Latest / True Crime California / TCC #2: The Wonderland Murders

Transcript

TCC #2: The Wonderland Murders · True Crime California

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to True Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy,
• 0:05
  and I'm glad you're here. Welcome back, everybody. This is
• 0:21
  episode two of True Crime California. Almost forgot the name
• 0:26
  of my own podcast. I almost I was twisted listeners.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Not anymore.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Very sadly, but happy to be doing this, and I'm
• 0:32
  really excited for my second case. It's a really big case.
• 0:36
  I decided to take on a hell of a case,
• 0:40
  a really iconic case in California true crime history. And weirdly,
• 0:44
  it also takes place only about a year after my
• 0:47
  first case, So the murder of Dorothy Stratton that happened
• 0:50
  in nineteen eighty and then this case, the murders take
• 0:53
  place in nineteen eighty one, and then the actual story
• 0:57
  takes place over a number of years after that, up
• 1:00
  until I believe, like the two thousands, like new information
• 1:04
  was still coming out, things were still coming to light.
• 1:08
  But anyway, all of that is to say that it's
• 1:11
  a really interesting case and I'm going to talk about
• 1:14
  the Wonderland murders now before I do that. Thanks to
• 1:16
  everybody who is tuning in. I know a lot of
• 1:18
  people are still listening on the Twisted Listers podcast. I'm
• 1:22
  not going to be posting most of my episodes there,
• 1:26
  so you're going to have to find me on Spotify
• 1:28
  or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. I should be
• 1:31
  on all the major distribution podcast distributors or whatever the
• 1:35
  hell they're called. Anyway, I will post this one as
• 1:38
  well on Twisted Listeners, but after that it's all just
• 1:41
  going to be on True Crime California. I am getting
• 1:44
  downloads on that channel, so thank you everybody who's come over.
• 1:48
  I will do my best to link it in Twisted Listers,
• 1:50
  to link it on my Instagram, which is just True
• 1:53
  Crime California. But just come find me and come listen.
• 1:56
  And thanks everybody who has already listened. There's quite a
• 1:58
  few of you, and super stoked, super excited for the support.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: Think you think you? Thank you.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: All right, let's get in to this crazy, crazy ass
• 2:08
  fucking case. So, as I mentioned, this is the case
• 2:12
  of the Wonderland murders. There's so much to this story.
• 2:17
  I'm going to try to cover a lot and keep
• 2:19
  it interesting, but also condense it down. I read quite
• 2:22
  a few books about this, articles had to go into
• 2:26
  the archives. It was super fun, actually, to kind of
• 2:30
  do this research, so hopefully it results in a pretty
• 2:33
  great second and possibly third episode. We'll see how long
• 2:36
  this one goes. So this is a really iconic murder.
• 2:39
  It took place in Los Angeles in nineteen eighty one
• 2:41
  in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood, which is a really cool
• 2:46
  neighborhood in Los Angeles. I actually work at a venue there.
• 2:50
  For people who don't know, I do like event catering
• 2:52
  in a lot of weddings, and there's a venue there
• 2:55
  called the Houdini Estate. And now the Houdini Estate is
• 2:57
  obviously named after Harry Houdini because for a time, I
• 3:02
  think in the forties something like that. I'm not a
• 3:04
  Houdini expert. I apologize. He stayed at this estate that's
• 3:08
  like up on a hill in this area, and it's super,
• 3:11
  super beautiful from there, this whole it's just a magical area.
• 3:16
  The name of the street is actually Wonderland. That's where
• 3:19
  Wonderland Murders comes from. And it's a perfect name for
• 3:22
  this street and this neighborhood and sort of the vibe.
• 3:24
  It's definitely like artists and hipsters, and at this point
• 3:28
  it's rich people, which it kind of was back then,
• 3:31
  But in any case, it's a really magical and really
• 3:33
  interesting area and just a really iconic area. Now this
• 3:38
  is definitely a really nice area, but considering the time
• 3:43
  that we're in, like the year, we have to think
• 3:45
  about Los Angeles as a whole. And during this time,
• 3:48
  this was sort of the heyday of like cocaine sex,
• 3:52
  a very hard partying Hollywood lifestyle. So everybody was just
• 3:56
  doing blow everybody who was high on cocaine all the time.
• 4:00
  You know, it was everything from people in the street
• 4:03
  to the Hollywood elite. Everybody ooh that rhymed. Everybody was
• 4:06
  just doing this. And it's also right in the middle
• 4:10
  of a very big change regarding pornography and adult films.
• 4:16
  And the reason I'm saying that is because, as anybody
• 4:18
  who knows anything about this case knows, pornography and a
• 4:22
  particular porn star plays into this story quite a bit.
• 4:26
  So to talk a little bit more about pornography in America,
• 4:29
  it wasn't actually until nineteen seventy three that became legal
• 4:32
  in America, but you could or before then, sorry, you
• 4:35
  could get up to ten years in prison for being
• 4:38
  in producing, or selling adult films and in California. I
• 4:42
  think it took even a little bit longer for those
• 4:45
  restrictions to sort of be lifted. But I saw to you,
• 4:47
  like the moment they were there were like hundreds of films.
• 4:50
  It became a huge industry basically same day and has
• 4:54
  not slowed down to this day. And you know, my
• 4:56
  personal feelings aside. You know, the different between can and
• 5:00
  showed is very different. Do I believe there should be
• 5:02
  regulations against people starring in adult films? No?
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: Do I watch them or support the industry? No.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: So it's you know, it's a complicated issue. But all
• 5:12
  of that said, nineteen seventy three was where everything sort
• 5:15
  of started to turn around. And within the next you know,
• 5:19
  five ten years, the way people thought about, you know,
• 5:23
  nude models, pornography started to kind of change as well.
• 5:26
  The eighties were a hell of a time, that's all
• 5:28
  I'm gonna say. So all that said, let's go back
• 5:32
  in time to nineteen forty four in Columbus, Ohio. This
• 5:35
  is when the main player in our story, John Holmes,
• 5:39
  was born. Now, John was actually fathered by a man
• 5:41
  whose last name was Estes, but as the man was
• 5:44
  out of the picture very very early on if he
• 5:47
  was ever in the picture at all. John's mother decided
• 5:50
  to give John the last name of her on again,
• 5:52
  off again husband, Edgar Holmes, even though he wasn't John's
• 5:56
  biological father. Now, these two had a really relationship. They'd
• 6:01
  been married three times between nineteen thirty six and nineteen
• 6:04
  forty seven, and Edgar was seventeen years Mary's senior. So
• 6:09
  the dynamic here is not great. And I think we
• 6:12
  should keep in mind this dynamic of the older man
• 6:15
  and the younger woman because it absolutely comes into play
• 6:17
  later on. Edgar was also a hardcore alcoholic, and he
• 6:22
  was abusive to the children, And in basically every retelling
• 6:26
  of John Holmes's young life, you will read or hear
• 6:29
  about this story, which is that one night Edgar came
• 6:32
  home so drunk that he vomited on to the children
• 6:35
  before passing out. So I imagine they were probably all on
• 6:38
  the couch and he just puked on them and passed
• 6:41
  the fuck out. Now, finally, when John was seven years old,
• 6:43
  his mother remarried another man who wasn't much better and
• 6:47
  basically just ignored the children. So, you know, just going
• 6:51
  from bad to worse to just kind of whatever, like
• 6:54
  he does not have a good family life, he does
• 6:57
  not have good models for behavior. Things were just kind
• 7:00
  of bleak. He's in Ohio. It's just not great. So
• 7:04
  from there, when John Holmes was fifteen, supposedly, I don't
• 7:09
  know if is totally accurate, but apparently you could do
• 7:12
  this back then, he enlisted in the army. He got
• 7:15
  his mother's permission and he signed up. From there, he
• 7:18
  lived in Germany and he was in for about four years,
• 7:21
  and when he was nineteen he was honorably discharged and
• 7:24
  then went to live in New York. Now, his time
• 7:27
  in New York is pretty difficult to track. He himself
• 7:29
  later wrote an autobiography and in it he told a
• 7:32
  lot of tales of his time in New York working
• 7:34
  as a jiggalow and you know, talking about all this
• 7:37
  money he made. In truth, it's anybody's guest what he
• 7:40
  did for money or how he spent his time Above
• 7:43
  all else, John Holmes is a fucking liar. And because
• 7:47
  at that time he wasn't famous at all, nobody really
• 7:49
  paid attention to him or knew what he was up to.
• 7:51
  Before he became the infamous Johnny Wadd which is his
• 7:55
  most famous stage name. He got it as a porn actor.
• 7:58
  I'll talk a little bit more about it later. Anyway,
• 8:01
  after a while, he moved to la for no known reason,
• 8:03
  but likely because he ran into trouble in New York.
• 8:06
  And he worked a bunch of odd jobs, including as
• 8:09
  an ambulance driver. And this is where he met Sharon Jebanini,
• 8:13
  who's about a year older than John and worked as
• 8:15
  a nurse. The two married within five months of meeting,
• 8:18
  when John was just twenty one years old, so I
• 8:20
  guess she would have been twenty two. And I want
• 8:22
  to call a few things out at this point, starting
• 8:24
  with the fact that the two of them hadn't ever
• 8:26
  had sex with each other until after they were married. Now,
• 8:28
  obviously John is talking about all these exploits. He's a
• 8:31
  jiggalo in New York and blah blah blah, blah blah.
• 8:33
  He goes on about having this wealthy benefactor who gave
• 8:36
  him a bunch of money. So you know, he's not
• 8:38
  a virgin, but Sharon was. And this is really crazy
• 8:42
  for a number of reasons. I mean, I guess back
• 8:45
  then it was more common to not have sex before
• 8:47
  you're married. Now it's like a free for all all
• 8:49
  the time. But the main thing about this that was
• 8:53
  so crazy to me is the reason that John Holmes
• 8:55
  ever had anybody look at him twice was because he
• 8:58
  has an absolutely massive penis. Now there's no official measurement
• 9:02
  on record, but I mean you can watch his movies
• 9:05
  and see for yourself. The thing is huge, and it's
• 9:07
  rumored to have been anywhere between ten and sixteen inches long. Now,
• 9:11
  he had a couple of friends who were in the
• 9:13
  industry with him who claimed that he measured it in
• 9:15
  front of them a few times, which super weird but
• 9:17
  maybe not for you know, that type of lifestyle. And
• 9:21
  one of his friends said, oh, he measured in front
• 9:22
  of me.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: All the time. It was thirteen and a half inches. Now.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: On top of the length, this thing was girthy as
• 9:27
  fuck as well. So it's just like a crazy it's
• 9:30
  like a I don't know, it's like two beer cans
• 9:32
  end to end. Maybe even more so as a former
• 9:36
  virgin myself, I can't think about taking that on without
• 9:39
  shivers going down my spine.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: Like it's fucked up.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: In any case, So they got together and you know John,
• 9:47
  I wanted to also kind of talk about John's early life.
