Town note
The Sepulveda family established and started raising cattle on Rancho Los Palos Verdes, which angered the Dominguez family because the Sepulvedas had no land grant and simply started using the land.
about 0:05:21The story
Around 1994 he met Dawn, a waitress where he was the chef, and they married in 1997. In 2008 they settled in a two-bedroom apartment in Lomita, Los Angeles County.
In spring 2009 they opened the Time Contemporary Cafe in a Lomita shopping centre. It closed for a remodel from May to September while Dawn waited tables elsewhere. Dawn was a heavy drinker who also used cocaine and meth. That summer she gave $640 in cash to Joe Cakase to hold as a nest egg.
On Sunday, October 18, 2009, Richard 'Dicky' Stagneto installed a pot and pan rack at the cafe. There were a few more calls, then nothing.
On October 20 Dawn failed to meet Patterson at the hospital where Patterson was having cancer treatment. The receipts showed only about $25 missing, and he said 'good riddance to her'. On October 23 Patterson received a text from Dawn's phone signed 'Love Pixy', misspelt and full of uncharacteristic errors, saying she needed time and was moving back east. A neighbour, Donna Morton, recalled an argument and Dawn leaving with bags. On November 8 Dawn's sister filed a missing persons report with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
About two weeks after the disappearance he began a relationship with Kathy Galvan, who moved in during mid-November. His daughter Jackie came from South Carolina and, with Kathy, packed Dawn's clothes into storage. In a recorded phone interview on December 9 he claimed she drank about 18 beers a day.
On February 22, 2011, two sheriff's detectives interviewed Jackie in South Carolina. She told them what her father had said and, at their request, called him to say she had told the police everything. He asked Kathy to tell his mother and brother he loved them, then jumped off an 80-foot cliff. He survived the fall onto the rocks, was rescued by a police helicopter and taken to hospital.
Search warrants at his mother's house and the cafe found no physical evidence, though a cadaver dog stopped at a shed behind the restaurant. On March 1, 2011, detectives interviewed him at his hospital bed. He said he took Ambien and blockaded the bedroom door, and when Dawn kept raising hell he forced her down in the living room and taped her hands, feet and mouth. He said she did not resist, that he woke to find her dead and put her in a plastic bag, and first claimed he dumped her in a dumpster behind the restaurant. Pressed again four days later, he said he had placed her body face down in a 55-gallon drum of boiling water with weights on top, slow-cooked her for four days, strained the remains and mixed them with restaurant grease and debris in garbage bags in the dumpster. He said he kept her skull and jawbone in his mother's attic in Torrance; a search found nothing and her skull has never been recovered.
The defence was Ambien: forensic toxicologist Dr Marvin Pietruska testified that the drug could cause confusion, aggravated by alcohol.