Background
The Wonderland Gang operated out of a rented townhouse at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles. The residents — Ronald Lee "Ron" Launius, William Raymond "Billy" Deverell, Deverell's girlfriend and leaseholder Joy Audrey Gold Miller, Tracy Raymond McCourt, and David Clay Lind — were involved in drug use and dealing.
On June 29, 1981, Launius, Deverell, Lind, and McCourt carried out an armed home invasion robbery at the home of nightclub owner and organized crime figure Eddie Nash, during which Nash's bodyguard Gregory Dewitt Diles was shot and injured. Nash suspected porn actor John Holmes had facilitated the robbery, since Holmes had visited his home multiple times that morning and left a door open. Diles brought Holmes to Nash for questioning; witness Scott Thorson, present to buy drugs, later said he saw Holmes tied to a chair and beaten.
The murders
Shortly before 3:00 a.m. on July 1, 1981, two days after the robbery, unidentified assailants entered the Wonderland Avenue townhouse and killed Launius, Deverell, Miller, and Barbara Richardson — Lind's girlfriend, who had been visiting — using what investigators believed were hammers and metal pipes. Launius's wife, Susan, was severely injured but survived, suffering permanent amnesia about the attack, partial loss of a finger, and surgical removal of part of her skull. Lind and McCourt were not present at the time of the attack; Lind died of a heroin overdose in 1995 and McCourt died in 2006.
Investigation and trials
LAPD detectives Tom Lange and Robert Souza led the investigation and, searching Nash's home days later, found over $1 million in cocaine and items stolen from the townhouse. After Holmes' palm print was found at the scene, he was charged with four counts of murder in March 1982; he was acquitted on June 26, 1982, after his defense argued he had been forced by the actual killers to give them entry. Holmes separately served 110 days for contempt for refusing to cooperate with investigators. He died on March 13, 1988, from AIDS complications; a month before his death, LAPD detectives questioned him but received only incoherent responses. In April 1988, Holmes' first wife told the Los Angeles Times that Holmes had described leading three assailants into the house and watching the killings, though he never named them to her.
In 1990, Nash and Diles were charged in California state court; Thorson testified against them, but a first trial ended in a hung jury (11–1 for conviction), and a second trial in 1991 resulted in acquittal for both. Diles died of liver failure in 1997. In 2000, following a four-year joint local-federal investigation, Nash was indicted on federal RICO charges covering drug trafficking, money laundering, conspiracy in the Wonderland murders, and bribery of the holdout juror from his first trial. In September 2001 Nash pleaded guilty to RICO and money-laundering charges and admitted bribing the juror and ordering associates to retrieve stolen property in a manner that could have led to violence, but he denied planning the murders. He received a 4½-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine. Nash died in 2014.
No one has been convicted of the murders themselves.
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