Talk:Wonderland murders

Story?

the first sentences says "...is a story of..." Does that mean that this is a story of a novel? Short story? porn movie? Or did this really happen? If it really happened, then it is not a STORY ;) Please clarify. Kingturtle 06:05, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I have to agree that this article needs work. First we read that Holmes was responsible for the robbery of Nash; then, without transition or explanation, we read that 4 people at an address on Wonderland Ave are killed & 1 more severely injured.

Then we are told that Holmes & Nash were indicted for the crimes at the Wonderland house -- without an explanation why.

Can someone fill in the holes & explain why "the circumstances ... reads [sic] like a detective story"? -- llywrch 02:44, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Unsourced material recently removed

The material below was recently removed from the article by User:Hayford Peirce.

It was added by User:JMoyer with the edit comment that "Specific page numbers, newspaper articles to be added." Ordinarily, this would warrant tagging the material with the {{Fact}} tag and waiting to see whether a proper source citation was forthcoming, then eventually removing it or moving it to the talk page for discussion.

In this case, however, in addition to being unsourced, the material is voluminous, needs rewriting, and the truth of it has been sharply questioned by two editors of the John Holmes (actor) article. Therefore I agree with Hayford Peirce that the material should not be left in the article in its present form. Per the verifiability policy, "The obligation to provide a reputable source lies with the editors wishing to include the material, not on those seeking to remove it."

If JMoyer wishes to keep this material, source citations should be included at the time when it is inserted. I personally would suggest that the material should be boiled down to a moderate-length paragraph or so. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:23, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Material removed

It is also widely believed, and widely diputed that a young teenaged girl known as Annie, another of Holmes underage lovers who was pregnant at this time, was present at the Wonderland murders, but hidden in a closet, protected by Holmes. A friend of the Wonderland residents, she was believed to have been assaulted at Nash's residence by several male guests a few days before the robbery, thus giving Holmes and the Wonderland gang reason for the personal humiliation of Nash and his bodyguard during the robbery. Friends of the Wonderland residents speculated the baby was likely Ron Launius's, not Holmes's, accounting for Launius's particular venomous attack on Nash during the robbery as alleged in a forthcoming bigraphy from Knopf books by author J.H. Adams. It has been alleged that the girl was already in the home before the murders, having been a visitor, and Holmes used her to open the door from the inside and unknowingly give easy access to the interior for the killers, the intent being to not to alert the sleeping occupants of the home. The Wonderland gang were known to be armed and may have been on alert, anticipating some sort of revenge for the robbery. They were also aware of a threat by a person known as "Sam", a dealer/hit man to whom they owed a large amount of money according to a 1983 Hustler article and John Holmes'Autobiography "Porn King". A surprise or blitz attack would have been the only way to get them off guard. It was also theorized that the reason Susan Launius was not beaten more severly was that she was mistaken for Annie whom the killers had been told not to touch in accordance with the agreement with Holmes. Autopsy reports and a video tape including actual crime scene footage was released along with the "WADD" documentary and shows the victims were beaten mercilessly and were barely recognizable. Annie was reportedly hidden by Holmes in the large walk-in closet in Ron Launius's bedroom, where, as can be seen on the LAPD crime scene footage, is inches from where Susan was found. It was reported that Nash let Holmes remove the girl from harms way in exchange for Holmes getting her to open the door and his later cooperation in the form of silence about the events of that night. Nash reportedly gave Holmes several hundred dollars after the murders, a fact which Holmes reveals in his Autobigraphy "Porn King", part of which was used to send the girl back east, the rest to get Holmes out of town as well. Police have never confirmed nor refuted this element of the story, perhaps to preserve the ongoing investigation or the safety of the girl. The extent of involment of this young girl has come under more serious scrutiny in recent years. According to newspaper articles and websites (WomenWhoKill, Court TV, Morning Call.com) this same young girl was arrested 11 years after the Wonderland murders, accused of killing another young woman over a drug deal gone wrong. Newspapers at the time described the killing as "execution style" (Express-Times.com). If convicted, she faced the death penalty (Express-Times.com) She was acquitted, just as Holmes had been acquitted in the Wonderland killings. In 2005 an Ohio newspaper ran an obituary for this girl, so the truth will likely never be known (Ancestry.com, Columbus-Dipatch).

