Lawrence Horn: From Motown Engineer to Murder-for-Hire Conviction

Lawrence Horn was an early Motown Records recording engineer who, three decades after helping shape hits like “My Girl” and “Shotgun,” hired a Detroit gunman to murder his ex-wife Mildred Horn, their eight-year-old quadriplegic son Trevor, and Trevor’s overnight nurse Janice Saunders at Mildred’s Silver Spring, Maryland home on March 3, 1993. His motive was money: Trevor had received a roughly $1.7 million medical malpractice settlement, and Horn, broke and behind on child support, stood to inherit if both mother and son were dead. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996, sentenced to life in prison without parole, and died behind bars in 2017.¹

His Years at Motown

Lawrence T. Horn, known as “L.T.,” joined Motown in late 1962 after leaving the U.S. Navy. He was 22. Berry Gordy Jr. hired him as a technician at $50 a week when the label was still operating out of its West Grand Boulevard headquarters in Detroit, the building known as “Hitsville U.S.A.”²³

Horn became one of Motown’s first full-time recording engineers. He helped build and modify the studio’s gear, playing a part in the upgrade from a three-track recording machine to an eight-track system by the mid-1960s. He was chief mixing technician on The Temptations’ 1965 hit “My Girl” and co-produced Junior Walker and the All Stars’ “Shotgun,” one of the few records on which he received a producer credit. He also worked sessions for Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and the Funk Brothers.²

The 1960s were Horn’s peak. He drove a Porsche and dressed well. When Motown moved to Los Angeles and was eventually sold to MCA, his career declined, and he ended up working as a tape librarian until the company laid him off in 1990. By 1993 he was unemployed, living in a run-down one-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles, struggling to pay rent and child support, and picking up occasional freelance work repairing computers.²

The Family and the Money

Mildred Horn, a 43-year-old American Airlines flight attendant, had married Lawrence Horn in the early 1970s and moved to Maryland in 1978 with their daughter, Tiffani. The couple later had twins, Trevor and Tamielle, born prematurely in 1984. When he was about thirteen months old, Trevor suffered catastrophic brain damage and cerebral palsy from a failed medical procedure, leaving him a quadriplegic who needed around-the-clock nursing care and an apnea monitor.⁴

A medical malpractice lawsuit produced a $2,750,000 settlement. Of that, $350,000 covered medical bills, $250,000 went to Mildred Horn, and $125,000 went to Lawrence Horn. A trust of $1,100,000 was set aside for Trevor, payable when he turned thirteen.⁴ Trevor’s care cost roughly $25,000 a month, and by early 1993 Mildred had exhausted the $500,000 lifetime maximum on her American Airlines insurance and had begun drawing on the settlement.⁵

Prosecutors said Horn, owing $16,000 in back child support, saw Trevor’s death as a payday. If both Trevor and Mildred died, Horn stood to inherit a substantial portion of an estate valued at roughly $1.84 million at the time of the murders.⁴ Janice Saunders, 38, was Trevor’s overnight nurse. She was on duty the night of the murders and was killed because she was there.⁶

How Horn Hired the Killer

Horn connected with James Edward Perry through his cousin Thomas Turner, a Detroit man who was a former prison acquaintance and close friend of Perry’s. Turner and Horn had been out of touch for about twenty years before reconnecting in the spring of 1992. During one of Horn’s visits, Turner suggested that Perry “might be able to assist” Horn with his “domestic problem” and handed him Perry’s business card, which read “spiritual adviser, cold reader, case buster.”⁴

Over the months that followed, Horn and Perry communicated using a telephone calling card issued under the fictitious name “Camilla McKinney,” obtained by Horn’s cousin Marsha Webb at his request. Investigators eventually traced 261 long-distance calls between Perry’s Detroit residence and Horn’s Los Angeles home, plus calls from pay phones around Rockville and Gaithersburg, Maryland to Horn’s number. Horn wired roughly $6,000 to Perry through Western Union under the fake sender name “George Shaw.”⁴⁷

Perry had no credit card, so Turner rented cars for him on multiple occasions between December 1992 and March 1993, including one covering March 1 through March 8, 1993, the window around the murders. Turner later testified against Horn under a grant of immunity.⁴

The Murders

Perry drove to Mildred Horn’s home in Silver Spring on the night of March 3, 1993. He checked into a Days Inn in Rockville at 12:23 a.m. and checked out at 6:00 a.m. The killings happened between roughly 2:30 and 5:15 a.m.⁴

Perry shot Mildred Horn and Janice Saunders in the eyes with an AR-7 rifle fitted with a homemade silencer. He killed Trevor by disconnecting the boy’s breathing tube.⁸ Prosecutors later demonstrated that Perry had followed at least 20 specific instructions from a Paladin Press book called Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, including guidance on weapon selection, silencer construction, serial number removal, and the use of stolen out-of-state license plates on his rental car.⁹ After the killings Perry disassembled the rifle, drilled out its serial number, and dumped the pieces along Route 28 in Montgomery County, where investigators later recovered them.⁴

How Investigators Caught Him

Detectives traced a pay phone call placed to Horn’s Hollywood apartment from a Denny’s near the crime scene on the night of the murders. Checking motels near the restaurant, they found that Perry had paid cash and left at dawn.¹⁰ Lead investigator Detective Craig Wittenberger obtained long-distance phone records from AT&T after searching Horn’s Los Angeles apartment, revealing the web of calls between the two men.⁴ Police also found the Paladin Press catalogue at Perry’s Detroit home and confirmed through the publisher that he had ordered Hit Man and a companion manual on building silencers.

