Danielle van Dam — Victim of "Alternative Lifestyles?"
by Chris Weinkopf
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 13, 2002
MAYBE, JUST MAYBE it was a total stranger who abducted seven-year-old Danielle van Dam from her San Diego home almost two weeks ago. Some thug could have picked her parents’ house at random and snuck in during the middle of the night, evading detection despite the home-security system. Somehow, the intruder could have found his way up to Danielle’s bedroom and removed her against her will—again, without being noticed.
Then again, maybe not.
The practical realities and crime statistics—less than 1 percent of the 800,000 children reported missing in the U.S. last year were abducted by someone unconnected to the family—suggest otherwise. Yet to judge by the initial coverage of Danielle’s disappearance on national TV, one would think her kidnapping had to be the exception to the rule.
The story, as first told on The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, Larry King Live, and America's Most Wanted, mirrored the account of Danielle’s parents, Brenda and Damon: Brenda was out partying that Friday night with friends at a San Diego nightspot. Damon put the kids to bed around 10. Brenda and her pals showed up around 2:30 and joined Damon for some pizza. The friends then left, and Brenda and Damon went to bed without first checking in on their daughter. They didn’t discover that she was missing until 9 a.m. Saturday morning.
As usual, the story behind the story has been available mostly outside the establishment media—on the Internet and talk radio.
Last Friday, San Diego talk-show host Rick Roberts presented his listeners with an alternative scenario for what might have happened. According to his "reliable" source "high in law enforcement," the van Dams are "swingers," and not in the dancing sense. They engage in "lots of wife-swapping," and reportedly did so in their garage the night Danielle disappeared. According to rumors circulating like mad on local talk shows and Internet bulletin boards, the van Dams lock their garage from the inside during their swingers’ parties to make sure Danielle and her two brothers don’t stumble in on the festivities.
That would explain why the van Dams might have failed to notice an intruder breaking into their home and walking off with their child. It also provides a motive for neighbor David Westerfield, the only suspect thus far identified by San Diego police. According to the rumors—which are, it should be noted, only that—Westerfield was a frustrated, would-be swinger who wanted to attend the van Dams’ soirees, but was denied admission for lack of a partner.
There’s more to the Westerfield angle: He saw Mrs. van Dam at the bar earlier in the evening, where, he claims, they danced (which she denies). He also high-tailed it out of San Diego and into the desert the next morning, which was enough to make police suspicious. So far, they have searched his home, where they found child pornography, and seized two of his vehicles, but they haven’t sought his arrest.
It’s easy to speculate by connecting the dots: At the nightclub, Westerfield might have learned about the orgy planned later in the evening. Mindful that Danielle’s parents would be distracted, he could have used the opportunity to sneak into their home and take her, thereby satisfying his perverted sexual appetites and exacting revenge against the van Dams for not including him in theirs.
It’s just a theory, and it’s rooted purely in conjecture, but it’s also the best lead available so far, which raises a worthwhile question: Why have so many in the press, the national TV media in particular, been reluctant to pursue it?
Surely it’s not just that the stories are unsubstantiated. That, after all, never kept the media from investigating claims of Nicole Brown Simpson’s drug use, the basis of O.J. defenders’ absurd charge that drug lords were "the real killer."
For their part, the van Dams have yet to deny the innuendos categorically. Asked about the alleged swinging on a San Diego TV station, Mrs. van Dam replied that "rumors are rumors," and "they have absolutely nothing to do with this investigation." Newsweek, one of few national media outlets that’s questioned the van Dams’ telling of events, quotes their spokeswoman, Sara Fraunces, as issuing the classic non-denial denial: The van Dams "do not lead a perfect lifestyle," she said, but that’s immaterial to the matter at hand.
Fraunces no doubt chose her words carefully. In the last 35 years, the term "lifestyle" has become not only the code word for any sort of sexual deviance, but also the quick way to claim a certain immunity from inconvenient questioning about it. This is the same logic Bill Clinton and his defenders used to rationalize perjury and lying to the American public, because it was "just about sex." For Gary Condit, it justified denying his affair to Washington police. His lifestyle took precedence over their duty to find Chandra Levy, dead or alive.
Like the "right to privacy" (a term invoked almost exclusively in sexual matters), the "lifestyle" claim is an appeal to the sexual revolution and its promise of an uninhibited sex life free of all responsibilities and moral judgment. It supersedes even laws, justice, or, in the case of Danielle van Dam and others, human life. To many of the reporters covering the van Dam story, the couple’s right to privacy similarly transcends the need for a complete and thorough investigation of their daughter’s disappearance.
But the couple’s "personal life" is a legitimate subject of inquiry, and not just for investigators. With their appeals to the press and calls for volunteers to help look for Danielle, the van Dams have made the investigation into their daughter’s kidnapping a very public affair. Privacy concerns should keep neither police nor reporters from pursuing all viable leads—certainly not when there’s a chance Danielle may still be alive.
