By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2026-07-26 17:30:27 | Updated at 2026-07-28 02:51:39
1 day ago
Laurel Woods can remember the day when it became overwhelmingly clear to her that her father’s job was not like the parents of other girls her age.
She was 13, clad in her Catholic school girl uniform with her backpack stuffed with $10,000 in cash, and driving her father’s massive red Cadillac. She knew she was not old enough to drive, but had got the orders from her father, Michael Woods, so she obeyed.
Too small to see over the dashboard, she had to sit on a phone book to comfortably reach the wheel. A true daddy’s girl, she considered him one of the most important people in her life and, she, in turn, was his confidante. She would have done anything for him.
So, when he asked her to help him skip town because he was fearful of a possible FBI raid and arrest, she obliged and didn't think twice. Perhaps presciently, her father had taught her to drive stick when she was 11 years old.
He was a former policeman who co-owned a string of successful strip clubs in Los Angeles, and had just got word that his business partner had been arrested by the FBI. Woods was terrified that he would be targeted next. His response was to sneak out of the family home with an overnight bag, cash and a gun.
While Woods didn’t end up getting arrested, he spent a month in hiding – something that Laurel now realizes isn’t what most fathers typically do. But it was in that moment in 1982 that Laurel first suspected her family life was unorthodox. She had only ever known her father as her hero, the man who would take her to drive-in movies and play with her on the SlipNSlide in the backyard of their Los Angeles home.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, Laurel reflected: ‘My dad was like Superman. When you grow up and have your life, that’s all you know, but I thought it was a very normal childhood.’
Now 57, Laurel has examined her past through a very different lens from the childish one through which she lived it. Writing in her new memoir, Strip Club Heiress, what seemed, back then, to be excitement is now behavior she recognizes as reckless, lawless and ultimately murderous.
Laurel Woods has examined her past through her new memoir, Strip Club Heiress
Woods can remember the day when it became overwhelmingly clear to her that her father’s job was not like the parents of other girls her age
Laurel was in elementary school when he started building his strip club empire. It provided the family with all the trappings of an upper-middle class lifestyle but Laurel's childhood was decidedly different from the experiences of her peers in the tony Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles where she grew up.
She attended the same Catholic girls’ school and took the same extracurricular dance and music classes, but unlike her friends, Laurel was also spending time at her father’s three strip infamous clubs:, which ranged from The Jet Strip, a traditional gentleman’s club; to the high-class joint Bare Elegance; and The Bear, a topless bar turned gay club. At these clubs, she would often do her homework after school, sipping Shirley Temples at the bar.
To Laurel, getting to hang out with her father at the gentleman's clubs was a fantastical and glamour-filled experience. As a student of ballet, tap, and jazz growing up, she loved watching the dancers at the club spin on the poles and dance across the stage, and even fondly recalls her father letting her, at age 11, twirl on stage to Olivia Newton-John before the club opened.
'When I was young, going to strip clubs, I just felt like a princess there,’ Laurel said. ‘It was fun and exciting to me. Obviously, I did not have any other friend going to strip clubs when they were, you know, 9, 10, 11 years old.’
Indeed, the parents of her friends made it no secret that they thought his line of work was seedy, sinful and dangerous. Laurel remembers the time she was disinvited from a friend’s birthday and how she got dropped from the ballet carpool when the other parents found out about her father’s strip club.
It would be years before Laurel was forced to confront just how dangerous the world in which she was raised truly was. In 2001, her father was convicted of ordering the March 1989 murder of his business partner, Horace 'Big Mac' McKenna.
McKenna was sitting in his chauffeured limousine outside of his Brea, California, ranch when he was hit by a barrage of machine gun fire.
Though McKenna, a hulking, 300-pound bodybuilder notorious for his shady dealings and past infractions with the law, had no shortage of enemies, Woods was a prime suspect given their business affiliation from the get-go.
McKenna was a silent partner in the clubs due to his criminal past, partnering with Woods to utilize his clean-cut, family man persona, but rumors of years-long tension between the co-owners raised investigators' suspicions about Woods.
Woods was brought in for questioning, but a lack of evidence rendered the investigation a cold case for nearly a decade during which he loudly maintained his innocence to friends and family. For her part, Laurel believed him.
After graduating high school with honors, Laurel had gone to college at UC Santa Barbara and later landed a job as a legal coordinator for Playboy’s Business Affairs department, a gig that at times felt comfortably adjacent to the strip clubs she grew up in.
She was living in the Bay Area working for Lucasfilm's Industrial Light + Magic when a shock confession in 2000 by the gunman, Johnny Sheridan, a former strip club employee, upended her life once more.
Laurel was in elementary school when he started building his strip club empire, which included the high-class joint Bare Elegance
Michael Woods was convicted of ordering the March 1989 murder of his business partner, Horace 'Big Mac' McKenna
McKenna, a hulking, 300-pound bodybuilder, was a silent partner in the clubs due to his criminal past
During his confession, Sheridan claimed that Woods had paid another club employee, David Amos, to arrange the shooting of McKenna. Amos then turned to Sheridan to do the deed.
As part of a plea deal, Sheridan wore a wire during a conversation with during which Amos implicated himself in the murder. Charged with the crime, Amos in turn, cooperated with prosecutors to wiretap a conversation in which Woods agreed to take care of Amos’s family if Amos ‘took the fall’ for him.
Woods was charged with murder in October 2000. A year later, in 2001, after a painful public trial, Woods was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life.
Still, for years Laurel swallowed her father's account of McKenna wholesale. In that version of reality McKenna was a crook involved in drug dealing and illegal gambling, a man who had already been to prison.
