PARK RAPIDS — A Park Rapids woman recently pleaded guilty for her role as an after-the-fact accomplice in a stabbing last fall.
Danielle Westphal, 51, was originally charged with four felony counts as an accomplice of an attempted murder. Her husband, 44-year-old Charles Justus, allegedly instructed her to throw bloody jeans out of a car window while driving near Nevis.
Hubbard County sheriff’s deputies responded to a residence Oct. 4, 2025, where a man and his 5-year-old daughter were screaming for help from neighbors following the attack. Justus allegedly stabbed the man, believing Westphal was having an affair with him.
Westphal entered a guilty plea March 16 to being an accomplice of a first-degree assault, a felony.
“I knew throwing the jeans out the car window would also hinder [the Hubbard County Sheriff’s Office’s] investigation,” reads Westphal’s petition for a guilty plea. “I did this intentionally to help my husband.”
She is expected to be sentenced to five years of supervised probation at an April 20 hearing.
The state is seeking an upward durational departure from sentencing against Justus — or a harsher sentence from the state’s sentencing guidelines — due to aggravating factors and Justus’ decades of criminal history.
“The victim’s 5-year-old child was present and witnessed the defendant stab the victim multiple times,” stated the prosecution’s March 3 notice of intent for aggravated sentencing.
Other Minnesota judges have upheld that for justification of a harsher sentence before, reasoning that “committing the offense in front of the children was a particularly outrageous act and that while the children maybe were not technically victims of the crime, they were victims in another sense,” as cited in Minnesota v. Cox.
The other aggravating factor was Justus invading what the court views as the “zone of privacy” to carry out the assault, where people can reasonably expect to be safe inside their own homes.
Justus has a criminal record that begins in 2000 from California, and includes assault with a dangerous weapon, burglary and weapons offenses.
His next omnibus hearing is April 13.
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