‘The Problem With Erik,’ Episode 2: “Bill”

Transcript

Katy Vine (voice-over): This episode contains descriptions of domestic violence. Support is available at: 1-800-799-SAFE.

Erik Maund isn’t the first person on the planet to get caught having an affair—or to have someone try to take advantage of their secret. The guys at the Shithole—businessmen and gamblers who’ve known Erik for years—have brushed up against their fair share of opportunistic characters. So it’s not hard for them to imagine the situation Erik was in. One day, my producer, Ana, asked them about this. 

Ana Worrel: If you got a text that was like, “I want money or else I’m going to tell everyone what you did.” What would you do?

Salem Joseph: I would say, “Here, tell them, let me give you some more to tell them about.”

This is Salem Joseph, who runs the Shithole. 

Salem Joseph: I mean, I had an affair similar to that. I was very young. And I had a titty bar. She worked there. She was married. I was married. She fell in love with me, like they all do for some reason. I don’t know why. And she used to come in my driveway. My wife would leave to go to the store, and she made me tell her I love her or she wasn’t going to leave. I said. “You’ve got to get . . . Okay. I love you, bye.” Well, she called me, drunk, one night on Easter, says, “I left my husband. I want you to leave your wife. Or I’ll come up there and I’ll tell her about our affair.”

He called out into the empty house:

Salem Joseph: “I said, ‘hold on.’ I said, ‘somebody wants to talk to you.’ Like that. Go ahead and tell her about it.”

The difference between Salem’s story and Erik’s is that Salem knew who was threatening to expose his affair. Erik didn’t. All Erik knew is that an unknown number was texting him, asking for twenty-five thousand dollars to keep quiet about a woman he’d slept with in Nashville three weeks earlier, an escort he knew as Layla Love. 

Erik didn’t know Layla Love’s real name was Holly Williams. Just like he probably didn’t know the real name of the escort he contacted the next night.

When Erik went back to Austin, he probably didn’t think much about Holly at all. Makes sense. He barely knew her. Which means he definitely didn’t know about Bill. 

I’m Katy Vine, and this is The Problem with Erik, an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Ana Worrel. This is episode two: “Bill.”

If you went out to bars and clubs in Nashville in 2019, you might’ve noticed Bill Lanway. He was kind of hard to miss: a lanky redhead, over six feet tall, with a round face.

This is Che Mock, one of Bill’s childhood friends. 

Che Mock: Bill had a scar on his right side from where, idiotically, on the back of my ’96 Mercury Cougar, he was holding on and we were leaving a Key Club meeting and my idiocy jerked the wheel, and he flew off and scratched himself on the pavement, and had a scar. So every time I’d see him, he’d bring up that scar.

Che maintained a relationship with Bill after they graduated from high school. 

Che Mock: And Bill liked to go out. Bill, he liked to have fun. He liked to party a little bit, for better or worse. Nashville is a city that’s very conducive to nightlife. And Bill enjoyed the Nashville nightlife.

Katy VO: Bill lived in Clarksville, a northwest suburb, so he’d drive an hour to Nashville several nights a week to party at the big, rowdy bars on Broadway owned by country stars like Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan. 

He also loved techno clubs and EDM festivals. 

Bill’s friend: Our friend group was a lot of mutual friends, like friends of friends. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the EDM scene at all, but it is electronic dance music, so it’s festivals.

This is a friend of Bill’s, who wants to remain anonymous. We talked in my rental car one afternoon, outside a fast food restaurant she manages in Clarksville. 

Bill’s friend: There’s a very large EDM scene in Nashville. We all used to travel together, so we would go and get big houses together and just go to these big festivals, and Bill was a big part of that.

She eventually met Bill’s girlfriend, Holly.

Bill’s friend: She partied too. That was a lot of it. She was a big partyer, and that’s how they met. I feel like it was the scene that brought them . . . Like, they met out at a club.

For all of them, nightlife was sort of an escape. 

Bill’s friend: It’s a way to check out, you know? Because when we go to these big festivals, it’s like thousands and thousands of people that are all dressed up or don’t wear a lot of clothes, and they do their own thing. And nobody’s judging the way that they’re dancing. Nobody’s judging their outfits. Nobody cares what type of drugs you’re on as long as you’re safe. You’re able to lose yourself and have a good time and then check back into reality a couple days later.

