7-1-81, 25th Anniversary of the Wonderland Murders

From AVN Online Magazine, September 2005:

Once in a while you have to put down the damn Linux manual and read something patently salacious just to blow out the cobwebs. Our current recommendation is “Long Time Money and Lots of Cocaine”, the latest exhumation of how John Holmes’ runaway blow habit led to the grisly “Four-on-the-Floor” murders on Hollywood’s Wonderland Avenue. Unlike watching the movie “Wonderland”, however, one need not endure Val Kilmer’s interpretation of The Wadd, nor Hollywood’s skewed version of events to get to the blood-spattered truth.

The bulk of this tome is the real deal—the complete transcript of the February 1982 preliminary hearing for Holmes in the multiple murder case (the transcript from his subsequent trial has mysteriously disappeared), and it’s a grim yet fascinating read that would be impossible to put down were it not for the overwhelming desire to take a shower every seven pages. Reading the testimony of this parade of parasites is like watching a series of car accidents in slow motion. You know it’s all going to end in crimson carnage, but you can’t avert your eyes.

While hardly the formula for Greek tragedy, this is a tale of both hubris and sheer stupidity, fueled by equal amounts of greed and narcotics, and peopled by scumbags, misfits, addicts, and caricatures of evil incarnate: Eddie Nash, the Middle Eastern Mephistopheles who ruled L.A.’s nightclub empire and was once the most ruthless mobster in early ’80s Los Angeles; Ron Launius, equally as brutal but hardly as clever, smuggled heroin out of ’Nam in cadavers, and was suspected of more murders than Juan Corona; Susan Launius, the sole survivor of the attack on Wonderland whose addled memory is a testament to the brutal beating she endured; and Holmes himself, the well-hung shitweasel who betrayed all of his “friends” in an attempt to pay off his debts, and somehow escaped with his life.

The same cannot be said of the four career criminals who let the world’s most famous porn stud talk them into robbing the wrong guy. Rodger Jacobs wraps it all up with a biting look at the making of the documentary “Wadd”, which is a descent into the inferno unto itself.

– Tony Lovett

Order “Long Time Money and Lots of Cocaine”