13 1/2-Year-Old Question: Murderer or Manipulator?

Who is this engaging man across the table?

An innocent victim hounded by an unethical detective?

Or the sinister character who paid two hit men to kill his former business partner and wife, and then watched the murders through binoculars?

When the man across the table is Mike Goodwin, it’s either one or the other.

I spoke with Goodwin recently to find out what it’s like to live for 13 1/2 years under the cloud of a double-murder investigation.

How does it feel to know that the cops and others, maybe even your friends, believe you’re a killer?

Over the years, authorities have made little secret of their suspicions that Goodwin was involved in the murders of auto racing legend Mickey Thompson and his wife, Trudy, outside their San Gabriel Valley home on March 16, 1988.

So even though no charges have ever been filed, Goodwin has lived for more than a decade with at least some people believing him a killer.

On the day of our conversation, with his attorney and public relations spokesman sitting in, Goodwin says he fully expects to be indicted by an Orange County grand jury. Over the course of our 90 minutes together in a glass-enclosed conference room at his lawyer’s Irvine office, Goodwin says he has even begun to welcome the indictment--if that’s what it takes to resolve things.

He asserts his innocence, says he has a couple of theories as to who might have killed the Thompsons and bridles at what he says is a concerted, unethical effort to “make it look like it’s me.”

I told him going in that I wasn’t interested in airing the stacks of evidence he says he’s collected--information he says he’ll use to defend himself if he is ever charged.

Goodwin agreed, but insisted that the central issue is how investigators “doctor evidence, threaten witnesses and make false statements all the time” in pursuing the case against him. He repeatedly offers documents, rebuttals, accusations, theories.

Goodwin and Thompson were estranged business partners at the time of the slayings. The theory, as previously laid out by Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives, is that Goodwin was angry at Thompson because he’d lost a lawsuit to him.

Goodwin, now 57, concedes that he was a logical investigative target, but so, he says, were countless other people. Indeed, Sports Illustrated wrote that some Thompson friends wondered early on if loan sharks hadn’t killed Thompson.

Goodwin, dressed this day in a dark suit and tie, says the case consumes him.

“I wake up 20 to 30 times a night when cars pull up, wondering if they’ve come to illegally arrest me. Every car I hear wakes me up. I probably go to the blinds a dozen times during the day when I hear a car pull up.”

He is divorced, and works out of the mobile home he shares with his 87-year-old father in Dana Point.

“I don’t do anything else but this. I have an office, floor to ceiling with evidence . . . .

“This is an execution case. I could get killed for a crime I didn’t commit. . . . When you’re in prison, you don’t get to put this stuff together. You can’t do any of this work. It’s too late if it’s not done now.”

Goodwin, by reputation, is a swaggering, confident businessman. His skill as a motocross promoter was matched by Thompson’s with off-road car racing. The two joined forces in 1984 but eventually butted heads.

Goodwin says he’s tired of being identified by Thompson family members and authorities as the likely killer.

“I want it to be over with,” he says. “If that requires an indictment instead of this hanging over me for 13 more years, so be it. I don’t want to be living like this a year from today. I want to be a productive member of society and don’t want to wake up several times a night wondering if they’re coming to get me.”

I reach Goodwin’s chief antagonist--Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Det. Mark Lillienfeld--and tell him of my time across the table from Goodwin. “That’s 90 minutes you’ll never get back,” he says wryly.

“I know him incredibly well,” Lillienfeld says, “better than any criminal defendant I’ve ever dealt with. He’s a pretty remarkable guy. He’s a brilliant guy, certainly, in his own right.”

I ask Lillienfeld what he means. “You ever see ‘The Natural’ with Robert Redford? He tells people in the movie he wants people to say, ‘There goes Roy Hobbs. He’s the best [hitter] there ever was.’

“I think of other people of the same ilk as Mr. Goodwin--that hide behind lawyers, that are cowards, bullies and spin fictitious tales, that are pretty much evildoers--and I think, ‘There goes Mr. Mike Goodwin, the best there ever was.’ He’s a very manipulative, opportunistic guy.”

I’m no mind reader. Talk is cheap in the criminal justice world. It’s sometimes hard to know whether to believe the suspect or the police.

Goodwin says he’s not the monster that Lillienfeld suggests. Eerily, Lillienfeld uses almost identical language to rebut what Goodwin says about him.

Each calls the other a master manipulator.

Only one reflection in the mirror is true.

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Dana Parsons writes a column Wednesday, Friday and Sunday for the Orange County edition of The Times.