January 6, 2025 • 43 mins
For this week’s episode, we travel to my hometown of Austin, Texas. An iconic local business is embroiled in a murder for hire case that attracts national attention. Why did Erik Maund hire someone to kill two people? Katy Vine from Texas Monthly tells me about her podcast, The Problem with Erik.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
So when Eric asks how much does something like that cost?
He follows up with, you know, five hundred thousand? Is
that sound about right? And Gil says, yeah, I think
five hundred thousand would do it.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about what the choices writers make,
both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into
the unpublished details behind their stories. For this week's episode,
we traveled to my hometown of Austin, Texas. An iconic
(01:14):
local business is embroiled in a murder for higher case
that attracts national attention. Why did Eric mand hire someone
to kill two people? Katie Vine from Texas Monthly tells
me about her podcast, The Problem with Eric. Well, let's
talk about this story. First of all, how did you
get roped into doing this story? Did you bring it
(01:36):
to the folks at Texas Monthly or was it pitched
to you?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Now, we were lucky enough at Texas Monthly that Anna Worrel,
who's a freelance podcast producer, came to us with this story.
She's an Austin native and was working in the film
world out in Los Angeles and her dad kept sending
her updates on this case, sent her clippings and stuff,
and so she got interested and brought it to us,
and I'm really glad that she did. You know, some
(02:02):
of the folks in the podcast studio brought it to
me and I think a week later we were on
a plane to Nashville, shaking hands in the airport. Hi,
I'm going to be basically living with you for the
next three weeks.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
We've had several Texas Monthly podcasts featured on Wicked Words,
but I always feel like, you know, they're Texas stories.
I always feel like they're small towns. But this is
not this is where we are, this isn't Austin. So
before we get into the story, is it different working
in a bigger city have a different feel than maybe
(02:36):
like a more small town story.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yes, although you can kind of find the slice of
the big city that is basically a small town. And
so while the crime stars that I've done in small towns,
you are looking for that person who knows everybody to
introduce you around. We didn't have that necessary here. But
(03:00):
we could find people who were in Eric Mond's world,
which is its own little universe, if that makes sense. Yeah,
So like the Austin Country club and you know, the
world of car dealerships, those are little worlds that we
could tap into and let them explain the culture in
(03:23):
which he'd grown up.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Let's just start from the beginning with the dealership. It's
Charles Montyota, which I have heard about I feel like
my entire life. I don't know if that's true, but
it's an institution, a car dealership here in Austin. Tell
me about the origin of that car dealership, since there's
so much money involved, and then we'll get into a
little bit about how Eric kind of grew up and
(03:46):
you know, this must have shaped some of the decisions
that he made. But tell me about the car dealership first.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Sure, the Mond name has it definitely been blasted on
TV and radio ads in Central Texas for decades. Eric
Mond's grandpa, Charles Moond, founded the first Mond dealership in
nineteen fifty seven, and over the years, that company, as
you say, became this empire, the total Loston institution. It
(04:12):
grew over the decades to include Volkswagen and eventually Toyota.
As a grandson. Then Eric is one of the heirs
to the empire with forty million dollars, high profile enough
that anyone could google him and find out that he's
got money.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
So we have Charlesmond, and this is a huge empire.
And is Eric what is he like? What's the impression
you get from him? Is he working in the dealership
or is he sort of the playboy kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I don't know that he was a playboy necessarily, but
he was married to a former dealership office worker. They'd
raised two kids. They had a giant mansion next to
the golf course at the country club. He had a
close group of friends who he played golf with all
the time. One guy who we talked to, who he
(05:05):
worked with at the Volkswagen dealership, said that he basically
would sit around and dip snuff and make night comments
like he just you don't get the impression from talking
to the people who we were able to talk to
that he was a terrifically hard worker or had a
ton of insight into the dealership itself, as his granddad
(05:28):
certainly did. I mean, people talk about Charles Mont his granddad,
as if he were sort of legendary figure who'd come
from really nothing in East Texas and got to Austin
and built this from scratch. That's sort of who Eric is.
He's sort of living in the shadow of somebody who
(05:48):
was able to have the rags to riches legacy, and
he's just sort of like kid who's born at the
Silver Spoon.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Was Charles Mond alive when Eric was growing up? Oh yeah, okay,
So were they close? I mean, how did they view
each other? Do you know?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
I don't know what the relationship was between Eric and
Charles Moond. I only know the relationship between Dougmond was
Eric's father, and Charles Wond because there's a story that
we were told over and over again about a knife
fight had occurred at the Austin Gundry Club. Who between
(06:26):
father and son? So Charles Wond I don't know who
pulled the knife first, what kind of knife it was,
what it was about. But a lot of people said, oh, yeah,
did you hear about the knife fight?
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Do we know anything about Doug and Eric and how
they got along?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Very tight? Doug and Eric were tight.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Okay, so you all reached out to basically, it sounds
like on his side as many people as possible, with
the exception of the kids. You tried the wife. Is
the wife around?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Oh sure, yeah, that was a no go.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, nobody wanted to participate. Yeah, but you have to try.
I meanjournalists, you have to try. So when we start
moving through this story, Eric sounds lazy and not ambitious.
Does he seem like a good father, good husband? Do
you have any impression about that.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
By March of twenty twenty, when the main events of
this story occur, Eric and his wife are already on
the brink of a divorce. So, you know, I think
if she didn't have suspicions then that he was having,
you know, affairs or seeing escorts, she certainly knew it
a little later because he had Charlie Sheen's assistant, who'd
(07:38):
become a someone who kind of was hanging around the dealership.
He had him forge a light detector, saying that Eric
wasn't being unfaithful. So you make make of that, would
you will?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay, so he is a philanderer. It sounds like she
wants to divorce him. When does this pivotal affair come in?
That is the crux of this whole story. It sounds like,
what do we know about what happens with that march?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Maybe it's maybe it's late February of twenty twenty. Eric
is going to go to Nashville, where his son is
in college, and during that visit, he texts an escort
whom he's seen once before. They seemed familiar with each
other according to the texts, and they set up a
(08:26):
night to meet, and all the text evidence shows they
did meet, and then he made arrangements with another escort
for the following night. I did not find evidence whether
or not that actually happened, but he was trying to
at least set up a date with a separate escort. Initially,
that was that, and he came back to Austin and
(08:47):
figured everything was fine.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
So this was not unusual for him hiring escorts. I mean,
do you get that impression?
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I don't know. I can only say that he definitely
had seen this particular escort at least once before. Leila
Loved was the name that she used. Her real name
was Holly Williams.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
So he returns to Austin after seeing his kid at college.
And you said, this was about late February, So we
are on the cusp of the pandemic right there.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
You're coming right up to the edge of the pandemic.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, yeah, maybe this was like New York things happening
in New York at this point. And then okay, and
the pandemic hits. When is the next incident that happens?
And I know that it involves Holly. What happens next?
This man is on the edge. He's a hiring escorts,
but he's on the edge. He's trying to get a divorce.
He's got a lot of money. First of all, before
you answer that, what is the divorce going to be? Like?
(09:42):
Is she going to get a lot of money out
of him? Because of his money?
Speaker 2 (09:47):
This has always been something that has confused me because
apparently they had a prenup and according to testimony from
his attorney who wrote up the prenup, that was a
as I guess he would say, a very good prenup,
and so he wasn't really in danger of losing a
lot of money in that way. I think it was
(10:07):
about his motivation was not financial necessarily. The next thing
that happens is Holly Williams. It turns out as a boyfriend.
The boyfriend is this nanke you redhead named Bill Landway
from the suburbs of Nashville. They started going to DM
parties a lot together and they got very close, and
(10:30):
then he found out she was in escort. I guess
he didn't know that rightway, he got extremely possessive and jealous.
Also wasn't making a lot of money. It sounds like
at the time he was delivering Amazon packages a little bad,
and he was dealing cards for high end poker games,
but not really anything steady. And he started to get
(10:51):
a hold of her phone when she wasn't around, and
digging up her client list, and in one case he
found a Vanderbilt radiologist whom he threatened. He didn't extort
the radiologist, he was just threatening him and said, you know,
if you see Hollywood's again and I'll tell your wife.