I’ve seen photos of Bill out with these friends. And he looks like he’s having a blast. They’re all huddled together in tie-dye outfits, arms around each other, making faces or flashing peace signs at the camera. 

Below the surface, though, Bill was in a dark place.

In 2011, he lost his five-year-old daughter to cancer. His friends say it changed him.

Bill Lanway (speaking in video): When Maddie was diagnosed, I feel like the whole world just came crashing down.

This is Bill, speaking in a film called Hope Is Everything: A Childhood Cancer Documentary. 

Bill Lanway (speaking in video): One minute you have a healthy girl, the next moment you’re seeing her tubes come out of her body and laying in a hospital bed motionless wondering if she’s ever gonna wake up again. 

Here’s Che again:

Che Mock: He also became much more depressed. I don’t know if you call alcohol abuse self-medication, but I think that maybe when I would see him out, sometimes it might be borderline excessive.

Che’s older brother, Rudy Mock, bartended at one of Bill’s hangouts, where he helped run a fundraiser for Bill’s daughter, Maddie, when she was diagnosed.

Rudy Mock: I know he was having some depression issues because of his daughter and some of that techno scene. . . That wasn’t really my scene, but I know he was into, I think, molly, ecstasy, things like that.

Bill already wasn’t in a great place when he met Holly around 2018. And he didn’t have a good track record in his romantic relationships, either. A friend told me Bill had “bad luck with girls” and could be insecure. Holly’s friends, like Shawnta Joiner, saw it too. 

Shawnta Joiner: Holly’s an attention-getter. She’s going to draw the crowd, the attention. That’s just her personality. It’s very outgoing. And he didn’t. . . I don’t think he liked that sometimes. 

But still, Holly liked him, and she withdrew from her friendships as her world melted into his. According to friends and text messages that would later become trial evidence, the two traveled to EDM shows and took party drugs together. He’d call her “baby girl” and “Holly Ann,” and she’d affectionately call him “punk” and “Will.” 

Bill told her she was “absolutely mesmerizing” and texted her that he was proud of her, quote, “for being a strong, independent woman and for facing all you have in life and still coming out on top.”

But then, at some point, Bill discovered that Holly had been keeping a secret. He snooped around on her phone and found out she was an escort. 

Bill was humiliated, but by that point, he’d moved in with Holly, and might’ve felt like he couldn’t just walk away. Sometimes he made money dealing cards for high-end poker games, and sometimes he delivered Amazon packages, but he didn’t have a reliable income.  

He took his feelings out on Holly. 

According to a police statement she gave in April 2019, Bill stole the SIM card out of her phone, punched the windshield of her car, and at least once, hit her in the mouth with his fist. 

Holly filed an order of protection, but got back with him shortly after. 

And things didn’t get better. Bill went through Holly’s phone, found her client list, and sent a threatening message to at least one of the men: a radiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The doctor was a longtime client. He’d been seeing Holly every few months for years. Bill texted him anonymously to stop seeing Holly. If he didn’t, Bill would tell the doctor’s office staff and his wife all about his affair. 

The doctor contacted Holly and asked if he should be concerned. She assured him no. She figured it was just Bill being jealous again. Holly stressed that he wouldn’t be an issue.

But then, a few months later, Bill came back. This time, Bill followed through with his threats. He texted the doctor’s wife that her husband had been cheating on her. 

Holly’s friends didn’t always know the extent of her problems with Bill, but they knew the relationship was volatile. They tried to convince her to break up with him, or stay broken up with him. Here’s Holly’s friend Marie Carroll:

Marie Carroll: Yeah, she would text me whenever she was scared. And I would always just try to encourage her to just leave. And of course, it’s just so hard to leave a toxic situation sometimes. When things are really, really good and then there’s times that are really, really bad. You think that the good overpowers the bad, and so you stay.

Sometimes Bill would shout at Holly, and she’d shout back. The conflict was loud enough that it reverberated beyond the walls of Holly’s apartment.

We know this because Holly’s upstairs neighbor, Steve Roehm, heard their fights while he was working from home, at a job that required total silence. 

