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Blame The Swingers · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:39
  On the first of February two thousand and two, seven year old Danielle van
• 0:43
  Dam was at home with her two brothers. Her dad, Damon van Dam,
• 0:47
  looked after the kids while his wife, Brenda, spent the Friday evening
• 0:51
  out drinking with some of her friends. At about half past ten that night,
• 0:56
  Damon tucked Danielle into bed. She fell asleep quickly, and shortly afterwards,
• 1:00
  Damon went to bed himself until he was woken up in the early morning
• 1:04
  hours by Brenda returning home. While coming in the house, Brenda noticed that
• 1:10
  somebody had left a small side door that led into the house's garage open,
• 1:15
  and one of the lights on the alarm system was flashing after being set off,
• 1:19
  but Brenda didn't think much of it because Damon had been home the whole
• 1:23
  time. The four girlfriends that she was out drinking with she brought them home
• 1:27
  with her, and Damon and Brenda stayed up talking with the group for a
• 1:32
  while before saying good night and going to bed. Damon had a disrupted sleep
• 1:37
  that night and woke up again at about three thirty a m. Again,
• 1:42
  he noticed that one of the alarm system's lights were flashing. He investigated what
• 1:47
  might have set the alarm off, and discovered that the door to the back
• 1:49
  yard was wide open. He closed the door and went back to sleep.
• 1:55
  The next morning, Damon and Brenda went to check on their children. The
• 1:59
  two boys had slept through the night, but Danielle's bed was empty. There
• 2:02
  was no sign of her in the house or backyard, so at nine thirty
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  nine that morning, the Van Dams called nine to one one in a panic,
• 2:12
  telling the operator that their seven year old daughter was missing. The community
• 2:15
  in the neighborhood of Saber Springs, San Diego pulled together in an attempt to
• 2:20
  reunite Danielle with their family. Large groups of volunteers combed the area, searching
• 2:24
  along the highways and the nearby desert for any sign of the missing child.
• 2:30
  Meanwhile, Saber Springs law enforcement systematically interviewed everyone in Danielle's neighborhood. That morning.
• 2:38
  All the neighbors were home except for one, a forty nine year old
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  engineer named David Westerfield. David only lived a couple of doors down from the
• 2:46
  Van Dams, and he owned a high end motor home that he often used
• 2:51
  to go for getaway trips, overnight trips David wasn't a stranger to the Van
• 2:55
  Dams. In fact, Brenda had taken Danielle to David's house only a few
• 3:00
  days before her abduction because she was selling cookies for the Girl Scouts. After
• 3:06
  David answered the door and bought some cookies, Brenda asked if she could come
• 3:09
  inside and look at the kitchen because she knew he had recently had it remodeled.
• 3:15
  Investigators discovered that not only was David not home, his motor home wasn't
• 3:21
  there either. Only a handful of minutes after Brenda and Damon had reported their
• 3:24
  daughter missing, David had packed up his motor home and driven to Silver Strand
• 3:30
  State Beach, where he had paid to stay for two nights. However,
• 3:32
  the following day he decided that it was too cold to stay at the beach,
• 3:37
  so he took the motor home to the desert instead. On Monday morning,
• 3:42
  David drove back home. He was seen at the dry cleaners he frequented,
• 3:46
  barefoot and appearing to be exhausted. While he was there, he dropped
• 3:51
  off a small load of laundry, two pillowcases, two bed comforters, and
• 3:55
  the jacket. Immediately after he arrived home, he began to clean his motor
• 4:00
  home. The police placed him on around the clock's surveillance, and the following
• 4:05
  day they impounded his motor home and another vehicle for forensic testing. While speaking
• 4:12
  to the police, David insisted that he had no idea where Danielle had gone,
• 4:15
  but he had actually seen Brenda the night her daughter disappeared, because the
• 4:20
  two of them had been out drinking at the same bar. One other aspect
• 4:25
  of David's original interview with police was very interesting to investigators. He provided an
• 4:30
  incredibly detailed summary of his nights spent away in the motor home, and all
• 4:34
  of the details could be backed up by eyewitnesses, receipts, and phone records.
• 4:40
  However, despite all of this detail, there was one thing that David
• 4:44
  somehow forgot to mention, the fact that he had stopped at the dry cleaners
• 4:47
  on his way home. On the twenty second of February, David was arrested
• 4:54
  for abducting Danielle. One tiny spot of blood had been found inside his motor
• 4:59
  home and another had been found on the jacket he had dry cleaned shortly before
• 5:03
  returning home. DNA testing revealed that the blood was a match to Danielle's Five
• 5:11
  days later, on the twenty seventh of February, a group of searching volunteers
• 5:15
  in Dahsa, California, found Danielle's remains lying just off of a trail.
