Killers for Hire

by Tori Richards

  LILLIENFELD: It’s true…Now, I know you and I had this discussion before, and I made this offer before, but this would be a great opportunity for you to say, ‘You know what kid? Go in this direction or go in that direction…’

  GOODWIN: Well, the only thing that I would give you is stuff that would exonerate me and you won’t—please forgive me if I respectfully say—

  LILLIENFELD: I know, you think I’ll twist that and manipulate it—

  GOODWIN: Well…

  LILLIENFELD:—cause I’m a bad man.

  GOODWIN: I didn’t say you were…

  LILLIENFELD: Yeah!

  GOODWIN: …a bad man. I say that I believe that witnesses have been threatened, intimidated and—

  LILLIENFELD: You think I have this big grudge for you and for some reason, Mike…

  GOODWIN: I know.

  LILLIENFELD: …I don’t quite get that.

  The pair continued to discuss their differences, with Lillienfeld repeatedly saying that he had no vested interest in the Thompson case, and Goodwin countering that Lillienfeld would stop at nothing to convict him.

  GOODWIN: It’s unfortunate, because you are a very personable guy.

  LILLIENFELD: Well, thanks.

  GOODWIN: I’m not trying to defend myself. In fact, there’s things I’ve admitted to my attorney and said, “Boy, I wish I wouldn’t have done these things.” It just looks weird. Follow me? Uh, but you—but I don’t understand why you lied.

  LILLIENFELD: I understand. I-I-I take full responsibility for my actions Mike, and—and if you believe that, I don’t have a problem with that. I think—not to be impolite, you’re a real personable guy too. I think you’re a little bit off. I-I wouldn’t know—you need help maybe? I don’t know.

  GOODWIN: I can understand—

  LILLIENFELD: I’m not saying it to be rude or mean. That’s just what I think. But you—you’re really—you’re like obsessed with this case, you’re obsessed with Collene Campbell. You breathe and live it every day, and most regular guys that are, you know, under the magnifying glass, under the gun, they—they don’t act that way. You act very peculiar. And it doesn’t make you a bad guy, and it doesn’t make you guilty, but it definitely makes you different, remarkable and unique, unlike—

  GOODWIN: I—

  LILLIENFELD: —other people.

  GOODWIN: I am different.

  LILLIENFELD: Yeah, you are. You are a strange guy.

  Then the men talked about Goodwin’s dad and a trip they took to Ireland. Goodwin gave Lillienfeld a DNA sample. The conversation lasted 45 minutes.

  Four days later Goodwin was arraigned. A preliminary hearing was set for Jan. 30, 2002. If the case had moved slowly during the investigative stage, Lillienfeld was about to discover that the judicial system wouldn’t provide any respite.

  Chapter 8: A Witness is Silenced

  Michael Goodwin was settling into the Orange County Jail, but he didn’t plan on being a permanent resident. His lawyer, Jeff Benice, was working on a myriad of legal options to get him released.

  Goodwin was all too aware that if it weren’t for his relationship with Mickey, he wouldn’t be in this predicament. Even in death, the racing legend was reaching out to strangle Goodwin’s livelihood and make his life miserable. Being held accountable for Mickey’s death would be something Goodwin would fight with every fiber of his being. Part of this involved clearing up loose ends, and he’d soon get that chance.

  When Goodwin arrived in jail, a middle-aged man incarcerated on a drug charge watched with interest. The inmate, who called himself “Steve,” had seen the spectacle of Goodwin’s arrest on television just a few minutes earlier and wondered how Marc Goodwin was holding up. Both Steve and Marc were drug addicts and had met on numerous times on the streets of Orange County trying to feed their habits.

  “Marc was a shell of a man who was in pieces,” Steve said later during a phone conversation from a prison in California, where he had served time for a drug conviction and was due to be released soon. “A lot of it had to do with Mike. Marc did his bidding for him. Mike was the dominant, alpha-type and at first it was out of loyalty to his brother. Then he started giving Marc money, then drugs, to control him.”

  Goodwin entered jail in typical fashion, carrying himself with a larger than life air and commanding the attention of those around him. As the weeks dragged on, Goodwin and Steve had numerous conversations, mostly bravado about how Goodwin was on the verge of the next great business empire and Steve would be wise to make a small investment to get in on the ground floor.

