“Behind the Scenes” – Texas Monthly

Transcript

Patrick Michels: Hi again, and welcome to another bonus episode of “The Problem With Erik,” an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Ana Worrel. I’m Patrick Michels. I was a producer and story editor on the show. And here with me in the studio is Katy Vine, the show’s host. Hey, Katy.

Katy Vine: Hey.

Patrick Michels: And Ana Worrel, the show’s lead producer. Hi, Ana.

Ana Worrel: Hi.

Patrick Michels: And my colleague here in the studio, Brian Standefer, who produced and engineered the show and also wrote the original score, which we’ll talk about later. Hey Brian.

Brian Standefer: Hi.

Patrick Michels: You’re getting this episode because you’re an audio subscriber to Texas Monthly, and we’re really grateful to you for supporting our work. We’re producing these bonus episodes as a way of saying thank you and to give you more of the story. So today we’re going to take you behind the scenes of the show to hear more about how we made it, covering the Erik Maund trial in Nashville, and, of course, getting access to the Shithole. 

So I’m going to start with Ana, because the podcast here started with you. You brought us the idea and I remember you telling me that when you first heard about this case, it was one that just hooked you, and you spent I don’t know how long digging up records from court and reading everything you could find about it. So what was it that made this something you wanted to really dig into?

Ana Worrel: Well, I remember my dad texted me, and it was like, I think, in December 2021, the day that Erik was arrested. There was news article, and he was like, Remember this car dealership? And I just thought it was wild, because I had been there before with my mom when I was a kid. So I just started looking into the story and following it for about a year as the court case started unfolding. And there were just a lot of elements about it that were super interesting to me.

But also, there was audio. Like, the court published the transcripts for these undercover phone calls. And I was like, okay, well that— like, the medium has to be audio to tell this story. It felt like its own sonic landscape, like, those annoying car commercials that get stuck in your head. That is a place that you can go just in sound. 

Patrick Michels: So Katy, what about for you getting the story, getting into the story for the first time? I mean, you talk about it in the show, that murder stories are not typically your thing. It’s usually con men and white collar crime. 

Katy Vine: Yeah, I, I’d done a few murder stories early in my career. Two women who killed a guy and went on the run, and in the interview process, one of the women, Jennifer Jones, told me about how she was having sex with the guy when she pulled a pillow over his head and shot him in the head. And then in another murder case, I interviewed the mother talking about in the autopsy how much her daughter’s heart weighed. And that’s just . . . that stuff gave me such nightmares and it was really hard. I don’t know, I never really was able to get it too far from my head, I think. And so when y’all came to me with Ana’s idea for this show, a couple of things stood out.

One is that I would have a partner to process this stuff with. If we had an interview that was rough, at least, as happened in some of these Erik Maund interviews, you know, we could talk about it. And Ana struck me as somebody who was a sensitive person and wasn’t going to sensationalize everything, and make it gross.

So from that standpoint, I just felt comfortable. And also I just was curious about audio storytelling. I’ve been writing stories for 27 years, but often you write a quote and it just doesn’t land on the page the way it did in your ear when someone said it, and to have the audience hear that interview themselves was sort of just a fascinating concept to me. Especially in a media atmosphere where so many readers now question the reporting. With a podcast, you have time to unpeel that story and just take a listener with you. You can show more of your work. 

Patrick Michels: From my perspective, the really strong sense of tone for the show was one that y’all came up with, that you brought to the studio. What were the conversations like that you guys had together about, about striking the right note with this?

Ana Worrel: Yeah, I think it, like, following the story, kind of the ticktock of the plot of what happened, it was wild to me how similar it was to, like, a Coen brothers movie. It was really important to me to not, like, sensationalize death, but at the same time, there’s this trope in, like, true crime podcasts that, that was starting to bother me after a while, in which, like, somebody would act like they know this victim so well and, and really flesh them out—which was great—but it also . . . it felt phony at times.

