Dateline: Unforgettable is re-examining the sickening murder of Tori Vienneau and her baby Dean by the child’s father, Dennis Potts, who decided to kill them both to avoid paying child support.
On July 26, 2006, Potts tricked his way into Tori’s San Diego apartment with an offer of dinner. The cops said he then knocked the 22-year-old unconscious and strangled her with the cord from a hair-straightening iron.
The twisted killer then hanged his son in his crib with a cellphone charger. It had been Dean’s 10-month birthday.
Potts and Tori had engaged in a casual sexual relationship before Dean was born, which allegedly included a period when Tori was living with another man, Neil Springstube.
When a paternity test revealed Dean was not his son, Springstube left Tori and moved to Florida. Tori then asked Potts to provide a paternity test, which he faked by mailing in his friend’s DNA.
Tori correctly suspected that Potts was avoiding his responsibilities and had tampered with the paternity test, so she insisted he submit to a court-supervised test. Potts decided to kill her and Dean instead. Subsequent tests determined that he was the father.
The evidence mounted against Dennis Potts in Tori Vienneau and Dean murder
The investigators caught Potts by examining his cellphone records, which placed him in the vicinity of Tori’s apartment when the murders occurred.
Watch the Latest on our YouTube ChannelThe cops also recovered internet searches from his hard drive that included “committing murder,” “the best way to kill someone,” “getting away with murder,” “how to cheat a swab paternity test,” and “getting out of child support.”
The killer’s legal team tried to blame Daniel Moen for the murder. Moen was a former roommate of Tori’s, and the couple had become close in the weeks before the murders. However, Moen was at work during the time of the murders.
Dennis Potts will likely die in prison following murder conviction
Potts was subsequently convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and was ordered to serve two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Tori’s mom, Dayna Herroz, reportedly made a strange request to the sentencing judge, which was granted. A large picture of the bodies of Tori and Dean in their casket on the day of their funerals has been hung in Potts’s jail cell.
Herroz explained, “I want him to live with it every day. It’s laminated, so he can’t cut it up; he can’t draw on it.” She also said that Potts’s decision to kill her daughter and his son “went beyond evil.”
Dateline: Unforgettable airs Thursdays at 8/7c on Oxygen.