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- [00:01]
Carter Roy
Hi listeners. It's Carter Roy Happy America 250. If you want to binge all four parts of our limited series about the crimes that built America, ad free, subscribe to Crime House Plus. With Crime House plus, you'll get all four episodes right now instead of waiting. You'll also get every episode of Murder True Crime Stories and the rest of the Crime House shows ad free and released early. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap. Try free at the top of this show's page. This is crime house. Most murder cases come down to evidence. Eyewitnesses, a weapon, a confession. Things a jury can clearly see. But sooner or later, every detective learns that even with all that, you can still lose. Evidence ends up in the wrong hands. People with money and connections find ways out. Sometimes the one witness who could blow a case wide open survives the attack and can't remember a thing. And sometimes a case that should have ended in a courtroom drags on for decades instead. For LAPD detectives Tom Lang and Robert Souza, the Wonderland murders were that kind of case. From the very first days on the scene, they were almost certain who'd ordered the killings. The hard part was making it stick. And it would take them and a long line of prosecutors, judges and juries nearly 20 years to get there. And even then, it wouldn't be the kind of ending anybody had been hoping for. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end, but you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon and. And we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show. And for early ad free access to every episode, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Stories show page on Apple Podcasts. This is the second of two episodes on the Wonderland Murders in Los Angeles 45 years ago. On July 1, 1981, poor people were bludgeoned to death and a fifth was left for dead. Last time we covered the rise and fall of the Wonderland gang. Five drug dealers who dominated LA's cocaine trade in the late 1970s. In the summer of 1981, they robbed a nightclub owner named Eddie Nash. Two days later, a group of men showed up at their townhouse for revenge. Today I'll take you through what happened next. The witnesses who came forward, the witnesses who wouldn't, and a suspect that two LAPD detectives were almost certain had ordered the killings. But every time they got close, the case slipped through their fingers and it would be 20 years before they got another shot. All that and more coming up.
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- [05:42]
Carter Roy
Carvana.com on the morning of June 29, 1981, four members of LA's Wonderland gang broke into the home of a 52 year old nightclub owner named Eddie Nash. They tied up Eddie and his bodyguard Gregory Deals, then forced them to open the safe in Eddie's bedroom closet. They walked out with around $1.2 million in cash, drugs, jewelry and antique guns. It didn't take Eddie long to figure out who'd set him up. Within a couple of days, his bodyguard had picked up the man behind it, a 36 year old former adult film star named John Holmes, and dragged him back to the house. Allegedly, Eddie threatened John's family until he gave up every name in the gang. Two nights later, on July 1, John led a group of Eddie's men back to the Wonderland gang's townhouse in Laurel Canyon. The men used hammers and metal pipes to beat everyone inside to death. Or so they thought. Over the next 12 hours, several groups of junkies came in and out of the place, looting whatever they could find and trampling the crime scene in the process. It wasn't until late afternoon that one of the neighbors finally called the cops. Officers were shocked by what they walked into. Four of the Wonderlanders were dead in their beds and on the floor. 