The Real Dirk Diggler

He couldn't act, wasn't particularly good-looking and wasn't too bright. He was a liar, a thief and a crack junkie who was accused of taking part in the grisly murders of four people who were savagely beaten to death. Just about the only thing John C. Holmes -- a.k.a. Johnny Wadd--had going for him was his magnificent dick: 14 inches long, as thick as a wrist, closer to a Louisville Slugger than any other cock ever put on film. It was enough to earn him several million dollars for the more than 500 X-rated feature films he made. Enough to inspire, ten years after his death, Boogie Nights, a movie based loosely on his years as the one and only male porn actor to achieve the marquee status of the female stars. And though critics have generally loved the movie, those who knew Holmes, those who worked with him in the outlaw world of the early hard-core business, tell a much darker and more sinister story about the life of the man they still call the King of Porn. And, unlike the movie's, the ending to their story isn't a happy one.

The stories Holmes told about himself were mostly lies, tales that could have been lifted from the thin scripts through which his characters moved on film from one erotic scene to another. He grew up, he said, with a rich aunt who took him to Europe, fed him caviar and champagne and cozied him in her lavish Florida mansion. When he was just eight years old, she took his virginity, then schooled him in the art of fucking while the two of them were waited on by butlers and maids and cooks.

In fact, he was from a poor Midwestern family of confused lineage. His birth certificate registers him as John Curtis Estes, born in rural Ohio on August 8, 1944, though his listed father, Carl Estes, a railroad laborer, was never a part of his life. Sometime later, his mother, Mary, changed his last name to that of her husband, Edward Holmes, a carpenter. They divorced when John was three, and the family--John's mother, two brothers and a sister -- moved to a housing project in Columbus. When John was eight, his mother married a man named Harold, who moved them to a small house in Pataskala, Ohio. Neighbors remember John as a shy, awkward boy with a perfect attendance record at Baptist Bible classes, a love for the outdoors and a tense relationship with his manic-depressive stepfather. By the time that John reached high school, his relationship with Harold had become violent. When he turned 16 his mother defused the situation by signing papers that enabled him to join the Army early. He went off with the Signal Corps to Germany for three years.

He had a very good time in the service, according to an autobiographical manuscript his widow, Laurie Holmes, is preparing for publication under the title Porn King. Laurie, who has worked in more than 20 porn films, is a delicately pretty 34-year-old who was with John for the last five years of his life and married him 14 months before he died. She's a brunette in their wedding pictures but a blonde these days, and though she no longer makes movies, she fondly remembers her days as Misty Dawn. "I was a natural-born porn animal," she said of her film career. "I didn't even have to take drugs to do it. I was naturally sick." She makes a living now dancing in strip clubs around the Southwest.

Laurie is guarded about the manuscript and will paraphrase and quote from it sparingly. She insists that the stories in the book are true, despite the fact that many of them, including one of John's Army reminiscences, sound like the macho legend spinning he was notorious for.

"He had a lot of fun in Germany," she said, flipping through the 200 typed pages to find what John had written. "He spent, a lot of time in a bordello, where the madam liked him so much that she wouldn't let him pay and wouldn't let any of the other girls near him. Here's a quote: 'The Army was good for me. I can't honestly say that it taught me any morals or sense of responsibility. I had been raised with those qualities. What it taught me was that there was a whole world of sex I had yet to discover.'"

When he mustered out he landed in New York and started hanging around with a buddy who showed him how he could make a lot of money as a prostitute. "But he didn't like the cold weather," Laurie said, continuing the story in her own words. "He'd grown up with it in Ohio. Anyway, what he really wanted to be was a cinematographer, to work behind the cameras. He said he never in his wildest dreams thought he was going to be what he became."

