John Holmes - Porn King

Through the years I have been criticized for not allowing anyone to visit John during his stay at the V.A. Hospital, something else that John had insisted. I merely followed his wishes.

I moved back to Albuquerque a month after John died. I bought a house with the insurance money that John had left and tried to go on about my life, raising my son. I started seeing another man and soon became pregnant with my second child. Years later after the relationship failed, I found myself alone raising two boys. The money was gone; I was working an office job and hardly making enough to support two kids and a household by myself.

I returned to a way I knew how to make money best—taking off my clothes for men. I began stripping at local night clubs. It was just another form of adult entertainment, and I was good at working the crowd for money.

There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about John or the life that we had both once lived. It was always a struggle between having a secret past and living in the present. My old friends from high school, who knew about John Holmes, looked at me differently from the way they used to years before. On one hand I wanted to shout out to the world about what a great guy John Holmes had been to me, and on the other hand once they knew they somehow seemed judgmental, as what they had heard about John Holmes on the news never sat pretty with them. I found that people seemed to want to believe the worst about John, yet what they had heard about John in various media was highly inaccurate. I was often made fun of when trying to defend John and often I became angry. It was during this time that I too fell to the addiction of drugs.

Before John had died, and while he was in the hospital, I had received a call from a nurse at the hospital. “The cops are coming to interview John,” she told me.

I took off from work and rushed to the hospital, running every red light along the way. I was worried as to what John might say because often in the final days of his illness he didn’t grasp reality.

“The cops are coming to interview you, John,” I said, somewhat hysterical. “Just lay there, act like you don’t know what’s going on,” I told him.

As I was looking down the long hospital hallway, I saw the doors at the end swing open and watched as they made their way towards John’s room.

“They are coming right now,” I screeched. Just like a scene out of an oldtime movie, John took one last puff off his cigarette, put it out in the ashtray and lay there moaning as the door swung open. Detective Tom Lange was there with some other officers in an attempt to get some sort of death bed confession out of John with regards to The Wonderland Murders.

John continued to moan as they asked him question after question and answered nothing. When they couldn’t get anything out of John, they turned to me.

“John never told me anything.” I firmly stated again and again.

Almost ten years after John’s death, the first of a series of movies inspired by different aspects of John’s life was released. In 1997, a film called Boogie Nights, starring Mark Wahlberg as John Holmes, introduced audiences to John and the 1970s porn industry. The movie was “loosely” based on John. Although Boogie Nights was somewhat entertaining to the public, I would have to argue against its similarity to John’s story. Although the movie was inspired by John’s story, it wasn’t factually close to it.

Toward the end of 1997, I was contacted by a producer that was making a documentary about John. I agreed to be interviewed and was flown back to the San Fernando Valley where I was interviewed for Wadd [ The Life and Times of John C. Holmes ]. What I didn’t know was that Bill Amerson had his own part in the making of this film. Just about everything I said was twisted to make me sound bad. The Amersons told the audience that I had tricked John into marrying me while he was heavily medicated, a blatant lie. John and I had called Bill the night before we left to Las Vegas to be married and Bill gave us his blessing, a blessing I think he may have regretted because John, in turn, left his estate to me. I believe that Bill had his own plans in regards to John’s estate. This ruined everything for Bill. I believe that Bill had used this project as his own personal tool and vendetta towards me. The Amersons also stated that John didn’t wish to be cremated, but I cremated John anyway—another lie. I do believe the Amerson children were influenced by their father in their testimony. The first part of the movie was pretty good, right up until it suddenly became the “let’s smear Laurie Holmes campaign.” They had interviewed many of John’s long-time friends and business associates. During Bill’s interview he also stated that I was a prostitute. He claimed that between filming scenes, I would go out and hitchhike and pick up tricks. Then they showed a clip from the movie Dreams of Misty, where I was walking down the street dressed up as a young girl in an effort to confirm this statement, but failed to mention that this little clip was taken out of a movie. I filed a lawsuit against the company that made the film. After all, prostitution is a crime in the state of California and I have never been charged with such a crime. I ended up later dropping the suit as I believed witnesses had been paid to testify against me. I could never prove this, however, and was advised to drop the suit. The producer of the film has since apologized to me. I still occasionally receive hate mail from someone who has watched this film.

Toward the end of 1998 I left my hometown once again after another horribly failed and abusive relationship. My kids had gone to live with my parents and I didn’t know where else to go, so I headed back to the San Fernando Valley where I once again re-entered the business. AIDS testing had recently been established within the adult entertainment industry; otherwise I never would have started making movies again. They were also using a new test called the PCR/DNA HIV Test. This new test claimed to have a window period of only two weeks. It was still no guarantee, but the chances of catching HIV were much less with this test and in this program. Nobody was allowed to work without a test within the last 30 days. Shortly after I moved back and re-entered the business I met Tony Montana, a Colombian-born actor who had been in the business since the early 1980s. We began seeing quite a bit of each other, on and off the set. We had just fallen in love when he was suddenly ill stricken with hepatitis C. About a month went by before he began to feel better. Ready to work again, he went to AIM Healthcare to be tested for HIV. He, too, was given the grave news of his condition. Everyone thought I was just going to run out on him. I never ran out on John, why would I run out on Tony? I really doubt that many of those people have the first clue about loyalty. I was amazed at the different medications and treatment compared to when John was stricken. I considered myself educated, after all. Tony and I were married in the spring of 2001. We separated some time ago. We make better friends than we do married partners. To this day I remain uninfected by HIV or hepatitis C. I count my blessings every single day.

Sometime in 1999, I had discussed the audio tapes with my public relations person. He advised me to take the Wonderland portion of the tapes to the LAPD as the murders were still unsolved and an open case. I didn’t want to be sitting on evidence in an open murder investigation. We took the tapes to downtown Los Angeles, Homicide Division. The detective listened to the tapes and then said that they didn’t need them. I asked the detective about David Lind and if he was still alive as John had always worried about David Lind coming after me. The detective typed David Lind’s name into the computer and a rap sheet a mile long began to print, one violent crime after another. However, sometime in 1988 the rap sheet just stopped. He couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me if David Lind was still alive.