John Holmes’s 13-inch cock made him an X-rated legend. Then a wicked cocaine habit made him a prime suspect in a shocking multiple murder.
Born to be Wadd
Herewith, the true story of “Johnny Wadd” from the people who Knew, loved, and prosecuted him.
He claimed to have slept with 14,000 women, been a hired call boy of the rich and famous, and the best fuck in Hollywood. His name was John Curtis Holmes; he was a skinny Ohio farm boy who, appearing under the nom du porn “Johnny Wadd,” wielded his 13-inch penis to become the Elvis Presley of X-rated films-and the envy of every man on the planet during the “Golden Age of Porn” in the seventies. “John Holmes was nothing less than the first pop icon from pornography,” observed director Paul Thomas Anderson, who loosely based his 1997 Oscar-nominated film Boogie Nights on Holmes’s life. “You can mention a lot of porn stars from today’s world, and a lot of housewives in the middle of America wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about, but say ’John Holmes’ and everyone knows.” In many respects, Anderson’s story of Dirk Diggler, a young loser from the San Fernando Valley who has nothing going for him except a huge cock, which he whips out before the camera and finds fame and fortune, was the John Holmes story, the X-rated equivalent of A Star Is Born and as American as apple pie. But for the real-life man with the monster dick, the denouement was violent and ugly, and far from entertaining.
With overnight success also came a wicked free-base cocaine habit that rendered Holmes unable to get it up on camera, the only true sin in the world of pornography. By the early 1980s, his porn career in shambles, Holmes turned to drug dealing and petty theft with a gang of low-life junkies who lived at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in the Hollywood Hills. But even among the bottom feeders of the Wonderland Avenue Gang, Holmes was considered a joke, until he suggested the gang rob his good friend, Hollywood nightclub owner Eddie Nash (real name: Adel Nasrallah).
After spending the night freebasing with Nash, Holmes departed, but not before leaving a sliding door unlocked. An hour later the gang burst into the house with guns drawn, beat up Nash and his bodyguard, Gregory Diles, and made off with $100,000 in cocaine and tens of thousands in cash and jewelry.
The Wonderland Avenue Gang made only one mistake: They left Nash and Diles alive. A few nights later, on July 1, 1981, according to the testimony of L.A. P. D. detectives who investigated the case, Nash forced Holmes to lead a group of unknown assailants to the Wonderland Avenue house, where Holmes watched as four of the gang were beaten to death while they slept. It was the most brutal multiple homicide in Los Angeles since the Sharon Tate slayings in 1969.
The Wonderland Avenue Murders remain unsolved to this day. In his upcoming book, Pop Shots: The Uncensored Oral History of the Adult Film Industry, Legs McNeil ( coauthor with Gillian McCain of the best-seller Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk) sheds new light on the murders and how they were instigated by John Holmes’s fatal quest for drugs. With the help of documentary filmmaker Cass Paley (Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes, VCA Pictures), McNeil interviewed many of the major figures in Holmes’s life and the adult-film industry of the seventies, drawing upon their recollections of the King of Porn in order to present his tragic tale of self-destruction in all its sordid reality. As the following excerpt from Pop Shots shockingly details, John Holmes was indeed a man who once had everything and threw it all away, leaving death and destruction in his wake.
“Even among the bottom feeders of the Wonderland Avenue Gang, Holmes was considered a joke until he suggested they rob Eddie Nash.”
Al Goldstein (publisher of Screw magazine): John Holmes was the biggest cock in the business. And I was always fascinated with him because he had everything I didn’t have. He was hung like a horse; I’m hung like a squirrel. He had what all guys dream about. We’re all size queens. We want to have that big cock.
I’m not gay, but I thought one day I’d love to suck that cock. Feel that power. Transcend my limit in size and swallow his virility in the same way some African tribes cannibalize their enemy. I could see blowing him and swallowing his sperm and being better for it.
He was that important to me, because he walked among us with that massive tool banging on the floor. He was like some huge dinosaur, “Thump, thump, thump!” And it wasn’t his tail hitting the ground.
So when I met him, I figured I’d meet a guy who had paradise regained, who had everything. Instead I met a sociopath and a liar. In effect, every manifestation of this man’s life was a lie, a distortion, a duplicity, a quagmire of deceit.
