The Wonderland Murders: John Holmes, Eddie Nash, and the Night That Shocked Los Angeles

Jan 9, 2025
7 min read

Mugshots of Susan Lunnins, Ron Lunnins, Mohmad, Gavin ML, Eddie Boh.

At around 4 a.m. on July 1, 1981, several men entered a rented townhouse at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon hills above Hollywood. They were carrying lead pipes. They went from room to room and beat five people to death, or as close to it as made no difference. Four of them didn't make it. The fifth, Susan Launius, survived with permanent brain damage and no memory of the attack. It took a furniture removal crew working next door more than twelve hours later to notice she was still moaning.

When police arrived, the walls and ceiling of the Wonderland Avenue house were covered in blood. Investigators compared the scene to the Tate-LaBianca murders. The case became one of Los Angeles' most notorious, not just for the violence, but for the cast of characters involved: a drug gang operating out of a canyon hideout, one of the most powerful crime bosses in the city, and a porn star whose career was in freefall and whose cocaine habit had reduced him to something close to a servant.

The Wonderland Gang

The townhouse on Wonderland Avenue was home to a small but prolific crew of drug dealers and thieves. Ron Launius ran the operation. He was a Vietnam veteran with a history of violent crime and a reputation, even within the criminal world, for being genuinely cold-blooded. His second-in-command was Billy DeVerell, who handled the day-to-day alongside his girlfriend Joy Miller, the leaseholder of the property. David Lind, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood who'd met Launius in prison, had come down from Sacramento to help run their growing cocaine trade. Tracy McCourt drove for them. Barbara Richardson, Lind's girlfriend, was sleeping on the sofa the night everything went wrong.

The gang dealt cocaine and heroin, but also supplemented their income by robbing other drug dealers. It was a dangerous way to operate. Their supplier relationships ran through a network of middlemen and fences, one of whom was a porn actor named John Holmes, who used the Wonderland house as somewhere to sleep when he had nowhere else to go, and who spent his days shuttling between the gang and the man who kept him in cocaine.

White apartment building with balconies, garage, and trash bins on a slope. — The Wonderland house

Eddie Nash

Born Adel Gharib Nasrallah in Palestine, Eddie Nash had arrived in America with almost nothing and built himself into one of the most significant figures in Los Angeles' criminal underworld. He owned dozens of nightclubs by the late 1970s, including the Starwood on Santa Monica Boulevard, which hosted early shows by Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, and Quiet Riot. He sold drugs to his patrons. His sartorial trademark was a pair of brightly coloured bikini briefs, which he wore when receiving visitors at his Studio City mansion. Nash's power in the city was real enough that he usually referred to himself in the third person as "The Nash." He'd become a figure of some notoriety, the kind of man people in Los Angeles crime circles either worked with or made a point of avoiding.

John Holmes was one of the most bankable performers in the history of the adult film industry, famous for his role as detective Johnny Wadd across a long series of pornographic films. By 1981, he'd appeared in over 500 productions. He'd also spent the best part of a decade destroying himself with cocaine and had reportedly spent $750,000 on the drug in a single year during his peak. With his career drying up and his money gone, he'd become financially dependent on Nash, who supplied him with drugs in exchange for services rendered. Nash called Holmes "my brother." Holmes drew Nash a map of the Wonderland house so Nash could identify the people selling him product. He also fenced stolen goods between the gang and Nash, exchanging property the Wonderland crew had stolen from other targets for drugs during lean periods.

The Robbery That Started Everything

In the spring of 1981, Holmes was sleeping in the Wonderland house regularly. He told the gang that Nash kept a safe embedded in the floor of his bedroom containing substantial quantities of heroin, cocaine, Quaaludes, jewellery, and cash. He offered to help them rob it. The plan was simple enough: Holmes would visit Nash under the pretence of buying drugs, leave the patio door to the kitchen unlatched on his way out, and the gang would walk in.

It took Holmes three attempts to pull it off. The first time, he forgot to unlatch the door. The second time, he managed it, but the gang was too high on heroin to move. By the third visit, Holmes was nervous enough about the door being re-locked that he bought some crack cocaine to justify being there, checked the latch, and gave the all-clear. The gang entered the house pretending to be police officers, with David Lind flashing a stolen San Francisco police badge. Nash's 300-pound bodyguard, Gregory Diles, was handcuffed. Lind's gun went off during the struggle, grazing Diles in the side. Nash appeared from his bedroom in his underwear, dropped to his knees, and begged not to be killed. He opened the safe.

The gang left with heroin, cocaine, Quaaludes, jewellery, antique guns, and around $185,000 in cash, totalling over $1 million in value. Shortly afterwards, one of Nash's associates spotted Holmes walking around Hollywood wearing a ring that had been stolen from the house. Diles found him, brought him back to Nash's mansion, tied him to a chair, and beat him. Scott Thorson, Liberace's former companion, was at Nash's house buying drugs that evening and later testified to what he witnessed. Nash, he said, threatened to kill Holmes and his entire family until Holmes gave up the identities of the people who'd robbed him.