(11:12):
He also found Eric's number and he must have done
enough googling. Doesn't take much to figure out that Eric
Land has a lot of money. This time he started
asking for money. I don't know if there were others,
if there were others that didn't come into evidence in the.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Trial, but we know of at least those two that
Bill Lanway was reaching out to Eric as most people
would in this situation, completely breaked out.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
So he doesn't extort money from the radiologist, but he
does from Eric. So he makes this decision. And what
is he doing? So he's calling Eric and he says,
You're going to need to give me money or I'm
going to tell everybody that you've hired an escort. Is
that pretty much what ends up happening. How much? Which
(12:00):
is he demanding twenty five thousand dollars? You would think
you would ask for more money.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Everybody assumes that he mistyped it, but he wrote at
one point twenty five hundred, even lower twenty five hundred
to make all your problems go away, right, But Eric
and the people around Eric testified that twenty five thousand
was the number that was being batted around. So on
the phone and however else Eric was getting this information,
(12:27):
it was clear to him anyway that it was twenty
five thousand.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Now does Bill's girlfriend, the escort Holly, does she know
that this is happening.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Or no, There's been no evidence that she knew about
any of this.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
What are the instructions that Bill has given Eric? Is
this like a wire transfer or what's supposed to happen?
Speaker 2 (12:46):
I don't remember what the method was supposed to be.
But Eric decides instead of doing that, he talks to
one of his colleagues at the dealership, and that guy
gets in touch with somebody named Gil Pulled. Gil Paled
is a new security worker at the dealership. He claimed
to have served in the Masade, the Israeli intelligence agency.
(13:10):
He has built like I mean, just like a brick,
and so Gil suggested to Eric that he go to
the police, but Eric said he didn't want to be embarrassed,
and so Gil told him, Okay, I got it.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
I'll take care of it.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
He then goes to another guy in Austin, not far
from his house. This guy, Brian Brockway, lives nearby, and
he said, what I can do for you is, you know,
just build this, do a surveillance operation in Nashville and
just kind of spoke around. At this point. They just
know that it has something to do with Layla love, right,
(13:46):
and that's kind of all they have to go on.
And so the idea is Brian Brockway will get a
little team together and they'll go to Nashville and sniff
it out. And that was all that it was supposed
to be.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I feel like there's some weird disconnect with this part
of the story because twenty five thousand is not a lot, okay,
And then I'm thinking, okay, twenty five thousand. Of course,
we've already said this over and over again. He can
spend this. This is no big deal. He's getting a divorce,
I mean basically, right. I mean he's sort of the
relationship is essentially over. He's not trying to save a relationship.
(14:22):
He has adult children, he doesn't have little children. Is
it really sort of this shame? I know he's very
close to his father. You really think he's driven by
like the shame the public ridicule of this coming out. Somehow,
it just seems so extreme to then hire eventually a
hitman to do this.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Well, I think it's important to remember that he didn't
go into this hiring a Hitman, right. He just went
into it, hiring somebody to look into it, and then
it just sort of escalates. I can't say exactly that
it got out of his control because he's paid for
but he just kind of kept signing off on you
(15:03):
want to do what sure, go do that yes, And
so the guys on the ground could not seem to
get Holly or Bill Landway to respond. They would knock
on the door, they would text.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
The guys who landed were very experienced. Brian Brockway had
deployed all of the world conducting special ops on behalf
of the US Marines, and he hired this kid, Adam,
a twenty nine year old former marine. There were two
other guys who were involved, one whom we call Red
(15:38):
because he has had to keep his name out of
the press because he's still concerned that some of these
guys and their friends may come after him. And then
there's a guy named Tony Rapinsky who landed got one
whiff of the situation and was like, I'm out of here.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Wow, this is all bad.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
This can only go in bad directions based on the
things that I'm seeing. In fact, like when he sat
down to give his testimony. I remember one of the
defense attorneys. Eric's defense attorney asked, you know, what were
you most afraid of when you landed in Nashville, and
he just said stupidity and that basically said it all.
Like I can really testify. After that, it was kind
(16:20):
of like, Okay, yeah, that loves it up.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
But I mean, the more people you involved in this conspiracy,
the bigger. Well, of course, I'm thinking this is way
more than twenty five thousand. I'm assuming this is really
he's going to be on the whole as we're going along.
But at the same time, I'm thinking, you know, the
more people that you're adding in, the riskier it is.
But it sounds like he really was just scared, right.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
I think so he was out of his element. If
he had dealt with blackmail before, it wasn't this type
of black mail, I don't. I mean, I don't have
any evidence that he'd ever dealt with it before, but
I don't know, certainly not this type, bro, because his
reactions are give up a whiff of.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Desperation, Yeah, very extreme.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Adam, who was the youngest, you know, the group, the
twenty nine year old, starts making comments about he could
get rid of this problem for fifty or sixty. K
Red thinks it's a joke at first, but then starts thinking,
this kid's loose cannon. He's really immature. Adam goes to
Walmart and buys cable tize and burlap, and you know,
(17:26):
the rest of the guys are like, what is this
kid up to? But then Brian after Red and Tony
Rapinsky leave Nashville and it's just Brian and Adam and
it's coming to this sort deadline point for Eric. They
finally take that idea to Gil Pullett and say, what
if we just take.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Them out, both of them. They're talking about Bill and Holly.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah, at first they talk about just Bill, but then
based on something that was so nothing. I mean, I
think they claimed that they saw Holly walking around with
like a bag from a home depot or office depot
or something, and based on just like that said, oh,
I think she's spending a lot of money. We don't
(18:10):
know if they just wanted to cover their bases, if
they wanted to do a thorough job, if they really
just needed the money and so they needed kind of
to amp up the threat. Whatever the case is, they
brought it to Gil. Gil brought it to Eric. It's
then I think the evening of March eleventh, Eric is home.
(18:31):
His landline rings a voice he doesn't recognize, which is
Bill says, you have till eight o'clock tonight or he's
gonna tell Eric's wife everything. And then at eight o'clock
he texts, it's eight o'clock and I'm going to follow
up through with everything and thank you. It's just weird.
That night, Gil takes the idea to Eric and he
(18:51):
drives up outside of Eric's house and he says, you know,
this is what Adam and Brian propose edm and Brian
had proposed course to take them out for sixteen k each,
so one hundred and twenty total that Eric would be
paying out. But that's not what Gila Led told Eric
(19:12):
because gilad Led was desperate for cash himself. Gil needed
I think he had eleven dollars in the bank at
that moment. He had two little kids and was having
trouble with his wife's business. He could see, you know,
COVID was coming, his wife had a salon. Everything was
shutting down. I mean, I think there was just sort
of panic in the air. And so when Eric asks
(19:34):
how much does something like that cost. He follows up with,
you know, five hundred thousand Is that sound about right?
And Gil says, yeah, I think five hundred thousand wouldn't
do it.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Did you find out or did it come out during
any of the trial. Did you find out if Eric
had told anyone else about this in his family other
than you know, talking to all these goons. Did his
dad know? Did anybody know if they did?
Speaker 2 (20:01):
That was never revealed in court.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
So tell me how this starts to unfold. Eric says, okay,
half a million's fine? And what happens after that? You
have all of these players involved, who all sound like
goons to me.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Well again, by this time, it's just Adam and Bryan
on the ground. That night, they just decide they're going
to surprise Bill and Holly in the parking lot outside
of Holly's apartment, which is what they do. They kidnap
Holly first, They shoot Bill dead, keep him in the car,
then keep her alive in the back seat. One of
(20:39):
the special ops guys drives Holly's car with Bill and
Holly in it to a site, an off site location,
and then the other special ops worker takes a rental
car behind Holly's car to follow them as sort of
the getaway car.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
And Holly is alive. Does anybody talk about what hery?
I'm sure she terrified and has no idea what's happening,
but her boyfriend is dead.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
We do find out later in undercover recordings that they
were possibly surprised. It gets a little confusing, like, on
one hand, you hear from gil Paled that yes, it
was the plan was always Holly and Bill. But when
Brian Brockway is telling the story to Red in an
undercover recording that the FBI set up later, he tells
(21:27):
read that they were shocked all of a sudden, Oh
my god, it's both of them. So now we've got
two of them. And they were kind of telling Holly
it's fine, it's fine, We're not after you, and then
ended up killing her in the back seat just to
kind of cover their tracks.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Where do they end up putting the bodies? So they
have these these two adults. Are they driving out of
town or what are they doing?