37 year old Ron Lonius, 44 year old Billy Deverell, 46 year old Joy Miller, and 22 year old Barbara Lee Richardson. Somehow, Ron's 30 year old wife, Susan Launius, was still breathing. She was rushed to Cedars Sinai Medical center with severe head injuries. LAPD detectives Tom Lang and Robert Souza took over the case. By the time they arrived later that afternoon, they got the worst of it. Lang would later say it was the bloodiest scene he'd ever worked. Even bloodier than the Tate LaBianca murders 12 years earlier. Whoever had done this hadn't been trying to be efficient. They'd wanted to send a message. The needles all over the place pointed to drugs, but the level of violence ruled out a normal robbery or a turf war. But with Susan in a coma at the hospital, Lang and Susa had to start somewhere else. They cataloged evidence. They began forensic testing. They interviewed everyone they could find in the immediate area. One of the neighbors reported hearing a scream around 4am on July 1. Though they hadn't thought to report it at the time. Loud noises in the middle of the night weren't exactly out of the ordinary when you live next to a drug house. At first, no one they talked to had any idea who'd done it. The Wonderland gang were notorious dealers and thieves, so there was no shortage of people who might have wanted them dead. The list was long enough to be useless. Then, on July 2nd, the detectives got their first real break. A man walked into the Hollywood police station, asked to speak to whoever was working the Wonderland case, and started naming names. His name was David Lind. He was 42 years old, a biker, a heavy heroin user and a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He was also clearly grieving. His 22 year old girlfriend, Barbara Richardson, had been the youngest victim in the house. David was a core member of the Wonderland gang, and the only reason he wasn't dead was that he'd left the house the night before the attack to do drugs At a motel in the San Fernando Valley. Over the next several hours, David told Lang and Souza everything. The robbery at Eddie Nash's house on June 29. John Holmes as the inside man. The half shares afterward. Eddie putting it together within a day or two and grabbing John off the street. For the detective, it was the first time the case had a shape. They had a name for the man who'd ordered it. Eddie Nash. They had a name for the man who'd opened the door for the killers, John Holmes. And they had a timeline. But David Lind wasn't going to be the perfect witness. He was a longtime criminal with a hefty rap sheet, including assault and rape. He was clearly high during parts of the interrogation. And once detectives started digging, rumors surfaced in the Sacramento drug world that he might have been working as a police informant up there before he came to la. That didn't make him a bad source. It just meant they couldn't walk into court with only David Lind on the standard. They needed more. The problem was, going for Eddie Nash directly would be a disaster. Eddie was rich, paranoid, well connected, and he had a small army of lawyers on call. The minute he knew he was a suspect, he'd lawyer up and the trail would go cold. So Lang and Souza went looking for a way in that would wouldn't tip their hand. They didn't have to look long. About a week after the murders, the Sheriff's narcotics bureau came to them with a piece of news that solved their problem. In recent weeks, an informant had bought drugs at Eddie Nash's home. That was enough for a judge to sign off on a search warrant for the property. One that had nothing to do with the Wonderland investigation on paper. In other words, detectives could go through Eddie's house from top to bottom, take whatever they could find, and Eddie wouldn't know they were really there for the murders. It was almost too good to pass up. The sheriff's office got a no knock warrant, an order that allowed deputies to enter without giving Eddie any advance notice. Dangerous, but it would stop him from destroying anything before they got in. On the morning of July 10, 1981, nine days after the Wonderland murders, a squat team surrounded Eddie Nash's Studio City home. They went in fast. Eddie and Greg Deals had no idea who'd just kicked their door in. Two weeks earlier, they'd been ambushed by the Wonderland gang in this same house. As far as Greg was concerned, the same thing was happening now, and he wasn't going to let it. He grabbed his pistol and started firing. The deputies Dove for cover and returned fire with shotguns. Somehow, no one was hit. And after a few 10 seconds, the deputies managed to convince Greg that they were the police with a legitimate warrant. He and Eddy surrendered. Once the smoke cleared, the deputies got Eddie to open his safe. The same one the Wonderland gang had robbed two weeks earlier. Inside, they found drugs, a handgun, and some of the property that had been taken from his house during the robbery. They also found something else. In Eddie's bedroom, the deputies turned up a stash of paperwork, confidential police documents, including reports and search