You know, you don't really expect the suspected murderer to call you back and confess. I mean, that's just not what happens. My name is Kevin Sullivan. I'm a senior correspondent for the Washington Post. I've been at the Post for twenty eight years, and in three I covered the murders that Lawrence Horn was involved with. On March three of that year, Millie Horn, her eight year old son Trevor, and his nurse, Janice Saunders were murdered. Back then, Sullivan was a general assignment reporter in the Montgomery County Maryland Bureau. Montgomery County is not the kind of place where we have a lot of triple murders. It's a sort of affluent, relatively peaceful kind of place, so this was a big deal for us. Sullivan was assigned to track down Millie's ex, Lawrence, who was living out in Los Angeles. I ended up finding a phone number and I called the number and I heard, you know, this is Lawrence Rren. Please leave me a message. And a few hours later my phone rang. He said, yeah, this is Laurence. Sorry, and you were trying to reach me, And I said, I'm just calling about what happened, and I wondered if you had anything to say about it, and said, well, what happened? What are you talking about? And I said, you haven't heard from the Montgomery County Police and he said, no, I have one message on my machine. It was from you. What are you talking about? What happened? So I said, Mr Horne, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but there's been a murder here and your wife, Millie and your son Trevor had been killed. And there was silence on the other end of the phone for a couple of seconds, and then I heard him say Millie Trevor and he started crying. There are lots of other details about this, and i've've completely forgotten, but that I will always remember. A few weeks after they spoke on the phone, Sullivan flew out to l A to see if he could interview Lawrence in person. He came to the door and I said, Mr Horn, and he said yeah, and I said, I'm Kevin Sullivan from the Washington Post. We've been we've been talking on the phone. And he looked at me and he said, how did you find me? The most remarkable thing was that he opened the door and let me in. I was fully prepared for him to say, I really can't talk about this. I have nothing to say, and close the door in my face. In his article, he described Lawrence's quote dark and cramped one bedroom apartment off grungy Hollywood Boulevard. Well, I remember walking down the hallway thinking this is kind of a creepy place. And and when he came to the door, he himself was kind of a mess. He was very heavy, he was wearing an old sweatsuit. He looked kind of schlobby. He had a baseball cap on, and he had the like tight little brat tail kind of braids, you know, sticking down from the back of the cap. But he just seemed sort of worn down by life. He didn't look like the kind of high flying, you know, motown record executive that he kind of portrayed himself as. On the phone, Lawrence spent the next several hours telling him his whole life story, as afternoon turned into evening and the apartment grew dark around them, and he was adamant about his innocence. I mean, he portrayed himself as very close to Berry Gordy, you know. He told me that he taught Stevie Wonder how to sign his name. He was making the case to me that somebody like him could never have done this. He was a great guide, had this great career. He said something like, if I had done this, how could I go on living with with something like that on my conscience? It would mean that I'm a monster. I'm Jasmine Morris from My Heart Radio and hit Home Media. This is hit Man. I've been looking into this book, Hitman, a technical manual for independent contractors, for years, and I've been talking to Tiffany Horn for almost as long. And after talking to Tiffany, I got a pretty clear picture of who her dad was. But the thing that's kind of hard to fathom is actually how big of a deal he was in Motown back in the day. He was partly responsible for some of the most important songs that are important to so many people. So I wanted to talk to those who were there while he was helping to make these things. Lawrence Horn is the person that made everything happen for me. That's music producer Tony bon Jovi, and I have to ask any relation to s Jon bon Jovi is my second cousin and I produced the records that got him signed and made the hits for him. In the early sixties, as a teenager in New Jersey, Tony had been teaching himself to be a recording engineer. He thought he'd figured out some of the tricks to the Motown sound and he wanted to meet with someone from the label. Motown instructed me to go to New York where Lawrence Horn was. He said, you have a tape to play for me, and I said, yes, I do, and I played him what I had done to some of the recordings and he was impressed. And that's when he said to me, would you like to come to Detroit to Motown. Yeah, it's like asking a ten year old he wants to go to Disneyland. So at seventeen, Tony found himself rubbing elbows with Motown's biggest stars, all at the direction of Lawrence Horn. You know, here's Smoky Rominson had the Miracles and all those hit records that I'm sitting there next to him. I'm in high school and I'm sitting next to him or Stevie Wonder. Lawrence made me feel comfortable. You're no, don't worry when you go in there. Don't feel that they're in inmidating you. You're just like them. Tony worked for Motown until the early seventies and then he went on to a successful music producing career of his own, but he kept in touch with Lawrence. As professional as my relationship was with him, it was very personal as well, because he nurtured that because I was a kid, and he would say, yeah, you learned a lot out in Detroit, didn't you. I said, yeah, I did, all because of you. Lawrence Thomas Horne was born in Detroit on April eighteenth, n His mother owned a modeling school and agency, and his father was a baker. Even as a kid, he was good with electronics and he attended Cast Technical High School, a magnet school in Detroit. Here's Lawrence's daughter, Tiffany. I mean he was friends with Diana Ross when they were in high school. You know their legendary. It's like you look back now sometimes I can't even believe he was part of that, but he was. And to better understand Lawrence who he was and who he became, we've got to first talk about how Motown became what it is. It's part of the legend of Detroit, A young songwriter named Barry Gordy was working his day job on the assembly line of the Lincoln Mercury car plan but he had an idea. What if he applied that same production model to cultivate musicians and make hit records. Well. In nineteen fifty nine, with eight dollars borrowed from his family, he launched his own record label. He bought an old house on West Grand Boulevard and a fixed a sign to the front that read Hitsville, USA, a move that could be read as arrogant or prophetic, maybe both. By nineteen sixty one, Motown scored its first number one hit with the marvel Atts Please, Mr Postman, I am Juanna are Royster. I am from Detroit, Michigan, and at one time I worked at Motown. Wanna was there at the beginning, sitting at the front desk as a receptionist. The essence of Monttown then and now is a out loves and family. Whether you were family or not, it made no difference. We were all family. Gordy fostered talent like Marvin Gay, the Temptations, Mary Wells, Stevie Wonder, so many artists that are considered legendary today. When I was in eighth grade, I joined a group called the Primets. Eventually we auditioned for Mr Barry Gordy. That's Mary Wilson, one