Defense Targets Van Dam Lifestyle

A tearful Brenda van Dam sharply rejected defense suggestions Thursday that her sexually permissive lifestyle exposed her daughter, Danielle, to a deadly kidnapping.

The suburban San Diego mother told a jury of her terror and confusion the morning in early February when she discovered that her 7-year-old daughter was missing from her room.

When defense attorney Steven Feldman probed about the customs in her home, Van Dam responded icily: “There’s never been a sex party at my house.”

The 39-year-old mother weathered four hours on the stand, her testimony clear but at times halting. At one point, Van Dam glared directly at David Westerfield, who lived two doors away in the upscale Sabre Springs neighborhood and is now accused of kidnapping and murdering Danielle Van Dam. Westerfield returned her gaze and remained impassive.

The murder defendant’s attorney asked repeatedly about the sex habits of Van Dam and her husband, Damon, and whether they had sexual relations with the two women who came to their home and smoked marijuana and drank beer with them the night Danielle disappeared.

Brenda van Dam later went out with the two women to a neighborhood bar for a night of drinking and dancing--leaving her husband to watch Danielle and the couple’s two sons. The next morning, Danielle was gone.

The defense has said the lifestyle issues are relevant because those invited into the Van Dam home for sex and marijuana should have been considered as suspects.

During a break in her four hours of testimony, Van Dam began sobbing and virtually collapsed into the arms of Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeff Dusek. The prosecutor embraced her, spoke quietly in her ear, and helped dry tears on her cheeks. The jury was not present.

Feldman had protested to Superior Court Judge William Mudd on Wednesday that jurors might be influenced by seeing Van Dam crying in the courthouse hallway while waiting for her husband to finish testifying.

While Damon van Dam was largely stoic during his testi- mony -- which also dealt with marijuana use and sex habits--Brenda Van Dam appeared on the verge of breaking down on the stand. She frequently asked Feldman to repeat his questions and, at several points, looked imploringly at Dusek.

“He [Feldman] keeps confusing me,” she said.

Under questioning by Feldman, she conceded that she and her husband had had sex with another couple in their home in the months before Danielle disappeared.

“I don’t consider that to be a sex party,” she said.

Feldman asked a series of questions about Van Dam’s purported habits--suggestive dancing, risque Halloween parties and contact with both men and women. Prosecutor Dusek objected to several of the queries.

After a strenuous objection, Mudd told Van Dam she did not have to answer Feldman’s question about whether she would “observe your husband looking at naked 20-year-olds.”

Justin Brooks, executive director of the Institute for Criminal Defense Advocacy at California Western School of Law, said that while Feldman’s questioning of the grieving Brenda van Dam may seem “horrible,” it is Feldman’s job to determine “the level of control in the house and who had access to the home.”

Noting that Feldman took a less assertive tone with Brenda van Dam than with her husband, Brooks said: “I think Feldman did a good job of covering the ground. If he had been sharper, she might have broken down and been unable to testify at all.”

In his opening statement this week, Feldman suggested it made more sense that someone familiar with the home, not Westerfield, committed the crime.

Those who had been inside the Van Dam home before would much more likely have made a stealthy entrance and known which bedroom contained the sleeping child, he said.

But prosecutors allege that neighbor Westerfield sneaked into the home around midnight Feb. 1 and kidnapped Danielle, later suffocating her and dumping her body in a rural area 40 miles from the Sabre Springs neighborhood.

Her body was too decomposed to determine the cause of death or whether she had been molested, the county medical examiner testified Thursday.

Dusek alleges that Westerfield harbored fantasies about having sex with underage girls and kept a voluminous collection of child pornography at his home. The prosecutor said that Danielle’s hair and blood were found in Westerfield’s recreational vehicle.

Before Brenda van Dam’s emotional testimony, jurors heard the mother’s anguished 911 call. Judge Mudd overruled a defense objection that the tape would prejudice the jury.

“My daughter is not in her bed this morning. She’s only 7.... Oh my God! . . . Oh my God! . . . Oh my God!” says a panicky Van Dam as she gasped for breath.

“Take a deep breath, OK?” says the 911 operator. “Think confident thoughts and everything will be OK.”