• 9:50
  In his autobiography, he talks about losing his virginity when
• 9:54
  he's eight years old, but in reality, it was more
• 9:57
  likely that he was sexually assaulted, I mean, basically raped
• 10:01
  by a thirty six year old neighbor woman when he
• 10:03
  was twelve. Now in his book, he's kind of playing
• 10:06
  these things up. It's like a brag for him. But
• 10:09
  I mean, that's that's child abuse, that's sexual abuse of
• 10:12
  a child.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Like it's fucked up.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: And so, you know, a big part of me feels
• 10:16
  really bad for John the child. But John Holmes the
• 10:20
  adult is just an absolute fucking piece of shit. But
• 10:23
  it is interesting to think about all of the things
• 10:25
  that happened to him that sort of led to that,
• 10:28
  and how his giant penis was as much a curse
• 10:31
  as it was, you know, a blessing in his eyes.
• 10:35
  So John and Sharon are seemingly happily married. Sharon never
• 10:38
  knew about John's alleged past as a jigglow. John had
• 10:42
  a steady job.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: She was a nurse.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: He was no longer working as an ambulance driver, but
• 10:46
  he was working. You know, things were fine. But while
• 10:50
  some men have a taste for the finer, things in life.
• 10:53
  John had a taste for the less fine things in life.
• 10:56
  He enjoyed gambling and partying, and he would go out
• 10:59
  to the casinos by himself quite often. Now, one night,
• 11:03
  while he was at a casino, he had to go
• 11:06
  to the bathroom, so he went and used a urinal
• 11:08
  and he was approached by a photographer who decided to
• 11:12
  sneak a peek over the urinal divider and look at
• 11:15
  John's junk and was like, my friend, you have a
• 11:17
  gift from there. John began making porno films, but remember
• 11:22
  this is the sixties, so they were still illegal at
• 11:24
  this time. He had to work in the shadows, but
• 11:26
  was making good money, anywhere from twenty to one hundred
• 11:29
  dollars per film, and he was making hundreds in just
• 11:32
  a few years. He eventually told Sharon, and she wasn't happy,
• 11:37
  but she didn't divorce or even leave him.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: She just sort of started.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Cohabitating with him. So they uncoupled sexually because she was
• 11:45
  just like, this is not fucking cool with me. But
• 11:48
  she loved him, and she was like a very you know,
• 11:51
  she's a very old fashioned woman obviously, so she never
• 11:54
  left him. In nineteen sixty nine, while John was doing
• 11:58
  all of these you know, illicit videos and the shadows
• 12:01
  and trying to not get caught. A court ruling made
• 12:04
  it legal to have pornographic movies in your own home,
• 12:08
  thereby opening up the country to such classic films as
• 12:11
  Deep Throat from nineteen seventy two and a little bit
• 12:14
  later Debbie Does Dallas in nineteen seventy eight, among hundreds
• 12:18
  and hundreds of other films. So pornography still wasn't fully legal,
• 12:23
  and John ended up getting arrested for prostitution and I
• 12:27
  forget what it was like pandering something, but he decided
• 12:31
  to become an informant for the LAPD to avoid jail time.
• 12:35
  This was the start of a long and storied relationship
• 12:38
  between John and the LAPD. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
• 12:41
  Suff I said to say, this guy would do anything
• 12:43
  to get out of trouble, and we'll kind of see
• 12:45
  that as the story unfolds. Now, John in his career
• 12:51
  became the character Johnny wadd This is starting in nineteen
• 12:56
  seventy one, and he was like it was like supposed
• 12:59
  to be kind of noir film. He was a detective
• 13:03
  trying to hunt certain things down and of course, he
• 13:05
  just had to have sex with multiple women in order
• 13:07
  to do it. So these movies were a fucking smash hit.
• 13:12
  I think there's like six of them that have to
• 13:15
  do with him. There's one just called like Johnny wadd
• 13:19
  And from there he just became like a fucking star.
• 13:23
  Everybody knew him, everybody wanted to know him. He was like,
• 13:27
  despite being a pornographic, you know, triple X star, he
• 13:31
  was known really well in the mainstream world. And as
• 13:34
  his fame grew, so did his love of partying. Now
• 13:38
  he was making as much as three thousand dollars a
• 13:40
  day shooting these films, and he was, you know, had
• 13:45
  good money for a while, but the party life will
• 13:48
  drain you pretty quick. And even though you know, he
• 13:52
  started to associate with people in Hollywood, a lot of
• 13:55
  those people were the wrong people. Now, like I said,
• 13:58
  we're entering into sort of the heyday of cocaine, freebasing,
• 14:02
  freebasing cocaine. It's like basically kind of like crack. I
• 14:05
  don't know, it's not crack, but basically you use baking
• 14:08
  soda and you bake the cocaine down and then you
• 14:10
  smoke it, and it's like the purest form of it,
• 14:12
  but it also takes like a ton of cocaine and
• 14:15
  reduces it down to a tiny little bit. So it's
• 14:17
  the most expensive way to do this. And in any case,
• 14:21
  Johnny wadd here got really fucking into this. He started
• 14:24
  just snorting cocaine, and before you know it, he's freebasing, which,
• 14:28
  on top of being way more expensive, is also far
• 14:31
  more addictive than just snorting cocaine. And on top of that,
• 14:35
  using this, you know, using drugs, using cocaine freebasing, it
• 14:39
  affected his ability to stay erect.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: And therefore to have sex and therefore to work.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: So he's using the money he has to buy these drugs.
• 14:48
  He's getting addicted to these drugs and is making it
• 14:51
  difficult for him to work, which makes it difficult.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: For him to get money.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: So John starts to turn to crime. Like I said,
• 14:59
  he he's meeting all the wrong people in Hollywood. He
• 15:01
  starts to meet some fences that can sell you know,
• 15:04
  his stolen property offenses, like somebody who sells your stolen property.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: I basically kind of just said it.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: And he starts, you know, thieving, he starts robbing. He's
• 15:14
  just doing anything he can, you know, he's running up
• 15:17
  Sharon's credit cards, he's stealing people's jewelry. He's just doing
• 15:22
  anything that he can to make money, and the situation
• 15:25
  is just getting, you know, more and more dire, more
• 15:27
  and more kind of pathetic. He's running out of money,
• 15:30
  and his addiction got up to being more than he
• 15:33
  was making in a day, even at the top of
• 15:35
  his game, before.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: All of this went super sideways.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Though, I did want to go back a little bit
• 15:41
  and to say that John did have a very lucrative career,
• 15:44
  but he also worked as an apartment manager with his
• 15:47
  wife Sharon in Glendale, California. It's here, in nineteen seventy
• 15:52
  six that he meets then fifteen year old Don Schiller.
• 15:57
  When he met Don, he said something about how it's
• 15:59
  too bad she was so young, But it quickly became
• 16:03
  clear that he didn't care at all about her age,
• 16:06
  and within a very short time, John was able to
• 16:09
  befriend Don and then seduce her. They became sexually active
• 16:14
  pretty quickly, and before John, before John. Before long, John
• 16:18
  was controlling down entirely. She never even finished the tenth grade. Now,
• 16:23
  I want to take a minute to talk a little
• 16:25
  bit about Don, because she plays into this story. And
• 16:27
  also I think her story, which isn't exactly the Wonderland story,
• 16:32
  is still a story worth telling on its own. And
• 16:35
  in fact, she has a really great book I read
• 16:37
  called The Road through Wonderland Surviving John Holmes. It's a
• 16:42
  really interesting, raw kind of take on her experience, and
• 16:46
  it gives you a really in depth, sort of detailed,
• 16:50
  you know, telling of this side of John Holmes that
• 16:54
  I think a lot of Hollywood movies and a lot
• 16:56
  of you know, stories don't really really drive home in
• 17:00
  a way that they should, because this guy was a
• 17:02
  fucking evil piece of shit, and even you know, watching
• 17:06
  the movie Wonderland, they make him sympathetic and it's really
• 17:09
  problematic to me. So reading her book was really great
• 17:12
  for giving me a lot of perspective about this case
• 17:15
  and who he was that I think was missing in
• 17:17
  a lot of mainstream media that discussed this case. Even
• 17:20
  when they sort of went in on him, she was
• 17:23
  kind of just glossed over, and I think that's really unfortunate.
• 17:26
  Don Schiller was born in nineteen sixty to an American
• 17:29
  gi father and a German immigrant mother. She had a
• 17:33
  younger sister and also a younger brother, Wayne, who was
• 17:35
  four years younger than she was. Her parents were happy
• 17:38
  for a time, but her father unfortunately went away to
• 17:41
  Vietnam and when he came back he was a completely
• 17:44
  different man. He moved the family from New Jersey to
• 17:47
  Florida and then left the family there for years while
• 17:50
  he went overseas. He convinced his grandmother to sell her
• 17:53
  home in New Jersey and move to Florida, and then
• 17:56
  basically just fucking abandoned the family. Turned There was a
• 18:00
  lot of abuse, and her parents divorced when she was
• 18:04
  fifteen because her father brought another woman back with him
• 18:07
  from overseas. So her father then moved out to California
• 18:11
  and she and her younger sister, Terry went with him,
• 18:14
  and that's where she met John Holmes. Don's dad was
• 18:19
  not great. He got her into smoking weed. He was
• 18:23
  very I mean, I feel for the guy. He probably
• 18:26
  had a lot of PTSD, but you know, he's taking
• 18:29
  it out on his kids and they're just not being
• 18:32
  set up for success. You know, Don said that she
• 18:34
  would roll him joints before leaving for school in the morning,
• 18:37
  So clearly he's a very damaged man and he's damaging
• 18:41
  his children. Then leaving them, you know, open to being
• 18:44
  taken you know in by a disgusting creep like John Holmes.