of the original Supremes. Within a few years, Barry Gordy's Motown had become one of the most successful black owned businesses in the US, all during a time when segregation was still common practice and a growing civil rights movement was gaining momentum. He didn't find us, We found him, and which continued to go there until he finally relinquished the idea that we weren't good enough and signed us. In fact, that's how most of the artists came to Motown. They heard about this place where young people, especially black people because it was in the black neighborhood, would go then get side. At two years old and just out of the Navy, Lawrence Horn had served on board an aircraft carrier where he hosted his own radio show under the DJ name LT The Tall Cool One, Your Man with the Plan, his plan get a job with Barry Gordy. Want to recognized him when he showed up at Motown for an interview. When I became a student at cast Technical High School, I remembered Lawrence being six six and just being shocked that you know, this tall, slender, very handsome guy was walking down the hall. Are you kidding me? Lawrence also made a good impression on Motown's Boss. Well, he got a position as a recording artist, I said, artist. I sorry, he was a recording engineer. I mean he was an artist in a way. And while you might not recognize Lawrence's name, you definitely know his work. If you look at some of those old Motown records, there's actually little codes on them. This was common back in the day. You can find them on any vinyl record, but you'll see letters, and if you see an L on any Motown record, that stands for Lawrence. The other thing that Barry Gordy put on those labels was the phrase the sound of Young America, which Motown definitely was Any Holland one third of the Holland ten and that's about it. Hdh wrote, arranged, and produced so many of the songs that helped to find the Motown sound in the sixties, like Baby Love, You Keep Me Hanging On, and Stop in the Name of Love. Any said he once heard it described as Oreo music. Black on the outside went on the inside like the Oriole Cookie because the chords that we were used were really pop chords, but we just had an R and B feeling because of the way we were brought up. Here's Mary Wilson again. What was the Motown sound? Can you describe it? You know what it has to do with a lot of different elements and and yes, everyone has trying to say what it is. It's like love. Can you tell what love is? Now? I guess you can't. Obviously Mr Gordy was the person on top, but it was all of the workers under him who made the music what it is. I actually met Lawrence Horn in the studio a as he ran the sessions, and you know he was at in the pioneer days when they were still kind of creating the motown sound. In his autobiography To Be Loved, Barry Gordy wrote, quote, engineers are often some of the most important, yet overlooked factors in a record success. From those early days when Lawrence Horn had to handle most of the recording and mixing, We've been fortunate to build one of the best engineering teams in the business, and Lawrence was the master of the control room as chief recording engineer. He handled all the recording and technical equipment. I think I would even ask him, you know, why were you never a singer or a musician, And he would say he liked the behind the scenes and that was what he was good at. For him, that was nirvana. He absolutely loved recording, you know what I mean. His face would light up and when things did not work right, it bothered him because he was one who wanted everything to be just right. He was also known for being quirky and technical. His personality was extremely off. I mean, he was more of an intellectual. For an example, you know this character that Spark from Star Trek, that was really his idle. That's the first time I've ever said, you know, he was the one from this other plan and he himnd is that's way over the earth things. Here's Adam White, a music journalist who co authored a book on Motown. He actually gets his first credit on a couple of Moton albums in sixty three for editing and engineering two albums that Motown put out by Dr Martin Luther King. His famous speeches the Great March on Washington and the Great March to Freedom in Detroit in June sixty three, I have a dreen this afternoon one day right here in Detroit. For an engineer to actually be named on a Moton album sleeve back then, believe me, was pretty unusual. And you know the number one hit My Girl by the Temptations, Lawrence engineered that. I understand he worked on Stop in the Name of Love, and I know he worked with the song Shotgun Shotgun. That's the hit single Shotgun by Junior Walker in the All Stars. Gordy shared a producer credit with Lawrence on the song, which he rarely did. The song Shotgun actually starts with the sound of a shotgun blast. And while this is a wildly popular song, you know it if you heard it, it's really hard to hear the same once you know this story. Of course, I'm thinking about this in the context of this show with a lot of hindsight, and I want to play you this song and a lot of the others that Lawrence helped create, But after months of asking, the publisher wouldn't give us the rights to use them here. I mean, I can't speculate why, but it does remind me of that first phone call I made to Palette and Press about the book hit Man, the one that was clearly unwanted. Knowing where the rest of the story goes, it's not a huge surprise. I want to jump ahead to the early days of the investigation, which went on for a really long time and became incredibly frustrating and intense, because I want to talk about something else that Lawrence recorded. But first you have to remember, whoever had killed Millie Trevor in Janice left no evidence behind that could identify him, and investigators were a long way from discovering the truth behind this triple murder. On March twelfth, a little over a week later, investigators got a warrant and executed a search on Lawrence's Los Angeles apartment, where he lived with his girlfriend at the time. The police gathered lots of cassette tapes. Prosecutor Bob Dean, they looked at records that he kept back on that day. He was a computer specialist for the early nineteen nineties. He was very advanced in his computer assessories and equipment. Lawrence recorded more than music, He recorded everything. Really, he was just ahead of his time, regularly documenting everyday moments in a way that is now so commonplace. He taped phone conversations. He had a cam quarter that he'd used to record trips around town with his daughters. This is the audio from some of those tapes. Okay, detectives found hours and hours of footage like this in Lawrence's apartment, but one tape in particular stood out to prosecutor Bob Dean. Can you describe it? Do you remember? He had set up the camera in his TV room videoed himself watching TV time stamped the night of the murder. In this video, Lawrence is filming his TV that's tuned to a rolling channel guide, clearly displaying the time and date. It reads eleven o three pm March second Pacific Standard time, showing he was definitely miles away when Millie, Trevor, and Janice were killed and he wanted to prove it. Here's John Marshall, a lawyer and close family friend. So you think, well, that was pretty clever, until you think, why would you do that? We'll be right back. It's actually kind of an adorable, meat cute scenario. That's Lawrence and Millie's daughter, Tiffany. They basically had like a whirlwind romance. It was pretty quick as the sixties come to a close. Motown undergoes some