Killers for Hire

by Tori Richards

  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.

  Chapter 4: A Case Goes Cold

  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 t
o 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.”

  But graduate he did, with his first assignment in South Central Los Angeles, where shootings, stabbings and gang violence were the rule instead of the exception. Rather than looking for a way to get on a safer beat, Lillienfeld thought his job was exciting and gratifying because he got to arrest thugs who had robbed, maimed and murdered. After seven years he transferred to the fraud unit and then to prison gang investigations. In 1992 he was promoted to homicide and started making a name for himself within the law enforcement community.

  Lillienfeld loved the challenge of being immersed in a pile of cases that seemed unsolvable. Each one had a victim beckoning from the grave for someone who had the tenacity and wits to learn everything about his life until the moment he left this earth. Lillienfeld would think nothing of working 100 hours a week, with Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve thrown in. He’d follow suspects, tap their phones, turn their colleagues into snitches, befriend their enemies, dig through their trash and sic the press on them.

  Heaven help Michael Goodwin.

  Chapter 5: A Worthy Adversary

  Mark Lillienfeld

  photo by Gene Blevins

  Mark Lillienfeld inherited one mammoth of a case. It had thousands of pages of notes, police reports, forensic test results, newspaper articles and transcripts that completely filled three four-drawer file cabinets. In 1994 he started reading it all. Over the next few years he’d visit the crime scene, start trying to locate witnesses and hope for a break.

  “When I went into this, I did it with blinders on,” Lillienfeld said later. A variety of rumors needed to be investigated: that Thompson was involved in Las Vegas organized crime; that the killing was a robbery gone bad; that it was a botched drug deal, that a motorcycle gang was to blame.

  Then, in 1997, Sgt. Mike Robinson joined the investigation and for three months the duo was taken out of the normal rotation of receiving new cases so they could work exclusively on the Thompson murders.

  Robinson had been with the department 33 years, 15 of them in homicide. And like Lillienfeld, he had worked the prison gang unit. The pair complemented each other: Robinson had a fatherly persona and was quiet and thoughtful; Lillienfeld said exactly what was on his mind and was sometimes referred to as a “kid” because he looked about 10 years younger. At 5’8” tall, he was slender, had a full head of dark hair and a smooth complexion that didn’t bear the signs of stress that normally comes with spending years in homicide. In contrast, Robinson had gray hair, a white moustache and stood 6’4” tall. Lillienfeld thought he seemed like the Clint Eastwood type.

  Lillienfeld gave you the impression that he always had a stack of things waiting for him to do. He had a favorite saying: “You’ve got 5 minutes of my time and it’s time that I will never get back.”

  He walked with a purpose, leaning slightly forward with a fast gait, looking like he was late getting to wherever he was going. If he talked to you, the corners of his mouth curved up in a slight smile and he’d gaze at you intently, like he could read your mind. But above all Lillienfeld could be unfailingly witty and charming, blessed with an interview technique that made witnesses open up and tell him whatever he wanted to know. People wanted to like him, even the suspects he arrested. About 10 percent of them had no need for a trial, they’d confess to Lillienfeld before it ever got that far.

  His conversations with suspects were sprinkled with phrases like, “How’s it going?” or “Hey, pal.”

  He was like a machine, getting out of bed when the sun came up and going to sleep often around midnight. He kept in shape by working out and running. Breakfast was health food: oatmeal and whole wheat toast and tea. Lillienfeld didn’t operate on coffee or soda, he just buzzed through the day on some natural high.

  A Democrat who had no problem with helping to send people to death row (“If it’s my job, I’m going to do it”), Lillienfeld avoids talking about his personal life, politics or religion. But he will talk about dogs—he’s owned several different breeds since childhood and likes to read about them, watch television shows about them and encourage any of his friends to bring their dogs along if a get-together is scheduled.

  Lillienfeld and Robinson started the Thompson case at ground zero, working as if it had just happened. Every witness who had previously been interviewed would be sought out for a new round of talks; every piece of evidence that was examined would be looked at again. The world of forensic science is ever evolving, and maybe they’d find a new clue.

  But the first thing they did was contact a producer from the television show “America’s Most Wanted” to do a segment on the case.

  Many of the Thompsons’ neighbors had moved away, and the detectives needed to talk to all of them: the Triarsi family, who saw the gunmen from across the street; Lance Johnson, who shot at them from next door; the two women who were driving outside the gates of Bradbury and saw two black men fleeing on bikes, and others.

  Goodwin’s legal woes were a major avenue in the case, and the detectives pieced together his convoluted business dealings and subsequent shell game to retain hold of his assets. They read through the Thompson/Goodwin lawsuit file, the Goodwin bankruptcy case and ensuing federal loan fraud case. It was thousands of pages. They were particularly interested in three attorneys who came up against Goodwin during his legal problems and lived to rue the day: Philip Bartinetti, Jeffrey Coyne and Ron Durkin.

  Bartinetti represented Mickey in his initial lawsuit against Goodwin. Toward the end of the litigation, the attorney received a series of threatening, anonymous letters that referenced personal details in his life such as names of family members, the type of car he drove and the age of his daughter. The letters contained veiled threats about getting even and contained numerous grammatical errors. One was signed, “Master of the Universe.” All were mailed to Bartinetti’s law practice with the exception of one, which was placed inside his country club locker. The note said, “Remember! You are vermin and really deserve death rather than good golf.”

  Griggs knew about the letters and had them dusted for fingerprints, but none were evident. By the time Lillienfeld inherited the case forensic science had new fingerprint lifting
techniques. The letters and envelopes were resubmitted but met with negative results. Criminalists were also unable to get DNA off of the stamp or envelope.

  Attorney and Duke University law professor Jeffrey Coyne was Goodwin’s bankruptcy trustee and someone the Griggs team had never talked to. Coyne endured the same type of scenario as Bartinetti—threatening letters, harassing phone calls and court hearings with an irate Goodwin, who once told him, “You’re ruining my life. If my life is ruined, your life is ruined.”

  While relaying these incidents to Lillienfeld, a thought crept into Coyne’s mind.

  “Oh, by the way. You might be interested in this,” he said. A tale then unfolded that sounded like something out of a spy movie.

  The day of the Thompson murders, Coyne was late getting to work. Around noon he parked his red Corvette in its usual assigned spot and headed to his office. A security guard met him there.

  “There were two white men looking for your car,” the guard said. “They were Italian looking, dark and swarthy.” The men knew what Coyne’s car looked like and had been driving around the parking lot in the morning. Finally they asked the guard if he had seen the car.

  Coyne was terrified. He had heard about the Thompson murders on the news and now it appeared that he was next. Because Coyne figured that the men probably knew where he lived, he arranged to have his family immediately leave the state.

  Coyne stayed in the area and continued to work, but obtained a concealed weapons permit and wore a bulletproof vest. As soon as he could, he quit the case, and another trustee, Ron Durkin, took over. Like his predecessor, Durkin was targeted with a barrage of angry phone calls and letters. The correspondence was signed by Goodwin, who complained about the way Durkin was handling the case.