The Problem With Erik: Privilege, Blackmail, and Murder for Hire in Austin (2024)

Erik Maund had always lived the high life, as you might expect of a man whose surname had been blasted on TV ads for decades. By the time he was in his forties, he was an executive at Maund Automotive Group, a car sales business whose first dealership was opened by his grandfather Charles Maund. “If you say the Maund name in Austin in a 7-Eleven, two people say, ‘I bought a car from him,’ ” said Wallace Lundgren, a retired Chevrolet dealer. Austinites could probably recognize the major names in the car business better than they could identify any local politician. And members of the city’s old power circles would recognize Erik—a six-foot-three white guy with short brown hair, a boxy head, and heavy-lidded eyes tucked under a straight brow—as a likely heir to the business.

He and his wife, Sheri, a former dealership office worker, had raised two kids to the cusp of adulthood and lived in a seven-thousand-square-foot white brick mansion next to the Austin Country Club, where he teed off regularly with a close-knit group of friends. He owned a boat and a lake house. On Sundays he often enjoyed brunch at the club with his family.

But on March 1, 2020, as the world was rattled by reports of a highly contagious virus turning up in nation after nation, Erik received a text that demanded his attention. It came from a stranger who knew about a night Erik had spent with an escort in Nashville a few weeks earlier and wanted money to keep quiet.

Certain aspects of Erik’s life were less than picture-perfect. He was a gambler, sometimes losing thousands of dollars on a golf game. He treated the country club as his local bar, favoring Ketel One and tonic with lime. At times he struck others as clueless about his privilege. And he wasn’t above paying an escort for her services.

In February, while he was preparing to visit his son at college in Nashville, he’d messaged an escort who went by the name “Layla Love” and whom he had met at least once before, on an earlier trip. “Hey darling!!” he wrote. “I was thinking Wednesday night around 9:30 at the JW Marriott. 90 minutes would be great so we’re not rushed. If all sounds good, let me know and I’ll text you Wednesday when I get to Nashville. Erik”

Two days later, Erik met with Layla Love as planned; he made reservations with a different escort the following night. Afterward, he returned to Austin, where he went back to his routine at the dealership and the country club, in what would be the last few weeks of normalcy before the COVID-19 lockdown.

And then that text appeared on his phone. The message is now lost to the digital ether, but as court testimony would later establish, the sender threatened to expose him. Get me $25,000 dollars, the blackmailer demanded, or I’ll tell your wife everything.

“Let me get you in touch with a divorce lawyer. That’s what I would have told him,” said someone who knew Erik. That was one possible course of action: Erik could have told his wife everything. Or he could have called the cops. He could have just paid up. After all, he was worth millions of dollars, and the sender might have gone away.

He chose a fourth option, one that would cost him a lot more money and, ultimately, his freedom. Four years and a jury trial later, it’s still hard to pinpoint just what motivated his ruinous decision. At first glance, Erik comes off as a spoiled heir missing a moral compass, who in trying to outwit a blackmailer wound up guilty of murder. As you look closer, a striking feature of the story is that Erik and many others involved, culprits and victims alike, were trying to chase away their demons with fantasies and desperate schemes—until all these delusions collided, leaving two people dead.

One of those victims was Holly Williams, the escort who called herself Layla Love. Though the work was lucrative, it left her vulnerable. She’d installed security cameras outside her front door and inside her apartment, and on the afternoon of March 10, the interior footage shows that she was acting peculiarly, sneaking around. Petite, wearing a black tank top with her midnight-black hair ponytailed, Holly crept out from the bedroom holding a door brace. She passed the tall floor vase in the dining room and the black and white photo of a longhorn steer above a navy sofa, with fluffy pillows placed just so, in the living room. Using her left foot, she scooched aside a woven welcome mat and quietly secured one side of the brace to the floor and the other below the doorknob.

Outside her door, about forty minutes later, a man knocked, crossed his muscular arms, and knocked again. “Hey, Holly. Holly, if you’re in there,” he said. “Just a couple questions then I’m done. No worries.”

She didn’t respond and tiptoed back to the kitchen, waiting for him to leave.

Holly was a magnetic beauty in her early thirties, with Kardashian-style thick lashes and full lips, who was always in the mood for dancing, whether it was the goofy Carlton snap-step from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or some steady bouncing to electronic dance music (EDM). If she couldn’t find a friend to join her for a night on the town, she’d head to the clubs solo and make new acquaintances, staying out till dawn, drawing guys like moths to her glow. “It was like a Marilyn Monroe movie, where the men come up and light her cigarette,” said her friend Marie Carroll. “There’s six men around her. And that’s how it was whenever we went out. Everyone just swarmed her, especially the men.”