major changes. Barry Gordon decides to relocate Motown to Los Angeles to be closer to the film and TV industry. The hit making team of Holland Dozer Holland leave the label, also move out west and take Lawrence with them. In two on an American Airlines flight from Detroit to l A, a young flight attendant named Millie Marie catches his eye. Here's Millie's sister, Maryland Farmer. Millie told me that she had met this man and she was really dazzled by the fact that he was recording people like Diana Ross and the Supremes and Stevie Wonder. She was excited about that, but wow, she'd met someone who was big time. Millie was born in ninety in a small town called round Oh, near the city of Walterboro, South Carolina. Our parents were sharecroppers and we were poor, you know, but I don't ever remember being hungry, and my dad was adamant that we had to take care of each other. Millie wanted to get out and see the world, and as a young woman, she figured there was one way she could accomplish that goal and get paid for it. Here's Tiffany. She would read these penny romances my aunt's tell me, and many times the star was a flight attendant, she'd be up all night under the covers with a flashlight reading them. Like she was obsessed with these books. I mean, she was living her dream life. To get hired as a flight attendant during the nineteen fifties and sixties, a woman had to meet very strict requirements. It buried by airline, but in general, you had to be female, unmarried, and under thirty. You had to weigh less than one thirty five pounds and be no taller than five ft eight. On top of that, airlines just weren't hiring many black women. I know she applied to one and she was rejected because of her knees. They said that her knees were too big. Can you believe that Lawrence had definitely met his match? A woman is driven and willful as he was. They were larger than live personalities. And it's funny because when they got together it was even more charismas so on their own they were their own big personalities. They'd walk into a room and you have this beautiful black woman with green eyes and blonde hair and this tall guy with curly hair and eyes are on them immediately. They were both magnetic. Tiffany showed me a photo of them together from around this time. Millie is sitting on Lawrence's lap with his arm around her waist. Their style is peak nine seventies, brown leather, high waisted pants. They're both beaming. My dad, he knew what he wanted, and he pursued her, and he bought her jewelry and took her on trips to Vegas, and they ended up getting married on one of those trips in secret. That was August three, just a year after they met. He was thirty three, she was twenty four. If they wanted to do something, they did it. And I think that's probably one of the things that attracted them to each other. Whether it was considered a luxury thing or something where maybe a lot of black people didn't have access to at that time, I would say, honestly, like my parents were never afraid. Tiffany was born about a year after Million Lawrence were married. Even she remembers being swept up in her parents aura. I can remember being in the car on a ski trip and just being in the back seat and just wishing that was my life all the time, that they could get along and that it was the three of us and we were together all the time. This was before or my brother and sister were born, but something was always a little off between her parents. Tiffany told me this story about how Lawrence and Millie were on one of their trips, this time in Mexico. Millie couldn't swim, but one day at the beach, Lawrence helped her out onto a raft anchored just offshore, and then he just left her there. He just swam away, and so she sat there crying until a stranger came to help her back, and he was gone. He just disappeared. That jumps out at me as like unusually cruel that he did to her. Well, why don't you tell me about your relationship? Describe that is towards the end of the match, it was unique, unpredictable, A fast, me stormy. That's Lawrence Horne's voice. This recording is from a deposition he gave for a civil case. We'll get into later in this story, but I wanted you to hear him describe his relationship with Milly in his own words. Did it change over that three Yes? And could you tell us what the nature of the change was. It was a series of events. I recall it as being just constantly one negative on top of another. Trevor, the twins were born in four They were premature. Millie had a problem with the birth that created a problem. Because Tiffany and I weren't here, it just got worse. When you hear Lawrence describe the marriage, it sounds a lot like the way Tiffany talks about it. Big personalities, huge emotional swings, breakups, reconciliations. But there's something darker. Here's what he told Kevin Sullivan, the Washington Post reporter after the murders. He talked at length about Millie, and he really threw her under the bus. He said that she was volatile and emotional and unpredictable and violent with him sometimes. And and I said, well, really, everybody else seems to say that she's this wonderful person and and he said, well, I mean I think I saw a side of her that nobody else did. And he and he really kind of went on and on, and at one point, I remember he even suggested maybe she had done it. And I said, oh, come on, I don't think a mother could arrange something like this, And he said, yeah, no, I guess that's crazy. But you know, my life with her was so so topsy turvy. Back to the late nineties seventies, Lawrence and Millie are separated. Millie and Tiffany moved to Maryland to be close to her family, and Lawrence stayed in l A. But they kept going round and round for another five years. In in nine three, the same year Paladin put out hit Man, a technical manual for independent contractors, they reconciled again. He never really would let her go. I mean she would date and he would pop back up. I think she had filed for divorce, but she wasn't divorced. She was even engaged at one point, but he was able to get her to break it off. He had such a power over my mom because she truly loved him, and you know that's how she ended up being pregnant again with my brother and sister. I was shocked. I thought the marriage was over. You know, I knew something was going on. I would hear her whispering on the phone. I'm thinking, what is going on? So I'm like listening at the door, like ear to the door trying to figure out what's happening with my mom. In twins Tammiel and Trevor were born, but even with Trevor and critical condition, Lawrence showed no interest. And it was summer, which meant Tiffany was visiting her father in California. He refused to fly back and blamed me, and he told my aunts who were calling, that I wanted to go to the Motown Picnic, which was true. I was nine and it sounded fun. This was an annual event where Tiffany got to hang out with her favorite artist, Stevie Wonder. I didn't want to go sit in the hospital, but I had no idea what was happening. We wouldn't leave until afterwards, which is awful and horrible, and I can't believe he did that to my mother, and he put me in the middle. And that's one of my worst memories and when I kind of really realized my dad wasn't totally my ally like he made himself out to be. At the same time, Lawrence's marriage to Milly was falling apart, so was his career. By the mid eighties, popular music as well as Young America had really moved on from Motown. He would always bring me music that I'm like, well, this is not what I want. I want Madonna and I want Prince and I thought