Murdered For Money

On the 28th of January 1971, Dana Ewell was born to two highly successful parents. His father, Dale Ewell, had become a multi-millionaire through aircraft sales after leaving the US Air Force, and the two Ewell children grew up surrounded by privilege, although the family preferred not to flaunt their wealth. 

On Easter weekend, 1992, 21-year-old Dana was away from the family to visit his girlfriend. On Sunday the 19th of April, his parents and 24-year-old Tiffany had just arrived back in Fresno after spending the weekend at a beach house they owned in Pajaro Dunes. Tiffany and her mother, Glee Ewell, had driven back, but Dale had decided to fly home in his own airplane.

On Tuesday, April 21st, Dana contacted some friends of the family, expressing concern that he hadn’t heard from his parents in two days, and that nobody had responded when he had tried to reach out. At the Ewell family home, police discovered the reason that nobody had heard from Dale, Glee and Tiffany since Sunday - all three of them had been shot to death on Sunday evening.

The homicide detectives assigned to the case were Chris Curtice and John Souza of the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office, and they spent four days at the crime scene. Early into the investigation, the detectives were sure of one thing: the triple homicide had not been a spontaneous act of violence. There was evidence that it had been meticulously planned, by somebody who was determined not to leave anybody in the house alive. The Ewells had been shot one by one, and each of the shell casings had been carefully picked up after the gun was fired. The killer had good aim - while Glee was shot four times, Dale and Tiffany had each only been shot once.

Detective Souza had seen many burglary-homicides in his time, and despite the Ewell family’s wealth, he came to believe that the motivation for the crimes wasn’t burglary. Even though the house was in disarray, making it appear that somebody had been looking for things to steal, nothing of value had actually been taken. According to Detective Souza, this appeared to be part of the killer’s plan - making it look like a burglary gone wrong in order to obscure the real motive for the murders.

That left the detectives with a key question to answer: if the crime wasn’t financially motivated, what was the killer’s real motive - and why had they tried so hard to hide it? With no clues about the identity of the killer, they investigated the history of each member of the Ewell family, searching for anything that might have led to their deaths. During the deep dive into Dale Ewell’s life, they discovered that his path to success hadn’t been as simple as the Fresno community believed. Two decades ago, shortly after leaving the Air Force, Dale had started out selling airplanes for a man who had later been convicted for drug smuggling. Once his boss was arrested, Dale took over the business, and his airplane-selling empire began. However, the detectives didn’t find any indications that there were any connections between Dale’s previous employer and his death.

One by one, the detectives eliminated every person who might have had a motive for wanting the family dead. In the end, they only had one suspect remaining: 21-year-old Dana Ewell. Even though Dana had been with his girlfriend in San Francisco during the time when his family had been killed, Detective Souza and Detective Curtice were suspicious about his behavior both before and after the crime.

Unlike his sister, who was more down to earth, Dana had always had an unusual fixation on money. He didn’t want to be the son of wealthy, successful parents - he wanted other people to perceive him as being wealthy and successful in his own right. When he started studying finance at Santa Clara University, he viewed his college career like a fresh start. He began telling people that he had earned millions as an entrepreneur, taking his father’s story and pretending that he had been the one to earn the money, and claiming to be a “stock-market whiz.” Plenty of people believed him - he even had a story printed in the SCU newspaper which described him as “a self-made millionaire.”

Eventually, the lies that Dana was telling at college trickled back to his family. In response, Dale Ewell decided to change the plan for his estate, and decided that he would be cutting Dana off financially after he graduated from college in the summer. Dana had always boasted that he would be a millionaire in his own right by his 25th birthday - but realistically, at the age of 21, he was still living at home with his parents, using the family money for everything.

After finding out that he was the only surviving member of his immediate family, Dana didn’t appear to be stricken by grief. Instead, he was mostly focused on the contents of his parents’ wills. He had already known that his father would stop paying for his expenses after college - however, Dana didn’t know that his parents had also created a trust for him. His expenses would be paid for by a trustee throughout his early 20s, and he would receive some dividends during his late 20s, but he would not have immediate access to their assets. Once Dana was informed that he wouldn’t be able to benefit from the bulk of the Ewell family wealth for another ten years, he was unable to hide his anger and shock.

From the earliest days of the investigation, Detective Curtice had suspected Dana. He’d been the one responsible for taking Dana through the crime scene for the first time, and immediately noticed that Dana’s reactions weren’t normal. Later, the detective summarized the experience, saying that he’d looked at 21-year-old Dana and thought, “That kid’s dirty.”

But Dana wasn’t the only one that investigators didn’t trust. They couldn’t deny that he had an airtight alibi, and there was only one way that he could have killed his family: getting somebody else to do it. As it happened, Dana did have one friend who might have been willing to kill for him: Joel Radovcich, a college dropout who had a reputation for being obsessed with explosives and firearms. 

The suspicion about Dana and Joel was fueled by their decision to start living in the Ewell home together less than a month after the murders, even using cash to buy themselves helicopter flying lessons. Throughout this time, Dana and Joel made the unusual decision to only communicate with each other by using payphones and pagers, as if they were paranoid that somebody would overhear them talking. For months, investigators watched the pair closely, trying to monitor their communications. One day, an undercover detective recorded one of Joel’s payphone conversations with Dana, where he told him, “They don’t have evidence…they will try to catch you in a lie.”

Forensics revealed that the firearm used to shoot the Ewells was a 9mm high-end rifle. One of these specialty rifles had been purchased by one of Joel Radovcich’s family friends only a couple of weeks before the Ewells were murdered. The friend, Ernest Ponce, admitted to police that he had bought the rifle and given it to Joel, but insisted that he had no idea that Joel planned to kill someone with it. On the 2nd of March 1995, both Dana and Joel were arrested - and Ernest Ponce was granted immunity as long as he agreed to testify against his friends.

Ernest did end up testifying at the eight-month-long trial, but the jury ultimately decided that he wasn’t a reliable witness, and they believed that he had been more involved in the crimes than he was willing to admit to. After almost two weeks of deliberation, the jury found both Dana and Joel guilty of three counts of murder in the first degree, as well as aggravating circumstances that meant they were eligible for a stricter sentence. One of these factors was that the murders had been committed by a killer who lay in wait for the family to arrive home, showing exactly how premeditated it had been. Both men were sentenced to life in prison, without parole.

Out of the three victims, Detective Curtice believed that only one of them had caught sight of the killer. Dale and Tiffany had both been killed by a single shot, but Glee had been shot four times, several of the shots at close range while the killer was straddling her. Glee had met Joel several times before when he had come to the house, and knew that he was one of Dana’s closest friends. “I’m sure she saw who it was,” said one of the prosecutors at the trial. “She knew her son was murdering her.”