Murder On the Last Turn

First there were the threats. "I'm going to kill that son of a bitch. I'm going to kill that motherfucker. I'm going to take out Mickey. I'm too smart to get caught. I'll have him wasted. He'll never see a nickel. I'll kill him first. Mickey doesn't know who he is fucking with. He is fucking dead."

"Mickey" was Mickey Thompson, a dynamic, charismatic and much-admired former off-road racer and promoter. Fearless on his own behalf, he was "scared to death," he told his sister, that someone was going to hurt his "baby" — his beloved wife, Trudy. He hired a guard to watch his house, asked the sheriff for extra patrols, wore a bulletproof vest, loaded his shotgun with buckshot, avoided standing in front of lighted windows, varied his work routine, but none of it made any difference in the end.

At 6 a.m. on March 16, 1988, as Trudy backed the van out of the garage of their home in Bradbury, a small gated community in the San Gabriel foothills just east of Monrovia, two black males in their 20s, wearing dark, hooded jogging suits, suddenly materialized out of the shrubbery. One fired a 9 mm bullet that shattered the side window and penetrated the windshield. The van rolled back and hit a wall. Trudy jumped out, lost her balance and tried to crawl away, breaking her acrylic fingernails on the concrete drive. At the same time, Mickey apparently ran out around the side of the garage screaming, "Don't shoot my wife." One shooter crippled Mickey with a volley to the legs and abdomen. Even as Mickey begged the gunmen to at least spare Trudy, the second shooter killed her with a shot to the back of the head. Then, to complete the job, the first gunman administered the coup de grâce to Mickey as well.

As the screams and gunshots brought early-rising neighbors rushing to their windows and decks, the killers jumped on two 10-speed recurve-handlebar bikes and fled downhill at top speed. Narrowly avoiding being hit by a woman driving her dog to canine-assertiveness training, the men pushed their bikes across North Royal Oaks Avenue, went through a break in a grape-stake fence, down an embankment, and disappeared along a jogging path, which had once been an old railroad right of way.

News of the killings flashed like summer lightning through the Thompsons' family and friends. One of the neighbors called the Mickey Thompson Entertainment Group offices at Anaheim Stadium to say that he didn't know what had happened, but shots were fired and "someone is lying in the driveway." By the time Thompson's vice president for operations, Bill Marcel, got there, the Thompson compound was cordoned off with yellow tape, behind which he could see the bodies of Mickey and Trudy lying in the drive "50 feet apart."

Marcel spent the rest of the morning waiting to be interviewed by Sheriff's investigators. When they finally got around to him, they asked, "Do you know anyone who would want to do this?"

Yes, said Marcel. As a matter of fact, he did.

After 18 years, the case has taken an enormous toll on everyone concerned. Goodwin has been in jail without bail for five years, awaiting trial. He's got high blood pressure, impaired vision in one eye, toe problems that make it difficult to walk and such severe back pain that he can't sit for more than 30 minutes at a time. Still, he keeps working. Writing with a 3½-inch stubby yellow pencil, he turns out complicated, cited, footnoted legal documents, memoranda and media briefing books with titles like "Government Fraud in the Thompson Murder Investigation," "Elaborate Malevolent Conspiracy" and "There Is Evidence Thompson May Have Been Killed by Loan Sharks or Money Launderers."

Because in jury trials it's just not enough to declare one's innocence, you have to suggest other credible suspects who might have committed the crime instead of you. Goodwin, therefore, along with John Bradley, has at times offered up six other possible suspects: (1) Saudis to whom Thompson's tire company supposedly sold defective tires; (2) members of the Vagos motorcycle gang, against which Thompson once testified in Scott Campbell's murder trial; (3) drug lords for whom Thompson supposedly transported product during all those off-road races in Mexico; (4) supposedly disgruntled business partners of Thompson; (5) Las Vegas mobsters and/or "freelance bankers" from whom Thompson had supposedly borrowed money that he couldn't repay; and (6) Joey Hunter, a smalltime street hustler with alcohol and drug abuse problems who supposedly confessed to killing the Thompsons to his sister-in-law and failed two lie-detector tests.

Despite appearances, says Lillienfeld, Joey Hunter was never a serious suspect. "His alibi rang true." His alleged confession was merely a joke. It was true he failed a lie-detector test. But that's why, says Lillienfeld, lie detectors "are inadmissible in a court of law."