It allowed her to follow her father blindly: 'Whenever something was going down with me [essentially] aiding and abetting my dad, I rationalized in my head that, you know, it was more Mac's doing than my dad's.'
During the trial, she had learned from her father’s lawyer that McKenna had threatened to gang rape her, her mother and her sister on more than one occasion and knew that her father would stop at nothing to protect their family.
It was a revelation that made her physically ill and left her emotionally reeling. She had never even considered that her father would or could do something so heinous.
'I almost had a stroke over that realization.'
Laurel said: ‘I was so naïve. I thought there was no way that my father, who loves his family so much, would ever put us in jeopardy like that.'
That stubborn refusal to accept reality persisted even after her father's conviction in Mac's murder as Laurel, then in her early 30s, worked tirelessly with Michael’s lawyers on appeals. She gave up her home in the Bay Area and moved the nearly 400 miles back home to Los Angeles to support her family, and especially her mother, during the trial.
She said: ‘With a traumatic situation like this, your fight or flight mode kicks in and you have just the right amount of anxiety and adrenaline to stay focused. It was two years of running on empty. My goal was to get my dad out of jail, so I just did what I had to do.'
Rather than question her father's innocence, she stepped into his shoes. Where once she had sipped Shirley Temples at the strip club bars, now she was running the show.
The experience opened her eyes to the dangers and pressures of the world she had found so glamorous and alluring as a young girl.
Tasked with overseeing the cash-heavy business, she managed problems with the staff, most of whom were ex-cons fearful after Woods's conviction, kept strippers' boyfriends in line and formalized contracts, accounting and payroll. The changes were often fraught with backlash from the shady staffers, and her fearful state led to her hiring a private detective as protection to escort her to and from the clubs.
She said: ‘With stepping in to manage the clubs, I obviously did not have any experience with that. I was managing men that I knew as a little girl and then all a sudden they wanted more money or were acting like cowards. They all had prior convictions for weapons or drugs or illegal gambling, so they were scared when the investigation was happening. I found myself just stepping in and really doing it.’
‘Even though my mom was married to my father, she was a nurse and really in the dark about the club and didn’t want to know anything about it. My younger sister] wasn’t capable of stepping in and nor would she have wanted to.'
But bit by bit, the scales began to fall from Laurel's eyes - she began to see the cracks in her father’s façade as a bravado-filled successful club owner.
In 2001, after a painful public trial, Woods was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life
'Without a doubt, I was my dad’s confidante,' she said. 'I was the only one he could trust'
She had known that Woods had overcome hardscrabble and humble beginnings in New Jersey, an upbringing filled with familial neglect, physical abuse and homelessness. His origin story was why she believed he was so fiercely loyal and protective of their family.
This protective nature, however, began to look different to Laurel as she grew older and realized that her father was overly controlling of her and her family’s life. Even from behind bars, housed in the same prison as Phil Spector and Charles Manson, he dictated where she could live and called her constantly, doing the same to her mother and sister. It came as no surprise when he was diagnosed with narcissistic behavorial disorder by the prison psychologist.
‘Having a father in prison, you get these life lessons that you can’t sign up for,’ Laurel said. ‘In prison, you already have a lack of control, so you’re just grasping for anything to control and I think that’s what my dad was doing with my family… It was very sad for me because I felt like this person that I had just worshipped as a child didn’t exist anymore.’
It took years, and therapy, for Laurel, who had moved away to New York, to push back and assert her own boundaries.
In 2011, after nearly a decade of Michael being in jail, Laurel finally accepted that her father was responsible for McKenna’s murder. By then, she was in her forties.
She said: 'I realized that basically this [his innocence] was all a sham. It was 2011 when it hit me that he did do it and everything just started to make so much more sense. It hit me so quickly because it wasn't the evidence that made me think he was guilty. It was his actions and his personality that made me realize he was guilty.
‘I love my father so much, but I had so much anger about what he put us through. Mac was not a super stand-up guy, but he was a human. It’s crazy to me that my dad actually thought he could get away with this.’
In 2017, after serving 17 years of his sentence, Michael received parole. To this day, he maintains his innocence, a claim that Laurel can no longer fathom despite having believed him for years.
In the nine years since he’s returned home, Laurel's relationship with her father has evolved. No longer is she the wide-eyed daughter naively believing in his innocence, nor is she someone who is easily manipulated and controlled.
In 2011, after nearly a decade of Michael being in jail, Laurel finally accepted that her father was responsible for McKenna’s murder
To this day, he maintains his innocence, a claim that Laurel can no longer fathom despite having believed him for years
‘I love my father so much, but I had so much anger about what he put us through,' she said
Laurel said: ‘When my dad got out, I had a choice to make. I could be angry forever, but then nothing's going to change because he's not going to change. I have to be the one to change.
‘The first couple months when he was released, I was just struggling so much with my emotions because it was like having a stranger come back into your life. Now that it's been nine years, I love my father so much, and I care about him so much. He's 84. I just want him to enjoy his twilight years, and I want to support him and be there for him. And I still want to make him proud.’
In the time since Woods returned from prison, Laurel has made some life changes of her own. She’s followed in her mother’s footsteps and become a nurse. And she’s reckoned with what it really meant to grow up as a ‘strip club heiress’ and what it means to be her father’s daughter.
For Laurel, publishing her memoir has been nerve-wracking, but necessary. While her parents still maintain her father’s innocence, Laurel felt that it was important to tell her truth, something that her father can now finally respect.
‘I was terrified to write that I thought my dad did it, but your readers have to believe you, so I had to tell the truth,’ she said. ‘I'm so happy that I'm finally getting it out there. It is a true crime story, but it's also about a father-daughter relationship.'