From New York he hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where he met and married a nurse named Sharon Gebenini. He took odd jobs, intending to save money to go to UCLA film school. He later claimed to have graduated, though there is no evidence he ever enrolled. Instead, while in his early 20s, in the porn capital of the world, he fell easily into the trades that his monumental penis fated him to: He whored, posed for still photographs and worked in a few short erotic films called loops. He was paid $100 for his first short movie, but the check bounced. "From then on," Laurie said, "it was cash only for John." Then, sometime in 1971, he met Bill Amerson, the 6'3", 250-pound Brahman bull of the fledgling hard-core movie business, who would become his mentor, his protector and perhaps the only close friend he ever had.

Now 60, Amerson has a big, rumbling voice and a presence that has been described as "benignly menacing." He's been clean and sober for six years and works as a counselor at the California Center for Addiction Recovery. That's about as far across town as he could get from his days in the X business, with its big money, Mob connections, hillside houses, women, drugs, arrests and shootings.

"I got into the business in 1970," Amerson said. "My wife at the time -- I've had a few--knew a couple of girls in the nudie business. They were making movies--all simulated stuff back then, no penetration--and I went to work for them to learn how to do it. Back then you could shoot an X-rated movie for $4000 and make 60 grand on it. Around 1971 some friends and I decided to start showing actual penetration. We took $14,000 and a handful of bennies, and in one weekend we made five films. We sold them in New York and Chicago, made back our investment in a week and went on to make a lot of money off those movies."

Enough money, it turned out, to attract a legendary organized crime family from New York, who sent an under-boss to Hollywood to organize a piece of the action.

"I told him I didn't want any partners," said Amerson, who still wears a diamond pinkie ring, the fraternity jewelry of the profession. "Said I'd teach him the business but that I liked to work alone. He basically told me, 'If you don't work with us, you don't work.' I wanted to work."

That same year, working with his new partners out of a building called Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard, he met John Holmes.

"It was late in the afternoon. We'd been interviewing people all day for magazine work, and in wanders this kid, six feet tall, really scrawny, ugly. I thought, Don't waste my time. The guy I was working with told me to take a Polaroid and get rid of him. So we went in the back room, he took off his clothes--and I just stood there looking at his dick, thinking, My God, this guy's a star."

Holmes' timing was propitious. He had walked into an enterprise that had begun to surge into the mainstream. The grungy freelancers in trench coats who sold "dirty" 8mm films out of the trunks of cars were being replaced by organized hustlers who knew how to make and distribute big-screen movies with real sex. And an audience was ready for them. In 1972 Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones and Behind the Green Door broke hard-core movies into the public consciousness as a logical outgrowth of the sexual revolution.

Not that those in the business escaped the wrath of conservatives or the police, who were still vigorously enforcing pornography laws.

"There was a tremendous tyrannical power that came down on the performers," remembered Bill Margold, a 54-year-old critic, porn actor, director and entrepreneur who started his career in 1969. "Everything we did back then was illegal. I was in 300 movies--500 sex scenes--wondering through much of it if I was going to be arrested. And I was, many times. One of the things I hated about Boogie Nights was that it never portrayed any of the incredible tension we worked under. We were the last outlaws, really. It was Les Misérables. We were the Jean Valjeans, the vice cops were Javert and our loaves of bread were between our legs."

Margold, who coined the title "the King" for Holmes, vividly remembered his first encounter with the cock that was, he says, "absolute proof that all men are not created equal."

"The first movie I made with him was called Disco Dolls in Hot Skin, 3D. I was on the floor being blown by the great Lesllie Bovee, reputed to be the best cocksucker in the business. John was above us on a window seat, and there were three or four girls playing with him. At one point I glanced up to see his dick hanging over my head, and it looked like the opening scene from Star Wars, with that spaceship swooping in, filling the screen. It was intimidating. My poor dick just collapsed into the rug like an ostrich burying its head."

Holmes' first movies cast him in bit parts and didn't pay much, which left him hustling around the business for whatever work he could find. Then he showed up on the set of a movie Bob Chinn was directing.