Michael Jackson used to be on your label, and he's like, not anymore. So I had all of the old Jackson five albums and I had Lionel Richie. That was kind of cool because Lionel Richie had like a moment, you know, But other than that, it was like, yeah, this is easy listening and this is from the sixties. I don't want this. Lawrence's venture with the hit makers Holland Osher Holland didn't work out either, and he went back to work for Barry Gordy. I don't think Barry Gordy ever looked at him the same, so he felt like he kind of was being punished Over the years for that. Lawrence fell from chief recording engineer to tape librarian, cataloging and organizing the work from his golden years in the basement of Motown's l A operations. It's a task that must have been humiliating for someone with so many hits on his resume. Here's Eddie Holland, the technical people. They sort of moved into the basement part of this building. I visited him a couple of times. He was engineering somewhat, but he was doing mostly cattle up it. He had been that lawless. He grew up dealing with more talent. He could do better than most people. By seven, Lawrence and Millie were officially divorced and locked in a bitter custody battle. He'd been ordered to pay six fifty dollars a month in child support payments, on top of the seventy five dollars per month he was paying in health insurance, and court records show that at one point he had three hundred sixty dollars in his bank account. My dad had been at the top of the world, and the sixties and seventies were his prime. He talked a lot about legacies. Motown did create a legacy, and he was part of that. He was very proud of that. And the eighties it started to decline for him. He didn't have as much money anymore and he was trying to hold on. That was kind of painful to see. That experience is seeing your parents kind of fall from grace in real time. In Motown, founder Berry Gordy would sell the label to M. C. A in a Boston based investment firm for sixty one million dollar and Lawrence was let go in it's very difficult for people to continue living a life that's no longer as glamorous and as you know, financially gratifying as it was. That's Mary Wilson again. Perhaps that's something that may have happened with Mr. Horn. I couldn't tell you if that's how it happened, but I'm sure a lot of that is what was going on. And that's when sometimes certain things, you know, happened, and they do desperate things because they're trying to, you know, make their life work again. His life sprailed down when so many things were not going the way you know, he wanted or thought or expected. Whenever I think about what was going on between Million Lawrence and really will never know for sure, but I keep coming back to the first chapter of Hitman. Rex Ferrell actually starts off like he's a teacher with a reading list for aspiring contract killers. Read and reread pertinent articles relating to weapons and techniques that interest you in magazines such as Soldier of Fortune, New Breed, and Gung Ho. He says, keep up quote on New trends and developments, as well as new gadgets and inventions. Get into detective fiction. Quote, chuckle through the trench coats and warped personalities. It's worth it, he says, because with the right attitude, in an open mind, almost any good mystery or murder story can provide some ingenious new methods of terrorizing, victimizing, or exterminating. Sometimes the warped imagination of a fiction writer we will point out and obvious but somehow never before realized method of pacification or body disposal. Most important of all, keep in mind this was but, he says, Quote, A subscription to your local newspaper maybe the wisest investment with the highest return that you'll ever make. He instructs the reader. Each morning, sip your coffee and carefully study the paper. Quote to see who in your area might be your next employer or victim. Follow closely news or rumors of particularly nasty divorce proceedings involving any wealthy or socially prominent couples. Chances are one could use your discreete professional services, or perhaps I'm not so wealthy acquaintance who prefers not to become entangled and messy divorce proceedings. You may find it a proper time to collect on that old life insurance policy. By the early nineties, Lawrence and Millie Horn's divorce and the subsequent custody battle had definitely gotten messy. My mother didn't trust him at all. She felt like he was up to something. I mean, she made it very clear he couldn't come in to see Trevor, especially when she wasn't at home. According to written testimony from the custody case, Lawrence claimed that Milly interfered with his attempts to see Tiffany and the twins Tammiell and Trevor. He wrote, quote chief other advised me that if I wanted to exercise my visitation with Trevor, I would not be permitted to sit on any of her furniture or the floor, that I would not be permitted to use the bathroom during the four hour time period allotted for the visit. On the other hand, Millie said he never made an effort. As she put it, quote, he found the time to ski and aspen and vow while I made decisions regarding a life threatening condition concerning our ill son, Trevor, and caring for Tammiel and Tiffany at the same time. But all of a sudden, in the year before the murders, Lawrence was showing up in Maryland a lot. My mom said that he could come and pick us up after school when he was in town, but he couldn't come into the driveway. She was very adamant about that, and so, yeah, I told him, you can pick us up, but you have to, you know, meet us at the end of the driveway. We'll walk down my sister and I. So he would greet us sometimes with the camp quarter and he would be, you know, videotaping us. I've been good, You've been good? Are you never? Never not good? When are you ever bad? I? Never? So why would you say I've been good? My dad would record everything for the most part, as much as he could. When we would get in the car with him. In these video tapes, they go to a toy store, they go out to eat, drive around and listen to music. Who was that saying? He would act like it was part of his video diary of his visit to take back to our family members in California, like his mom, his sister, my cousins that lived there. Why it's Disney's my married from time. That's not true. Have we I kind of believed him. He definitely found it important to tape us. None of it seems terribly unusual when you remember that recording was second nature to Lawrence. But you can't miss the skepticism in Tiffany's voice. Why yeah, out flee everybody stay high? Why think I want to think that they can see They've already seen that, showed them a picture. H don't feel like that? Why you have a big dam And then there's this moment in the tape Lawrence is picking the girls up near the driveway. Where is Trevor? Which one open you up front? Up there? That's where is Trevor? Which one is his room? Where up front? Hitman is a production of I Heart Radio and Hit Home Media. It's produced and reported by me Jasmine Morris. Our supervising producer is Michelle Lance. Mark Loto is our story consultant. Executive producers are Main Guesh, Hatika Door and Me. Mixing by Josh Rogison, Michelle Lance and Jacobo Penzo are fact checkers are Austin Thompson and not Sumi Ajisaka. Voice acting by Levi Petrie. Special thanks to Andrew Goldberg, Michael Garofolo, Tori Piquette, Christopher Hasiotis, and Nathan Morris. Our theme song by Alice McCoy and additional music written and produced by students at DIME, powered by the Detroit Institute of Music Education,