The one truth was, he had a big dick.
Sharon Holmes (first wife): I first met John Holmes in 1964, when he was involved with Vera, a fellow nursing-student friend of mine, and they came over to have dinner. When he broke up with Vera about two months later, John started coming to the door, bringing me flowers and asking me to go out with him. So one thing led to another, and he had no place to live, so he moved into my apartment.
He was very young, very immature at that time, but very, very sweet. Always had an arm around me, always holding hands, you know, that type of thing. So things just gradually evolved into a real tight relationship. And we were married five months later.
Bill Amerson (former manager): I first met John in 1969 while casting for some still-photo porn-magazine stuff at the Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard. We had an open casting call. It was toward the end of the day, and in walked this really skinny kid with an Afro haircut. And he didn’t look like the type we could use.
My partner said, “Go ahead and take a Polaroid of him anyway. Have him go in the back room and take off his clothes and take a picture, say, ‘Thank you very much,’ and that’s the end of that.” So we went into the back room.
John undressed. He turned around. I looked at it and said, “You’re going to be a star!”
Sharon Holmes: I came home from work one evening and found John measuring himself in the bathroom. I thought this was a little strange. So I started dinner, and John came in and said, “I think I’ve found what I want to do.”
That’s when he said, “I want to do porno.”
I said, “Movies?”
He said, “Wherever it will take me.”
I was appalled. I’m sorry, I was appalled. It didn’t sound like something that one would want to make one’s lifework, but what do you say?
Bob Chin (early porn director): I’d just come out of U.C.L.A. film school and started making porn films on a budget of about $750. One day this scruffy, bushy-haired guy came up to the office, looking for a job as a grip or a gaffer. I told him, “We have our crew. We don’t have any openings for grips or gaffers.”
Then he said, “Well, I’m really an actor. My name is John Holmes.”
And that sort of rang a bell, because one of the actresses I knew had mentioned this guy, told me about his attributes. So I said, “So you’re John Holmes. I’ve heard about you. Show me your credentials.”
And then he showed me his credentials.
Bill Amerson: It was 13 and a half inches long. I know, because John measured it many times for many people who didn’t believe him. And they’d ask him how thick it was, and he’d say, “Grab my wrists.”
But I thought that he really wouldn’t stay in the porn business very long. He was very nervous. He was like a fish out of water. He just didn’t know what to do.
Sharon Holmes: John out and out told me, “This is probably my only shot at being famous for something. I want to do this. I really want to do this.”
And I was speechless.
Bob Chin: After John showed me his credentials, my partner and I sat down and said, “We can make a film with this guy.”
And my partner said, “God, what a wad that guy has.”
I said, “Let’s call him ‘Johnny Wadd,’ make it a private-detective thing.”
So we wrote the first script on the back of an envelope. And then we shot it two days later. I hired John Holmes to play Johnny Wadd at the unheard-of rate of $75 a day, since at the time we were only paying actors $50 a day. We shot the film in one day and then sent it out, just like we sent out all the other films.
New York was our biggest market. And within two weeks of us sending it out, our distributor in New York called and said they wanted more films with Johnny Wadd. I said, “Okay.”
It took one day to shoot the next one, Flesh of the Lotus. We developed it the same night, and then we cut the original. Within a week after it was shot, it was playing the theaters.
Bill Amerson: I’m not sure why people were so fascinated by the size of his penis. I just know that they were. And it was a great marketing tool, if you will.
At first John didn’t really like the name “Johnny Wadd,” but it stuck, it went over big, and John became a star behind that name. We’d run into people at different places, and they’d call out to him, “Hey, Johnny Wadd!”
So that was the start of the star system in the adult-film industry, and the Johnny Wadd series became famous throughout the world.
Bunny Bleu (seventies porn star): We went on a promotional tour in Texas, signing autographs in adult-book stores, and it was really wild because the women would line up around the block.
And they would actually piss their pants, they were so excited to meet him. One lady actually came back for more autographs. She went home, changed, cleaned up, came back, and said, “I want another autograph.”
I was like, “Wow.”
That takes a lot of balls. I don’t think after peeing my pants from meeting somebody, I would come back and see them again.