Speaker 2 (21:50):
They drove kind of where there was a construction site.
It's not far from Hollway's apartment. They just drove kind
of around the corner where there was this little construction site,
and they made it look like Holly's car had kind
of just driven down into a ditch to hit a tree.
On the first glance, it looked like it could have
been just a car crash, except that when you look
(22:12):
in the car itself, there's nobody in the driver's seat.
I mean, one person is in the back seat and
the other person is literally like, I don't know why
upside down. Bill was upside down in the passenger seat.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Wow, And of course they've been shot once you start
looking at it. Okay, who makes the discovery of these
two bodies.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
It was a construction worker who got to the job
site the morning of March thirteenth, We spotted Holly's Acura
and calls nine to one one. Then the Metro Nashville
Police Department starts to investigate, and pretty soon after that
they start to put pieces together. Probably because hollyhead recording
(22:54):
devices all over her house.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
What she did.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Why Bill Landway had been increasingly abusive and to the
point where she had even filed restraining orders against him.
I mean it was on again, off again, and so
even though he had these instructions, he would kind of
still come by and they would make up and it
would all be fine. It was complicated that way, And
so when the officers went into Holly's apartment, they had
(23:21):
all this video, but all you could see from the
video as far as the murders are concerned, is you
see Holly and Billy in the apartment. Then you can
hear everything happening in the parking lot, but you can't
see it. But then they rewind the tape and they
see these suspicious looking characters, big guys not facing the camera,
(23:43):
seemingly intentionally knocking on her door asking to talk. So
they feel like, okay, this is probably connected too. Then
they release the video to the public and say, hey,
anyone know who this guy is. It's sort of a
amazing when you hear the tech workers for the investigative
(24:04):
units describe the tools that they have. I mean, it's like,
you know, picking off the cell towers and trying to
figure out, like, well, who set up this address and
whose phone is this and all that. And so they
were finally able to figure out this involved Eric MOHMD.
They still didn't know exactly how it involved ericmand but
they were able to get stuff off the cloud and
(24:25):
find some messages and things like that, and because then
it became multiple states, then it's involved the FBI.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
I know this is an odd question, but what is
Eric using that you all are able to figure out
that he requested Holly one night and then another escort
another night. Are the police tracing something to be able
to figure out what he had been doing?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I think that was P four one one and SLIKSA
were two sites that Holly had been using. Their sites
coming used with escorts, and so I think it was
just going through all of her clients and trying to
figure out which numbers matched. The investigators were finally able
(25:10):
to get texts between Holly and Bill to illuminate that
relationship and conflict, and then they were also able to
get all of the texts between Bill and others, and
so he was they, you know, by like who is
this number? Well, this is this number belongs to some
guy in Austin. Why is he texting him for money?
(25:31):
I don't understand what's going on here. So then they
have to kind of start piecing it out enough that
they can make the connection to Gil Paled and then
they start getting the bank records and learn that Eric
wand transferred one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Glad
Paled the day of the murders, which is significant for investigator. Right,
they find a situation report that wrote to Gil talking
(25:56):
about the surveillance of Holly and Bill. Point I think
the FBI knew really what they were looking at. Hitman
for hire resulting in murder is pretty rare. A lot
of times it's hit man for hire, but it doesn't
get to the point of the actual murders, and this
was a rare instance where it did. And so they're
(26:17):
kind of working backwards.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
So it's Gill and Adam only is Byron in this
at all?
Speaker 4 (26:22):
Or no?
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah? Yeah, so Gil was sort of the middleman, right.
It's Brian and Adam were the guys on the ground
doing the shooting, and they were never able to clarify
who which one of them pulled the trigger or if
they both pulled the trigger. At the end of the day,
it was tried as a conspiracy, and so it didn't matter.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Once they kill Bill and Hawley and try to stage
just as an accident, is there a text or a
phone call to Eric confirming that this is done.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
The only way that the investigators knew that Gil and
Eric knew is because all their phones suddenly go silent,
like Adam dismantles his account, Brian gets rid of his account,
All the accounts suddenly disappear.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
How quickly does this case come together after Bill and
Holly are discovered.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Not very quickly, not very quickly at all. So that
was right when COVID hits right March twenty twenty, and
they're not able to put anything together until they gets
summer of twenty twenty one, when they finally have done
enough desk work, you know, searching bank records, phone records,
(27:33):
all that kind of jazz, and they figure they need
a confidential source whom they can leverage. And Red had
just applied for a job that we can't say, but
you can guess something that required really high security clearance.
And the FBI met him in the interview and told
(27:54):
him he needed to start texting Adam and Brian again
and set up a ruse as if Red were going
to attempt something similar in a similar situation where a
guy was being exhorted by a woman and needed to
get rid of her, and so he was pretending like
he was looking for tips like what did you learn
(28:16):
from your Nashville experience? You know, I never really heard
what went on? Can you tell me more? And so
using that technique, he was able to get them both
to talk extensively, even though they both both Adam and
Brian started out very nervous. And that was one of
the most amazing things to me about doing this as
a podcast, And of course it's a standalone story too,
(28:39):
But when you can hear the audio of Adam and
Brian discussing what they did, things they would have done differently,
advice that they give to Red, it's just so chilling.
You're just in the room with them, you know, dear
a nonchalant it is.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
How well did Red know them that well?
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I mean, he was in the same circles and they
knew a lot of people in common, but I don't
think naming each other very well before all.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
This, So you all ended up interviewing Red for this
or no.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
No, I'm hoping after sentencing, I don't think we're going
to have many surprises because it's mandatory life or this
kind of conviction. But there always appeals, so you know,
everybody's kind of waiting. Some of those people who are
in with the investigators, and maybe even on in any
of the other groups. You know, if there's anybody from
Bryan's family or Eric's family, or at a family or
(29:33):
even the victims' families who wanted to talk, I think
maybe they will wait until sentencing as well.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Tell me about some of the things that you can
recall that were on this undercover wire. Is there anything
that was surprising to you?
Speaker 2 (29:48):
A lot of it was surprising the level of detail
that Adam was able to give. Read, you know, make
sure use these kinds of gloves, make sure you tape,
you know, put two pairs of gloves on, so don't
leave any DNA and TAPA shut on it, so on
this kind of stuff. Probably shocking to me was Brian
saying how he really respected Adam for killing Holly in
(30:13):
the backseat because he knows a lot of guys have
a bleeding heart and couldn't do that, And that kind
of talk was pretty pretty shocking for me.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And Red handled it well, I'm assuming, I mean, they
believed him obviously, so he got them everything that they needed,
essentially he did.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
And then the FBI grabbed Gil coming off the airplane
at the Austin Airport, and put him on the phone
with Eric Moond, knowing that Eric was driving up from
a hunting trip in South Texas. I think this was
December of twenty twenty one, So again, like took a
long time to get to this point of starting to
(30:55):
arrest anybody, and then everybody's basically arrested on the same day,
just after Gil gets Eric on the phone and they record,
I records that and Gil tells Eric, you know, we
have a problem. The Nashville shooters want an extra twenty
five thousand dollars to keep quiet. What should we do?
Do you want me to take care of it? And
(31:15):
Eric just says, give me a number. That's his response,
Not what are you talking about anything like that. Just
give me a number, and Gil says one hundred. And
Eric says, honestly, I'd rather take care of it permanently
than do the twenty five thousand. So it's almost like
his idea. He says, I'll just wire it to you,
just like last time. Wow, it's a hard thing for
(31:37):
him to defend himself. After that, the FBI descends on
him pretty quickly, arrests him, pulls him in, and after
all that, it's just a matter of going to trial.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Then do they say what Eric's reaction was? I mean,
I know that sounds like a silly question, but was
he in denial about it or what did he do?
Speaker 2 (31:56):
It was hard to say what his reaction was.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
We watched the video as the FBI played a recording
of the murders from Holly's security camera audio, and they
recorded Eric's reaction.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
He shows that he's listening really hard. He keeps saying
like kind of I don't know, you know what this is?
