Trial of hitman who allegedly killed boy brings up old crime, bitter memories

Listen to this article

The crime seemed straight from a made-for-TV movie: A father hires a hit man to kill his quadriplegic 8-year-old son so he can collect the boy’s $1.7 million medical lawsuit settlement.The killer did the job with textbook precision the night of March 3, 1993.Trevor Horn’s mother and nurse were both shot in the head while they sat by his bed in a Silver Spring home, and the boy had been suffocated. A medical examiner later said Trevor gasped violently for breath as his life slipped away.Trevor’s father, Lawrence Horn, and alleged hitman James Edward Perry were both convicted of murder and conspiracy for the deaths of Trevor, Mildred Horn, 43, and nurse Janice Saunders, 38. Perry was sentenced to death, while Horn was sentenced to life imprisonment.Perry will be back in court this week, his conviction and death sentence overturned two years ago by Maryland’s highest court. Jury selection is expected to begin in Montgomery County Circuit Court.As prosecutors prepare again to convince a jury that Perry deserves to die, family members again will have to confront the grisly crime.“When something like this happens to you, there’s never any closure,” said Michael Saunders, Janice’s husband.“It’s not possible when what happened was so evil. When you have a child that was 4 years old when his mother was murdered, you just can never put it behind you.”When Vivian Rice, Mildred Horn’s sister, opened the home’s front door early March 3, she heard the screech of Trevor’s medical monitor.Inside, she found her sister and Janice Saunders shot through their eyes by a .22-caliber rifle. The gun and the placement of the fatal shot were both recommended by Perry’s lethal guidebook.The killer had removed the neck tube that Trevor used to breathe, holding one hand over the neck opening and the other over his mouth and nose. A single blade of grass was left on his cheek.Prosecutors based much of their original case on a 22-second tape of a phone call Perry made from Gaithersburg to Lawrence Horn’s home in Los Angeles the morning after the murders.The cryptic tape, recorded by Horn, was the only concrete evidence of a deadly pact between the two. Prosecutors played it four times during Perry’s first trial to explain why a stranger from Detroit would travel to Maryland just to kill a young boy.But that snippet of tape later was ruled inadmissible by the Court of Appeals, which decided 4-3 that it violated Maryland’s strict wiretap law. Perry’s original attorney should have used that law to get the tape thrown out before the trial, the majority said.Even without the tape, there still is strong evidence suggesting collaboration between Perry and Horn, said former Montgomery County Assistant State’s Attorney Teresa Whalen, who prosecuted Perry in 1995.

“There’s a lot of other circumstantial evidence that ties them together that is not as powerful as that tape, but it’s pretty darn good,” she said.That includes phone records from a calling card set up by Lawrence Horn’s cousin under a fake name. The card was used to make more than 135 calls to both Perry’s residence in Detroit and Horn’s in Los Angeles before and after the crime.About $6,000 also was wired to Perry in the months before the shootings by someone using a phony name.Prosecutors in Perry’s first trial also alleged the novice hitman honed his skills by reading a murder-for-hire manual, “Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors.”A copy of the book, printed by Colorado publisher Paladin Press, was found in Perry’s Detroit residence. It gave such practical advice as running a file on the inside of the gun barrel erase its ballistic fingerprint and demanding upfront payment for a hit.Paladin Press agreed to pay the victims’ families a multimillion-dollar sum in a 1999 settlement and ceased publishing the book after a federal appeals court ruled it was not protected free speech.Perry’s attorney, William Brennan, would not comment on the coming trial. A spokesman for the Montgomery County State’s Attorney also did not comment, citing a pretrial gag order.Although prosecutors will likely have to proceed without the tape, they aren’t required to prove Perry’s motive.“Certainly that strengthens the picture of the mental state of the defendant, but there is no requirement of presenting a motive,” said Byron L. Warnken, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law.Jurors likely will hear how Horn allegedly sought out Perry to help him get hold of a $1.7 million trust set up for the severely disabled Trevor. The boy was awarded the money as part of a settlement with Children’s Hospital National Medical Center in Washington after what court documents call an “accident.”While much of the evidence used in the first trial to implicate Perry still is available to prosecutors, there are no guarantees a second conviction will bring another death sentence, Whalen said.“A second trial is always more difficult because you may have potentially lost witnesses, you have a new judge and new defense attorneys,” she said.“But it is still a strong case.”Saunders, a Virginia resident, plans to attend as much of the trial as possible. But after Perry’s first trial, Lawrence Horn’s trial and the lawsuit against Paladin Press, another court case will take its toll, he said.“You only want to have to do something like this once in your life, not four times,” he said.