Killers for Hire (5 page)

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.

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.

Goodwin even sued Durkin for malpractice and served the summons at his home instead of business, a blatant indication that he knew where Durkin lived.

“He was the single most tenacious, focused, fixed and litigious person I’ve ever dealt with,” Durkin told Lillienfeld. “He brought so much grief into my life that I actually moved my family into another home, behind a gated community.”

As the detectives talked to more and more Thompson associates, they found dozens of people who said Mickey and Trudy mentioned being afraid that Goodwin would harm them. Friend Benjamin Christ recalled Mickey saying two weeks before he died that Goodwin had put a contract out on his life. The night before the murders, Christ and Thompson talked on the phone about whether Mickey should invest in gold. The conversation was jovial and Goodwin wasn’t mentioned.

Carl Schiefer, who worked for Mickey as a television consultant, said the racing legend had a premonition of his own death that was disturbingly accurate. The men were at Mickey’s house when Schiefer was shown an anonymous letter with the phrases “a contract was put out on you” and “you’re going to die.”

As Schiefer walked out to his car in the driveway, Mickey told him: “I’m afraid somebody is going to attack Trudy and I in this very spot as we’re leaving to go to work.” Four months later that’s exactly what happened.

The detectives delved into the world of racing, wanting to find anyone who ever worked for or with Michael Goodwin. They were hard pressed to find someone saying something nice.

“He would fly off the handle for no reason,” said secretary Lynn Friesen. “I saw him slap and hit Diane and throw her against a wall in a fit of rage.”

“He was a hot-tempered asshole who always thought he was right,” said Robert Kelly, a flagman at Supercross races. “He was very difficult to deal with, very argumentative and wouldn’t listen to riders who complained about unsafe conditions.”

“He was very pretentious and a horse’s ass,” said George Mazzacane, who sponsored a motocross team. “He wore a raccoon coat, drove a Clenet kit car and flaunted his money.”

“He was a fanatical lunatic who was 100 percent nuts,” said Marguerite Tavarez, a personal assistant to a Goodwin executive. She also provided a clue that Griggs never had: Goodwin possibly purchased a stun gun from a sporting goods store in Orange County called Grant Boys. Lillienfeld jumped on this.

The Grant Boys is to the outdoorsman what a shoe store is to a woman. It offers a vast array of hunting, fishing and camping gear inside a store decorated like a Wild West trading outpost. Founded by Buddy Grant, the store has been located on the same street corner for 30 years, becoming an institution of sorts. Grant died in 1993 and passed the store on to his son-in-law, Randy Garrell. Any recollection of Goodwin buying a stun gun died with Grant.

However, Goodwin had purchased other guns at the store.

The detectives asked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI for any information they might have on Goodwin. It was discovered that Goodwin and Diane had been in Las Vegas two days after the Thompson murders and then went on to Colorado and Phoenix.

It was time to interview Diane, who had since divorced Goodwin. On Oct. 1, 1997, the detectives flew back to Norfolk, Virginia, where she lived.

Diane claimed to have heard about the murders from someone who phoned her house, but couldn’t remember who that person was. She also couldn’t remember where she and Goodwin had traveled the next day or the reasoning behind it. Any answers to questions surrounding Goodwin’s involvement with the murders were carefully crafted and well thought out, the detectives noted. At one point, Diane “alluded to the fact that Michael Goodwin had admitted responsibility in the Mickey Thompson murders. She further told detectives that she perhaps did not believe Mr. Goodwin, as he was a consummate liar and he may have alluded to that fact in order to manipulate or coerce her into doing something she would have normally not done,” Lillienfeld wrote in a report.

Diane was shown a photograph of the stun gun found at the crime scene and told detectives that Goodwin owned a similar weapon between 1976 and 1984 and kept it in a nightstand drawer next to a .22 caliber handgun. The stun gun was for her protection because she didn’t know how to use the handgun, something that angered Goodwin.

“He was a manic depressive and may have been on lithium,” Diane said of her former husband. “If he wasn’t seeing a psychiatrist, then he should have been.”

The detectives pressed her for more details about any black men Goodwin may have known and his plans around the time of the murders.

“I’m somewhat hesitant to talk to you because I’m afraid of possibly being found criminally liable for certain acts,” she said.

“We’ll give you full immunity in writing,” Lillienfeld offered.

“I’d feel better talking to you then. But that time in my life was all a bad memory, and I don’t think I’d be able to come up with any more details or information that I haven’t already provided you,” she responded.

After a 90-minute interview, Diane agreed to talk more at a later date. Lillienfeld and Robinson were upbeat.