Wonderland Murders

Author: Jewls Krueger

Special thanks to Grave Line Tours for recommending this location. If you're in the Los Angeles area, take a tour with Grave Line Tours to learn about this and other famous LA area cases. Link to book a tour below.

Shortly before dawn on July 1, 1981, four people were beaten to death inside a rented townhouse on Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles. The victims were members and associates of the Wonderland Gang, a group of drug dealers who had recently robbed the home of nightclub owner and organized crime figure Eddie Nash. The killings were violent enough that Los Angeles Police Department investigators compared the scene to the Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Manson Family in the same hills a little over a decade earlier.

Three men were tried at various times for the murders, including adult film star John Holmes, whose palm print was found at the scene. All were acquitted. More than four decades later, no one has been convicted, and the case is still classified as unsolved.

The Wonderland Gang

The gang was centered on the occupants of the Wonderland Avenue townhouse, which was leased in the name of Joy Audrey Gold Miller. Miller was a longtime heroin user who had fallen in with the group after leaving a wealthier life in Beverly Hills. Her boyfriend, William "Billy" Deverell, served as the gang's second in command and was described in later reports as a reluctant criminal whose drug history made steady work difficult.

The leader was Ronald Lee "Ron" Launius, a Vietnam veteran with a long criminal record who was reportedly a person of interest in as many as two dozen other homicides by the summer of 1981. Other figures around the house included Tracy Raymond McCourt and David Clay Lind. Launius's wife, Susan, also stayed at the home but largely kept away from the gang's activities.

John Holmes, the well-known adult film actor, was a frequent guest. By 1981 his career had collapsed amid heavy cocaine use, and he often bought or mooched drugs from the gang while running up debts.

The Robbery

On June 29, 1981, four gang members robbed the home of Eddie Nash, a nightclub owner with reputed ties to the Los Angeles drug trade. Launius and Deverell reportedly posed as police officers to get inside, then handcuffed Nash and his bodyguard, Gregory Dewitt Diles. During the robbery, Diles was shot and wounded. The crew left with a large haul of cash, drugs, jewelry, and weapons.

Nash suspected Holmes had helped set up the robbery, since Holmes had visited the house three times that morning, apparently to leave a sliding door unlocked. According to Scott Thorson, a former partner of the entertainer Liberace who was at Nash's home to buy drugs, Nash had Holmes tied to a chair and beaten until he gave up the names of the people responsible.

The Wonderland Murders

Shortly before 3:00 a.m. on July 1, two days after the robbery, an unknown number of men entered the townhouse and attacked the people sleeping inside. Ron Launius, Billy Deverell, Joy Miller, and Barbara Richardson, who was Lind's girlfriend and had been visiting, were all killed. Investigators believed the weapons were a combination of hammers and metal pipes, and a hammer was recovered at the scene.

Neither Lind nor McCourt was at the house that night. Susan Launius was gravely injured but survived, though she suffered permanent brain damage and could not remember the attack.

The bodies were not discovered until that afternoon, when furniture movers working next door heard moaning coming from the home and called police. Neighbors later said they had heard screams around 3:00 a.m. but assumed the noise came from another late party at the house.

The Investigation and Trials

LAPD detectives Tom Lange and Robert Souza led the investigation and searched Nash's home days later, where they reported finding a large quantity of cocaine along with items taken from the Wonderland townhouse. A palm print belonging to John Holmes was found on a headboard above Launius's bed, and Holmes was arrested and charged with four counts of murder in March 1982.

Prosecutors argued Holmes had helped the killers in revenge for being cut out of the robbery proceeds. His defense presented him instead as a frightened man forced to lead the attackers inside. Holmes was acquitted in June 1982, but he served 110 days in jail for contempt of court after refusing to testify.

In 1990, Nash was charged with planning the murders and Diles with taking part. Thorson testified, but the first trial ended with a hung jury reportedly split 11 to 1 in favor of conviction. A second trial in 1991 ended in acquittal for both men.

Recent Developments

In 2000, after a multi-year investigation, Nash was arrested on federal racketeering charges tied to drug trafficking and money laundering. As part of a 2001 plea agreement, he admitted to bribing the lone holdout juror from his first murder trial and acknowledged ordering associates to recover the stolen property from the Wonderland house, conduct he conceded could have led to violence. He denied ordering the murders. Nash received a sentence of roughly four and a half years and a large fine. He died in 2014.

Several of the case's central figures are also gone. John Holmes died of AIDS complications in March 1988. After his death, his first wife, Sharon Gebenini Holmes, told the Los Angeles Times that he had come home on the morning of the murders with blood on his clothes and described leading three men into the house and standing by as they attacked the people inside. Diles died in 1997, Lind died of a heroin overdose in 1995, and McCourt died in 2006. No one was ever convicted of the four killings.

Dawn Schiller, Holmes's much younger girlfriend during this period, later wrote a memoir about her experience titled "The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes," which recounts her life with Holmes and the aftermath of the murders.

The House Today

The townhouse still stands on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, a wooded, winding stretch of the Hollywood Hills known for its music history as much as its darker chapters. It is a modest split-level home with a carport and an iron balcony, and it remains a private residence.

The house sits on a narrow canyon road, and there is little to see from the street that hints at what happened here. If you visit, please stay on public roadways, do not attempt to enter the property or make contact with whoever lives there now, and be mindful of the neighbors. This is someone's home, and the crime that took place inside it ended four lives.