Bob Vosse (former porn producer): By the mid-seventies, John Holmes was getting $1,000 a loop, which was more-quite a bit more — than anyone else in the industry. And in all fairness, he deserved more, because his loops and his films were outselling the competition by at least ten to one. It didn’t matter who the girl was — if John Holmes was in it, it would outsell everything in the line.
So his prices kept going up, and he deserved it.
Bill Margold (former porn star and porn historian): John Holmes became the single most recognizable name in the history of the adult-film industry and proof that all men are not created equal.
There is an orgy scene in Disco Dolls where I’m being blown by Leslie Bovee and John’s being worked on by four people next to me — and all of a sudden his dick popped out over my head, and I looked up at it and it was like the opening shot of Star Wars.
I had the feeling that if I got hit in the head by that thing, I’d get a concussion. So my dick, which was happily ensconced in Leslie’s mouth, was no longer interested in working. And she laughed, and he laughed, and I had to laugh at myself.
Such was the legacy of the King.
Sheri St.Clair (porn star): The way he was built, John couldn’t help but be put on a pedestal. People couldn’t quite believe that he was so endowed; they were rather amazed.
You know, you go to the awards ceremonies, and you’re constantly being bombarded by people asking you to sign autographs. You were the girl working at the coffee shop one day, and suddenly you’re bigger than anybody else.
And I think that John fell into that. He became a celebrity and lived and breathed that 24 hours a day.
Annette Haven (porn star): What was interesting was John Holmes really only worked on camera. His cock was impressive visually, but let’s face it, as the joke goes, if John ever got fully erect, he’d lose consciousness due to lack of blood to his brain — because his dick really was that big.
And it’s true that his cock was never hard. It was like doing it with a big, soft loofah sponge. You had to kind of stuff it in. For me, personally, I prefer something in a smaller size that’s actually rigid and functions really well. Being stuffed full of loofah is kind of interesting, I guess, but not exactly a turn-on.
Joel Sussman (still photographer): When John started making $1,000 cash a day, he got real spoiled. And I think that was what propelled him into insanity more than anything else. It was that “too much, too soon” thing. You know, where you start with cigarettes and go to smack. And what do you do after smack? And then you start doing even weirder things to yourself.
He was like a rock star. He did the same things rock stars do. Go up high and burn out. And then you can’t get back into the atmosphere.
His life was like a cartoon, and then it became real. I think when it was a cartoon it was fun, but when it was real, it was ugly and scary.
Bill Amerson: When I first met him, John wouldn’t do any drug except marijuana. He was afraid of everything else. Then around 1975 or 1976 he got turned on to cocaine by a producer. There was always cocaine around. It was a commodity in the adult-film business. People were paid in cocaine.
So John started doing cocaine. He lived with me at the time, and I would see him two hours after he had finished on the set and he would still be buzzing.
He was doing things like waxing his car, washing the dishes, cleaning the floor. And this was like two in the morning, and John thought this was the greatest discovery of his life.
That was the first time John snorted cocaine. And then for a few years, John snorted cocaine almost on a daily basis.
Sharon Mitchell (porn star): Everyone had cocaine, everyone had some heroin, everyone had whatever they did; P.C.P., speed, people carried it around.
I’m not necessarily saying we needed it to perform in the movies, I’m just saying we preferred it. We carried it one step further than the sixties. It was free sex and a lot of drugs. It was a sign of the times, and everyone was packing whatever their preference was.
And we would all share. We were good that way.
Bob Chin: At that time, just shooting an X-rated film was bad enough, was subject to a bust. So if you had drugs on the set, that would definitely mean jail. So I wouldn’t tolerate drugs on my shoots.
But one day I caught John with cocaine on the set. I flushed it down the toilet and said, “John, you can’t do this!”
He became petulant and wouldn’t work. It cost us a lot of time. I said, “John, I haven’t paid you yet. Finish the film, get your money, and do whatever you want.”
From that point on I just couldn’t work with him. It was just too difficult.
Sharon Mitchell: One time when I was shooting a film with John in Laurel Canyon, he just disappeared. Everyone on the set thought he had gone out for lunch, and we were waiting and waiting, and it was getting dark. And then all of a sudden we heard a little scream from one of the bedrooms. Some woman had opened up a closet, and John was in there with a base pipe, getting high. He had been on the set all day.
