Los Angeles in 1981 was a city in the specific condition of a place that has been glamorous for long enough that the glamour has developed a shadow side of equivalent size — the underworld that grows beneath any sufficiently bright light, sustained by the same appetites that sustain the surface, invisible to the same degree that the surface is visible.

Laurel Canyon was the seam between those two worlds.

It had been a seam for decades — the neighborhood where the music industry bled into the hills, where the people who made the records and the people who sold the drugs that the people who made the records consumed lived in proximity close enough that the distinction between them became, at certain hours of the night, difficult to maintain. By 1981 the canyon had passed through its most romanticized period and into something more complicated — still expensive, still beautiful in the specific way of Los Angeles hills at night, with the city spread below like a circuit board, but carrying now the particular atmosphere of a place that has accumulated history it cannot entirely account for.

The house at 8763 Wonderland Avenue was a split-level structure on a slope, unremarkable from the road, the kind of house that exists in thousands of variations across the hills of Los Angeles and that becomes remarkable only in retrospect, once something has happened inside it that gives it a gravity it did not previously possess.

On the morning of July 1st, 1981, a neighbor called the police.

The detectives who arrived were from the Los Angeles Police Department’s homicide division — experienced men, by any measure. Los Angeles had given them experience in quantity and variety. They had worked the Manson cases. They had worked the cases that don’t make it into the history books but that accumulate, year by year, in a city of that size and that particular character, into a substantial education in the range of things that human beings do to each other.

They stood in the doorway of the Wonderland Avenue house and did not immediately proceed inside.

What was inside had been done with a steel pipe. Four people — Ron Launius, Billy DeVerell, Joy Miller, and Barbara Richardson — had been beaten with a force that the subsequent forensic reports described in the flat clinical language that pathology uses to maintain professional distance from its subject matter, and that translated, in its substance, to something that the detectives standing in the doorway understood without requiring translation. The violence had not been incidental to an intent to kill. It had been, in some sense, the point — a demonstration, conducted on the bodies of four people, of a capacity and a willingness that the person or people responsible wanted to make legible to anyone who subsequently entered the house.

A fifth person, Susan Launius, was alive. She had been beaten with the same implement and had survived through a combination of factors that the medical staff who treated her could not fully account for. She would carry the physical consequences for the rest of her life. Her memory of the night would remain fragmented and contested — a condition that served, over the years, the interests of several parties who had reasons to prefer that certain memories remain inaccessible.

The investigation that began on July 1st, 1981 would produce, over the following months and years, a cast of characters so specifically Californian in their particular combination of ambition and dissolution that the case came to function as a kind of index of Los Angeles at that moment — a city in which the distance between the penthouse and the gutter was shorter than the neon suggested, and in which the same substances and the same appetites moved through both.

Eddie Nash was born Adel Gharib Nasrallah in Palestine in 1929 and had arrived in Los Angeles in the 1950s with thirty dollars and the specific determination of a man who has decided that the country he has arrived in owes him nothing and that he intends to take from it everything available. He had taken a considerable amount. By 1981 he owned more than thirty businesses in the Los Angeles area — nightclubs, restaurants, adult bookstores — and had built, around the legitimate commercial infrastructure, an operation in cocaine that made him one of the primary suppliers to the entertainment industry at the precise moment when the entertainment industry’s appetite for cocaine was at its historical peak.

He was also, by the accounts of the people who dealt with him when transactions went wrong, a man whose response to betrayal was not proportional.

John Holmes was, by 1981, the ruins of a career that had once been, in its strange and specific way, a kind of stardom. He had performed in more than two thousand adult films during the 1970s, had been known by a name that functioned as a brand, had generated revenue that he had spent on cocaine at a rate that ultimately outpaced the revenue. By the time the money was gone the addiction was not, and the addiction required ongoing funding, and the funding required arrangements with people who made arrangements of that kind. He had ended up, in the loose and contingent way of a man whose life is organized around the next score, connected to the small circle of thieves living in the Wonderland Avenue house.

Ron Launius, who led that circle, was not a careful man. He was a man who had served time, who had developed in prison and afterward a confidence in his own capacity for violence that was not entirely without foundation but that had never been tested against someone like Eddie Nash. On the night of June 29th, 1981, Launius and several associates — with John Holmes present in a role that would be debated for decades — broke into Nash’s Bel Air home and took cash, cocaine, jewelry, and a ring from Nash’s finger while Nash was present and, by various accounts, aware of what was happening and temporarily unable to respond.

