Before this episode published, I called Tiffany Horn.

I wanted to make sure she knew what was coming.

I wanted to let her know that we begin with her brother, Trevor.

She said to me, I put my love for him in this box in my heart and I don't open it often because it's too painful.

But she insisted he should be seen.

He deserves it.

And just so you know this episode of Hitman might be hard to hear listener, discretion is advised.

A blade of grass.

There was this single blade of grass on Trevor's cheek when the police found him on the morning of March third, nineteen ninety three.

He was lying in his crib wearing his white and blue Peachays.

One of the nurses would later testify that he was given a bath every evening before bed.

They were very thorough, and the nurse she knew that grass couldn't have been thereby accident.

He stayed in his wheelchair any time he went outside.

If he played, she said, it was on the rug or on the quilt in his room.

The prosecutors argued that the grass had to have come from the killer's hands, that he wrapped one hand around the boy's nose and mouth and the other around his track opening and left behind that blade of grass.

I came across the crime scene photos of Trevor last year and I tried not to look.

It almost felt disrespectful.

But this is the reality of what happened to him, As Tiffany said, I owed him a moment of acknowledgement of seeing him.

I understand if you've been trying to put Trevor out of your mind, if you'd rather I tell you more about Motown or this crazy book hit man, or the French publisher behind the murder manual, or maybe you just want me to hurry up and get to the part where they catch the killers.

But anytime someone tells me, oh, it's just to book, it's just a book, it's just a book.

I remember that a hitman entered a quiet home in the middle of the night and smothered an eight year old child.

I remember that blade of grass.

It wasn't an accident.

Trevor wasn't collateral.

His death was all part of the plan.

It was the plan.

Trevor had to die in order for Lawrence to inherit Trevor's money, but Millie had to die so that Lawrence could inherit all of it.

I'm Jasmine Morris from My Heart Radio and Hit Home Media.

This is Hitman.

It took eighteen months for detectives to complete their investigation into the triple murder of Trevor and Millie Horn and Janice Saunders, but it only took one day for police to establish a prime suspect in a motive.

Millie had seen this coming.

She knew.

She was very fearful for Trevor's life.

Millie's sister Maryland, and she was also fearful for herself because she always said, I will not die in an aeroplane crash.

If something ever happens to me, it's Lawrence Horn.

And all the sisters were there and we laughed about it.

We're like Millie, he's crazy, but he's not that crazy.

She actually said that to you.

She said that, she said, if anything ever happens to me, you all make sure that Lawrence Horn is never alone with Trevor.

Lawrence never took responsibility for Trevor, even on the day he was born.

I mean, he didn't even show up for the birth, so he had no connect into this child at all.

He showed no interest.

My brother being sick was such a turn off.

He totally rejected him.

And that was when my mom was finally really done with my dad, which is looking back, really sad for her, but I think she knew it just was never going to go the way she wanted it to go with him.

And so here's where I need to tell you about how and when Trevor's life suddenly became valuable to Lawrence Horn.

Remember when Trevor and his twin sister, Tammiel were born three months premature.

Trevor was really sick.

He had been born with underdeveloped lungs, but by the time he was one, he was exceeding doctor's expectations.

He was doing really well.

And then one day he went in for something routine at Children's Hospital in d C and there was some kind of accident.

He was without oxygen for seven or eight minutes, leaving him with significant brain damage.

They put him in the COLMA.

Yeah, you didn't give us very much hope, and they talked to Milly about removing him from life support.

So she talked to us about it and we said, Milly, you know, what's your decision, because I said he would you know, more than a vegetable.

She still wasn't sure what she was going to do, and so Milly went to his room and Trevor opened his eyes, looked urd smile, and that was the answer.

Doctors told Milly to put Trevor in a care facility.

They said that caring for him would be too much of a burden on her and her family.

Milly refused, here's Tiffany.

I mean she learned how to be a nurse, Like who does that?

She definitely did.

She knew his care better than the nurses that she fired, and she would fire them if they didn't do what she wanted them to do.

Milly made sure that Trevor had a life the same as any other child.

At a pool party, he's in the pool.

The nurse and Trevor and Millie, they're in the pool.

Halloween, he had his costume.

He got dressed up.

Actually I remember too.

One was a clown, another one was Peter Pain.

They said he would never talk.

Trevor learned to talk.

He used to say I love you.

