Strings Attached

The Maund family ran an automobile empire, beginning in 1957 with Charles Maund opening his own auto group, Charles Maund Oldsmobile-Cadillac. The success was passed on through the generations, and by the time Charles’ grandson Erik Maund was born, the family was living in luxury, and Erik was incorporated into the business as soon as he was old enough to work. In 2020, 45-year-old Erik was living inside a $5 million dollar ten-bedroom mansion in Texas, overlooking Austin Country Club.

Erik was married with children, but on a trip to Nashville to see one of his kids at college, he met up with another woman - a 33-year-old beautician and escort named Holly Williams. Although Erik gave Holly a fake name, calling himself “Erik Moore” to avoid her finding out his real identity, his affair with her wasn’t entirely no-strings-attached. 

Holly had just broken up with a long-term boyfriend, a man named Bill Lanway. Their relationship had been emotionally volatile and sometimes physically violent, and only a few months before meeting Erik, Holly had officially put an end to things. However, Bill remained a constant presence in her life. They kept living together after the breakup, and Bill continued to be violent and controlling. In January of 2020, Bill had gotten angry at Holly and then started strangling her while telling her, “this is only happening because you tried to run away.” After the incident, Holly had gone to the police, telling them that she had been convinced that Bill was going to kill her. It wasn’t the first time that Holly had called the police on Bill - in fact, it was the third.

After their initial meeting, Holly and Erik met up again in early February 2020. Erik knew that he would be back in Nashville for a few nights, so before he arrived there, he sent Holly a message stating that he’d love to see her again. When she agreed to meet him, Erik responded that he was “excited to see her” and directed her to wait for him in a specific hotel bar like she had last time.

On the first of March, 2020, several weeks had passed since Erik last met up with Holly, and he received a text from her on-again, off-again partner, Bill Lanway. Holly hadn’t told Bill that she had been sleeping with Erik, but he had gone through her phone and managed to trace Erik’s cell phone number back to his real identity. Bill was furious, and now that he had discovered how wealthy and powerful Erik was, he was determined to use this information to extort the other man. In the text, he told Erik that he would agree to keep the affair a secret in exchange for a significant amount of hush money.

Erik panicked. He had a reputation to uphold, and he didn’t want his wife and family to find out about his infidelity. Ten days later, he transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars into another bank account…but the recipient wasn’t Bill Lanway. Instead, Erik paid the money to a private security company named Speartip Security Group. The company’s owner, Gilad Peled, had previously been in the Israel Defense Forces as a military commander before he moved to Texas and opened up the firm.

When Erik had approached Gilad on the 5th of March and asked for his help, Gilad suggested that the case should be taken to law enforcement who would be able to arrest Bill for blackmail. However, Erik refused. He wanted to settle this privately, and didn’t want to risk involving the police - instead, he wanted Gilad, as well as two of Gilad’s employees, to fix it. Gilad agreed, and one of his former Special Operations Marine employees, Byron Brockway, investigated the situation and created what he called an intelligent report. Another former Special Operations Marine employee, Adam Carey, kept both Bill and Holly under tight surveillance, watching their movements.

A surveillance document, titled “Tennessee Sitrep” was sent through from the employees to Gilad on the 9th of March. It confirmed the details that Adam had found out while keeping Holly under surveillance, including details about the vehicle she drove and her address, as well as confirmation that Bill was still living with her. The document clearly stated the purpose of the surveillance: Adam and Byron would use “everything at their disposal to stop the attempted extortion of [Erik] Maund.”

On the 11th of March - the same day that Erik made the massive final payment to Speartip Security Group - both Byron Brockway and Adam Carey waited outside Bill and Holly’s apartment complex and then approached them in the parking lot. Both Speartip Security employees were carrying a weapon, and during the confrontation, one of them shot and killed Bill Lanway. 

Byron and Adam had come prepared, hiring cars for the occasion. The men forced Holly into a rental car at gunpoint, and then maneuvered Bill’s lifeless body into the vehicle before driving to Old Hickory Boulevard, where they pulled into a construction site. They dragged Holly out of the car and shot her multiple times, killing her, and dumped both bodies at the construction site inside one of the cars before driving away. With the deed done, and Erik’s payment received, Gilad then divided up the profits and paid Adam and Byron around $100,000 each.

Shortly after Holly and Bill were killed, Byron returned the rental car, and the account that the men had used to communicate with Erik was deleted. Within the same day, both killers made their way back to Austin, Texas - but they hadn’t done enough to erase the connection between Speartip Security Group, Erik Maund, and the murders. Holly and Bill’s bodies were found early the next day at the construction site, and immediately, the investigation into their murders began.

Multiple factors connected Erik to the couple. His phone records connected him to Holly, even though he had used a fake name - and later on, they connected him to Bill, when the threatening texts had started. Meanwhile, his financial records showed an unexplained transfer of more than $800,000, which was able to be traced to Gilad.

In December 2021, Holly had been dead for nine months, and Erik’s life had more or less returned to normal. His wife had never found out about the affair, and the family’s empire was intact. He decided to travel to a ranch in South Texas with one of his friends, planning to go on a luxury hunting trip. When the two men were driving back home along Interstate 35 in Erik’s black Toyota SUV, they were suddenly ambushed at what appeared to be a routine traffic stop. A group of federal agents and other law enforcement officials, who had planned to surprise Erik and prevent him from fleeing.

Erik was removed from the SUV and placed under arrest, facing murder-for-hire charges. The friend he had been hunting with, who had no idea what was going on, remained sitting in the car’s passenger seat while Erik was handcuffed and taken into custody. Almost simultaneously, Byron Brockway was tracked down and arrested in San Diego, and Adam Carey was arrested at his North Carolina home. Despite not being at the scene of the crime, Gilad Peled was also arrested for his connection to the murders after FBI agents ambushed him at the airport. 

Erik, Gilad, Byron and Adam all faced the same charge of murder-for-hire, and Byron and Adam received additional charges for kidnapping Holly and taking her to a secondary location before murdering her. After accepting a plea deal in 2022, Gilad Peled had an earlier trial than the other guilty parties.

As a part of his deal, Gilad agreed to testify at the trials of the other three. In court, he was asked why, as the man in charge of Speartip Security Group, he had gone ahead with the murder-for-hire plot instead of sticking to his original suggestion of helping Erik to get Bill arrested for extortion. “I should have,” Gilad replied, unable to give the attorneys a clear answer. “I’m sorry. I’ll regret that for the rest of my life, but I didn’t.”

The remaining three men went to trial in 2023, and they were found guilty on all charges. At the trial, the amount of hush money that Bill had demanded from Erik was finally revealed. He’d asked for $25,000… around 1/30th of what Erik had eventually paid to have him murdered.