• 18:49
  So John Holmes meets Don and he just love bombs
• 18:52
  her and they end up being together for about six
• 18:55
  years now. During their time together, John became more and
• 18:58
  more addicted to freebasing, and on top of his own
• 19:00
  porn career, he would also not only get Dawn addicted
• 19:05
  to the drugs, but he would force her to sell
• 19:08
  her body for drug money. Their time together is detailed
• 19:14
  in her book in such a fucked up way, like
• 19:17
  the things that she says that he did to her,
• 19:19
  and obviously.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: They're all true.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: He would beat her, he would rape her, He would
• 19:24
  force her to you know, do sex work to fund
• 19:28
  his addictions. He would leave her for days at a time,
• 19:32
  not only in cheap hotels where she was kicked out
• 19:35
  numerous times because of his drug issues and the fights
• 19:38
  they would get into, which were really just him beating her,
• 19:41
  but he also when they finally took off out of Glendale,
• 19:45
  he took Sharon's car and he would leave Don in
• 19:48
  it for days at a time while he was gone
• 19:51
  running drugs for people to make money. And that is
• 19:54
  what John Holmes did eventually, is he became a drug
• 19:57
  runner so that he could keep his addiction going. And
• 20:01
  you know, Don would talk about if he came back
• 20:04
  and couldn't score or things didn't go well, he would
• 20:06
  take it out on her. She talks about one time
• 20:09
  he beat her so badly that he broke multiple of
• 20:12
  her ribs and almost killed her, and she said he
• 20:16
  had not treated her well in ages, and he was
• 20:19
  so scared that he had gone too far and probably
• 20:22
  just that he would get in trouble that he went
• 20:24
  back to like love bombing her. But he started with
• 20:28
  the love bombing. He took a fifteen year old, you know,
• 20:31
  when he's in his fucking thirties, he's like twenty years
• 20:34
  older than her, and he love bombs her until she
• 20:38
  just gives him whatever he wants, and then he gets
• 20:40
  her under his spell. He gets her addicted to drugs
• 20:43
  and he abuses her in unimaginable fucking ways. And I'll
• 20:47
  get into more detail on that a little bit farther
• 20:49
  into the story, but I just kind of wanted to
• 20:50
  set the scene there because I think it's really important
• 20:53
  to kind of look at all of the people in
• 20:55
  the story and how this disgusting man harmed them and
• 21:00
  their lives up because this guy's just the worst. Now,
• 21:02
  we sort of set the scene and introduced you to
• 21:05
  a lot of the people and really talked about John Holmes.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: I'm going to.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: Introduce a few more people to the story now. As
• 21:10
  I had mentioned, John was getting into crime to support
• 21:12
  his drug habit. He'd met a ton of really shitty
• 21:15
  people around Hollywood. You know, Hollywood was in the throes
• 21:18
  of drug addictions and party culture, and you know a
• 21:23
  lot of people knew people who were into some bad shit.
• 21:27
  And nobody was into more bad shit than the infamous
• 21:30
  Eddie Nash, a nightclub owner and cocaine dealer with his
• 21:34
  hands in many pots, who allegedly owned the police.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: And I think it's kind of true.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Eddie owned celebrity hangout clubs like The Odyssey, the Seven
• 21:44
  C's Nightclub. He owned a bunch of strip clubs, gay clubs.
• 21:47
  He had a club for every type of person. He
• 21:50
  didn't care. He just wanted your money, and he sold
• 21:53
  drugs a lot of them. He lived in what is
• 21:57
  still one of the nicer areas of Studio City, which
• 22:00
  is just over the hill from Hollywood in the valley,
• 22:02
  and it's weird because I swear I've driven by his
• 22:03
  house and like didn't even know it. There's the streets
• 22:06
  called like the Donahs, it's de Na. I always thought
• 22:08
  it was Donia, like you know, Spanish, but apparently everybody
• 22:11
  just calls them the Donahs. But anyway, he lived there
• 22:15
  in this really nice house because he was selling a
• 22:18
  fuck ton of drugs. He had all these night clubs,
• 22:21
  and he had a full time living bodyguard named Gregory Dials.
• 22:25
  Gregory Dowles was a three hundred pound karate master who
• 22:29
  carried a gun at all times and lived with Eddie,
• 22:33
  like I said, and sort of almost took care of.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: Him in like a weird way.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: Gregory had a crazy sort of reputation. There were stories
• 22:42
  of him chasing a man out of one of Eddie's
• 22:44
  clubs with a loaded gun and unloading it into his
• 22:48
  car across Hollywood Boulevard at two thirty in the afternoon.
• 22:53
  So just in broad fucking daylight, this guy is shooting
• 22:56
  out of man into his vehicle. He could have hit anybody,
• 22:59
  He could have hit a.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: Bunch of cars.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: So the guy is pretty pretty fucking gnarly. Let's just
• 23:03
  say that so Eddie and John became friends. Eddie really
• 23:09
  liked John, despite the fact that most other.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: People did not. I think he liked that.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: He was a porn star, probably the most famous one
• 23:16
  around in the at the time. And Eddie was a
• 23:18
  weird fucking dude who liked to do crazy shit, like
• 23:22
  he would have people come over and play Russian Roulette
• 23:24
  in front of them just to freak them the fuck out.
• 23:27
  He would also have people come over and sit in
• 23:29
  his living room and he would leave them there for
• 23:32
  like hours, and he would leave drugs out and there
• 23:34
  were two way mirrors there, and if people fucked up
• 23:38
  and used any of his drugs, he'd kick them out,
• 23:40
  and they were fucking like out of the club, like
• 23:42
  they couldn't ever deal with him again. So this guy
• 23:44
  was really weird and he was freebasing like eight thousand
• 23:47
  dollars a day, like ounces and ounces every single day.
• 23:51
  So he's a radic. His brain's all fucked up. He's
• 23:54
  just a weird, bad fucking man. Eddie Nash was a
• 23:58
  Palestinian immigrant. His birth name was Adele Nosrala, who came
• 24:03
  to America when he was twenty two years old with
• 24:05
  only seven.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Dollars in his pocket. He built his.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: Fortune in the beginning through hard work and started small
• 24:12
  with a hot dog stand he called Chuck's Beef. He
• 24:16
  sold hot dogs in Hollywood, but also did some unknown
• 24:19
  and likely unsavory things and was able to save money
• 24:22
  until he could buy more and more clubs and build
• 24:25
  his empire. And he had like a punk rock club,
• 24:28
  and he would sell most of his drugs out of there.
• 24:31
  So he would sell kludes, which don't even exist anymore,
• 24:34
  but he would do you know, all sorts of his
• 24:36
  illegal activities out of that club. Eddie was a ruthless
• 24:41
  businessman and everybody knew who knew him was terrified of him.
• 24:45
  You know, Everybody called him evil. Like John Holmes said
• 24:48
  he was the most evil man he'd ever met, and
• 24:50
  I'm like, I think you're the most evil man you've
• 24:51
  ever met. But regardless, Eddie was fucking crazy, super scary.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: John once told Don like the there's hundreds of bodies
• 25:01
  buried in the desert and nobody will ever find them.
• 25:02
  And that's all Eddie Nash And to be to be
• 25:05
  totally honest, I don't doubt that. Like, he's a scary ass,
• 25:08
  fucking guy. He's also a really trippy guy in that
• 25:12
  he would always kind of be there for his friends,
• 25:14
  Like if one of his friends got in trouble, he
• 25:16
  would help them out, but then he would always kind
• 25:19
  of want something in return, which is probably not surprising.
• 25:21
  And one of these instances in particular that is outlined
• 25:25
  in Don's book is one time when John Holmes got
• 25:29
  arrested for drugs. Don anonymously called.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: Eddie Nash and Eddie bailed him out.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: In return, Eddie basically told John, if you don't tell
• 25:39
  me who that woman was who called, I'm gonna fucking
• 25:41
  cut you off from drugs and you're gonna be in deep.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: Shit with me.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: So he introduced Don to Eddie as his niece Gabrielle,
• 25:49
  and then forced Don to have sex with Eddie. Now
• 25:52
  Eddie drugged her, likely with heroin, and basically raped her
• 25:55
  while she was unconscious, and John had no problem with this,
• 25:58
  like he just wanted to save his own ass. So
• 26:01
  in any case, really bad fucking people here. He was
• 26:05
  extremely rich, He sold copious amount of drugs, he had
• 26:08
  popular nightclubs, and he liked to party really hard. By
• 26:12
  the time this whole situation takes place, Eddie Nash had
• 26:14
  already had one lung removed and one of his nasal
• 26:17
  cavities was like gone because of all the drugs he did,
• 26:20
  Like I said, upwards of eight thousand dollars in free
• 26:23
  based cocaine every single day. So there's a couple movies
• 26:27
  that are inspired by the John Holmes case. We're talking
• 26:30
  Boogie Nights. They also did Wonderland and Alfred Molina plays
• 26:35
  a character inspired by Eddie Holmes in Boogie Nights. You
• 26:38
  should watch it. It's fucking crazy and it's so spot on.
• 26:41
  I've already seen the movie, but after I realized that's
• 26:43
  what it was like who he was playing, I went
• 26:46
  back and watched the scenes with him, and it's fucking crazy.
• 26:49
  So Eddie would always wear a Maroon's silk robe and
• 26:52
  a speedo and that's just like how he lived his
• 26:53
  fucking life. So now we've set the scene with Eddie.
• 26:57
  So after they become friends, John would spend hours at
• 27:00
  Eddie's house. He would also spend thousands of dollars there
• 27:03
  as well, and he would also do Eddie's drugs for free.
• 27:06
  But as many drug addicts do, he would get too
• 27:09
  deep into debt with Eddie and have to find his
• 27:11
  drugs elsewhere for a while until he could do some
• 27:13
  drug running to pay off his debt. And when this happened,
• 27:17
  he would hit up Ron Lnnius and the Wonderland Gang. Now,
• 27:21
  the people in this so called gang included Ron Lonnius,
• 27:23
  who was the leader of the gang. He was a
• 27:25
  drug dealer and drug user and had done murder for
• 27:28
  hire and was just a ruthless piece of shit. And
• 27:32
  on top of doing murder for hire, he just killed
• 27:35
  people like He was the kind of guy that if
• 27:37
  you pissed him off, if you crossed him, he would
• 27:39
  fucking kill you dead. And he was a suspect in
• 27:42
  multiple murder cases over the years, including when this story happens.
• 27:47
  It was suspected and he was probably going to be
• 27:49
  arrested for a murder. He was thirty seven years old
• 27:52
  at the time of this story. Ron's wife, Susan Lannias,
• 27:55
  was not super involved in like the gang, but she
• 27:59
  was around. She was on again, off again with Ron.