His favorite story was Three Little Pigs.

He was so smart.

I would say the wolf would huff and he would puff.

He would be laughing so much.

Here's John Marshall, a lawyer and close family friend.

He was doing better and better and better and defining the odds, you know, Salts Corner, but by dint of determination of his mother and sure love.

That's who Milly was.

She was determined and willful.

It's like she never questioned what insurmountable things she had to do to protect the ones she loved.

It reminds me of this story Maryland told me about their childhood growing up in South Carolina.

During Jim Crow, our family decided that we would get a better education at an integrated school.

It was horrible.

I just couldn't believe that people could be so mean to me because of the color of my skin.

And there was this guy on the bus.

It was a white guy, and he was bigger than me and older than me, and every day he would push me, and one day I decided I am not going to take that anymore.

So when he pushed me, I pushed him back, and of course he pushed me down on a seat and he's beating me up.

I mean, he's really beating me up.

And Millie Millie came to my desfense.

Millie stepped in and the boys stopped beating Maryland and started in on Millie.

She was badly hurt.

She had to be taken to the hospital.

Her shoulder was dislocated.

She was not going to stand by it and the herd or simply so That's the way she was.

She was our big sister.

It wasn't until about three years after the accident when it became clear just how challenging and expensive it was going to be to care for Trevor.

That's when Milly decided to pursue a lawsuit against Children's Hospital.

John Marshall and Howard Siegel representator.

Here's John.

This was not a case where this family was going to make millions of dollars.

This was a case where whatever money that was going to be received out of the matter was going for Trevor's use.

And that was Millie's goal from day one was just how do I take care of him?

So John helped the family bring a lawsuit against Children's Hospital.

I had been in touch with Lawrence.

He called and we talked about it, and I explained to him the cases we saw.

It was at its core Millie and Trevor.

They had the bond.

That was the emotional heart of the case.

As we've heard from Tiffany, Lawrence was barely a father to Trevor.

Even still, the lawyers felt Lawrence should be listed in the suit.

They thought it played better to a jury, the idea that this estranged couple came together to fight for their son.

Here's Howard Siegel, John's co council.

The first time I ever met him was at the trial.

He made a good impression.

He was a big, nice looking guy, and Lawrence played his part.

John and Howard went back and forth with the hospitals insurance company for months.

Finally they got a settlement offer they thought was fair.

This is a really important moment, and so for the next couple of minutes, I'm just gonna let John and Howard tell you what happened next.

They offered a significant amount of money, and Millie was clear this was going to Trevor.

Every lawyer is different, but our philosophy was, if you get to a point where you can look at the client in the eye and say, you know, we can't guarantee you're gonna do better, and this number in this kind of a case, will if we invest it wisely, that he will be able to be taken care of so Milly was fine.

Lawrence Horn was sitting at council table with us, and Lawrence turned to us and he said, that's not enough.

And I turned to him and I said, what do you mean that's not enough.

It turned out that Lawrence Horn through a major bomb into the settlement.

He wrote down on a yellow pad with a red pen a million dollars times which was the interest rate back then is a hundred thousand a year, and he said, I came here expecting this for me.

I turned to him and I said, what makes you think you're entitled to one nickel of this child's money?

And he looked at me and he said, Trevor lives through me.

I assumed he meant that because Trevor was profoundly disabled and could not enjoy life, that when Lawrence took his money and wrote down Hollywood Boulevard in a BMW, that Trevor would be enjoying it.

I was stunned.

I've just never been so shocked by anything anybody said to me in my life.

It was the first time he had revealed himself, and we were floored.

It had just never been discussed that the parents were going to get any money at all.

I just never came up from that point on.

He just dug his heels in.

We took a recess.

I went out in the hall with John Marshall and I said, I have just looked into the eyes of pure evil.

This man scares me.

It was the way that he said it.

It was chilling, It was detached, It was matter of fact.

Lawrence Horn's only concern was what he was going to get out of it.

The Children's Hospital settlement came through and the family was awarded two million dollars, with roughly half of that going into a trust for Trevor and three dollars going to Millie, which she used to buy that big house in Silver Spring, with the whole wing devoted to Trevor's care.

Lawrence walked away with Millie's sister Maryland.

He felt that he got cheated, that he should have gotten more money, and it was all her fault.

As long as Lawrence was working at Motown, the majority of Trevor's medical bills were covered and the settlement money would go into that trust.

