Plea deal 'minutes away' when body found

Minutes before Danielle van Dam's remains were found Feb. 27, David Westerfield's lawyers were brokering a deal with prosecutors:

He would tell police where he dumped the 7-year-old girl's body; they would not seek the death penalty.

Law enforcement sources told The San Diego Union-Tribune yesterday defense lawyers Steven Feldman and Robert Boyce were negotiating for a life sentence for the 50-year-old design engineer, a neighbor of the van Dams in Sabre Springs.

The deal they were discussing would have allowed Westerfield to plead guilty to murder and be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, said the officials, who spoke on condition they not be identified.

Prosecutors were seriously considering the bargain when Danielle's body was discovered off Dehesa Road that afternoon, nearly four weeks after she disappeared from her bedroom.

It was aborted, but details were confirmed yesterday soon after a San Diego Superior Court jury recommended the death penalty for Westerfield.

Feldman and Boyce were at the downtown San Diego jail discussing the final arrangements with Westerfield when volunteer searchers found Danielle's remains beneath trees along Dehesa Road east of El Cajon.

When the lawyers left to meet with prosecutors, they noticed members of the news media gathering in the street and asked what was happening.

After being told a body had been found, they went directly to the nearby Hall of Justice and met with prosecutors. The defense lawyers were handed a copy of a Thomas Guide map of the Dehesa area on which a circle had been drawn indicating the location of the body.

Feldman and Boyce took the map back to Westerfield and later telephoned to say they no longer "had anything to discuss regarding a plea bargain."

Danielle was reported missing from her home the morning of Feb. 2, and Westerfield, who lived two doors away, quickly became the primary suspect. He was watched closely by police for weeks as authorities and volunteers searched from the Sabre Springs neighborhood to the Imperial County desert.

After DNA results linked Westerfield to the crime, he was arrested Feb. 22 and charged with kidnapping and burglary.

Three days later, even though Danielle's body had not been found, District Attorney Paul Pfingst announced murder and kidnapping charges would be filed that could carry the death penalty.

Many law enforcement officials feared Danielle's body might never be found. Then, on Feb. 27, volunteer searchers combing the Dehesa area, far from where police had focused, found Danielle's badly decomposed remains.

At that point, the official sources said yesterday, any opportunity Westerfield and his lawyers had to win a plea bargain evaporated.

Wonder why they feel the need to leak it to the media, seeing as everyone said they so thoroughly proved their case.

Well, the westie fans complained that the judge was biased. Guess the judge deemed some things non-admissable.

Many here on both sides said we'd be very interested, when the trial was over, to hear whatever was withheld from trial.

We have been assured by westie fans that it would be news about the van Dams that would show they were worse than previously revealed.

So you think cutting off his wife's underwear while she slept is just another perversion? Ooooooookay.

Look at the reply just above yours about the plea bargain. It looks like DW rejected it, rather than being ready to sign it.

I see the point of your arguments, why they would lead you to believe DW is guilty. You can probably imagine rebuttal arguments to those, though, so I won't waste time repeating them.

I've been looking more closely at the prosecution.

Dusek, imo, worked hard to twist words and possibilities into the sickest, dirtiest context. Feldman's repeated objections were overruled. That makes me resistant to any conclusion that Dusek would order me to reach.

If DW did it, there should have been at least the outline of a story to tell clearly. Instead Dusek whines he didn't have to prove anything, then did his gross enactment of dw slamming her into the headboard while raping her. John rebutted that silliness early on. And Dusek himself didn't even charge DW with rape. That was purely inflamatory, and suggests he didn't have anything more factual to use in his closing.

There were other examples of words and phrases taken from Redden's interview and twisted to sound awful. But the context on the tape, made sense to me. Maybe not to you, but to me. Redden asked him if he was ever invited to the vd's, then Dusek paints an answer that he wasn't invited as evasive.

I can't believe someone who holds a little girl, raped and dead, would drive her around in the most ostentatious motor home in southern California for days. Why on earth would he return to the neighborhood with it, and her, dead or alive, on board? That suggests innocence to me.

What killer would tell a detective the silly, naive stories in answers probing questions that he seems to have told Redden. A killer would work very hard to move the discussion somewhere else. DW seems to have answered every question right up front. Typical engineer/problem solving mode, in my experience. When in doubt, brain storm possible explanations and solutions. Especially if your life experience doesn't send out warnings that this is a trap.

There is an argument that all the coincidences that need to be explained away prove that he actually is guilty. We only have reports of reports about the physical evidence. I don't know technical limitations of tests. John points out that they neglected to do the final definitive blood test on the drops on the carpet and jacket. That could be crucial.

I DO know, from watching the trial, that Dusek relentlessly went for every dirty innuendo, or undermining sarcastic tone he could dig out. Is that consistent with pretending that every fiber that was a 'close' match was the same as exact? I don't know. But I know that a polaroid would prevent a close inspection that an enlarged 35 mm. would allow.

I know that a hair with a mitochondrial match that is destroyed in testing cannot be retested. I know that 5 people at the vd's home on Friday each gave conflicting stories, even in their apparent stripped down form.

My biases may be blinding me to some big truth you see. I couldn't live with myself signing a death warrant for a man convicted with 2 drops of dna, a hair in a drain, and a hair on a pillow, all of which COULD have easily been planted. Maybe it wasn't, but I couldn't kill a man based on that.

Oh I agree with you that many of Westerfield's defenders were more obsessed with the parents sexual and drug activities than they were in the facts of the case. I wouldn't be suprised if a few of these nuts believe that Westerfield was the avenging angel of God and brutalized and murdered that couples little girl to smite them for their sins.
These people just want to cling to anything or deny anything to hold onto their narrow world view. Bad things happen to bad people, and bad people do bad things. In their minds eye, the VD's were bad people, and they did bad things.. therefor the bad thing.. the death of their daughter was somehow their fault... not the sick sadistic animal who committed the crime, but the parents fault. Westerfield doesn't look evil.. so he can't have done it. They stare evil right in the face and refuse to accept what they see.

No one is going to put the VD's up as parents of the year, but it is ludicrous to claim their actions caused their daughters demise.Westerfield did that, and mercifully he will never have the opportunity to do it again. May God have mercy on his soul, because he will get and deserves no quarter on earth.

I had to repeat your whole post. You wrote everything I've been trying to write,and did a much better job of expressing what I wanted to say that I've been able to do myself. Thank you.

You are the one misinterpreting the article, whether by mistake or by design. The last paragraph you cite is immediately preceded by this one:

THEN is the last part you posted:

Feldman and Boyce took the map back to Westerfield and later telephoned to say they no longer "had anything to discuss regarding a plea bargain."

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