In 1995, Orange County's Dale Franklin Wensinger brandished a weapon at the driver of a vehicle and, in a separate incident, used a weapon during the rape and beating of a woman.
For those crimes, Wensinger received laughable, slap-on-the-wrist punishments: probation for the rape and one year in jail for the brandishing crime, according to court records.
Perhaps by 2002 he believed that committing brazen felonies in OC carried no meaningful consequences.
That's when Wensinger began to terrorize his neighbors with his Rottweiler.
]
Twice at Lilly King Park close to South Coast Plaza, he
allowed his dog to try to bite a man who was walking through
the area. During the second incident, the man said to Wensinger, “Wow!
That dog needs a shot.”
An angry Wensinger replied, “You want to shoot my dog?”
“No,” said the man. “He needs a shot. He is a hyper dog.”
According to court records, Wensinger then unleased the Rottweiler and yelled, “Attack! Attack!”
The dog chased the man down and tore a piece of flesh from his thigh.
Wensinger asked the frightened, wounded man, “Do you want more?”
Several
months later, another man at the same park watched
Wensinger and his Rottweiller chase an elderly man.
While that man screamed for help, Wensinger yelled
statements like, “I'm going to kill you” and “son of a bitch,” according to the court record.
Santa Ana police eventually arrested him, a jury found him guilty and a judge sentenced him to prison.
But Wensinger got lucky. When he appealed his conviction, a California Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana discovered that a court reporter had lost an official transcript of his trial. They reversed all of the convictions.
In
a new trial in 2010, another jury found Wensinger guilty of five
felonies involving assault and making criminal threats. His luck had
evaporated. His sentencing judge was Frank “Fry em” Fasel,
perhaps the most non-nonsense judge in OC history. Considering
the two prior unrelated convictions, Fasel handed the bad dog owner a 368-month prison sentence.
The defendant appealed again.
In a 21-page ruling this month,
appellate justices determined that Wensinger had repeatedly used his dog
“as a weapon” likely to “cause great bodily injury.” But they found that
one of the criminal threat convictions hadn't been constitutionally
valid. They reversed the jury's finding and Fasel's related 16-month punishment.
Upshot: For using his Rottweiler to abuse his neighbors while barking threats, the 48-year-old Wensinger is now serving a prison sentence tougher than some blood-loving murderers receive: 29 years and four months.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.