• 28:03
  She was a drug user. She was twenty nine. We
• 28:07
  also have Billy Deverell, who is Ron's right hand man
• 28:10
  sort of a co leader of the Wonderland Gang. He
• 28:13
  apparently was something of a decent person who would go
• 28:15
  into deep depressions over his actions, but ultimately he was
• 28:18
  a violent drug addict. He was forty four. Then we
• 28:21
  have Joy Miller. This is Billy Deverell's girlfriend and the
• 28:24
  lease holder for the house. She was formerly married to
• 28:27
  a Beverly Hill's attorney and had two daughters. But she
• 28:30
  became a drug addict. I believe after taking Hills for pain.
• 28:36
  She had actually had breast cancer and had sort of
• 28:38
  just gotten over it. And I believe that the use
• 28:41
  of the pain meds that she took during that time
• 28:43
  had led to her use of heroin. Now she was
• 28:45
  forty six. The next person is David Lynde. He was
• 28:49
  a biker from NorCal. He was in the Arian Brotherhood,
• 28:52
  spent most of his adult life in prison. He was
• 28:55
  forty at the time that this goes down, and he
• 28:57
  had come to Los Angeles to hang out with Ron
• 28:58
  and get some drugs and also out of Sacramento where
• 29:01
  he'd run into a lot of trouble. And with him
• 29:03
  he brought Barbara Butterfly Richardson, who was his twenty two
• 29:07
  year old girlfriend.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: So again we've got a forty year old with a
• 29:10
  twenty two year old. These people are all trash.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: So they were called the Wonderland Gang because they lived
• 29:15
  in that house on Wonderland Avenue. It was eighty seven
• 29:18
  sixty three. Wonderland There was and still is a very or.
• 29:21
  It was and still is a very nice area. And additionally,
• 29:24
  before the gang lived in that house, the band Paul
• 29:27
  Revere and the Raiders stayed in that exact house as well,
• 29:31
  so it was a well known house. It was a
• 29:33
  very nice but chill area and it was weird that
• 29:36
  they lived there and had the lifestyle they did because
• 29:38
  they would throw wild parties and have people at the
• 29:40
  house all hours of the day and night. They would
• 29:43
  do cocaine, they drank, they had loud parties, they did heroin.
• 29:47
  Most of the Wonderland Gang was like you know, horribly
• 29:50
  addicted to heroin. So they were addicts, criminals, and they
• 29:54
  were just a lot of trouble. And while John was
• 29:56
  a regular at their house, he was never a part
• 29:58
  of their gang, most because ron Lonnius fucking hated him
• 30:02
  and in return, John Holmes feared and likely hated ron Lannius.
• 30:06
  But because of the drugs, John always played nice. If
• 30:10
  it hasn't been well established yet. John Holmes has no morals.
• 30:13
  He has no problem using anybody and everybody to get
• 30:16
  what he wants. And he's just a scummy, wormy piece
• 30:19
  of shit. And what he wanted was copious amounts of drugs.
• 30:23
  So now we're in nineteen eighty one. John has been
• 30:26
  hanging out with this group for a while. He's in
• 30:28
  them for a lot of money, and he was drug
• 30:31
  mule for them, but would smoke up the drugs and
• 30:33
  his profits intended to end up in debt. There was
• 30:36
  also a point the Wonderland Gang never met Eddie Nash,
• 30:39
  but they did a deal with him through John where
• 30:41
  he bought some antique rifles from them, but they knew
• 30:45
  that they were worth a lot of money, like seventy
• 30:48
  five thousand dollars back in nineteen eighty one. Eddie knew
• 30:52
  that if he ever displayed them, or if anybody ever
• 30:54
  saw them, they would immediately know they were stolen and
• 30:56
  he would get into.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: A lot of trouble.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: So he ended up giving the Underland Gang two thousand
• 31:01
  dollars for these rifles, saying that he would figure out
• 31:04
  a way to give them more money later. But it
• 31:06
  was kind of like his hands were tired because he
• 31:07
  couldn't really do anything with them, even though he thought
• 31:09
  they were cool. At least, that's kind of my understanding
• 31:12
  of what happened with these guns. So the Wonderland gangs
• 31:17
  kind of like fuck Eddie Nash. But what it really
• 31:20
  came down to was that at the time that the
• 31:22
  story takes place, they were low on cash and desperately
• 31:25
  in need of drugs. John, seeing an opportunity, suggests to
• 31:29
  them that he has a big score in mind, and
• 31:32
  he does this, you know, to get in their good graces,
• 31:34
  to get out of debt, and to get some money
• 31:36
  and drugs in return. He tells them, Hey, that guy
• 31:39
  Eddie Nash, the one you know guys don't really like
• 31:40
  that much. He has a ton of drugs and money
• 31:43
  in his house and he has a safe under his
• 31:45
  bed in his bedroom that's.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: Full of drugs and money, and we can go get it.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: The safe was hidden in the floor, so very few
• 31:52
  people knew about it, but John did. He told the
• 31:55
  gang they could rob Nash and they'd never.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: Know who did it.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: His plan was that he go into the house earlier
• 32:01
  in the evening and buy some drugs. He would then
• 32:04
  unlock the sliding glass door that led to the backyard.
• 32:07
  Rawn and his crew could then sneak in in the
• 32:09
  middle of the night and hold Nash hostage, make him
• 32:12
  open up the safe, and make off with all of
• 32:14
  his money and drugs. Now, John also drew a map
• 32:18
  for them, so he was really into this and thinking about,
• 32:23
  you know, what's.
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: He going to get out of this.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: So despite both the Wonderland Gang and Nash having done
• 32:28
  business and both knowing John, they had never met. Now
• 32:32
  this was advantageous to the Wonderland Crew because they could
• 32:35
  go in without masks or fear of being recognized. It
• 32:38
  was also a bit of a disadvantage because they didn't
• 32:40
  seem to know who the fuck they were dealing with
• 32:43
  the fact that Eddie Nash had killed tons of people,
• 32:45
  had cops on his bank roll. I mean, it's fucking
• 32:49
  nuts how connected and how crazy.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: This guy is.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: Beyond all of this, he's just very fucking evil, And
• 32:55
  it was dumb as fuck to think he'd never figure
• 32:57
  out who robbed him since barely anybody knew about the safe. However,
• 33:01
  drug out brains aren't typically the smartest brains out there,
• 33:04
  so the gang went through with the plan. It's now Sunday,
• 33:07
  June twenty seventh, nineteen eighty one, and John goes to
• 33:10
  Nash's house and buys about.
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: Four hundred dollars worth of drugs.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: This is all the gang could come up with, but
• 33:15
  it was enough. He of course spent the hours after
• 33:18
  buying it there doing all of the drugs instead of
• 33:21
  taking them back to the Wonderland crew. But whatever, he
• 33:26
  went ahead and unlocked the door. He eventually got back
• 33:29
  to the house on Wonderland, but then got nervous that
• 33:32
  he hadn't actually unlocked the sliding door, so went back
• 33:34
  to Nash's place to check. I have read that he
• 33:37
  went back twice, and I've read that he went back
• 33:38
  three times. Either way, it's suspicious as fuck, but he
• 33:41
  seemed to think he was smooth and that Nash wouldn't
• 33:43
  question it. By the time Holmes got back to Wonderland, Ron,
• 33:48
  David Lynde, Billy Deverell, and a friend of theirs named
• 33:51
  Tracy McCourt had taken too many drugs. Tracy's a man
• 33:55
  by the way, including heroin, and they were nodding off
• 33:58
  and not at all ready to rob anyone or even
• 34:01
  move so they slept until about eight am on Monday morning,
• 34:06
  which is when they all got into a car driven
• 34:08
  by Tracy, who was an idiot but not super involved,
• 34:11
  and drove the less than two miles to Nash's house
• 34:14
  at thirty three point fifteen Dona Lola Place. The car
• 34:18
  was empty on gas, which is just another piece to
• 34:20
  let you know how fucking out of it these guys were.
• 34:22
  But somehow, m m they made it to Nash's home
• 34:26
  right around eight thirty am on a Monday, June twenty eighth,
• 34:30
  when everyone is on their way to work, school, whatever.
• 34:34
  I wanted to take a moment to discuss how crazy
• 34:37
  Hollywood and Los Angeles in general was at this time.
• 34:40
  Like I said, this was about a year after Dorothy
• 34:42
  Stratton was murdered, which was huge news, but it was
• 34:44
  literally like almost exactly a year later that this takes place,
• 34:48
  and the amount of murders, serial killers, drug lords, and
• 34:51
  general chaos in the area at the time was just
• 34:53
  something that I don't know that we could really imagine.
• 34:55
  The detective, one of the detectives anyway that worked on
• 34:58
  the Wonderland case was also involved in catching will and
• 35:02
  William Boonen, otherwise known as the Freeway Killer and also
• 35:06
  worked on the Hillside Strangler's case, which back then was
• 35:08
  the hill Hillside Strangler. Because they didn't know those two people.
• 35:12
  So shit is just nuts, And maybe an eight thirty
• 35:15
  am robbery wasn't super weird back then, but I think
• 35:17
  with all the information we know, it was just because
• 35:20
  these guys were drug addicts and fuck ups in general. Anyway,
• 35:23
  when they get to the house without John Holmes, who
• 35:25
  of course you know, waited back at the at Wonderland,
• 35:29
  they get inside, so we have David Lynde, Billy Deverell,
• 35:31
  and ron Lonnias Tracy waits in the car. They break in.
• 35:35
  They pretend to be cops by flashing a badge for
• 35:37
  the San Francisco Police Department, which is actually what they'd
• 35:40
  been doing recently to rob other.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: Homes in the area.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: And that's the only way they were making money is
• 35:45
  by doing like open fucking robbery of people when they
• 35:48
  were home, like robbing them pretending to be cops. They
• 35:51
  would break in, say they were cops, tie them up,
• 35:54
  and steal all their shit. So they find Dials walking
• 35:58
  down the hallway hold a tray that possibly had Eddie
• 36:02
  Nash's breakfast on it. Eddie Nash is in his you know,
• 36:06
  trademark speedo, no robe, just the speedo, sitting on his couch.
• 36:10
  They make Gregory Dials lay on the ground. They attempt
• 36:12
  to handcuff him, but he's too big, but they finally
• 36:15
  you know, end up tying him up. They then pull
• 36:17
  out their guns and they begin, you know, demanding money
• 36:20
  and drugs. Nash has said to have begged for his life,
• 36:24
  which I'm sure pissed him off, maybe more than anything
• 36:26
  else in his life ever had, because he's a you know,
• 36:29
  a tough guy, and he's like wants to be the
• 36:31
  big boss. So that's an ultimate you know, insult to him.