  “He was the most pompous ass of a person you would ever meet,” Steve said. “He’s such a self-serving person, anything to serve himself and his cause, he’ll do.” Goodwin worked his considerable charisma on the guards in order to get special privileges and the ability to go talk to other inmates of his choosing.

  Still, the confident veneer was showing signs of cracking.

  “Mike was under a lot of stress regarding his brother and said Marc would be the downfall of him,” Steve said. “He said Marc got some people to come over to do a job for him.” In another conversation, Goodwin said: “I gotta do something about Marc; I don’t know what to do.”

  Ironically, Marc showed up in the jail on a drunk driving arrest a few weeks later. Steve talked to him to find out how he was doing. Marc “leaned on me to help him with his brother,” Steve said. “He said, ‘Mike thinks I’m gonna talk and make problems for him because of what I know and (I) could get him in trouble.’” Echoing his earlier wiretap conversation, Marc added, “I’m not going to say anything. I wish he would leave me alone.”

  According to Steve, Marc was “petrified” of Mike and “thought Mike would kill him some day.”

  Steve tried to help Marc out by broaching the subject to Goodwin about getting Marc into a sober living situation. The idea was dismissed. Instead, Goodwin asked the jailers to let him talk to his brother in a separate block. Apparently the jailers weren’t aware that Lillienfeld considered Marc an accomplice in the Thompson murders and should be kept away from his brother in order to prevent collusion.

  After the meeting, Goodwin sought out Steve. He said Marc was due to be released, and he wanted to know if Steve would find a suitable place for him to live where he would be kept “occupied.” Then Goodwin whispered, “Anyone you trust? You know, the right position so they could give him a hot shot?”

  A hot shot is slang for a fatal injection of heroin or cocaine.

  Steve was stunned at what he just heard and at the same time angry that Goodwin would consider him capable of such a deed. “Why would you ask me to do this?” he demanded. Goodwin offered shares in one of his business ventures as compensation, but still Steve balked and later contacted a jailer regarding Goodwin’s solicitation. This led to a conversation with Lillienfeld.

  Lillienfeld admitted that he believed Steve’s account of what happened.

  “His story was full of unique details that only Goodwin could have provided (to him),” the detective said. “He also provided the motivation that Goodwin expressed for wanting Marc dead, and was very articulate in his reasons for it.”

  In addition, Steve provided Lillienfeld with several letters and documents that Goodwin had given to him.

  Marc was soon released from jail and Steve never saw him again. Marc turned up dead four years later of the very thing Goodwin had requested: an overdose of synthetic heroin administered by a syringe.

  “I have no doubt in my mind that Goodwin did this, it doesn’t matter that it was a few years later. It takes time to recruit someone to kill somebody,” Steve said later. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  As if to prove this point, Goodwin would describe his brother’s death as a murder years later in another jail with another inmate.

  According to his autopsy report, Marc Stephen Goodwin died at age 49 on March 24, 2005, of an overdose of oxycodone, a powerful prescription opiate. The painkiller Trazodone was also pres
ent in his bloodstream and heart. Marc’s body was discovered by his father on a boat docked in the San Pedro Harbor that the two men called home. A syringe was next to Marc’s foot and a needle mark was on his right big toe along with abrasions on his chin, chest, left arm and right leg. His right hand had a large bruise. It appeared to be just another one of the numerous drug addict suicides in the City of Angels and was labeled accidental by the coroner.

  Lillienfeld looked at the case to see whether he could find some connection to Goodwin, some sort of evidence that this was murder beyond just a set of highly suspicious circumstances. He couldn’t. Marc had been a drug addict for most of his life.

  Regardless, the timing of his overdose couldn’t have been more perfect for Goodwin. Like thousands of cases that go through the coroner’s office with the probability of another story to tell, this one wouldn’t have another chapter.

  “We get a lot more drug deaths that are really murders than we can ever prove,” said one of the coroner’s top investigators, Lt. Cheryl MacWillie, as she glanced at the autopsy report.