Men loading stretcher with body into 'CORONER' van outside building. — A victim is removed from the Wonderland house

The Murders

Two days after the robbery, in the early hours of July 1, a group of men entered the Wonderland Avenue townhouse. They used lead pipes. They moved through the property methodically. Ron Launius and Billy DeVerell were beaten in the bedroom. Joy Miller was killed on her bed. Barbara Richardson, asleep on the living room sofa, was killed there. Susan Launius, Ron's wife, was attacked beside her husband. She was found alive but barely. Surgeons later removed part of her skull. When she eventually regained enough consciousness to testify, all she could remember were "three shadowy figures."

The murders went unnoticed for over twelve hours. The neighbours on Wonderland Avenue were used to noise from the townhouse and assumed the sounds they heard were part of another late-night party. It was only at around 4 p.m. that the furniture removal crew working next door heard moaning and called the police.

Charles Manson handcuffed, escorted by a police officer during an arrest. — Eddie Nash under arrest

John Holmes, the Handprint, and the Trial

Detectives Tom Lange and Robert Souza led the LAPD investigation. When they searched Nash's home days after the murders, they found over $1 million worth of cocaine and several items stolen from the Wonderland house still on the premises. The most significant piece of evidence from the crime scene itself was a bloody left palm print found on the headboard of Ron Launius' bed. It belonged to John Holmes.

Man with beard, long hair, 'L.A. COUNTY JAIL' uniform, looking left.

Holmes was arrested in March 1982 and charged with four counts of murder. His first wife Sharon, in a newspaper interview shortly after the murders, said he'd told her he'd been at the Wonderland house the night it happened and knew the people inside. After Holmes died of AIDS complications in March 1988, Sharon gave a fuller account to the Los Angeles Times: that on the morning of July 1, Holmes had arrived at her home with blood on his clothes and told her he'd led three men to the Wonderland house, let them in, and stood there while they beat the five people inside.

https://youtu.be/W17drnwlvTA?si=Ux59U0A1-u46uz2g

At his trial, Holmes didn't testify. His lawyers argued successfully that he'd been forced to participate, a victim of coercion by Nash rather than a willing accomplice. The jury acquitted him of all murder charges on June 26, 1982. He spent 110 days in jail for contempt of court after refusing to cooperate with investigators. He never formally confessed and died without being prosecuted for his role.

Nash's Trials and the Plea Deal

Eddie Nash and Gregory Diles were charged with planning and carrying out the murders in 1990. Their trial ended in a hung jury. A second trial in 1991 ended in acquittal. Rumours of juror tampering surfaced, and they turned out to be accurate. In 2000, federal prosecutors charged Nash under RICO statutes. Facing charges of drug trafficking, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit murder, Nash took a plea deal in September 2001. He admitted to bribing the lone holdout juror in his first trial with $50,000. He also admitted to ordering his associates to retrieve the stolen property from the Wonderland house, knowing that violence might follow. He denied ordering the murders specifically. He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and fined $250,000. He died in 2014, aged 85. Diles had already died in 1997 from liver failure.

Nobody has ever been convicted of the four murders. The case remains officially unsolved.

https://youtu.be/paRSucZyQlc?si=GetqqMNLggtFcAns

Porn star John Holmes, dressed in a prison jumpsuit the day before he was acquitted of murder

What Came After

The Wonderland murders embedded themselves in Los Angeles mythology alongside the Black Dahlia and the Manson killings as a benchmark of the city's capacity for extreme violence. The story has been told several times on screen: the 1997 film Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson's portrait of the porn industry, included a sequence directly inspired by the Nash robbery, with Alfred Molina portraying a character clearly based on Nash, freebasing cocaine in his underwear while Night Ranger played on the stereo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPkdRM0uD_Q

The 2003 film Wonderland, with Val Kilmer as Holmes, reconstructed the events directly, using police reports and coroner's photographs to recreate the Wonderland house.

Holmes's story in particular became a symbol of what the adult film industry of the 1970s could do to the people inside it. His trajectory from one of the industry's most recognised performers to a drug-dependent man sleeping on the sofa of a drug gang's hideout, then leading killers through the front door, is as bleak an arc as any true crime story produces. Bob Crane, another Hollywood figure whose private life intersected fatally with the adult entertainment world, met his end around the same period under circumstances that also went unsolved.

As of 2017, Susan Launius remained the only surviving member of the Wonderland Gang and the only witness to the murders. She has never been able to recall anything beyond those three shadowy figures. The Wonderland Avenue house has been renovated and rented out several times since 1981. The last known listing had the two-bedroom property going for $3,000 a month.

The weapons were never found. No one was ever convicted. The case is closed in name only.