Family Tips Led Police to 3 Murder Suspects
By JIM CARLTON AND TONY MARCANO
JAN. 18, 1990 12 AM PT
TIMES STAFF WRITERS

CLEMENTE — A tip from a family member led to the arrests Sunday of three Indiana suspects in a cross-country crime spree that left four, possibly five people dead, authorities said Wednesday.
Police learned that the fugitives were in Orange County after suspect Tracy Lynn Holland, 21, placed a series of desperate phone calls to her cousin and grandmother in Indiana. A tearful Holland told her relatives that she played no part in crimes allegedly committed by accused killer Keith Eugene Goodman, 30, and Holland’s boyfriend, Jon Christopher Mead, 22.

“She was crying real hard,” said cousin Christine Holland, 17. “She told me that she was scared for her life and that she did not kill anyone. And I believe her. She used to cry about people killing animals.

“I could tell she was sneaking the call because she said she was in a bathroom whispering and I could hear the water running,” the cousin said. “I think she was being held against her will.”

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At one point, Holland pleaded with her relatives to send money so she could escape from her two traveling companions. Instead, family members called police.

Holland and Mead were captured at a Greyhound bus station in San Clemente, where they went to a Western Union office to pick up a $400 money order that actually had been sent by police from their hometown of Anderson, Ind.

Three hours later, a SWAT team raided a South Laguna home and seized Goodman, the crime spree’s alleged mastermind.

Anderson police acknowledged that they were tipped off to the suspects’ whereabouts by Holland’s relatives.

“They (police) instructed us to try and find out where she was at,” said Alvah Holland, 47, the suspect’s uncle. But, he added, his niece did not call back until a day later, when she told her family that she, Mead and Goodman were bound for San Clemente and asked to have the money wired to Western Union there.

Anderson police wired the money to San Clemente and contacted authorities in Orange County and New York, where the suspects in December allegedly took part in the slaying of Harold D. Williams, 60, in the upstate town of Windsor, Anderson Police Chief Ron Rheam said.

The other three slaying victims--R.C. Vaughn, 49; his roommate, Richard Ray Thomas, 29, and Tommy Lee Mayhall--were shot to death in Fulton, Miss., on Jan. 7. Police in Tennessee, meanwhile, are investigating whether the suspects may have killed a biology professor there in October.

The victims corresponded with and sometimes sent money to Goodman while he was serving 10 years of a 20-year sentence in Indiana for the robbery and sexual assault of an 80-year-old woman. During his term, Goodman was moved from a medium-security facility to a maximum-security penitentiary after he was charged with such offenses as sexually assaulting inmates and refusing to work, his parole officer, Phyllis Elsey, said.

In a phone call placed Jan. 2, before the Mississippi slayings, Holland told family members that she feared for her safety while traveling with Goodman and Mead. She pleaded for help but would not disclose where she was, her cousin said.

In another phone call to her cousin this week from the San Clemente jail, Holland--while being held with Mead and Goodman on weapons possession charges--said she was not aware of Goodman’s violent past and described the aftermath of Williams’ slaying in New York.

“She said that she heard them (Goodman and Mead) shooting and she went to see, and did see, the body,” the cousin said, emphasizing that Holland claimed not to have been present when Williams was slain.

Anderson Police Chief Rheam said he agreed with the family’s belief that Tracy Holland was not aware of what Goodman and Mead had in mind as they allegedly went on the killing spree. Rheam said Holland’s family had long been concerned for her safety.

“Here’s a little gal that I’m sure fell in with the wrong people,” Rheam said. “She might end up doing some time on this. It reminds me of the Patty Hearst case.”

Holland, Mead and Goodman appeared Wednesday before Judge Pamela Iles in South Orange County Municipal Court, where they waived their right to fight extradition during a short hearing. They were subsequently whisked away in the custody of U.S. marshals to San Diego, where they are scheduled to depart for New York today.

Mead and Goodman are expected to face a charge of murder in New York, but Holland may only face charges of criminal possession of stolen property--the red station wagon the trio allegedly used to travel there from Indiana, officials said. Mississippi authorities are expected to seek extradition from New York after the trial there, however, and prosecute all three on murder charges carrying a maximum penalty of death.

For Goodman, the murder allegations cap a career of run-ins with the law dating back to when he was a teen-ager. Sgt. Randy Simmons of the Madison County, Ind., Sheriff’s Department said Goodman had a history of domestic violence aimed mainly at his mother, and one incident against her landed him, at age 17, in the Indiana Boys School, a juvenile detention facility. He escaped once while serving a 10-month sentence there for assault and battery, officials said.

Two years later, Goodman was arrested in the attack on the elderly woman. He was charged with rape, but, in a plea-bargain agreement, received a 23-year sentence for burglary, confinement and battery, said David A. Ferguson, supervisor of parole services for the Indiana Department of Corrections.

Goodman served 10 years of the sentence in a number of facilities, winding up in the maximum-security Indiana State Prison at Michigan City after he allegedly sexually assaulted several inmates, said Elsey, his parole officer.

Elsey said Goodman openly boasted about both fleecing his prison pen pals of money and his physical assaults on strangers and girlfriends.

“He’s violent. He used people. That’s how he got by in prison. That’s how he survived,” Elsey said Wednesday from Anderson, Ind.

After Goodman’s release from prison, Elsey said, he repeatedly complained about his inability to find jobs and claimed he knew no way to make money honestly.

“I think Goodman was pretty institutionalized and just couldn’t make it on the outside on his own,” she said. “He couldn’t handle it.”