Marie connected with Holly back in 2018, through a mutual friend who figured they could bond over their training as aestheticians—though as Holly admitted to Marie, she wasn’t paying her rent by selling laser treatments or Botox injections. She drew much of her income from working as an escort, a service she publicized on secure websites such as Preferred411 and Slixa. As for why Holly had chosen that work, “I think a lot of it was that need to be told, ‘You’re beautiful,’ ” said Marie. The money was good too: some guys, whom she called her “whales,” would pay her $20,000 or $30,000 for a weekend.

Even so, the work felt risky. “The benefit is you get presents, and you can get whatever you want,” she had told Marie. “You can travel, you can get a car, furniture, or whatever. But it’s not worth it if you just feel like you’re in danger constantly.” Holly was cautious. She charged enough to keep the riffraff away: $1,500 a session for one person; $2,500 for a couple, according to trial testimony. She could always reach out to other escorts on her sites and ask if this or that client was “safe.” Still, she never knew exactly what was going to happen when she was alone with a guy.

A few months after she met Marie, Holly fell for a tall, lanky redhead named Bill Lanway, and she withdrew from her friendships as her world melted into his. According to friends and recovered texts that would later become evidence, the two started traveling to EDM shows and taking party drugs together. He’d call her Holly Ann or “baby girl,” and she’d call him Will or, affectionately, “punk.” Bill assured her that she was “absolutely mesmerizing” and texted her that he was proud of her “for being a strong independent woman and for facing all u have in life and still coming out on top”—something she needed to hear. She responded, “I’m glad u can see the good in me because I sure as hell can’t. Nor can my family. I keep making all the wrong decisions and repeating the same mistakes. I can’t help but feel like a failure in life or like as if I’m being punished for not changing my lifestyle & the people I associate with.”

As they drew strength from each other’s support, they also revealed their scars. She had an estranged relationship with her mother, and he had a heartbreaking past he rarely told anyone about: his father had stabbed and killed his mother when he was a toddler, and he’d been raised by an aunt. In 2011 he’d lost his five-year-old daughter, Maddie, to cancer. The two traumas, his friends believed, lay behind the endless partying.

Bill likely didn’t know about Holly’s escort business until they’d been dating awhile, when he snooped around on her phone. By then, he couldn’t easily walk away. His feelings for her had grown too strong. Plus, he’d become financially dependent on her; he’d even moved into her apartment. While he made a little money delivering Amazon packages and dealing for private, high-stakes poker games, he didn’t have a reliable source of income. So what could he say about her line of work? “He kind of confided in me about it,” said Bill’s best friend, “and then I was like, ‘Man, Bill. What the hell? How do you deal with that?’ ”

He dealt with it poorly. The couple began fighting, and by April 2019, Holly had involved the police, filing an order of protection against Bill. The complaint alleged that he stole the SIM card out of her phone, punched the windshield of her car, and hit her in the mouth. She later dropped the request.

Bill kept going through Holly’s phone, and one day, he found her client list and zeroed in on a local radiologist who’d been seeing Holly every few months for years. Bill texted the doctor anonymously, instructing him to stop seeing Holly or Bill would tell his wife and his employees.

In the months that followed, the couple’s behavior followed a pattern of violent escalation and reconciliation. After one fight, Bill broke into Holly’s apartment, snatched her dog, and dropped it off next to a busy highway, where a car ran over it. Holly trashed Bill to her friends and reset the keypad locks. Then, as usual, she and Bill made up.

By early 2020, Holly was trying to get her life on track: paying bills, hiring an accountant to help with her taxes, screening new clients. On February 3 she texted Bill, “I hope you don’t go back to your jealous ways and start bitching at me anytime I have to do work stuff. Just remember, I would not be in this position and would not have to put myself out there to gain new clientele if you hadn’t run off my consistent, longtime clients.”

Her message must not have sunk in, because Bill texted the wife of the radiologist. (The radiologist dealt with the personal fallout, eventually coming clean to his wife.)

