Michael Connelly and Alison Ellwood
Return to Wonderland
by Jay S. Jacobs
Hollywood was a pretty wild place in the early 1980s; a mixture of glitz, glamour and seediness, aging stars and young up-and-comers, gorgeous homes and run-down hoods, big business and small-time crime, nature, shopping and lots and lots of drugs.
On July 1, 1981, four people were found violently executed in a house on Wonderland Avenue in the beautiful Laurel Canyon section of LA. This mystery has long fascinated Angelinos and true-crime buffs. Barbara Richardson, Ron Launius, Joy Miller and Billy DeVerell were killed in the home invasion, with Lanius’ wife Susan Launius surviving with serious injuries.
While since early on the responsibility for the crimes has been attached to LA nightclub owner and gangster Eddie Nash as retribution to Ron Lanius and DeVerell taking part in a robbery of Nash’s home, no one has ever been successfully charged with the murders. However, the events had tendrils which reached way out into Hollywood, ensnaring porn star John Holmes and Vegas icon Liberace, and even lightly brushing upon such 1980s superstars as John Belushi, Richard Pryor and Michael Jackson.
The Liberace, Belushi, Pryor and Jackson connections mostly came through witness Scott Thorson, Liberace’s former companion (he wrote the book Behind the Candelabra) turned drug dealer. Thorson is an infamously unreliable storyteller (he is referred to as an “enigma” in the series), however, it seems that he has mostly told the truth about the goings-on at Wonderland.
Crime novelist Michael Connelly (the Harry Bosch books and The Lincoln Lawyer) has long had a fascination with the case, going back to his days as a crime reporter at The Los Angeles Times. He also lived right around the corner from the crime scene for much of the 1990s. His fascination led to his 2021 podcast on the crime, “The Wonderland Murders & the Secret History of Hollywood.” The podcast was such a success that it has been turned into a TV series to stream on MGM+.
A few years after we spoke with the novelist about the podcast, we checked back in with Connelly and series director Alison Ellwood to discuss the TV series version of The Wonderland Massacre & the Secret History of Hollywood.
Michael, you did a podcast on the case a few years ago. Why did the two of you think that it would make for an intriguing TV series?
Michael Connelly: I thought there'd be some pretty good archival stuff. I had some of that, but obviously I only had the audio of it for the podcast. I didn't know the wealth of stuff that Alison would find, going all the way back to Eddie Nash being on TV. That was something I was hoping for. That would be a reason to go from podcast to documentary. That idea, or that hope, paid off in much bigger ways than I even expected. I think that's a really big part of what keeps this series compelling.
Alison, what was it that interested you about making this a series?
Alison Ellwood: I had just finished doing the Laurel Canyon music series, and that was this beautiful place with these musicians and all this amazing music. By the time this story happens, it's like the negative image of what had become of this place: houses with artists creating music could become dens of drug thieves. That noirish turn in a place was what compelled me about it, plus getting to work with Michael. I'm a big fan of his books.
Scott Thorson died a couple weeks ago. He was a huge part of the show, and the series is dedicated to him. However, you always referred to him as “an enigma” and “an unreliable narrator.” He has told many stories of the Wonderland Massacre, and many seem to check out, but you never know for sure with him. He even said in your last interview that he was working on a book on the case, which will probably never see the light of day. How much of the story do you think he took to the grave with him, or do you think he shared most of what he knew?
Michael Connelly: I think he shared probably 90% of it, but he always inferred – we didn't put this in podcast or the show – he always inferred that if push came to shove, he would name other people that were there that night. That were dispatched to Wonderland to exact Eddie Nash's revenge. He was scared of these people, and said they were still alive. Whether that was baiting or exaggeration, I don't really know, but I'm pretty sure he took some stuff with him, and I don't think we'll ever be able to dig that out.
Alison Ellwood: I don't think he could know for sure, too. He said he suspected who met them at the house, but he didn't personally witness that.
A lot of other people also have gone to the grave since, people like Johnny Holmes and Greg Iles. Why do you think that Eddie Nash had that kind of effect on people that they were just so afraid to talk, no matter what happened?
Alison Ellwood: Well, look at what he did at Wonderland. I mean, it was brutal. They were terrified of it. They were all addicted to drugs too. He had that hold over them as well.
Michael Connelly: Yeah, it was money and drugs. It was obviously a key way of controlling people. And indications are that he had tentacles into power structures in Los Angeles, through payoffs and bribes and things like that. So, whether he really had it as wired as it appeared is one thing, but if people of that time believed it, they were going to stay in line. I think over the years that what happened at Wonderland served him well as being the scary figure that you don't cross.
The killings are in this weird netherworld of crime because it's officially still an open case after all these years, although everyone pretty much agrees they know the who, the why and what happened. Eddie Nash did end up spending a little time in jail on RICOH charges, but not nearly as much as he probably should have for what he did. Do you think that the fact that justice was never quite served makes this story even more interesting and more sordid?
Alison Ellwood: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can see it in the detectives, the frustration and frankly, anger. They feel they had it. They had all the pieces. Everything was in place, and just one thing after another, the rug would get pulled out from under them.
