The Wonderland Murders and their Coverage
**Note: This is a condensed version of a much longer research paper. This version does not have the complete citations, though the full paper is attached below the condensed version.
On July 1st, 1981, four people were murdered and another beaten unconscious by men using steel pipes (linked is video from the crime scene--not for the faint of heart). Many framed it in the context of Los Angeles, from local journalists to ones thousands of miles away. One journalist who wrote extensively about it said, “It is such a quintessential L.A. story of the 80s: drugs, sex, excess, night clubs, gangsters, and porn stars. It’s like Raymond Chandler on crack."[1] Nobody was ever convicted of the murders, leading many to call the case “unsolved,” including its own Wikipedia page. As one journalist puts it though, the case is more “unresolved” than “unsolved.”[2] Every person who has written about the case knows the story, of the shrewd immigrant nightclub owner, of the infamously third-legged adult actor, of the gang of lowlifes. This paper will not seek to re-litigate the murders, but rather explore the ways people have understood them.
The Characters
The murders themselves are best told as the culminating interaction between several characters. The first of these characters was Adel Gharib Nasrallah (below via NetWorthBuzz), a Palestinian immigrant to Los Angeles, who went by the name Eddie Nash. His family was wealthy in British Palestine, but he arrived in America quite poor, working odd jobs until opening up a hot dog stand. He eventually got richer and richer, amassing 36 liquor licenses for his numerous strip clubs, nightclubs, gay clubs, and even teen dance clubs. His assets totaled over $133 million in today’s money, though much of it was spent on his estimated $12,300 per day drug habit (also in today’s money). His house became a sex and drug den, with many of Los Angeles’ drug-addicted elite arriving regularly. One of these was pornography legend John Holmes.
John Holmes (below via Rolling Stone) was born in Ohio to a difficult family environment, with an alcoholic father replaced by a more violent and alcoholic stepfather. He joined the army at age 16, serving in the signal corps for three years in Nuremburg before moving to Los Angeles. He also worked odd jobs for years, meeting his wife Sharon Gebenini (she would change her name to Sharon Holmes after the marriage), while working as an ambulance driver and she as a nurse at USC County General Hospital. Without telling his wife, he began to pose nude for pornographic photographers. When his wife found out, she was dismayed, but he insisted on going into pornography. The two were never intimate again, but John Holmes was determined to make a career out of his abnormally large penis. When Holmes met pornography director Bob Chinn, his career quickly became legendary. He was crowned the king of porn, made 2000 movies, one with an Italian member of Parliament, and at his peak he was hiring his own co-stars and making $3,000 a day filming (or being a prostitute for rich men and women), roughly $14,000 in today’s money.
The Wonderland Gang, as they were known, were a group of drug addicts and dealers who operated outside of the house on Wonderland Avenue where the murders occurred. The leader of the group was Ron Launius, who had been dishonorably discharged from the Air Force after being convicted of smuggling heroin from Vietnam in the corpses of American soldiers. Joy Miller was the leaseholder of the home, a heroin addict with seven arrests and two daughters. Billy DeVerell, her boyfriend, had thirteen arrests. All three were addicted to heroin.
The Crime
Much of what we know of the story is thanks to what John Holmes told his then-wife Sharon Holmes while sitting in a bathtub soon after the murder, corroborated by what John Holmes told his longtime mistress Dawn Schiller. They did not reveal his confessions until 1988 when he died of complications relating to AIDS. Because these confessions were largely corroborated by what the Los Angeles Police Department thought happened, these confessions as told by the two women, are considered to be what occurred. As the lead investigator on the case said, “There is no mystery, because we know who is involved and we know why.”[3]
By 1978, John Holmes’ cocaine addiction became crippling to his pornography career. He was unaccountable and so was his ability to maintain an erection. He was taking a hit of freebase every 10-15 minutes and swallowing 40-50 valium per day. As his career declined, he began to steal in addition to running deliveries for the Wonderland Gang. His life was falling apart, he owed Nash money, and a recently bungled delivery had seen him beaten by members of the Wonderland Gang. He came up with a plan: robbing Eddie Nash. Holmes drove to Nash’s home for a drug deal, but purposely left a sliding door open, allowing the Wonderland Gang to get in and rob Nash at gunpoint of roughly one million dollars’ worth of drugs, weapons, money, and jewelry.
When an acquaintance of Nash’s saw Holmes walking around Hollywood wearing Nash’s stolen jewelry, Holmes was met by armed men who forced him to drive to Nash’s house. Once there, Nash threatened to kill Holmes’ family back in Ohio if he didn’t tell Nash who committed the robberies and exact revenge. Holmes was forced to drive armed men to the Wonderland Gang’s home and watch as some members of the Gang and their friends were beaten to death (or near-death, for one victim) by steel pipes.
