A California chef told police he slow-cooked his wife’s body for four
days after accidentally killing her, the Los Angeles Times reported.The grisly detail emerged Tuesday during the second week of the murder trial of David Viens, accused in the death of 39-year-old Dawn Viens in October 2009.

In two March 2011 interviews with authorities that were played for the jury on Tuesday, David Viens
recounted how he caused the death of his wife and disposed of her
remains. The interviews were conducted in a hospital because Viens had
jumped off an 80-foot cliff when suspected by police in his wife’s
disappearance.David Viens,
49, said on the night of Oct. 18, 2009, he taped his wife’s mouth and
bound her hands and feet to prevent her from “driving around wasted,
whacked out on coke and drinking,” according to the Los Angeles Times.“For some reason I just got violent,” Viens said, according to the paper.

He
said he panicked when he woke up the next morning and found his wife
dead. Viens told investigators he placed her body into a large drum of
boiling water and used weights to keep it submerged, the newspaper
reported.“I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days,” he said, according to the paper.

“You cooked on Dawn’s body for four days?” responded Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Richard Garcia.



“Before
it was done,” Viens said. He didn’t say where he cooked the body, but
Viens owned the Thyme Contemporary Cafe in Lomita, Calif., at the time.The
defendant did say he kept his wife’s skull. “That’s the only thing I
didn’t want to get rid of in case I wanted to leave it somewhere,” he
admitted, according to the Los Angeles Times.He told police that the skull was in his mother’s attic in Torrance, but they did not find it there.

Viens’
daughter testified last week that her father joked about cooking his
wife’s body to get rid of the evidence. A girlfriend of the defendant
also testified last week, according to the paper.Viens, who is attending the trial in a wheelchair, pleaded not guilty.