Around this time, a friend of Holly’s named Matt Garrett, whom she’d known since her teenage years, had a sudden urge to call her. Matt lived an hour away, and he hadn’t talked with Holly in six or seven months. He was a competitive bodybuilder with “antihero” tattooed on his knuckles. He considered himself an empath, and he’d just had an ominous dream. “Look, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think your boyfriend is going to kill you,” he told Holly on the phone. He could understand her surprise, but he felt compelled to let her know. “Yeah, do with it what you want.” That was the last time he talked with her.

Left: Salem Joseph at the sh*thole. Photograph by Jordan Vonderhaar

Top: The exterior of the sh*thole, located behind a Shell station, in Austin. Photograph by Jordan Vonderhaar

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A contingent of aging car dealers and other businessmen regularly gathers at a Central Austin hangout they call the sh*thole, basically a painted concrete man cave behind a Shell station, overseen by Salem Joseph, a longtime gambler and self-titled “Head Motherf—er in Charge.” Over the years it has drawn former UT football stars and other local luminaries, lending it a certain allure. That might explain why Erik Maund used to stop by once in a while, though he rarely sat down. “Afraid he might get diseased,” said Salem’s brother Joe Joseph.

The sh*thole crowd represents an older generation of hustlers and scrappers, some of whom had known Charles Maund, the founder of the family business. On one of the days we visited, a massive TV playing ESPN was mounted over a dripping sink. Wooden floors offset the gas station vibe, while a handful of men sat around a table cutting chunks off a block of Costco cheese.

While Erik was raised in a wealthy part of West Austin, playing on the golf team at Westlake High School, his grandfather came from tougher stock, they said. Charles Maund grew up poor in Hemphill, Texas, two hours’ drive north of Beaumont, and according to his 2002 obituary in the Austin American-Statesman, his parents had both died by the time he turned fifteen. He was sixteen years old, pumping gas for a living, when a local banker lent him $500 to buy a used car. Charles fixed it up and sold the car for a profit.

A few years later he started selling cars in earnest, and in 1957, when he turned thirty, he moved to Austin and opened his first dealership, Charles Maund Oldsmobile-Cadillac. “They called him Lucky. How he got the dealership, we never figured that out, because Cadillac was so particular,” said Wallace Lundgren, the Chevrolet dealer and sh*thole regular. “He was a fun guy. Not the kind of fun you brag about, but we drank lots of whiskey, and we really had a good time, you know?” Wallace thought for a second. “Well, we didn’t kill anybody.”

Charles Maund built an empire of dealerships over the decades, selling Cadillacs, Toyotas, Volkswagens, and other vehicles. He eventually passed that empire along to Erik’s father, Doug, though it sounds as if Charles never completely dropped certain conditioned instincts. In one hard-to-imagine incident that came up in multiple interviews about the Maunds, Charles and Doug got into a knife fight at the Austin Country Club. “That’s common knowledge,” Wallace said, though neither he nor anyone else could say what the fight was about. Doug never quite developed his father’s street smarts, friends said.

As luck would have it, though, the path was laid for Erik. The middle child of three born to Doug and Janis Maund, Erik attended St. Edward’s University, in Austin, and the National Automobile Dealers Association Academy, in Virginia, before going to work in the family business. According to a former employee named Justin Wright, Erik could be ruthless to anyone who crossed him; otherwise, as a manager at the family’s Volkswagen dealership, he coasted on his name. “So his part was, no s—, just sitting in his office dipping [snuff] and looking at the internet,” Wright said. “He was just kind of like an asshole figure in the background, always.” At the country club, his reputation wasn’t so much lazy or vindictive as it was occasionally tone-deaf. Once, when a fellow member of the country club asked him about the Camry hybrid that his dealership sold, Erik responded quite earnestly that his dad’s butler liked the one he had bought.

He had a prenuptial agreement, so had he told Sheri about his dalliance in Nashville, he wouldn’t have risked losing his fortune in a divorce. Yet exposure would’ve been devastating to his reputation and to his family—including his mom and his sisters, all of whom were well regarded. Looking for advice, Erik turned to a trusted colleague, Charles Maund Toyota’s general manager, Jim DiMeo. Erik had confided in Jim before when he’d had issues with gambling or women. Someone had sent a message, Erik said, wanting money.

Jim had an idea: maybe the dealership’s new security person, Gilad Peled, could help. Though he’d only just started a relationship with the Maunds, he claimed to have served in the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Built like a boulder, with a neck as wide as his shaved head, he looked like a badass.

Gil and Erik linked up at the dealership, Erik explained the situation, and at first Gil suggested going to the police. But when Erik explained he didn’t want the embarrassment, Gil reassured him that everything would be fine. “I got this,” he said.