You know, you don't really expect the suspected murderer to call you back and confess. I mean, that's just not what happens. My name is Kevin Sullivan. I'm a senior correspondent for the Washington Post. I've been at the Post for twenty eight years, and in three I covered the murders that Lawrence Horn was involved with. On March three of that year, Millie Horn, her eight year old son Trevor, and his nurse, Janice Saunders were murdered. Back then, Sullivan was a general assignment reporter in the Montgomery County Maryland Bureau. Montgomery County is not the kind of place where we have a lot of triple murders. It's a sort of affluent, relatively peaceful kind of place, so this was a big deal for us. Sullivan was assigned to track down Millie's ex, Lawrence, who was living out in Los Angeles. I ended up finding a phone number and I called the number and I heard, you know, this is Lawrence Rren. Please leave me a message. And a few hours later my phone rang. He said, yeah, this is Laurence. Sorry, and you were trying to reach me, And I said, I'm just calling about what happened, and I wondered if you had anything to say about it, and said, well, what happened? What are you talking about? And I said, you haven't heard from the Montgomery County Police and he said, no, I have one message on my machine. It was from you. What are you talking about? What happened? So I said, Mr Horne, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but there's been a murder here and your wife, Millie and your son Trevor had been killed. And there was silence on the other end of the phone for a couple of seconds, and then I heard him say Millie Trevor and he started crying. There are lots of other details about this, and i've've completely forgotten, but that I will always remember. A few weeks after they spoke on the phone, Sullivan flew out to l A to see if he could interview Lawrence in person. He came to the door and I said, Mr Horn, and he said yeah, and I said, I'm Kevin Sullivan from the Washington Post. We've been we've been talking on the phone. And he looked at me and he said, how did you find me? The most remarkable thing was that he opened the door and let me in. I was fully prepared for him to say, I really can't talk about this. I have nothing to say, and close the door in my face. In his article, he described Lawrence's quote dark and cramped one bedroom apartment off grungy Hollywood Boulevard. Well, I remember walking down the hallway thinking this is kind of a creepy place. And and when he came to the door, he himself was kind of a mess. He was very heavy, he was wearing an old sweatsuit. He looked kind of schlobby. He had a baseball cap on, and he had the like tight little brat tail kind of braids, you know, sticking down from the back of the cap. But he just seemed sort of worn down by life. He didn't look like the kind of high flying, you know, motown record executive that he kind of portrayed himself as. On the phone, Lawrence spent the next several hours telling him his whole life story, as afternoon turned into evening and the apartment grew dark around them, and he was adamant about his innocence. I mean, he portrayed himself as very close to Berry Gordy, you know. He told me that he taught Stevie Wonder how to sign his name. He was making the case to me that somebody like him could never have done this. He was a great guide, had this great career. He said something like, if I had done this, how could I go on living with with something like that on my conscience? It would mean that I'm a monster. I'm Jasmine Morris from My Heart Radio and hit Home Media. This is hit Man. I've been looking into this book, Hitman, a technical manual for independent contractors, for years, and I've been talking to Tiffany Horn for almost as long. And after talking to Tiffany, I got a pretty clear picture of who her dad was. But the thing that's kind of hard to fathom is actually how big of a deal he was in Motown back in the day. He was partly responsible for some of the most important songs that are important to so many people. So I wanted to talk to those who were there while he was helping to make these things. Lawrence Horn is the person that made everything happen for me. That's music producer Tony bon Jovi, and I have to ask any relation to s Jon bon Jovi is my second cousin and I produced the records that got him signed and made the hits for him. In the early sixties, as a teenager in New Jersey, Tony had been teaching himself to be a recording engineer. He thought he'd figured out some of the tricks to the Motown sound and he wanted to meet with someone from the label. Motown instructed me to go to New York where Lawrence Horn was. He said, you have a tape to play for me, and I said, yes, I do, and I played him what I had done to some of the recordings and he was impressed. And that's when he said to me, would you like to come to Detroit to Motown. Yeah, it's like asking a ten year old he wants to go to Disneyland. So at seventeen, Tony found himself rubbing elbows with Motown's biggest stars, all at the direction of Lawrence Horn. You know, here's Smoky Rominson had the Miracles and all those hit records that I'm sitting there next to him. I'm in high school and I'm sitting next to him or Stevie Wonder. Lawrence made me feel comfortable. You're no, don't worry when you go in there. Don't feel that they're in inmidating you. You're just like them. Tony worked for Motown until the early seventies and then he went on to a successful music producing career of his own, but he kept in touch with Lawrence. As professional as my relationship was with him, it was very personal as well, because he nurtured that because I was a kid, and he would say, yeah, you learned a lot out in Detroit, didn't you. I said, yeah, I did, all because of you. Lawrence Thomas Horne was born in Detroit on April eighteenth, n His mother owned a modeling school and agency, and his father was a baker. Even as a kid, he was good with electronics and he attended Cast Technical High School, a magnet school in Detroit. Here's Lawrence's daughter, Tiffany. I mean he was friends with Diana Ross when they were in high school. You know their legendary. It's like you look back now sometimes I can't even believe he was part of that, but he was. And to better understand Lawrence who he was and who he became, we've got to first talk about how Motown became what it is. It's part of the legend of Detroit, A young songwriter named Barry Gordy was working his day job on the assembly line of the Lincoln Mercury car plan but he had an idea. What if he applied that same production model to cultivate musicians and make hit records. Well. In nineteen fifty nine, with eight dollars borrowed from his family, he launched his own record label. He bought an old house on West Grand Boulevard and a fixed a sign to the front that read Hitsville, USA, a move that could be read as arrogant or prophetic, maybe both. By nineteen sixty one, Motown scored its first number one hit with the marvel Atts Please, Mr Postman, I am Juanna are Royster. I am from Detroit, Michigan, and at one time I worked at Motown. Wanna was there at the beginning, sitting at the front desk as a receptionist. The essence of Monttown then and now is a out loves and family. Whether you were family or not, it made no difference. We were all family. Gordy fostered talent like Marvin Gay, the Temptations, Mary Wells, Stevie Wonder, so many artists that are considered legendary today. When I was in eighth grade, I joined a group called the Primets. Eventually we auditioned for Mr Barry Gordy. That's Mary Wilson, one