Murder Of A Speed King

Many of the media reports also noted the soured partnership between Thompson and Mike Goodwin, 43, of Laguna Beach. In late 1984, Thompson sued Goodwin, seeking control of "stadium off-road racing"—races held on temporary courses in arenas such as football stadiums—and after a long court battle, Thompson won a $500,000 judgment in May 1986. Four months later Goodwin filed for bankruptcy. Then on Jan. 6 of this year, Thompson obtained a writ requiring Goodwin to pay a total of more than $800,000, including additional legal costs and interest. Acrimonious is too gentle a word to describe the relations between the two men, and Thompson frequently alleged that threats against his life had been made by Goodwin. According to Deke Houlgate, a public relations consultant who worked with Thompson, "Mickey told us about his death threats.... He has told anyone who would stand still for 15 seconds that Mike Goodwin had threatened his life. I don't know if Goodwin has or not. The only source of that information to my knowledge is Mickey. Or other people repeating what Mickey had said."

Goodwin has been unavailable to the media since the killings; he is reported to have gone into seclusion, fearing for his own safety. The sheriff's department has interviewed Goodwin, and he is not considered a suspect at this time.

Narcotics have also been suggested as the basis for a possible motive. In 1982, Thompson's 27-year-old nephew, Scott Campbell, was strangled and tossed from an airplane in a drug deal gone bad. But Larry Cowell, 38, whose family had been close to the Campbells, was convicted of ordering the murder, and received a 25-years-to-life sentence in 1984. And in July 1987, Donald DiMascio was convicted of the actual killing; he is serving a life sentence. Thompson reportedly helped to finance the private investigation that resulted in the cases against Cowell and DiMascio, and he testified in both trials.

Could Thompson's fame have made him a target for a retribution killing? Was he the victim of drug dealers wanting to deliver a "Don't mess with us" message? "Absolutely not, there's no connection," Collene Campbell, Mickey's sister and Scott's mother, told reporter Fred Gregory last weekend. "If we're talking about the men who murdered my son, they are both in jail.... It was no kind of mob deal."

By his own count, Thompson had been hospitalized 27 times because of racing—for reasons ranging from exhaustion to a shattered vertebra that left him briefly paralyzed in 1960. He was not afraid to risk injury himself to prove a point, and often joked that he "had more broken bones than Evel Knievel." However, at least for the time being, the point his killers may have intended to make seems to have been overshadowed by the colorful personality of their victim.