• 36:35
  They begin ransacking the place and then they move Eddie
• 36:39
  into his bedroom and they force him to open the
• 36:41
  safe nobody knows about. He at first refuses to give
• 36:44
  them the combination, but Ron Lannius or David Lynde I
• 36:48
  can't remember who put the gun into his mouth and
• 36:51
  was like, I will fucking kill you, and he opens
• 36:55
  the safe and they steal over one million dollars in
• 36:58
  drugs and cash. And that's a million in nineteen eighty
• 37:01
  one dollars, so way more today. At one point David
• 37:06
  Lynde accidentally discharged his gun and grazed Gregory Dials like
• 37:10
  on the either the leg or like the chest. It
• 37:13
  was more of like a like a powder burn than
• 37:15
  like an actual shot, which only further terrifies the captives
• 37:19
  and lets them know that these men will fucking kill them,
• 37:22
  possibly by accident. It's later found out that Ron Lannius,
• 37:25
  who was at the time, you know, like I said,
• 37:27
  a very serious suspect in multiple you know, murder cases,
• 37:31
  including a murder for higher case you know, wanted to
• 37:34
  kill Eddie and Gregory Dials, but was talked out of
• 37:37
  it by Billy, who, like I said, was kind of
• 37:39
  like the level headed guy of the group. So eventually
• 37:42
  they make their way of the house after cutting the
• 37:44
  phone lines, they make their babe way back to Wonderland
• 37:47
  and they split up the score. Now, Ron, David, and
• 37:50
  Billy get their share, which is a fuck ton of money.
• 37:54
  John Holmes and Tracy McCourt get much smaller shares. For Tracy,
• 37:58
  he was just the driver, so it's like fuck you.
• 38:00
  For John, it's because they fucking didn't like him and
• 38:03
  he owed the money and just fuck him. As you
• 38:06
  can imagine, John wasn't super happy about this, but he
• 38:09
  was kind of.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: A little bitch.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: So when he complained, the Wonderland Gang beat him up
• 38:13
  and then sent him on his way, like go fuck yourself.
• 38:15
  They gave him three thousand dollars and a pinky ring
• 38:18
  that belonged to Eddie Nash. Now, Eddie Nash gets untied,
• 38:22
  gets his phone lines back up, definitely doesn't call the cops,
• 38:25
  but he is thinking who might have ripped him off,
• 38:28
  who had the information, who could.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: Have done it? Who knew about the safe? You know,
• 38:33
  who's gonna unlock the door? Who was there?
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: And very quickly, all signs point to one man, John Holmes.
• 38:41
  Now I want to point out that you know, Eddie
• 38:44
  Nash loved John Holmes. He referred to him as his brother,
• 38:48
  to the point where when John got arrested and had
• 38:51
  had Dawn call anonymously, he told her just say your
• 38:55
  brother is in jail. Don't say anything else, don't say
• 38:59
  my name, just say your brother is in jail. And
• 39:02
  Eddie knew exactly who he was talking about. So that's
• 39:05
  the kind of relationship that Eddie thought he had with
• 39:07
  John Holmes. So when he figures out John's the one
• 39:11
  to fucking, you know, double cross him.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: He is super pissed now.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: He sends Gregory Diles out to get John and when
• 39:19
  he finds him, and I read somewhere that like John
• 39:23
  decided to come over because he's just that cavalier, but
• 39:25
  that's not what happened. So Gregory Diles goes out and
• 39:28
  he finds John. And when he finds him, John is
• 39:31
  wearing Eddie Nash's fucking pinky ring because he's a fucking idiot.
• 39:36
  So he brings John into Nash's office by the scruff
• 39:39
  of his neck and it gets crazy from there, you know,
• 39:43
  according to John Holmes. But there is somebody to kind
• 39:45
  of back it up, which we'll talk about later. And
• 39:47
  mind you, at this time, Don is just living with
• 39:50
  her tiny little dog. They had a dog named Thor,
• 39:54
  and they were just living in Sharon's fucking car. Like
• 39:57
  he gave her cans to piss in. He never let
• 39:59
  her leave, and also he never let anybody know about her.
• 40:03
  When he drove around with her, he would make her
• 40:04
  lay in the back with a blanket over her head.
• 40:07
  Nobody knew about her. The Wonderland Gang didn't know about her.
• 40:09
  Eddie Nash didn't know about her. I mean, when he
• 40:12
  raped her, he thought it was John's niece, Gabrielle from Oregon,
• 40:16
  So I mean, he was really, really careful and he
• 40:19
  just basically held her captive for years. So she's sitting
• 40:23
  in a car somewhere having no fucking clue where John is. Meanwhile,
• 40:28
  he's at Eddie Nash's house getting the shit beat out
• 40:31
  of him. Now, when this happened, there was another man
• 40:33
  at the house named Scott Thorson. Scott will plan into
• 40:36
  the story more later, but just remember his name and
• 40:39
  that he was the lover and also adopted son of Liberaci.
• 40:42
  And I'm just gonna leave that mess right there and
• 40:44
  we'll get into that more later. So he's asked to
• 40:47
  wait in the other room while Nash and Dials do
• 40:49
  their thing with Holmes. He said later, you know, they
• 40:52
  beat him, and John says, you know, according to him,
• 40:55
  they're threatening to kill his wife, his mother, his siblings,
• 40:58
  everyone in his family. He said, they found his address
• 41:00
  book and they're running through the names being like they're
• 41:02
  fucking dead. They're fucking dead. You don't tell us who
• 41:05
  you had rob us. Everybody you've ever known is fucking dead.
• 41:08
  So you know, I I may I think maybe he
• 41:12
  was embellishing the story a little bit to make himself
• 41:15
  more of a victim.
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: And you'll see why. But who knows.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: In the end, John tells them this is who ripped
• 41:20
  you off. Yes, I facilitated it. They were mad about
• 41:23
  these fucking antique guns.
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: They needed money.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: Whatever, Eddie Nash decides it. Rather than kill Holmes, he
• 41:29
  will make him help Nash exact his revenge. So now
• 41:33
  it's Wednesday, July first, so like two days after the robbery,
• 41:37
  and Holmes never leaves Nash's house until we're at the
• 41:41
  part where the murders go down. So Nash tells Holmes
• 41:44
  he's gonna go to the Wonderland House and let Gregory
• 41:46
  Dials and another man into the house through the locked gate.
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: He's supposed to do this by.
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: Calling up to the residents who know him and will
• 41:53
  let him in because there was like a metal security
• 41:56
  gate that was always locked. It is also said that
• 42:00
  at one point Joy Miller, Billy Deverell's girlfriend gave John
• 42:04
  Holmes a key, which Ron was not fucking stoked about,
• 42:07
  so maybe he used that to get in and kind
• 42:10
  of when you read about the crime scene and where
• 42:12
  the bodies were It almost makes sense that he let
• 42:14
  himself in, but I don't know.
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: I've heard both ways.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: So anyway, they go to the house that same night
• 42:19
  and Holmes gets in one way or another, and what
• 42:22
  happens next is the definition of a massacre. The next day,
• 42:27
  the neighbors who were moving out because they were tired
• 42:29
  of dealing with living next to this fucking drug house,
• 42:32
  said that they saw several people going in, out and
• 42:35
  out of the residence, which was normal. This happened between
• 42:39
  four am and four pm that same day, so about
• 42:42
  twelve hours of people coming and going. Finally, one of
• 42:45
  the visitors to the.
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: House told one of the movers who was.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: Moving the people out, there are dead people inside that house.
• 42:54
  The mover took a look for himself and immediately called
• 42:57
  the cops, as he had seen the most fucked up scene.
• 43:00
  Police and detective detectives arrived shortly thereafter to find five
• 43:05
  people inside. There was Barbara Butterfly Richardson again, twenty two
• 43:09
  years old. She was found in the living room with
• 43:12
  her head caved in. There was a pillow on the
• 43:15
  couch completely soaked in blood, and she had fallen to
• 43:19
  the ground and led out some more. You can watch
• 43:23
  a video of this on YouTube. We'll talk more about it.
• 43:27
  She was very much dead, she had been for hours.
• 43:29
  They then found in Ron and Susan's room the body
• 43:32
  of Ron Lannius and the barely alive Susan Lnnius. She
• 43:38
  was still clinging to life after twelve hours of being
• 43:41
  you know, after being beaten, and that means all the
• 43:45
  people who went in and out of the house over
• 43:47
  the past twelve hours did nothing to help her despite
• 43:50
  hearing her moaning. Neighbors also said they heard moaning, but
• 43:54
  they didn't really think anything of it because the house
• 43:57
  is fucking crazy. Susan was taken to the hostel, where
• 44:00
  she wasn't expected to survive, and the police continued their
• 44:03
  search of the space. In the upstairs room, they found
• 44:06
  the bodies of Joy.
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: Miller and Billy Deverell.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: Joy had been killed in bed, much like Ron, but
• 44:12
  Billy had put up a fight and was found crumbled
• 44:15
  on the ground with this head against a TV stand.
• 44:17
  Now the TV was on, but just playing like fuzz
• 44:20
  on the screen, which I don't even know if you
• 44:21
  can get a TV to do that anymore, but it's
• 44:24
  a very creepy thing to think about in a murder scene.
• 44:27
  Billy was shirtless and covered in blood and had clearly
• 44:32
  put up a fight.
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: Joy's head had been so.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: Badly beaten in that her forehead, like above her eyebrows,
• 44:39
  was pushed all the way back against the back of
• 44:41
  her skull. So fucking crazy. The scene was brutal. There
• 44:46
  was blood all over the walls, all over the house.
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: It's insane.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: So at this point I wanted to just quickly introduce
• 44:54
  the two main detectives who were on this case for years,
• 44:56
  for better or worse, because officially this case is not solved,
• 44:59
  even we all know who did it. So these detectives
• 45:02
  are Tom Lang and Robert Bob SUSA.
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: Now they arrive on the scene, and.