He just looked up and said, “Where were you guys? Nobody came to get me!”
Bill Amerson: John still tried to work, but he got a reputation for not showing up, or spending most of the time in the bathroom.
And people didn’t want to hire him anymore, because John always got paid up-front. So producers got to the point where they didn’t want to pay him up-front anymore because he wasn’t reliable.
Bobby Hollander (porn star): The first time I met John Holmes I was living with Gloria Leonard in Burbank. I came home from work early one day, and I opened up the front door, and the house smelled like somebody was frying grapes. I said, “What the hell is this?”
I didn’t notice any other cars or anything strange. Except the odor in the house. So I walked down into the living room. The first person I see is John Holmes, standing up in front of a coffee table. And I notice he has a suitcase not a briefcase or an attache case, it’s like a suitcase a little kid runs away from home with. It’s plaid, and it’s on the coffee table with the lid up. And John’s holding something in his hand, and the smell is coming from him.
So I walk in and Gloria’s sitting on the couch with another girl, and she says, “Oh, Bobby, I want you to meet John Holmes.”
And I take a look in the suitcase, and there’s six free-base pipes in it, and a blowtorch, and a bottle of 151 Bacardi rum to make the torch. And he is taking a blast off the pipe.
John says, “Well, do you want to get a little buzz?”
So we got high that day, and we were showing everyone around the house. We went out to the pool, and I was bragging about getting new cars the next day.
We had an 11 o’clock appointment to pick up the cars the next day. So we go and get the cars — they’re beautiful, I love it — we get home, we walk in the front door, and the house is a shambles.
The television is gone, the VCR is gone, cameras are gone, jewelry is gone, the bedroom is completely ransacked, guns were gone. And the only one who knew that we were going to be gone at that particular time, that day, was John Holmes.
Bob Vosse: No one in the industry knew John Holmes socially. John had no social life, he’d never stick around for parties, and he had very few friends. I tried to be John’s friend. We worked together in many places, many times. I shot more than half the films John made in his life, but he never trusted me. He never trusted anyone.
Dawn Schiller (girlfriend): When I was 15, my father divorced my mother in Florida, and I chose to move with my father to California.
But we had nowhere to live. Then a hitchhiker we picked up on the way to California told us we could stay with his girlfriend. But when we got there, she said she would have to ask the manager first. So in walked John Holmes. He was the manager of the apartment complex.
John looked me up and down and asked me how old I was.
I said, “Fifteen.”
And he went, “Mmm. Too bad.”
Sharon Holmes: By 1973, I was literally eating my own guts alive because of the emotional upheaval of trying to deal with John’s porn career and maintain a physical relationship with him. I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I was hospitalized with pancreatitis.
When I got home I told John, “I have no problem with your living with me, but I don’t want anything to do with you physically. I don’t want to hear about what you’re doing. Fine, I’ll do your laundry. I’ll be your mother, I’ll be your confessor, I’ll be your sister, I’ll be your friend, but I don’t want to be physical anymore.”
He begged and pleaded, saying, “This porn stuff means absolutely nothing to me.”
And I said, “John, it doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means a lot to me. I’m married to a hooker. I’m not comfortable with that. I can’t handle it anymore.”
So by 1975 we no longer had a physical relationship.
We slept in the same bed, we hugged, we kissed, we felt intimate with each other, but not sexually intimate.
So John found Dawn, a skinny 15-year-old whose dad was one of those expatriates who settled in Thailand after Vietnam because of the drug connection. So on his first trip home since the Vietnam War he told his wife he wanted a divorce, and that he wanted to take the kids to Disneyland.
So when they got here, they moved into our apartment court. Five people — in a one-bedroom apartment.
Dawn Schiller: John knew that me and my sister liked to smoke pot, and he always came home with the best stuff. He’d say, “Here, try this,” and he would flick it on the couch and then leave. He always had a dramatic air. And I thought, “God, he’s cool!”
My sister thought he was weird cause he was too old to be hanging around us. But I liked him.
Sharon Holmes: Dawn was a very nice-looking girl. Big-boned, but skinny. And John hired her and her sister, Terry, to do the gardening around the apartment complex so they could make their own money. Their father had money, but he didn’t spend it on his kids. He was always out connecting with some drug person from Thailand.