It may be, as Mrs. van Dam claims, that Danielle’s abduction has nothing to do with her parents’ sexual predilections, but at this point, there’s no way for the van Dams to know that for sure. If they are lying about that Friday night’s events, then their credibility on all matters must be called into doubt. And even if they are telling the truth about that night, but they hosted sex parties in their home on others, that could yield a long list of potential suspects—people with unhealthy sexual behaviors who know the lay of the house.
The fetishization of "privacy" shouldn’t keep the van Dams from being forthright, or preclude the press from doing its job. The life of a little girl is at stake.
Trial ordered in Danielle van Dam case
SAN DIEGO, March 14 (UPI) -- After gut-wrenching emotional testimony from the parents of Danielle van Dam, a San Diego County judge late Thursday ordered David Westerfield, the suspect in the 7-year-old girl's disappearance and death, to stand trial on kidnapping and murder charges that carry a potential death sentence.
Superior Court Judge H. Ronald Domnitz scheduled a March 28 arraignment for Westerfield, 50, a neighbor of the little girl who vanished from her bedroom on the night of Feb. 1-2 and was found dead along a country road nearly a month later following an intensive search.
Danielle's mother testified earlier in Thursday's preliminary hearing that she saw Westerfield at a neighborhood nightclub on the night her daughter was kidnapped, however she described the suspect in the case as a largely peripheral figure in the festivities who was not invited back to the Van Dam home.
Brenda van Dam testified, sometimes tearfully, sometimes defiant, at Westerfield's preliminary hearing that she and two girlfriends drank, danced with men and with one another and shot pool with different men at the bar that Friday night. But she said their socializing with the twice-divorced Westerfield was limited and he was not invited to continue the socializing at the Van Dam home when the bar closed at 2 a.m.
"We let him buy us drinks," Mrs. Van Dam said during her three hours on the stand, but said she did not know the exact number of drinks he had purchased for her and her friends because there was "cash on the bar."
There was some conflicting information back and forth between defense attorney Steven Feldman and Mrs. Van Dam over an alleged conversation between her and Westerfield.
On the stand she denied an exchange with him but memorialized interviews with other witnesses were read to her and she was forced to admit that Westerfield had invited her to his home for an "adult" type party. She admitted to giving Westerfield their home phone number. Mrs. Van Dam said that she called her husband from the bar and informed him that they were not "the only ones" who had such affairs.
Domnitz appeared eager to protect Mrs. Van Dam from the sometimes aggressive questioning by Feldman. He sustained dozens of objections by the prosecution when Feldman made forays into the shadowy and suggestive sexual side of Mrs. Van Dam. He also refused to allow her to answer questions pertaining to the marital status of the Van Dams, calling their talk of divorce a year ago "off limits."
Westerfield allegedly slipped into the Van Dam home on the night of Feb. 1 and carried off 7-year-old Danielle. Her decomposing body was found at the end of the month along a rural road about 25 miles from the family's home in the San Diego subdivision of Sabre Springs.
The interaction between Westerfield and Mrs. Van Dam has been considered an important element in the case because it would indicate whether Westerfield had been invited to the home where he would have had access to Danielle's bedroom.
Mrs. Van Dam testified that she and her husband, Damon, knew Westerfield only slightly even though he lived two doors away, but Westerfield appeared anxious to socialize with her and her two female friends at the bar.
The women, however, preferred to talk and play pool among themselves and with two other male patrons who were invited back to the residence where Damon van Dam was watching Danielle and her two brothers.
"I did not dance with David Westerfield," she said.
Mrs. Van Dam said she had several mixed drinks and a shot of tequila while at the bar and had also shared a marijuana cigarette with her friends at her home and later outside the bar. She denied being a regular drug user, but admitted to smoking marijuana around 30 times in her life. She nevertheless described herself as being clear headed and able to drive home safely.
After a late-night snack of leftover pizza, the Van Dam's guests departed. Damon van Dam testified late Thursday that he got up to let the pet dog out before dawn and found a sliding door ajar, which he assumed had been left open by one of the guests who had been smoking. His wife had earlier described a situation where she had found the door left ajar.
Feldman prodded Damon Van Dam on the time that the dog was let out after he said he didn't recall the exact time even though he had told police it was around 3:30 a.m.
The next morning, Mrs. Van Dam said she went to wake her daughter for a breakfast of eggs she was cooking and found her bedroom empty. She and her husband and two sons frantically searched the house and yard and then called 911.
A police officer arrived, walked through the house and called in reinforcements.
"Before I knew it, it was total chaos," Mrs. Van Dam testified. "There were a lot of people on streets and neighbors came over and started searching for Danielle."
(Reported by Hil Anderson in Los Angeles)