Would you raise your right handswer do you soundly declaring a firm and the families of Burdery that the testimony you should give should be the truth, though truths about the truth?

I do.

You've heard short excerpts from this deposition in previous episodes, and I told you i'd explain it later.

Well, that's what we're gonna do now.

And that term deposition is going to come up a lot, So for those who aren't sure what it means, just know that it's testimony taken under oath to be used as evidence in a court case.

How could you say you name?

Please, Sir Lawrence Thomas Horn.

I'm going to be asking you a series of questions during this deposition.

Lawrence Horne sat down for this deposition at one am on July six at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Maryland.

Do you have any questions about that Millie Horne's two sisters and her daughter Tiffany had filed the civil suit to keep him from inheriting his son's one point seven million dollar estate.

Did you ever have any discussions or were you present at any discussions about what would happen to Trevor's estate if Millie died.

If Millie Millie died, Yes, if Millie and Trevor died, Okay, say that again.

Now, any discussions of what would happen to Trevor's estate if Millian Trevor died.

Did I have any discussions?

Yes?

This deposition is stunning to listen to his tone, the way he takes his time in answering certain questions, the way he dodges others.

Lawrence would sit through two days of this in pursuit of Trevor's estate.

We thought we had done well for this family.

That's Attorney John Marshall.

He helped win that settlement money, and yet we created the monster by doing well.

I don't think any of us regret what we did.

It's just you don't know what people are capable of.

Marshall referred Millie's family to Attorney Glenn Cooper, whose voice you here questioning Lawrence on the tape, and his co council Trish Weaver.

Within the week that the murders had occurred, Millie's sisters Elaine and Maryland came to the firm and they basically said, you know, they firmly believed that Lawrence Horn was responsible for the murder of their sister and their nephew, as well as Janie Saunders.

The family started this process ten days after the murders because there was a sense of urgency here.

It was the family's concern that he would try to himself get control of the estate, distribute the money to himself, and you know, by the time something happened down the road, it would be too late and the money would be gone.

It was a case that would run parallel l to the police investigation and provide law enforcement with a number of insights and leads.

Here's Lawrence's defense attorney from the criminal trial, Jeff O'Toole, who remembers the deposition.

Well, he was torn between keeping very careful and trying to keep his eye on the prize with the money, while at the same time trying not to implicate himself in the murder case.

And I think Lawrence Horn thought he was smart enough to do both.

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

This is Hitman.

At the time Lawrence sat down for this deposition almost a year and a half into the criminal investigation looking into who murdered Milly and Trevor Horn and Janice Saunders.

Detectives had compiled a ton of circumstantial evidence.

There were surveillance tapes of Millie's house found in Lawrence's apartment, a map of Millie's neighborhood, and even an accidental recording on his answering machine that seemed to be him in the contract killer, confirming the hit.

As we've noted, everyone thought Lawrence was behind this, but he had an airtight alibi.

He'd recorded himself sitting in his apartment in l A at the time of the murders, and the alleged hit man, James Perry, had left behind no fingerprints, no DNA footprints, or physical evidence.

The police had discovered that Perry bought the How To Book hit Man, a technical manual for independent contractors, and it laid out what investigators called a blueprint for the crimes.

In fact, he seemed to have followed something like two dozen of its recommendations for a successful hit.

But again that was all circumstantial, and what investigators were really struggling with was that there was no actual connection between Lawrence Horn and James Perry, so that whole time Lawrence was free, just going about his life trying to pull off the final stages of his plan.

What was that year like where your dad was just out there?

It was terrifying for me.

I mean, I was an emotional wreck.

This is from one of the many interviews I did with his daughter Tiffany, who was eighteen at the time of the murders.

I was afraid that my dad would actually come after me because I had information, and I was one of the people that, you know, gave the police so much of his background to kind of show them that my dad could do that.

In Just two months after the murders, Lawrence came back to Maryland.

Supposedly he was consulting with attorneys on custody issues.

Millie's sister, Elaine had been awarded temporary already in ship of Trevor's twin sister, Tamielle, which wouldn't be surprising given how cautious he was about making sure his daughters wouldn't be home the night of the murders.

I think he set it up the way he did because I think he really did not want me and my sister to be murdered.