Gil Peled considered himself a fixer. In 1999 he moved from his homeland of Israel to the U.S., and in 2007 he became a U.S. citizen. He served as a tank commander in the Israeli army and claimed at various times to have worked as a member of a special-forces unit and as an operative for the Mossad foreign intelligence service. He also boasted about negotiating hostage and extortion threats for a Russian billionaire and for the Mexican government. In 2011 he landed a flashy Hollywood job: bodyguard for Charlie Sheen.

Sheen’s former personal assistant, Steve Han, said that when he first met Gil, it was hard for him to take the man seriously. Gil always wore sunglasses, and he acted like his job was to stand around flexing his gigantic muscles. “Gil played the role of bodyguard protecting his client very seriously, but it’s like, who’s he protecting him from, a soccer mom that just wants a photo?” Steve said. Once, when Sheen was visiting Colombia, Gil saw to it that Sheen and his entire crew were transported in bulletproof vehicles. “I wouldn’t say he was a fearmonger,” Steve said, “but it was in his best interest if the world was a scary place for someone like Charlie.”

In 2014, Sheen fired Gil, who wasn’t a favorite of Sheen’s fiancée, and the Israeli American and his family moved to Austin, where he had relatives. While his wife established a salon in an upscale shopping center, Gil struggled to secure the kind of wealthy clients and steady business he’d rounded up in Los Angeles. Though he had a talent for projecting success, he’d overdrawn his business bank account, and he was facing foreclosure on his home. In late February 2020 he had eleven dollars in the bank.

By this time, he’d found temporary work providing security at Charles Maund Toyota. He was hired mainly to deter run-of-the-mill vandalism—nothing that required his claimed level of expertise. But now Gil had a new mission: to figure out who was extorting Erik and put an end to the threats.

Erik gave Gil the blackmailer’s phone number and the name mentioned in the message, Layla Love. Gil asked an acquaintance who worked at a private security firm to help him out, and by the next day, he had identified “Layla Love” as Holly Williams, of Nashville, who had an on-again-off-again boyfriend named William Lanway. Someone should approach William and Holly and negotiate with one or both of them, Gil told Erik. The encounter wouldn’t be violent, and it wouldn’t be illegal. It would mostly require on-the-ground surveillance, Gil said. He could arrange a few days of that for $50,000.

To surveil Holly and Bill in Nashville, Gil wanted all-stars—“the best money can buy,” as he later called them, guys he didn’t have to “second-guess or micromanage,” though some on the team of military vets he assembled would decide that achieving the objective justified extreme tactics. He didn’t have to look far to find someone who could run the operation from Austin. Just a few miles from Gil’s house lived the perfect candidate, a guy whose wife was friends with his wife: Bryon Brockway. He’d deployed all over the world conducting special operations on behalf of the U.S. Marines and the CIA. His voicemail greeting used to say he couldn’t answer because he was “currently taking over the world.”

Brockway boasted an extensive network of military contacts. His first hire was Adam Carey, a tall and lanky 29-year-old former Marine with hollowed-out cheeks and a dirty blond buzz cut. In Adam, he saw a kid who was eager for action. All too eager, as it turned out. Adam had done prison time for impersonating a police officer.

Brockway’s next hire was a man who’d served as an Army Ranger, whose real name we’ve agreed not to use. We’ll call him Red. He was recommended to Brockway by a mutual friend in the contract security world. In Red’s telling, he’d been “blown up” by improvised bombs a few times and somehow walked away. If the plan was just to monitor a young woman’s apartment, Adam and Red seemed a bit overqualified.

On March 7, 2020, Adam hopped in his black Ram truck, Red boarded a flight, and they met in Nashville to begin investigating. They didn’t have the blackmailer’s name, just a number. Adam set up a phone app called Pinger to anonymously text that number, then he reached out to Holly through one of her online escort sites, pretending to be a potential client. Both tactics went nowhere.

Figuring they could learn more by observing Holly and attempting to contact her when she was alone, Adam and Red staked out her apartment. After the first two days, they determined—as anyone would have—that Bill was a frequent visitor, if not a live-in boyfriend. In a report to Gil, Red wrote that he didn’t believe Holly could be part of the blackmail scheme since it would be “professional suicide” for Holly “to intentionally breach the client’s trust.” Bill was a different story. “Mr. Lanway has previously demonstrated his controlling nature over Ms. Williams,” he wrote, possibly in reference to posts she’d made on social media about her troubles with Bill. Red wasn’t positive, but he suggested Bill had initiated the extortion and was acting alone.

