Killers for Hire (4 page)

Detective Griggs already had his answer to the former; the latter would not be forthcoming.

At 9 AM the day after the murders, he stood in one of the three autopsy rooms, looking at Mickey’s and Trudy’s bodies on adjacent stainless steel tables. It took the medical examiners four pages to describe Trudy’s bullet wounds, five for Mickey’s. The doctors were able to tell where the bullets entered, the path they took through the bodies and where they exited—complete with wound size and measurements of the penetration angle. Mickey was shot behind the right ear from back to front; three times in the abdomen, and once in the hip. Trudy was shot in the abdomen and the back of her head.

Trudy was 5’4” tall, weighing 140 pounds. Mickey was almost 5’8” tall and weighed 205 pounds. He had two tattoos, on his right upper arm and shoulder. Trudy’s body was “extensively” tanned and she had naturally brown hair that had been tinted blonde. Her toenails and fingernails had red polish.

The consensus of the medical examiners did not change from an initial report dispatching the coroner’s office to the scene: “Gunshot wound to the head—execution style.”

On March 21, the Thompsons were buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park in east Los Angeles County. The sprawling, 2,500-acre cemetery is the last resting place for numerous celebrities and sports figures.

More than 1,000 mourners packed into the cemetery chapel that seated only a few hundred. A greater number stood outside and lined the paved roadway leading to the burial site. It was the biggest thing Rose Hills had ever seen, attracting a who’s who of the racing world.

“We were competitors and not the closest of friends, but we had a lot of respect for each other,” Indy 500 legend Parnelli Jones told
The Orange County Register
newspaper at the time. “I never needed it, but if I’d needed help and asked for it from Mickey, I’d have gotten it. He was that way. And anybody who got hurt in any of his events, he went out of his way to take care of them.”

Son Danny was a pallbearer, as was Mickey’s brother-in-law, Gary Campbell, and two Indy car mechanics who were long-time friends.

“I was in a trance, still in disbelief,” Danny said later, adding that he didn’t deliver one of the eulogies. “I didn’t want to get up and talk in front of all those people.”

Meanwhile, detectives continued with their interviews during the next several weeks in order to learn more about the Thompsons and a possible motive.

Friend Harrison Haslan told detectives that he had met Goodwin in 1987 during a business deal. Goodwin made clear his dislike of Mickey.

“I don’t understand why he won’t leave me alone,” Goodwin allegedly said of Mickey. “If that son of a bitch takes me down, I’ll take him down or out.”

It wasn’t long before Goodwin decided to retain Al Stokke, one of Orange County’s most prominent criminal attorneys. Sgt. Verdugo had been trying to reach Goodwin to interview him after getting an earful from Mickey’s employees about how Goodwin wanted Mickey dead.

“Stokke calls out of the blue—‘I understand you are looking for him, let me arrange for you to meet him in my office,’” Verdugo recalled later.

Curious to hear what Goodwin had to say for himself, Verdugo and his partner arrived at Stokke’s office the evening of March 28 expecting to interview the motocross promoter. As he sat waiting in the lawyer’s library, Verdugo saw a man pass the doorway wearing a bomber jacket and Levis jeans. Verdugo had always prided himself on having an innate intuition regarding murder suspects. He told partner Jerry Jansen: “That is Goodwin, and he is the fucker who hired the killers. I don’t believe in psychics, but man, I’ve got a feeling here.”

Sure enough, a few minutes later the man in the bomber jacket walked into the room with Stokke and was identified as Goodwin.

“Mr. Goodwin will not be making any statements,” Stokke told the detectives. Goodwin stood behind his lawyer with a “deer in the headlights expression,” pantomiming zipping his lips and making exaggerated gestures of shrugging his shoulders to appear helpless, Verdugo said.

“When he heard about the murders, he was shocked by the brutality of it,” Stokke said later of Goodwin. “It was a terrible murder; there never can be an excuse for that. Michael Goodwin’s civil case (with Mickey) was over, and there was no motivation for the killings.”

