Man Held in Deaths of Son and Ex-Wife : Courts: Hollywood engineer is accused of trying to get $2-million inheritance by hiring a hit man to kill the paralyzed boy.

A Hollywood recording engineer has been arrested and charged with hiring a hit man who suffocated the engineer’s paralyzed 8-year-old son and shot his former wife and the boy’s nurse to death, court officials said Thursday.

Prosecutors say Lawrence T. Horn ordered the killings last year in Silver Spring, Md., in an effort to inherit about $2 million from a 1990 settlement with a Washington hospital, where the boy had been involved in an accident that left him a quadriplegic.

But the boy’s relatives tied up the settlement with a lawsuit designed to prevent Horn from getting the money. As a result, Horn was unable to pay off the alleged hit man, convicted felon James Edward Perry, and Perry’s repeated phone calls demanding payment eventually provided the evidence needed to make the arrests, a source close to the case said Thursday.

Horn, 54, and Perry, 45, were indicted Tuesday on three counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy. Both were arrested later that day--Horn at his apartment in Los Angeles and Perry at his home in Detroit.

Perry’s attorneys have indicated he will fight extradition, but Horn’s Beverly Hills lawyer, Donald B. Marks, said at a Los Angeles Municipal Court hearing Thursday that his client--who once worked for Motown Records in Detroit--will go to Maryland voluntarily to stand trial.

“He will fight these charges,” Marks said. “He has protested his innocence since the very first day.”

Teresa Whalen, an assistant state’s attorney in Maryland who will be prosecuting the case, said the bodies of Trevor Horn, his 43-year-old mother, Mildred Elizabeth Horn, and Trevor’s nurse, Janice Saunders, 38, were found at the Horn home by Mildred Horn’s sister, Vivian Rice, on the morning of March 3, 1993.

The two women had been shot several times in the face at close range. Both were sprawled on the floor.

The blind, paralyzed boy was lying in his bed. His breathing tube--attached to a respirator that operated around the clock--had been wrenched from his throat.

Police determined quickly that someone had broken into the house during the night through a small basement window, killed all three occupants and fled in the family van. The vehicle was found abandoned a few blocks away.

Trevor’s twin sister, Tamielle, had spent the night at Vivian Rice’s home. The twins’ older sister, Tiffani, now 20, was away at college.

Although the tall, burly engineer insisted that he had been in Hollywood when the crime was committed--an alibi corroborated by a girlfriend-- detectives theorized that he might have hired someone to do the job.

Police soon learned that Horn had made a videotape of the route from downtown Washington to the home where the slayings occurred, and that he had obtained tapes Tiffani had shot earlier of the interior of the house--which he had never seen, a source said.

Police also learned about the hospital’s settlement money, which Horn stood to inherit with the deaths of Mildred Horn and his son.

Officials say Trevor and his twin were born prematurely, and although she grew up strong and healthy, he suffered from asthma. Eleven months after his birth, a respirator at Children’s Hospital failed while Trevor was undergoing treatment for his respiratory disorder.

Sources said Trevor suffered severe brain damage in the accident. The boy required around-the-clock nursing care and needed the constant assistance of a respirator, equipped with an emergency backup battery, to breathe.

Under the settlement reached in 1990, Trevor amassed an estate that now has an estimated value of about $2 million.

Six months after the slayings, Rice--acting on behalf of Tiffani and Tamielle Hunt--filed a suit to block Lawrence Horn from inheriting Trevor’s estate.

“The family uniformly believes that he committed the crime,” a source said.

By last fall, a grand jury had begun investigating the case. A court order was obtained authorizing the tapping of Lawrence Horn’s telephone.

In the months that followed, Horn received calls from Perry, whom Horn had met through mutual friends in Detroit, sources said. Perry--who has served prison terms in Michigan for armed robbery and assault with intent to rob--wanted payment for the killings, but Horn said “he couldn’t get his hands on the money,” the sources said.

Times staff writer James Bornemeier in Washington contributed to this story.