The Wonderland Murders
Eddie Nash
Besides drug-dealing, the Wonderland gang did a heavy trade in stolen property. Holmes sold the goods to Nash, who paid him in "nugget-sized rocks of base worth a thousand dollars" each, Holmes wrote in his autobiography.
Born Adel Gharib Nasrallah in Palestine, Nash lived a twisted version of the immigrant's dream in the United States. He was a hard worker and a crafty businessman, who graduated from running a hot-dog stand on Hollywood Boulevard in 1960 to owning a dozens of nightclubs, ranging from gay dance parlors to strip clubs, in the late '70s. He supplemented his nightclub revenues by selling drugs to the patrons, police say.
Nash's sartorial trademark was a pair of tight, brightly colored bikini briefs. When he received visitors at his Studio City mansion, he seldom wore anything more. In the 1997 porn industry satire Boogie Nights, actor Alfred Molina portrays Nash brilliantly in one scene where he freebases cocaine, then prances about in his colorful undies, dancing to Night Ranger's "Sister Christian."
Schiller accompanied Holmes on drug runs to the Nash household and other places, waiting in the car for hours with her pet Chihuahua, Thor, while Holmes bought coke, and smoked it.
When Holmes was on a bad trip or jonesing for drugs, he'd beat Schiller or prostitute her for money, she told Crime Library. After she came back from a trick, he'd make her take a scalding bath and scrub her clean, all the while berating her for losing the innocence that first caught his eye, said Schiller, who's working on an autobiography titled The Road Through Wonderland.
On December 25, 1980, Holmes sold Schiller to Nash as a Christmas present, and when she returned, he beat her so hard her tooth pierced her lip. Tired of the abuse, Schiller fled to stay with her mother in Oregon, but Holmes wouldn't leave her alone. For the first couple of months, she refused to take his phone calls, but eventually his apologies and promises to change wore her down.
He met her at LAX carrying a couple of suitcases he swiped from the baggage carousel, and told her he had one more deal to make, a big one, before the two of them could blow L.A. and start over in a new town, leaving the murk of drugs and violence forever behind them.
Naively, she believed him.