The Thompsons’ housekeeper of two years, Sable Reeves, was interviewed. She told an investigator that she had worked the day before the murders and talked to Trudy.

“Mrs. Thompson had mentioned to her that Mickey could not sleep the previous night and had left for work at 0400 hours. Mrs. Thompson later left with a lady friend to go shopping,” according to a police report.

Reeves said she didn’t know who wanted to kill the couple, but she did notice a black handgun in an open dresser drawer next to the bed.

When homicide detectives are working on a case, the hounding of the media isn’t usually seen as a welcome respite. But if you’re Detective Michael Griggs with no real leads, it can be viewed as a godsend. On Feb. 15, 1989, 11 months after the Thompsons’ slaying, television’s “Unsolved Mysteries” aired a nine-minute segment on the case. It mentioned a reward for the arrest and conviction of all those responsible.

“When the 800 number flashed at about 8:15, after the Mickey Thompson segment, the phones lit up. They went crazy,” an NBC executive told
The Orange County Register
newspaper the next day. About 150 tips came in that night; mostly from people who said they recognized the composites of the shooters.

Griggs and his new partner, Detective Cheryl Lyons, interviewed all the tipsters, but nothing was the lynchpin they were looking for. So Lyons went back and talked to Thompson’s neighbors and associates again to see if anything was missed. The neighbors still had the same vivid recollection of the crime; the associates parroted the evils of Michael Goodwin.

Michael Goodwin
photo by Gene Blevins

“He’s a one-sided person who only deals with someone if he holds all the cards,” said Mike DeStefano, one of Thompson’s corporate officers who had also worked for Goodwin at one time. “(Goodwin) can’t handle failures and had a very high staff turnover at his business because he frequently got irate and yelled obscenities at everyone.”

Mickey told DeStefano that Goodwin threatened him over the phone and he had taped the conversation. After the murders, DeStefano tried to find the tape but couldn’t.

Goodwin was doing his own PR spin. He told
The Register
that his family had been terrorized by police, who broke into his parents’ and sister’s homes to plant bugging devices. His wife, Diane, complained as well: “They have taken everything we have worked 20 years for and destroyed our business. We have lost our house, car, livelihood, health and friends.”

Goodwin continued: “This is truly like a Robert Ludlum novel, but real. I mean careers have been ruined and new ones created. There’s corruption, payoffs, people selling out. The unfortunate violence situation (is) not associated with this, but people try and make it seem like it is.”

The drama surrounding this scenario would make a great book and movie, one that Goodwin planned on writing and producing. He told
The Register
that the title would be “The True Story of Mickey and Me.”

“Unsolved Mysteries” aired the Thompson segment again four months after the first one. And the case remained just that—unsolved. “It’s just not there,” Griggs told
The Register
in September 1989. “It’s almost gotten down to the point where we need a phone call, for somebody to come forth … and that’s almost like winning the lottery.

“Usually, in a homicide, if the case remains unsolved after a week, your chances really start to drop. As time passes, the flow of information just starts to cease. There’s nothing magical you can do,” Griggs said.

By now, there were 1,100 clues. Out of 322 murders that occurred the year before, this was one of the 116 that remained unsolved and that didn’t sit well with Griggs. The unthinkable finally happened: He wouldn’t beat the bad guys.

One day in late 1992 he called in sick and never returned to work. Like most detectives, he had accumulated months of sick leave and vacation, so he burned through that and then officially retired in March 1993. He just couldn’t handle it anymore: the long hours, the high-profile aspect of the case, dealing with daily phone calls from Mickey’s sister, Collene Campbell, and working full time on something that was going nowhere.

“It was just kind of a
puff
and he was gone,” said Sgt. Rey Verdugo. “Most people have hugs and tears and a little retirement party. But not him. That’s because most people have a lot more friends than he did.”