Chinn, a soft-spoken, slightly built Hawaiian, had begun making amateur films when he was 12, after his family had moved from the islands to New Mexico. He bounced from the University of Miami to Santa Monica City College, then graduated from UCLA's film school in 1966. He went to work building sets for commercials, crewing on X-rated films and making erotic loops on his own and selling them to theaters.

"In those days you could hire a girl for $25 and shoot ten or 15 minutes of film, one reel. It was a strange period, when you could get away with hardcore if you did just a little, sort of slipped it in. There wasn't a lot of money in it then, but it was a living, and it led to my crewing on features and then to directing them."

Asked about Mafia involvement in those years, Chinn was comically circumspect, though he wasn't trying to be funny. "I don't know if they were Mob or not," he said. "I was making films for Italian businessmen."

He was working out of an office next to the Pussycat Theater on Western Avenue when Holmes walked in and asked him for a job on the crew or as an actor.

"I'd heard about him from an actress I worked with," said Chinn, on his way to the sort of understatement that is his hallmark. "And when I saw him with his clothes off, I thought, I could make an interesting movie with this man."

(continued on page 124)John Holmes(continued from page 122)

Immediately after Holmes left the office, Chinn went to work on a script for him. "I came up with the idea of a private detective sort of character. I called him Johnny Wadd and wrote the script on the back of an envelope."

Not exactly the Gettysburg Address, perhaps, but for Holmes, the character Johnny Wadd--a caricature of Chandler's and Hammett's tough-guy detectives--was a double-entendre star vehicle: a hard-boiled dick with a hard-boiled dick.

Chinn shot the first film, called Johnny Wadd, in a day. It was an hour long and cost about $750 to make. Theaters around the country bought it, wore out the prints and began asking for sequels. Chinn and Holmes made nine Wadd films, a series that eventually turned the kid from Ohio into the hottest male star the business would ever see. People began to recognize him on the street. He grew a droopy mustache and started wearing three-piece suits. His acting fee went to $3000 a day. His work as a gigolo for Beverly Hills women brought him cars and jewelry.

"Sex was taking over my life," he says in his autobiography. "Husbands wanted me to fuck their wives, sometimes while they watched. Wives were calling me to come back when their husbands weren't around. Wherever I went there was always someone new to meet--always a waiting bed."

At the height of his success, Holmes worked with the hottest female porn stars, including Marilyn Chambers, Seka and Gloria Leonard. A few months ago Leonard attended a rare big-screen showing of a Holmes movie in which she had co-starred. About 60 people sat listening in the Sunset Theater as Bill Margold introduced her. Leonard, articulate, sophisticated and beautiful in her early 50s, told the audience that she and Holmes had traveled to France in 1978 to make Johnny Does Paris, one of three films they made on that trip. "The day we met," she said, "he had this diva attitude, so I said, 'I'm sorry, my dear, but this set isn't large enough for two prima donnas.' He was a baby, really, and an egomaniac. But people are here tonight not because I'm in the film. They're here to see John Holmes."

Bill Margold thanked her, then noted that the big-screen experience was going to be very different than videosized porn. "It's going to be all Eiffel Towers and Grand Canyons up here, folks."

And it was. Holmes made his way around Paris as a young Heming-wayesque writer determined to collect experiences he would someday write about. Leonard played a rich American woman who subsidized his adventures in exchange for the services of his mighty schlong. After 20 minutes of Holmes' terrible acting and four fuck scenes, Leonard made a discreet exit.

Around 1975, as Holmes' stardom grew, he began supplementing the marijuana he had always used with cocaine. The joke among his fellow actors was that if you wanted him in front of the camera, you had to lay a line of coke from his dressing room door to the set. According to his autobiography, his habit "spun wildly out of control" over a three-year period. Then he began freebasing and losing work because of his erratic behavior.