Dawn Schiller: John and I were getting closer, and then he started getting camping trips together — to the beach — in his van. He had a Chevy van with a WADD license plate. I guess that was a porn series that he did.
Then the camping trips turned into overnight camping, but always with my sister, and John always made it fun. He’d build a big bonfire on the beach, and we’d eat peanut-butter-brown sugar-chocolate-chip cookies, which is the ultimate when you’re stoned.
So he was very romantic. Quite a romantic.
And then one time he set it up so that my sister couldn’t be there, and asked me to go camping by myself. And, like, we both knew this was the night.
So we went to Malibu, walked on the beach, and it was a full moon. It was low in the sky. It was perfect and John was very quiet. We just sat on the rocks and watched the moon. The atmosphere was magical.
And without saying anything, John got down from that rock and just took my hand and we walked to the van.
And he was extremely gentle and extremely awesome. Just awesome.
Sharon Holmes: After Dawn and John became intimate, Dawn became like a daughter to me, and I tried to show her that John wasn’t God Almighty. But I guess to a 15-year-old who’s getting showered with gifts and John telling her how wonderful she is, she would have done anything he wanted.
And eventually she did do anything he wanted.
Chris Coxx (nightclub owner): I first met John Holmes when I had my nightclub, the Odyssey. He was brought in by a mutual friend to my office at the club. This was in late 1980, and it was kind of unique to meet him, because he was so well-known. I remember seeing his movies. Everybody’d seen his movies.
But when I met him, he was pretty heavy into coke. I think his career had gone down the tubes and he was basically homeless. He was living in the back of an old milk truck, and he was pretty much living day to day, you know, heavily caught up in cocaine. John carried around a big aluminum briefcase loaded up with freebasing paraphernalia: butane and propane, and pipes and nozzles — all the equipment we were using in those days.
So John kind of befriended me because the drugs were flowing pretty heavily. He knew a good thing when he saw it.
You see, those were the days when everybody was carrying around a two gram bottle of coke. You know what I mean? It was just the right thing to have. And then there was an elite group that was doing the freebasing, because it was so expensive; it was like $2,800 an ounce. So it was just affluent people who could afford to do it back then. And there were just small cliques around town that had the little freebasing empires going on.
There was me and my group. And there was Eddie Nash and his group, centered around Nash’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Eddie… had six or seven nightclubs in Hollywood, and it was known that he pretty much ran everything. If you wanted to get something done, you had to see Eddie Nash.
But then, in 1980, I kind of got put out to pasture when I introduced John Holmes to Eddie Nash. I mean, when I first brought John over to Nash’s, it was like bringing over a celebrity. There were lots of girls there, and they were pretty much bumping into one another to get to John. He was well liked up there. He was a conversation piece. And John and Ed hit it off very well, and John started spending all his time over at Eddie Nash’s house.
My feelings weren’t really hurt; I understood what was going on. John was doing whatever he had to do to get his own supply.
Dawn Schiller: John referred to Eddie Nash as “brother.” Eddie was portrayed to me as an extremely dangerous person who we didn’t talk about. We barely were to breathe around him because it could be taken wrong. I didn’t really understand the social structure, other than that it was based on fear. So, yeah, I got to meet Eddie Nash.
It was after sitting outside [Nash’s] house more days than he knows, because John started taking me with him when he went on drug runs. I never went into anybody’s home. He’d always make me wait in cars, hidden. With nothing but a Coke can to pee in and a free-base pipe. And John would come by every 12 hours or so and drop me a free-base rock.
But John did bring me into Eddie’s house a couple of times. He basically sold me for dope. He needed to get high and he’d give me, the teenager, in trade.
One time it was my birthday, and I was drilled with this story that I was supposed to be John’s niece from Oregon, in town looking into nursing schools. John warned me about how Nash would treat me the moment I came in. He told me that Nash would leave me sitting in the living room with the drugs, money, and jewelry in front of me. For hours.
And if I touched a thing, my body would disappear in the desert somewhere, because I was being watched with a two-way mirror. So I came in and I was left in the living room for hours with all these things in front of me. Nash did it to see if I was on dope. And at that time I was so addicted to coke, you know? So I just broke into cold sweats, waiting to be called into the bedroom.
Finally I got traded off.