And and they keep coming back to him with you
know exactly what this is?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Does everybody else turn on him? Essentially? I mean, do
you get the real real story? Once these guys are
all under arrest?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Not really really. None of them testified in the trial
except for Guilfilett. They said that there might be some
Google rooms in his sentencing if you testified, but everybody
else said nothing and pled not guilty, which you know,
someone explained to me that they would all, of course
plead not guilty because it would be sort of notpractice
(32:48):
for an attorney to tell your client to plead guilty
if you know they're looking at life anyway, so their
only chance is to plead not guilty even I says
sort of a slam dunk.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Now, what are the chart or just for all these
guys because Gil doesn't pull the trigger, he's not even
at the scene. He's the middleman who's organizing things. What
is he charged with?
Speaker 2 (33:07):
So Adam, Brian and Eric were trying who murder for hire?
I'm pretty sure that's what Gil was also charged with.
Because it's a conspiracy, They're all charged together. And then
Adam and Brian were also charged and found guilty of
two additional charges, conspiracy to kidnapping and kidnapping with death
resulting because they'd taken Holly while she was still alive
(33:30):
in the parking lot and then killed her later than
they had the extra kidnapping charges.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Do we ever see Holly's family or Bill's family through
any of this?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Not really. Bill's family is pretty complicated. His dad shot
his mom or stabbed his mom when he was really
little in.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Front of him.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
But he was raised by other family members who did
come to the child but understandably wanted the mood to
talk to reporters. And Hollick's family was also grieving and wow,
they were in the courtroom, didn't want to interact with.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Us what happens with Eric, because he's you know, now
kind of the central character here. Has he gone on trial?
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, they were all tried together in Nashville and found
guilty after I think it was about three weeks testimony
and said then the sentencing. Now they're just kind of
hanging out in federal prison waiting for where they're going
to be permanently and for how long, and so we'll
know more about that. I think by the end of
the year.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Any reaction from his family, Eric's family, his ex wife,
or the kids. Was anyone there from his family?
Speaker 2 (34:36):
His family sat in front of us and they were
underto you know, they were upset.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Of course, did they believe it.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I don't know. I don't know what they said to
each other when they would go back to their hotel
in Nashville. We were told by other folks who hang
out in Eric's circles that in the days leading up
to the jury's decision that the people were kind of split.
There were some people who were just thinking like, well,
(35:04):
he probably just said take care of it, and somebody
misinterpreted that. But I think after all the evidence came
out and that got around Austin the opinion shifted a bit,
although there are still people who we've talked to who
not defend him necessarily, but don't believe that he should
(35:26):
go that Eric should go to prison for the rest
of his life, because I said, he only did it
the one time, and it's not like something that he
would probably do again. So there are folks who say
things like that or justify it one way or the other.
I don't know what Eric's personal reaction is to it.
(35:46):
I did get the sense from just watching him in
court that he was pretty devastated by the decision. Adam
and Brian were totally impossible to read. They had no reaction.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
What's your feeling about this whole story? I mean, why
is this an interesting story to you? Why would you
want to spend so much time on this particular story?
What does it say?
Speaker 2 (36:06):
I think there's a lot of talk these days about privilege,
and this was a doozy somebody who really didn't see
that his actions had any consequences, or that the consequences
that it meant for other people weren't any relevant. I,
as you know, like generally do convent stories. If I
(36:29):
do true crime, I normally steer away from murders. But
this one did have some overlap with the con men
who I've written about, which is that conman always think
they're smarter than everybody else and that the rules are flexible.
One guy explained to me, you know, rules are man made,
and he too was a man who could make rules.
And I think while Eric's not a con man, he
(36:50):
did share that philosophy. He kind of just felt like,
just pay the money and get it taken care of,
and you don't have to get your hands dirty. Also
was really intrigued by all of the motivations that were
sort of creating this perfect storm in which this was
sort of an inevitability. You have the jealous boyfriend who
(37:14):
lashes out of his girlfriend's clients, so there's you know
he's coming in. You have a middleman who's desperate for
cash and sees endless opportunities. Eric Non is basically an
ATM machine, right. You have a guy who's sort of Adam,
who's sort of fantasized about becoming a hitman his whole life,
who now has a perfect opportunity to live out his fantasies.
And Eric, a rich guy who wants to keep his
(37:35):
secret secret and Holly kind of walks into this storm
and it's just got a collateral damage. We've seen a
lot of the texts between her and Bill in the
week's leading up to this. There's no indication, I mean,
she was trying to get rid of him. In fact,
she was about to go to the courthouse and give
(37:57):
more testimony about things he had done that would put
Bill in prison.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
I think her exact words were in the in one
of the texts you in court, motherfucker.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Poor Holly. I mean, a tumultuous existence. It sounds like
I mean so ultimately.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
You know.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
One of the things that I find so confusing about
this story is I keep coming back to the twenty
five thousand dollars, just what a not a big deal
this was. But you know what, Paul Hole's on Barry
Bones and I talk about this all the time, where
we say, boy, you know, nobody would kill someone over this,
and Paul always says, it doesn't matter what you think,
(38:36):
it's the perception of that person. And as you keep
coming back to, it's not the twenty five thousand for him,
it's the you know, humiliation or the Lord knows whatever
is in Eric Mohm's mind, but it doesn't matter because
that's what he thought was the appropriate reaction. So now
he's sitting in jail over twenty five thousand dollars and
(38:59):
you know, and murdering two people he barely knew and
what he didn't know at all, And that's just awful, awful.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
I think it's to me, it's the escalation of things
getting out of control and how slippery it gets after
a certain point. You know, if you keep saying, yes,
let's keep going down this road and yes, and you're panicking,
and you can kind of feel this moment approaching and
it feels like there is nobody in their right mind
(39:28):
around to stop it. Yeah, the only people who could
have stopped it left town.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Well, it's normalized. It's being more normalized. The more they
talk about the surveillance. It's like stalking, you know, peeping tom.
It all escalates into something worse. So what a story.
And I will say, I mean, aside from feeling I
don't feel as bad for Bill obviously as I do
for Holly, but I feel particularly terrible for his eric's
adult children and his ex wife. I mean, and I
(39:56):
guess his father too. I mean, that must just be
really differ. Do you think that this has had any
kind of impact on the dealership, which I know people
are going to think it's silly, but Charles Monteyute has
been around forever. I mean, it's an institution. Did it
get any kind of blowback? Do you think?
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Oh? For sure. In the months after the arrests, the
Monts had to sell their car business to a fortune
three hundred company whoa The amount was undisclosed. But yeah,
another dealer, former dealer in town, told us that there's
a clause in a lot of these agreements that local
dealerships have with the company, and if you get into
(40:36):
some kind of jam like this, you're done.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
So that was because of this, I mean that's.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
The family has not said that, and there's no paperwork
to say that, but a dealer who knows family and
has enough experience in this that it's definitely something to consider.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Wow, oh boy, what a story. And you know, I mean,
I know it was an Austin story, and I know
had been kicking around for several years. And you know,
something that happens in the middle of the pandemic, which
throws so much stuff off and slows investigations, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Oh yeah, Well, and if there's a time to you know,
sit tight and be quiet, which Eric had to do
of course, and then months after the murder it would
have been that time, Like, there's no better time to
keep from acting suspicious. I mean, who knows, if you know,
people see you out and about in the world in
the months, in the weeks after something like this, maybe
(41:28):
you are rattled or you look you know, look different.
But when we started asking around people in Austin, you know,
how did his behavior change? The response was it was
the pandemic.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
Yeah, so we all changed.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Yeah, I don't know. He was in his living room
like everybody else.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yeah. What do you think the lesson learned is from
all of this, Katie? Do you I mean, is there
any takeaway aside from I mean just the obvious, which
is murder for hire is an awful life, conspiracy is
and awful idea. We've talked about privilege, is that kind
of what it boils down to people thinking that they
(42:08):
can do whatever the hell they want because of the
way they grew up.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
It's a big part of it, certainly a big part
of it. And then again, how in some situations there's
these sort of trains racing towards each other, and sometimes
it just seems like there's very little you can do
to stop it.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(43:00):
Associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by
John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga.
Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and
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This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
So when Eric asks how much does something like that cost?
He follows up with, you know, five hundred thousand? Is
that sound about right? And Gil says, yeah, I think
five hundred thousand would do it.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about what the choices writers make,
both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into
the unpublished details behind their stories. For this week's episode,
we traveled to my hometown of Austin, Texas. An iconic
(01:14):
local business is embroiled in a murder for higher case
that attracts national attention. Why did Eric mand hire someone
to kill two people? Katie Vine from Texas Monthly tells
me about her podcast, The Problem with Eric. Well, let's
talk about this story. First of all, how did you
get roped into doing this story? Did you bring it
(01:36):
to the folks at Texas Monthly or was it pitched
to you?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Now, we were lucky enough at Texas Monthly that Anna Worrel,
who's a freelance podcast producer, came to us with this story.
She's an Austin native and was working in the film
world out in Los Angeles and her dad kept sending
her updates on this case, sent her clippings and stuff,
and so she got interested and brought it to us,
and I'm really glad that she did. You know, some
(02:02):
of the folks in the podcast studio brought it to
me and I think a week later we were on
a plane to Nashville, shaking hands in the airport. Hi,
I'm going to be basically living with you for the
next three weeks.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
We've had several Texas Monthly podcasts featured on Wicked Words,
but I always feel like, you know, they're Texas stories.
I always feel like they're small towns. But this is
not this is where we are, this isn't Austin. So
before we get into the story, is it different working
in a bigger city have a different feel than maybe
(02:36):
like a more small town story.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yes, although you can kind of find the slice of
the big city that is basically a small town. And
so while the crime stars that I've done in small towns,
you are looking for that person who knows everybody to
introduce you around. We didn't have that necessary here. But
(03:00):
we could find people who were in Eric Mond's world,
which is its own little universe, if that makes sense. Yeah,
So like the Austin Country club and you know, the
world of car dealerships, those are little worlds that we
could tap into and let them explain the culture in
(03:23):
which he'd grown up.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Let's just start from the beginning with the dealership. It's
Charles Montyota, which I have heard about I feel like
my entire life. I don't know if that's true, but
it's an institution, a car dealership here in Austin. Tell
me about the origin of that car dealership, since there's
so much money involved, and then we'll get into a
little bit about how Eric kind of grew up and
(03:46):
you know, this must have shaped some of the decisions
that he made. But tell me about the car dealership first.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Sure, the Mond name has it definitely been blasted on
TV and radio ads in Central Texas for decades. Eric
Mond's grandpa, Charles Moond, founded the first Mond dealership in
nineteen fifty seven, and over the years, that company, as
you say, became this empire, the total Loston institution. It
(04:12):
grew over the decades to include Volkswagen and eventually Toyota.
As a grandson. Then Eric is one of the heirs
to the empire with forty million dollars, high profile enough
that anyone could google him and find out that he's
got money.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
So we have Charlesmond, and this is a huge empire.
And is Eric what is he like? What's the impression
you get from him? Is he working in the dealership
or is he sort of the playboy kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I don't know that he was a playboy necessarily, but
he was married to a former dealership office worker. They'd
raised two kids. They had a giant mansion next to
the golf course at the country club. He had a
close group of friends who he played golf with all
the time. One guy who we talked to, who he
(05:05):
worked with at the Volkswagen dealership, said that he basically
would sit around and dip snuff and make night comments
like he just you don't get the impression from talking
to the people who we were able to talk to
that he was a terrifically hard worker or had a
ton of insight into the dealership itself, as his granddad
(05:28):
certainly did. I mean, people talk about Charles Mont his granddad,
as if he were sort of legendary figure who'd come
from really nothing in East Texas and got to Austin
and built this from scratch. That's sort of who Eric is.
He's sort of living in the shadow of somebody who
(05:48):
was able to have the rags to riches legacy, and
he's just sort of like kid who's born at the
Silver Spoon.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Was Charles Mond alive when Eric was growing up? Oh yeah, okay,
So were they close? I mean, how did they view
each other? Do you know?
Speaker 2 (06:04):
I don't know what the relationship was between Eric and
Charles Moond. I only know the relationship between Dougmond was
Eric's father, and Charles Wond because there's a story that
we were told over and over again about a knife
fight had occurred at the Austin Gundry Club. Who between
(06:26):
father and son? So Charles Wond I don't know who
pulled the knife first, what kind of knife it was,
what it was about. But a lot of people said, oh, yeah,
did you hear about the knife fight?
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Do we know anything about Doug and Eric and how
they got along?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Very tight? Doug and Eric were tight.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Okay, so you all reached out to basically, it sounds
like on his side as many people as possible, with
the exception of the kids. You tried the wife. Is
the wife around?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Oh sure, yeah, that was a no go.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, nobody wanted to participate. Yeah, but you have to try.
I meanjournalists, you have to try. So when we start
moving through this story, Eric sounds lazy and not ambitious.
Does he seem like a good father, good husband? Do
you have any impression about that.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
By March of twenty twenty, when the main events of
this story occur, Eric and his wife are already on
the brink of a divorce. So, you know, I think
if she didn't have suspicions then that he was having,
you know, affairs or seeing escorts, she certainly knew it
a little later because he had Charlie Sheen's assistant, who'd
(07:38):
become a someone who kind of was hanging around the dealership.
He had him forge a light detector, saying that Eric
wasn't being unfaithful. So you make make of that, would
you will?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay, so he is a philanderer. It sounds like she
wants to divorce him. When does this pivotal affair come in?
That is the crux of this whole story. It sounds like,
what do we know about what happens with that march?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Maybe it's maybe it's late February of twenty twenty. Eric
is going to go to Nashville, where his son is
in college, and during that visit, he texts an escort
whom he's seen once before. They seemed familiar with each
other according to the texts, and they set up a
(08:26):
night to meet, and all the text evidence shows they
did meet, and then he made arrangements with another escort
for the following night. I did not find evidence whether
or not that actually happened, but he was trying to
at least set up a date with a separate escort. Initially,
that was that, and he came back to Austin and
(08:47):
figured everything was fine.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
So this was not unusual for him hiring escorts. I mean,
do you get that impression?
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I don't know. I can only say that he definitely
had seen this particular escort at least once before. Leila
Loved was the name that she used. Her real name
was Holly Williams.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
So he returns to Austin after seeing his kid at college.
And you said, this was about late February, So we
are on the cusp of the pandemic right there.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
You're coming right up to the edge of the pandemic.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, yeah, maybe this was like New York things happening
in New York at this point. And then okay, and
the pandemic hits. When is the next incident that happens?
And I know that it involves Holly. What happens next?
This man is on the edge. He's a hiring escorts,
but he's on the edge. He's trying to get a divorce.
He's got a lot of money. First of all, before
you answer that, what is the divorce going to be? Like?
(09:42):
Is she going to get a lot of money out
of him? Because of his money?
Speaker 2 (09:47):
This has always been something that has confused me because
apparently they had a prenup and according to testimony from
his attorney who wrote up the prenup, that was a
as I guess he would say, a very good prenup,
and so he wasn't really in danger of losing a
lot of money in that way. I think it was
(10:07):
about his motivation was not financial necessarily. The next thing
that happens is Holly Williams. It turns out as a boyfriend.
The boyfriend is this nanke you redhead named Bill Landway
from the suburbs of Nashville. They started going to DM
parties a lot together and they got very close, and
(10:30):
then he found out she was in escort. I guess
he didn't know that rightway, he got extremely possessive and jealous.
Also wasn't making a lot of money. It sounds like
at the time he was delivering Amazon packages a little bad,
and he was dealing cards for high end poker games,
but not really anything steady. And he started to get
(10:51):
a hold of her phone when she wasn't around, and
digging up her client list, and in one case he
found a Vanderbilt radiologist whom he threatened. He didn't extort
the radiologist, he was just threatening him and said, you know,
if you see Hollywood's again and I'll tell your wife.