But then Lawrence lost his job.

In Trevor had exhausted the lifetime maximum benefits on Milly's insurance and we had to go to court for the first time to ask for some money to be used for Trevor's care, which meant that every month, now six thousand dollars the cost of Trevor's care was going to come out of Trevor's one point seven million dollar trust fund.

All of this timing was because these policies had run out and now we were cutting into Trevor's money.

There there's no accident about this timing.

This was all done to maximize the return to Lawrence.

I remember Millie being very wary, very agitated that something was amiss, and of course she was right.

A month later she was killed, and as we're about to learn, Lawrence Horn had been planning this for a very long time.

We'll be right back.

When you think about Hitman, you probably imagine the ones you've seen in movies, like John Wick, Jason Bourne, James Bond with his double ow license to kill.

They only killed bad men, men who deserved it.

The Hitman book plays on these same tropes.

The writer Rex Ferrell insists that he's quote the last recourse in these times when laws are so twisted that justice goes unserved.

But in this story, the mark was a defenseless child and two mothers.

So I know we've been jumping around a lot in the story telling you different bits of pertinent information.

But for the rest of this episode, I'm going to walk you through Lawrence's plan.

This wasn't just something that was done in a vacuum where my dad, in a crime of passion, just murdered them, which is not okay either way.

But there was a lot of planning.

There was a lot of time that passed by within the planning.

There was money exchange.

About a year before the murders, in the spring of Lawrence took a trip back home to Detroit and reconnected with family.

Here he is talking about that in a deposition.

You drove to Detroit?

Did you do it one day?

Yes?

You know how far it is the Detroit seven hours, five hundred miles?

And where did you stay in Detroit?

Had a relatives?

Relatives?

Did you when you were in Detroit?

Tommy Turner?

What else he related to, Oh, he's my mother's sisters son.

Lawrence hadn't seen his cousin, Thomas Turner in twenty years.

Turner would later take immunity, but according to his testimony, Lawrence talked about his divorce and said quote that he was having a problem seeing his children.

Turner didn't even know that Lawrence was married or had it's until this visit, but that's when he told Lawrence about his close friend, a straight preacher and spiritual advisor.

Turner drove a truck in the occasional taxicab and he'd helped this guy drom up business by passing out as cards and flyers that said things like that love problem must go, get your luck straightened out, feel good again.

Don't worry.

I got it.

I see where you just feel like giving up.

Listen at the darkest moment, there is a light.

All you need is faith in God, and get this He has given me to give unto you.

I know just what to do for all your problems.

That friend, James Edward Perry, turns out they met in prison thirteen years prior before becoming a spiritual advisor.

Perry once shot at a Michigan State trooper in an attempted bank robbery in the seventies.

Lawrence would visit his cousin more than once in the spring of NTO, and this is around the same time he started showing up in Maryland to see his kids.

Remember those recordings we'd played last episode, the ones he'd make while driving around with his daughters.

Where am I here?

Oh I got business?

Well, investigators found something else on those tapes.

At one point, he recorded himself driving the route from a daizen in Rockville, Maryland, the same one Perry would later stay at, to Milly's house.

He was not only pretending to be personable or caring for his family and spending time with his two daughters.

That's Lawrence Horns defense attorney Jeff O'Toole.

It became clear that when he was doing his videotaping he was he was planning the escape route for James Perry.

These trips out to Maryland were like reconnaissance missions.

And remember that moment in our last episode when he asked his two young daughters where Trevor's room was.

Which one?

Well, that's not all.

There was another tape where he asked Tiffany two videotape Trevor and where his room was in the house.

He was like, well, I have a video camera.

Do you think if I show you how to use it that you can?

You know, tape Trevor and like show me your new house.

That you keep talking about and I mean, obviously I'm going to do it.

He's my dad.

I went right in and came right out and gave it to him.

He made it seem like this was his way to try to learn more about his son.

I wanted him to be that dad.

I wanted him to like dig deep down and find in the love for his child.

I felt like he was so disappointed that he wasn't like a normal son that it almost broke him.

So I was trying to feel sympathetic towards my dad.

I'm trying to tell him, no, it's okay, Like you know, we've created this life and he's he's perfect.

You know, we love him.

Tiffany and her dad were close at one point, and he used that he definitely manipulated me.