• 5:20
  She had been stripped nude, and exposure to the elements had caused the decomposition
• 5:26
  process to accelerate. Because of the degree of decomposition, no cause of death
• 5:30
  could be identified, and the coroner could not confirm whether or not she had
• 5:34
  been sexually abused prior to the murder. The location of Danielle's remains further implicated
• 5:41
  David Westerfield in the case. The road was one of the couple of routes
• 5:45
  that David might have taken during his drive to the desert. Despite the evidence
• 5:49
  against him, David decided to plead not guilty. In the lead up to
• 5:54
  his June two thousand and two trial, his defense attorneys attempted to have his
• 5:58
  police statements exit gluted from the trial, alleging that the interrogation process had been
• 6:03
  unfair. During his interrogations, David had been questioned for almost ten hours,
• 6:10
  and the detectives had ignored all of his requests, including asking to speak to
• 6:14
  a lawyer go to sleep and eat. This resulted in the two detectives who
• 6:18
  had interrogated David not testifying at the trial, but the police statements themselves remained
• 6:25
  included. During the trial, the prosecution presented a wealth of forensic evidence,
• 6:30
  as well as the spots of Danielle's blood that had been found on the floor
• 6:33
  of David's home and on one of his jackets. Forensic testing had also found
• 6:39
  strands of hair that were believed to be Danielle's on David's bed sheets, several
• 6:44
  of her fingerprints inside David's motor home, and several pieces of dog hair on
• 6:48
  the comforter of his bed which were a match to Danielle's pet dog. The
• 6:54
  prosecution provided the theory that David might have gotten into the Van Dam residence through
• 6:59
  the garage side door, which Brenda had noticed was unlocked when she returned home
• 7:03
  with her girlfriends. However, despite the theory, attorney Jeff Dusak emphasized one
• 7:09
  thing to the jury the prosecution did not need to prove how David got into
• 7:14
  the house to kidnap Danielle. They only needed to prove that he kidnapped her,
• 7:18
  and the forensic evidence suggested that he had. In contrast, David's defense
• 7:25
  lawyers argued that law enforcement had felt pressure to solve the kidnapping case, so
• 7:30
  they had focused on David instead of investigating any other suspects. Because David was
• 7:34
  also facing charges for pornographic material involving children that had been discovered on his personal
• 7:40
  computer, his lawyers suggested that the pornography did not belong to David. Instead,
• 7:46
  the person who had downloaded it was his son, eighteen year old Neil.
• 7:50
  Neil, who was now being partially blamed for his own father's crimes,
• 7:55
  testified and denied that he had any knowledge of the material. In an attempt
• 8:01
  to argue that other people who could have kidnapped Danielle had been inside the Vandam
• 8:05
  house that night, the defense lawyers zeroed in on Brenda and Damon, who
• 8:09
  they alleged had a non monogamous marriage where they would have sexual encounters with other
• 8:15
  couples, as well as smoking marijuana. Because of Brenda and Damon's alleged swinging,
• 8:20
  the defense proposed the theory that more people had actually been in the house
• 8:24
  during the night of February first, two thousand and two, and it was
• 8:28
  possible that these unnamed, unidentified people had abducted and killed Danielle, despite the
• 8:35
  forensic evidence proving that Danielle had been in David's trailer shortly before her death.
• 8:41
  The defense argued that there was no forensic evidence that David himself had been inside
• 8:45
  the Vandam house in order to abduct her, and that there was also no
• 8:50
  evidence that he'd been physically present at the site where her body was found.
• 8:54
  In response, Attorney Dusak argued that it was completely possible for somebody to avoid
• 9:00
  leaving forensic evidence inside a home if they were being cautious. David had known
• 9:05
  to be careful about leaving DNA and fingerprints inside the Van Dam home, but
• 9:09
  meanwhile, Danielle had likely been frightened and struggling inside David's motor home, causing
• 9:16
  trace evidence to be left behind. There was no innocent explanation, Attorney Dusk
• 9:22
  stated, for Danielle's DNA being left in David's home. On the sixteenth of
• 9:28
  September two thousand and two, the jury reached their decision David Westerfield was guilty
• 9:33
  and should be sentenced to death. He is held at San Quentin State Prison,
• 9:39
  but it is unknown whether his execution will ever go ahead. That's ten
• 9:56
  Minute Murder for today, brief and bingeable true crime. My name is Joe.
• 10:01
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