Original subtitles

♪♪

[Michael] Los Angeles,

a city infamous for its music and movies...

[director] Action!

...is also defined by its murders.

[gunshot fires, man screams]

It seems to set the City of Angels apart,

capturing the world's attention.

The randomness of murder plays out beneath

the bright lights of Hollywood,

the boulevard of broken dreams,

and seeps into the veins of the American zeitgeist.

I'm Michael Connelly, and I came here nearly 40 years ago,

drawn by the movies, the music, and, yes, the murders.

This dark pantheon includes the Black Dahlia,

the Hillside Strangler, the Manson case,

the OJ Simpson case, the slaying of Biggie Smalls,

just to name a few.

But perhaps no other case

symbolizes an era in Los Angeles

more than the Wonderland Massacre.

[man] Okay, cameras rolling.

[reporter] Four murder victims were found today

in a posh Hollywood Hills home.

Police said all four had been beaten to death in a struggle

that splattered the interior of the house with blood --

a Manson-like mass murder.

[Michael] The tentacles of the case

would ensnare a porn star, a corrupt judge,

and drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Multiple celebrities would be swept into the story

by Liberace's boy toy, enigma Scott Thorson.

♪♪

To this day, no one has been held directly accountable.

For many, including me,

it has been a decades-long obsession.

♪♪

♪♪

[vehicles passing, indistinct conversations]

[car horn honks]

♪♪

[Richard Pryor] Listen, addiction, it's a monster.

Well, I'll tell you one thing, man.

When that fire hits your ass,

that will sober your ass up quickly.

[cheers and applause]

[Michael] What was your interaction with Pryor?

Isn't there a story about you warning Pryor

about the dangers of freebasing?

Oh, yeah.

♪♪

We took off and went to Mulholland Drive.

And we parked my gold Rolls-Royce,

and he went in the back. -[lighter strikes]

We had trays that would fold down.

And he was freebasing, and he'd light that pipe up.

Yeah, he even worked it into his act.

You got a light? Match?

-Thank you. -[man] Don't do it!

[chuckles] Say, watch out.

And it was an ether base,

so I said, "You got to be careful, Richard."

And, uh, he didn't listen, and he blew himself up.

Just strike the match like this. You say, "What's that?"

"Richard Pryor running down the street."

[laughter and applause]

And, uh, that's when...

it just exploded in Los Angeles.

[man] Deputy District Attorney Jan Maurizi.

You were a prosecutor of murders and major crimes

in L.A. County in the 1980s,

so you kinda had a front row seat

on what was happening in the worlds of crime,

and especially this advent of crack cocaine.

In the '70s and early '80s, powder cocaine was king.

♪♪

But it was more the drug of choice for the elite,

so it was sort of that segment of the population

in those early days.

By the early 1980s,

they wanted an opportunity and the ability

to increase profitability,

and so they came up with a way to create crack cocaine.

Crack cocaine was something

that they could take a small amount of powder cocaine,

mix it with baking soda and water,

and cook it at a high temperature

until it sort of crystallized and became crack.

And then when it cooled, they could break off the rocks

so they could sell them to the population.

Their cost was much less. They had much more product.

And that's when I saw it going into

the lower and sort of middle class communities.

So that's when the epidemic really took off,

the early to mid '80s.

[reporter] Crack -- a kind of cocaine, a powerful mind bender

and increasingly popular and deadly.

[reporter #2] Today, crack cocaine use here

is an epidemic, up 200% in the last year.

Good evening.

Drugs are menacing our society.

They're threatening our values

and undercutting our institutions.

Today, there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic,

in this country, and no one is safe from it.

The casual user cannot morally escape responsibility

for the action of drug traffickers and dealings.

There's a trail of death and destruction

that leads directly to his door.

I like these glasses. They're nice.

Tell me about the wave of crack

that came to Los Angeles.

Eddie Nash was the granddaddy of crack.

He introduced it to Hollywood.

He sold it through the nightclubs.

He had me making the crack. I would do the cooking for him.

We would cook in these big gallon mayonnaise jars,

and they're called "the cookie." "Make the cookie."

And then cut them up, and then we'd sell them

through the nightclubs and all that.

You guys were involved in crack so early

that law enforcement didn't really understand

what was going on with that.

♪♪

One day, I was driving,

and I was going up to Eddie Nash,

and I had this big, round rock...

[siren wails]

...and I was pulled over and they searched the car.

And they said, "What the hell is this?"

And they put it on the hood of the car.

I said, "I don't know. I found that in my brother's house."

I was going to point to it, and he slapped my hand,

and the crack went flying off the hood of the car.

They didn't know what was up.

It wasn't until, um, the gang members,

the Bloods, the Crips, started selling it.

Here, off an ounce of dope,

I can make anywhere from $1,100 to $1,200.