(11:12):
He also found Eric's number and he must have done
enough googling. Doesn't take much to figure out that Eric
Land has a lot of money. This time he started
asking for money. I don't know if there were others,
if there were others that didn't come into evidence in the.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Trial, but we know of at least those two that
Bill Lanway was reaching out to Eric as most people
would in this situation, completely breaked out.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
So he doesn't extort money from the radiologist, but he
does from Eric. So he makes this decision. And what
is he doing? So he's calling Eric and he says,
You're going to need to give me money or I'm
going to tell everybody that you've hired an escort. Is
that pretty much what ends up happening. How much? Which
(12:00):
is he demanding twenty five thousand dollars? You would think
you would ask for more money.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Everybody assumes that he mistyped it, but he wrote at
one point twenty five hundred, even lower twenty five hundred
to make all your problems go away, right, But Eric
and the people around Eric testified that twenty five thousand
was the number that was being batted around. So on
the phone and however else Eric was getting this information,
(12:27):
it was clear to him anyway that it was twenty
five thousand.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Now does Bill's girlfriend, the escort Holly, does she know
that this is happening.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
Or no, There's been no evidence that she knew about
any of this.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
What are the instructions that Bill has given Eric? Is
this like a wire transfer or what's supposed to happen?
Speaker 2 (12:46):
I don't remember what the method was supposed to be.
But Eric decides instead of doing that, he talks to
one of his colleagues at the dealership, and that guy
gets in touch with somebody named Gil Pulled. Gil Paled
is a new security worker at the dealership. He claimed
to have served in the Masade, the Israeli intelligence agency.
(13:10):
He has built like I mean, just like a brick,
and so Gil suggested to Eric that he go to
the police, but Eric said he didn't want to be embarrassed,
and so Gil told him, Okay, I got it.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
I'll take care of it.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
He then goes to another guy in Austin, not far
from his house. This guy, Brian Brockway, lives nearby, and
he said, what I can do for you is, you know,
just build this, do a surveillance operation in Nashville and
just kind of spoke around. At this point. They just
know that it has something to do with Layla love, right,
(13:46):
and that's kind of all they have to go on.
And so the idea is Brian Brockway will get a
little team together and they'll go to Nashville and sniff
it out. And that was all that it was supposed
to be.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I feel like there's some weird disconnect with this part
of the story because twenty five thousand is not a lot, okay,
And then I'm thinking, okay, twenty five thousand. Of course,
we've already said this over and over again. He can
spend this. This is no big deal. He's getting a divorce,
I mean basically, right. I mean he's sort of the
relationship is essentially over. He's not trying to save a relationship.
(14:22):
He has adult children, he doesn't have little children. Is
it really sort of this shame? I know he's very
close to his father. You really think he's driven by
like the shame the public ridicule of this coming out. Somehow,
it just seems so extreme to then hire eventually a
hitman to do this.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Well, I think it's important to remember that he didn't
go into this hiring a Hitman, right. He just went
into it, hiring somebody to look into it, and then
it just sort of escalates. I can't say exactly that
it got out of his control because he's paid for
but he just kind of kept signing off on you
(15:03):
want to do what sure, go do that yes, And
so the guys on the ground could not seem to
get Holly or Bill Landway to respond. They would knock
on the door, they would text.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
The guys who landed were very experienced. Brian Brockway had
deployed all of the world conducting special ops on behalf
of the US Marines, and he hired this kid, Adam,
a twenty nine year old former marine. There were two
other guys who were involved, one whom we call Red
(15:38):
because he has had to keep his name out of
the press because he's still concerned that some of these
guys and their friends may come after him. And then
there's a guy named Tony Rapinsky who landed got one
whiff of the situation and was like, I'm out of here.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Wow, this is all bad.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
This can only go in bad directions based on the
things that I'm seeing. In fact, like when he sat
down to give his testimony. I remember one of the
defense attorneys. Eric's defense attorney asked, you know, what were
you most afraid of when you landed in Nashville, and
he just said stupidity and that basically said it all.
Like I can really testify. After that, it was kind
(16:20):
of like, Okay, yeah, that loves it up.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
But I mean, the more people you involved in this conspiracy,
the bigger. Well, of course, I'm thinking this is way
more than twenty five thousand. I'm assuming this is really
he's going to be on the whole as we're going along.
But at the same time, I'm thinking, you know, the
more people that you're adding in, the riskier it is.
But it sounds like he really was just scared, right.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
I think so he was out of his element. If
he had dealt with blackmail before, it wasn't this type
of black mail, I don't. I mean, I don't have
any evidence that he'd ever dealt with it before, but
I don't know, certainly not this type, bro, because his
reactions are give up a whiff of.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Desperation, Yeah, very extreme.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Adam, who was the youngest, you know, the group, the
twenty nine year old, starts making comments about he could
get rid of this problem for fifty or sixty. K
Red thinks it's a joke at first, but then starts thinking,
this kid's loose cannon. He's really immature. Adam goes to
Walmart and buys cable tize and burlap, and you know,
(17:26):
the rest of the guys are like, what is this
kid up to? But then Brian after Red and Tony
Rapinsky leave Nashville and it's just Brian and Adam and
it's coming to this sort deadline point for Eric. They
finally take that idea to Gil Pullett and say, what
if we just take.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Them out, both of them. They're talking about Bill and Holly.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah, at first they talk about just Bill, but then
based on something that was so nothing. I mean, I
think they claimed that they saw Holly walking around with
like a bag from a home depot or office depot
or something, and based on just like that said, oh,
I think she's spending a lot of money. We don't
(18:10):
know if they just wanted to cover their bases, if
they wanted to do a thorough job, if they really
just needed the money and so they needed kind of
to amp up the threat. Whatever the case is, they
brought it to Gil. Gil brought it to Eric. It's
then I think the evening of March eleventh, Eric is home.
(18:31):
His landline rings a voice he doesn't recognize, which is
Bill says, you have till eight o'clock tonight or he's
gonna tell Eric's wife everything. And then at eight o'clock
he texts, it's eight o'clock and I'm going to follow
up through with everything and thank you. It's just weird.
That night, Gil takes the idea to Eric and he
(18:51):
drives up outside of Eric's house and he says, you know,
this is what Adam and Brian propose edm and Brian
had proposed course to take them out for sixteen k each,
so one hundred and twenty total that Eric would be
paying out. But that's not what Gila Led told Eric
(19:12):
because gilad Led was desperate for cash himself. Gil needed
I think he had eleven dollars in the bank at
that moment. He had two little kids and was having
trouble with his wife's business. He could see, you know,
COVID was coming, his wife had a salon. Everything was
shutting down. I mean, I think there was just sort
of panic in the air. And so when Eric asks
(19:34):
how much does something like that cost. He follows up with,
you know, five hundred thousand Is that sound about right?
And Gil says, yeah, I think five hundred thousand wouldn't
do it.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Did you find out or did it come out during
any of the trial. Did you find out if Eric
had told anyone else about this in his family other
than you know, talking to all these goons. Did his
dad know? Did anybody know if they did?
Speaker 2 (20:01):
That was never revealed in court.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
So tell me how this starts to unfold. Eric says, okay,
half a million's fine? And what happens after that? You
have all of these players involved, who all sound like
goons to me.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Well again, by this time, it's just Adam and Bryan
on the ground. That night, they just decide they're going
to surprise Bill and Holly in the parking lot outside
of Holly's apartment, which is what they do. They kidnap
Holly first, They shoot Bill dead, keep him in the car,
then keep her alive in the back seat. One of
(20:39):
the special ops guys drives Holly's car with Bill and
Holly in it to a site, an off site location,
and then the other special ops worker takes a rental
car behind Holly's car to follow them as sort of
the getaway car.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
And Holly is alive. Does anybody talk about what hery?
I'm sure she terrified and has no idea what's happening,
but her boyfriend is dead.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
We do find out later in undercover recordings that they
were possibly surprised. It gets a little confusing, like, on
one hand, you hear from gil Paled that yes, it
was the plan was always Holly and Bill. But when
Brian Brockway is telling the story to Red in an
undercover recording that the FBI set up later, he tells
(21:27):
read that they were shocked all of a sudden, Oh
my god, it's both of them. So now we've got
two of them. And they were kind of telling Holly
it's fine, it's fine, We're not after you, and then
ended up killing her in the back seat just to
kind of cover their tracks.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Where do they end up putting the bodies? So they
have these these two adults. Are they driving out of
town or what are they doing?