warrants for ongoing investigations. The kind of material no civilian should have access to. The kind of material that would only come into Eddie's hands if somebody on the inside was passing it to him. For Lang and Souza, it was the worst case scenario. Eddie Nash didn't just have money and lawyers and gangland connections. He had a source inside the Los Angeles law enforcement community. Years later, Lang would put it plainly. Eddie Nash was, in his words, very insulated, like the Teflon Don. Nobody could ever nail him. And the reason for that was simple. Political corruption, police corruption, and according to Lang, even corruption among federal agents who were supposed to be helping this case was going to be a lot harder to crack than they'd expected. Even so, they had to keep working the leads they did have. And at that point, the most obvious one was a man they hadn't yet found. John Holmes. John had been at the front door right before the killers went in. He'd known the gang, he'd been in their house, and by all accounts, he was Eddie Nash's man. The problem was, John had vanished after the murders. He'd shown up at his estranged wife Sharon's house the morning of July 1st. According to her, he was covered in dry blood, told her some of what he'd seen, then disappeared into the city. It took the LAPD almost two weeks to track him down. But on July 12, detectives found John holed up at a motel with Don Schiller, a young woman he'd been abusing and trafficking since she was 15. They brought him in. What happened next was one of the strangest interrogations in the case of Lang. And Souza had assumed they'd be the ones to question John. After all, they were the lead detectives on the case. But when they tracked down the address where John was being held, they discovered two other detectives had been put in charge, and their boss wouldn't fully explain why. By the time Lang and Souza rushed over to the hotel where the interrogation was happening, John Holmes was running the show. He claimed to know who the killers were. He claimed he could give them up. But first, he was hungry, and he had a few specific requests. For the next five days, John ate room service steaks, drank top shelf scotch, and dragged out the questioning as long as he could. All of it paid for by the lapd. Lang and Sousa went along with it because they had to. John was their only direct witness to the killings. They even promised him and Sharon spots in witness protection if he'd cooperate. He never did. Every time the conversation got close to actual names, John backed off. He'd give a piece of the story. He'd give a hint. He'd promised more. After one more meal. By July 19, almost three weeks after the murders, Lang and Souza finally had enough. They let John go. And then they tailed him. He drove to Eddie Nash's house. The one person who'd been at the front door of the Wonderland house that night had just walked out of LAPD custody and straight back to the man they thought had ordered the killings. That was the answer. No matter how many stakes the LAPD bought him, John was never going to flip on Eddie. If Lang and Souza wanted to crack this case, they'd have to find another way to do it. Look, we all hit points in life where anxiety, depression, or ADHD feel like a lot more than just a rough patch. I have been there. And honestly, sometimes standard self help tools or talk therapy aren't the total answer. We need a little more. If you need a deeper level of care, Talk Iatry connects you with real virtual psychiatry. This isn't a therapy app. It a 100% online psychiatry practice providing comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like adhd, anxiety, and more. You're actually seeing a medical provider who takes the time to understand what you're going through and build a personalized treatment plan. Plus, they accept major insurers, meaning you can use your existing insurance instead of paying massive out of network costs. Getting started is incredibly simple. You just complete a short online assessment, get matched with clinicians who fit your specific needs, and schedule your first virtual visit in days rather than months. Head to tokyetry.com mtcs to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiotry.com MTCs to get matched in minutes. Hi, listeners, it's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can binge all of them right now ad free with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap Try free at the top of this show's page.