  Chapter 9: The Road to Los Angeles

  A preliminary hearing was held that featured Lillienfeld as the star witness. Goodwin was ordered to stand trial.

  Benice filed a motion to dismiss the case that ultimately failed, going into elaborate detail about the prosecution’s lack of evidence and Lillienfeld’s alleged misconduct in an effort to render his testimony at the preliminary hearing useless. Benice claimed that Lillienfeld threatened Diane Goodwin and a Goodwin business partner in order to obtain damning statements and then proceeded to search Goodwin’s home office even though a sign on the door said “Do Not Enter.”

  Undaunted, Benice appealed the jurisdictional issue to a California appellate court but wouldn’t see the fruits of his labor. He wasn’t getting paid and quit two weeks before the appellate court sided with him and dismissed the case.

  Unbeknownst to Goodwin, Orange County prosecutors had been meeting with their Los Angeles counterparts just in case matters didn’t go their way. So when the dismissal happened, Los Angeles was ready and gave Goodwin what he wanted—a case filed in the jurisdiction where the crime happened. But unlike a liberal O.J. Simpson jury from downtown, this time it would be in Pasadena, 10 miles from Bradbury. An upscale area of white-collar professionals, Pasadena was almost as bad as Orange County from a defense standpoint.

  Lillienfeld drove Goodwin to the Los Angeles County Jail after the case was filed on June 8, 2004. Any time a suspect or defendant in one of his cases needs to be picked up and transported to jail Lillienfeld does it himself, always hoping to lull his target into some sort of an admission regarding the crime along the way. It’s worked in some cases, but not with Goodwin.

  “On the ride up there he basically talked about what an asshole I was, a puppet for Collene (Campbell), a crook, etc,” Lillienfeld said. “The standard stuff.”

  The case was assigned to Patrick Dixon, the head deputy of the major crimes unit, which prosecutes cases involving public officials, celebrities and other high-profile defendants. Tall and distinguished looking with gray hair and a commanding presence, Dixon is a legend of sorts within his office and is known as a master trial strategist. “I’m not a genius on the law or like some others who are good at investigating cases,” Dixon said. “But if I do have any skill, it’s tactical strategy during trial and knowing how to put on a case.”

  He joined the DA’s Office in 1976 because the idea of not having to work with a client appealed to him. Rather, he wanted to be in court “seeking truth and justice, as Pollyannish as that sounds,” he said.

  Dixon decided to approach the case in a different way than his predecessor. Instead of focusing on the conspiracy of planning the murders in Orange County, Dixon didn’t even want to make that an element. Rather, he wanted to show a pattern of guilty behavior that would leave jurors with the consensus that no one else could be responsible.

  Once Dixon filed the case, he looked for an assistant to help bring it to trial. Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson had been in the major crimes unit just a month when Dixon asked him if he wanted the case. Young, good looking and on his way up the ladder, Jackson had been in the DA’s Office nine years prosecuting juveniles, miscellaneous felonies and gang members, winning 29 murderer convictions.

  “I knew who Mickey Thompson was, having grown up in Texas and following racing in my early years,” Jackson said. “When I was younger, I had a hot rod with Mickey Thompson parts in it. I was not only flattered but awed that the office would trust me to work on this case and with someone like Pat Dixon. It was by far the biggest case I’ve ever been given.”

  In fact, Jackson would be the main attorney responsible for preparing the case for trial and attending all court appearances.

  Witty and debonair, he had a completely different style from either David Brent or Michael Jacobs. He uses his considerable charm, good looks and self-deprecating humor to win over jurors. Like Lillienfeld, he lulls adversaries into a false sense of security as a charming conversationalist. And also like Lillienfeld, he isn’t afraid of hard work. Jackson paid for his college education by working as a jet mechanic in the Air Force.

  Alan Jackson & Patrick Dixon (L to R)

  photo by Gene Blevins

  Dixon and Jackson work out of the downtown Los Angeles Superior Court building, where a small room was cleared out for a new tenant: the Thompson case file, which arrived from Orange County in a 40-foot moving van, all 240,000 pages of it contained in 121 file boxes.

