Orange County man receives life sentence for hate-motivated murder
Saying the killer had shown no remorse, a judge on Friday sentenced Samuel Woodward to life in prison without parole for murdering a gay former schoolmate in January 2018.
In July, an Orange County jury convicted Woodward of first-degree murder and found he was motivated by hate when he inflicted 28 stab wounds on Blaze Bernstein, a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student who was Jewish and gay.
On Friday, Judge Kimberly Menninger said the evidence showed that Woodward’s crime required planning and went beyond “a fit of rage.” From the time he picked up Bernstein in Lake Forest to the time he fled the nearby park where he had buried Bernstein’s body, just 1½ hours elapsed, the judge said.
“He had some ability — I don’t know how — to quickly dig a grave,” Menninger said.
While Woodward claimed that Bernstein provoked the stabbing by taking a photo of Woodward’s genitals, the judge said that “the facts don’t support this,” noting there was no evidence of any such photo.
Woodward, then 21, was driven by “pure hate and rage due to [Bernstein’s] sexual orientation and religious beliefs,” the judge said. She said the two former schoolmates had found themselves on “opposite ends of a culture war.”
Woodward kept a “hate diary” in which he boasted of scaring gay men, and his computer was full of anti-gay and anti-Jewish propaganda from the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group. The jury convicted him of a hate-crime enhancement, which applied to the victim’s sexual orientation.
Friday’s sentencing was scheduled in the morning but was delayed for much of the day by Woodward’s failure to appear, which the judge attributed to him being “ill.” The parties agreed to proceed without him.
“He was supposed to be in this courtroom but was too cowardly to do so,” Bernstein’s mother, Jeanne Pepper, told the court in her victim impact statement.
While she was desperately trying to find her missing son in January 2018, she told the court, the “calm and earnest-sounding” Woodward lied to her that Bernstein had been fine when he last saw him.
“He misled us to believe that Blaze had wandered off,” Pepper said. “Anyone with a stitch of remorse would have admitted the truth in the beginning, but there doesn’t appear to be any of that in this monster. ... He wanted to be the big man in Atomwaffen.”
Woodward and Bernstein had known each other casually years earlier at the Orange County School of the Arts. By early 2018, Woodward had dropped out of college and was living with his parents in Newport Beach, while Bernstein was staying with his parents in Lake Forest over winter break.
Bernstein and Woodward exchanged flirtatious messages, and Woodward suggested that he was bi-curious. Woodward picked Bernstein up and took him to a nearby park.
During the three-month trial, both sides portrayed 26-year-old Samuel Woodward as a young man who struggled with his sexuality growing up in a conservative Newport Beach family, with a particularly disapproving father.
Taking the stand at his murder trial, Woodward testified that he smoked marijuana at the park, went into a haze and discovered Bernstein touching his genitals. He said he feared Bernstein had taken a photo of his genitals, while prosecutor Jennifer Walker derided his account as “ridiculous.”
The prosecutor said Woodward, a former Eagle Scout, was hoping to raise his profile with the Atomwaffen Division and prove to himself that he wasn’t gay.
In Woodward’s belongings, police found a death’s-head mask — an emblem of the Atomwaffen — spattered with Bernstein’s blood. At Friday’s sentencing, Bernstein’s mother said she was haunted by the thought that her son was made “to die looking at an Atomwaffen mask.”
Woodward buried Bernstein in a shallow grave in the park. He told investigators he had been there with Bernstein but that Bernstein had wandered off without explanation. Bernstein’s body was found after a weeklong search.
Woodward’s lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Ken Morrison, devoted much of the three-month trial to assailing what he called the “Nazi kills gay Jew” narrative and portrayed his client as struggling with his sexuality while growing up in a conservative family.
He said Woodward was a socially awkward young man who suffered for years with undiagnosed autism and felt a “starvation for human connection” exploited by the extremist group.
Morrison said the killing was a “hideous crime” but had no connection to Woodward’s interest in the Atomwaffen Division. He asked the judge to give his client 28 years to life and complained that the court had excluded evidence useful to the defense, though the judge forbade him from mentioning specifics in court.
The Woodward family did not give a statement at the sentencing. When Morrison said the case had “destroyed the Woodward family,” Bernstein’s parents stood up abruptly and left the crowded courtroom.
Many of Bernstein’s friends and family wore T-shirts and caps that said #BlazeItForward, a movement to honor his memory and promote tolerance.
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