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- [21:31]
Carter Roy
late July 1981, the Wonderland Investigation had hit a wall. Detectives Tom Lang and Robert souza were convinced 52 year old Eddie Nash had ordered the killings and and that John Holmes had let the killers in. But John wasn't going to talk, and the only way to put Eddie at the scene was to get him in an interview room and trip him up. When Lang and Souza suggested it, their supervisor shot them down. The reasoning on his face was practical. Eddie would lawyer up the second he heard the word Wonderland. They'd get Nothing usable. And they'd burn whatever element of surprise they had left. It made some sense, but it also rubbed the detectives the wrong way. And it wasn't the only oddly defensive moment they'd run into when Eddie's name came up. Around the same time, a retired LAPD detective walked into Lang's office unannounced. He didn't have a reason to be there. He didn't have a piece of evidence to share. He just wanted Lang to know that he'd known Eddie Nash for years and that, in his expert opinion, Eddie couldn't possibly have anything to do with the Wonderland murders. He said his piece and left. There was no hard evidence of obstruction, just a pattern. Everyone who knew Eddie seemed to be waving the detectives off. And given what they'd already found at Eddie's house, confidential police paperwork in his bedroom, they had to assume any move they made could get back to him. So they decided to switch gears and look for any gang members who'd survived the attack. David Lynd had already given them most of the story, but he was one witness, and an unreliable one at that. They needed someone who could back him up. The next name on the list was Tracy McCourt. He was 32 years old, the getaway driver during the Nash robbery, and one of the only people who could confirm David's version of events. Tracy hadn't been at the townhouse the night of the murders either. He was crashing at a friend's apartment in North Hollywood when it happens. But Tracy's luck didn't hold long. Within a few days of the murders, he was arrested on an unrelated theft charge. Lang and Souza went straight to his jail cell. He told them everything he knew. Most of it matched what David had said. Some of it filled in details no one else could have. The detectives now had two credible witnesses to the Nash robbery and the bad blood it caused. But two witnesses still weren't enough to make a murder case. What they really needed was someone who could place a killer inside the Wonderland House on the night of July 1st. And the science of forensics was their best shot at finding that person. The Wonderland House had been a goldmine of evidence. Bloody handprints, hair fibers, striated marks where the pipes had hit. Everyone working the case hoped that something in there would tie a specific person to the scene. Months passed before they got anything. At the end of the year, a forensic match finally came back. A left palm print pulled from the headboard of Ron Launius bed belonged to John Holmes. It wasn't a smoking gun. It Only proved that John had been in the room. It didn't prove he'd swung anything. And it lined up uncomfortably well with the story John himself had been telling. That he'd been forced to lead the killers in and watch them work. But it was something. And in a case that had nothing else, something was a lot. There was one more thread they hadn't given up on Susan launius. Susan was the only person who'd been awake when the killers came through the house and lived to tell about it. For months after the attack, she'd been in and out of consciousness at cedars sinai. Surgeons had removed part of her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. Her scalp was held together with staples. Part of one finger was gone. For Robert sousa, she was the only hope left. As soon as he could get clearance from her doctors, he started visiting her in the hospital, Trying to coax some thread of memory out of her about who'd been in the house that night. He never got it. By all medical accounts, the night of July 1st was gone. For susan, the brain damage was too severe. Over the next several months, she'd slowly come back, Relearning to walk, Relearning to talk, Relearning much of her own life. She'd eventually appear in court and try to describe what she could remember of the attack. It wasn't much. She remembered arriving at the wonderland house with her husband on June 30th. She remembered being in bed watching TV. She remembered shadows moving fast through the room. Then nothing. The doctors called it permanent amnesia. Susan could remember her life before that night. She'd eventually be able to live a more or less normal life after. But the hours that mattered for the investigation, the hours when men with hammers beat her husband to death beside her, those hours were erased. The one person who'd been awake when the killers came in Couldn't tell anyone what she'd seen. By the end of 1981, the detectives had been working the case non