of the original Supremes. Within a few years, Barry Gordy's Motown had become one of the most successful black owned businesses in the US, all during a time when segregation was still common practice and a growing civil rights movement was gaining momentum. He didn't find us, We found him, and which continued to go there until he finally relinquished the idea that we weren't good enough and signed us. In fact, that's how most of the artists came to Motown. They heard about this place where young people, especially black people because it was in the black neighborhood, would go then get side. At two years old and just out of the Navy, Lawrence Horn had served on board an aircraft carrier where he hosted his own radio show under the DJ name LT The Tall Cool One, Your Man with the Plan, his plan get a job with Barry Gordy. Want to recognized him when he showed up at Motown for an interview. When I became a student at cast Technical High School, I remembered Lawrence being six six and just being shocked that you know, this tall, slender, very handsome guy was walking down the hall. Are you kidding me? Lawrence also made a good impression on Motown's Boss. Well, he got a position as a recording artist, I said, artist. I sorry, he was a recording engineer. I mean he was an artist in a way. And while you might not recognize Lawrence's name, you definitely know his work. If you look at some of those old Motown records, there's actually little codes on them. This was common back in the day. You can find them on any vinyl record, but you'll see letters, and if you see an L on any Motown record, that stands for Lawrence. The other thing that Barry Gordy put on those labels was the phrase the sound of Young America, which Motown definitely was Any Holland one third of the Holland ten and that's about it. Hdh wrote, arranged, and produced so many of the songs that helped to find the Motown sound in the sixties, like Baby Love, You Keep Me Hanging On, and Stop in the Name of Love. Any said he once heard it described as Oreo music. Black on the outside went on the inside like the Oriole Cookie because the chords that we were used were really pop chords, but we just had an R and B feeling because of the way we were brought up. Here's Mary Wilson again. What was the Motown sound? Can you describe it? You know what it has to do with a lot of different elements and and yes, everyone has trying to say what it is. It's like love. Can you tell what love is? Now? I guess you can't. Obviously Mr Gordy was the person on top, but it was all of the workers under him who made the music what it is. I actually met Lawrence Horn in the studio a as he ran the sessions, and you know he was at in the pioneer days when they were still kind of creating the motown sound. In his autobiography To Be Loved, Barry Gordy wrote, quote, engineers are often some of the most important, yet overlooked factors in a record success. From those early days when Lawrence Horn had to handle most of the recording and mixing, We've been fortunate to build one of the best engineering teams in the business, and Lawrence was the master of the control room as chief recording engineer. He handled all the recording and technical equipment. I think I would even ask him, you know, why were you never a singer or a musician, And he would say he liked the behind the scenes and that was what he was good at. For him, that was nirvana. He absolutely loved recording, you know what I mean. His face would light up and when things did not work right, it bothered him because he was one who wanted everything to be just right. He was also known for being quirky and technical. His personality was extremely off. I mean, he was more of an intellectual. For an example, you know this character that Spark from Star Trek, that was really his idle. That's the first time I've ever said, you know, he was the one from this other plan and he himnd is that's way over the earth things. Here's Adam White, a music journalist who co authored a book on Motown. He actually gets his first credit on a couple of Moton albums in sixty three for editing and engineering two albums that Motown put out by Dr Martin Luther King. His famous speeches the Great March on Washington and the Great March to Freedom in Detroit in June sixty three, I have a dreen this afternoon one day right here in Detroit. For an engineer to actually be named on a Moton album sleeve back then, believe me, was pretty unusual. And you know the number one hit My Girl by the Temptations, Lawrence engineered that. I understand he worked on Stop in the Name of Love, and I know he worked with the song Shotgun Shotgun. That's the hit single Shotgun by Junior Walker in the All Stars. Gordy shared a producer credit with Lawrence on the song, which he rarely did. The song Shotgun actually starts with the sound of a shotgun blast. And while this is a wildly popular song, you know it if you heard it, it's really hard to hear the same once you know this story. Of course, I'm thinking about this in the context of this show with a lot of hindsight, and I want to play you this song and a lot of the others that Lawrence helped create, But after months of asking, the publisher wouldn't give us the rights to use them here. I mean, I can't speculate why, but it does remind me of that first phone call I made to Palette and Press about the book hit Man, the one that was clearly unwanted. Knowing where the rest of the story goes, it's not a huge surprise. I want to jump ahead to the early days of the investigation, which went on for a really long time and became incredibly frustrating and intense, because I want to talk about something else that Lawrence recorded. But first you have to remember, whoever had killed Millie Trevor in Janice left no evidence behind that could identify him, and investigators were a long way from discovering the truth behind this triple murder. On March twelfth, a little over a week later, investigators got a warrant and executed a search on Lawrence's Los Angeles apartment, where he lived with his girlfriend at the time. The police gathered lots of cassette tapes. Prosecutor Bob Dean, they looked at records that he kept back on that day. He was a computer specialist for the early nineteen nineties. He was very advanced in his computer assessories and equipment. Lawrence recorded more than music, He recorded everything. Really, he was just ahead of his time, regularly documenting everyday moments in a way that is now so commonplace. He taped phone conversations. He had a cam quarter that he'd used to record trips around town with his daughters. This is the audio from some of those tapes. Okay, detectives found hours and hours of footage like this in Lawrence's apartment, but one tape in particular stood out to prosecutor Bob Dean. Can you describe it? Do you remember? He had set up the camera in his TV room videoed himself watching TV time stamped the night of the murder. In this video, Lawrence is filming his TV that's tuned to a rolling channel guide, clearly displaying the time and date. It reads eleven o three pm March second Pacific Standard time, showing he was definitely miles away when Millie, Trevor, and Janice were killed and he wanted to prove it. Here's John Marshall, a lawyer and close family friend. So you think, well, that was pretty clever, until you think, why would you do that? We'll be right back. It's actually kind of an adorable, meat cute scenario. That's Lawrence and Millie's daughter, Tiffany. They basically had like a whirlwind romance. It was pretty quick as the sixties come to a close. Motown undergoes some