He'd always been a thief--stealing luggage from whatever airport he landed at, snagging jewelry out of the rented houses where his films were shot. But by 1979 his drug habit was outrunning his dwindling income and he began to burgle and steal from everyone he knew. Even his wife Sharon, with whom he had only an off-and-on relationship by then, and Gloria Leonard were targets. Holmes visited Leonard at her home. The following day, returning home from an appointment to meet John, Leonard found that $25,000 in valuables were missing.

Amerson and Holmes, meanwhile, had become close. "He's the godfather to my kids," said Amerson, citing the good times that drew them into then-long friendship. "He lived with us in the big house we had in Sherman Oaks, and the two of us became like brothers. He liked to garden, did handyman stuff. We went hunting and fishing together, partied around town. He had a heart as big as the fucking world, but as he got more and more fucked up on drugs it became impossible to make movies with him. He started hanging out with his suppliers, real assholes, people like Eddie Nash and Ron Launius' bunch."

Nash, whose real name was Adel Nasrallah, had arrived in Los Angeles from Lebanon as a young man and opened a hot dog stand on Hollywood Boulevard. When he met Holmes, Nash was in his 50s and had parlayed his business into a drug-and-entertainment empire that included a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard called the Seven Seas, a strip joint called the Kit Kat, several gay clubs, a club that catered to blacks and a rock-and-roll hangout called the Starwood.

Nash, a heavy addict himself, had a large home in the San Fernando Valley from which he dealt coke, heroin and other drugs. He was gaunt and had dark wavy hair and an evil temper. He rarely left his house. Instead, he invited friends and associates to parties that went on for days and often included his favorite entertainment--young women.

"He was an awful man," said Laurie Holmes. "John told me he use to leave the bathrooms without toilet paper, then offer the young women cocaine if they'd lick his ass clean."

His bodyguard, Greg Diles, slept in a back bedroom with a shotgun under his blanket.

Holmes was a star attraction at Nash's parties and eventually went to work delivering drugs and doing other favors for him in an attempt to repay some of the massive drug debt he owed the gangster.

And Nash was only one of the dangerous drug dealers Holmes owed. The others lived in a dumpy two-storied house on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon. The name on the lease was that of Joy Miller, a 46-year-old junkie who had been arrested for dealing. She lived there with her lover, Billy DeVerell, 42, a heroin addict with 13 arrests on his record, and they shared the house with Ron Launius, a 37-year-old convicted drug smuggler with a violent reputation. Holmes began visiting the house to fence what he had stolen in exchange for drugs, then went to work making connections and delivering for them. Sometime in the summer of 1981, he smoked up one of the shipments he was supposed to deliver. When he came back without the money, Launius beat him with a walking stick, then asked how he was going to make good.

Holmes--strung out, broke, unable to work and desperately afraid they were going to kill him--told them he knew someone they could rip off for lots of money and drugs, and that he could help them do it.

"Eddie Nash," he told them. "I've known him for three years. He trusts me, calls me his brother. I know the house, where the drugs are, and the cash. I'll draw you a floor plan. I'll visit him and leave a door unlocked. You (continued on page 163)John Holmes(continued from page 124) cut me in for whatever you think is right."

On June 29, 1981 Holmes showed up at the Nash villa to party and buy drugs. He left a few hours later, unlocking a door on his way out. Early the same morning, Launius, DeVerell and two of their low-life friends, Tracy McCourt and David Lind, slipped in through the unlocked door and surprised Nash and his bodyguard in the living room. Lind flashed a stolen police badge, waved a .357 Magnum and told them to freeze.

As the intruders struggled to handcuff the hugely fat bodyguard, Launius fell against Lind's gun hand and the .357 went off, leaving a nasty muzzle burn across Diles' back. The gunshot frightened Nash onto his knees. He began to cry, invoking his children and begging for his life. Launius put his gun into Nash's mouth and demanded the combination to his floor safe, which Holmes had identified as the drug stash. In it they found several pounds of coke, thousands of quaaludes, money and jewelry. They took a large vial of heroin from a bedroom dresser and then fled.

