's way of getting the truth about his son on the record in the same justice system where Sam had once been called a killer.

And then it was over. After six years, Daniel Warr, Wozniak was convicted, sentenced, and sent to death row. But Dan hadn't done all of this alone, and he wasn't the only person his plan damaged. His brother, Tim Wozniak, admitted to helping hide evidence. Tim later cooperated with authorities and apologized to the victim's families. There was also the teenager Dan had used to withdraw the money, a kid who had worshipped him, and had no idea who was being made part of a double murder cover-up.

Dan didn't just take two lives. He damaged the people who had trusted him and turned that trust against them. And then there was Rachel Buffett, Dan's fiancé, the woman he had been days away from marrying. Investigators came to believe that Rachel had lied to them during the early days of the investigation. They said she dodged questions, changed her account, and held back detail. that could have mattered, including the fact that Dan had left home for a few hours on the day of the murders. They also pointed to a story she told police early on about seeing Sam with an unidentified man in a black hat. That man never existed.

In November 2012, she was arrested and charged with three felony counts of being an accessory after the fact she was not charged with murder. Her case dragged on nearly as long as Dan's. It didn't reach a verdict until 2018. That September, a jury found Rachel Buffett guilty of two counts of being an accessory after the fact for lying to police. She was sentenced to 32 months, and with credit for time served and good behavior, she was released in 2019 after just a few months. She's never stopped insisting she was innocent. In 2013, with the charges still pending, she appeared on the Dr. Phil show and said she had been duped by Dan.

That brings the case to where it stands today. Daniel Wozniak is still on death row, but he's almost certainly never going to be executed. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on the death penalty, effectively pausing all executions in the state. Not long after, Dan was moved off death row at San Quentin and transferred to another prison as part of a program that relocates condemned inmates into facilities where they can hold jobs and pay restitution. This case is never fully closed either. A California death sentence carries an automatic appeal and the informant fight has followed him into it. As recently as 2022, his lawyers were still fighting over those informant records asked, a court to guarantee they wouldn't be destroyed before the appeal could use them, the court

turned them down. And so the man who murdered two people and dismembered one of them to fund a wedding weekend will live out his days in prison, working, existing, growing older. For the families, there's no outcome here that could ever balance the scales. Nothing gives them back, Sam, or Julie. But there is one part of how this story ended that counts for something. Samhair died, branded as a killer, hunted by the very institution that should have been searching for him as a victim. So much was taken from him in those few days, not just his life, but his good name, the reputation he'd worked so hard to rebuild, and his father refused to let that stand. Steve Hare pushed until the record was corrected in the eyes of the law and of everyone who had believed the worst.

Sam was cleared. The story Dan Wozniak had built around him fell apart and Sam was known for who he actually was. A decorated combat veteran, a devoted son and a loyal friend who died doing a favor for a neighbor he trusted. He was laid to rest with full military honors. at Riverside National Cemetery. His headstone carries a single word from the life he had rebuilt for himself. Afghanistan. And the people who loved him found their own ways to keep him alive.

One of the veterans he served with, a man named Miles Fultz, asked Steve Hare to stand as best man at his wedding in the place his best friend should have been. Steve said yes. There were tributes for Julie. to a family that her mother June had worked with, sewed a quilt in her honor, stitching in the thing she loved most, her music, and her fashion. The kibuishis want her to be remembered exactly as she was, sweet, generous, and loyal. Sam and Julie belonged to a chosen family, a circle of young people in a Costa Mesa apartment complex who lent each other keys and money and answered when

someone needed them. That kind of family runs on trust. And it's what Dan Wozniak took advantage of. He didn't break into that world. He was let in. And he turned the best things about Sam and Julie against him. Sam's instinct to help a friend move something heavy and Julie's instinct to drive across town in the middle of the night for someone who was hurting. Sam and Julie were always there for the people they loved, right up until it cost them everything. And that's worth holding on to. Not the plan, not the performance, not the man who pulled it off. Dan Wozniak will be forgotten.

But Sam Hare and Julie Kibuishi will always be remembered as the friends who showed up. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True. crime stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it 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 Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. He'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, plus ad-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 Friday.

Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Percivsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa, Mara de la Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, 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.