That's why he was calling to find out where my sister was and making sure I was at school because I really do believe that he thought that was salvaging at least some of his family, and that I would take ownership of my sister because I was eighteen, and move her out to California with him and his family.

Remember Lawrence's nickname back in his navy days was your man with the plan.

And maybe he thought his plan was really working.

He'd evade justice, he'd get the one point seven million dollars, and not just the money, but his daughters too.

But Millie's sisters were a lot like she was, tough, determined, willful, like these steel magnolias who looked out for one another, and they were never going to let him near Tammielle, Tiffany or the estate.

So in Maryland there is something called the slayer's role again, Trish Weaver.

It stands for the very basic proposition that if you are responsible for killing someone, you don't get to inherit from them, Okay, So the slayer's rule.

It's important that we understand this in order to understand what's happening in Lawrence's deposition.

Crime shouldn't pay.

It's a principle that goes all the way back to the beginnings of common law.

The Romans had a maxim our engineer Jacopo Penzo actually speaks Latin.

I'll let him tell you.

It translates to no one can derive an advantage from his own wrong.

Along the way, you see, it gets implemented in different societies.

In the Middle Ages, kings made sure that anyone found to have committed a felony really paid they had to give up their property rights.

The US actually didn't have a similar rule until six This case is a little tricky, but the version is a guy took a life insurance policy out on his friend, then killed him.

When the insurance company refused to pay, he sued them for the money.

It went all the way to the Supreme Court, who said it would be a reproach to the jurisprudence of the country if one could recover insurance money payable on the death of a party whose life he had feloniously taken.

Morally, it makes perfect sense.

However, it can be tough to apply, Like what if it's a car crash, so you're guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

What if you're found not guilty by reason of insanity, do you still get the inheritance?

Then?

It can get murky.

And here's the other thing.

The slayer's rule gets applied in civil court, not criminal court, and the burden of proof is totally different.

In other words, you can be acquitted of murder in a criminal trial and still lose your inheritance in a lawsuit like this one.

So in pursuit of Trevor's inheritance, Lawrence sat down for this deposition.

It was not ruffled.

He didn't appear to break a sweat, you know, And he answered questions for two days.

And I think he truly believed that he was going to be out smarting everybody, that he was going to get away with it.

There was one big problem for Lawrence, though.

Prosecutors from the criminal case had decided to use his deposition as a kind of trojan horse.

They were racing.

They had to prove Lawrence Horn hired someone to murder his family for money.

Before he could get his hands on the money, Glenn Cooper was representing a family.

Glenn would call from time to time, what's going on?

I said, I can't tell you a lot.

We are where we are on this.

But he said, but if if I chance during your deposition of him, you asked him about a calling card.

It might be helpful to all of us, so he questioned, he had no idea what I was talking about, and go back to this calling card in some other name.

So he asked that in the deposition for you essentially kind of yeah, yeah, I just want to say, there are so many important calls in this investigation, forty three to be exact, so it's okay if you lose tracks sometimes.

Investigators spent months now combing through the phone records of Lawrence Horn and James Perry, and eventually they figured out that the two men, one living in l a and the other in Detroit, had been using the same calling card, registered under a fake name, for a full year before the murders.

Just for the record, Lawrence claims he was using this card to call other women so his living girlfriend didn't find out.

And even though they were both using the calling card, neither was calling each other's house.

They used pay phones a lot so they wouldn't be caught talking to each other, and investigators had no way of knowing what was actually being said on these calls.

We've still needed to somehow find out how in the world do we connect Lawrence Horn and James Perry.

We've got phone records, you know, We've got okay Detroit, and we put up a surveillance.

They started telling Perry, honestly, if there wasn't already so much to cover in the series, we could have done a whole episode on the surveillance alone.

And we basically wound up setting wire taps up on James Perry's house.

We had I guess four separate wire taps going.

They keep on Perry for months, unable to catch him in conversation with Lawrence Horn.

But then they noticed he's been hanging out with this one guy a lot, Thomas Turner.

So we followed him and got his tag number and found that Thomas Turner.

Who the heck is Thomas Turner, Well, he's Lawrence Horn's cousin.

It wasn't until they got a warrant to tap Turner's phone when they realized just how Perry and Horn had been communicating.