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: I believe it was Tom who took a two and
• 45:08
  a half hour video of the crime scene, and that's
• 45:10
  you know. Those of you with strong stomachs can find
• 45:12
  some of it on YouTube. You can hear him narrating
• 45:15
  while filming the victims up close, as well as the
• 45:17
  horribly you know, blood spattered house. The video shows the
• 45:21
  lifeless bodies of the victims, including Joy Miller, who is
• 45:24
  purple and unrecognizable while lying in bed, and That shit
• 45:28
  haunted me for days after I watched it, and I've
• 45:30
  seen some shit, so it's really disturbing. Be careful if
• 45:33
  you do choose to watch it. But also really interestingly,
• 45:37
  it would later be the first video used as evidence
• 45:40
  in a murder trial in California, So we'll get there,
• 45:44
  but it's pretty cool to know that. Once the video
• 45:46
  is done, police begin their interviews. Now, at first not
• 45:50
  a lot comes up, but pretty quickly they get a
• 45:52
  call from a man named Fat Howard or Howard Cook,
• 45:55
  who said he had a witness who wanted to talk
• 45:56
  about the murders. He asks that they meet him at
• 45:59
  the wonder Land address, and when they do, he's in
• 46:02
  his car outside and he points to the house and
• 46:04
  says there's someone inside and that's definitely a crime scene.
• 46:08
  So it's been a couple of days, like the bodies
• 46:10
  are with the medical examiner, but still you know he
• 46:12
  should not be in there, So they go inside to
• 46:14
  find David Lynde, who was one of the only people
• 46:17
  not in the house when the murders took place, as
• 46:20
  he had had to go up to Sacramento for a
• 46:21
  court date and then when he came back he was
• 46:25
  in a motel with a male sex worker doing drugs,
• 46:30
  and he left Butterfly behind in the in the house
• 46:33
  in the care of his friends. Now, when they got
• 46:35
  into the house, David just ransacking the place, grabbing pills
• 46:38
  off the floor, shoving them into his mouth frantically. And
• 46:41
  when the detectives were like, hey, Bud, what are you doing,
• 46:44
  he asked them where a butterfly. Was convinced she was
• 46:47
  the sole survivor he had heard about on the news.
• 46:50
  Now we all know that she was not the sole survivor,
• 46:53
  but the police did not tell him that right away. Instead,
• 46:57
  they took him to the station to interview him. And
• 46:59
  once they hold Butterfly had died, he was ready to
• 47:02
  talk as long as he was able to openly do
• 47:05
  the pocket full of drugs that he had brought with him,
• 47:07
  which they led him. He wasn't being aggressive towards them,
• 47:10
  and they felt it would help keep him cooperative. So
• 47:13
  David Lynd recounted the entire burglary and nashes, which gave
• 47:17
  them their first solid lead as well as a motive.
• 47:20
  It also brought John Holmes into the fold, as his
• 47:22
  name hadn't yet been mentioned. Granted, this was in the
• 47:25
  first week of the murders, but still it took a
• 47:27
  few days to figure out who was involved. Anyway, Lynn
• 47:30
  tells him about the score, how it was split, just
• 47:33
  kind of lays it all out for them. But obviously
• 47:35
  he wasn't at the house the night of the murders,
• 47:37
  so he's not really able to place anyone at the
• 47:39
  scene or give them anything super concrete. He could just
• 47:42
  sort of suggest who might have done this and why.
• 47:45
  So from there, police interview a ton of other people
• 47:47
  about the murders, including Chuck Nigron, the lead singer of
• 47:51
  the band Three Dog Knight, who was a known drug
• 47:54
  user who frequented the Wonder Lamb House. In fact, he
• 47:59
  and his then wife had been invited to go party
• 48:01
  there the night of the murders, but declined as they
• 48:04
  were quote too sick meaning dope sick from withdrawals, which
• 48:08
  was fucking lucky for them because they probably would have
• 48:10
  ended up passed out somewhere in that house and then
• 48:12
  getting murdered. They basically told a similar story. John Holmes
• 48:17
  did in fact hang around there, and in fact Julia,
• 48:21
  Chuck's wife, who was also the former wife of the
• 48:24
  doors drummer John Densmore said she had gone to the
• 48:27
  house the morning of the murders, after the murders took place,
• 48:30
  and told a neighbor what she saw, but the neighbor
• 48:33
  didn't call the cops, and neither did she, So everything's
• 48:37
  kind of coming together. They're starting to figure out a timeline.
• 48:41
  Was crazy as that people who were like coming into
• 48:43
  the house to buy drugs were walking into the open
• 48:45
  house seeing the dead people, seeing the moaning woman on
• 48:49
  the floor, stealing drugs and money and fucking leaving, so
• 48:53
  so fucking insane. So anyway, it takes nearly two weeks,
• 48:57
  but on July twelfth, the detectives Lang and SUSA got
• 49:00
  word that John Holmes had been picked up and was
• 49:02
  at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA with another set
• 49:06
  of cops outside their jurisdiction, which they were not happy about.
• 49:09
  That being said, they were able to meet with Holmes,
• 49:11
  who ended up telling a different detective some of the
• 49:13
  details of the murders. Now, as a reminder, he was
• 49:16
  an informant, so he had a bunch of cop contacts,
• 49:19
  so it makes sense that he would be with like
• 49:21
  Vice or somebody instead of the homicide detectives. Because you know,
• 49:25
  John Holmes is trying to control the narrative of this
• 49:29
  scene and kind of get ahead of it, right, So
• 49:31
  he wants to reach out to his buddies and give
• 49:34
  them his version of the story before shit gets too real.
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: Interestingly, John Holmes actually admitted not only to a part
• 49:41
  in the robbery of Nash, but also to being a
• 49:43
  part of the murders. He said he was convinced to
• 49:46
  leave the front door unlocked at Wonderland, though when they
• 49:49
  asked who made him do it, he refused to say.
• 49:52
  He clammed up entirely. He said, yeah, I robbed Nash,
• 49:55
  and yeah I was there when Wonderland was murdered, but
• 49:57
  I'm not going to tell you there was a connection,
• 49:59
  and I'm not going to tell you that Eddie Nash
• 50:00
  ordered it or that Gregory Dowlls was there. He never
• 50:03
  even mentioned their names. He straight up fucking refused. He did, however,
• 50:07
  take advantage of now being housed at the Biltmore, another
• 50:10
  swanky hotel where he had no problem ordering a copious
• 50:13
  amounts of room service while refusing basically to cooperate at all.
• 50:17
  He had also brought not only Sharon to this hotel,
• 50:21
  but Don as well, And to be clear, Sharon and
• 50:25
  Don had a very interesting relationship where I think Sharon
• 50:29
  really wanted and felt they need to take care of
• 50:31
  Don and loved Don and wanted to sort of save Don.
• 50:35
  So the two women mostly got along because I think
• 50:39
  Sharon thought of Don as like a daughter, which is
• 50:41
  probably how John Holme should have seen her. But he's
• 50:43
  a piece of shit.
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: So there you go.
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: In any case, all of them are there, and he's
• 50:47
  basically saying, I can cooperate if you put me in
• 50:49
  witness protection and if you take Don and Sharon and
• 50:53
  we can all go. And Sharon's like, get fucked, dude,
• 50:55
  I'm not leaving my house.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: I'm not doing this.
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: You're a drug addict. There's something fucking wrong with you.
• 50:59
  I don't want anything to do with this, right so,
• 51:02
  you know, I mean, the cops have some stuff and
• 51:06
  they can sort of place John at the crime scene,
• 51:08
  but he already admitted to being there. It doesn't mean
• 51:11
  he actually murdered anybody. He could have just been a witness.
• 51:13
  He could have been held hostage, which is essentially what
• 51:16
  he told the cops.
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: Was the situation.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: The one thing that they had that was really suspicious
• 51:22
  and I think kind of led to him being arrested
• 51:24
  later on was they found a palm print in blood
• 51:28
  on the bedframe over Ron Lannius's bed, like where his
• 51:32
  body was, So it was positioned as though whoever grabbed
• 51:36
  the bed frame was steadying themselves while they were beating
• 51:40
  Ron to death. Now this pomp print was John's, so
• 51:44
  you know, not only does it put him in the house,
• 51:46
  but it makes it seem like maybe he had actually
• 51:49
  beat Ron. Now he could have said, you know, it
• 51:52
  was under duress, Greg Dials made.
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: Him do it.
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: And he could have also said that he didn't actually
• 51:57
  hit anybody, he just grabbed the railing. So there was
• 52:00
  a lot of kind of like there wasn't anything solid.
• 52:03
  So cops were ready to press any charges, and in truth,
• 52:07
  a few of them believed John Holmes that he didn't
• 52:09
  actually participate in the murders and was just in the
• 52:11
  rooms being forced to watch while being held at gunpoint
• 52:14
  is what he said, which didn't bode well for any
• 52:18
  case they might want to bring against him. Now, around
• 52:21
  this time, the medical examiner came back with the cause
• 52:23
  of death for the victims and it was found they
• 52:24
  were all beaten to death with a lead pipe. Not
• 52:27
  only a lead pipe, but a pipe with threads on
• 52:29
  the end. They knew this because the threads had embedded
• 52:33
  in the skin and bone of the victims, because they
• 52:36
  were beaten that hard, like they were hit that hard
• 52:40
  with the pipe. It was around this time that detectives
• 52:43
  received a letter from a patrol cop out of West
• 52:46
  Hollywood telling them that Gregory Dials had had many complaints
• 52:50
  lodged against him while working at the star Wood Club,
• 52:52
  which is one of the clubs that's actually the punk
• 52:54
  rock club where Eddie did a lot of his drug dealing.
• 52:57
  But these complaints were for brutality and for using some
• 53:00
  sort of rod or pipe, and that once he was
• 53:04
  pulled over and cops found a lead pipe with threading
• 53:07
  on the end of it in his car. So again
• 53:11
  more circumstantial evidence, no proof, but definitely very interesting and
• 53:14
  lets them know to keep kind of digging.
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: From here, I could get into a ton of details
• 53:18
  about the interviews of various jailhouse snitches, but suffice it
• 53:22
  to say there was a lot of talk but very
• 53:24
  little concrete evidence. Also, around this time, police were able
• 53:28
  to get a search warrant for Nash's residence because he
• 53:30
  got caught selling drugs to a snitch. So they go
• 53:34
  to his house and during the search, they're you know,
• 53:36
  obviously looking for evidence to time to the murders, but
• 53:39
  they didn't find any. What they did find was documents
• 53:42
  that he could have only received from somebody in a
• 53:45
  high ranking position in some sort of law enforcement so LAPD, FBI,
• 53:52
  something like that.
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: So that's bad.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: News and again shows the scope of his influence and connections.
