Blame the Swingers

On the 1st of February 2002, 7-year-old Danielle van Dam was at home with her two brothers. Her dad, Damon van Dam, looked after the kids while his wife, Brenda, spent the Friday evening out drinking with some of her friends.

At about half past ten that night, Damon tucked Danielle into bed. She fell asleep quickly, and shortly afterwards, Damon went to bed until he was woken up in the early hours of the morning by Brenda returning home. While entering the house, Brenda noticed that somebody had left a small side door that led into the house’s garage open, and one of the lights on their alarm system was flashing after being set off. However, Brenda didn’t think anything of it: Damon had been home the whole time, after all. She had brought the four girlfriends she was drinking with home with her, and Damon and Brenda stayed up talking with the group for a while before saying goodbye and going to bed.

Damon had a disrupted sleep that night, and woke up again at approximately 3:30am. Again, he noticed that one of the alarm system lights was flashing. He investigated what had set the alarm off and discovered that the door to the backyard was wide open. He closed the door, and went back to sleep.

The following morning, Damon and Brenda went to check on their children. The two boys had slept through the nights, but Danielle’s bed was empty. There was no sign of her in the house or garden, so at 9:39 that morning, the van Dams called 911 in a panic, telling the operator that their 7-year-old daughter was missing. The community in the neighborhood of Sabre Springs, San Diego pulled together in an attempt to reunite Danielle with her family. Large groups of volunteers combed the area, searching along the highways and the nearby desert for any sign of the missing child. 

Meanwhile, Sabre Springs law enforcement systematically interviewed everyone in Danielle’s neighborhood. That morning, all of the neighbors were at home except for one: a 49-year-old engineer named David Westerfield. David only lived a couple of doors down from the van Dams, and owned a high-end motorhome that he often used to go away for overnight trips. David wasn’t a stranger to the van Dams. In fact, Brenda had taken Danielle to David's house only a few days before her abduction, because she was selling cookies for the Girl Scouts. After David answered the door and bought some cookies, Brenda asked if she could come inside the home and look at the kitchen, because she knew he had recently had it remodeled.

Investigators discovered that, not only was David not home - his motor home wasn’t there, either. Only a handful of minutes after Brenda and Damon had reported their daughter missing, David had packed up his motor home and driven to Silver Strand State Beach, where he had paid to stay for two nights. However, the following day, he decided that it was too cold to stay at the beach, so he took the motorhome to the desert instead.

On Monday morning, David drove back home. He was seen at the dry cleaners he frequented, barefoot and appearing to be exhausted. While he was there, he dropped off a small load of laundry: two pillow cases, two bed comforters, and a jacket. Immediately after he arrived home, he began to clean his motorhome. The police placed him under around-the-clock surveillance, and the following day, they impounded his motorhome and other vehicle for forensic testing.

While speaking to the police, David insisted that he had no idea where Danielle had gone - but that he had actually seen Brenda the night her daughter disappeared, because the two of them had been drinking at the same bar. One other aspect of David’s original interview with police was very interesting to investigators. He provided an incredibly detailed summary of his nights spent away in the motorhome, and all of the details could be backed up by eyewitnesses, receipts, and phone records. However, despite all of this detail, there was one thing that David somehow forgot to mention: the fact that he had stopped at the dry cleaners on his way home.

On the 22nd of February, David was arrested for abducting Danielle. One tiny spot of blood had been found inside his motor home, and another had been found on the jacket he had dry cleaned shortly before returning home. DNA testing revealed that the blood was a match to Danielle’s.

Five days later, on the 27th of February, a group of searching volunteers in Dehesa, California, found Danielle’s remains lying just off a trail. She had been stripped nude, and exposure to the elements had caused the decomposition process to accelerate. Because of the degree of decomposition, no cause of death could be identified, and the coroner could not confirm whether or not she had been sexually abused prior to her murder. The location of Danielle’s remains further implicated David Westerfield in the case - the road was one of a couple of routes that David might have taken during his drive to the desert.

Despite the evidence against him, David decided to plead not-guilty. In the lead-up to his June 2002 trial, his defense attorneys attempted to have his police statements excluded from the trial, alleging that the interrogation process had been unfair. During his interrogations, David had been questioned for almost ten hours, and the detectives had ignored all of his requests, including asking to speak to a lawyer, go to sleep, and eat. This resulted in the two detectives who had interrogated David not testifying at the trial, but the police statements themselves remained included.

During the trial, the prosecution presented a wealth of forensic evidence. As well as the spots of Danielle’s blood that had been found on the floor of David’s home and on one of his jackets, forensic testing had also found strands of hair that were believed to be Danielle’s on David’s bed sheets, several of her fingerprints inside David’s motorhome, and several pieces of dog hair on the comforter of his bed which were a match to Danielle’s pet dog.

The prosecution provided the theory that David might have gotten into the van Dam residence through the garage side door, which Brenda had noticed was unlocked when she returned home with her girlfriends. However, despite the theory, attorney Jeff Dusek emphasized one thing to the jury: the prosecution did not need to prove how David got into the house to kidnap Danielle, they only needed to prove that he had kidnapped her, and the forensic evidence suggested that he had.

In contrast, David’s defense lawyers argued that law enforcement had felt pressured to solve the kidnapping case, so they had focused on David instead of investigating any other suspects. Because David was also facing charges for pornographic material involving children that had been discovered on his personal computer, his lawyers suggested that the pornography didn’t belong to David - instead, the person who had downloaded it was his son, 18-year-old Neal. Neal, who was now being partially blamed for his own father’s crimes, testified and denied that he had any knowledge of the material.

In an attempt to argue that other people who could have kidnapped Danielle had been inside the van Dam house that night, the defense lawyers zeroed in on Brenda and Damon, who they alleged had a non-monogamous marriage where they would have sexual encounters with other couples as well as smoking marijuana. Because of Brenda and Damon’s alleged swinging, the defense proposed the theory that more people had actually been in the house during the night of February 1st, 2002, and it was possible that these unnamed, unidentified people had abducted and killed Danielle.

Despite the forensic evidence proving that Danielle had been in David’s trailer shortly before her death, the defense argued that there was no forensic evidence that David himself had been inside the van Dam house in order to abduct her, and that there was also no evidence that he had been physically present at the site where her body was found. In response, attorney Dusek argued that it was completely possible for somebody to avoid leaving forensic evidence inside a home if they were being cautious - David had known to be careful about leaving DNA and fingerprints inside the van Dam home, but meanwhile, Danielle had likely been frightened and struggling inside David’s motorhome, causing trace evidence to be left behind. There was no innocent explanation, attorney Dusek stated, for Danielle’s DNA being left in David’s home.

On the 16th of September, 2002, the jury reached their decision: David Westerfield was guilty, and should be sentenced to death. He is held at San Quentin State Prison, but it is unknown whether or not his execution will ever go ahead.