And then we're killing each other over it.

[man] Another guy hit over there, too.

[man #2] We know about him. He's just his leg.

That's...That's what started it all.

This guy's hit in the chest.

It's real bad.

People dying over nothing, man.

So your 10, 11 years in Hollywood

matched the rise of crack cocaine.

-Yeah. -...and that epidemic

that really destroyed certain levels of society.

The drug trade is bringing in gobs and gobs of money,

and everybody's got guns

because they're carrying a lot of money.

They're carrying a lot of drugs.

There's protection, and both sides have that.

It's ripe for shootouts and -- and murders.

And -- And the same thing was going on

in Hollywood at that time.

It just -- All the pieces of the puzzle

were there to be put together to explode with violence.

And I got brought in to the homicide unit

just to help try to control the problem.

♪♪

[camera shutter clicking]

[Michael] The granddaddy of this crack epidemic,

Eddie Nash, was facing trial for the drug charges

that resulted from the cocaine found

during the raids of his home and businesses.

Were there any special challenges on the drug trial,

or did you feel like you were going in,

uh, to get that victory?

It's a bread-and-butter trial.

There's just nothing that could be raised.

Drugs are found in is safe in the house.

Diles shoots at the deputy sheriffs.

I wasn't sweating this too badly.

Anytime you're dealing with 12 jurors, nothing is assured.

Not wanting to leave anything to chance,

in a bold move, Eddie Nash approached

Tom Lange and Bob Souza.

[Souza] Nash actually attempted to bribe Tom and I

in the courthouse

20 feet from his attorneys.

He said, "Hey, you guys are homicide guys.

What's it gonna take to make this go away, you know?

I got to get rid of these drug cases.

How about a quarter of a million each?"

And when we heard that, we thought,

"How many people can you buy

for a quarter of a million dollars in 1982?"

And, you know, I mean,

he had to have a lot of people on the street.

[indistinct conversations]

[reporter] The jury deliberated for less than a day.

And when the verdict was read this morning,

Eddie Nash didn't seem surprised.

He was found guilty of seven counts of possessing drugs,

two of those counts with intent to sell --

each a felony.

[Michael] Judge Rix sentenced Nash

to the maximum of eight years...

[cell door clanking]

...plus a fine of more than $120,000.

At this point, Scott Thorson was merely a name

that had been passed to investigators

by the sheriff's department,

which had Nash's house under surveillance

prior to the Wonderland murders.

Thorson was seen, along with many others,

going into the house, presumably to buy drugs.

We'd heard of Scott Thorson because,

uh, we knew that he was at Nash's place early on.

Somebody that we wanted to talk to.

Well, he wouldn't talk to us.

Everybody kept coming to me, and I wouldn't --

I wouldn't talk about it.

[chuckles] I -- I was scared to death.

I knew too much.

So about sometime in '82, he goes off...

-To prison. -...to prison,

so what were you doing then?

When he went to jail,

I then took over and I became involved in running drugs.

I became a big Hollywood drug lord myself.

I went into another organized crime family

with the -- called the BGF, the Black Guerilla Family.

I was the only white member there.

And we ran coke -- crack houses.

♪♪

When Eddie was gone, did you kind of

forge new bonds?

You're with a couple people

that were Black Guerilla Family.

This was like a whole new distribution branch

for the Eddie Nash operation?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, this was huge.

[Michael] The Black Guerilla Family.

-[Rick] Right. -Can you kind of explain

who and what that organization is?

Yeah, it's, uh, it's one of the main four prison gangs.

It started in California, like so many gangs do.

And it was a Black Power gang in prison.

Was it surprising that here's this guy, Scott Thorson,

he's a white guy,

and he's involved with the Black Guerilla Family?

-Right. -Is that an unusual thing,

or is it -- when it comes to drugs,

is -- everyone's welcome?

With Scott Thorson,

he had some prominent connections through Liberace.

There were people from all layers of society

that were using cocaine back then.

It -- It didn't matter.

And if they could infiltrate

through a guy like Scott Thorson,

who had pretty decent connections, that would work.

♪♪

[Michael] But the BGF didn't start as a drug operation.

The Black Guerilla Family started in the late 1960s

in the prison system as a paramilitary organization,

um, very politically involved.

George Jackson was the founder.

Here in prison, we see the repression,

the exploitation,

the -- the victimization of, uh,

lower-class peoples.

Jackson was very Marxist and Leninist in his philosophy,

much like the SLA and the Black Panthers.

And so that, as I understand it,

was part of the original beginnings.

[indistinct shouting]

[reporter] Tension had been mounting here

at San Quentin Prison for several months.

On Saturday, August 21st,

George Jackson was shot in circumstances

which are, to say the least, mysterious.

George Jackson was killed.

