The Academy Award-nominated 1997 film Boogie Nights captured viewers with its fast-paced tale of sex, drugs, and crime in Hollywood‘s Golden Age of Porn. But behind the popular film is a real-life murder that captured Hollywood’s attention for over 40 years. Now, Michael Connelly, the crime novelist behind best-selling works like The Lincoln Lawyer, is working with MGM+ to release a new docuseries diving into one of the most infamous bloodbaths in Tinsel Town: The Wonderland Massacre.
When police arrived at a Laurel Canyon house of suspected drug dealers on July 1, 1981, they found four people bludgeoned to death: Ron Launius, William Raymond “Billy” DeVerell, Joy Audrey Gold Miller, and Barbara Richardson. They were also known as The Wonderland Gang. Only one victim survived, Susan Lanius, but she was gravely injured and developed amnesia from the incident. The subsequent investigation revealed a tangled web of Los Angeles’s crime community — and linked the murders to a robbery that happened two days earlier at the home of Eddie Nash, a nightclub owner and drug kingpin. While police arrested and tried several people associated with Nash’s drug empire, no one was ever officially convicted of the murders. It’s a notorious Hollywood mystery — one Connelly is taking head-on once again.
Connelly first began investigating the Wonderland murders for his popular documentary Audible podcast in 2021. Now, the MGM+ docuseries uses a mix of archival footage and one on one interviews with one of the only true witnesses of the night: former porn star and once-boyfriend of Liberace, Scott Thorson. Thorson is the only person left alive with first-hand claims about the event — although his drug use at the time and demeanor have often made both prosecutors and documentarians approach him cautiously. Connelly spoke to Rolling Stone in 2021 and noted that Thorson was a difficult witness to speak to, but seemed to always speak the truth. Once, he thought he caught Thorson in a lie about doing drugs with Richard Pryor. “I know when crack started, so I looked up the timing of all this and I said, ‘There’s no way you could have been smoking crack with Richard Pryor in 1979,’ and he goes, ‘It wasn’t crack. We were freebasing,’ and he was right. I went back to the tape and he didn’t say crack, Connelly told Rolling Stone. “I have to be honest, if I could catch him in a lie, that would have added entertainment value to the podcast. But the few times I thought he lied, he had a good and valid explanation on how either I misconstrued something or he misconstrued a question.” With new footage, interviews, and testimony from the original detectives and prosecutors, Connelly weaves an important journey about Hollywood 1980 drug scene and the crimes that happened within it.
The trailer features several key moments between Connelly and Thorson, including one chilling sentiment. “People still know about this case. How much does it bother you that people got away with murder?” Connelly asks. Thorson’s answer is simple: “I slept with one eye open.”
The Wonderland Massacres & The Secret History of Hollywood premieres September 8 on MGM+.