The Perfect Husband

There is a moment that Detective John Souza would return to again and again in the years that followed — a moment so small, so fleeting, that it might have meant nothing at all. He was standing in the entry hall of a beautiful home in the Fig Garden neighborhood of Fresno, California, Easter Sunday, 1992, and he was watching a young man. Not crying. Not trembling. Not doing any of the things a person does when they have just learned that their entire family has been wiped off the earth. The young man was composed. Measured. Almost, Souza thought, *theatrical* in his grief. And something in the detective's chest went still and quiet, the way it does when experience speaks before reason can catch up.

That young man was Dana Ewell. He was twenty-one years old. And what Souza was watching, though he couldn't prove it yet — wouldn't be able to prove it for the better part of seven years — was a performance.

Dale Ewell had built something real. That was the first thing you needed to understand about this family, about what was lost on that April morning. Dale was a self-made man in the truest sense of the phrase, an aviation entrepreneur who had grown Western Piper Sales into one of the most successful aircraft dealerships in California. He was sixty years old in the spring of 1992, still vigorous, still engaged, the kind of man who had places to be and things to build. His wife, Glee, was fifty-four, warm and devoted, the gravitational center of a family she had helped shape with tremendous care. Their daughter Tiffany was twenty-four, a recent college graduate still finding her footing in the world, her whole life genuinely and properly ahead of her. People who knew the Ewells spoke of a family that was close, that gathered willingly, that chose each other's company. Dale and Glee had worked hard for everything they had, had accumulated an estate worth somewhere in the neighborhood of eight million dollars, and they had done it without apology and without cruelty. They were, by all accounts, good people. Complicated, certainly, as all people are, but good.

Their son Dana had grown up in the comfort that Dale's success provided, and he had absorbed something from it — ambition, certainly, a taste for finer things, a belief that the world ought to bend in his direction. He was attending Santa Clara University, studying business, presenting himself to classmates and professors as a young man of means and trajectory. He drove a Ferrari. He spoke, according to those who knew him, with a confident, almost aggressive certainty about the fortune he expected to inherit. Not earn. Inherit. That distinction, prosecutors would later argue, was everything.

Easter Sunday fell on April 19th that year. Dale, Glee, and Tiffany had gathered at the family home on West Kaweah Avenue, the kind of occasion that comes around reliably and without drama in close families — a holiday, a meal, an ordinary Sunday made slightly more formal by tradition. It was Dana's roommate at Santa Clara, a young man named Joel Radovcich, who was also in Fresno that day. He had been in town for several days, in fact. According to what prosecutors would eventually reconstruct through years of investigation, Radovcich entered the Ewell home that Easter Sunday and shot Dale, Glee, and Tiffany to death with a nine-millimeter handgun.

Dana was not in Fresno. He had arranged to be elsewhere. He was in San Jose, building an alibi with the careful, almost clinical attention to detail that would come to define prosecutors' portrait of him.

It was Dana himself who reportedly prompted the welfare check that led to the discovery of the bodies. Glee had failed to call him, he told someone. That wasn't like her. The bodies were found by neighbors or responding officers — three people shot inside their own home on a holiday afternoon, the house otherwise undisturbed, no sign of forced entry, no apparent robbery. In an instant, the Ewell family was gone.

Dana arrived in Fresno, and Detective Souza watched him, and something was wrong.

What followed was one of the longest and most painstaking murder investigations in the history of Fresno County. The detectives assigned to the case — Souza most prominently among them — faced an immediate and maddening problem: they had a theory, and they had almost nothing to support it. The most obvious question in any murder investigation is who benefits. In this case, the answer was stark. With Dale, Glee, and Tiffany dead, Dana Ewell stood to inherit the full estate — millions of dollars, the aircraft business, everything his father had built. He was the sole surviving heir. The motive was almost embarrassingly plain. But motive is not evidence, and evidence was what the investigators lacked.

Dana did nothing to alleviate their suspicions. He retained legal counsel almost immediately. He purchased additional vehicles. He spoke, according to those who encountered him in the aftermath, with a kind of impatience about the estate, about his inheritance, about the business that was now, in his view, his. Souza and his colleagues watched and documented and gathered what they could, but the case remained circumstantial, indirect, maddeningly thin.

The investigation began to turn, slowly, on connections. Investigators looked hard at Dana's life at Santa Clara, at his relationships, at the people around him. Joel Radovcich emerged as a figure of interest. He and Dana had been roommates. He was quiet, technically skilled, described by some who knew him as someone who operated on the margins of social situations — watchful, contained. Investigators traced his movements around the time of the murders, placed him in Fresno in the days surrounding Easter Sunday, and began to build the architecture of a theory: that Dana Ewell had hired Joel Radovcich to kill his family so that Dana could collect the inheritance before age and chance could complicate his access to it.

But connecting two young men to a triple murder — placing the conspiracy in evidence, not just in logic — required more. It required someone who knew. And that person, as it turned out, existed.