So at that time,

a man by the name of Doc Holiday took over,

and he had already had a drug business in Pasadena.

And so he began to expand sort of the goals

of the Black Guerilla Family into more profit making.

[Michael] How did you meet Doc Holiday?

Doc Holiday I met through a friend of mine

that was a Blood.

Doc Holiday went in partnership with me,

and we took over these abandoned apartment buildings.

We turned them into crack houses.

It was the BGF and Bloods that worked together in these homes.

[Jan] One of the things that the BGF did

that was really pretty unique was

there are Bloods, and there are Crips,

and they are natural enemies.

They were then. They are today.

But the Black Guerilla Family was able

to recruit both of them.

♪♪

[Scott] They'd be on the rooftops with walkie talkies,

looking for police or any trouble that would come to them.

-So it was like a whole system. -There's a whole system.

We had two -- two of

the biggest apartment buildings in Hollywood.

We'd have people lined up for over a block.

So you're in business with these guys.

You're not scared that...

-I was scared to death. -I mean, you're also an addict,

so it sounds like... -I was so far gone by then.

So far gone. I was just out of control.

I was a mess. I slept with one eye open.

♪♪

[Michael] I remember when I first put

the words "Black Guerilla Family"

into a newspaper story.

We had barely written about it at the LA Times.

I thought it was an ego thing.

I felt like the prince of the city.

I'd be driving home over the elevated freeways

over Hollywood, and I'd look out at the lights

and say, "These things are going on,

and do all those people behind those lights,

do they even care, do they know about it?"

By the early 1980s,

the increased population of people

who are addicted to drugs, it just all escalated.

The rise of crack, if you will,

did that coincide with the rise of violent crime?

Most definitely. Most definitely.

[siren wailing police radio chatter]

Stabbed three times. Then shot one time.

Left femur, one entrance wound, no exit.

[man] Yeah, there's another fella here

that was where he was shot, shot in the face. He's dead.

And then we started to see

multiple murders throughout the Black Guerilla Family

and throughout the San Fernando Valley,

which ultimately led up to the quadruple murder

that I'm most familiar with.

♪♪

By the time we had put together this quadruple,

we had 58 murder books.

You keep mentioning a quadruple,

and you're not talking about Wonderland, right?

That's correct. I'm not.

That was a quadruple homicide that took place

that the Bryant Organization had orchestrated.

You call it the Bryant Organization,

but this was an organization that answered to Doc Holiday.

Through Jeff Bryant.

Jeff Bryant ordered hits on people.

Yes. Two of the Bryant associates,

James Brown and Andre Armstrong, got together.

They decided that the Bryants owed them,

and they were gonna demand their due.

When they set up a meeting with them

at one of the crack houses in Lakeview Terrace...

...unfortunately, they brought Andre's girlfriend,

and she had two little kids with her --

a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son.

[Michael] As the two associates entered the crack house,

they were shot at point-blank range.

[gunshot fires]

Waiting outside in the car, the girlfriend and her daughter

were both shot in the back of the head.

[gunshots fire]

♪♪

Four people were killed in Lakeview Terrace.

I wrote about it a lot, but I never knew what --

if my stories had any impact

or increased the knowledge of the community

of what's going on about this cancer

that was at the center of the community.

Here you have a quadruple murder

that's not getting a whole lot of attention.

Then the flip side is Wonderland is still a crime of fascination.

It's kind of hit the upper pantheon

of famous Los Angeles crimes.

I certainly remember just as a citizen

reading about that -- multiple murders,

drugs, Laurel Canyon, and porn stars.

But it really wasn't

until I began to see this -- sort of the correlation

between the elite powder cocaine

and then the lower-class, middle-class crack cocaine,

and how they were sort of

two sides of the same coin, in a sense.

[man] What are you doing?

Smoking some crack. 'Cause I like it.

[man] I love cocaine,

and I couldn't wait to get out of college

and start working and making money

'cause I wanted to live that lifestyle.

[man #2] You don't become known smoking crack.

You become shit.

Who's buying it?

People, man. Who you think?

The stockbrokers, the lawyers,

the people with the money.

It's not -- It's not a party

unless there's drugs or drinking.

[chuckles]

I don't know why I do it.

Maybe the addiction.

♪♪

The addiction is what it is.

♪♪

It was horrible.

That drug, it makes people evil.

It's one of the worst drugs I've ever done.

People lose their lives over this.

They become insane.

They become tweakers, and that's all they want

is that drug, and they chase it.

They will sell their mother's ass on the street if they could.

And they would.

I had a lady come up to me one day,

and she had two little babies.

She offered to sell her babies to me.

I said, "How dare you?

How could you do that to your own children?"

-It broke my heart. -And you say that now,

but when this was all happening in the '80s,

and Los Angeles had

the highest rate of homicide it's ever had...

Yeah.