  “There was no order to it or anything, it looked like it had just been thrown in there,” Jackson said. “I opened the first box and just started reading. I removed the things that weren’t relevant and glossed through those at first. Eventually I read through the whole thing; it took me a month of 12-hour days and working weekends.”

  Meanwhile, Goodwin was making himself at home in Los Angeles County’s Twin Towers Jail. Built in the late ’90s, the 4,000-bed facility was designed to house the county’s general jail population. Twin Towers was just that—dual seven-story buildings that also contain an in-house medical facility. Two two-man cellblocks are monitored from guards positioned in an outside Plexiglas booth.

  Twin Towers Jail

  courtesy Los Angeles Co. Sheriff’s Dept.

  Goodwin found himself in a high-power unit, the type reserved for celebrity defendants or those with high notoriety. The block is constructed like a horseshoe with sheriff’s deputies in the center. Each cell has a Plexiglas door that leads out into a common recreation area.

  “Typical Goodwin, he started demanding stuff from Day One,” Lillienfeld commented. “He wanted a laptop, unlimited phone access, doctor’s visits, special medication, bedding, etc. He didn’t end up having any disciplinary write-ups because he mostly stayed in his cell reading. I think he was intimidated by the other defendants.”

  As expected, Lillienfeld and Jackson became fast friends, bound by their blue-collar work ethic, wit and zealous desire to see Michael Goodwin confined to a California prison for life.

  “Mark and I got along like brothers; he’s the brother I never had,” Jackson said. “If I was ever murdered, I’d want him to investigate my case. He is like a dog without a bone. He starts sniffing it out and he latches on and gets lockjaw and will not let go until it’s brought to a conclusion.”

  Alan Jackson & Mark Lilliefeld (L to R)

  photo by Gene Blevins

  As soon as Jackson got up to speed on the case, he and Lillienfeld decided to take a road trip and visit all the important players in the case so Jackson could talk to them and see how they might hold up on the witness stand. They visited Alabama, where Marc Goodwin had moved; North Carolina to see Jeffrey Coyne, who was Goodwin’s bankruptcy trustee and victim of a failed assassination plot; New York to see Goodwin’s ex-girlfriend Gail Hunter; Virginia to see Diane Goodwin, and Florida, where boat bounty hunter Mike McGhee lived.

  An avid seaman with contact
s in ports throughout the Caribbean, McGhee makes a living of locating vessels that have been stolen or foreclosed by banks. Using snitches, contacts, police sources and paper trails, McGhee is a detective on the high seas who will track his prey across the globe.

  “I’ve been doing this 20 years,” McGhee said. “I’ve gotten some of the biggest boats in the business; I’ve taken boats from drug dealers in the Caribbean and wise guys in New Jersey.”

  In 1991, he was hired by the Maryland National Bank to find a yacht Goodwin had stopped making payments on—still owing $290,000. The last time the bank had heard from the Goodwins was a year earlier, when they were awarded a $54,000 claim for lightning damage.

  McGhee soon found the boat docked in Pensacola, and Marc Goodwin was aboard with two black men who looked like the composite drawings of the Thompsons’ killers. Michael Goodwin wasn’t there.

  As McGhee walked up the dock toward the boat, Marc “went ballistic,” McGhee said. “He screamed at me and threatened to kill me.” One thing that is different between McGhee and his land-based counterparts: He locates the boat but doesn’t actually seize it; that part is left to a repossessor.

  The boat was not seized in time and left Florida. McGhee started his search anew, focusing on dive spots in the Caribbean. It took three months before he hit pay dirt—Goodwin was found in Belize, swimming, lying out in the sun, laughing and joking with his brother and the two black men.

  As the bounty hunter approached Goodwin’s boat, named the Scalawag, “he knew exactly who I was,” McGhee said. “He said, ‘I know why you’re here. What do you think you’re doing? You think you’re slick!’

  “I said, ‘It’s all over Mr. Goodwin. Your boat is the bank’s and you know it.’ “

  At that point, Goodwin’s face turned red with rage as he screamed and cursed at McGhee, threatening to kill him.

  McGhee watched the boat for 12 days, waiting for a moment when everyone would be on shore so it could be repossessed. That didn’t happen, and it went back to Florida and then to Guatemala, where it was eventually repossessed.