Steve Roehm: Well, I’m a hypnotherapist. I also teach hypnosis. Twenty-four-and-a-half years ago, I got hypnotized to quit smoking, and I was completely off the rails in my life. And I was smoking two packs a day on a good, healthy day. And somebody suggested hypnosis. I’m like, “What the hell? I’ve tried everything else.” And I got hypnotized by a redneck outside of Murray, Kentucky, and walked out of his house and I just had no desire for cigarettes anymore.

Since that day, he can’t stand the smell of cigarettes. He cannot stress this enough. 

Steve Roehm: [laughs] I hate cigarettes now, despise the smell of cigarettes.

That’s why, when he started to smell someone smoking around his nonsmoking apartment complex, he set out to find the culprit.

It didn’t take long. It was Bill.

Steve Roehm: Initially it was just him hanging out, and I think he was the one who was smoking and causing all the problems. At least that’s what the office told me when I talked to them is that “her boyfriend’s there and he’s been doing it.” And I’m like, “Well, I really don’t care who’s doing it. Just don’t.” 

Steve spends hours on Zoom to help clients achieve heightened suggestibility so he can treat them. To do that, he requires total silence. Around November 2019, that wasn’t happening. 

Steve Roehm: I remember one morning I woke up and heard them arguing and fighting downstairs. I used to hear her in the bathroom crying a lot. I guess because of the plumbing and stuff, I could hear more sounds coming up through the floor. But yeah, I heard her on multiple occasions in the bathroom, sobbing.

It all came to a head on Christmas morning, when Steve was awakened by the sounds from downstairs. Holly was crying, Bill was shouting. At one point, Steve thought he heard a body slam into a wall. 

Steve Roehm: And finally I was just like. . . “I can’t, this is not good. I don’t know what’s going on down there, but I know she’s in jeopardy and I’m not going to go down there because if I do, we’re going to have a problem.” So I figured I better call the cops. And so I called the police and they came in and they took him away. 

I’m not sure what came of that, but I know he was back within a week or two. I know they ended up changing her gate code and her door code because we had digital door locks. And apparently she ended up giving him the new gate code and door codes again, after the fact—is what they told me from the office—because he wasn’t supposed to be on property, and she was still giving him the code for some reason, even with all this stuff going on.

Conversations with Holly and Bill’s friends illuminate a pattern in their relationship: They would fight, she would kick him out, he would come back. 

Some of Holly’s friends knew what was going on. They just didn’t know how to help. Here’s her friends Shawnta and Marie. 

Shawnta Joiner: I had reached out a few times, but I never heard back from her.

Marie Carroll: Wherever she lived, it was probably like 20 minutes from me, but she never would give me her address because she knew I would come.

On January 11, 2020—after Holly had kicked Bill out again—he disabled the smart lock on her door and got back into her apartment. She woke up to see him rifling through her dresser drawers. She picked up the phone to dial for help, but Bill grabbed it, put his hands over her mouth, and used his body to smother her. Holly couldn’t breathe. She almost passed out. 

Bill finally let her go, then ran out the door. 

Later that day, she was out at a family gathering when she got a notification from her security app that someone was in her home. Bill had broken into her apartment again. This time, he’d taken her little white Maltese, Max. 

Holly spent days searching for her dog, and asking for help. She started posting frantically on Facebook. She got a tip that some people might’ve seen Max in his sweater around the apartment complex, then she thought he could be hiding in the woods. 

She posted: “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep the prayers coming in.”

Later that week. Holly wrote an update. Someone had told her they saw a dog on the road across from her apartment complex. Holly posted, quote, “I drove to the location where my biggest fear was confirmed. It was my buddy Max.”

Here’s Holly’s friends, Matt and Shawnta. 

Matt Garrett: I guess he snatched that dog up and threw it out in the road somewhere. This dude stole her dog and took it out and just dropped it off.

Shawnta Joiner: All the posts on Facebook and stuff, and I’m just like, “Did he really take her dog and just let it go and it get ran over?”

Holly filed another order of protection against Bill and contacted a security company to reset her apartment locks. Still, she couldn’t get Bill to leave her alone. She could see that he was trying to access codes to her apartment remotely. 