...you're cooking this stuff. Did it never --

Did you make that connection, or did you say...

-You know something? -..."What did we start?"

I was so far gone and making so much money.

I'm not proud of it, and I have regrets.

But I did it to survive.

♪♪

[Michael] As the drug wars raged,

and with the Holmes acquittal long in the rearview mirror,

the Wonderland case was at a standstill.

♪♪

♪♪

[man] Mitzi Roberts, LAPD cold case detective. Mark.

When you, um, look at a cold case,

there's something like 6,000 unsolved murders in Los Angeles.

What is the protocol or what is the checklist

that you're looking for in order to open up a case

that's 43 years old?

There's really no checklist.

I mean, obviously, if it's self-initiated,

I'm going to try and find a case that has evidence

that's gonna solve the case -- DNA, fingerprints.

Now, with genetic genealogy, I mean, that's the game changer.

That's the face of -- of investigations,

especially cold cases.

I've always known about the Wonderland murders,

the Laurel Canyon murders.

To our benefit, it's a hands-on crime.

It's not like a shooting.

It's not like, you know, an execution with a gun.

So every time they're coming down, um, if there's --

Blood's flying. Blood, blood, blood.

Even then, you're gonna need a lot of circumstantial evidence

from other people that were there.

Does the history of the case also,

uh, not intimidate, but give you pause?

Yeah, it -- it does give me pause,

because some of the best detectives and DAs

that I've known in my career

have already put everything into this case.

So why is this case still so interesting

that people want to know about it?

Why is this case still in the zeitgeist?

First of all, people love Hollywood

all throughout the country,

and this is a great Hollywood mystery.

It's like the Black Dahlia.

As someone who makes up a lot of my stories,

yeah, having a good villain is important.

I think Eddie Nash emerged as a really good villain.

-Yeah. -And of course,

it's somebody who, our villain,

a real life villain came out here

to be a make-believe guy, to be an actor.

Yeah.

So it's like a "only in Hollywood" story.

It's got its fingers in everything

we know about Hollywood.

You know, we got a porn star as a suspect...

drugs and money and Liberace,

Hollywood nightclubs, and everything

we know of what the '70s and the '80s were in Hollywood,

this mystery has.

That's what I love about cold cases.

It's like a time machine.

What seemed so brutal when this murder happened

we've seen so much since then.

The late '80s were a killing field in Los Angeles.

[siren wailing in distance]

♪♪

[Michael] Okay, so some years go by,

and this case looks like it's gone forever, probably.

Yeah. We moved on to these other cases.

You've got to prioritize 'em.

You have the Hillside Strangler with these young girls

who are getting kidnapped, brutalized,

raped and dumped over the hills of L.A.,

and then you throw in the two or three

different Skid Row serial killings

that we had at the time, Slasher, Stabber.

30 or 40 derelicts down there were knifed to death

over a period of five or six years.

♪♪

[Michael] And it's in the midst of these other cases

that Lange and Souza's professional lives

were about to be turned upside down

when Souza made a routine check-in

on the Wonderland case.

There was a concerted effort to smear you guys.

Yeah.

You discovered this whole thing, right,

when you come into the office after hours or something?

Yeah. By that time, the murder book,

we had four volumes of thick three-ring binders.

That night I went to get the folders,

the entire case was gone.

All four folders were missing.

Our captain happened to be there late.

I said, "Hey, Cap. I got a problem."

I said, "Our Laurel Canyon case is missing.

I wonder where it's gone."

He says, uh, "Sit down a minute, Bob."

And I knew something was up,

and I said, "No, no, what's going on?"

He said, "There's been a --

a chief special Internal Affairs investigation

against you and Tom."

I said, "For what?"

He said, "Well, there's allegations

that you two were, uh, were on the take,

and Nash is paying you guys off.

That's why you haven't arrested him.

Because you're on his payroll."

I said, "Jesus." I said, "I don't believe this shit."

And I mean, I lost it. I said, "Cap, this is bullshit."

-[chuckles] -So I stormed out.

I called Tom at home, and I said, "Tom, you sitting down?"

And I could tell on the other -- I could feel --

I could feel the heat coming off of Tom.

[Michael] According to documents

in the internal investigation file,

an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

was the source of the complaint against Lange and Souza.

His name was Henry Hoskins.

♪♪

[Tom] Henry Hoskins' office

with the Organized Crime Strike Force

is right across the street from Parker Center, where we were.

One afternoon, he came walking across the street

into our office and introduced himself.

And he was there on a fishing expedition.

Yeah. He's kind of an intimidating type of individual.

He says, "We'd like to know about your investigation,

what you have, as it probably ties in with us."

Unbeknownst to us,

he's a federal agent, but he's also working with Ed Nash.

He's dirty. He's a dirty fed.

We didn't know that at the time.