Michael Connelly: That's my connection to the case, because I spend a lot of time with detectives to inspire and research the books I write. All the detectives in this story I've known for a while, long before I decided to do a podcast or a documentary series. This is the one that really sticks with them. As you say, it's unrequited justice. Sometimes some people were brought before the courts, publicly and so forth, but at the end of the day, X number of people went in that house and brutally killed four people. Every person that went in there, no matter how many it was – whether there was two, three or four – none of them served any time for what they did. That's why it's still open. Probably will always be open. You never know, this documentary series could spawn something, but at the end of the day, it's a story of unrequited justice, and that makes it pretty interesting.
As a novelist, you say in the series, you couldn’t get away with writing many of the things which happen in real life. What are some of the things that really happened here that if you were writing fiction, you would feel you could never get away with?
Michael Connelly: Just the idea of this guy who was appearing on Las Vegas stages with Liberace becomes at the center of this drug kingdom. Just the idea that a guy that's delivered to witness protection ends up on The 700 Club as a TV evangelist. Put that in a book and see what your editor says. I love the little story about how they were ahead of the wave of law enforcement with crack cocaine, where Thorson got pulled over, they found a baseball sized ball of crack, and the cops didn't even know what it was. They just tossed it on the hood of the car and then let him go about his way when he said it was a toy that his brother's kid used, or something like that. Just little things that have the ring of truth to them because they are outrageous. “When you write a crime novel, you have to be more real than real,” is one of the things that my editor told me once a long time ago. I would always seed my books with little anecdotes that I know are true, but they just seemed unbelievable. This case is full of them.
Alison Ellwood: Yeah, and Scott's claims just become more and more fantastical as it goes on. But they actually proved to be vetted out, so….
Alison as a filmmaker, was it fun and/or difficult to track down and go through all the footage of not just the case, but basically the United States in the 80s and Hollywood in the 80s and everything that was going on there?
Alison Ellwood: Yeah. We had researchers working constantly, bringing in material all the time and finding new things. One of the best things we found was [footage of] Scott after he'd been shot in Jacksonville. I mean, who knew that existed? That was crazy that we got that. That was like another point in telling of the story. It was just covered by local news. I guess he was still famous enough as being attached to Liberace, that they covered it as a local thing, but we never knew that existed. It was constant, bringing stuff in, even up until the very last minute.
Michael Connelly: The archival stuff that we were able to get, that Alison was able to get, really are the reasons to take it from podcast to visual storytelling. You can have, as I did in the podcast, Scott talk about knowing these people like Michael Jackson, but I've already said he's an unreliable narrator. In the documentary, we have a slew of photos of him with Michael Jackson, so it's confirmed. The documentary confirms a lot of the podcast that you can't just confirm with audio storytelling.
Just on a more basic level, why do you think that true crime stories make for such interesting television?
Michael Connelly: From my standpoint, it's because you're talking about the 2% of the world that gets involved in these things. It's almost like science fiction or something. You're taking someone into a world that they don't understand. When I do book tours, I usually say, “How many here have solved a murder?” and no one raises their hand. But they love reading books about solving murders, because it's an alien world and it's fascinating, and the stakes are always high. So, I think that does translate to this… I guess it's a vogue, or maybe it's always been that way… but that true crime is something that so many people are interested in.
Alison Ellwood: I personally prefer reading true crime to watching true crime because it's too scary. (laughs)
Michael Connelly: It helps when you have a story that extends the genre or takes it to a point where it has some resonance. The social history involved in this and the start of the crack epidemic, and the tendrils of this story that go into the underworld of Hollywood and the overworld of Hollywood. All that adds to it, I think, and gives you something that's more than a whodunit.
Alison Ellwood: Also, not to be just sensationalized. There's a much deeper story beneath all of this, both about the human beings, and how they got tripped up into all this. Storytelling is what interests me and this was very rich in that respect.
Are there any other Hollywood mysteries, or just mystery stories in general, that you'd like to explore for possible future series?
Alison Ellwood: Yes. (laughs)
Michael Connelly: We've had a good time on this. I enjoyed being a pseudo detective, so Alison and I are and the production company that made this, we're all talking about maybe doing something else.
You've long ago moved past your crime reporting to doing fiction. Was it fun to get your reporter’s cap back on and do all of the interviews and probe into the mystery?
Michael Connelly: Yes, definitely. I mean, I don't think I ever lost that. You're right, I've not done any kind of newspaper writing or anything like that. Even though it's been 25 years or so since I worked at a newspaper, I've always felt, even as I'm writing fiction, that I'm still a journalist at heart. Something happened in the last few years, maybe the craze of podcasts led me back to telling true stories and it's been fun. I don't want this one to be the last story I tell that's true.
You've also been having a hot streak on television right now with Bosch and Bosch: Legacy and The Lincoln Lawyer and now this. Writing books is very solitary work, and TV is much more interactive. You're dealing with people, everyone's putting things together. Are you enjoying all the different directions your TV work is taking in?
Michael Connelly: Yeah, I think it's therapeutic to get out of the isolation of a room where you write books and go into a [TV} writing room or go to a set. It appears that I'm more involved than I really am. What I do is gather people that I can trust with my work and let them do their thing, and then I bask in the glory of it. So, it's not like I'm totally there all the time. I pick my times to show up and to help out if I can, but for the most part, I'm back in that room by myself writing books.
Copyright ©2024 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: September 8, 2024.
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Except for Photo 2 © 2024 Jay S. Jacobs. All rights reserved.
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