Among Hollywood’s most iconic and enduring true crime cases, one never officially solved 42 years later, is analyzed by best-selling crime fiction author Michael Connelly in the MGM+ series, “The Wonderland Massacre & The Secret History of Hollywood.”

The notorious 1981 quadruple murder on Wonderland Avenue in LA’s supposedly bucolic Laurel Canyon continues to fascinate. Entangled with the actual crime, a drug dispute, was notorious porn star John Holmes and Scott Thorson, an addict and the decades-younger lover of flamboyant entertainer Liberace.

“It was all about drugs, sex and lies. And murder,” Thorson, who died last month of cancer, tells Connelly.

“For whatever reason, certain murders in Los Angeles have become iconic, and not just in this city, but they go out through society,” Connelly, 65, said in a Zoom interview. “This is a case that for many reasons, including the celebrity part and also because of the violence involved, has had a long, lasting resonance.”

The massacre prompted several trials over many years. The case includes one bribed juror, a hung jury, one bribed judge and the Federal Witness Protection program for Thorson.
“Figuring out how to structure and tell the story in a way that makes sense was the trickiest thing,” conceded director Alison Ellwood. “That’s why we wanted to use Michael almost as a detective himself, detecting the detectives.”

Connelly, with two returning series, “Bosch: Legacy” on Amazon and Netflix’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” never wrote about Wonderland.

“I have steadfastly in my books tried to avoid writing something inspired by something big that a lot of people would know about and say, ‘Oh, this is based on that Wonderland case.’

“I’ve done a lot of novels that are inspired by true cases, but they’re usually not the ones that get headlines. That’s what I pursue in my fiction, telling a story that no one’s heard before.”

Added Ellwood, “What I also love about this story is that Michael said if he’d written this as fiction, it wouldn’t be believable. It’s so out there.”

Connelly agreed. “There’s things about it that are very novelistic: A really interesting and scary villain? You got to have that.

“You’ve got to have relentless detectives who won’t give up. We have that in this true story as well. But then there’s a key witness, supposedly in Witness Protection, who shows up on the PTL Club on TV and now he’s an evangelist?

“There’s just so many strange things that happen in this that I feel if I turned this in as a novel, my editor would say, ‘Wait a minute, this is not really believable!’ In fiction, you actually have to have a higher degree of believability than real life.”

“The Wonderland Massacre & The Secret History of Hollywood” streams on MGM+

(Courtesy MGM+)