He was just a liar, like he was just a sick person that I felt, just this obsessive need to like prove something or win, and he was willing to throw everything away, even his relationship with me.

And it wasn't the last time Lawrence would use Tiffany like this.

A day before the murders, late at night on March one, Tiffany got a phone call to a dorm room at Howard University.

He never called me, but he asked me whether my mom was going to be flying out the next morning because he wanted to talk to my sister.

And so I told him that my sister, if she wasn't home, would probably be at my aunt's house.

I called my mom right after I got off the phone with him.

He was like searching for information, which I found odd.

Tiffany said, over the course of their ten minute call, he asked her about Millie and Tammielle four or five times.

The following evening on March two, Millie also received a call.

I talked to Millie at night about ten o'clock.

She called to tell me guess who called me.

Lawrence called me, and she said, do you know I was actually nice to him.

I talked nice to him for a change.

So that's the last time I talked to her.

Lawrence was also asking Milly about Tammielle's whereabouts.

Here's Prosecutor Bob Dean.

Lawrence made sure that Tammielle, twin sister of Trevor, would not be home the night of the killing.

And you know, we had an information that that.

You know, he was careful about that, and I don't know what that means or shows other than the fact that you know, she didn't fit into the plans for the inheritance.

They ordered a copy of the book from Palinin Press.

They did it was like, oh my god, here it all is.

It was written out, So there were many similarities that say about what was said in this book and what was done, and some of the evidence that they hadn't covered also matched specifics.

Just so you know, there's no evidence that Lawrence ever read Hitman.

In fact, there's no evidence James Perry read it either.

Investigators never found an actual copy, but they found the Paladin Press catalog in his apartment with the book's title circled, and they got a copy of the check he made out to Paladin for two books, including Hitman, though that checked it bounce.

Paladin even shared the order form with investigators, so they believed he ordered it.

And the similarities between rex Ferrell's manual and the murders of Millie Horn, her son, Trevor, and Janice Saunders are difficult to ignore.

I'm going to walk you through some of those.

Now we've already told you about a few Hitman instructs, An explicit detail with photographs how to build a homemade silencer from material available in any hardware store.

The silencer is one of the most important tools a professional will ever have.

Again, we got that same actor to read these lines.

The silenced weapon, when fired will not draw attention.

Lack of adenda means more time.

More time means getting a job done right.

According to the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner for Maryland, Donald writes testimony, one of Janis Saunder's gunshot wounds indicated Perry likely used a silencer.

A hitman without a gun is like a carpenter without a Hammer's not very effective.

The first weapon listed in the basic Equipment Checklist for Beginners on page twenty one of Hitman is an a R seven rifle, exactly what was used.

Hitman goes on to instruct its readers on where to find the rifles serial number here's Bob Dean.

It suggested that you drill out the serial numbers to the weapon, which James Perry did.

But beyond obscuring the serial number, Hitman also explains that the gun barrel needs to be altered with a rattail file as well.

Each one of these items leaves its own definite mark and impression on the shell casing, which if any shell has happened to be left behind, can be matched to the gun under a microscope.

In the police laboratory, we found the file in the BA back yard, the file that was used to go into the barrel of the gun.

We had that file tested.

That file had elements of ammunition on the file.

It's clearly consistent with rubbing through and defacing the interior of a rifle.

Hitman suggests shooting at close range to ensure quote the desired result has been achieved.

It's best to shoot from a distance of three to six ft.

You'll not want to be at point blank range to avoid having the victim's blood splatter you or your clothing.

Ballistics showed Millie and Jennie were shot from about a foot and a half to three ft away, aimed for the head, preferably the eye sockets.

If you are a sharp shooter.

Lawrence Horns defense attorney again Jeff O'Toole, the book suggested shooting the victims in the eye because that was going to be the most assured way to to make sure they're dead.

That's an image from the book that you just can't.

You just can't let go.

And the reason Rex Ferrell recommends the a R seven in his book, it's a gun that's easily disassembled.

The book suggested that you dismantle the gun in the silence room and throw it along the way as you're escaping.

So they did a drag net search of these woods and they found a small piece of a gun, but it was the trigger mechanism only, which is an odd thing.

They were instructed to break the gun into many pieces and distribute them wherever, you know, felt like it.

We had an analysis done on the pieces of the gun and according to the FBI expert did he did a rust development analysis.