His name was Ernest Ponce, and he was a mutual acquaintance of both Dana and Joel. What Ponce knew, and what he eventually agreed to share with investigators, was the kind of information that breaks a case open at its seams. According to court records and reporting on the case, Ponce had knowledge of the conspiracy — had been aware, to varying degrees, of what had been planned and what had been done. He became a cooperating witness for the prosecution, and the information he provided gave investigators the traction they had spent years trying to find.

There were other threads as well. Investigators worked the financial angle — tracing the movement of money, looking for evidence of payment between Dana and Joel. They examined phone records, travel records, the material residue of a conspiracy that had been constructed with care but not, it turned out, with perfection. Firearms evidence was examined. The nine-millimeter weapon used in the killings was never recovered, but ballistics work and the broader evidentiary picture were assembled piece by piece over the course of the investigation.

A significant development in the case involved a woman named Monica Zent, who had been Dana's girlfriend and who had her own complicated proximity to events. Her father, Jack Zent, was a former FBI agent, a detail that added another layer of scrutiny to an already intricate case. Monica had been with Dana in San Jose on Easter Sunday, part of the alibi architecture, and investigators examined her role and knowledge carefully. The full contours of what she knew and when she knew it were contested, but her presence in the story was undeniable.

By the mid-1990s, investigators had built a case they believed could go to trial. In 1998, Dana Ewell and Joel Radovcich were formally charged with three counts of first-degree murder each, along with special circumstances allegations that would make them eligible for the death penalty. The charges against Dana encompassed not just the murders themselves but the alleged conspiracy — that he had planned, arranged, and financed the killing of his own parents and sister in exchange for an inheritance he was unwilling to wait for.

The trial began in 1998 and stretched into 1999. It was, by any measure, a complex proceeding. The prosecution presented its theory of the case through financial evidence, phone records, witness testimony, and the framework of motive and opportunity. Ernest Ponce testified about what he had been told and what he had known. Prosecutors argued that Dana had recruited Radovcich — a man he knew to be capable, in some clinical sense, of violence — and had paid him for the murders, that the arrangement had been made with cold deliberation, and that Dana's alibi had been manufactured with similar care.

The defense challenged the evidence at every turn. Dana Ewell maintained his innocence. His attorneys questioned the reliability of cooperating witnesses, the completeness of the investigation, the circumstantial nature of much of the state's case. But the jury, after deliberation, returned verdicts of guilty on all counts of first-degree murder against both Dana Ewell and Joel Radovcich. The special circumstances findings made both men eligible for the death penalty.

At the penalty phase, the jury ultimately returned sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for both men, rather than death. It was a significant distinction, legally and humanly, but it meant that both Dana Ewell and Joel Radovcich would spend the remainder of their lives in California state prison.

The convictions were appealed, as convictions in complex cases invariably are. The California appellate courts reviewed the record, the evidentiary issues, the trial proceedings, and affirmed the convictions. The legal challenges did not succeed in overturning what the jury had found. As of the public record, Dana Ewell and Joel Radovcich remain incarcerated, serving their sentences.

The estate — the eight million dollars that Dale Ewell had built over a lifetime, the aircraft dealership, the house on West Kaweah Avenue — was the subject of its own civil proceedings in the years following the criminal case. California law, like most states, does not permit a person to profit from the murder of another. The slayer rule, as it is known, operates on a principle as old as law itself: you do not get to keep what you killed for. The fortune that Dana had allegedly found so urgent, so necessary, so worth the destruction of his entire family — he did not receive it.

That is perhaps the detail that settles into the mind most heavily when you sit with this case. Not the mechanics of the crime, not the long years of investigation, not even the trial and its outcome — but the arithmetic of what was exchanged. A father who had built something from work and will. A mother who had held a family together with love and attention. A young woman of twenty-four with everything still ahead of her. All of it traded away, if the jury got it right, for money that was never going to arrive.

Detective John Souza retired after the case was resolved. By various accounts, the investigation had consumed years of his professional life, had demanded a kind of sustained, patient commitment that few cases require. He had watched a young man in a hallway on Easter Sunday and felt something shift in his understanding of what he was dealing with, and then he had spent the better part of a decade building the proof that intuition demanded. He wrote about the case. He spoke about it. It was, by any measure, the defining investigation of his career.

There is a kind of story we tell ourselves about families — that they are the one place where the fundamental human obligations hold, where whatever else falls away in the world outside, the bonds of blood carry some irreducible weight. Dale and Glee Ewell had raised their children, had worked and provided and gathered them home for holidays. Easter Sunday was supposed to be one of those ordinary, renewable occasions that families take for granted because they assume, as we all do, that there will be more of them.

Tiffany Ewell was twenty-four years old. She had done nothing except exist in the wrong family at the wrong moment. That fact, perhaps more than any other in this case, is the one that resists resolution. The courts did their work. The jury deliberated and found. The appeals ran their course. The law, in the end, held. But Tiffany Ewell does not get her life back, and Dale and Glee do not get to see what might have been built in the years that remained to them, and none of the legal architecture that followed can address that particular loss at all.

What the law can do, it did. And that, in cases like this one, is both everything and not nearly enough.