In January 1994 the FBI brought Turner in for questioning. Turner called Horn from the FBI’s Detroit office, and Horn told him to hire a lawyer and say nothing, not knowing the FBI had been monitoring Turner’s phone under a court-authorized wiretap since November 1993.⁴ Perry was arrested in Detroit on July 19, 1994. Told that Horn was being arrested at the same moment in Los Angeles, Perry denied knowing him.⁷

Conviction and Sentence

Horn’s trial opened in Montgomery County Circuit Court in April 1996. Prosecutors sought the death penalty. Turner testified as a key witness, describing his role as middleman.¹¹ The state laid out the phone records, the Western Union transfers, and the inheritance motive.

On May 16, 1996, the jury convicted Horn of first-degree murder and murder conspiracy. In the penalty phase the panel spared him and sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.¹²

Perry was tried separately. A Montgomery County jury convicted him in October 1995 and he was sentenced to three death sentences, but the Maryland Court of Appeals later threw out the convictions over a 22-second taped phone call seized from Horn’s apartment that the court held was admitted in violation of Maryland’s wiretap statute.¹³¹⁴ At his 2001 retrial Perry was again convicted of all three murders, but jurors found it “not proven” that he was the principal in the first degree, which took the death penalty off the table. He received three life sentences without parole plus a life sentence for the conspiracy.¹⁵

The Lawsuit Against the Publisher

Relatives of the three victims sued Paladin Enterprises, the Colorado publisher of Hit Man, arguing the company had aided and abetted Perry by producing and marketing the book. In an unusual step, Paladin stipulated for purposes of a summary judgment motion that it intended to attract and assist criminals and knew the book would be used to plan and execute murder for hire.¹⁶ The federal district court in Maryland nevertheless granted summary judgment to Paladin in 1996, holding that the First Amendment barred the claims.

On November 10, 1997, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed. Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge J. Michael Luttig held that the First Amendment does not protect speech that constitutes aiding and abetting of criminal conduct, distinguishing “mere abstract teaching” of violence under Brandenburg v. Ohio from speech that prepares individuals for imminent lawless action. The court described Hit Man as a “step-by-step murder manual” with “no legitimate purpose beyond the promotion and teaching of murder.”¹⁷ Media organizations, including The Washington Post Company and The New York Times Company, filed amicus briefs opposing the ruling.¹⁸ The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in April 1998.

In May 1999, rather than face a jury, Paladin settled. The settlement was reported at roughly $5 million, paid by the publisher’s insurance carrier, and Paladin agreed to stop publishing and distributing Hit Man.¹⁹ University of Richmond law professor Rodney Smolla, who consulted on the case, called it “a landmark because it draws a line in the law that had not been drawn before.” Legal commentators widely described it as the first time in American publishing history that a publisher had been held financially liable for a crime committed by a reader.²⁰

What Happened to Horn

Lawrence Horn spent the rest of his life in prison and died in custody in 2017.¹ The engineer who had worked the boards for The Temptations and the Supremes died a convicted triple murderer, remembered not for the records he mixed but for a crime that gave American courts their first case holding a publisher financially answerable for a reader’s killings.

1
Adam P. White. Nowhere to Run
2
Washington City Paper. Hitsville USA
3
The Washington Post. Accused Went From Glamour of Motown to a Life of Modest Means
4
Maryland Court of Special Appeals. Perry v. State of Maryland
5
The Washington Post. Costs of Disabled Boy’s Care Ate Into His Settlement, Jurors Told
6
The Washington Post. Slain Women Were Shot in the Eyes
7
Court of Appeals of Maryland. Perry v. State of Maryland, No. 119
8
The Daily Record. Trial of Hitman Who Allegedly Killed Boy Brings Up Old Crime, Bitter Memories
9
Time. Hit Man
10
Los Angeles Times. Hit Man Book Linked to Triple Murder
11
The Washington Post. Cousin Says He Was Horn’s Middleman
12
The Washington Post. Horn Escapes Death Penalty in Triple Murder
13
The Washington Post. Perry Gets 3 Death Sentences
14
Court of Appeals of Maryland. Perry v. State of Maryland, No. 23
15
The Washington Times. Perry Gets Life in Prison Without Parole
16
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Rice v. Paladin Enterprises
17
Justia. Rice v. Paladin Enterprises, 128 F.3d 233
18
Society of Professional Journalists. Hitman Decision a Landmark Battle
19
Publishers Weekly. Paladin Press Pays Millions to Settle Hit Man Case
20
Los Angeles Times. Publisher of Hit Man Manual Settles Lawsuit