Holmes was waiting for them when they returned to the Wonderland house, and he watched as they weighed and counted their booty. Altogether they had robbed Nash of more than $100,000 in cash, $150,000 in jewelry, eight pounds of cocaine, a kilo of heroin and 5000 quaaludes. Holmes smoked some of the coke as he waited for his split, which came to $3000. When he complained that they were cheating him, Launius punched him in the stomach and threw him out.

For Billy DeVerell and Ron Launius--who had swindled other drug dealers by selling them bags of baking powder--the caper was the perfect score. What was Nash going to do, call the cops? As it turned out, although he wasn't the first gangster they had ripped off, he would be the last.

Detective Tom Lange and his partner, Bob Souza, received a call around 4:30 the afternoon of July 1, 1981. They were working with a special unit of the LAPD's Robbery and Homicide Division that investigated high-profile murder cases. Fourteen years later, Lange and his subsequent partner, Philip Vannatter, would become painfully famous as the lead investigators in the O.J. Simpson case. But as brutal as those murders were, they didn't come close to the butchery Lange and Souza found when they arrived on Wonderland Avenue.

"Tom and I thought we'd seen it all," said Souza, a bear-sized man with a short salt-and-pepper beard. "But I'd never seen so much blood. Four people bludgeoned to death and a fifth victim who survived. It was gruesome."

The video of what they found fits Souza's description. It was the first time that a multiple-murder scene had been videotaped by the LAPD (coinciding with the changeover from film to video in the porn industry), and though the quality of the police tape is rough, the scene it renders is chillingly vivid. As the camera is moved from room to room, blood is everywhere: on the floors, the furniture, the walls, even the ceilings. Barbara Richardson, Lind's girlfriend and an overnight visitor, lies in a pool of blood and brains on the floor next to the couch where she had been sleeping. (Lind was not home when the murderers arrived.) Ron Launius sprawls in a bloody bed, as does Joy Miller. Billy DeVerell, probably the only one who had had a chance to fight back, is in a half-seated slump beneath a television. Susan Launius, Ron's wife, was beaten severely around the head. The blows crushed her skull in a way that impaired bleeding and allowed her to be rushed to the hospital in time to survive.

That night, Lange and Souza, both retired now from the LAPD and working as private investigators, began their probe into what they called the "four-on-the-floor murders." They knew from previous police surveillance of the house, and from needles and pipes and pills they found there, that it was a drug case. And from the position of the bodies they knew that at least three, and perhaps as many as five, assailants had participated in the slaughter.

"The next day we got a call from a go-between stating that a David Lind would talk to us," Lange said. "When we met with him he sat there popping pills--rainbows, cartwheels, everything--and told us the whole story of the Nash robbery and Holmes' involvement. In fact, he was the one who figured out that Holmes had played both ends against the middle and had set up the Wonderland gang the same way he had set up Nash."

As it turned out, a couple days after the robbery, Nash had confronted Holmes about his part in it. Diles had taken Holmes' address book from him, and when Nash found the names of John's family members in Ohio, he told him that he would kill them all, every last one, if he didn't identify his partners in the robbery.

There are several versions of what happened next. Lange and Souza, who are writing a book with Nils Grevillius about the crime, Four on the Floor: The Laurel Canyon Murders, are convinced that Holmes led the Nash gang to the house, let them in, then watched as they went about the carnage. "He may have assisted in the killing of Ron Launius," said Lange. "He hated him, was terrified of him. We found Holmes' palm print on a bed rail above Launius' body, an incriminating place for it to be."