He felt that based upon the weather conditions of March of that year that they had been outside for you know, the side of the road for for several weeks, a matter of weeks, it was clear that this was the weapon, the weapon that was used.

If the hit was supposed to look like a burglary.

Messed the place up a bit, take anything of value that you can carry concealed.

There was some disheveling and disturbance of pieces of furniture.

There's a bookshelf that was overturned, but it didn't appear that much was stolen.

There were some items that were taken from um, the purse of Mildred.

Of course, you can't keep anything.

These items have to be ditched, along with your work clothes and the weapon.

Actually, the day of the murder, there was a jogger who found Mildred Horns credit cards and identification cards that had been taken from her purse hours before.

He had done exactly what the book said to do.

I've been thinking a lot about accountability as I report this story.

Was the book an accomplice of sorts?

The courts would later say just that the story is a whole tangled knot of accountability.

It's like that saying it's turtles all the way down.

Lawrence was clearly the mastermind.

And sometimes I'm tempted to just look through Perry to see Lawrence the hitman becomes a tool or a pawn or an instrument to just get the job done.

But it was James Perry's hands that killed Trevor.

It was his hands that left that blade of grass.

Lawrence recorded so many things as part of his plan.

The surveillance tapes, the LBI tape, the one where he's standing in front of his TV, clearly displaying the time and date, which was pretty much the exact time of the murders.

But there was one other recording the investigators found in the search of Lawrence's apartment, and it took everyone by surprise.

You heard an excerpt from this in our first episode.

Remember this call was made from a payphone not far from Millie's house, and investigators believed it was made just hours after the murders.

It's a little hard to understand, but basically you hear Lawrence answer the phone, and then another man we now know to be James Perry, presumably calling to say the job was done, all right?

Then you him right right.

It was cryptic, but investigators believed this meant he was going to take a photograph of Trevor to prove he'd done his job, but the noise of Trevor's alarm was distracting.

I didn't want to go.

Was this on an answering machine machine?

Remember those answering machines, And sometimes if you picked up too late, it would record exactly So is that what happened?

Horn didn't mean to record it.

I don't think he did.

It cuts off because actually it comes at the very end of this answering machine tape.

It literally ran out of tape.

The fact that this tape even exists is kind of hard to believe.

Lawrence's own defense attorney Jeff O'Toole.

So Lawrence was this person who taped everything.

He made a career of taping Stevie Wonder and all the different people and the songs that the Holland Brothers wrote.

He knew how to tape things well.

Unfortunately, he was taping his telephone conversation when Perry called him.

That was a tape recording that was accidentally either taped or certainly accidentally kept by Lawrence Horn.

What did he have to say about that tape?

You know, I think he shook his head Jasmine and said sort of.

I'm not sure we had the expression back then, but I think he said it is what it is.

I think he he wasn't able to say that wasn't his tape.

He wasn't able to say that was not James Perry.

The tape was was really something to hold up and go here it is, ladies and gentlemen.

Was there a smoking gun?

Probably The second phone call that Perry made to Horn was was a crucial one, of course, that was made you know, an hour or so after the murders.

The plan almost worked, They almost got away with it.

Perry left no identifying evidence behind.

Lawrence had his alibi, and if Perry hadn't checked into the hotel under his own name, who knows what would have happened.

Here's what we're going to talk about next week.

Even as investigators telled the Hitman and the mastermind, why are tapping their phones?

Building their case, Lawrence was trying to pull off the last piece of his plan, getting the one point seven million dollars and his son's trust fund.

Just one thing stood in his way, well, a couple of things.

Millie's sisters, my aunts were really strategic, especially my aunty Lane.

She made sure to file a civil suit like immediately to block my dad from receiving my brother's estate, which is essentially the reason why he had them murdered in the first place.

And that became like a primary goal, even without him being arrested, because we knew that was always about power and control, of course, but the money he wanted that money.

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 Latto is our story consultant.

Executive producers are Main gesh Ha, Tiktor and Me.

Mixing by Josh Rogison, Michelle Lance and Jacopo Penzo.

Our fact checkers are Austin Thompson and Natsumi Ajisaka.

Special thanks to Andrew Goldberg, the Montgomery County States Attorney's Office and the Criminal Department in Central Files at the Montgomery County Courthouse.

Our theme song by Alice McCoy in.

Additional music written and produced by the students at DIME, powered by the Detroit Institute of Music Education,