stop for six months. They had two witnesses to the robbery. They had a palm print. They had a survivor with no memory. And they had a prime suspect, Eddie nash, who seemed to have an in with local law enforcement. The decision they reached was uncomfortable but logical. If they couldn't get to eddie, they'd go after John holmes. A murder charge against John wood at the very least, forced the the question. He'd either flip on Eddie to save himself, or he'd take the fall and the case would close. There was just one more thing to do first. Find him again. John had been on the run for months. After the LAPD let him go in July, he and Don had bounced across the country. Arizona, Montana, Florida. On December 4th 4th, 1981, former LAPD homicide detective Frank Tomlinson and Tom Lang caught up with John at a motel in Miami. He was arrested on the spot. Three months later, in March 1982, prosecutors officially charged him with four counts of murder. By that point, Lange and Souza were betting on a long shot. They knew the case against John was was thin, a palm print and a couple of witnesses. They were hoping that just walking John into a courtroom in chains would scare him into giving up the man who'd ordered the killings. What they didn't know yet was just how much John Holmes feared Eddie Nash. More than prison, more than anything. When the case went to trial in May, 37 year old John Holmes stuck with a story he'd been telling since the beginning. He was a victim. The Wonderland gang had coerced him into the Nash robbery. He'd gotten dragged along into the revenge attack. He'd watched the killings, sure, but he hadn't swung anything. Behind the scenes, prosecutors kept pushing him to cut a deal. They wanted Eddie. They told John that if he gave them what he knew, they'd find a way to take care of him. John didn't budge. He said Eddie was the most evil man he'd ever known. He'd rather take a life sentence than get on Eddie's bad side. The prosecution pointed out the obvious problems with John's story. He had every reason to lie, and legally, coercion was no defense against murder. But the prosecution had its own problem. Their story wasn't actually that different from John's. They were also telling the jury that John was, at worst, a pawn. The real villain was Eddie Nash, who wasn't on trial. On June 26, 1982, John. After a three week trial, the jury acquitted John Holmes of all charges. But he wasn't free yet. Throughout the trial, John's lawyers had argued that he had been inside the Wonderland house when the killings happened. He clearly knew something. A judge ordered him to testify under oath about everything he'd seen. Once again, John chose prison over ratting Eddie out. He refused to talk and was held in contempt of court for 110 days. When his time was up, he walked out. And he still hadn't said a word about Eddie Nash. With John off the table, the LAPD pivoted. They couldn't charge Eddie with the murders, but they could go after him and his men for the lesser crimes. The Investigation had turned up. Gregory Deals was charged with attempted murder and assault for firing on the deputies during the July 10 raid. He was sentenced to three years. Then came Eddie himself. Two raids on his home, the one on July 10 and a second one in November 1981, had turned up roughly two pounds of pure cocaine, much of it stashed in his bedroom safe. Combined, the haul was estimated at around a million dollars in street value. On October 6, 1982, Eddie was convicted of possessing cocaine for sale. The next month he was sentenced to eight years, the maximum. It was something. But for Lang and Souza, it wasn't anywhere close to enough. Eddie had ordered a quadruple murder. He was getting time on a drug charge. And then it got worse. In the summer of 1984, Eddie's lawyers filed a motion to release him from prison on medical grounds. They argued that 55 year old Eddie needed surgery to remove a tumor in his sinuses. The judge agreed. After serving roughly two years of his eight year sentence, Eddie Nash walked out a free man. He never did get the surgery his lawyers had described. And years later, an associate of his would admit that the judge had been bribed for about $100,000. For Lang and Souza, it was infuriating. But there was nothing they could do in the short term. They'd taken every shot they had. So they put the case on a slow burn, kept their files updated and waited for something to change. And before long, it did.
- [33:59]
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- [34:07]
Carter Roy
Kundal,
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we found you on July 10th.
- [34:13]
Carter Roy
What did we do to deserve this?
- [34:16]
Carvana Advertiser
Every family.
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Carter Roy
We can all be reunited has its demons. I could never have lived without you. I won't let you live without me.
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Carvana Advertiser
EVIL DEAD Burn Rated R under 17. Not admitted without parent July 10.
