It could have gone so many different ways, write Katy Vine and Ana Worrel for Texas Monthly. Instead, two people are dead and four others have been convicted in their murders, including a prominent car dealer in Austin. The story the journalists unwind is one that devolves into a "gruesome show of machismo," though it began simply enough. The car dealer, Erik Maund, connected with a Nashville escort, Holly Williams, while traveling. Her on-and-off (and volatile) boyfriend, Bill Lanway, later got hold of her phone and decided to try to blackmail Maund for $25,000 about their tryst. Maund could have paid up, or told his wife, or called the cops. But fearing a scandal, he "chose a fourth option, one that would cost him a lot more money and, ultimately, his freedom."
Maund's big mistake was turning to his dealership's new head of security, Gilad Peled, a former bodyguard for Charlie Sheen who claimed to have ties to Israel's Mossad, for help. Peled, in turn, might have "managed the job directly rather than delegating it to the ex-CIA husband of one of his wife's friends." That man, Bryon Brockway, "could've given less priority to experience in Afghanistan and more to experience doing shoe-leather investigative work in the Nashville area." Instead, the assembled group (the last member is former Marine Adam Carey) went from a mission of surveilling the blackmailer to a decision to kill both him and the escort. The now-imprisoned Maund paid nearly $1 million for the eventual murders. Peled ended up taking a plea deal and cooperating with investigators. Read the full story. (Or check out other longform recaps.)
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