Nash paid me in coke. When John picked me up I turned all the coke over to him, and then I told him word for word everything that happened, and he backhanded me so hard my tooth went through my cheek. I guess because there wasn’t as much cocaine as they originally bargained on. I think it had to do with the fact that Eddie Nash could tell I wasn’t John’s innocent niece from Oregon. I mean, he could tell that I’d smoked free base before.
Cass Paley (documentary filmmaker): At the same time John Holmes was hanging out with Eddie Nash, he [Holmes] was living with the Wonderland Avenue Gang: Joy Miller, Ronnie and Susan Launius, Billy Deverell, David Lind, and Tracy Mccourt. They were heroin addicts who lived in an armed camp. John was running drugs for them, but I think he always ended up doing more than he dealt. So they were always pissed off at him, because John was always owing them money, so then they came up with the “bright idea” to have John set up Eddie Nash to be robbed.
Bob Souza (L.A.P.D. homicide detective): Holmes was afraid of Ron Launius, the leader of the Wonderland Avenue Gang. Launius called Holmes “donkey dick,” which would be a compliment to most guys, but it was the way Launius said it, as an insult. Launius used to say to Holmes, “Hey, show ‘em your dick. Pull it out.”
You know, Launius just treated Holmes like a butt boy. And Launius was a tough son of a bitch.
So Holmes was shootin’ off his mouth at the Wonderland house about Eddie Nash, and Ron Launius heard him talking. And Launius started asking a lot of questions about Nash: “Has he got any dope? Has he got guns? You know, what’s he got? Got any jewelry in there?”
Ron Launius was a fuckin’ thief from way back, so he’s thinking, Hey, this looks like a pretty good score.
The Wonderland Avenue Gang was doing residential robberies at that time; that was their big thing. They were going out and ripping off other drug dealers. So you know you got some tough bastards when they’re robbing other dope dealers. Cause you know you’re gonna face some guns.
Dawn Schiller: One night John came in and asked me to draw his bath and to get him a cup of coffee. Up until this time, he hadn’t taken his eyes off me. I was watched because he knew that I wanted to get out. He knew I’d run any second. But when he asked me to go ger him a cup of coffee — while he was in the bathtub — it was my chance to make my break.
I went out and I mixed the coffee, and there was a sliding-glass door behind me — and I ran.
And so I made it — I got away.
I went up to Oregon and stayed at my mother’s for a couple of months, and John called every day. He begged me to come back, telling me how much he loved me. That he was sorry and that he’d never hit me again. Saying it was the drugs. Telling me if we just got away from the drugs, everything would be all right. And I cringed.
But he wheedled his way back in. And I started to believe him.
So John talked me into going back. I flew down from Oregon, and he met me at the Burbank airport. And, immediately, the first thing he did was pick up someone else’s baggage off the conveyor belt and walk off with it.
I pretended I didn’t see it.
Then John left me in a motel, said that he’d be right back, but the rent expired. Here I was, just back from Oregon, with all these promises, standing on an extremely busy street, not knowing what to do. And not knowing where John was.
David Lind (Wonderland Avenue Gang): On Monday, June 29, 1981, Ron Launius provided John Holmes with money to purchase narcotics from Eddie Nash and leave a door open for us to enter.
Tracy McCourt (Wonderland Avenue Gang): So we left the house on Wonderland Avenue, and we passed John on our way to Nash’s. He was driving down the hill and we were going up the hill. We stopped and he told us, “Get him!” He went like, “Get him!”
So we went to the house and got him.
“I watched him toss and turn, and then he screamed. ‘Blood! Blood! There is so much blood!’”
David Lind: At Nash’s there was a chain-link gate that we just pushed open; we went to the sliding-glass doors that were left open by Holmes-and entered the guest bedroom. There was a doorway leading into the hallway, and I saw Gregory Diles, the bodyguard, a 300-pound black man, coming out of the kitchen with a serving tray in his hands.
I shouted, “Freeze! Police! You are under arrest!”
And then Ronnie and Billy also threw down on Eddie Nash.
I had a leather case containing a San Francisco police officer’s badge, and we all identified ourselves as police officers, and we were all armed. So we handcuffed Gregory Diles and lay him on his stomach. But while I was cuffing Diles, Ronnie bumped my arm and the gun went off.
