Blaze Bernstein’s cryptic final texts revealed in court as Woodward murder trial continues
19-year-old Blaze Bernstein, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, was murdered in January 2018. Courtesy of the Bernstein family
By Louis Keene April 11, 2024
In the last texts he sent before his gruesome death, Blaze Bernstein confessed to a friend that he had done “something really horrible for the story,” the attorney representing Bernstein’s accused murderer revealed Wednesday in court.
The second day of the trial of Samuel Woodward, who has pleaded not guilty to first degree murder with a hate crime enhancement, swirled around texts between him and Bernstein, revealing how the relationship between the victim and his killer — who only barely knew each other in high school — developed leading up to their fatal 2018 encounter.
Read to the jury before roughly 50 attendees in an Orange County courtroom Wednesday, Bernstein’s final messages deepened the mystery of what happened after Woodward picked Bernstein up from his parents’ home and before he allegedly stabbed him to death. Neither party, the texts convey, seemed to be representing himself honestly.
The subsequent testimony of Bernstein’s mother, which will continue Thursday, previewed a possible change of course by lead prosecutor Jennifer Walker, one that may portray the crime as not only anti-gay, but antisemitic. Woodward, who was linked to a neo-Nazi group at the time of Bernstein’s murder, will testify in the case.
Cryptic messages
Woodward’s attorney, Ken Morrison, in his opening remarks Wednesday, shared texts to support his argument that his client, raised by a homophobic father, lashed out at openly-gay Bernstein because he could not accept that he was possibly also gay. Woodward had boasted in diary entries about humiliating gay males by leading them on, calling them “sodomites” and other slurs.
Texts also indicate that Bernstein, meanwhile, was gleefully texting his friends about the prospect of seducing their ultra-conservative former classmate — even as he promised Woodward he’d keep their conversation secret.
Morrison conceded in his opening argument that his client, 20 at the time of the murder, had unlawfully killed Bernstein, 19. But he drew on Bernstein’s messages to build a case that the act was not premeditated or motivated by anti-gay hatred, but rather something Bernstein had done to provoke Woodward’s wrath. Morrison has not yet said what that provocation might have been.
The case struck a national chord six years ago amid a rise of white nationalist violence due to Woodward’s affiliation with Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group whose members were connected to multiple killings across the United States. Lead prosecutor Jennifer Walker said Tuesday in her opening arguments that after Bernstein invited him over, Woodward brought an Atomwaffen mask, a folding knife and a “shovel-like device” with him.
Bernstein, a University of Pennsylvania sophomore who was home for winter break when he was killed, was stabbed 28 times, coroners said. His body was discovered buried in a park near the family’s Lake Forest home, near Irvine, after a seven-day search. Blood matching Bernstein’s DNA was found on the knife, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Walker had said on the trial’s first day that Woodward’s “prey was gay people,” seemingly eliding Bernstein’s Jewishness as a possible source of his killer’s hatred. She took a different tack Wednesday, introducing the testimony of Bernstein’s mother, Jeanne Pepper, by asking what the family’s religion and race were.
“We are a Jewish family,” Pepper said.
Their first match
As sexuality and Jewish identity have foregrounded the trial’s first two days, the interplay of social media, dating apps and hookup culture has emerged as a secondary theme. Morrison has been explaining to jurors how dating app Tinder and messaging app Snapchat work and translating online slang like “lmfao.” (One word Bernstein messaged Woodward stumped Morrison, who apparently didn’t realize “hm” was a non-committal response, not an abbreviation.)
Walker had offered a glimpse of Bernstein and Woodward’s text messaging in her opening argument. In their first exchange on on Tinder in June 2017 — six months before the murder — Bernstein had “super-liked” Woodward, and when Woodward liked him in turn, Bernstein messaged him: “Wait, Sam Woodward?? Is that you??”
By the time he sent that message, Morrison said, Bernstein — apparently shocked by his right-wing former classmate’s appearance in a male-seeking-male dating context — had already sent a screenshot of Woodward’s profile to two close friends from their high school alma mater, Orange County School of the Arts. He told one that having sex with Woodward would be “legendary,” and offered a play-by-play as his flirtation with Woodward unfolded. Woodward had been rumored in Bernstein’s friend group to be closeted; here, Bernstein said, was the proof.
