Wonderland Murders - Police Action and Trials

Police Action and Trials

Los Angeles Police Department detectives Tom Lange and Robert Souza led the murder investigation and searched Nash's home a few days after the crime. There they found more than $1 million worth of cocaine, as well as some items stolen from the Wonderland house. Following arrest and conviction for the cocaine charges, Nash spent two years in prison.

As a result of the palm print found at the scene, Holmes was arrested and charged with four counts of murder in March, 1982. The prosecutor, Los Angeles District Attorney Ron Coen, attempted to prove Holmes was a willing participant who betrayed the Wonderland Gang after not getting a full share of the loot from the robbery of Nash's house. Holmes' court-appointed defense lawyers, Earl Hanson and Mitchell Egers, successfully presented Holmes as one of the victims, having been forced by the real killers to give them entry to the house where the murders took place. Holmes was acquitted of all criminal charges on June 26, 1982. Refusing to testify and cooperate with authorities, he spent 110 days in jail for contempt of court.

Holmes died six years later on March 13, 1988, as a result of AIDS complications at a VA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Shortly after the murders, in her first newspaper interview in July 1981, Holmes' first wife, Sharon Gebenini-Holmes, stated that Holmes had told her he'd known the people in the Wonderland house and that he had been there shortly before the murders occurred. She did not divulge any additional information to police. During an interview several years following his death, Sharon stated that Holmes had come to her house the morning after the killings. According to Gebenini, with blood splattered all over his clothes, Holmes was personally uninjured; he did not give her any details to explain the condition of his clothing. One month before Holmes died, two police detectives visited him at the VA hospital to question him at what he knew about the murders. Nothing came out of the visit because Holmes was barely awake and his responses to their questions were incoherent. Yet on his deathbed, Holmes refused to answer the detectives if he took part in the murders or anything else of his involvement.

In 1990, Nash was charged in state court with having planned the murders and Diles was charged with participating in the murders. Thorson testified against them, but the trial ended with a hung jury voting 11–1 for conviction; the second trial in 1991 ended in acquittal. Diles died in 1995.

In 2000, after a four-year joint investigation involving local and federal authorities, Nash was arrested and indicted on federal charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for running a drug trafficking and money laundering operation, conspiring to carry out the Wonderland Murders, and bribing the sole holdout juror of his first trial. Nash, already in his seventies and suffering from emphysema and several other ailments, agreed to a plea bargain agreement in September 2001. He admitted to having bribed the lone holdout in his first trial, a young woman, with $50,000 and also pled guilty to the RICO charges and to money laundering. He admitted to having ordered his associates to retrieve stolen property from the Wonderland house, which might have resulted in violence including murder, yet he denied having planned the Wonderland murders. In the end, Nash received a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.