Joseph Jordan Taylor pleaded guilty to an attempted murder-for-hire plot. Image: DA’s Office
In mid-March, Joseph Jordan Taylor, the 32-year-old son of John Reid Taylor of the legendary Hole in the Wall Gang, pleaded guilty to an attempted murder-for-hire plot that occurred in 2015. On March 27th, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison. The Taylor family is well-known in the Huntington Beach surfing community.
It was May of 2015 when Taylor, then 29, attempted to pay hitmen to kill his brother’s ex-wife. “According to court records, Taylor told a friend that he wanted to have his brother’s former wife killed before an upcoming child-custody hearing between the ex-couple,” wrote Kelly Puente for the OC Register. “Huntington Beach police were tipped off on his plot and arranged to have undercover officers – posing as hit men – meet with Taylor in the Westminster Mall parking lot.”
In that meeting, Taylor said he would pay $12,000 to have the woman—who asked to remain unnamed—killed because she was attempting to get money out of the family. According to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, after he agreed to pay the undercover officers, he was arrested and charged with solicitation of murder and attempted murder. Fox News reported that “the murder of his brother’s ex should look like a ‘robbery gone bad.'”
In all, four men were arrested, but only Taylor was held on charges. “The men are Taylor’s 27-year-old brother, Matthew Austin Taylor; their 36-year-old friend Travis James Sprague; and the brothers’ 67-year-old father, John Reid Taylor,” Alma Fausto explained at the time for the OC Register.
The Hole in the Wall Gang was a group of Huntington Beach surfers who, at the time, didn’t like the way surfing was going. It was named for a hole in the retaining wall under a sea cliff in front of where the gang surfed. They were known for surfing well and partying hard, and the Gang was inducted into Huntington Beach’s Surfing Walk of Fame in 2011.
At Taylor’s initial hearing in 2015, his bail was raised from $1 million to $3 million. “Mr. Taylor, we believe, has the means to make $1 million bail,” said Deputy District Attorney Jess Rodriguez. “Once it happens, our fear is he will flee.” The Taylor family kept a yacht in Newport Beach and traveled extensively throughout Mexico.
Huntington Beach surf photographer John Salanoa told the OC Register that Joseph Taylor was “a standout surfer growing up, but through the years struggled with a substance-abuse problem.” This was not, by any means, Joseph Taylor’s first brush with the law—in 2009, he was convicted of kidnapping and carjacking and in 2007, a “DUI causing injury and hit-and-run with great bodily injury,” and various other offences.