Holmes was first tried for the murders, being acquitted in 1982. Nash and his bodyguard Gregory Diles were charged in 1990. Their first cases each ended in a mistrial with 11-1 hung jury in favor of convicting Nash and 10-2 hung jury in favor of acquitting Gregory Diles. The two would be acquitted in the proceeding trials. In 2000, Nash was charged with racketeering and accused of paying off the unflinching jury member in his original murder trial. For this charge, now-72-year-old Nash pled guilty. He also admitted it was understood “that to get back the [stolen] property, violence up to and including the killing of the thieves might occur.”[4] He was sentenced to 37 months in prison.
The Coverage, Starting with the Crime
The coverage of the murders weren’t the same in every publication. We’ll be comparing three news services: the Associated Press, the primary U.S. news wire service, the New York Times, America’s most popular newspaper, and the Los Angeles Times, the major paper in Los Angeles. The Associated Press published two relevant news stories on the day of the murders. One of its headlines reads “Four Dead, One Wounded in Estate Shooting.”[5] The other one reads “Four Dead in Fashionable Hollywood Neighborhood.”[6] The authors write that the neighborhood is “fashionable” and that the house is an “estate,” emphasizing the wealth of the neighborhood. Ignoring just the tone of the headlines, one of them happens to be just incorrect, calling the location a “Hollywood Neighborhood” when the house wasn’t in Hollywood. In the body of the article, it is quickly corrected, but the reasoning for putting just “Hollywood” in the headline is to draw in an international audience with the allure of the same fame and wealth that Hollywood has always been associated with.
The New York Times article written about the slayings reads more like a mystery crime drama than a story of death. The headline reads “Los Angeles Police Seek a Motive in 4 Slayings in Hollywood Hills: Problem of Identification.”[7] The subject in the headline is the police, emphasizing the investigation over the victims, seemingly writing that the police case is what makes the story worth reading. The article comes out two days after the murder, suggesting the story wasn’t newsworthy until the police investigation got underway. In addition, the author questions the role of drugs before even telling us the name of two of the murder victims. Similar to the Associated Press article, the New York Times article also emphasizes the character of the neighborhood, calling the neighborhood “rather exclusive.” The author writes imprecisely that “many celebrities live nearby,” which could be said of almost any house in Los Angeles. This phrase is used to add another newsworthy angle besides the police investigation: rich victims!
Though the Los Angeles Times does mention the Governor living nearby, it tends to stay away from wealth of the victims or from characterizing the murders as the pretense for an interesting police investigation. The headline reads “Four Found Slain in Laurel Canyon Home,” making the subject of the headline the victims.[8] They also use a more specific name for the area one that notably leaves out the word “Hollywood,” refusing to use what would be a buzzword to many. The structure of the article also differs from the New York Times article. While the New York Times article largely began with the investigation, the Los Angeles Times article begins with descriptions of the victims.
When reporting the murder, each level of news journalism takes a different angle. The Associated Press emphasizes the wealth of the victims, drawing readers in with words like “estate” and “Hollywood” regardless of accuracy or precision. More national news like the New York Times frame the case as an interesting police investigation, both because of the wealth and because of the gruesomeness. Local news takes a much flatter and victim-centered approach, refusing to sensationalize the story with tales of wealth, keeping the focus on the victims.
The Coverage of the End
When the legal saga finally ended with the 2001 sentencing of Nash to 37 months in prison for racketeering, news sources again demonstrated their differences in their reporting of it. The Associated Press released a short news article headlined “California ex-nightclub owner once accused of murder jailed for 37 months.”[9] The one clearly missing from this headline is the mention of which murder, or which nightclub owner. This headline clearly reflects the Associated Press’ belief that by 2001, nobody really remembered the Wonderland Murders or cared much at all. This belief is shared by the New York Times, who didn’t publish an article on the sentencing at all. In addition to failing to mention the Wonderland Murders by name in the headline, the Associated Press’ article doesn’t go so far as to assert that by pleading guilty to the racketeering charges, Nash is effectively admitting he ordered the actions that became murder.
The Los Angeles Times, on the other hand, tried extremely hard to place the sentencing within the context of the legal saga, tying up the loose ends of the story nicely for those that had been following closely. The headline and subheadline read “Nash Gets 37 Months in 'Wonderland' Murders; The former Hollywood nightclub owner's plea bargain ends a 20-year legal saga.” In addition, the first sentence states that “Eddie Nash was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison Friday for racketeering and other crimes, including a conspiracy to murder four people in a Laurel Canyon drug den 20 years ago.”[10] They name “Wonderland” upfront so that the reader is immediately flushed with all the memories they’ve had of this case. Moreover, they write that he has been sentenced for crimes including “conspiracy to murder four people,” a framing of the decision that is much more extreme and satisfying than saying “racketeering, money laundering, and wire fraud” as the Associated Press did. The Los Angeles Times sought to tie up loose ends and appease their readers who might have had deep prolonged interest in the murders that happened in their very own city, but other news services were just less interested in the end of a saga they did not imagine their readers much caring about.