Poorly Written

This entire article is poorly written, and in such a way that suggests that it was plagiarized en bloc from something decent like a Los Angeles Magazine article, then edited down and re-phrased to conceal the fact that it was copied, all the while without the "author" understanding the English language in which it was written. Some of it takes something that may have been correct and makes it wrong, like, and I quote directly, "The prosecutor, district attorney Ron Coen..." This is crap, Los Angeles has never had a district attorney named Ron Coen. Anyone capable of writing a single sentence of true crime (or anything in English) would have said "deputy district attorney Ron Coen". Big difference. Will someone who can write re-do this? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.127.228.248 (talk) 08:23, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Rewrite

ok, so pretty much everyone has commented that this is a poorly written article, but has anyone taken a stab at a rewrite?? i noticed the beginning of the article listing 2 people DILES and THORSON who were only mentioned once and there was no other context as to who these people were or what their actual involvement was (i.e: ok, so Diles was implicated...by whom and how, etc.).

this is a pretty intriguing case, but with the way this article reads, makes it seem like some horrible LA Weekly column or something. BAH. --162.80.36.13 (talk) 17:33, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

The article is badly written. I can't even quite tell who the murdered people were! The opening paragraph should explain who was murdered, and the date when it happened. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.70.100.201 (talk) 21:51, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the article is poorly written. At present, the article has five different lists of the people involved. Each list includes a different subset of those people. And the lists have incoherent, incomplete, and contradictory explanations of why their subsets are different from the subsets in the other lists.

I rewrote the article to be totally clear. Then someone, who I can only assume is a psychopath, reverted my edits. I won't bother trying to make the edits again. But if you've come to this talk page because you're confused because the article is still unclear in the future, then I suggest you check out my previous version of the article, shown here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wonderland_murders&oldid=845612728

- 173.171.160.127 (talk) 03:21, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Unsourced material

Section was tagged for needing sources for over a year. Feel free to reinsert the below material with appropriate references. DonIago (talk) 13:53, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Robbery and murders

On June 28, 1981, the group met with friends Tracy McCourt and John Holmes, a porn star and known drug addict. They had decided to rob the home of Eddie Nash, né Adel Gharib Nasrallah, wealthy owner of several Los Angeles-area night clubs and drug dealer. Holmes, whom Nash had befriended, visited the house, ostensibly to buy drugs. While at Nash's home, Holmes unlocked a back door for the gang to enter later. Holmes then went back to Wonderland in order to report back to Launius and the others. The next morning, June 29, DeVerell, Launius, Lind, and McCourt went to Nash's house. While McCourt stayed with the car, a stolen Ford Granada, the other three entered through the unlocked door. Invading the home, the trio handcuffed Nash and his live-in bodyguard, Gregory Diles. During the course of the subsequent robbery, the group took money, drugs, and jewelry; threatened to kill Nash and Dile, and accidentally grazed Diles with a bullet. They then went back to the Wonderland Avenue townhouse to split up the money. In the early morning of July 1, 1981, two days after the robbery, an unknown number of assailants entered the Wonderland Avenue townhouse. Joy Miller, her boyfriend DeVerell, Launius and his wife Susan, and Lind's girlfriend, Barbara Richardson. Each occupant present was bludgeoned repeatedly with what was later determined by the medical examiner and detectives to be a striated steel pipe. Susan Launius was the only one in the home who survived, albeit with serious injuries. A left palm print belonging to John Holmes found on the bed railing above Ron Launius' head gave homicide detectives reason to believe John Holmes was present at the site of the murder. Holmes denied participating in the killings or being there when the murders happened. Later, however, he admitted to his ex-wife Sharon Holmes and girlfriend Dawn Schiller that he was forced to watch the killings, but he denied participating in them. According to court testimony, David Lind survived because he was not at the house at the time of the murders, having spent the night at a San Fernando Valley motel with a prostitute and consuming drugs there. Shortly after the news media reported the murders, Lind contacted the police and informed on Nash and Holmes, thus giving them a start to their investigation.

Motive

The article currently lists the motive as revenge, but this is unsourced and without knowing the perpetrators pretty hard to confirm. I am going to go ahead and remove the motive for now, however if anyone disagrees they can revert me. Bakilas (talk) 06:21, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

William Shatner

Any info on Bill Shatner being questioned, implicated, or otherwise investigated as the possible murder suspect? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.178.137.210 (talk) 20:59, 29 October 2019 (UTC)