Trial Ordered for 3 Held in ‘Nightmare’ Double Slaying, Fire : Drugs: Survivor describes the attack. Hearing provides a glimpse of the middle-class drug trade in L.A.

Three men were ordered to stand trial Monday in a brutal, cocaine-related double-murder case dubbed “Nightmare on Orange Grove.”

Los Angeles Municipal Judge David M. Horwitz ordered that the three be held to answer on seven counts--including murder, attempted murder, burglary and arson--after a preliminary hearing that has been in progress sporadically since April. The three will be arraigned in Superior Court on Nov. 28.

In an emotional finale to the proceedings, a victim who survived despite burns over 80% of her body testified--her head and hands still swathed in bandages.

She said that she and two other people were bound with electrical cords and stuffed into a closet with pillowcases over their heads, then doused with gasoline and set afire last Jan. 30 during the course of a robbery.

The 33-year-old survivor--who described herself as a former secretary who became a $400-a-week drug messenger for one of the victims--testified that she was also raped and shot but managed to flee the fire-engulfed building.

The charred remains of Lee Gottstein, 57, and his wife, Sylvia Carruth, 45, were found by firefighters in an upstairs closet in their Spanish Colonial fourplex on South Orange Grove Avenue in the Mid-City area. Authorities said they died of asphyxiation.

The three suspects--Lonnie Lewis, 29; his brother, Jerome Martin, 22, and Derek Bloodworth, 26--could receive the death penalty if convicted in the special-circumstances case. Martin was also ordered to stand trial on a rape charge.

The proceedings offered a glimpse of the middle-class drug trade in Los Angeles.

Gottstein apparently oversaw a flourishing rock cocaine business from the Orange Grove address and a second apartment on Crescent Heights Boulevard, where the drugs were stored, according to testimony from his surviving employee.

She said she delivered small rocks in plastic bags to addresses all over town, collecting $50 for each. She also smoked cocaine, she admitted, “but never during working hours.”

Under questioning by Deputy Dist. Atty. Patricia Wilkinson, the survivor--whose name is not being published because she is an alleged rape victim--described the events leading up to the robbery and murders, breaking down in sobs as she told of lapsing into unconsciousness and waking up at County-USC Medical Center.

The woman said she had known “Lee and Sylvia” for several months before “the accident.” They had gone to a play and dinner on Jan. 30, then returned to the Orange Grove apartment, where she and Sylvia did “just a little” drugs and were feeling mellow and talkative. They were listening to the stereo in an upstairs guest den when, the witness said, Gottstein received a call and then a visit from a man she knew only as “Lonnie,” who was accompanied by his brother.

After hearing “a thumping noise like someone being thrown against a wall,” the women were called downstairs, where they were forced at gunpoint to lie down on the floor, she said.

“They kept telling us not to say a word; that if we did, they’d blow our heads off,” the woman testified.

After more than an hour, during which she was raped, the woman said the three victims were marched upstairs, where the bedroom had been ransacked. The brothers tied their hands behind their backs, put pillow cases over their heads and ordered them into a walk-in closet.

“Lee was begging and pleading with them not to do it that way . . . that it didn’t have to be that way,” the woman said. “Sylvia was crying.

“They poured gasoline in the closet, then I could hear something being pushed up against the door and they lit the match. I could hear screaming.”

After pushing her way out of the closet, the woman said she tried to hide under the bed but was shot in the arm and buttocks and left for dead by a man wearing red and white Nike shoes and gray jeans, the clothes she remembered Lewis wearing.

She waited a few minutes, then fled the burning house, doused her burns with water and lay on the lawn until paramedics arrived. She said she was hospitalized for six months.

Police reported finding Bloodworth sleeping in a garage two blocks away with stolen jewelry belonging to the Gottsteins in his possession. Lewis was arrested a few days later in Green River, Utah, Martin in Denver. All three are being held without bail.

Defense attorney Joel Isaacson, who represents Lewis, said the defense will attempt to show at the trial that the prosecution’s star witness was so “based out” on cocaine on the murder night that she was unable to perceive and recall accurately, or perhaps that she was herself involved in a plan that went awry and purposely “fingered” the wrong suspects.