Speaker 2 (21:50):
They drove kind of where there was a construction site.
It's not far from Hollway's apartment. They just drove kind
of around the corner where there was this little construction site,
and they made it look like Holly's car had kind
of just driven down into a ditch to hit a tree.
On the first glance, it looked like it could have
been just a car crash, except that when you look
(22:12):
in the car itself, there's nobody in the driver's seat.
I mean, one person is in the back seat and
the other person is literally like, I don't know why
upside down. Bill was upside down in the passenger seat.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Wow, And of course they've been shot once you start
looking at it. Okay, who makes the discovery of these
two bodies.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
It was a construction worker who got to the job
site the morning of March thirteenth, We spotted Holly's Acura
and calls nine to one one. Then the Metro Nashville
Police Department starts to investigate, and pretty soon after that
they start to put pieces together. Probably because hollyhead recording
(22:54):
devices all over her house.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
What she did.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Why Bill Landway had been increasingly abusive and to the
point where she had even filed restraining orders against him.
I mean it was on again, off again, and so
even though he had these instructions, he would kind of
still come by and they would make up and it
would all be fine. It was complicated that way, And
so when the officers went into Holly's apartment, they had
(23:21):
all this video, but all you could see from the
video as far as the murders are concerned, is you
see Holly and Billy in the apartment. Then you can
hear everything happening in the parking lot, but you can't
see it. But then they rewind the tape and they
see these suspicious looking characters, big guys not facing the camera,
(23:43):
seemingly intentionally knocking on her door asking to talk. So
they feel like, okay, this is probably connected too. Then
they release the video to the public and say, hey,
anyone know who this guy is. It's sort of a
amazing when you hear the tech workers for the investigative
(24:04):
units describe the tools that they have. I mean, it's like,
you know, picking off the cell towers and trying to
figure out, like, well, who set up this address and
whose phone is this and all that. And so they
were finally able to figure out this involved Eric MOHMD.
They still didn't know exactly how it involved ericmand but
they were able to get stuff off the cloud and
(24:25):
find some messages and things like that, and because then
it became multiple states, then it's involved the FBI.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
I know this is an odd question, but what is
Eric using that you all are able to figure out
that he requested Holly one night and then another escort
another night. Are the police tracing something to be able
to figure out what he had been doing?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
I think that was P four one one and SLIKSA
were two sites that Holly had been using. Their sites
coming used with escorts, and so I think it was
just going through all of her clients and trying to
figure out which numbers matched. The investigators were finally able
(25:10):
to get texts between Holly and Bill to illuminate that
relationship and conflict, and then they were also able to
get all of the texts between Bill and others, and
so he was they, you know, by like who is
this number? Well, this is this number belongs to some
guy in Austin. Why is he texting him for money?
(25:31):
I don't understand what's going on here. So then they
have to kind of start piecing it out enough that
they can make the connection to Gil Paled and then
they start getting the bank records and learn that Eric
wand transferred one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Glad
Paled the day of the murders, which is significant for investigator. Right,
they find a situation report that wrote to Gil talking
(25:56):
about the surveillance of Holly and Bill. Point I think
the FBI knew really what they were looking at. Hitman
for hire resulting in murder is pretty rare. A lot
of times it's hit man for hire, but it doesn't
get to the point of the actual murders, and this
was a rare instance where it did. And so they're
(26:17):
kind of working backwards.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
So it's Gill and Adam only is Byron in this
at all?
Speaker 4 (26:22):
Or no?
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah? Yeah, so Gil was sort of the middleman, right.
It's Brian and Adam were the guys on the ground
doing the shooting, and they were never able to clarify
who which one of them pulled the trigger or if
they both pulled the trigger. At the end of the day,
it was tried as a conspiracy, and so it didn't matter.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Once they kill Bill and Hawley and try to stage
just as an accident, is there a text or a
phone call to Eric confirming that this is done.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
The only way that the investigators knew that Gil and
Eric knew is because all their phones suddenly go silent,
like Adam dismantles his account, Brian gets rid of his account,
All the accounts suddenly disappear.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
How quickly does this case come together after Bill and
Holly are discovered.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Not very quickly, not very quickly at all. So that
was right when COVID hits right March twenty twenty, and
they're not able to put anything together until they gets
summer of twenty twenty one, when they finally have done
enough desk work, you know, searching bank records, phone records,
(27:33):
all that kind of jazz, and they figure they need
a confidential source whom they can leverage. And Red had
just applied for a job that we can't say, but
you can guess something that required really high security clearance.
And the FBI met him in the interview and told
(27:54):
him he needed to start texting Adam and Brian again
and set up a ruse as if Red were going
to attempt something similar in a similar situation where a
guy was being exhorted by a woman and needed to
get rid of her, and so he was pretending like
he was looking for tips like what did you learn
(28:16):
from your Nashville experience? You know, I never really heard
what went on? Can you tell me more? And so
using that technique, he was able to get them both
to talk extensively, even though they both both Adam and
Brian started out very nervous. And that was one of
the most amazing things to me about doing this as
a podcast, And of course it's a standalone story too,
(28:39):
But when you can hear the audio of Adam and
Brian discussing what they did, things they would have done differently,
advice that they give to Red, it's just so chilling.
You're just in the room with them, you know, dear
a nonchalant it is.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
How well did Red know them that well?
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I mean, he was in the same circles and they
knew a lot of people in common, but I don't
think naming each other very well before all.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
This, So you all ended up interviewing Red for this
or no.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
No, I'm hoping after sentencing, I don't think we're going
to have many surprises because it's mandatory life or this
kind of conviction. But there always appeals, so you know,
everybody's kind of waiting. Some of those people who are
in with the investigators, and maybe even on in any
of the other groups. You know, if there's anybody from
Bryan's family or Eric's family, or at a family or
(29:33):
even the victims' families who wanted to talk, I think
maybe they will wait until sentencing as well.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Tell me about some of the things that you can
recall that were on this undercover wire. Is there anything
that was surprising to you?
Speaker 2 (29:48):
A lot of it was surprising the level of detail
that Adam was able to give. Read, you know, make
sure use these kinds of gloves, make sure you tape,
you know, put two pairs of gloves on, so don't
leave any DNA and TAPA shut on it, so on
this kind of stuff. Probably shocking to me was Brian
saying how he really respected Adam for killing Holly in
(30:13):
the backseat because he knows a lot of guys have
a bleeding heart and couldn't do that, And that kind
of talk was pretty pretty shocking for me.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And Red handled it well, I'm assuming, I mean, they
believed him obviously, so he got them everything that they needed,
essentially he did.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
And then the FBI grabbed Gil coming off the airplane
at the Austin Airport, and put him on the phone
with Eric Moond, knowing that Eric was driving up from
a hunting trip in South Texas. I think this was
December of twenty twenty one, So again, like took a
long time to get to this point of starting to
(30:55):
arrest anybody, and then everybody's basically arrested on the same day,
just after Gil gets Eric on the phone and they record,
I records that and Gil tells Eric, you know, we
have a problem. The Nashville shooters want an extra twenty
five thousand dollars to keep quiet. What should we do?
Do you want me to take care of it? And
(31:15):
Eric just says, give me a number. That's his response,
Not what are you talking about anything like that. Just
give me a number, and Gil says one hundred. And
Eric says, honestly, I'd rather take care of it permanently
than do the twenty five thousand. So it's almost like
his idea. He says, I'll just wire it to you,
just like last time. Wow, it's a hard thing for
(31:37):
him to defend himself. After that, the FBI descends on
him pretty quickly, arrests him, pulls him in, and after
all that, it's just a matter of going to trial.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Then do they say what Eric's reaction was? I mean,
I know that sounds like a silly question, but was
he in denial about it or what did he do?
Speaker 2 (31:56):
It was hard to say what his reaction was.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
We watched the video as the FBI played a recording
of the murders from Holly's security camera audio, and they
recorded Eric's reaction.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
He shows that he's listening really hard. He keeps saying
like kind of I don't know, you know what this is?
