6200 Carbon Canyon Road: Big Mac and Me

Terri was engaged to a notorious strip club owner known as 'Big Mac' McKenna for seven years. He was gunned down in his limousine in his driveway at 6200 Carbon Canyon Road. He took twenty- one bullets in the chest. By sheer luck Terri had escaped being in the limousine with him by leaving Mac three months earlier. She was rocked by the murder and frightened by the prospect of who could have done it.

"I usually drove to check the mailbox, which was down by the road at the end of a mile-long winding driveway, but it was a beautiful southern California summer day in August 1987, sunny and inviting outside. I needed the fresh air, and it was a chance to enjoy some rare time alone in a turbulent life that seemed at a turning point. I must have anticipated that something important would be waiting for me in the mail. I opened the letter addressed to me, Terri Lenée Peake, from Penthouse magazine and couldn’t believe my eyes—there with the letter was a gold Penthouse key necklace for me and a note saying “Congratulations, you are October 1987 Penthouse centerfold.” That moment I went from nobody to suddenly somebody and things were about to take a drastic turn. I was living in an increasingly abusive relationship with Horace "Big Mac" McKenna, a six-foot-six, black bodybuilder, ex-cop, and notorious gangster who co-owned a string of strip clubs. He had moved me into his lavish forty-acre ranch at 6200 Carbon Canyon Road in Brea, an address that would later become infamous as a murder scene. For now, it was where Mac kept his Arabian horses, his pet tiger and jaguar, four attack dobermans, his spider monkeys that he dressed in tuxedos, his collection of lethal snakes—and me."