"He was there all right, but he didn't do it, and neither did Nash," said Amerson, who believes that people were lined up to kill the Wonderland bunch. "The morning of the murders I got a call from a good friend, Dee Samuels, who was a hit man. He'd been staking out the Wonderland house because he had a contract to kill the guys and was waiting for his moment. He told me, 'I just saw your friend John Holmes coming out of there alone, covered in blood. I went in to see what was going on, and they were all dead.' John showed up at my house a half hour later, all wild and bloody, saying he'd gone over there to let the Nash bunch in and found everybody, except Susan Launius, dead already. She was moaning, so he rolled her back onto the bed, then went through the house looking for coke and whatever else he could find. He was carrying something in a pillowcase when he showed up at my place. He was crazed, said he needed money and a car. So I gave him 20 bucks and a fully restored 1960 Ford Fairlane convertible, and he took off. A while later Dee told me that along with his contract and Nash's contract, there was a third hit out on these people, and that two methamphetamine dealers who'd been burned by the group got there first." Lange and Souza, who interviewed the two speed merchants, say they believe the two men arrived after the murders, searched the bloody scene, stepped over Susan Launius as she lay on the floor moaning for help, then left.

John's first wife, Sharon, said that he showed up at her house in bloody clothes, saying that he'd led three of the Nash gang to the house (he didn't say whether Nash was there), where they forced him to watch as they beat the victims. She said he took a bath, then drove to a motel in the valley to be with a girlfriend.

Lange and Souza's investigation of the case was frustrated almost immediately when their superiors forbade them to talk to the primary suspects.

"I don't want to get into details we're saving for the book," said Lange, "but this was unprecedented. Robbery and Homicide always had complete autonomy in running its cases, and all of a sudden we were being told not to talk to Eddie Nash, not to interview John Holmes. As it turned out, a federal agent who was working on a RICO case against Nash accused us of being dirty. He said we were failing to act on information against Nash that we had. It wasn't true. Unbeknownst to us, the department launched an internal investigation. We were eventually cleared. Meanwhile, we were wondering what the hell was going on."

"It was all done to derail the investigation," said Souza, "and it was pretty successful. They didn't take us off the case, but they brought in another detective, Frank Tomlinson, who we were told had a rapport with Holmes. Frank began working with us, and when Holmes turned himself in, it was Tomlinson who interviewed him."

"They put him up at a hotel with his wife and one of his girlfriends," said Lange. "He partied for three days, ate big meals and drank expensive scotch. We finally sat in on one of the interviews and he didn't say anything. He was being the actor, playing both sides of the fence, talking shit."

Both Lange and Souza suspect that Nash had police and political connections that kept them from getting directly at him. And Holmes, it turned out, also had police connections. Because of the world he ran in, Holmes was the type of guy vice officers liked to keep on the hook, checking in with him from time to time. Although Holmes didn't always have valuable information, his police relationships further complicated the case.

Shortly after the hotel interviews, Holmes and his girlfriend ran. They were gone six months, staying for a while in a Florida trailer park, where Holmes worked as a handyman. Then Lange got a tip that Holmes' girlfriend was working in a strip club in Miami. He and Tomlinson flew to Florida and through her found Holmes. They arrested him on a murder warrant and brought him back to be tried.

In late June 1982, after deliberating over a mostly circumstantial case in which Holmes did not testify, the jury acquitted him. Despite the victory, Holmes was held on an outstanding burglary charge. The D.A. got a judicial order that compelled him to tell what he knew about the Wonderland murders. Because of the acquittal, his Fifth Amendment rights were moot, and when he refused to talk about the crime or Eddie Nash--whom he still feared would kill him--he was held for contempt. He spent 111 days in the Los Angeles County jail (and survived a murder attempt that he believed was a contract hit). Holmes finally decided to testify before a grand jury on the same day Eddie Nash was sentenced to prison on a drug charge. Whatever he said, the transcript remains sealed. Holmes then walked free into the ruins of his life.

