Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detectives Tom Lange and Robert Souza led the murder investigation and searched Nash's home a few days after the crime. There, they found more than $1 million worth of cocaine, as well as some items stolen from the Wonderland Avenue townhouse. An initial theory of the murders centered on Holmes. After his left palm print was found at the crime scene on the Launius's headboard, he was arrested and charged with four counts of murder in March 1982. The prosecutor, Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Ron Coen, attempted to prove Holmes was a willing participant who betrayed the gang after not getting a full share of the loot from the Nash robbery. However, Holmes' court-appointed defense lawyers, Earl Hanson and Mitchell Egers, successfully presented Holmes as one of the victims, who had been forced by the real killers to give them entry to the house before the murders took place. After a publicized three-week trial, Holmes was acquitted of all criminal charges on June 26, 1982. He spent 110 days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to testify or cooperate with authorities. Shortly after the murders, in her first newspaper interview in July 1981, Holmes' first wife, Sharon Gebenini Holmes, stated he had told her he had known the people in the Wonderland Avenue townhouse, and had been there shortly before the murders occurred. She did not divulge any additional information to the police. In April 1988, one month after Holmes' death, Gebenini stated in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times that on the morning of the murders, Holmes had arrived at her house with blood splattered on his clothes and recounted how he led three thugs to the tightly secured drug house on Wonderland Avenue, escorted them in, and stood by as they bludgeoned the five people inside. She said Holmes never told her the names of the three other assailants. Holmes died on March 13, 1988, from AIDS complications. One month before he died, two LAPD detectives visited Holmes at the
Veterans Administration hospital where he was convalescing to question him about the murders. Nothing came of the visit; Holmes was barely awake, and his responses to their questions were incoherent. A second trial, in 1991, ended in acquittal for both Nash and Diles. Diles died from liver failure in 1997. In 2000, after a four-year joint investigation involving local and federal authorities, Nash was arrested and indicted on federal charges under the
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for drug trafficking and money laundering, conspiring to carry out the Wonderland murders, and
bribing the sole holdout juror of his first trial. Nash, already in his 70s and suffering from emphysema and other ailments, agreed to a plea bargain in September 2001. He admitted to having bribed the lone holdout in his first trial with $50,000 and pleaded guilty to the RICO charges and money laundering. He also admitted to having ordered his associates to retrieve stolen property from the Wonderland Avenue townhouse, which might have resulted in violence, including murder, yet he denied having planned the murders. Ultimately, Nash received a -year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.
Eddie Nash died in 2014. ==In popular culture==