The sheriff’s homicide squad is an exclusive fraternity, and its members often show up at parties and law enforcement gatherings, whether they are retired or not. Griggs wouldn’t be like that; he’d just fade away. It would be more than a decade before anyone heard from him again.

The case was transferred to homicide’s cold case unit, which was an elite assignment for the veteran investigators. At the time, the unit had six detectives, who worked a few hundred cases dating back to the’60s. Those cases were the lucky ones—getting a second look because a new clue or two surfaced that looked promising. Sgt. John Yarborough was the new detective on the Thompson case. He was a quiet, studious, meticulous man who was one of the first in the department to graduate from the FBI’s profiler academy.

Yarborough focused on Goodwin, the only real suspect. He placed a call to John Hall, a columnist with
The Register
. Hall had befriended Goodwin before the murders and still stayed in contact with him to write stories from time to time. By now Goodwin was in Denver; he had split with wife Diane by leaving her stranded in her bikini on a boat dock in Mexico as he sailed off in their yacht. Even though he had been having numerous affairs himself, Goodwin couldn’t tolerate that she was seeing someone else.

“For part (of the) year he was run down because of sinusitis. He had surgery and was planning a comeback,” Yarborough wrote in a notepad. “Hall said call was typically confusing—that Goodwin was seeking information. No threats were made. Hall had previously been told by (attorney Allan) Stokke that Goodwin had been cleared.”

Yarborough met with the Orange County DA’s Office regarding an ongoing investigation into Goodwin for bank fraud pertaining to unpaid loans totaling more than $500,000. Then he met with Jeanne Sleeper, a Goodwin employee. She heard about the murders about an hour after they happened and had two trains of thought: Either Goodwin was responsible, or if he wasn’t, then his life was in jeopardy as well.

That morning Sleeper went over to Goodwin’s house and knocked several times. Diane appeared on the upstairs balcony and said Goodwin was exercising at a local gym, where he swam to stay in shape for spear fishing.

Even though Goodwin wasn’t under arrest, Yarborough still wanted to keep tabs on him. By June 1992 Goodwin was back in Orange County, and then he went scuba diving in New Guinea. In August, he was spotted at a motorcycle race in Aspen with a hat pushed low over his face. The former promoter once thrived on garnering all the attention he could, but now he attempted to meld into the crowd.

Two years later, Yarborough started making plans to retire. He hadn’t come up with enough evidence to file the case and wanted to make sure it didn’t end up like thousands of others: lingering in a dusty storage facility, crying out for someone to spend precious time poring over old reports, photographs and evidence in search of a spark that could ignite a prosecution. Time is gold, and any detective would admit that in a perfect world, each case would get an unlimited amount of it. But in actuality, each detective has several hundred cases and the ones that are actively worked have clues that continue to pour in. The Thompsons had been dead for seven years, and detectives were no closer to arresting anyone than they were the first day.

So Yarborough approached Detective Mark Lillienfeld—the brash young detective had worked patrol with Yarborough many years ago and they’d hit it off. Yarborough liked Lillienfeld’s aggressive, dogged persona. Plus, at 35 years old, Lillienfeld wouldn’t be retiring any time soon. With any luck, he’d outlast the case.

Lillienfeld was raised in a small town outside Chicago where he led an idyllic, middle-class Ozzie and Harriet-type existence. His parents taught their four children that hard work and strong morals were essential to succeed in life. So when Lillienfeld came to Los Angeles in 1976, he didn’t think twice about getting a job digging ditches. He also had no money, so he spent nine months living in his green Pontiac Le Mans station wagon. At night, Lillienfeld took general education classes at a community college because he didn’t know what type of career to choose.

He debated between joining the service or the sheriff’s department. The latter seemed more exciting and had higher pay. He was hired in 1980.

“When I started, I didn’t think I’d finish the (police) academy,” he admitted. “I’m a simple guy, ‘Leave it to Beaver’ mentality.”