And and they keep coming back to him with you
know exactly what this is?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Does everybody else turn on him? Essentially? I mean, do
you get the real real story? Once these guys are
all under arrest?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Not really really. None of them testified in the trial
except for Guilfilett. They said that there might be some
Google rooms in his sentencing if you testified, but everybody
else said nothing and pled not guilty, which you know,
someone explained to me that they would all, of course
plead not guilty because it would be sort of notpractice
(32:48):
for an attorney to tell your client to plead guilty
if you know they're looking at life anyway, so their
only chance is to plead not guilty even I says
sort of a slam dunk.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Now, what are the chart or just for all these
guys because Gil doesn't pull the trigger, he's not even
at the scene. He's the middleman who's organizing things. What
is he charged with?
Speaker 2 (33:07):
So Adam, Brian and Eric were trying who murder for hire?
I'm pretty sure that's what Gil was also charged with.
Because it's a conspiracy, They're all charged together. And then
Adam and Brian were also charged and found guilty of
two additional charges, conspiracy to kidnapping and kidnapping with death
resulting because they'd taken Holly while she was still alive
(33:30):
in the parking lot and then killed her later than
they had the extra kidnapping charges.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Do we ever see Holly's family or Bill's family through
any of this?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Not really. Bill's family is pretty complicated. His dad shot
his mom or stabbed his mom when he was really
little in.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Front of him.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
But he was raised by other family members who did
come to the child but understandably wanted the mood to
talk to reporters. And Hollick's family was also grieving and wow,
they were in the courtroom, didn't want to interact with.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Us what happens with Eric, because he's you know, now
kind of the central character here. Has he gone on trial?
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, they were all tried together in Nashville and found
guilty after I think it was about three weeks testimony
and said then the sentencing. Now they're just kind of
hanging out in federal prison waiting for where they're going
to be permanently and for how long, and so we'll
know more about that. I think by the end of
the year.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Any reaction from his family, Eric's family, his ex wife,
or the kids. Was anyone there from his family?
Speaker 2 (34:36):
His family sat in front of us and they were
underto you know, they were upset.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Of course, did they believe it.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I don't know. I don't know what they said to
each other when they would go back to their hotel
in Nashville. We were told by other folks who hang
out in Eric's circles that in the days leading up
to the jury's decision that the people were kind of split.
There were some people who were just thinking like, well,
(35:04):
he probably just said take care of it, and somebody
misinterpreted that. But I think after all the evidence came
out and that got around Austin the opinion shifted a bit,
although there are still people who we've talked to who
not defend him necessarily, but don't believe that he should
(35:26):
go that Eric should go to prison for the rest
of his life, because I said, he only did it
the one time, and it's not like something that he
would probably do again. So there are folks who say
things like that or justify it one way or the other.
I don't know what Eric's personal reaction is to it.
(35:46):
I did get the sense from just watching him in
court that he was pretty devastated by the decision. Adam
and Brian were totally impossible to read. They had no reaction.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
What's your feeling about this whole story? I mean, why
is this an interesting story to you? Why would you
want to spend so much time on this particular story?
What does it say?
Speaker 2 (36:06):
I think there's a lot of talk these days about privilege,
and this was a doozy somebody who really didn't see
that his actions had any consequences, or that the consequences
that it meant for other people weren't any relevant. I,
as you know, like generally do convent stories. If I
(36:29):
do true crime, I normally steer away from murders. But
this one did have some overlap with the con men
who I've written about, which is that conman always think
they're smarter than everybody else and that the rules are flexible.
One guy explained to me, you know, rules are man made,
and he too was a man who could make rules.
And I think while Eric's not a con man, he
(36:50):
did share that philosophy. He kind of just felt like,
just pay the money and get it taken care of,
and you don't have to get your hands dirty. Also
was really intrigued by all of the motivations that were
sort of creating this perfect storm in which this was
sort of an inevitability. You have the jealous boyfriend who
(37:14):
lashes out of his girlfriend's clients, so there's you know
he's coming in. You have a middleman who's desperate for
cash and sees endless opportunities. Eric Non is basically an
ATM machine, right. You have a guy who's sort of Adam,
who's sort of fantasized about becoming a hitman his whole life,
who now has a perfect opportunity to live out his fantasies.
And Eric, a rich guy who wants to keep his
(37:35):
secret secret and Holly kind of walks into this storm
and it's just got a collateral damage. We've seen a
lot of the texts between her and Bill in the
week's leading up to this. There's no indication, I mean,
she was trying to get rid of him. In fact,
she was about to go to the courthouse and give
(37:57):
more testimony about things he had done that would put
Bill in prison.
Speaker 4 (38:03):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
I think her exact words were in the in one
of the texts you in court, motherfucker.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Poor Holly. I mean, a tumultuous existence. It sounds like
I mean so ultimately.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
You know.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
One of the things that I find so confusing about
this story is I keep coming back to the twenty
five thousand dollars, just what a not a big deal
this was. But you know what, Paul Hole's on Barry
Bones and I talk about this all the time, where
we say, boy, you know, nobody would kill someone over this,
and Paul always says, it doesn't matter what you think,
(38:36):
it's the perception of that person. And as you keep
coming back to, it's not the twenty five thousand for him,
it's the you know, humiliation or the Lord knows whatever
is in Eric Mohm's mind, but it doesn't matter because
that's what he thought was the appropriate reaction. So now
he's sitting in jail over twenty five thousand dollars and
(38:59):
you know, and murdering two people he barely knew and
what he didn't know at all, And that's just awful, awful.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
I think it's to me, it's the escalation of things
getting out of control and how slippery it gets after
a certain point. You know, if you keep saying, yes,
let's keep going down this road and yes, and you're panicking,
and you can kind of feel this moment approaching and
it feels like there is nobody in their right mind
(39:28):
around to stop it. Yeah, the only people who could
have stopped it left town.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Well, it's normalized. It's being more normalized. The more they
talk about the surveillance. It's like stalking, you know, peeping tom.
It all escalates into something worse. So what a story.
And I will say, I mean, aside from feeling I
don't feel as bad for Bill obviously as I do
for Holly, but I feel particularly terrible for his eric's
adult children and his ex wife. I mean, and I
(39:56):
guess his father too. I mean, that must just be
really differ. Do you think that this has had any
kind of impact on the dealership, which I know people
are going to think it's silly, but Charles Monteyute has
been around forever. I mean, it's an institution. Did it
get any kind of blowback? Do you think?
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Oh? For sure. In the months after the arrests, the
Monts had to sell their car business to a fortune
three hundred company whoa The amount was undisclosed. But yeah,
another dealer, former dealer in town, told us that there's
a clause in a lot of these agreements that local
dealerships have with the company, and if you get into
(40:36):
some kind of jam like this, you're done.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
So that was because of this, I mean that's.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
The family has not said that, and there's no paperwork
to say that, but a dealer who knows family and
has enough experience in this that it's definitely something to consider.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Wow, oh boy, what a story. And you know, I mean,
I know it was an Austin story, and I know
had been kicking around for several years. And you know,
something that happens in the middle of the pandemic, which
throws so much stuff off and slows investigations, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Oh yeah, Well, and if there's a time to you know,
sit tight and be quiet, which Eric had to do
of course, and then months after the murder it would
have been that time, Like, there's no better time to
keep from acting suspicious. I mean, who knows, if you know,
people see you out and about in the world in
the months, in the weeks after something like this, maybe
(41:28):
you are rattled or you look you know, look different.
But when we started asking around people in Austin, you know,
how did his behavior change? The response was it was
the pandemic.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
Yeah, so we all changed.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Yeah, I don't know. He was in his living room
like everybody else.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yeah. What do you think the lesson learned is from
all of this, Katie? Do you I mean, is there
any takeaway aside from I mean just the obvious, which
is murder for hire is an awful life, conspiracy is
and awful idea. We've talked about privilege, is that kind
of what it boils down to people thinking that they
(42:08):
can do whatever the hell they want because of the
way they grew up.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
It's a big part of it, certainly a big part
of it. And then again, how in some situations there's
these sort of trains racing towards each other, and sometimes
it just seems like there's very little you can do
to stop it.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(43:00):
Associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed by
John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga.
Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and
on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!