“We all knew it,” Bernstein wrote.
In the Tinder chat Woodward initially said that he was on Tinder looking for Black women to hook up with and guys to go deer hunting with, and that he had only matched with Bernstein because he wanted to catch up. Yet after Bernstein called him cute, Woodward said “you’re not too shabby looking yourself.” And when Bernstein said he was home working on a birthday gift for a friend, Woodward offered to drive over and help. Bernstein rebuffed him, saying it would be too complicated with his family home.
After he asked Bernstein about his sexual preferences, Woodward revealed that he’d been “kinda dishonest” with him: He’d only been curious how Bernstein would respond if he’d said he was into him. Bernstein — who had been chuckling with his friend about Woodward’s various covers — seemed annoyed, but let it go. Woodward subsequently ended the match.
Six months later, on Jan. 2, the two matched on Tinder again.
An ‘exception’
This time, Woodward came to his former classmate hat-in-hand, apologizing for their awkward interaction the previous spring. He said he had been “going through a weird time” in his life and alluded to battling a drug addiction, but said he was better now. Bernstein said he was glad Woodward was better, but also that he didn’t really care.
Woodward then asked, “Why did you like me if you didn’t care? I’m confused.” Bernstein replied that he thought Woodward was attractive and hadn’t recognized him at first. Nor had he understood, Bernstein added, that Woodward was straight.
After checking with Bernstein that no one was reading over his shoulder, Woodward said, “I might make an exception for you.”
“We’ve already done this prank, Sam,” Bernstein said. Woodward then asked if he had Snapchat. Bernstein replied with his handle, and the conversation moved to that app.
On Snapchat, messages disappear unless a user chooses to save them. The only saved message from their conversation was Bernstein sending his family’s home address at 10:37 p.m.
Morrison said evidence would show that his client immediately got in the car and drove over.
Fifty-nine minutes after he sent Woodward his home address, at 11:36 p.m. on Jan. 2, Bernstein messaged his friend Lily:
“I did something really horrible for the story,” he wrote.
He sent another message a few seconds later: “But also no one can ever know.”
He never replied to the friend’s concerned reply.
A mother’s testimony
After Morrison concluded, the prosecution called Bernstein’s mother to testify.
Pepper, who had complained publicly about the six-year wait for her son’s alleged murderer to face trial, struck a defiant pose on the stand. She shot looks at Morrison when his objections forced Walker to take circuitous routes to elicit certain responses. At least 10 of her friends, several from the Jewish community, were present in the courtroom to support her.
The primacy of Walker’s questions about the Bernsteins’ religious background signaled a possible shift in tactics from the day prior, when the prosecutor had mentioned Bernstein was gay and Jewish but did not elaborate. In addition to identifying as Jewish, Pepper said the family was practicing, though Walker did not ask her to elaborate before changing the subject to Bernstein’s sexual orientation and dating life.
Pepper said she and her husband, Gideon, discovered that Bernstein was “not heterosexual” by looking through his texts when he was 13. When that happened, Bernstein’s parents told him that his sexual orientation wasn’t important to them and that “we knew.” Bernstein neither confirmed nor denied their implication, she said.
In spite of what she had told her son, Pepper said, it took her a while to come to terms with it. “I always pictured him walking down the aisle with a lady on his arm,” she said. “When I realized that it was never going to happen that way, it was shocking to me.” And while she never saw him date, she had an inclination — later validated — that a friend he often visited in high school was a romantic partner.
Walker, the lead prosecutor, then turned the topic to Jan. 2, 2018. That day, Bernstein and his mother went grocery shopping at Costco; that night, Bernstein’s paternal grandparents came for dinner, and Bernstein — an avid chef — cooked what Pepper recalled as “a feast.”
Bernstein never told his mom he was leaving that night, and the next morning, when he did not emerge from his bedroom, Pepper first believed he was sleeping in and didn’t knock on his door to make sure he was home. Her concern grew after he missed a long-awaited dental procedure scheduled for that afternoon. Beginning to panic on her way into the dentist — Pepper had her own appointment — she left a message with Barbara, the housekeeper, asking if she had seen Blaze.
She heard back from Barbara afterward: He wasn’t in his room when she went to clean it. And he hadn’t been home all morning.
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