Tracy Mccourt: I was sitting in the car waiting for them when I heard a real loud noise and knew it had to be a gunshot. It sounded like a Magnum, but I calmed down by telling myself that any of the neighbors would have thought it was a load of lumber falling off a truck.
David Lind: When the shot went off, Eddie Nash immediately fell to his knees. Diles wasn’t shot or anything, he just suffered some powder burns and bled a little.
So I finished handcuffing him and laid him on the floor and put a throw rug over his head so he couldn’t see what we were doing. Eddie Nash was on his knees with his hands behind his head. Then Ron and Billy took Nash into his bedroom and I followed.
Eddie was asked to lie facedown on the carpet of his bedroom. Ron went to a wardrobe closet where there was a floor safe, and asked Nash for the combination. Then Ronnie opened the safe and withdrew a half-pound zip-lock storage bag, which was approximately three-quarters full of cocaine.
John had told us earlier that there was also a laboratory vial — approximately eight to ten inches in length, half an inch in diameter, full of heroin, which he called China white — and that it was in the area of Eddie Nash’s dresser. We picked that up, and also an attache case full of money and jewelry. We found everything.
Inside the attache case was a considerable sum of money in twenties, fifties, and hundred-dollar bills, and a considerable amount of jewelry-gold jewelry and diamonds.
Then I taped up Gregory Diles and removed the handcuffs, because the handcuffs could have been identified by what was engraved on them, and went to the bedroom and taped up Eddie Nash and threw a sheet over him.
After that, as we were getting ready to leave, Ronnie started to question Diles about the whereabouts of the rest of the stuff, then pulled out a knife and started to cut him, but I told Ronnie, “We’ve got everything we need here. Let’s go.”
So I opened the front door and signaled to Tracy McCourt. He started to back the car up. Then we all split.
John was waiting inside the door when we arrived back at Wonderland Avenue. The first thing he wanted to know was exactly what had happened. He was very excited about it, but I told Ron not to tell him anything.
Tracy McCourt: When we got back to the house, I just started getting very nervous. I looked out the balcony and saw a car that looked like the Lincoln Continental that had been parked at Eddie Nash’s house.
I told everybody about it, but they were so high and screwed up on drugs that they paid no attention. That’s when I got really nervous and decided to leave on my own.
David Lind: There were five of us involved in the robbery. Ronnie Launius, Billy Deverell, and myself were to [each] receive 25 percent of what we took. And John Holmes and Tracy McCourt were to split the remaining 25 percent of the drugs and the money. Everybody was in a pretty good mood after the success of the robbery, and we just got high.
I don’t remember when John left. I do remember when I left. I left approximately nine or ten o’clock the next morning.
And that was the last time I saw any of them alive.
Dawn Schiller: I called John’s answering service and left messages, and when we hooked up again John pulled out his briefcase, and there was the largest pile of cocaine I’d ever seen in my life.
It was the pile they ripped off from Eddie Nash.
I didn’t question the pile, but John said, “This is how we are getting out of here. This is our bank.”
He said we needed to sell it, and that’s what we’d use to get away. But then we checked into this motel and just got high. We just got way high. We just got high for about a week.
Then John went out again.
Tom Lange (L.A.P.D. homicide detective): On July 1, 1981, at 6:20 P.M., I arrived at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in Los Angeles. The purpose was to investigate a reported quadruple homicide.
I entered the two-story residence on Wonderland Avenue, went up the stairs, into the front, and observed the first victim, Barbara Richardson, lying facedown in the living room, just off the balcony.
I proceeded to the rear of the house and went up one level, three stairs, to a rear bedroom, where I saw the second victim, Ronald Launius, lying in bed. There were extensive wounds on him as well as on Richardson. They were both apparently dead.
I then went in back, through the kitchen, upstairs to the second level, and entered a bedroom. I observed the third victim, Joy Miller… She was apparently dead and on the floor, again near the balcony. I observed the fourth victim, William Deverell, with extensive head injuries, also apparently dead.
Then I was informed that a fifth victim, Susan Launius, had been transported to the hospital and was in surgery.
