Girl’s Diary Reveals Grisly Details of Plot to Kill Father : Slaying: A chilling insight is provided into sad tale of a dad and daughter who struggled to understand each other.

“We have a plan to kill Daniel,” the nervous 14-year-old girl scribbled in her diary about her father. “Were (sic) going to shoot him burn then bury him. . . . We have everything planned really good!”

Six days later, Daniel Allen Jr. was dead, a bullet hole in his head and his charred body dumped in a hastily dug grave about a mile from his Highland Park apartment in Northeast Los Angeles.

Police allege that Allen’s daughter, her 17-year-old boyfriend and a 16-year-old girl murdered the unemployed graphic artist, slipping a fistful of sleeping pills into his Coca-Cola on June 10 and shooting him through a pillow as he slept.

The diary entry, disclosed by police in a search warrant affidavit, provides a chilling insight into the sad tale of a broken family, where father and daughter struggled to understand each other after years of estrangement but found it impossible to bridge a gap of pain and separation, paternal strictness and defiant teen-age love.

“I’m a little twichy (sic), were (sic) going to do it, a few days,” Allen’s daughter confided in the June 4 diary entry.

The three teen-agers, whose names have not been released, were charged last month with murder after Allen’s body was discovered by hikers along a stretch of railroad track, his hand protruding from the grave.

The Texas native’s daughter and her boyfriend have admitted to the killing, according to the affidavit, with the girl explaining to authorities that her father “wouldn’t let her and (her boyfriend) be together,” police say.

The girl also alleged that her father had hit her, but police have not identified abuse as a motive.

Little is known about the 16-year-old friend, who met the others through a church youth group and was arrested four days after they were. Her family has refused requests for interviews and the search warrant indicates that she was arrested only after being implicated by her two friends and the younger girl’s diary.

In a haunting hint of the grisly task police say awaited them, Allen’s daughter wrote in her diary that she watched the movie “River’s Edge” after working out details of the murder at the older girl’s house. The diary described the film, based on the true story of a teen-age boy who murders his girlfriend and whose friends keep his secret while her body lay by a river, as “pretty cool.”

The Allen girl’s boyfriend, who police say fired the shot that killed her father, met the 14-year-old girl through the church group last August after the girl moved here from Texas. Allen and his ex-wife were divorced when their daughter was a toddler and Allen had not seen the girl for nearly 10 years.

Friends and relatives said the two teen-agers, although from different worlds, shared painful childhood experiences that left each feeling isolated and misunderstood. They hit it off, with the boy ending another relationship to be with his newfound love.

The sixth of seven children born to Latin American immigrants, the boy was 10 years old when his father suffered a fatal heart attack on Father’s Day, according to his mother, who asked not to be identified. Two years later, the boy was struck by a car while riding a bicycle, throwing him head-first against the windshield, she said.

Even with extensive plastic surgery, the boy’s shattered face was left scarred. Kids at school teased him and called him “scarface.” Once affectionate and outgoing, the boy became quiet and withdrawn, she said, never fully recovering.

“He didn’t laugh that much, like he used to,” said his 28-year-old sister. “He looked and acted like an older person.”

To Allen’s daughter, who had essentially grown up without a father, the self-reliant boy filled a void in her life. Her uncle, Stephen Williams, said his niece had found “somebody that cared for her without being authoritarian . . . that father figure that she needed so badly.”

Williams said the girl had always “felt misunderstood” and was “at an age where she was real rebellious.” In San Antonio, where she had lived with her mother, stepbrother, stepsister and an often absentee stepfather, the girl felt left out; she became hard to handle, sometimes staying out all night, he said.

But even with their troubled pasts, neither teen-ager had a criminal history, friends and relatives said. The boy, a Franklin High School senior, was described as a responsible, churchgoing teen-ager who steered clear of gangs and drugs.

The boy attended Faith United Presbyterian Church and was a valued member of the track and field team during his junior year, advancing to postseason competition in the high jump, according to the school yearbook.

“He was very competitive,” said Ed Elias, a coach at Franklin. “He had good athletic attributes.”

Elias said the youth dropped out of school last fall and did not return until spring, but his sister said the absence was because of her brother’s dyslexia. The boy had been suffering from migraine headaches, she said, and decided to take a break from his studies.

Friends and relatives said Allen did not dislike his daughter’s boyfriend, but was concerned that she was spending too much time with him, complained about her overnight absences and was fearful of the sexual nature of the relationship.

Raising a young daughter was all new to the 46-year-old recovering alcoholic, who friends said desperately wanted to do the right thing but was learning as he went along.

On three occasions, the boy’s mother said, police arrived at their home during the late evening searching for the girl after Allen reported her missing. Allen’s discipline--including restrictions on her coming and going--and the girl’s defiance set them on a collision course, with father-daughter shouting matches escalating into increasingly heated exchanges.

“He was just trying to keep a little grip on the situation,” said Joel Kroll, a close friend and former roommate of Allen’s. “She felt she was all the way grown . . . (and) wanted to wake up in the morning and see (her boyfriend).”