major changes. Barry Gordon decides to relocate Motown to Los Angeles to be closer to the film and TV industry. The hit making team of Holland Dozer Holland leave the label, also move out west and take Lawrence with them. In two on an American Airlines flight from Detroit to l A, a young flight attendant named Millie Marie catches his eye. Here's Millie's sister, Maryland Farmer. Millie told me that she had met this man and she was really dazzled by the fact that he was recording people like Diana Ross and the Supremes and Stevie Wonder. She was excited about that, but wow, she'd met someone who was big time. Millie was born in ninety in a small town called round Oh, near the city of Walterboro, South Carolina. Our parents were sharecroppers and we were poor, you know, but I don't ever remember being hungry, and my dad was adamant that we had to take care of each other. Millie wanted to get out and see the world, and as a young woman, she figured there was one way she could accomplish that goal and get paid for it. Here's Tiffany. She would read these penny romances my aunt's tell me, and many times the star was a flight attendant, she'd be up all night under the covers with a flashlight reading them. Like she was obsessed with these books. I mean, she was living her dream life. To get hired as a flight attendant during the nineteen fifties and sixties, a woman had to meet very strict requirements. It buried by airline, but in general, you had to be female, unmarried, and under thirty. You had to weigh less than one thirty five pounds and be no taller than five ft eight. On top of that, airlines just weren't hiring many black women. I know she applied to one and she was rejected because of her knees. They said that her knees were too big. Can you believe that Lawrence had definitely met his match? A woman is driven and willful as he was. They were larger than live personalities. And it's funny because when they got together it was even more charismas so on their own they were their own big personalities. They'd walk into a room and you have this beautiful black woman with green eyes and blonde hair and this tall guy with curly hair and eyes are on them immediately. They were both magnetic. Tiffany showed me a photo of them together from around this time. Millie is sitting on Lawrence's lap with his arm around her waist. Their style is peak nine seventies, brown leather, high waisted pants. They're both beaming. My dad, he knew what he wanted, and he pursued her, and he bought her jewelry and took her on trips to Vegas, and they ended up getting married on one of those trips in secret. That was August three, just a year after they met. He was thirty three, she was twenty four. If they wanted to do something, they did it. And I think that's probably one of the things that attracted them to each other. Whether it was considered a luxury thing or something where maybe a lot of black people didn't have access to at that time, I would say, honestly, like my parents were never afraid. Tiffany was born about a year after Million Lawrence were married. Even she remembers being swept up in her parents aura. I can remember being in the car on a ski trip and just being in the back seat and just wishing that was my life all the time, that they could get along and that it was the three of us and we were together all the time. This was before or my brother and sister were born, but something was always a little off between her parents. Tiffany told me this story about how Lawrence and Millie were on one of their trips, this time in Mexico. Millie couldn't swim, but one day at the beach, Lawrence helped her out onto a raft anchored just offshore, and then he just left her there. He just swam away, and so she sat there crying until a stranger came to help her back, and he was gone. He just disappeared. That jumps out at me as like unusually cruel that he did to her. Well, why don't you tell me about your relationship? Describe that is towards the end of the match, it was unique, unpredictable, A fast, me stormy. That's Lawrence Horne's voice. This recording is from a deposition he gave for a civil case. We'll get into later in this story, but I wanted you to hear him describe his relationship with Milly in his own words. Did it change over that three Yes? And could you tell us what the nature of the change was. It was a series of events. I recall it as being just constantly one negative on top of another. Trevor, the twins were born in four They were premature. Millie had a problem with the birth that created a problem. Because Tiffany and I weren't here, it just got worse. When you hear Lawrence describe the marriage, it sounds a lot like the way Tiffany talks about it. Big personalities, huge emotional swings, breakups, reconciliations. But there's something darker. Here's what he told Kevin Sullivan, the Washington Post reporter after the murders. He talked at length about Millie, and he really threw her under the bus. He said that she was volatile and emotional and unpredictable and violent with him sometimes. And and I said, well, really, everybody else seems to say that she's this wonderful person and and he said, well, I mean I think I saw a side of her that nobody else did. And he and he really kind of went on and on, and at one point, I remember he even suggested maybe she had done it. And I said, oh, come on, I don't think a mother could arrange something like this, And he said, yeah, no, I guess that's crazy. But you know, my life with her was so so topsy turvy. Back to the late nineties seventies, Lawrence and Millie are separated. Millie and Tiffany moved to Maryland to be close to her family, and Lawrence stayed in l A. But they kept going round and round for another five years. In in nine three, the same year Paladin put out hit Man, a technical manual for independent contractors, they reconciled again. He never really would let her go. I mean she would date and he would pop back up. I think she had filed for divorce, but she wasn't divorced. She was even engaged at one point, but he was able to get her to break it off. He had such a power over my mom because she truly loved him, and you know that's how she ended up being pregnant again with my brother and sister. I was shocked. I thought the marriage was over. You know, I knew something was going on. I would hear her whispering on the phone. I'm thinking, what is going on? So I'm like listening at the door, like ear to the door trying to figure out what's happening with my mom. In twins Tammiel and Trevor were born, but even with Trevor and critical condition, Lawrence showed no interest. And it was summer, which meant Tiffany was visiting her father in California. He refused to fly back and blamed me, and he told my aunts who were calling, that I wanted to go to the Motown Picnic, which was true. I was nine and it sounded fun. This was an annual event where Tiffany got to hang out with her favorite artist, Stevie Wonder. I didn't want to go sit in the hospital, but I had no idea what was happening. We wouldn't leave until afterwards, which is awful and horrible, and I can't believe he did that to my mother, and he put me in the middle. And that's one of my worst memories and when I kind of really realized my dad wasn't totally my ally like he made himself out to be. At the same time, Lawrence's marriage to Milly was falling apart, so was his career. By the mid eighties, popular music as well as Young America had really moved on from Motown. He would always bring me music that I'm like, well, this is not what I want. I want Madonna and I want Prince and I thought