They later learned Turner also rented the cars Perry used to go to Maryland.

There was a series of calls that were generated Horn to Turner just because trying to set up a call with Perry and vice versa.

Perry would use turner to set up calls.

Horn, so we're catching all this on wire interseps.

The following has been edited for time and clarity.

Yellow.

Hey man, that's your couse.

Hey, I've been trying to catch up to you.

Uh, take a contact of all yeah, set it up to call so I know you know when to go.

All right, okay, thank you, alright, Okay, I need to talk to you.

That nobody still the same over at your older brothers, I think so it would it be possible for you to think collective?

You call over there?

You know what I'm saying, Just in case, uh we're not cool?

Here?

Can we look it up anytime?

Later, investigators believed this older brother was actually James Perry.

They were talking about money.

Lawrence was keeping Perry posted on the progress of the estate litigation.

Perry was demanding payment.

Hello, yeah, Thomas, hold on the camp.

Hell yeah, what's up?

Yeah?

Well, I just wanted to have a conversation with you, and I just want you know, if if you feel that, uh, you know, everything is cool on your end and you know, well, uh discussed too much, you know, Okay, all right, you know the problem I'm having.

Yeah, So I just wanted to get into position where, you know, I felt that you were comfortable talking, you know, so that we could talk freely.

I mentioned, you know, going over to uh, you know, your older brother.

Yeah, because it's probably you know, clean, you know, there's no problem there.

Yeah, about ten you know.

Okay, I'm telling I expect to come all right, all right, okay.

Care They knew Turner was the broker.

Prosecutor Bob Dean went out to Detroit to pull him in.

Yeah, is the FBI office.

We brought him to and sat down and had a heart to heart with him.

He didn't want to say anything.

He called up Lawrence Horn, and Lawrence Horne told him, I'm going to get you a lawyer.

Don't say anything.

Were you still I was with him?

I was with him when he made the call.

Yeah, he was with him.

He was with the police.

He was the Montgomery County Police and the FBI, and he called Lawrence right in front of you.

Yes.

Does that say something?

Yes, of course it does.

That same day, wire taps caught this call between Lawrence and Turner's wife, Cynthia.

Cynthia, Yes, Laurence again, did Thomas call you?

Okay?

Okay?

Now from what he's telling me.

It's like they're trying to force him into making some statements or something.

Right, that's what he's trying to tell me.

But hold on't I say, take your time and listen and then ask you the question.

You know, Well, the point is is he does not have to see anything.

Okay, this isn't the same quiet Lawrence Horn from the other recordings or even the deposition.

He sounds rattled.

They investigated everybody out here, and then they said they were going back to Detroit, and then Cynthia shares even worse news.

They said they already been to James.

That's James Perry.

Yeah, so anyway, Uh, Lawrence's plot starting to unravel.

So investigators had wire taps proving this web of communication, and still Lawrence denied it all in his deposition.

Do you know how Mr Turner knows Mr Perry?

And if Mr Turner and Mr Perry conspired to murder your former wife and your son and your son's nurse, they did so completely on their own, without any involvement of you by you as that correct, check the form with you answer.

Yes, We'll be right back.

If you want to understand just how much trouble this deposition would end up being for Lawrence.

Just listen to this statement from prosecution during Lawrence's trial.

Quote during that deposition, despite all these phone calls, in these contacts between the two, and despite what you're going to hear about Thomas Turner setting up the phone calls for them to continue talking, Lawrence Horne denies knowing James Perry over and over again.

Not only denies knowing him, but says I never called him.

I don't know what you're talking about.

There are a few moments in this deposition that I had to listen to a couple of times.

The following has been edited down, but I promise you this is real.

When you were in the navy, there was apparently an incident where a sailor was lost at sea.

If you understand the question, you can answer yes.

What you repeat the question?

You were in the navy, there was apparently an incident where a sailor was lost a seal on your ship you were falling any such incident, Oh, I didn't.

During the period when you were in the navy, what ships were you shipped on?

I served aboard the USS Lake Champlain CBS, and during that period of time.

There was never anyone lost the seal on the way Champlain co action.

He guess him first on understanding or whether there was ever anyone lost to see that he may or may not know about.