"The day he got out of jail he showed up at my house driving a VW van he'd borrowed from his attorney," said Amerson, who hadn't seen Holmes since he'd been arrested. "He moved in and started a gigolo thing with a 65-year-old woman who gave him money and leased him a car. But he wasn't happy with it. He wanted to make movies, but nobody would hire him because he was so unreliable. Finally I got him a movie called California Valley Girls by promising the producer that I'd guarantee any money he might lose if John fucked up."

Holmes had one scene in the film. Then Amerson put him to work as his assistant at VCX films, a porn company, and insisted that he get off drugs. For a while it seemed he had.

In late 1982, on the set of a film in San Francisco, he met Misty Dawn, a 19-year-old whose real name was Laurie Rose. Misty was an aspiring anal queen. She had read about Holmes' murder trial and was somewhat nervous about meeting him. "Shall I bring a gun to the set?" she asked the director. Instead, the two of them fell into something of a romance and eventually moved into the Amerson house together.

In 1985, Amerson left VCX to start his own production company, called Penquin Films. He gave John a junior partnership in the company--on the condition that he stay off drugs--and hired Laurie as the Penquin's bookkeeper. The company made 15 films in six months (using video), most of them starring Holmes, who had picked up his drug habit again and began embezzling from Penquin. Amerson claims, and Laurie Holmes denies, that $190,000 went unaccounted for.

"He was completely zonked," said Amerson. "He needed the money for drugs, and it got to where he was worthless. He'd come into the office, stay 20 minutes, then go to see one of his girlfriends and to get high."

It was around this time that Amerson decided to start testing Penquin's performers for HIV. Amerson, who was trying to set a good example for his employees, and Holmes were tested and both came up negative. They retested six months later, and went together to the doctor's office for the results.

"The doctor told us he had good news and bad news," said Amerson. "Then he looked at me and said, 'You're all right,' and John turned white. The doctor told him that just because he was HIV-positive didn't mean he would get AIDS, and that if he'd stop smoking and drinking and drugging he could live another 20 years. Of course, John immediately went to six packs of cigarettes a day and two quarts of scotch instead of one, and began using more drugs than ever."

Holmes started outpatient treatment at the Sepulveda VA Hospital amid speculation about where he'd picked up the virus. He had lots of unprotected sex professionally. He made a gay movie, The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes, in 1983. And although many of the scenes were filmed with women disguised as men to keep him hard, he had performed one authentic anal sex scene with a gay star named Joey Yale, who died of AIDS not long after the filming.

In January 1987 Amerson got a call from Holmes, who was in Las Vegas. "I think I'm married," he said. "I'm all fucked up. I'm not sure, but I've got a ring, Laurie's with me and I think we're married."

By October, John Holmes was deteriorating fast. He eventually checked into the VA hospital, where Detective Lange visited him for the last time. Lange was collecting information for the trial of Nash and Diles, who had finally been charged in the Wonderland murders. (After a mistrial in 1990, both were retried and acquitted.)

"It was one of the greatest performances of his life," said Laurie, who was in the room when Lange questioned Holmes. "John would lean over slowly to stub out his cigarette, then start to answer the question, then become incoherent. He didn't tell them anything."

"It was a performance for sure," said Lange, "as if the cameras were rolling. It was typical John, full of shit."

John Holmes died on March 13, 1988. One of his last requests was that before his body was cremated, Laurie would view it to make sure that it was whole, that his famous dick would not end up in a jar. Then she, Holmes' mother and Holmes' half brother David scattered his ashes from a boat on the seaward side of Catalina Island.

A week later, a memorial service was held at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. It was an unusual ending for a life filled with lies, distrust and betrayal. At his best, Holmes had never made friends easily, and after the murders he became increasingly reclusive and paranoid. "It doesn't pay to have friends," he said. "Friends will get you killed." And yet of the 52 friends invited to the service, 50 showed. Holmes would have been surprised.

"Sex was taking over my life. Husbands wanted me to fuck their wives, sometimes while they watched."

The Long and the Short of it

there was no upbeat ending for porn star john holmes