Michael Jackson used to be on your label, and he's like, not anymore. So I had all of the old Jackson five albums and I had Lionel Richie. That was kind of cool because Lionel Richie had like a moment, you know, But other than that, it was like, yeah, this is easy listening and this is from the sixties. I don't want this. Lawrence's venture with the hit makers Holland Osher Holland didn't work out either, and he went back to work for Barry Gordy. I don't think Barry Gordy ever looked at him the same, so he felt like he kind of was being punished Over the years for that. Lawrence fell from chief recording engineer to tape librarian, cataloging and organizing the work from his golden years in the basement of Motown's l A operations. It's a task that must have been humiliating for someone with so many hits on his resume. Here's Eddie Holland, the technical people. They sort of moved into the basement part of this building. I visited him a couple of times. He was engineering somewhat, but he was doing mostly cattle up it. He had been that lawless. He grew up dealing with more talent. He could do better than most people. By seven, Lawrence and Millie were officially divorced and locked in a bitter custody battle. He'd been ordered to pay six fifty dollars a month in child support payments, on top of the seventy five dollars per month he was paying in health insurance, and court records show that at one point he had three hundred sixty dollars in his bank account. My dad had been at the top of the world, and the sixties and seventies were his prime. He talked a lot about legacies. Motown did create a legacy, and he was part of that. He was very proud of that. And the eighties it started to decline for him. He didn't have as much money anymore and he was trying to hold on. That was kind of painful to see. That experience is seeing your parents kind of fall from grace in real time. In Motown, founder Berry Gordy would sell the label to M. C. A in a Boston based investment firm for sixty one million dollar and Lawrence was let go in it's very difficult for people to continue living a life that's no longer as glamorous and as you know, financially gratifying as it was. That's Mary Wilson again. Perhaps that's something that may have happened with Mr. Horn. I couldn't tell you if that's how it happened, but I'm sure a lot of that is what was going on. And that's when sometimes certain things, you know, happened, and they do desperate things because they're trying to, you know, make their life work again. His life sprailed down when so many things were not going the way you know, he wanted or thought or expected. Whenever I think about what was going on between Million Lawrence and really will never know for sure, but I keep coming back to the first chapter of Hitman. Rex Ferrell actually starts off like he's a teacher with a reading list for aspiring contract killers. Read and reread pertinent articles relating to weapons and techniques that interest you in magazines such as Soldier of Fortune, New Breed, and Gung Ho. He says, keep up quote on New trends and developments, as well as new gadgets and inventions. Get into detective fiction. Quote, chuckle through the trench coats and warped personalities. It's worth it, he says, because with the right attitude, in an open mind, almost any good mystery or murder story can provide some ingenious new methods of terrorizing, victimizing, or exterminating. Sometimes the warped imagination of a fiction writer we will point out and obvious but somehow never before realized method of pacification or body disposal. Most important of all, keep in mind this was but, he says, Quote, A subscription to your local newspaper maybe the wisest investment with the highest return that you'll ever make. He instructs the reader. Each morning, sip your coffee and carefully study the paper. Quote to see who in your area might be your next employer or victim. Follow closely news or rumors of particularly nasty divorce proceedings involving any wealthy or socially prominent couples. Chances are one could use your discreete professional services, or perhaps I'm not so wealthy acquaintance who prefers not to become entangled and messy divorce proceedings. You may find it a proper time to collect on that old life insurance policy. By the early nineties, Lawrence and Millie Horn's divorce and the subsequent custody battle had definitely gotten messy. My mother didn't trust him at all. She felt like he was up to something. I mean, she made it very clear he couldn't come in to see Trevor, especially when she wasn't at home. According to written testimony from the custody case, Lawrence claimed that Milly interfered with his attempts to see Tiffany and the twins Tammiell and Trevor. He wrote, quote chief other advised me that if I wanted to exercise my visitation with Trevor, I would not be permitted to sit on any of her furniture or the floor, that I would not be permitted to use the bathroom during the four hour time period allotted for the visit. On the other hand, Millie said he never made an effort. As she put it, quote, he found the time to ski and aspen and vow while I made decisions regarding a life threatening condition concerning our ill son, Trevor, and caring for Tammiel and Tiffany at the same time. But all of a sudden, in the year before the murders, Lawrence was showing up in Maryland a lot. My mom said that he could come and pick us up after school when he was in town, but he couldn't come into the driveway. She was very adamant about that, and so, yeah, I told him, you can pick us up, but you have to, you know, meet us at the end of the driveway. We'll walk down my sister and I. So he would greet us sometimes with the camp quarter and he would be, you know, videotaping us. I've been good, You've been good? Are you never? Never not good? When are you ever bad? I? Never? So why would you say I've been good? My dad would record everything for the most part, as much as he could. When we would get in the car with him. In these video tapes, they go to a toy store, they go out to eat, drive around and listen to music. Who was that saying? He would act like it was part of his video diary of his visit to take back to our family members in California, like his mom, his sister, my cousins that lived there. Why it's Disney's my married from time. That's not true. Have we I kind of believed him. He definitely found it important to tape us. None of it seems terribly unusual when you remember that recording was second nature to Lawrence. But you can't miss the skepticism in Tiffany's voice. Why yeah, out flee everybody stay high? Why think I want to think that they can see They've already seen that, showed them a picture. H don't feel like that? Why you have a big dam And then there's this moment in the tape Lawrence is picking the girls up near the driveway. Where is Trevor? Which one open you up front? Up there? That's where is Trevor? Which one is his room? Where up front? Hitman is a production of I Heart Radio and Hit Home Media. It's produced and reported by me Jasmine Morris. Our supervising producer is Michelle Lance. Mark Loto is our story consultant. Executive producers are Main Guesh, Hatika Door and Me. Mixing by Josh Rogison, Michelle Lance and Jacobo Penzo are fact checkers are Austin Thompson and not Sumi Ajisaka. Voice acting by Levi Petrie. Special thanks to Andrew Goldberg, Michael Garofolo, Tori Piquette, Christopher Hasiotis, and Nathan Morris. Our theme song by Alice McCoy and additional music written and produced by students at DIME, powered by the Detroit Institute of Music Education,