Chapter 3 The Bathroom Floor #4
Most days we’d go up to the top of Victoria Hill and sled down.
I remember that at the bottom of the hill we’d be racing toward Route 31, which to a small kid seemed like a roaring freeway.
If you didn’t stop before you reached it, you ran the risk of ending up like Frogger—that is, very dead.
But we’d sled that hill over and over and over, until our lungs ached from the cold and our fingers could no longer hold the rope.
Other days we’d go cross-country skiing out west of the city, in Bendix Woods County Park.
Back at my grandmother’s house, sometimes when the family got too loud, I’d head down to her basement to get away from everybody upstairs.
It was a magical room with a pool table half the usual size.
The basement walls were decorated with art.
My grandfather, who died before I was born, had been a musician and an artist and a photographer.
When he was alive, he would take beautiful black-and-white portraits of people and then paint over them—essentially, colorizing them by hand—and hang them on those walls.
There were no addictions in South Bend, no mean people. At least not until I was much older. No one was creepy. We’d all wear Christmas sweaters; there would be game shows on the TV. I’d wake up in the morning and find my grandmother watching General Hospital, sipping on her Folgers.
I would think, “This is what other people do.”
Meanwhile, the Canyon kept slipping in the other direction.
One night when I was nine years old, we were awakened by the constant whir of helicopter blades.
Helicopters are an integral part of Los Angeles life—the LAPD helicopter squad is the biggest in the country, and local TV stations use them to cover news and car chases—so we didn’t immediately think too much of it.
But when they didn’t stop all night, we knew something bad had happened.
Less than a mile away, at 8763 Wonderland Avenue, the cops had found a scene of unimaginable horror.
Neighbors had heard screaming but either figured it was just someone doing gestalt therapy—it was Laurel Canyon, after all—or were so used to noise from the house that they hadn’t thought to call the police until much later.
The headline of an Associated Press article published two days later, on July 3, 1981, read SCREAMS OF VICTIMS DIDN’T ALERT NEIGHBORS and went on to say, “Four people killed in a house where screams were so commonplace that neighbors ceased to notice were beaten in a struggle… Several neighbors said they had heard screams, moans, and cries of ‘Please don’t kill me!’ in the early morning hours Wednesday, but had paid no attention. ”
When the police finally did arrive, they found four people who had been pulverized to death: Barbara Richardson, Ron Launius, Joy Miller, and William “Billy” Deverell had all been murdered by beatings.
Launius, Miller, and her boyfriend, Deverell, had been members of a cocaine-dealing group, the Wonderland Gang, and the house itself was a known drug-dealing spot.
A few weeks earlier, various members of the Wonderland Gang had robbed an underworld character called Eddie Nash, the sleazy owner of the Kit Kat Club strip club; they stole drugs, cash, heroin, jewelry, and even antique guns from the mobster.
The gang had made it into Nash’s house thanks to John Holmes, an infamous porn star.
Holmes had visited his pal Nash to score drugs and had then left a side door purposefully unlocked so that his friends in the gang could easily gain entry.
It’s widely believed that the murders of July 1, 1981—known now as the Wonderland Murders—were part of a payback scheme for the Nash heist. The murders are to this day unsolved, but they were horribly brutal: each of the deceased was bludgeoned to death, which must be one of the very worst ways to die.
Only one person who was present that night survived: Ron Launius’s wife, Susan.
Her terrible injuries left her with amnesia and brain damage, and she was therefore unable to help the detectives.
The only reason she survived was because after she was bludgeoned, she fell off the bed and against a wall, which served to keep her brains inside her skull.
I was not yet ten years old when the Wonderland murders happened, but I developed a kind of sick fascination with what had taken place just around the corner from where I lived.
When someone came over, we’d say, “Do you want to go see the murder house?,” and my mom and I would take people up the street to go look at the bloody mattresses left discarded in the carport.
I vividly remember all the windows having some kind of white substance on them—I’d later learn it was the stuff they use to get blood off.
The house itself was still blocked off with police tape, but TV cameras remained a constant, as did my mother and I, driving by to show friends where all this dreadful slaughter had happened.
I was mostly numb to the violence. A friend’s mom had been shot to death by her boyfriend in the neighborhood, and we never even talked about it.
There was crazy shit happening all around us.
By the time the Wonderland murders took place, it felt more like a movie than real life, and because it didn’t feel real, it couldn’t truly hurt me.
Instead, it was exciting. It never fully registered as horrifying until I grew up and looked back on it all.
It turns out that the Wonderland murders were a watershed; things started to improve in the following months and years.
Jerry Brown, then the governor of California, had a house around the corner from the murders in the Canyon, and with his influence, things got safer.
But the Wonderland murders were such a symbol of how far the Canyon had come from the days of wampum beads and two cats in the yard.
Coke was rampant; the shadowy bends of the narrow streets seemed more sinister than ever.
What had happened to my mother, and me, behind closed doors in recent years seemed to be echoed in the dark turn this once beautiful place had suffered.
Many years later, I heard that there was a movie being made about the Wonderland murders, and I met with the director, James Cox, at the Chateau Marmont to talk about the project. I felt a deep need to be part of the movie.
“I don’t know how I’m going to get into this movie, but I have to.
The people who understood that night were Canyonites.
You’re not going to find anyone who actually lived through that like I did,” I told him.
“I don’t care who I play; in fact, I’ll play John Holmes’s penis if that’s what it takes.
” (At five foot five I figured I was roughly the same size as the porn star’s infamous dick.)
Cox said, “Do you want to play Susan Launius?”—that is, the only survivor.
It immediately felt right. I knew everything about Susan.
I knew what happened to her. I knew intimate details of the crime scene.
I knew it all. I was the only person involved in the movie who had actually been there, not in the house but in the canyon.
I would have played anyone in that movie, but to be given the role of Susan felt like divine alignment.
As preparation for the role, I made a visit to 8763 Wonderland Avenue to get a sense of it, although given my obsession with it, I already knew every room where the murders and assaults had taken place.
(I was also the young child who read Helter Skelter, the book about the Manson murders, so often that I can still quote great chunks of it verbatim.) As I walked around 8763, I could still feel the violence, the horror palpable, the air sticky with blood and bludgeoning.
It was as if the walls held the unanswered screams. There was the very wall where Susan Launius’s brain matter was staunched, and there was the spot where Joy Miller was found on her bed…
At the time, a bunch of young dudes lived at 8763—rockabillies who rode Triumphs—and I was eager to find out if they too felt anything, felt the horror and mayhem, the dark, sinister echoes of a once-terrible time.
They said they didn’t feel a thing.
But I did. Sometimes I still do.