I could have sworn she said she had a babysitter.
I didn’t know her husband was home with the kids.
During their search, Keene believed defendant was overly cooperative, pointing out places that the detectives had missed. Keene and Parga looked at defendant’s 4Runner, which was parked in the garage. It seemed very clean inside and out. Parga detected the smell of bleach in the garage.
Uncle Dave [David] was in the room and he was being weird and it bothered me [J.N.]
Says to cop: Leave your gun here for a few minutes.
David Westerfield. Lot Of 2 SEALED. Typed Envelopes, ALS?. Pmks: (1) September 7, 2006 and (2) September 15, 2006. Content Unknown. Pristine.
On the night of Friday, February 1, 2002, Damon Van Dam put his two sons and his seven-year-old daughter, Danielle, to bed. His wife, Brenda, went out with her girlfriends to a bar where they saw David, David Westerfield, who lived two doors down from the Van Dams. When Brenda, her girlfriends, and two male friends came home, they noticed an alarm monitor was flashing, and the side garage door was open. They closed the door and had something to eat. Damon got up and joined them. After the friends left, Brenda and Damon went to bed. Sometime later during the night, Damon awoke and noticed an alarm monitor flashing. He went downstairs and noticed the door to the backyard was open. He closed it and made sure the other doors were closed. He went back to sleep without checking on the children. The next morning, Danielle was missing. A neighborhood search failed to find her, and David was not at home.
David Westerfield (hereinafter referred to as “David”) spent the weekend after Danielle’s disappearance driving around in his motorhome away from his house in the Sabre Springs neighborhood of San Diego to various state parks outside the San Diego area. He had awkward encounters with rangers and volunteers who worked at the Silver Strand state park near the city of Coronado.
On Monday morning, David arrived in his motorhome at his neighborhood dry cleaner’s shortly after the business opened to have bedding and a jacket cleaned. Although it was a cold morning, he was wearing a thin T-shirt, thin shorts, no shoes, and no socks.
An examination of the forensic evidence revealed that the jacket that David left at the dry cleaner’s contained Danielle’s blood. Danielle’s blood was also found on the carpet of David’s motorhome between the bathroom and the closet; her handprint, including several associated fingerprints, was on a cabinet above the motorhome’s bed. Hairs consistent with Danielle’s DNA profile were found in the bathroom of David’s motorhome and at his residence in his washing machine, dryer, and on the bedding from his master bedroom. Fibers matching others later found with Danielle’s body were discovered in David’s motorhome, SUV, laundry, and bedding. Fibers similar to those from the carpeting in Danielle’s bedroom were found by the bed, in the bathroom, and in the hall of David’s motorhome. Hairs from the Van Dams’ family dog were discovered on one of the comforters David dropped off at the dry cleaner’s, on the hallway carpet and bathroom rug in David’s motorhome, and in David’s laundry.
Danielle’s badly decomposed body was discovered off the side of a road in a remote part of San Diego County on February 27, 2002. Her mummified remains had been ravaged by animals, such that no sexual assault testing could be performed and no definite cause of death determined. The coroner could not rule out suffocation.
In David’s home, officers discovered computer files containing child pornography.
David principally relied on an alibi defense based on entomological evidence from Danielle’s body that suggested her death occurred sometime subsequent to February 5, after David was under constant police surveillance.
A jury convicted defendant David Alan Westerfield of the 2002 first degree murder of seven-year-old Danielle Van Dam. It found true the special circumstance that the murder was committed during a kidnapping. The jury also found defendant guilty of the kidnapping of Danielle, a child under the age of 14, and misdemeanor possession of child pornography. Following the penalty phase of trial, the jury returned a verdict of death. The trial court denied defendant’s motion for modification of the penalty to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and sentenced him to death on the murder count. The trial court sentenced defendant to a prison term of 11 years for his conviction of kidnapping. Defendant was sentenced to time served for his child pornography conviction.i
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i People v. Westerfield, 6 Cal.5th 632 | Casetext Search + Citator (2019). Available at: https://casetext.com/case/people-v-westerfield-7 (Accessed: 15 April 2023).