CRIME HUNTER: Blackmail drove sex-crazed car dealer to pay $750K for Music City murders

Erik Charles Maund was a big wheel in the Texas auto business. Married with grown children, Maund was living the good life. But while visiting his son who was going to school in Nashville, Tennessee in February 2020, Maund, 48, was looking for a little extra-curricular action in Music City.

And he found it in pretty 33-year-old escort Holly Williams. The auto mogul and the southern belle hooked up for carnal capers in a Nashville motel. Often, these exchanges are one-and-done affairs but this was the second booty call for the duo.

Maund emailed Williams: “Good day beautiful! Looking forward to [sic] later. I’m in Nashville. I’ll meet you in the bar like last time.

Text me when you arrive. ” The tryst went off without a hitch until about a month later. In March 2020, Maund began receiving threatening text messages.

Maund would later discover to his great dismay he had a problem. That problem was named Billy Lanway. Lanway was Williams’ ex-husband and he after discovering her trysts with the tres wealthy Maund, he wanted a slice of the action.

Unless Maund coughed up large, Laneway would rat out the auto dealer to his oblivious wife. The price for silence was $25,000 by March 11, 2020, or Mrs. Maund would be informed of her hubby’s activities in Nashville.

Erik Charles Maund was not about to take this threat lying down. By sunrise, he had contacted a former member of the Israeli Defence Force that he knew, a guy named Gilad Peled. The initial plan had been for a team assembled by Peled to travel to Nashville for reconnaissance on this Lanway character.

For that job, Peled recruited former U. S. Marines Bryon Brockway, 48, and Adam Carey, 32.

Brockway and co. didn’t get very far on the Music City mission. So Brockway offered another solution to Maund’s dilemma, something a little more permanent.

Williams and Lanway would be murdered in exchange for $100,000 for the two killers. Peled later testified that Maund “jumped on” this new innovation and, in fact, promised to pay over and above the odds for the blackmailer’s scalps. On the morning of March 13, 2020, at a Nashville construction site, the bodies of Williams and Lanway were discovered in a stolen car.

He had been shot to death in the parking lot of his one-time paramour’s apartment. She was killed in the car. “If you met her, she looked like a Kardashian and you didn’t know what to expect.

But then she made you feel just involved immediately. She was very humble and like really quiet but just sweet,” friend Marie Carroll told The Tennessean in 2021. Williams’ relationship with Lanway was rocky.

Cops were frequent fliers at their apartment. When he was around 10, Lanway’s father took him hostage at knifepoint and later murdered his mother. Nashville detectives and FBI agents began trying to piece together the puzzle.

Erik Maund was on their radar from the start and the operating theory was that the pair were killed to cover-up his cheating. Maund, Brockway, Carey and Peled were charged with murder-for-hire in December 2021 and indicted the following July. “On that same day, Brockway and Carey, while armed with firearms, confronted H.

W. and W. L.

in the parking lot of H. W. ’s apartment complex in Nashville and murdered W.

L. by shooting him multiple times,” the indictment said. “They then kidnapped H.

W. and drove her and the body of W. L.

to a construction site on Old Hickory Boulevard in Nashville, where they murdered H. W. by shooting her several times.

The bodies were then discarded at the construction site and within hours of the murders, the Pinger account used to communicate was deleted and a rental car rented by Brockway was returned. ” In addition, a grateful Maund wired more than $750,000 to Peled’s account as payment to the trio for the kidnapping and murders of Williams and Lanway. Peled would later plead guilty and was the star witness against Maund and the killers.

They were found guilty in the murder-for-hire plot in Nashville. All three face life in prison. “Almost three-and-a-half years after the murders of Holly Williams and William Lanway, these defendants have finally been held accountable for their heinous actions,” U.

S. Attorney Henry C. Leventis said.

“Today’s verdict is a testament to the outstanding investigative work done in this case by the FBI and Metro Nashville Police Department as well as the trial team’s incredible job presenting the government’s case to the jury. ” bhunter@postmedia. com @HunterTOSun.