But he doesn't know about it, obviously, you can't tell us about right, So amazing to his knowledge, because anyone ever lost to seeing like jam playing while you served, I'm not aware of any This part of the deposition jumps out because it seems so strange.

Why would they ask about a man being thrown overboard decades before?

Well, Tiffany has an answer.

She said that Lawrence used to brag to her about killing a man at sea.

It was one of the first red flags she told investigators after her family was murdered.

I mean, we'll never know if this actually happened.

And from what attorneys have told me, this was never investigated.

He was never accused or prosecuted.

But that's the rumor they're getting at in this deposition here.

I really can never predict where this story will go.

Like Tiffany once told me, this isn't one story, it's fifty.

And the thing is, Lawrence didn't have to answer any of these questions again, here's Trish Weaver.

He hadn't been indicted yet, nobody had been indicted, but he clearly had to know that he was under investigation, and so he could have come to that deposition and asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege and not answered any of the questions.

Instead, he answered questions for two days about his motives, about his desire to get the money, about what he knew, about a variety of different things.

Because in a Maryland civil case, if a person asserts their Fifth Amendment and refuses to answer questions, it doesn't look good.

In the civil case, the fact finder could say, oh, okay, well you didn't answer that because the answer that would have been bad for you.

And so, since the motive for the murders was to get Trevor's money, he apparently was not willing to risk lose see that money, and the lawyers knew it.

But clearly his whole plan hinges on acting like he's completely ignorant of the money.

Again, the following has been edited for time and clarity.

That is, up until March three.

I'm looking for your understanding of what would happen to the one point one million dollar future thing.

Trever Doe I didn't spent a lot of time thinking about that.

As I recall, I understood basically that if Trevor died after the settlement that million, I would inherit his estate equally, that include the one point one million dollar future plan.

Do you understand, yes, any discussions of what would happen to Trevor's estate if million Trevor died?

Did I have any discussions?

Yes?

No?

Right?

Uh?

Have you up until March three?

My understanding for your testimony is you've never discussed with anyone what happens to Trevor's estate if Millie and Trevor both that there are times when it seems like he's trying not to incriminate himself, and then there are times when he tells the truth.

In the deposition, they asked him if he called Millie on March two, just hours before she was killed.

He says, yes, that it was the last time he talked to her.

I'm not certain.

Was it half an hour?

Was?

No?

No, it was it was.

It was short, but it was nice.

You've heard excerpts already where he talks about his relationship with Millie, but I'm going to let it play now.

Describe for us.

Now, your relationship with Millie from seven until her death?

YEA, well, pretty much the same as it was as far as the roller coaster up and down, unpredictable, hot and cold.

When you say it was hot and cold, and I assume when you say it was cold at times there was some kind of distance between you, or when you say it was hot at times from until her death, what do you mean?

Uh, Milly was very moody.

And it's like I would call her at times and she wouldn't speak to me.

At other times she would, So it was it got to be how lucky I was as far as when I was able to you know, it's a contact her.

And remember this moment at the time that you married Millie Murray.

Did you love her?

M hm No.

So when Lawrence is giving this deposition, he knows Thomas Turner is talking, he knows James Perry's house has been searched, he knows the FBI is monitoring his phones, and still this is his answer to the question did you love her?

It's chilling.

It's almost like he couldn't help himself but to admit something so cold when he was under investigation for her murderer.

Do you re in my ber the way that he talked about his relationship with Millie.

Yeah, he struck me.

I mean, I'm not going to try to play, you know, armchair psychologist, but I mean he struck me very much as a narcissist.

I mean it seemed as if he was the center of his universe and everybody else was an orbit around that.

On July, just a week or so after Lawrence gave this deposition, he was arrested by federal agents in Hollywood.

Perry was taken into custody that same day by the FBI in Detroit.

So the deposition had helped unravel their plan.

So he was so confident that he wouldn't be indicted that he was willing to say things that could potentially perjur himself.

He did perjur himself absolutely.

The attorneys that represented him are very competent attorneys.

So I have every reason to believe that he was fully advised about the risk that he was taking.

I'm sure he really knowingly made that determination that he could kind of maneuver the whole thing and try to come out on top.

We videotaped the deposition.

It was two days and what we just took the video tapes over to the state's attorney's office.

