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Mickey Thompson was known as the fastest man on four wheels.
The racing legend earned the sobriquet ‘Speed King’ after breaking the American land-speed record in 1960, clocking in at almost 407 mph on Utah’s salt flats.
In his 24-years in the driver’s seat, he garnered 500 speed records, competed in the Indianapolis 500 and later landed himself in the Automotive Hall of Fame.
But 59-year-old Thompson and 41-year-old wife Trudy’s untimely death wasn’t a result of his daredevil lifestyle.
The couples’ lifeless bodies were found lying spreadeagle outside their home in Bradbury, California, riddled with bullet holes. Their blood trickled down their concrete driveway into the gutter.
Last week, the racing driver’s murder featured in the second episode of Netflix docuseries Homicide: Los Angeles.
After their brutal murder occured at 6am on March 16, 1988, the case remained cold for more than a decade as authorities struggled to identify the shooter or a motive for the crime.
Then in 2001, new evidence surfaced: Thompson’s strained relationship with former business partner, Michael Goodwin.
Gun casings and orange peel
Next to the Thompsons’ corpses lay spent bullet casings, a stun gun, muddy shoe prints, and most peculiarly, the rind of an orange.
Thousands of dollars remained in the speedster’s wallet while his wife’s jewellery remained untouched, evidence that suggested it wasn’t a robbery gone wrong.
The criminals had one motive: to murder the Thompsons.
“This wasn’t an easy residence to get in,” the racing driver’s son Danny Thompson said on the Netflix show. “You’ve had to have had a plan and it had to have been premeditated.”
An eyewitness testified to seeing two Black men shoot dead both Thompson and his wife before fleeing the scene on bicycles. “They’re described as 20 to 30 years of age,” Sam Jones, former Deputy Sheriff of the LA County Sheriff’s Office (LASD) said.
Authorities placed a $1 million bounty on the anonymous men’s heads.
A next door neighbour described the scene, as they heard gunshots ringing out followed by 10 to 15 minutes of eerie silence.
“Then I heard Mickey Thompson yelling, ‘don’t hurt my wife, don’t hurt my wife!’ And then the next thing we heard was another series of shots,” he told reporters atr the time.
Business turns sour
Thompson’s former business partner Michael Goodwin had long been a suspect but there had been no hard evidence.
Thompson ran his own stadium and off-road racing promotion business, Mickey Thompson Entertainment Group, according to court documents. Goodwin, aormer rock music promoter, had got into motocross, so the pair merged their automotive expertise and entered a partnership in 1984.
After several months, their relationship turned sour. Thompson then embarked on a court case, suing Goodwin for $768,000. After a two-year court battle, the Speed King won — just weeks before the couple were murdered.
Goodwin had began threatening his ex-business partner, according to Joel Weissler, Trudy Thompson’s nephew.
The disgruntled motocross promoter wanted vengence, court records show.
“I’m going to make you pay,’” Weissler recalled Goodwin saying in a voicemail left on the Thompsons’ home phone. Danny Thompson said his father had told him that “‘Goodwin was out of control.’”
Goodwin told friends that Thompson was “destroying me. I’m going to take him out,” according to a court filing.
The blue-green Chevy
Ron Stevens lived three blocks away from the Thompson residence.
Days before the Thompsons were murdered, Stevens and his wife’s suspicions were raised after spotting a blue-green Chevy station wagon parked outside their house. The passenger was Black, driver White.
The men were reportedly looking down the street towards the direction of Thompson’s home.
Tires spinning in a plume of smoke, the men realising they’d been seen and the vehicle fled the scene.
‘I’ll kill that motherf***er’
Five months after the death of the Speed King and his wife, Goodwin bought a yacht and fled to the Turks and Caicos Islands.
He sold his house, got rid of all his assets and funnelled his funds into a Caribbean bank account.
With the Thompson case still cold, a young homicide detective of the LASD, Mark Lillienfeld, put the case on reality television show America’s Most Wanted.
He said it garnered “hundreds of clues”.
One of those leads was a woman claiming to be Goodwin’s former girlfriend. He allegedly bragged to her about being complicit in the Thompson murders while watching a crime show on the very topic.
“He was bragging about how he would never be caught because he was too smart,” Lillifield said.
According to court testimony, Goodwin said: “I’m going to kill that motherf***er. I’m going to take out Mickey. I’m too smart to get caught. I’ll have him wasted.”
Danny Smith, another LASD homicide detective, tapped the phone of Goodwin’s ex-wife which provided another key piece of evidence: she claimed her husband commited the two murders.
Lillifield attained a warrant for his arrest.
“If I committed an otherwise perfect crime, would I have been so stupid to go to the scene of the crime?” he asked the press with a smirk on his face following his arrest.
‘Character assassination’
Lillifield coordinated a live line-up in Men’s Central Jail with witness Stevens and his wife. They picked out Goodwin as the driver of the blue-green Chevy.
Goodwin called the case against him a “character assassination,” falsely claiming that the authorities will “make up evidence”.
On December 12, 2001, Goodwin was charged in Orange County, California with the murders. By January 4, 2007, he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the killings. The identity of the two gunmen has never been uncovered.
Goodwin’s incarceration was welcome news to the Thompsons’ family memebers.
“I looked up in the sky and talked to Mickey. I said, ‘You think you’ve gone through some endurances races in your life. Let me tell you, we’ve just gone through a 13-year nine-month endurance race,” Thompson’s sister Collene Campbell said.
Goodwin is currently being held at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.