He's trying to get what he can from us.

We gave him nothing.

[Michael] The investigation into Lange and Souza

never leaked to the public,

but it hung over the two detectives

and the case for more than a year.

Here we are, doing the best we can

to solve a quadruple murder, and we're being followed.

Find out we're being surveilled.

Um, they're checking everything we did.

Every entry in our log is being analyzed.

Now who do we trust? We have no idea.

Hoskins was probably dialed in all the way up to the mayor.

♪♪

During that time, with just two and a half years

of a seven-year sentence served,

Nash claims to have developed a sinus tumor

and petitioned to be released to get medical treatment.

♪♪

And the judge cut the sentence...

made him eligible for immediate parole.

I was astounded!

Is this the same judge that maxed him out?

What happened?!

You know, I was amazed.

He gets out of prison... and never had surgery.

He was released because of a tumor.

Did you know that to be a true story?

No. [chuckles]

He never had an operation afterwards.

No, but he had lung problems.

I do know that. From smoking that crack.

[Michael] Was there anything you could do about that?

It's over. It's done.

Judge Rix sentenced Nash to eight years in prison.

He didn't serve but two years, and Rix let him out.

It just -- It was just unbelievable.

[siren wailing in distance]

[Michael] With Nash out of prison,

it was back to business as usual.

[reporter] The Odyssey is a popular teenage nightclub.

Teens can dance here until 4:00 in the morning on weekdays

and 5:00 a.m. on weekends.

No liquor is served, but the kids are out very late,

and they're causing problems.

The Odyssey eventually became an under-21 club

because the liquor license was lost.

Eddie Nash made it into a club

where young, young people could come.

13-, 14-year-olds.

Drugs were everywhere.

The main purpose for the clubs was

that's where he sold the crack and the cocaine,

especially at The Odyssey.

He had -- In the office were pounds of cocaine

that he would sell to the kids that came in.

[1980s synthesizer music playing]

[reporter] About 50 teenagers demonstrated in front

of The Odyssey nightclub near West Hollywood today.

The Odyssey's dance permit was revoked earlier this week

by the police commission

following neighbors' complaints about the kids.

The spokesman for the club says the owner plans

to appeal the decision that revoked the club's dance permit.

We've been here nine years.

We've never had an arrest on a location in nine years

or any violations.

[Scott] Chris Cox was a big supplier for Nash.

I thought he always owned The Odyssey,

but I understand that it was Nash that owned it.

[Michael] Facing continued pressure from the neighbors

and the police commission and losing money,

The Odyssey closed its doors.

[door closes]

[reporter] The buildings were mostly empty

and were scheduled to be auctioned off the end of April.

[siren wailing, fire crackling]

Arson investigators are looking into a fire

that broke out late today

at the controversial Odyssey nightclub.

Witnesses in the area saw people throw some type of liquid

into the front of the building and ignite the fire

at the front portion of the building.

[Michael] Neither Eddie Nash,

nor anyone else, for that matter,

was ever charged in the arson of The Odyssey.

But when there's smoke, there's fire.

♪♪

In federal custody, they have Henry Hoskins snitch.

He's one of the guys

who was setting the arson fires for Nash.

"You see Nash, the puppet master here?"

Okay, so back to the investigation into you guys.

It's easy to say, "Who's behind this?

Nash is behind this."

But how did you -- how did you prove that?

What happened to Hoskins that revealed the puppet master?

Hoskins left the feds during this investigation.

They knew he was dirty. He left.

He opens the private investigator business

on Sunset Boulevard.

He uses Ed Nash's nightclub, the Seven Seas, as his address.

♪♪

[chuckles]

And his office is upstairs from Nash's business.

♪♪

Now we know that he's connected to Ed Nash.

♪♪

With Nash,

imagine being that type of guy that was so comfortable

trying to get investigators off of a case.

That means it's worked for you several times before, right?

This isn't just like, "I'm gonna try my luck at this."

That is a, um, a different kind of villain.

♪♪

[Michael] So at the end of the day,

with the investigation into you guys,

they promulgate a...would you say four-inch-thick report?

And it ends with one line saying...

"Detectives Lange and Souza --

we could find no improprieties

in the above referenced case."

That was it. "No improprieties."

No apologies. That pissed us off.

♪♪

[wind howls]

♪♪

[Michael] Though back in business,

Eddie Nash needed to take precautions.

[Scott] He used to give me pounds of cocaine

to take my condo in Studio City because he was in fear.

He trusted me that I would not steal from him.

And then he'd call me and says, "Okay, I'm home. Bring it up."

And that's what I would do.

While playing a role in the crack epidemic,

Scott finds himself reuniting with his former lover

as the result of another epidemic

that's sweeping the nation.

[Scott] For a long time, we didn't speak,

and I didn't see him other than in court

or in depositions.