Then Adam made a drastic proposal. He could eliminate the client’s problem, he said, for $50,000 or $60,000. Unsure whether that was a joke, Red brushed him off at first, but then Adam kept casually suggesting things like zip-tying Bill to the steering wheel to get him to talk. He even went to Walmart and bought cable ties and burlap. And rather than continue to stake out the apartment from their rental car, Adam bushwhacked his way into a wooded area beside the complex and observed Holly’s building from there. Red started thinking Adam was cavalier and unprofessional, “a loose cannon.”

Soon he wouldn’t be the only member of the team to hold this opinion. Because of the lack of progress, Bryon added yet another member with extensive military training: Tony Repinski, a thirteen-year veteran of the Navy SEAL Team 6. The one thing Tony was concerned with when he signed on to the Nashville trip? Stupidity. He must have been disappointed, then, to have encountered stupidity right off the bat. Hours after landing in Nashville, Tony said in testimony, he was sitting in his car surveilling Holly’s apartment when—unannounced—Adam Carey opened Tony’s back door, hopped in, and tossed a pistol in Tony’s lap.

“What the f—?” Tony said and threw the gun back at him. To his thinking, this was just a surveillance operation. Adam continued the tough-guy banter. His temperament was immature, bordering on alarming, Tony thought. He didn’t want to be held accountable for anything Adam did. Keep that guy away from me, Tony told Red.

It’s all too easy, in retrospect, to see how the killings might’ve been avoided. Erik might have sought help from someone other than the Toyota dealership’s freelance security man. Gil could have managed the job directly rather than delegating it to the ex-CIA husband of one of his wife’s friends. Bryon, in selecting his team, could’ve given less priority to experience in Afghanistan and more to experience doing shoe-leather investigative work in the Nashville area.

Instead, the job of finding and talking to a blackmailer devolved into a gruesome show of machismo. By chance, in a Kroger parking lot on the afternoon of March 10, Red spotted Holly’s white Acura, which Bill had taken without asking. Red called Adam and Tony, and Adam, once he’d arrived, let the air out of the car’s tires. After Bill left the store, the three of them approached him. But Bill didn’t appear intimidated. He just slammed the car door, looked Red in the eye, flipped him the bird, and drove away on the leaking tires. Presumably, the team concluded that Bill wasn’t interested in talking.

It seems Bill didn’t immediately tell Holly about his encounter when he returned the car. But when he did share what happened, she didn’t believe his story, texting the next day, “You seriously think I’m going to believe some random person had the desire to come up to a random car for no good reason and let out the air?? Why!” Bill had a history of flattening her tires. It was part of a pattern. They’d fight, then he’d break something of hers, just so she’d come back to him, asking him to fix it.

“I almost got into a bad car accident!” she wrote. “My tire is putting off some major steam from me driving on it while it was flat! You could’ve killed me!”

Four days after the surveillance began, Gil’s team members were no closer to having a face-to-face conversation with Bill or Holly. Red was heading out for another job, and Tony was getting ready to leave the following morning. Deciding he’d done enough outsourcing, Bryon left Austin and flew to Nashville himself.

What he didn’t know was that Bill, too, had decided to step it up.

On the evening of March 11, Erik was at home when his landline rang. An unfamiliar voice was on the line, and Erik knew it was the blackmailer.

Erik freaked out—that’s what Gil would later tell a jury. We don’t know what was said on the call, but Bill also texted that he needed $25,000 by 8:00 that night, or he’d tell Sheri everything. The threat elicited no response.

“You lied to me Erik,” Bill texted. “It’s 8 now. I will follow through with everything. Thank you.”

Just before midnight, as Tony was packing up his things in a Hampton Inn in southwest Nashville, he asked Bryon to come to his room. He had a sinking feeling about this job, and he wanted to warn Bryon about Adam’s attitude. But Bryon showed up with Adam by his side.

Tony pivoted. Maybe we should ask the police to do a wellness check on Holly, Tony suggested, in case Bill was somehow controlling her actions.

Bryon and Adam told Tony they’d been hatching an alternative. They didn’t get into specifics. They’d be moving forward without him, on to plan B.