• 53:57
  And these papers basically let him know that were coming
• 54:00
  to raid his house. That being said, he didn't seem
• 54:03
  to give a shit because when they raided it, they
• 54:04
  found a bunch of drugs, so he was, you know,
• 54:06
  charged with various drug offenses. Now, after this thing sort
• 54:10
  of calmed down for a bit, there was an insider
• 54:13
  who tried to claim that Bob, that Langensusa, the two
• 54:16
  detectives on the case were crooked and working for a
• 54:19
  NASH and that the detectives you know, were basically throwing
• 54:24
  the case. And during this time also the detectives ended
• 54:27
  up taking on other cases because they weren't really able
• 54:29
  to do anything with this case. They ended up getting investigated,
• 54:34
  and then it turned out that the insider who said
• 54:37
  that they were working for Nash was actually the one
• 54:40
  working for Nash. So funny how that works. In any case,
• 54:42
  things you know, kind of chill out for a while.
• 54:45
  John is still around. He's still with Dawn, he's still
• 54:49
  beating her, forcing her to sell herself, raping her, just
• 54:53
  being a complete piece of shit. And he's also still
• 54:56
  informing for the police. So now it's November nineteen eighty one,
• 55:00
  same year. Just some months later, there's another rate at
• 55:02
  Nasha's house, more cocaine found.
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: More arrests.
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: Like I said, John Holmes just being a piece of shit.
• 55:08
  And finally the detectives go to Vice, which is who
• 55:11
  John Holmes informs for, and said, you know, we need
• 55:14
  him and we need to bring him in. We're going
• 55:17
  to try to like get something out of him. We
• 55:18
  think we're gonna charge him with murder. So weis Wan
• 55:21
  Is like pushing back because they're like, he's a really
• 55:22
  good informant. But finally they agree. John finds out and
• 55:25
  he takes the fuck off, so the cops go looking
• 55:28
  for him. They go to South Florida, which is where
• 55:30
  Don has some family.
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: That's a dead end.
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: They go up to Oregon, where Don also had family.
• 55:36
  Sharon tells them, you know, he has her car. She
• 55:40
  last heard from him in Oregon asking her for money.
• 55:42
  So they go up there, and then he gave no
• 55:47
  more information, just asking for money. She would never officially
• 55:50
  turn on him anyway, you know, but she gave up
• 55:53
  where she thought he was at this time. She also
• 55:55
  told him that he came to her house the day
• 55:58
  after the murders, but she meant them of covered in
• 56:01
  blood and bruises, saying that he'd been at Wonderland. He
• 56:05
  gave her no more information, and she, you know, wouldn't
• 56:09
  have told them either way. But it was interesting that
• 56:13
  she told them that, and I think that it was
• 56:14
  on her mind and she felt like she needed to
• 56:16
  get off her chest.
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: And the other thing is like, you don't get covered
• 56:19
  in blood if you're waiting downstairs, right. So they go
• 56:22
  to Oreon, they don't find him.
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: They find Don's family, who hated John and wanted to
• 56:26
  help find him, and Dawn, and they go back down
• 56:30
  to la because they heard he was last there. And
• 56:33
  then her brother gets in touch and says, I think
• 56:38
  he's she's in Florida. She called me from Florida, I
• 56:42
  probably asking for money. So at this point, you know,
• 56:44
  John's fully running from not only the cops but also
• 56:47
  Eddie Nash, who obviously knows he's about to be arrested
• 56:50
  for these murders and knows that the cops are doing
• 56:53
  that so that he'll turn on Nash. And Eddie Nash
• 56:56
  is not going to let that stand. So he's probably
• 56:58
  looking for John to fucking kill him, right And because
• 57:01
  obviously John Holmes is the type of person who would
• 57:03
  turn on him, So it's a fair concern. So I'm
• 57:07
  going to switch gears for a second here because Susan
• 57:10
  Lannias is waking up now. Police interview Susan, all she
• 57:14
  could really say at the time, beyond what they already knew,
• 57:17
  was that she remembered getting hit and being in excruciating pain. Now,
• 57:21
  as a reminder, this is, you know, four months after
• 57:24
  the attacks and she's just finally well enough to talk
• 57:28
  to the police.
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: She said she.
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: Remembered seeing red everywhere and hearing someone say that they
• 57:33
  didn't need to hit her more because she was going
• 57:36
  to die anyway. She heard the commotion, she heard the beating,
• 57:40
  She remembered the pain. She also remembered people coming in
• 57:43
  and out of the house, but she could not, for
• 57:46
  the life of her, identify a single one of them.
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: She also talked about Ron and.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: What a badass he was and that she thought he'd
• 57:54
  killed a lot of people, and she was like really
• 57:56
  impressed by that, which is really fucking weird. Any case,
• 57:59
  the interviews did do a lot, but she was still
• 58:01
  a star witness when John's trial came around because he
• 58:05
  was arrested. So anyway, they go down to South Florida
• 58:09
  the cops. They take Wayne Don's brother because they're close
• 58:13
  down with them, and he starts kind of talking to
• 58:16
  their family friends from when they live down there, and
• 58:19
  with his help, Don's location is found. She's living with
• 58:23
  an exotic dancer who needed somebody to babysit her kids,
• 58:26
  so she was living with this woman. She was still
• 58:28
  with John but sort of living apart from him, which
• 58:31
  I think is because she had been dealing with this
• 58:34
  abuse for so long and she had run away from
• 58:37
  him before. She'd gone up to Oregon for a few
• 58:39
  months with her family, but he coaxed her back to him.
• 58:42
  She'd physically run away from him and almost got murdered
• 58:44
  by somebody that when she was hitchhiking, like, so she
• 58:48
  wanted to get away from him, but she was in
• 58:50
  so deep and she was so fucking terrified she couldn't
• 58:53
  get away. So, you know, they're living apart, but they're
• 58:57
  still together. And when the lease you know, approached down
• 59:02
  at first she was really combative, but Wayne convinced her
• 59:05
  to cooperate and to get away from John, and she
• 59:08
  finally told the police where John was. So when they
• 59:10
  arrest him, he says, what took you so long? You know,
• 59:13
  like I've been expecting you, because he just has to
• 59:15
  be like the cool guy, like he's in a movie,
• 59:17
  you know, he's Johnny wadd like whatever the fuck. So anyway,
• 59:20
  they take him in, they charge him, Like I said,
• 59:23
  it's an attempt to get him to turn on Eddie Nash.
• 59:25
  In reality, while they seemingly have a lot on him,
• 59:28
  they don't really have anything on him. They can put
• 59:30
  him in the house, they can't really do anything else.
• 59:33
  Speaker 2: They can't put him as actually murdering anyone.
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: And you know, for his part, John's gonna say that
• 59:40
  he was a victim, that he was forced to go there,
• 59:42
  that he was held at gunpoint. You know that he
• 59:44
  didn't do anything besides witness a murder, and he's not
• 59:47
  he's not gonna turn on who did it because he's
• 59:48
  afraid for his life. While Down did get away from him,
• 59:53
  she still wouldn't testify against him, which is really unfortunate
• 59:56
  because it later comes out that he confessed to her
• 1:00:00
  he was there, that he saw the murders and he knew.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 2: Who did it.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: Likewise, Sharon wouldn't testify against him, and legally didn't have
• 1:00:06
  to because she was his wife. The only people that
• 1:00:09
  they had to testify against him really was were Susan
• 1:00:13
  Lannias and David Lynde. And Susan doesn't remember anything, and
• 1:00:17
  David wasn't there, so they can put him kind of
• 1:00:20
  in the middle of it. They can circumstantially make it
• 1:00:22
  seem very clear that he was involved, but there's no
• 1:00:25
  hard evidence. They still go to trial, but as you
• 1:00:28
  can guess, he is acquitted and things sort of peter
• 1:00:31
  out from there. As far as Johnny wadd goes, he
• 1:00:34
  just continues being a piece of shit. Like I said,
• 1:00:37
  don thankfully got away from him, but she'd been subjected
• 1:00:40
  to six years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse by
• 1:00:45
  John Holmes and anybody he deemed necessary to get what
• 1:00:50
  he wanted. He used her like she was just a
• 1:00:54
  fucking worthless piece of trash. And he did this to
• 1:00:57
  her all before she was like twenty one years old.
• 1:01:00
  And every time she tried to get away from him,
• 1:01:02
  he would convince her to come back. He would beg
• 1:01:05
  her and then he would leave her alone with this
• 1:01:08
  tiny little dog for days at a time. When he
• 1:01:10
  came back, he'd abuse her. He almost killed her. He
• 1:01:14
  almost got her killed multiple times, just you know, fucking horrible.
• 1:01:19
  So finally she gets away from him and she becomes
• 1:01:24
  like up speaker and an advocate for women and girls
• 1:01:26
  trapped in abusive relationships and who have been groomed by
• 1:01:29
  their partners.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: So really cool.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: Look her up. Her website's great. She has a lot
• 1:01:34
  of really great, you know, information about herself, and kind
• 1:01:36
  of what she does is honestly really inspiring. She's pretty
• 1:01:41
  fucking amazing. John, however, went on as a total, complete
• 1:01:45
  piece of shit, and eventually, in nineteen eighty four, Sharon
• 1:01:49
  divorced him and moved on with her life. From there,
• 1:01:53
  John continued to inform on people to feed his addiction
• 1:01:56
  and keep himself out of prison, but mostly faded intubscurity,
• 1:02:00
  like he was still working, but nobody really cared about him.
• 1:02:03
  Everybody kind of knew he was a drug addict, and
• 1:02:05
  again he couldn't really perform, so he couldn't really work.
• 1:02:09
  So at the time before the murders happened, he had
• 1:02:12
  done like a documentary about himself. I don't know if
• 1:02:15
  it ever actually came out, But after that, around this time,
• 1:02:18
  he wrote an autobiography, which wasn't actually published until after
• 1:02:22
  his death. He met and married another adult film star
• 1:02:26
  named Misty Dawn real name Laurie Rose in nineteen eighty seven.