And, uh, a reporter called me from Las Vegas

and said that he's terribly ill,

and there's a rumor that he's dying of AIDS.

♪♪

[announcer] Liberace!

[cheers and applause]

♪♪

I flew to Radio City Music Hall,

where he was performing

with the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes.

♪♪

["Clair de Lune" playing]

It was one of his last shows...

and, uh, backstage there were paramedics and oxygen tanks.

He asked me a question.

He says, "Are you okay? You're healthy?"

I said, "Yeah, why?"

♪♪

He says, "I was just checking."

♪♪

So I went there, to his home. Palm Springs, California.

♪♪

I gave him a hug, and when I gave him a hug,

I could feel the bones.

He was just a skeleton of what he was.

♪♪

He went fast, so I proceeded to take care of him.

We fed him his last meal.

♪♪

He died in my arms.

♪♪

["Clair de Lune" ends, applause]

[applause fades]

[Michael] You wrote a book called Behind the Candelabra.

Yes.

When did you start writing that?

Was Liberace still alive? Was he--

No, he was dead.

I started writing that right after his death.

I decided to tell, you know, an all-tell book.

People needed to know the truth,

what happened to me. I was very young.

He was 40 years my senior. He knew what he was doing.

He should be ashamed of himself.

I was just a kid. I didn't know anything.

[Michael] In Thorson's book,

neither the Wonderland murders or Nash are mentioned,

but there's a reference to a mysterious drug dealer

known only as Mr. Y.

And Liberace would not be the only one

connected to the Wonderland case

to fall victim to the AIDS epidemic.

[reporter] People in the porn industry have told us

it was hard for John to get work after the trial,

so he turned to the gay market.

Riddled with the disease, addicted to cocaine,

he continued to make porn films,

knowingly spreading the disease.

♪♪

He still was performing

when he, uh, had AIDS, and he wasn't telling...

-Yeah. -...other people about it.

He was, uh, introducing AIDS to the group.

[Michael] By this time, Detective Bob Souza had retired,

and Tom Lange's new partner was Mac McClain,

the same detective who guarded John Holmes

at the Biltmore Hotel back in '81.

[Michael] What were you doing before Tom said,

"Will you be my partner?"

In 1986, there was a serial killer

The "Southside Slayer," we called him.

Was killing prostitutes.

And so I came there as a part of that.

After the Southside Slayer case ended, Tom says,

"Hey, I don't have a partner.

I'll see if they'll let you stay."

I think he did that because both of us

had been in the Marines in Vietnam at the same time.

[Tom] I was working with Mac McClain,

and we got information

that John was at the Veterans Hospital

in the San Fernando Valley.

At the time, we were just trying to find Holmes.

We go out to the VA hospital,

see if John Holmes is checked in there.

And, yes, he is.

He apparently had contacted AIDS,

and he wasn't in good shape.

This told me and Mac that maybe he's ready to talk.

-I mean, we got nothing to lose. -Yeah.

So Mac and I went in. He was in bed.

He looked terrible.

He weighed about 90 pounds. He looked really, really frail.

His hair was really long. He had really long fingernails.

He was obviously in some kind of agony.

♪♪

I says, "John, by your own admission, you're dying."

And I goes, "You wanna take this with you?"

I goes, "You want to let Nash go free?"

"Once you're gone," I goes, "they're not gonna do

anything to your family."

And all of a sudden, he pops up...

-[clattering] -[John] I heard some noises

coming from the direction of the bedroom.

I decided to investigate.

And he says, "When I was doing my Johnny Wadd detective series,

I tried to emulate what you guys do."

JOHN: So, we meet again.

Look, I was just looking for some love letters I wrote.

You were looking for love letters. Like hell.

I think you were looking for something else.

He was all, "I pretended to be a detective,

and I really like LAPD."

All this crap, you know, feeding us this nonsense.

You son of a bitch.

♪♪

He said, "I'll tell you what I'll do.

I'm gonna write it all down for you. Lay it all out."

I looked at Mac, and he looked at me,

and we weren't going to go anywhere with this.

It's the same old John Holmes

talking out of both sides of his mouth. Nothing changes.

We're not gonna get anything from him.

If he writes something down, fine.

Of course, he never did.

The undisputed king of porn films in the 1970s,

the man who claimed to have had sex with 14,000 women,

died yesterday at a veterans hospital

in Southern California.

He was 43 years old.

[Tom] He died from the AIDS

about 12 days after we'd been there.

We'll never know what he knew. It's history.

♪♪

[Michael] John Holmes took his secret to the grave.

But shortly after his death,

his former wife Sharon agreed to be interviewed

on Current Affair, disguised only by a wig.

He certainly was capable of knowingly having

the disease longer

than anyone else knew and spreading it.