Back in Austin, Gil Peled drove in the darkness toward Erik’s house, passing stores and schools facing uncertain futures. A week earlier, the city had canceled the South by Southwest festival. Grocery stores were besieged by customers stocking up on toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

Outside the house, Erik opened the passenger door and slipped inside.

The guys on the ground had an offer, Gil said: they would take Bill out. He didn’t mention the fee he’d discussed with Bryon—two shooters, at $60,000 per shooter, for a total of $120,000.

Whatever negotiation skills he’d picked up over the decades seemed to have abandoned Erik in this moment. “How much does something like that cost?” he asked. “Five hundred thousand?”

Yes, Gil said, $500,000 would cover it.

At that point, the team believed Bill was acting alone. Holly’s texts with Bill, later obtained by investigators, would seem to back that up. Two months earlier, she’d filed a police complaint against Bill, and after he returned her car with flattened tires, she texted him that she was planning to confirm her statement with the district attorney. She added that she’d thrown his belongings outside and suggested he come pick them up before she doused them in bleach. “Have FUN in PRISON!” she wrote. “See you in court on the 16th motherf—er!”

The words hardly indicate two people acting in cahoots. On the contrary, Bill may even have been heading to jail, which would’ve complicated his blackmail attempt if it didn’t end it entirely.

Yet at some point between midnight on March 11 and the morning of March 12, someone on the team—we still don’t know why—decided that Holly was in on the blackmail attempt. So Adam and Bryon offered a new deal: $200,000, which the two shooters would split, to kill Holly Williams and Bill Lanway. Gil then set a new price with Erik: $750,000.

On the morning of March 13, a construction worker arrived at his jobsite a few miles away from Holly’s apartment. Down in a ditch alongside a gravel road, he spotted a white Acura. He walked closer. Inside, he saw two bodies: a petite woman with black hair hunched over the rear floorboard and a large man fully inverted in the passenger seat.

Detectives from the Metro Nashville Police Department conducted the first investigation of the murders. They pulled bullet fragments from the Acura and gathered prints from interior and exterior blood spatter. They began scouring the couple’s social media accounts and text messages. They also retrieved surveillance footage from Holly’s apartment.

In video from outside the apartment recorded just before they were killed, Holly and Bill can be seen exiting the apartment together, even though just hours earlier they were sending acrimonious texts back and forth. Something has reunited them. Cautiously, they creep out the front door—first Holly, in a black knit hat, followed by Bill, in a blue ball cap-—and walk down the short, dimly lit pathway to the parking lot.

Earlier, Adam had moved the camera to face Holly’s door, so that it wouldn’t record what happened in the parking lot. Nevertheless, the camera continued to pick up sounds from there. That recording, in the words of Brooke Farzad, one of the prosecutors on the case, “was very, very difficult to listen to.”

You can hear them get into a vehicle. You can hear that vehicle start up. Then Bill yells “What the f—?” Shots follow. Loud banging noises accompany high-pitched screaming. Holly begs, “Please God, help me. Help me!” Bill’s voice goes silent. You can still hear Holly screaming for several minutes before the car drives away and her screams trail off.

Investigators obtained Bill’s Pinger messages and from those identified Erik Maund as a person of interest. Once they learned that he was a wealthy car dealer in Texas, they decided it was time to contact the FBI.

Special agent David Som had been with the bureau since 2008. He has short black hair, a thin frame, a smooth complexion, and a methodical manner, and for almost a year after he was handed the case in 2020, he pieced together every bit of relevant information he could. While Som didn’t agree to an interview, prosecutor Rob McGuire, who worked with him on the case, told us, “We really wanted to try to find, wherever possible, hard evidence that told us one way or the other whether a person was involved or not. And that takes time.”

Once Adam Carey was identified as a suspect and Erik Maund was identified as a person of interest, Som tried to figure out who they were talking to in February and March of 2020. He gathered phone records and made a connection to Gil Peled. Then he tried to figure out who Gil had been talking to. Eventually, he learned that Erik Maund had transferred $150,000 to Gilad Peled the day of the murders, which was “very significant,” said McGuire.

In January 2021, a search warrant for Gil’s iCloud account allowed Som access to a critical piece of evidence: a “situation report” from Red, reporting on the surveillance of Holly and Bill. The murders, Som realized, stemmed from an effort to surveil these two victims.

“By the summer of 2021, we had really done everything that we knew to do covertly,” said McGuire. “There were no more bank records to search. There were no more phone records to obtain. There was no more iCloud data to gather. And we had a decision to make.” What they’d uncovered pointed toward Erik but fell short of an airtight case against him. They still felt like they could get more, better evidence.