• 1:02:31
  It's unclear exactly when, but at some point in the
• 1:02:34
  mid nineteen eighties he learned he had AIDS. He hid
• 1:02:38
  this from everyone in his life, including multiple women he
• 1:02:43
  worked with on adult films. Now it's said that he
• 1:02:47
  didn't know he had AIDS until just before the last
• 1:02:51
  film that he made, but he knew then, and he
• 1:02:54
  had unprotected sex with these women because he did not
• 1:02:58
  give a shit. He just wanted the fucking money. So
• 1:03:02
  he's a fucking scumbag, Like there's no words obviously, now
• 1:03:05
  this asshole, Johnny wadd Johnny fucking idiot, fucking hate This
• 1:03:10
  guy died in March nineteen eighty eight at forty three
• 1:03:13
  years old from complications of AIDS.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: Shortly thereafter, his.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: Ex wife, Sharon came forward with the official version of
• 1:03:21
  her story of what he told her. Just a few
• 1:03:24
  nights after the murder. He'd gone to her house, he
• 1:03:27
  got into the bathtub which you'll see in the Wonderland movie,
• 1:03:30
  and he told her that he went to the house
• 1:03:33
  that night he was basically being held hostage at gunpoint,
• 1:03:37
  and that he was forced to not only let three
• 1:03:40
  men into the house to murder everyone inside, but he
• 1:03:43
  was forced to go in and to watch as they
• 1:03:45
  murdered all of those people. Now, he never gave Sharon
• 1:03:49
  the names of the people who did it, and he
• 1:03:51
  never admitted to any further involvement, but he did tell
• 1:03:55
  her that he was there and he knew who did it,
• 1:03:58
  And he told Don the same thing. I personally believe
• 1:04:01
  that he probably hit Ron, that he was forced maybe
• 1:04:04
  to do it, but he also hated Ron, and he
• 1:04:06
  seems like a little bitch, you know, John Holmes, So
• 1:04:09
  I feel like he probably would have done it. The story, however,
• 1:04:14
  is not over. There's a little bit more, because remember
• 1:04:17
  Eddie Nash. So the year after John's death, prosecutors decided
• 1:04:21
  to charge Eddie Nash and Gregory Dials for the Wonderland murders.
• 1:04:25
  They made this decision after a witness came forward with
• 1:04:28
  pretty damning evidence, and this witness was none other than
• 1:04:33
  Liberaci's son turned lover, Scott Thorson. Now he and Liberaci
• 1:04:38
  were not together anymore at this point, it was really
• 1:04:41
  sad about Scott Thorson's life is really sad if you
• 1:04:44
  read about it. He was like in foster care and
• 1:04:48
  I think seventeen years old when he met Liberaci, and
• 1:04:51
  Liberacci groomed him just like John Holmes groomed Dawn. But
• 1:04:56
  it was even worse. He adopted Scott like as his son,
• 1:05:01
  made him get plastic surgery to look more like Liberaci
• 1:05:05
  to look more like him, created a sexual relationship with him,
• 1:05:10
  and put him on a weight loss program that ultimately
• 1:05:13
  got him addicted to drugs, all before he was like
• 1:05:16
  twenty years old. So this is a really fucked up situation.
• 1:05:20
  And the weirdest thing is that Liberaci was super against drugs,
• 1:05:23
  but weirdly was in a business with Eddie Nash. At
• 1:05:28
  one of the night clubs like Liberaci co owned part
• 1:05:31
  of it and had Scott sort of managing that for him.
• 1:05:34
  So Liberacci had no idea that Eddie Nash was so
• 1:05:36
  into the drug scene, and for a time he didn't
• 1:05:39
  know that Scott was into the drug scene. So he
• 1:05:41
  would send Scott down to La they were living in
• 1:05:43
  I think Lake Tahoe at the time, or Vegas, because
• 1:05:46
  I think Liberacci was performing in Vegas like every night.
• 1:05:48
  So he would send Scott down to pick up money
• 1:05:50
  from the club, and Scott would just buy a bunch
• 1:05:52
  of fucking drugs while he was there. And on the
• 1:05:54
  night of the murders, Scott Thorson, like I had said,
• 1:05:59
  was at A. D.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: Nash's home. Now.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: When he was there, he overheard everything that happened with
• 1:06:04
  John Holmes, including him being beaten, the threats to his life,
• 1:06:08
  the friends, the threats to his family's lives. You know,
• 1:06:12
  he heard Nash say, you know you're gonna take Greg
• 1:06:16
  Dials and these two other men to Wonderland and you're
• 1:06:18
  going to quote kill everyone. He was also at the
• 1:06:22
  house at Eddie Nash's house when they all came back
• 1:06:25
  covered in blood. He later in an interview in the
• 1:06:28
  two thousands said they had had in fact taken his
• 1:06:31
  car to do the killings.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 2: But who really knows.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: Apparently anybody and everybody who met Scott thought that he
• 1:06:36
  was just like a pathological liar, But nobody could ever
• 1:06:39
  fully catch him in a lie, and his testimony did
• 1:06:42
  match what police thought happened pretty much entirely, So I
• 1:06:44
  do tend to believe him, at least in this situation.
• 1:06:47
  So Eddie Nash and Gregory Dials went on trial in
• 1:06:51
  nineteen ninety one. They were on trial for a few weeks,
• 1:06:54
  but in the end the jury ended up being hung
• 1:06:56
  eleven to one. Now they had Susan, they had David Lynde,
• 1:07:01
  they had Scott Thorson. It was a done fucking deal.
• 1:07:05
  But one juror hung on would not change their mind.
• 1:07:10
  They ended up going to trial again and then were acquitted.
• 1:07:12
  I'm not really sure why. It probably has to do
• 1:07:14
  with the legal system. Things you can't do twice. Who
• 1:07:16
  fucking knows. However, it later came out that the first
• 1:07:19
  trial ended the way it did because Nash bribed a
• 1:07:22
  woman on the jury with fifty thousand dollars, so he
• 1:07:26
  bought his freedom. Because everybody else knew he fucking did it,
• 1:07:30
  and if that juror had not been bribed, he would
• 1:07:32
  have gone to prison for the rest of his life,
• 1:07:33
  and so would have Gregory Dials. Greg Dials died in
• 1:07:36
  nineteen ninety five, and fuck him, who cares. Scott Thorson
• 1:07:39
  after the trial, went into witness protection, but didn't stay
• 1:07:43
  out of trouble and ended up getting shot five times
• 1:07:45
  in a motel in South Florida over a bad drug deal.
• 1:07:48
  He also did more time in prison before finding Jesus
• 1:07:51
  and getting sober for about ten years before he died
• 1:07:54
  of cancer in twenty twenty one. Eddie Nash eventually got
• 1:07:58
  sent to prison on rico charges, including being charged for
• 1:08:01
  bribing the juror in the first murder trial, which he
• 1:08:04
  did plead guilty to, and arranging for the murders of
• 1:08:07
  the Wonderland Gang. He did or was sentenced to a
• 1:08:11
  whopping thirty seven months in prison for all of this,
• 1:08:13
  probably got out early for good behavior, and eventually died
• 1:08:16
  in twenty fourteen at the age of eighty five, which,
• 1:08:20
  on top of it being frustrating that he didn't have
• 1:08:23
  to go to prison he was eighty five years old,
• 1:08:27
  he had fucking destroyed his body to the point where
• 1:08:29
  he was missing along one of his nasal cavities was
• 1:08:33
  fucking gone. And this motherfucker lived eighty five. Like, what
• 1:08:36
  the fuck? What did you like pickle himself? I don't
• 1:08:39
  understand anyway. That's pretty much the end of this story.
• 1:08:43
  There's so much more if you really want to get
• 1:08:44
  into the details, but for a podcast, you know, you
• 1:08:47
  can't go too crazy. If you want to read more
• 1:08:49
  about it, you can listen or listen, you can read
• 1:08:52
  Dawn's book. It's available all over the place. There's a
• 1:08:57
  book that the detectives wrote that I read was fucking
• 1:09:00
  kind of shitty. I mean, I had a lot of information,
• 1:09:02
  but it also had a lot of cop talk. And
• 1:09:03
  anybody who knows me knows that I'm I'm not really
• 1:09:06
  into cops. I'm not really down for cops, so like
• 1:09:08
  having to read their like snarky comments just kind of
• 1:09:10
  bummed me out. But it's really interesting to read about
• 1:09:14
  the case and sort of like the behind the scenes details.
• 1:09:18
  You know, it was a really fucked up situation. But
• 1:09:21
  people like Ron Lanius, like, you can't really feel bad
• 1:09:24
  for them because there's such like hardcore pieces as shit.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: You know, he was.
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: Actually I forgot to mention this earlier. He was discharged
• 1:09:31
  from the army. Some people argue that it was dishonorable.
• 1:09:33
  Some people said he just you know, left, But he
• 1:09:36
  was caught during his time smuggling cocaine back from I
• 1:09:40
  think he was in like the Korean War. I want
• 1:09:42
  to say, he was smuggling cocaine in the caskets of
• 1:09:45
  dead soldiers, so he would stick the cocaine, like I
• 1:09:48
  don't know, in their bodies, under their bodies, in their
• 1:09:50
  fucking caskets, and then take it out when they got
• 1:09:53
  back to America.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 2: So even before the war.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: Ron Lanius was a complete disgusting piece of shit. All
• 1:09:58
  of the people, you know, David Lynde dating a twenty
• 1:10:01
  two year old when he's forty. He's a fucking white supremacist,
• 1:10:04
  he's a biker. He's in and out of prison, like
• 1:10:06
  fuck him too. You know, it's hard to mourn these people.
• 1:10:09
  But the case is so fucked up. It's so violent,
• 1:10:12
  it's so brutal, and it's so like Olpi and Noirrie
• 1:10:16
  and like perfectly La that I really wanted to cover it,
• 1:10:20
  even though the only thing I wouldn't really call it
• 1:10:23
  is sad except for Don. Don's really the only person
• 1:10:26
  in the story that brings humanity to it, and so
• 1:10:29
  it's really good to know that she's outliving her best
• 1:10:32
  life helping others. And I also think it's really great
• 1:10:35
  that after John died, she and Sharon became really really
• 1:10:38
  close until Sharon died in twenty twelve, like they were very,
• 1:10:42
  very tight Susan Lannius. For all I know, she disappeared
• 1:10:46
  and hopefully is having like a normal life out there.
• 1:10:49
  And the case, and at least, you know, as the
• 1:10:51
  legal system is concerned, remains unsolved to this day, which
• 1:10:55
  is fucking crazy because everybody knows exactly who did it.
• 1:10:58
  I mean, there's maybe one or two guys that we
• 1:11:00
  don't know. We don't have their names, but Gregory Dials
• 1:11:03
  and Eddie Nash were definitely you know, it was them.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 2: So all this being.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: Said, I'm gonna leave you with one of the worst
• 1:11:09
  quotes I've ever read from John Holmes. It's just so douchey,
• 1:11:13
  who wrote in his autobiography, how big is it? My
• 1:11:17
  fans would scream, bigger than a payphone, smaller than a
• 1:11:21
  Cadillac was my reply, and that's gonna do it for
• 1:11:26
  this episode of True Crime California. Thanks so much everybody
• 1:11:30
  for listening in. I'll have a new case for you
• 1:11:32
  next week, and until then, thanks for listening.