Longform Journalism
Another form of journalism has been largely ignored in this paper, but was very useful to me in my research. The courts did an insufficient job reconstructing or publicizing what happened, and news journalists have mostly responded to these court cases. Alternatively, citation-less, long, graphic, and adjective-heavy pieces in LAWeekly and Rolling Stone have been extremely important in my understanding of the case, and probably to many others doing research on these murders. Though they tell the fuller and more interesting tale, because these pieces are less flat and to-the-point, they can sometimes appear to be striving very hard to make entertainment out of profoundly sad lives. They are also more focused on things the reading public may find interesting, even if they are distracting to thinking about the crime, focusing less intensely on the more unentertaining parts of the case. Much of these pieces is focused on John Holmes, giving way less attention to other characters like the Wonderland Gang, simply because of his entertainment value, despite his not being one of the murder victims or even a true assailant. Phrases like “monster of a penis” or “had sex on screen with…[an] Italian member of Parliament” or “had sex with 14,000 women” or other things relating to John Holmes’ prolific pornography career sound infinitely more interesting than phrases like “ex-wife of an attorney” or other things describing the Wonderland Gang.
This selective, extended attention can also uncover stories that most news journalists are missing. John Holmes groomed, courted, beat, and prostituted out a girl named Dawn Schiller starting when she was only fifteen. This is a detail often lingered on by longform journalists, far more so than news journalists covering the court cases. Here’s an example from LAWeekly’s “In Too Deep:” “When Dawn returned to Holmes after fucking Nash for money, he smacked her in the face hard enough to pop her tooth through her lip. Nash had given them less coke than Holmes had anticipated. Four days later, on Dawn’s 20th birthday, he sent her back to Eddie.”[11] More graphic examples from the same article can be found, even about Dawn’s looks: “Dawn, at 15, was a strikingly attractive woman-child, her huge green eyes brimming over with fragile anticipation. You look at her picture, and you want to protect her. You hope no one will latch on to her and crush her spirit." These may serve to shed light on under-studied parts of the case and offer a fuller picture of it, but they also seem a bit exploitative of its characters. Furthermore, they lack easy verification and ignore important parts of the story that don’t catch readers’ eyes.
Concluding
From the coverage of the first event of the saga, the slayings, to the last event of the saga, the sentencing of Eddie Nash, news sources of various levels have taken different approaches. In the coverage of the slayings, the local news coverage by the Los Angeles Times sought to be victim-focused and dry, while the Associated Press focused on the wealth of the neighborhood, and the New York Times focused on the police investigation as a point of interest among the readers. In the coverage of Nash’s sentencing, the Associated Press gave a short, precisely accurate description of the case and the New York Times did not bother covering the sentencing at all. In contrast, the Los Angeles Times, characterized the sentencing as the end of a closely watched 20-year legal saga. And between these two times, longform journalists deeply analyzed the characters and the crimes, highlighting the most entertaining tidbits of the story, for better or for worse.
[1] Adrienne Crew, “LAist Interview: Rodger Jacobs,” LAist, dated June 20, 2005, https://laist.com/2005/06/20/laist_interview_rodger_jacobs.php
[2] Stephon Lemons, “Return to Wonderland,” Salon, posted June 9, 2000, https://www.salon.com/2000/06/09/wonderland/.
[3] Robert W. Stewart, “Holmes' Confession in Bathtub: Told Wife of Role in 4 Murders,” Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1988. This article cites what both Sharon Holmes and Dawn Schiller said about the confessions John Holmes gave them, but the then-attorney (in 1988) of John Holmes’ estate denied this based on information John Holmes had given a biographer before he died. The women did not share these confessions until John Holmes died in 1988.
[4] “California ex-nightclub owner once accused of murder jailed for 37 months,” Associated Press, October 13, 2001.
[5] “Four Dead, One Wounded In Estate Shooting,” Associated Press, July 1, 1981.
[6] Arar Yardena, “Four Dead in Fashionable Hollywood Neighborhood,” Associated Press, July 1, 1981.
[7] Hollie, Pamela G., “Los Angeles Police Seek a Motive In 4 Slayings in Hollywood Hills: Problem of Identification,” July 3, 1981.
[8] Patt Morrison and David Johnston, “Four Found Slain in Laurel Canyon Home,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 1981.
[9] “California ex-nightclub owner once accused of murder jailed for 37 months.”
[10] David Rosenzweig, “Nash Gets 37 Months in 'Wonderland' Murders; Crime: The former Hollywood nightclub owner's plea bargain ends a 20-year legal saga,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2001.
[11] MacDonell, “In Too Deep.”
Full version of the paper: Wonderland Murders and Their Coverage