I mean, would that be so hard to understand

when you can stand there

and watch four people be butchered in front of you?

♪♪

[Michael] Not only did she confirm

Holmes' involvement in the murders,

she went on to confirm the bizarre bathtub story

she told detective Tom Lange seven years earlier.

We started with the shaking and the crying, and he says,

"I do have to tell you 'cause I can't live with this by myself."

If there was something he knew, you wouldn't like.

This was always done in the bathroom,

and it was always done in the bathtub.

This scene was depicted in the Hollywood film Wonderland,

starring Val Kilmer and Lisa Kudrow.

-Oh, just a cut. -There's too much blood.

-I gotta get it off. Okay? -John, where's the wound?

There's no wound.

This isn't your blood, John.

Whose blood is this?

It's kind of like Macbeth's wife

washing her hands sort of thing.

He sold his soul that night.

Everything else was gone.

But to stand there and watch a butchering

or a slaughtering like that and doing nothing?

I said, "John, how could you?"

And he said, "They were dirt."

♪♪

And I said, "John, you knew these people."

And he said, "They were dirt, and they were stupid."

♪♪

The Wonderland case simmered for years

after Holmes' acquittal in 1982.

We, the jury, find the Defendant,

John Curtis Holmes,

not guilty of murder.

[reporter] John Holmes was acquitted of first degree.

I do not feel that justice was served.

[reporter #2] Case remains unsolved,

and we may never know what really happened.

[Michael] But a big break came thanks to the work

of Detective Rick Jackson.

[Michael] You were the first suit at the scene

of the Wonderland massacre.

It kind of came full circle when you ended up

bringing a key person to that investigation.

But why don't we start by how you met this person

and what that case was about?

Yeah. So I'm -- I'm a detective assigned to Hollywood homicide.

It's September of '87.

[siren wailing]

My partner and I got called out

to a murder that happened on Cherokee Avenue.

Some suspects went in with guns to an apartment,

and it was a drug rip-off,

and there were some sexual assaults that took place.

Eventually, arrests were made of a couple of suspects...

...and one of them had a connection

to the Black Guerilla Family,

and the name Scott Thorson comes up.

♪♪

[Michael] What was that all about?

There was a young lady that used to run

these abandoned apartment buildings with us.

I happened to show up that day at one of the crack houses.

-Who are you with? -A member of the Bloods.

They told me to knock on the door

and tell her to let them in.

I knocked on the door, and they pushed me aside.

And when she opened it, they barged in.

That's all I had. I didn't do any robbing.

I didn't do anything.

But didn't you know what they were gonna do?

No, he didn't tell me.

And you didn't go in? You left?

No, but I know that they raped her.

And so that's when a warrant was put out

for my arrest for robbery.

And that's when Rick Jackson came into play.

Actually, he probably saved my life.

[flash bulb crackles]

You get arrested by Rick Jackson?

Yes.

[Rick]: So I get the warrant for Scott Thorson.

I learned who Scott Thorson was.

You know, I knew that,

you know, he was connected to Liberace.

So in February of 1988,

I went to the county jail

and interviewed Scott Thorson for the first time.

And we connected to the extent of he was trying to help me,

but he's also obviously looking out for his own interests

'cause he potentially was gonna go to state prison

for this robbery.

So you're in county jail.

County jail. Eddie Nash pulled my bail.

He put me there, and he kept me there.

It was time to get rid of me 'cause he was through with me.

I was very angry. He was betraying me.

I was very loyal to Eddie Nash.

I never went to police.

I says, "Okay." I says, "You're gonna join me soon."

I says, "If I'm in jail, you're gonna go too."

[cell door clanking]

[Michael] It's like almost 10 years after the crime.

You have what appears to be

or may be new life to -- to the investigation.

Initially, Scott Thorson got into the wind.

We didn't hear from him for years.

Later, of course he needed something,

so I got a call from the county jail.

He wants to talk to us 'cause he's got

information on the murders.

[Michael] Years after the murders on Wonderland Avenue,

Lange would finally meet the man who knew too much.

Mac and I went over there, and Scott looked terrible,

and he'd been rung up on another charge locally.

He wanted a little help with that, obviously,

and he would have something to say.

So Rick Jackson inadvertently got the Wonderland case

basically out of mothballs. -Mm-hmm.

What Rick had done was arrest Thorson for a robbery.

But Thorson, facing jail time, said, "I will cooperate.

I was at Eddie Nash's house the night of those murders,"

and that kickstarted the whole thing again.

[video rewinds]

It did.

We were a little impatient initially,

but he got down to it.

To make a long story short, Mr. Nash one night

was throwing a big, well-to-do party.

♪♪

And he was robbed of over a million dollars' worth

of drugs, money, and jewelry.

[breathing heavily]

And later that day I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Scott tells us he was actually in the house

when John Holmes was brought into the house by Greg Diles.