- [34:33]
Carter Roy
By the mid-1980s, the LAPD had done everything they could think of with the Wonderland murders. John Holmes had been acquitted. Eddie Nash was out on a medical release. The man who'd ordered four killings had walked. Almost four years went by. Then, in early 1988, they got news that John Holmes was dying. He'd contracted aids. The same epidemic that was tearing through Los Angeles and the rest of the country in those years. By February, he was in bad shape. Doctors said he probably had weeks. Detective Tom Lang drove out to the VA hospital in Sepulveda for one last try. John was barely awake. The medication left him incoherent. Lang asked him about Eddie, about the night in Laurel Canyon, about the men with the pipes. John promised that he'd write everything down before he died. The whole truth. Finally, after seven years, he never did. On March 13, 1988, John Holmes died of AIDS complications. He was 43. A month after he died, his first wife, Sharon, broke her silence to the Los Angeles Times. She'd kept quiet for nearly seven years, but with John gone, she told the paper what she'd only told the closest investigators. Back in 1981, on the morning of the murders, John had shown up at her house covered in dried blood. He'd told her how he'd led three men to the Wonderland house, walked them in past the front gate and stood there while they killed almost everyone inside. It was exactly the corroboration the prosecution had needed seven years earlier. But by 1988, John was dead. And the three men he'd led to the house that night were still nameless. There was nobody left to put in a courtroom that looked at the time like the end. The one witness who could have nailed Eddie Nash was gone. So was any chance of charging the actual killers. Then, that spring, Tom Lang got a phone call from the LA County Jail. An inmate booked on drug charges had asked to speak with him about the Wonderland case. The inmate's name was Scott Thorsen. Lang recognized it. Scott had been the longtime live in partner of the entertainer Liberace through much of the 1970s. In 1982, Scott had sued Liberace for palimony, basically alimony for an unmarried partner in one of the most public same sex relationship lawsuits of the era. The settlement had given him a decent payout, but Scott's life had gone sideways. In the years since he'd developed a heavy cocaine habit. He'd become one of Eddie Nash's regular customers. By 1988, the drugs had run his money out and his luck had run with it. He was sitting in the LA County Jail facing armed robbery charges. And he had one bargaining chip left. He'd been in Eddie Nash's house on the late afternoon of June 30, 1981, less than 12 hours before the murders. And he'd seen everything. According to Scott, he'd gone to Eddie's house that afternoon to buy drugs. While he was there, he watched Gregory Deals drag John Holmes through the front door, tie him to a chair and beat him. He watched Eddie Nash threaten John's family by name, reading addresses out of a little black book. Until John gave up everyone in the Wonderland gang. He watched Eddie plan the revenge attack right in front of him. Scott hadn't said a word at the time, he'd been terrified of Eddie. But now, seven years later, sitting in jail and looking at his own legal problems, he was ready to talk. Lang was cautious. Scott was, by his own admission, a man with reasons to lie. He was also the closest thing to an eyewitness that they had. By the fall of 1988, Gregory Diels had been out of prison for three years. On September 7th, he was arrested again, this time on four counts of murder for the Wonderland killings, plus one count of attempted murder for Susan Launius. Eddie Nash was indicted shortly after for conspiracy and ordering the killings. It took until 199090 for the case to go to trial. By then, Eddie's lawyers had filed every motion they could to delay the proceedings. But Scott Thorson and the prosecution's case had survived. Both men would be tried in the same courtroom, but with two separate juries. The prosecution put on the best case they'd ever had. David Lynn testified. Scott Thorson testified about what he'd seen at Eddie's house the day before the murders. The forensic evidence was laid out. The timeline was clean. After five days of deliberation, the jury was almost ready to convict. Almost. Out of 12 jurors, 11 wanted to find Eddie guilty. One refused Eddie and refused to even discuss the evidence with the others. The judge could have replaced her with one of the alternates. Instead, he declared a mistrial. The deal's jury was similarly struck. Two holdouts who wouldn't budge. Another mistrial. For Lang and Souza, it was demoralizing. But they'd almost gotten a conviction once. They figured they could do it again. The retrial began in March 1991. The same witnesses, mostly the same evidence. By every metric, the prosecution's case was just as strong as it had been the first time around. But Eddie's defense team made a key change. They decided to lean harder on a theory they'd already floated in 1990. That the real killer was a man named Paul Kelly. Paul was a former associate of the Wonderland gang and a rival of Ron Launius. The defense produced a witness, a woman named Maggie Kaufman. She said Paul had described