He lied about many things, and I think that was very instrumental, and that ultimately was what led to his indictment.

Oh another thing, investigators had been trying to figure out how or how much or even if Lawrence had paid James Perry.

As always, this case came back to money, money.

Where did the money come from?

Well, Dan New Perry used Western Union from when they searched his apartment, So we went through hundreds of transactions from Western Union.

Of course, Lawrence's name was nowhere to be found, but there were several transaction from Los Angeles.

In the five months leading up to the murders.

James Perry and his girlfriend received money transfers and amounts totaling six thousand dollars, which is around the same amount of upfront payment.

The Hitman book suggests in these payments from Los Angeles came from a man named George Shaw.

And George Shaw whoever he was, and our theory was it was Laurence Horn.

Of course.

One of the addresses he used was the old address of Motown in Los Angeles.

He used a phone number of Motown and that wasn't all.

It was a feeling that I had that you know, there there had to be at the code to break.

I can remember going over to the University of Maryland library one night, and I really don't know why I did this other than just out of curiosity, but I started looking for back copies of Los Angeles Times on micro fish and in the July eight edition, Dean found the obituary from a man named George Shaw.

And on that same page there was a very large article about Mary Wells.

Mary Wells was a famous Motown singer known for the song my Guy I was fell off my chair so oh my, that works.

It's remarkable that Dean found this in His theory was that while Lawrence Horne was reading the obituary for an old Motown friend, he saw this name George Shaw and found his alias, then used former Motown contact information for this George Shaw.

So even when the stakes were high, even when he was engineering a hit on his own family, Lawrence held onto that legacy, that reminder of his greatness.

During one of our interviews, I asked Prosecutor Bob Dean to read some of his closing statements and who are we sentencing well, not the Lawrence Horn of the nineteen fifties or the nineteen sixties, who was a sound engineer for so many of those songs that so many of us like and snap our fingers too, too happy days.

No, we're dealing with the Lawrence Horn of the late eighties and early nineties.

We're dealing with someone totally different.

Basically spent his time in crafting a coast to coast conspiracy of death.

That's what he did.

That's how this man decided to use his talents.

We're sentencing a man who buried his past of the fifties and sixties and seventies in Detroit.

He had a secret life, he had secret hopes, and in the nineties he developed a secret plan.

Three years after Millie Hoorn, her son Trevor, and his nurse Janis Saunders were killed, James Perry was convicted and sentenced to death three times, which was later overturned in an appeal, and a new trial sentenced him to three life terms.

Lawrence Horn was found guilty on three counts of first degree murder and one murder of conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.

The civil case was put on hold while the criminal case went forward.

It was reopened after Lawrence was convicted.

Part of the summary judgment was asking the court to determine that Lawrence Horn, you know, because of the Slayer's rule, could not share in the distribution of Trevor's estate.

The court ruled, And so he was there and he heard it, and I think he knew that at that point the gig was up.

It was over, you know, I mean, obviously the plan had failed.

He was going to live the rest of his life behind bars.

This actually isn't the last time you'll hear about the Horn family in this podcast.

There's a lot more, including a battle with hit Man's publisher, Paladin Press, and the first amendment that went all the way up to the Supreme Court.

But we're going to be back with you in two weeks when I'm going to first tell you the story behind Paladin, and I'll start unearthing the truth behind the book hit Man, including the other time I know someone used it.

This book says Rex Ferrell is a professional hit man and he's going to give you all of his secrets.

So was Rex hit Man.

Now I don't think we'll ever know, but I'd say that there's good probability.

Of course, if every department had a cold case squad, they could go back and look at the things in those books and then compare them with what they have.

I think they may be able to find some things like that, but you know, that's that's the luxury most departments don't have.

Yeah.

Pitman 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.

Marc Latto is our story consultant.

Executive producers are Main gesh Had Ticket Door and Me.

Mixing by Michelle Lance and Jacobo Penzo are fact checkers are Austin Thompson and Natsumi Aji Saka.

Special thanks to Andrew Goldberg, Lucas Riley, Gabe Bluisier in the Montgomery County States Attorney's Office as well as the Montgomery County Courthouse.

Our theme song by Alice McCoy and additional music written and produced by the students at DIME, powered by the Detroit Institute of Music Education,