For years after her father was convicted of murder, Laurel Woods remained convinced he was innocent. Her new memoir, “Strip Club Heiress: The Jet Strip, My Father’s Conviction, and the Murder of Mac McKenna,” examines that loyalty and the moment she began to reconsider the man she had idolized.
Michael Woods, a former California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer, owned Southern California strip clubs including Bare Elegance, the Jet Strip and the Oddball Cabaret. His business partner, Horace “Big Mac” McKenna, was killed in March 1989 outside his Brea mansion. McKenna was sitting in a limousine waiting for the gate to open when a gunman fired an Uzi at the vehicle, striking it more than 20 times.
Woods and McKenna had known each other since their highway patrol days. Their business arrangement was kept off the books because McKenna’s counterfeiting record prevented him from appearing legally on the paperwork. Police identified Woods as a person of interest soon after the killing, but the investigation went cold before arrests followed in October 2000. In September 2001, Woods was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life.
Investigators alleged that Woods gave his bodyguard, David Amos, $50,000 to organize the killing. Amos paid John Patrick Sheridan, an ex-convict employed at one of the clubs, $25,000 to shoot McKenna. Sheridan eventually confessed, and Amos subsequently agreed to record a lunch with Woods at Jerry’s Deli in Woodland Hills. The recording led to Woods’ arrest.
For Laurel Woods, those allegations collided with memories of an affectionate father who built backyard play spaces, encouraged her interests and took the family camping. Raised with her younger sister, Rachel, in Newbury Park, Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village, she recalls feeling loved and protected. At age 9, she accompanied her father to a club, where the sisters danced before opening hours and later watched the surveillance monitors despite instructions not to.
She was studying at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when McKenna was killed. After college, she worked at Playboy, Industrial Light & Magic and then a San Francisco technology company. Following her father’s arrest, she returned to Southern California at his request to manage his three nude clubs while he awaited trial.
Her belief in his innocence broke during a February 2011 telephone conversation, after she had moved to New York and taken a job at MTV. She played him a personal account prepared for KCRW-FM’s “Unfictional” program, hoping he would recognize the family’s suffering. Instead, he objected to being described as a cop rather than a California Highway Patrol officer. She says that response prompted her to believe he had committed the crime.
Woods maintained contact but established limits on the relationship. When her father was paroled in June 2017 after 17 years in custody, she hoped he would acknowledge his responsibility for the family’s ordeal. She says his response fell short of the accountability she wanted.
The memoir follows her effort to reconcile affection with that disappointment. She continues to see her parents regularly and describes a relationship in which she has more control over her own boundaries. Accepting that her father might never change, she says, allowed her to move forward.