the Wonderland murders to her in detail just two days after they happened. And that he'd been in a cheerful mood while doing was a wild theory. The prosecution and thought it was a red herring designed to confuse the jury. Paul Kelly had an alibi. There was no physical evidence linking him to the house. There was no plausible explanation for how he could have gotten in or carried out the killings on his own. But the defense didn't need to prove that he had. All they needed was reasonable doubt. In the summer of 1991, the jury came back with verdicts on both men. Eddie Nash, not guilty. Gregory Deals, not guilty. For Lang and Sousa, the 1991 acquittal was the worst result so far. In the first trial, they'd been one juror away from a conviction. In the second, with almost identical evidence, they'd lost both men outright. Something didn't add up. They started asking questions about the first trial, specifically that one juror who'd refused to deliberate. What they learned, piece by piece over the next several years, was that the mistrial hadn't been an accident. By the mid-1990s, they had a working theory, but no way to charge it. Gregory Deals, by then in failing health, died in 1997. They put the case back on a slow burn, but by May of 2000, they were ready to act. Eddie was 71 years old, still living quietly in the LA area. And he had no idea that a multi agency federal task force had been building a racketeering case against him for four years. On May 19, 2000, federal agents arrested him at his Tarzana home. The indictment ran 16 counts. Drug trafficking, money laundering, conspiracy, and most importantly, conspiring to carry out the Wonderland murders and bribing a juror to deadlock the 1990 trial. It was the bribery charge that finally cracked the case open. When Gregory Deals was in custody in 1988, he got friendly with some gang members inside prison. One of them had a sister who ended up on the Nash jury in 1990. The arrangement was simple. For $50,000, she agreed to hold out. And that's exactly what she did. The statute of the limitations had already run out on charging the juror herself, but it hadn't run out on the men who'd bribed her. And for the first time in nearly two decades, Eddie Nash had nowhere to go. In September of 2001, 20 years and two months after the Wonderland murders, Eddie Nash took a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to RICO violations, money laundering, and jury tampering. He admitted that he'd ordered his men to retrieve his stolen property from the Wonderland house, knowing that violence might result. But he stopped short of admitting that he'd planned the murders. In exchange, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and a $250,000 fine for everyone who'd worked the case. It was complicated news. On the one hand, Eddie Nash was finally going to prison for something connected to Wonderland. On the other hand, the deal was a slap on the wrist. For someone connected to a quadruple murder. And then the slap on the wrist got softer. In 2003, Eddie Nash was released from federal prison after serving roughly one year of his sentence, citing, once again, chronic sinus problems and other health issues. He lived another 11 years, mostly out of the public eye, and died on August 9, 2014, at the age of 85. 45 years after the Wonderland murders, the case is still officially unsolved. No one has ever been charged or convicted. Convicted of swinging the pipes and hammers that took four lives in that townhouse. It's a hard story to land cleanly. Most of the people who could have told us what really happened that night are gone. John Holmes died in 1988 without ever saying a word. David Lynn died of a heroin overdose in 1995. Greg Deals died two years later in 1997. Tracy McCourt died in 2006. Eddie Nash outlived all of them. Susan Launius, the one person who'd been awake when the killers came through that door, never got her memory back. In the end, what the Wonderland case left behind was a kind of warning about the way money and connections can stall justice for decades. About the way fear keeps witnesses quiet. About what happens when a single juror, a few thousand dollars, and a long enough timeline are enough to make a murder case disappear. But it also left something else. Tom Lang and Robert Sousa didn't stop working the case after the 1991 acquittals. They didn't stop after John Holmes died, after Greg Deals died. After a decade of dead ends. They kept the file open. They kept the pressure on. And when the federal task force finally moved in 20 years later, the work they'd done made a case that Eddie Nash couldn't beat justice in. The Wonderland case didn't arrive on time. It didn't arrive in full. But the only reason it arrived at all was because two detectives wouldn't let go. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House. Plus on Apple Podcasts, you'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad free. No waiting for part two. Plus ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, type Try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Friday. True Crime Stories is hosted by Me, Carter Roy and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Tara Wells, Cassidy Dillon and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.