8/10/2019 Jurors See Videotape Suspect Made on Night His Son, Former Wife Were Slain- [FINAL Edition]

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Jurors See Videotape Suspect Made on Night His Son, Former Wife Were Slain: [FINAL Edition]

In the Montgomery County murder-for-hire trial of Detroit resident James Edward Perry, prosecutors

yesterday directed the jury's attention to Los Angeles -- specifically, to the Hollywood apartment where

Lawrence Horn happened to be making a video record of his presence the very evening that his son, his

former wife and the boy's nurse were slain a continent away.

Perry, 47, is charged with murdering them under contract from Horn, who prosecutors say coveted the

quadriplegic child's almost $2 million estate. The father will be tried separately in January, but as the

alleged mastermind of the crime, he looms large in the Perry trial.

Yesterday, jurors heard testimony that Horn was short on money. They then saw the tape.

On the night of the slayings, Horn was videotaping his own television screen. The screen first showed its

own videotape -- of a documentary on jazz great Miles Davis. Then the set was tuned to a rolling cable

TV directory. Horn's lens settled briefly on the time and date: 11:03 p.m., March 2, 1993.

In a Silver Spring home three time zones to the east, his former wife, Mildred Horn; 8-year-old Trevor

Horn; and nurse Janice Saunders would be slain sometime during the next three hours, according to

earlier testimony. Back in Hollywood, Horn set his video camera on a shelf -- still running -- and twice

walked past it.

That tape was still in the camera when police searched the apartment 10 days later.

Lawrence Horn is not expected to testify in Perry's trial, but his live-in girlfriend, Shiri Bogan, said that

Horn documented great tracts of his life on videotape.

"He always had it," Bogan said of Horn's camcorder.

Jurors also saw footage that Horn shot outside his former wife's home on Northgate Drive the summer

before the slayings. He kept the camera rolling after the daughter he had come to pick up disappeared

inside the house, pivoting to show the entire cul-de-sac and scanning Mildred Horn's house number.

Prosecutors suggest that Lawrence Horn later showed the tape to Perry while planning the killings. The

same search that turned up the tapes also produced a hand-drawn map of Northgate Drive, plus receipts

8/10/2019 Jurors See Videotape Suspect Made on Night His Son, Former Wife Were Slain- [FINAL Edition]

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and informal travel logs indicating that Horn traveled that summer between Maryland and Detroit, where

Perry lived.

But most testimony centered on Horn's finances. A day after testimony that Horn was concerned that the

24-hour nursing Trevor Horn required was beginning to eat into the boy's $1.8 million trust, jurors saw

photos of the crowded one-bedroom apartment Horn shared a couple of blocks above scruffy Hollywood

Boulevard.

Laid off by the company that bought Motown Records, where he had worked as an engineer since 1962,

Horn struggled as a consultant working out of the apartment, Bogan testified. He was $16,000 behind in

child support, a Montgomery court ruled, and was borrowing thousands from his mother.

Subpoenaed as a prosecution witness on her birthday, Pauline Horn, of Northridge, Calif., said she lent

her son $65,000 in 1992 and 1993. The money came from an account shared by Lawrence Horn's

nephews, one of whom appeared repeatedly on the NBC sitcom "A Different World." As collateral,

Lawrence Horn later signed over the title to a Sylmar, Calif., town house he had purchased after receiving

$125,000 as part of Trevor's malpractice settlement, his mother testified.

Pauline Horn said the loans were to cover legal bills in the custody battle Horn had waged with his wife,

whose own relatives scoffed aloud when Pauline Horn appeared to break down at the memory of Trevor."I only saw him one week of his life," she said.

Prosecutors ended the day with a bank representative testifying that Lawrence Horn took $12,000 from

one of his mother's $15,000 money orders in cash and deposited the rest in the account of his business,

called Supertec. Seven thousand dollars of another money order went to Supertec, and Horn received the

$8,000 balance in cash, according to testimony.

Credit: Washington Post Staff Writer

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Copyright The Washington Post Company Sep 21, 1995