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8/10/2019 Father Charged in Disabled Son's Slaying; Second Man
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Father Charged in Disabled Son's Slaying; Second Man Also
Arrested in 1993 Deaths of Three in
Silver Spring: [FINAL Edition]
The father of an 8-year-old quadriplegic boy who was suffocated
in his Silver Spring home last year was
arrested yesterday in the death of the boy, the boy's mother and
his nurse, officials said. A second man
was also arrested in the three killings, they said.
Lawrence T. , 54, of Los Angeles, was arrested there yesterday
in the killing of his son, Trevor, his former
wife, Mildred, and the boy's overnight nurse, Janice
Saunders.
Trevor was the beneficiary of an estimated $2 million settlement
of a lawsuit filed by his family after a
medical accident left him severely brain-damaged. Lawrence Horn
has resisted efforts by members of his
ex-wife's family to keep the money from him.
The second suspect, James E. Perry, 45, was arrested in his home
town of Detroit yesterday in the
suffocation of Trevor and the fatal shootings of the other two,
law enforcement sources said.
Montgomery County State's Attorney Andrew L. Sonner confirmed
the arrests late yesterday but provided
few details. He said he planned a news conference on the case
with Montgomery Police Chief Clarence
Edwards at 10 a.m. today.
Horn and Perry were named in warrants charging each of them with
three counts of first-degree murder
and one count of conspiracy, according to the sources.
The arrests followed an intensive 16-month investigation of a
crime that police found to be compelling in
its brutality.
Law enforcement sources said Horn, who has a claim to his son's
estate under Maryland law, has been
the prime suspect in the case almost from the beginning, and
they said his phone lines in California had
been tapped for months.
Investigators "used financial records, telephone records {and}
wiretaps," said one law enforcement source
familiar with the investigation. The source said the FBI played
a major role.
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The arrests came after sealed indictments were handed up by a
special grand jury in Montgomery
County, a law enforcement source said.
Horn, who has been described as an independent recording
engineer who helped Berry Gordy launch the
Motown music label in Detroit in the 1960s, was arrested in Los
Angeles at 6 p.m. Eastern Time, a law
enforcement source said. Perry was arrested in Detroit at 4:10
p.m., the source said.
Perry was being held without bond last night at the Wayne County
jail in Detroit. It was not immediately
clear where in Los Angeles Horn was being held.
"In terms of manpower and hours, this was a very intense,
time-consuming case," said an investigator in
the case. "To see a handicapped child murdered was completely
unacceptable. This was a case that
whatever we could legally do to solve it, we would."
Efforts to reach an attorney for Horn last night were
unsuccessful. In the past, he has denied any
connection with the three deaths and has said he was in Los
Angeles when they occurred.
Montgomery County police have said the killings occurred between
2 and 7:30 a.m. on March 3, 1993.
They were committed by someone who police said tried to make the
forced entry look like a burglary on
the house in the Layhill section, police said.
The women were shot in the eyes at close range by someone who
also suffocated Trevor Horn by
removing the tube that supplied him with air to breathe,
according to autopsy results.
Mildred Horn, 43, an American Airlines flight attendant, was
scheduled to board a flight at Baltimore-
Washington International Airport the day of the killings. She
was found in her nightclothes. Saunders, 38,
was also found dead in the house.
With the deaths of Trevor and Mildred Horn, Lawrence Horn
claimed in court documents that he was the
sole heir to Trevor's estate, valued by various lawyers at $1.7
million to $2.3 million. Under Maryland law,
parents automatically inherit their children's estates.
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8/10/2019 Father Charged in Disabled Son's Slaying; Second Man
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