What Som needed was a confidential source, someone he could leverage. And he was in luck. Red had just applied for a job at a federal agency that required a security clearance. Som met him at the interview, inside a government building in Virginia. At first Red pretended he didn’t know anything about a double homicide, but as the conversation continued, he realized he was in a tight spot. Trapped, Red agreed to go undercover, though he was terrified of being found out.

“Hey, been a minute,” he texted Adam. “Had a potential job come up, similar in nature to last March. Client is willing to throw a lot of money at it. This is in the very early stages just wanted to know if it’s something you’re interested in.”

“Always interested,” Adam responded.

With Agent Som hovering nearby, recording, the two men switched to the phone. Red, following Som’s instructions, told Adam he needed his advice. Adam weighed in on pricing and tricks of the trade—bring long gloves, he said, and if there’s a site where you plan to dump the bodies, be sure to scout it ahead of time. Afterward, make the weapon vanish like pixie dust.

A few days later, Red and Adam met in person at a brewpub in Raleigh, North Carolina, but in the interim Adam had talked to Bryon and had grown nervous. He patted Red down. Before long, though, he began venting about Erik and other clients like him. “Man, why don’t these guys hire soft dudes to go get them the right prostitute? Right?” Adam said. “Like just bring me along on your travels. I’m gonna bring you a chick that’s gonna do everything you want and this will never happen.”

“Yeah, it’s not hard,” Red said. “It’s just idiots with money being f—king idiots with money.”

Red also met with Bryon, first at a noisy Austin brewery, then retreating to Bryon’s car to have a more private conversation. There, Bryon started recalling the particulars of the crime.

He and Adam had shot both Holly and Bill in the apartment parking lot, he explained, but while Bill stopped responding, Holly was still conscious.

They drove her Acura down the highway to a quiet site they’d scouted earlier in the day, he said, and Adam took over from there.

“He finished it in the back seat,” Bryon said. “And he totally got my respect for that. A lot of guys with females they’ll f—ing have a bleeding heart.”

When Som and McGuire heard the recordings, they knew they had their case. In November 2021 they sought indictments for Bryon Brockway, Adam Carey, Erik Maund, and Gilad Peled.

Keeping a low profile was easy enough in the pandemic months that followed the murders. Even for Erik. “What else are you going to do?” said sh*thole owner Salem Joseph. “You’re not going to tell everybody what happened.” Erik paid off the $905,000 (the fee for the murders plus taxes) and even hired Gil’s company, Speartip, to provide overnight security at the Toyota dealership. When Erik went hunting, he’d save Gil deer meat. Gil would buy ammunition for Erik and others in his circle. And when Sheri Maund found a suspicious number for a “Brandon Love” in Erik’s phone (it’s unclear if “Brandon Love” was Erik’s code for “Layla Love”), it was Gil whom Erik asked to provide a fake polygraph test.

On December 7, 2021, Erik agreed to help his fixer in turn. He was preparing for an upcoming hunting trip with friends when Gil sent him a text. “Hey bro when you get a chance can you please review Speartip on Google.”

Erik gave the company five stars. “Speartip is very professional and on top of it,” he wrote. “They get the job done in an expedited time. Couldn’t imagine using anyone else!!”

Three days later, the FBI brought the hammer down. In San Diego, agents arrested Bryon Brockway as he was headed to his son’s Marine Corps boot camp graduation. On the opposite coast, the FBI arrested Adam Carey and searched his small North Carolina home, where agents found almost $60,000 in bundled cash hidden around the place. Down in Austin, ten FBI agents surrounded Gil Peled at the airport and took him in for questioning.

Gil must have known he had to outmaneuver the others. With the feds watching, he picked up his phone, opened his Signal app, and dialed Erik’s number.

“Man, we have a problem,” Gil said on the recorded line. Erik was with a hunting buddy, driving up Interstate 35, but he pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car, and walked down an embankment. He didn’t spot the FBI agent who’d been following him at a distance.

Gil told him that one of the Nashville shooters wanted an extra $25,000 to keep quiet. Erik was wary and retrieved a drink from his car. Once he was back on the line Gil assured him that Bryon would try to calm the guy down. But if the shooter didn’t comply, he asked, did Erik want Bryon to take care of it?

“Give me a number,” Erik said.

“One hundred,” Gil said.