Debra Williams, Allen’s former wife, said her ex-husband’s rules seemed reasonable and were in keeping with similar restrictions she had imposed on the girl. But, she said, her daughter always demanded more freedom.

“She argued about her rights to come and go,” the mother said. “You get a boyfriend, and you want his company all the time. You have to set some limits. I don’t believe his rules or limits were any more than I had set.”

Sometimes, the girl’s mother and Kroll said, the arguments between father and daughter erupted into violence--a point on which police have refused to comment. Williams, who divorced Allen when the girl was 21 months old, said her daughter was “hurt and angry . . . and very humiliated” because her father had hit her.

In one incident last fall, Allen kicked down a bathroom door after his daughter screamed a profanity at him, Williams said. The girl was struck by the door and required stitches, she said. A distressed Allen called his ex-wife afterward, confessing that he was “having trouble controlling his temper,” she said. “He felt sick about it,” Williams said. “He was very sorry.”

It was a heart-wrenching turn of events for a relationship that had begun with hope and optimism.

Last summer, Allen and his daughter talked excitedly about her decision to stay in Los Angeles, which they agreed upon during her two-week visit after they became reacquainted through a flurry of phone calls and letters.

“She called me and said she wanted to get to know her dad,” the girl’s mother said. “She told me I had had her for 13 years and now I should give him a chance to get to know her.”

For Allen, it was a dream come true, friends said, a once in a lifetime chance to make up for the many lost years with his only child. A good-natured guy who friends said had been dealt more than his share of bad luck, Allen was determined to be the father his daughter never had.

For the troubled girl, it was a new beginning in a new city, an opportunity to forget the past and start life anew with dad. Stephen Williams said his niece had an “idyllic vision” of her new living situation.

“It sounds idyllic, I’ll come to California with my real dad who really loves me and he won’t make me doing anything I don’t want to do,” said Williams, describing the girl’s outlook upon leaving Texas.

It was just a matter of weeks, however, when things began to sour. The girl started skipping classes at Burbank Middle School in Highland Park and, after meeting her boyfriend through the church youth group, ran away with him several times.

It was not long before the girl became consumed by her feelings for the boy, friends and relatives said, and began deeply resenting her father’s efforts to monitor and control the relationship. In an act of disobedience, the couple rode a Greyhound bus to Tijuana where they were married April 2 by a Mexican attorney.

The boy’s mother said her son married Allen’s daughter only because she said she was pregnant. Kroll, Allen’s former roommate, said the girl later feigned a miscarriage and when her father rushed her to the hospital, doctors said she had never been pregnant.

The incident poisoned relations between the girl and her boyfriend’s family, with the boy’s mother urging him to break off the relationship, family members said. But her son refused, insisting that he loved the girl.

“We told him: ‘She’s gonna cause you a lot of trouble, that girl--a lot of headaches,”’ the boy’s sister said.

The girl’s mother offered a different view, insisting that her daughter was led astray by her older friends.

“I think she was manipulated by her friends,” Williams said. The older teen-agers, she said, pressured her daughter to participate in the killing and “pulled (her) along.”

The Rev. Jim Edwards, the youth group leader at Faith United, said it came “as a complete shock” to the church’s staff that any of the three teen-agers are linked to the murder. The three youths had met at the church and “never had any history of anything like this,” he said.

Allen had told friends shortly before his death that he was encouraged, that the situation with his daughter had improved. He had begun attending a parenting support group and his daughter seemed to be more cooperative, friends said.

“It was kind of rocky, but he loved her, and she expressed that she loved him a lot so they were trying to work on it,” Kroll said.

Stephen Williams, the girl’s uncle, said stunned family members have been left trying to “comprehend why she would feel the need to go to such an extreme.”

“Why did they feel that there were no other options?” he asked. “Why did they feel there was no other way out?”

The girl’s June 4 diary entry provides few clues to the youths’ motivation, but does give an eerie firsthand account of a grisly murder plot apparently hatched while the girl and her boyfriend visited the home of their 16-year-old friend.

“We got on a really weird subject ‘Murder,’ ” the girl wrote. “We have a plan to kill Daniel.” She added that “(the 16-year old) agreed to do the shooting!”

Later, she continued: “With all three of our brains . . . everything will work out pretty cool.”

According to the search warrant affidavit, the murder plan ran into a few glitches. Allen’s daughter told police that she and the 16-year-old drugged her father with the sleeping pills and tried to shoot him with a gun belonging to the older girl’s brother.

When they fired the gun, however, they missed and struck the wall. The boy arrived shortly afterward, as they had planned, with a shovel and gasoline to dispose of the body. When he discovered that Allen was not dead, he shot him in the head, covering the gun with a pillow to muffle the sound, the affidavit said.

The three teen-agers wrapped the girl’s father in blankets and drove to the railroad tracks, where they burned and buried the body in hopes of concealing his identity, the affidavit said. “The plan was to say that victim Allen had packed up and left and no one knew where he had gone,” it said.

The three friends returned to the dead man’s apartment, the statement said, where they fell asleep.