OPENING PROSECUTION STATEMENTS IN MICKEY THOMPSON MURDER TRIALS

According to the Riverside Press enterprise: Revenge over bitter business lawsuits motivated Michael Frank Goodwin to arrange the killings, said Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson, who showed jurors enlarged photographs from Thompson’s celebrated career and of the couple lying in pools of blood in their driveway. The killings were engineered, according to the prosecutor, so that Thompson would see his wife, Trudy, die in front of his eyes before he was shot in the head, the prosecutor said. “As he was shot, over and over the mantra he repeated was the same, ‘Please don’t hurt my wife,'” Jackson said, quoting neighbors who heard the couple’s cries.

“Although they died March 16, 1988, their demise started four years earlier when they went into business with Michael Goodwin,” Jackson said, outlining a completely circumstantial case against the defendant. Goodwin, 61, is charged with two counts of murder with special circumstances and faces life in prison if convicted.
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“He met Michael Goodwin brash, loudmouth, over the top and known for his violent temper. But he was also known for Supercross,” said the prosecutor of the intense motorcycle races typically staged on stadium dirt courses featuring dramatic jumps. “The two men decided to go into business,” Jackson said. ” The evidence in this case will show that from day one Michael Goodwin had bad intentions.”

Prosecutor Jackson said, Thompson wasn’t formally educated but he was brilliant. “He was a Rhodes scholar in the school of hard knocks. He wasn’t going to get screwed over,” Jackson said. Before long, Thompson realized he was being cheated out of money by his new partner and he began filing lawsuits, Jackson said. He said Thompson won his first lawsuit, and Goodwin was ordered to pay him more than $793,000 after a judge found that Goodwin had stolen more than $500,000.

There were continuous lawsuits and countersuits over the next two years and Goodwin was forced to declare bankruptcy, Jackson said.

“Michael Goodwin was suffering a pattern of losing he could not tolerate,” said Jackson. “But he would not pay the judgments. … Mickey Thompson was crushing Michael Goodwin through the use of the court system and Michael Goodwin developed a vendetta against Mickey Thompson.” The prosecutor showed jurors quotes attributed to Goodwin, threatening to kill Thompson rather than pay him. “You took everything,” Goodwin was quoted as telling Thompson in an overheard phone conversation. “I’m gonna get it back. I’ll kill you.” Jackson said a witness will tell how Goodwin once declared: “Before he sees a dime I’ll have him wasted.” Jackson alleged that the defendant hired two hit men to go to the Thompsons’ house in the gated Los Angeles suburb of Bradbury, which he had scoped out beforehand, to shoot them and escape on a bicycle route.

“This was not a robbery. It was a professional execution,” said the prosecutor. The case outlined by Jackson offered no physical evidence to link Goodwin to the killings, but he said that the defendant’s behavior before and after the murders was enough to prove guilt.

Jackson said he will call neighbors who came forward years after the killing to say that they saw a man resembling Goodwin checking out the bicycle path with binoculars days before the killings. Shortly after the killings, he said, Goodwin liquidated his assets, sold his home, transferred money to an offshore account in the Caribbean and bought a $400,000 yacht on which he and his then-wife left the United States for three years.