A Big Hole Shot in a Big Murder Case

For the 16 months he’s sat in Orange County Jail awaiting trial on double murder charges, Michael Goodwin has fumed that the case against him is manufactured. To many, it no doubt sounded like the standard refrain from someone accused of murder.

Now, Goodwin’s cause has gotten a big boost from the unlikeliest source: the district attorney’s office that is prosecuting him.

Last week, prosecutors conceded a major point brought to their attention by Goodwin’s lawyers: that the 9-millimeter handgun prosecutors have repeatedly said Goodwin gave to the killers of Mickey and Trudy Thompson in 1988 couldn’t have been one of the murder weapons. In a letter to a state appeal court deliberating a pivotal jurisdictional issue in the case, the D.A.’s office said it was doing so “to ensure that the court’s opinion does not rely on an inference we believe to be incorrect.”

That’s a polite way to acknowledge a major screw-up in a double murder case.

The timing couldn’t be worse for prosecutors, who are trying to convince the three-judge appellate panel that Orange County has legal jurisdiction to try killings that occurred in Los Angeles County. In an earlier ruling, the panel took the unusual step of asking Orange County prosecutors to more convincingly justify why the case should be tried here.

For Goodwin, 58, the stakes are immense. Given the disinclination that Los Angeles County has shown over the years to file charges in the case, how the appellate panel rules may well determine whether he ever stands trial. If the panel denies jurisdiction to Orange County prosecutors, the charges would be dismissed and would have to be filed by Los Angeles County prosecutors.

In their letter, Orange County prosecutors said the firearms disclosure doesn’t gut their case before the appeal court. They may be right -- but, at minimum, it eliminates a key peg in their theory of the killings. Perhaps more damaging is that it raises obvious questions about the thoroughness and competence of the investigation and bolsters Goodwin’s contention that investigators are stretching to make a case against him.

Thompson, a race car driver who once held the land speed record and later was a pioneer in the racing promotion business, was gunned down along with his wife outside their Bradbury home in 1988 by two masked gunmen who have never been identified. Investigators looked into the Goodwin-Thompson connection because the two had ended a rancorous business relationship that resulted in a lawsuit and a judgment against Goodwin.

With the case lying fallow for years, the Orange County district attorney filed charges against Goodwin in December 2001 -- 13 1/2 years after the crime. To justify filing the case in Orange County, prosecutors had to establish a link between the killings and Goodwin’s local residence.

The allegation that Goodwin supplied the gun was one of three main elements the Orange County D.A.’s office has used in claiming jurisdiction. The other two elements -- that Goodwin gave the killers a stun gun and that he scoped out the area near the killings in the days before they occurred -- also have been disputed by Goodwin.

Prosecutors have argued in court papers that a 9-millimeter gun Goodwin bought in 1984 wasn’t accounted for at the time of the killings. He had bought one just like it 10 days after the killings and later asked a gun store owner about tracing old guns.

“Considered together,” prosecutors had argued, “this evidence supports an inference that [Goodwin] supplied a weapon from Orange County for use in the murders. After the killings, [Goodwin] had to go out and buy a new gun because he had to dispose of the one used in the crime.”

Prosecutors abruptly changed their minds last week when Goodwin’s attorneys provided them with information -- from both the gun manufacturer and an FBI firearms manual -- that the telltale characteristics on the kind of gun Goodwin owned before the killings couldn’t have fired the fatal shots.

I tried to reach two of the prosecutors involved in the case but couldn’t. A spokeswoman for the D.A.’s office also declined to comment.

Goodwin’s attorneys were more than willing to talk.

Jeffrey Benice said the defense only recently uncovered the ballistics discrepancy because it had been immersed in checking out tens of thousands of pages of potential evidence. He said Los Angeles sheriff’s Det. Mark Lillienfeld, the driving force behind the investigation of Goodwin since 1997, should have known long ago that Goodwin’s gun couldn’t have fired the fatal shots.

“Any facts -- and you can put quotes around that word -- to implicate Mike Goodwin are either outright falsehoods or distortions,” Benice said. “It’s outrageous.”

Jeffrey Friedman, another Goodwin attorney, says the ballistics error “cuts the heart out of half of their argument [on jurisdiction] and also discloses serious concerns about the credibility of the witness [Lillienfeld] upon whom the other half rests.”

What he means is that Lillienfeld testified at the preliminary hearing, at which Goodwin was bound over for trial, about many aspects of the case, including what other potential witnesses allegedly told him. “Our contention is that Det. Lillienfeld has massaged everything in this case to fit with his theory of the case, whether it’s accurate or not.”

Reached at his office, Lillienfeld owned up to the ballistics mistake. “That’s what we do,” he said. “We operate in an ethical manner, and when we realize we make a mistake, we bring it to the court’s attention.”

When I asked how he could overlook something as crucial as the ballistics, he first said, “That I cannot tell you. I just do not have the answer for you.” A moment later, he said that it hadn’t been overlooked but that information had been misinterpreted.

When I first spoke to Lillienfeld 19 months ago about Goodwin, he was unsparing in depicting Goodwin as a crafty killer. But when asked last week if he was still convinced of Goodwin’s guilt, he begged off. “I don’t render those kind of statements to the press,” he said.

What he does, he said, is “gather facts and present them to the court.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.