Sharon Holmes: It was the early-morning hours, nothing was moving in the streets, and John came knocking at the door. I left the latch on the door and said, “Why are you here?” This was the first time I had seen him, literally, since March, and he asked if he could come in. That’s when I realized — from the night — light in the entryway — that he was covered in blood. On his head, it was in his hair, around his ears, his clothes. He wasn’t dripping, but you could tell that something had happened.
He mumbled about how he’d had a car accident, then said, “Could you help clean me up?” Dope that I am, I let him in the house.
He said, “I have to get in the shower.”
I said, “There wasn’t an accident. What happened?” He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I was involved with” or “I witnessed”— I honestly don’t remember which — “murders.”
And, of course, nothing was in the news yet. So I had no idea what he was talking about.
He was almost incoherent, and he said, “Four people were killed in front of me.”
And then he proceeded to tell me about the robbery that had occurred the day before, that he set up and was carried out in a demeaning manner to Eddie Nash. And then he told me that these people, who had cut him in for drugs and money that were stolen from Eddie Nash, had been killed.
I said, “What do you mean they were killed?”
He said, “Well, I had to take them to the house, because Eddie had my address book and he told me he’d go back to Ohio and take care of my family if I didn’t square it away with him.”
So John took the people to Wonderland Avenue, and got them through the security door, and he was, according to him, thrown up against the wall and held there while two of the three people he took there carried out the murders.
I don’t think there’s anything anyone can tell you more appalling than they participated in a murder, or were responsible for it.
“You stood there and watched this?” I asked.
And he said, “Yes.”
I said, “These people were your friends.”
And he said, “They were dirt. They were filth. It was them or me.”
I don’t think I said a lot after that.
I was devastated. I just couldn’t believe, no matter what he had become, that he could be involved in this. I just had to learn to find a way to live with this. In the meantime, John went back to Hollywood, where Dawn was.
Dawn Schiller: Before John came back to the motel, the news was on and they were pulling the bodies out of the Wonderland Avenue house.
Now, I’d sat in the car in front of that house many times. I knew that house. I’d seen those people go in and out. And my heart just went into my gut, because I just knew. I mean, it was all bad and John wasn’t there and the big pile — it was adding up.
When John finally got back — he was gone overnight and came back about midday — I didn’t say anything about the murders, of course. And he just looked exhausted. I never saw his eyes so red. They were bloodshot red, as if he had been crying. I knew that we had been up for days, but his eyes were just brilliant red.
And he was in the weirdest mood. He was very low. It was different than him being mad. I mean, this was something that he wouldn’t even take out on me, you know?
So he took a couple of Valiums and laid down and went to sleep. I was still up. And I watched him toss and turn, and then he screamed, “Blood! Blood! There is so much blood!”
That was the final gut-stabber for me.
It wasn’t good. The day before, things had been hopeful, we had money, a big pile of coke, there was hope-and then he comes back a day later, and the money’s gone, the big pile of coke is gone, and he’s screaming about blood.
No, this wasn’t good.
This wasn’t like how he said it would be when he called me in Oregon.
Al Goldstein: In the end I don’t think there was a John Holmes. I think it was all smoke and mirrors. I think John was like a visit to a circus. With those convex mirrors. Nothing was real. It was, not to get too literary, because it’s only pornography with pretensions of being real, but I think of the allegory of the cavemen who are in a cave, and they never see the real world, they see only flickering shadows projected by the light. They don’t know what reality is.
And John didn’t know what reality is. And we don’t know what reality is — but we should try to discern what those shadows mean.
POSTSCRIPT on Johnny Wadd
Dawn Schiller and John Holmes went into hiding for a year after the Wonderland Avenue murders, until Holmes was arrested in Florida and extradited to California, where he stood trial for the murders. He was acquitted, released from jail, and resumed his career in pornography. John and Sharon were divorced in 1982. In 1987, Holmes married his second wife, Laurie, a former porn star.
Eddie Nash and Gregory Diles were tried twice for the Wonderland Avenue murders. The first trial ended in a hung jury. The second trial ended in an acquittal. After serving time on drug charges, Eddie Nash was released from prison and went into retirement.
John Holmes died of AIDS in the Sepulveda Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles on March 13, 1988, at the age of 43. On his deathbed he was questioned by Detective Tom Lange one last time about the Wonderland Avenue murders, but refused to give any information.
You can read the Los Angeles Times version of the revelation from that time by looking in their archives.