She messaged a friend, and said Bill, quote, “keeps f—ing with my smart lights & plugs from his phone. Just to let me know he’s close by. It’s pretty scary.” 

Marie Carroll: I just know that she felt unsafe. And I don’t know, I remember I wanted to come to her, I wanted to get her out of there. And I remember she didn’t have a car to escape in because he had taken her car or something. And so that’s why I wanted to come get her and just get her out of there. And she’s like, “No, don’t come. You know, I don’t want him knowing that you’re coming.”

Around the same time, Holly’s friend Matt had the sudden urge to call her. Matt lived an hour away, and it had been months since he and Holly had spoken. 

Matt Garrett: Yeah, because I don’t think I’ve ever had anything like this happen, especially where I felt compelled to call somebody and be like, “Hey, I think you’re going to die.”

Katy Vine: Well, and it’s amazing that her response was, “You may be right.”

Matt Garrett: Yeah.

This is Matt Garrett, an old friend of Holly’s.

Matt Garrett: I feel like I’ve always been an empath, kind of. So when I met Holly, there was just something that drew me to her.

For context, Matt is huge. He’s a barber and a bodybuilder, completely inked up, with finger tats that spell “anti hero” on his knuckles. If you saw him on the street, this is the last guy you would expect to volunteer that he’s an empath. 

Or tell a story like this one about a dream he had a few weeks after Bill took Holly’s dog:  

Matt Garrett: So, man, it’s weird. I had some relationship issues too at this time, and I had got in some trouble, and I had sold my house, and I ended up in a trailer. When I was in this trailer though, I had a couple of these odd dreams. And one of them was. . . I just slipped off into this dream, which seemed like I lost all sense of time, and I was just in this place, I can’t describe it, but I had lights flickering in front of me, and I just got this emotion inside of me, and I could feel what they were feeling. And I knew that this was the morning of these two people’s death.

These two people were Holly and Bill. 

Matt Garrett: And when I woke up, I just had this, I don’t know, it was a panicky feeling, but it just felt really real. And I was like, “I shouldn’t tell her.” And I was like, “No, I’ve got to tell her.” And so I called her, and I hadn’t talked to her in probably six or seven months, at that time.

And I was just like, “Look, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m just going to tell you this, I think your boyfriend’s going to kill you.” And she was just like, “Oh my god.” And I was like, yeah, “I just got this feeling like he’s like this tortured soul. He’s a weak person. He can’t handle who you are.”

And that was the last time I talked to her.

Holly told Matt she wanted to leave Bill, but didn’t feel like she could. He’d been through so much. There was the death of his daughter. And another tragedy that happened when Bill was just a toddler. 

Some friends knew vague outlines of the incident, but it seems like Bill rarely, if ever, talked about it. Local newspapers covered it, though.

In November 1986, when Bill was just three years old, his parents were getting a divorce. And one day, when Bill’s mother, Candy, left the house after a fight, his father, Lyle, started making threats. Lyle armed himself with a .22 and threatened to kill both Bill and himself. 

Bill was held hostage for five hours before the police came and took his father to the stress unit of a local hospital. 

At the time, the hospital had a merit system where patients could get day passes for good behavior. 

So, five days later, Lyle was released on a day pass for Thanksgiving. He drove home and stabbed Candy to death. Bill was there. 

Matt Garrett: I think that in relationships, I don’t know, that’s what I’ve experienced, is that if you’re not being saved, then you’re trying to save somebody. So especially that kind of person, I think that she was the one being a mom to him because she told me that she paid for everything, that he didn’t pay anything, that he was just kind of staying over there. I felt like she wanted to shake this anchor, you know what I mean? But at the same time, she said that. . . all this stuff, you know, that she just felt horrible about, that she couldn’t leave him, you know, she thought he was going to kill himself and all this.

I’ve been in a situation like that before, too, I felt like I was just trying to be this person’s rock. They’ve got this traumatic past, and so I’m trying to be all this for them. So once you invest your time and money into someone, you’ve invested a lot into this person in years. It’s hard to just let them go, I guess.

Through court records, I got a hold of texts between Bill and Holly for all of February and early March 2020. What they show is that Bill really latched on to Holly’s life, running errands for her, hanging out in the parking lot while she was getting her nails done. He’d use her Amazon password. He’d take her car.  