The robbery had been, in its execution, successful.

In its consequences, it was something else entirely.

Forty-eight hours later, four people in the Wonderland Avenue house were dead.

The timeline between the robbery and the murders is not disputed. The specific chain of events within that timeline — who went where, who made which decisions, what John Holmes knew and when he knew it and what role he played in what followed — has been the subject of competing accounts, two trials, a documentary, a feature film, and four decades of journalism that has not resolved the central questions to anyone’s satisfaction.

What is known: Holmes was seen in the area of Wonderland Avenue in the hours before the killings. Holmes had access to the house. Holmes had a relationship with Nash that predated the robbery and that involved, among other things, Nash supplying Holmes with cocaine. The nature of the communication, if any, between Holmes and Nash in the forty-eight hours between the robbery and the murders has never been definitively established.

Holmes was arrested and charged with four counts of murder.

In June 1982, after a trial in which the prosecution’s case rested heavily on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of witnesses whose own legal exposure gave them complicated incentives, John Holmes was acquitted.

He walked out of the courthouse in the specific way of a man who has been given back something he understood, at some level, he did not fully deserve — not innocent, not exonerated in any moral sense, but legally free, which in the American system is the relevant category.

He never told the complete truth about what happened on Wonderland Avenue.

Eddie Nash was prosecuted twice — once in the 1980s on drug charges, and once in 2000 on federal racketeering charges related to the Wonderland murders — and reached a plea agreement in 2001 in which he admitted to having solicited the assault on the Wonderland Avenue house. He was sentenced to time served and fined. He died in 2014 at the age of eighty-five.

John Holmes died in March 1988, of complications from AIDS, at the age of forty-three. He had given several interviews in the years since his acquittal in which he had addressed the Wonderland case in terms that suggested knowledge he was not prepared to fully disclose — a quality of strategic imprecision that allowed him to maintain proximity to the truth without committing to it.

Whatever he knew went with him.

The Wonderland murders have never entirely left Los Angeles’s consciousness — not because the case is unique in the annals of the city’s violent history, but because it arrived at a specific moment and involved a specific configuration of people that made it legible as something beyond a crime, as an illustration of something about the place and the time.

The 1970s in Los Angeles had been, in the version of themselves that the city preferred to remember, a period of creative and sensual abundance — the music, the parties, the cocaine at the right parties, the sense that the ordinary rules of consequence had been suspended in the specific geography between the hills and the ocean. The Wonderland murders arrived at the beginning of the decade in which those consequences began to be collected, in which the AIDS crisis would reshape the entertainment industry and the drug trade would produce body counts that the neon had previously obscured.

The house on Wonderland Avenue was a crime scene.

It was also, in a way that Los Angeles has a particular talent for producing, a kind of symbol — of what happens when the underworld that sustains the glamour becomes, for a moment, visible; of what happens when the people who live in the shadow of the neon discover that the shadow has its own rules, and that the rules are enforced in ways that the glamour prefers not to acknowledge.

Four people died in that house.

Their names were Ron Launius, Billy DeVerell, Joy Miller, and Barbara Richardson.

They were not glamorous people, by the standards of the city they lived in. They were people who had ended up, through various combinations of choice and circumstance and the particular gravity of addiction, in a house in a canyon, connected to people whose decisions would get them killed.

They deserved better than the deaths they got.

They also deserved better than the decades of secondary attention they received — as backdrop to the more famous name, as the victims in a case that became, in the cultural memory, primarily a story about John Holmes rather than about the four people whose lives ended in the early hours of July 1st, 1981.

Their story is worth telling in its own right.

Not as glamour.

Not as noir.

As what it was — four lives that ended badly, in a city that has always been better at producing myths than at accounting for the people the myths consume.

Los Angeles remembers the neon.

It is less good at remembering what the neon hides.

But the hiding does not make it unhappen.

It only makes the remembering more necessary.

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Full story · 14 min read · Dante Darkside

“Nash took a ring off his own finger during the robbery. Two days later four people were dead. The mathematics of that.” — Reader, Los Angeles “Holmes knew. He always knew. He died knowing. That is the weight the acquittal could not remove.” — Reader, New York NY “Four names: Ron Launius, Billy DeVerell, Joy Miller, Barbara Richardson. The story became about Holmes. It should have stayed about them.” — Reader, London “The city is better at producing myths than accounting for the people the myths consume. That line.” — Reader, Chicago IL “Forty years. No complete answer. Some questions are designed that way.” — Reader, San Francisco CA