“Honestly, I think I’d rather take care of it permanently than do the twenty-five,” Erik said.

Still living in a world where he paid to have troublesome people killed and moved on with his life, Erik said he’d wire $150,000 to Speartip, “like we did last time.” He then continued his drive until officers arrested him near San Marcos.

When news of Erik’s murder-for-hire charges hit Austin, many in the country club set wondered if authorities had trumped up the charges. “The way they’d defend him is to say: He didn’t say ‘kill them,’ he’d say ‘take care of it,’ and it was misinterpreted,” said one Austin Country Club member. The guys at the sh*thole were dumbfounded. “I could not believe it,” said Joe Joseph. Salem had a similar reaction. “I don’t believe it. No way,” he said.

A few Maund haters surfaced online, including Justin Wright, who’d worked with him at a VW-Audi dealership. “He definitely wasn’t the brightest bulb,” Wright wrote on a Reddit thread. A disgruntled restaurant service worker who’d waited on Erik and his father for a few years commented, “They’re all a bunch of pricks and I hope he rots.”

In the aftermath of the arrests, the Maunds sold their car business to a Fortune 300 company called Group 1 Automotive for an undisclosed amount. It’s possible the family was compelled to sell. “They lost the Toyota dealership over this deal,” said Wallace, who spoke from experience, having owned a Chevrolet dealership. “There’s a [clause] in all of our agreements with Chevrolet . . . and they stick to it. If you get in some kind of jam, like this, you’re done.”

The sale would give the Maunds an influx of cash. Erik hired a team of high-powered attorneys who must have buoyed his confidence. Erik’s father, Doug, had hope—“more hope than was reasonable,” said the Austin Country Club member, adding that Doug would wrestle the phrase “when Erik gets home” into conversations.

Erik’s loyal friends stayed in touch with him, calling him and sending him books to pass the time in jail, as he waited for his day in court alongside Adam and Bryon.

The prosecution painted Erik as cold-blooded, stressing that in his recording with Gil, he talked as if he were “speaking to the help.” Erik’s attorneys countered that Erik just told Gil to “take care of the problem,” and when the FBI approached Gil, Gil made up a story to save himself. “Gil Peled could take a small problem and turn it into a big problem and put a price tag on it,” said one of Erik’s attorneys. To explain Erik’s demeanor in the undercover recording, they explained that Erik had been drinking all day—and the day before.

In November 2023, inside a federal courthouse in Nashville, Adam, Bryon, and Erik were tried for murder for hire. (Angling for leniency, Gil had already pleaded guilty.) There were times during the eleven-day trial when Erik appeared relaxed, smiling and even laughing in conversations with his attorneys. But on the last day, a jury foreman announced that Erik was guilty of the murder-for-hire charge. As Erik listened, he sat still, as if he were trying to remember to breathe.

Bryon and Adam were found guilty of the same charge, and two additional ones: conspiracy to commit kidnapping, and kidnapping with death resulting. Each count carries a mandatory life sentence. A sentencing hearing will be held later this year, though appeals are in process.

As the verdict spread on text threads and social media posts, Wallace Lundgren noticed a shift in the mood about the trial. “The day before, you could get guys to argue with you that he was going to walk, and he didn’t do it,” he told us. The day after? “We haven’t heard a peep from anyone.”

Erik was now heir to a stockpile of money—some forty million dollars—he’d never see again. At the sh*thole, his downfall epitomized a younger generation’s foolishness. “If Charlie Maund was alive today, none of this would’ve happened,” Joe Joseph said. Charlie would have gotten him a divorce lawyer, paid up, and moved on. “Charlie, he came up the hard way. He knew about all that stuff.”

But you don’t need to have come up the hard way to understand that Erik had better options. As he tried to protect his family (and himself) from scandal, he thrust himself into a worse and much more public one. Erik and Sheri separated just a few weeks after the murders, with plans to divorce. His parents and siblings attended his trial, but Sheri and the kids were nowhere in the room. As for embarrassment, well, the country club set probably knew about the verdict within hours, while the car empire he was meant to inherit vanished.

If you drive around Central Texas today, you’ll eventually see a truck with a Charles Maund Toyota license plate holder, marked by the company’s logo—the shape of Texas colored like the state flag. Some day, years from now, a driver might see one of those and wonder: Whatever happened to Charles Maund Toyota? A silence will follow. And that will be Erik Maund’s legacy.

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue ofTexas Monthlywith the headline “The Problem With Erik.”Subscribe today.