He regularly begged for affirmations. Sometimes, he’d rapid-fire text her when she was with a client, saying things like, quote, “Still can’t say love you? Now that I’ve brought it up 4 times?”

He didn’t have steady work, but he didn’t want her to work, either. He wanted to go out with her. He wanted to be at her apartment. 

When she explained she had to focus on work to pay rent and bills, he’d act sheepish and pretend to support her for a bit, and then gaslight her and pick a new fight.

Holly would get angry. She’d tell him to stop being so dramatic. If her work was such a problem for him, why didn’t he just leave?

Holly summed up everything she’d been going through in a text to Bill on February 3, 2020. 

I want you to hear the whole thing, because it shows what was going on in her life when Erik Maund came into the picture. This text was sent the same day Erik Maund reached out to her to book a session.

She said, “Sorry babe, I’ve been so busy catching up on ad stuff and emails and trying to screen new potential clients. It’s overwhelming, but I need to do this to save my finances and my apartment. 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.” 

Just a few days after this text, Erik Maund took his trip to Nashville and met up with Layla Love. 

Erik met Holly at the JW Marriott’s swanky bar in downtown Nashville. He had asked for ninety minutes, so they wouldn’t be rushed, or interrupted. But while Holly was shifting her full attention to Erik, Bill was messaging her nonstop: 21 texts in the first seven minutes she was on the date. 

Holly said: “My client is here!!!!!! Stop this right now!!!!!”

Bill responded: “Ok say u love me. . . . Simple. Don’t know why I have to beg.” 

Holly fired back: “Hey. . . here’s an option. Don’t be with me. . . . That will fix everything.” 

But Bill kept at it, and she finally gave in. She told him she loved him multiple times. 

Two hours passed before she texted Bill again. “He just walked out the door,” she wrote.

Three weeks after Erik returned to Austin, he got his own threatening text, just like the Vanderbilt radiologist. It was of course from Bill, though Erik didn’t know that. All he knew was that it was related to Layla Love. 

Bill had threatened Holly’s clients before, but this time, he didn’t just want the recipient to stop seeing Holly. This time, he also wanted $25,000.

Back at the Shithole, we talked about the dilemma Erik faced in that moment. Salem’s brother, Joe Joseph, pointed out that, to Erik, twenty-five thousand would be nothing.

But Joe Turner, an attorney, considered why “paying up” might not have seemed like such a good idea to Erik. 

Joe Turner: Yes. But you understand when blackmail starts, it doesn’t end.

Joe Joseph: Okay, I understand.

Joe Turner: It’s twenty-five thousand today, it’s two hundred fifty next week, it’s seven-fifty a year later.

Joe Joseph: Then you don’t—

Joe Turner: So you just can’t deal with a blackmailer.

Joe Joseph: You go to the FBI and say, “Hey, this guy is trying to blackmail me.” I mean, that’s what you do. And you go to your wife and say, “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on, but this guy is trying to blackmail me” and blah blah blah.

Going to the authorities might’ve been a safer choice, especially since Erik and his wife, Sheri, had a prenup. That’s what Salem thought, too. 

Salem Joseph: He could have told his wife, said, “Look, you can have the $8 million house. You can have access to the airplane. You can stay married if you want, to me, or you can get a divorce and still use the plane, keep the house. But I’m going to go enjoy my life. I have a girlfriend. I want to have some fun.”

But Erik didn’t want to do any of this. Prenup or not, it would be devastating to his family and his reputation. And after his family found out, everyone would find out. Folks at the country club. Parents of his kids’ friends. Car dealers who’d worked with his grandfather. Instead of the heir to the throne, he’d be the loser with the scandal.

So, according to court testimony, Erik turned to a trusted colleague and father figure, Charles Maund Toyota’s general manager, Jim Dimeo. Erik told him about the text, and asked: What about the dealership’s security person, Gil Peled? The guy who used to be Charlie Sheen’s bodyguard. Didn’t he have experience with blackmail? Maybe we should call him to take care of this.

Turns out, Gil was looking for work, and was more than happy to help. Yes, he could take care of this, he said. He was the perfect guy to handle Erik’s problem. 

Gil Peled’s exact words? “I got this.”