[Scott] Mr. Nash found the man

that was responsible for setting the robberies up,

brought him back to his house, almost beat him to death.

[hits thudding, man groaning]

And then he ordered the young man to take him

up to Laurel Canyon to where these people lived.

And he ordered his bodyguard to have these people killed.

[hits thudding]

Four people died.

They had holes about the size of a baseball in their heads.

Greg Diles hit one of the victims so hard

that it left an indentation from the pipe in the forehead.

They didn't go public with that.

How'd you know about it?

I heard Gregory Diles tell Nash

that he hit the victim so hard

that the pipe threads left an indentation.

There were five victims involved.

One victim survived.

By the grace of God, she survived.

They cut her finger off.

It launched one of the biggest

and the most massive crime investigations in Los Angeles.

[Michael] Based on this new information

coming from Scott Thorson,

you go back to the DA, and you build a case,

a new case against Nash and Greg Diles.

-They're charged with murder. -Right.

[man] Deputy District Attorney Carol Najera. Marker.

Somewhat out of the blue

comes this guy named Scott Thorson

that kind of resuscitates the case.

Can you talk about that history, how it --

it was the case it wouldn't go away,

and then it suddenly came back?

When Scott Thorson came forward,

Tom Lange and Mac McClain vetted him a lot.

By the time they were convinced that he actually had something

that was actual, credible evidence

that could be used in this case,

they both came to me and asked

if I would like to join the organized crime unit

and do the Wonderland case.

And I thought it was an amazing opportunity,

so of course I jumped on it.

So what was the first thing you had to do--

take a deep dive into who Eddie Nash was?

Exactly. I read a lot of articles.

I read a lot of police reports on him,

and then I read the transcripts from the John Holmes trial

that Judge Cohen had done,

as well as the drug trafficking case

that he had successfully prosecuted Eddie Nash on.

[Michael] With the DA on board,

the detectives then proceeded to arrest Nash and Diles.

[siren wailing]

You and Tom split up to make these arrests.

Yes, 'cause we figure if Nash gets in jail

and warns Diles, Diles is gone.

They arrest Nash. We're going to Diles.

We go to the Seven Seas,

where he works as a parking lot attendant.

We arrest him. We get in the car.

I'm sitting next to him, and he looks over and he goes,

"What am I being arrested for?"

I go, "Murder." He goes, "Hmm."

That's all he said.

[jet engines roaring]

I'm flying to Las Vegas, short flight,

and I'm, you know, reading the LA Times.

And all of a sudden I see an article.

I knew it was about Wonderland,

and I started reading it.

♪♪

And kind of like, "Holy shit."

The article confirmed that Scott Thorson,

who was in custody for a robbery --

my robbery --

um, had come forward by meeting with the DA's office

and the detectives on the Wonderland murders.

♪♪

[Michael] So for his involvement as the key witness,

what happened with Thorson's robbery charges?

They weren't dismissed.

He was allowed to plead guilty to a felony robbery,

but he served no time other than the time

that he had served up to the point.

♪♪

The murder charges against Nash and Diles

were going to hinge on Scott's testimony.

But your key witness now is not that much better

than -- than Holmes, right?

I mean, this is a guy who has a criminal record.

He also has drug problems.

How do you go about making him

that -- that strong witness in court?

♪♪

[Tom] Well, making him a strong witness,

it's not real easy to do.

Our problem was that, much like John Holmes,

he does, in fact, talk out of both sides of his mouth.

Oh, yeah.

Scott, um, he'll forever be able to tell stories

which sometimes seem kind of over the top and bizarre,

but a lot of them, I've learned, have been true.

When he starts telling the story,

he gets very animated

telling what happened that night.

But a problem you have when you have somebody

in jail as a witness,

the first thing the Defense is going to say,

"You got a jailhouse snitch."

And so you have to weigh that.

Do we believe him enough,

or is he just trying to use us

to get out of jail?

[Michael] Okay, so I -- I write books. I write novels,

and a device I use is something called the unreliable narrator.

Do you know what that means?

-Not really. [chuckles] -Okay.

So it's where you take a very important person in a story,

and you don't know whether they're telling the truth,

and you have to try to figure that out.

And that's a little bit of what we're doing now with you.

Well, I think -- I think some

of these unbelievable stories that you mentioned,

you're a good author. You're a good investigator.

I don't think you found anything that was untrue.

I'm telling the truth. I've lived the life.

That's all I can say.

Believe me, or you don't believe me.

I'm telling the truth. I have no reason to lie.

Your client murdered those people,

had those people murdered.

I heard it, I saw it.

I saw Mr. Diles and Mr. Holmes.

And there isn't anything you can do and say that I'm lying now.

That man is a murderer right there.

♪♪

♪♪