And so I think the balance we were trying to strike was, like, figuring out as much as we could about this true victim, who was Holly, and telling her story in the most realistic and caring way. But also that is a separate kind of thing that happened from, like, these men who conspired in the most strange and honestly stupid way, that sparked this entire situation.

So we were always constantly trying to strike this balance. And we did have trouble, you know, we really wanted more on Holly, and her family did not want to speak to us. And so that was another thing that we just really wanted to respect and not push.

Katy Vine: And Bill. 

Ana Worrel: And same with Bill. 

Katy Vine: Yeah, absolutely. It’s almost like two separate stories, right? You’ve got the incident in the parking lot of the actual murders. And then there’s sort of everything else.

Ana Worrel: Yeah.

Brian Standefer: It seems like that happened a lot where we had to go back to what the tone was, you know. Is this sort of, like, oddball, almost darkly humorous moment? Or is this, like, leaning into kind of the tragedy of it? And it was like almost hopscotch sometime where I had to like jump over to this side, jump over to this…

Patrick Michels: And moment to moment in the show, as you’re scoring, that’s something that you’re thinking about too?

Brian Standefer: Yeah. It’s really easy to ruin a scene with music. I always err on the side of less is more, because you don’t want to distract from what the writing is and what the producing is, and it’s always got to just support the scene. But yeah, that’s the thing. Do we go with the bumbling kind of music on this, or do we go with the more serious “let’s go deeper emotionally,” you know?

Patrick Michels: I’m thinking back to when we decided to make the show and we knew about how long the trial trial was going to last. We knew where it was going to be. And you were making travel plans, but we didn’t know a whole lot more. No idea of who was going to talk, what was going to happen once you got out there. What’s it like showing up in Nashville, showing up to the courthouse on day one, with no guarantee of access to anybody and just sort of . . . what? Rolling dice, hoping it works out?

Katy Vine: I know for most articles I feel like I run into that situation a lot.

Patrick Michels: You weren’t stressed out about it. This is like par for the course.

Katy Vine: It’s, that’s just how it goes, yeah.

Patrick Michels: Ana, what about you?

Ana Worrel: I mean, I was terrified. I think I was so excited about the opportunity to do this with this team that I was like, we’re going to figure it out. Like, it doesn’t matter.

Katy Vine: Ana’s a “figure it out” person too, generally speaking. She’s just, like, we’re gonna make it work. “Don’t think about it. It’ll work.”

I mean, most of the folks in the courtroom, I think, were avoiding us at first. And we did introduce ourselves, and told folks if they wanted to talk, here’s our contact info whenever they’re ready, but that we weren’t going to push it right there and then. And I think then everybody kind of was able to get comfortable with our presence, knowing that we weren’t going to rush them with some kind of surprise interview in the hallway or something like that.

There were definitely awkward hallway hangouts, as there always are, with people from each side having to kind of hang out near the water fountains together and so on. But, after a while, folks started to just sort of open up. And some folks did talk to us, like Chad Brockway. Others never did, like the Williams family that sat across the room from us, or the Maund family that sat directly in front of us. But at least they got to know us a little bit and know that they could approach us if they wanted to.

Patrick Michels: How would it have changed things if Charlie Sheen had shown up?

Katy Vine: Oh, God. I think that would’ve changed it a lot. It was probably good for the trial that they didn’t, you know? Everybody thought it was gonna happen. It was like, “He’s coming today!” Everybody was all like ready to go. Or it would be like a video—then they were like, oh no, it’s just gonna be a video. But then in the end it was nothing.

Ana Worrel: When they were picking the jurors, they named him, like, “This might be a defense witness—if you’ve heard this name, like, speak now.” And nobody said anything because I’m sure they’re like, it couldn’t be Charlie Sheen…

Katy Vine: “It couldn’t possibly be that Charlie Sheen!” But I love trials. I mean, they just give you so much. Each side gives you a narrative, and you can weigh the evidence that they present and decide which pieces of the narrative ring true and which ones sort of fall apart.

Patrick Michels: How do you, how do you think it affected you to be in the room, and how did that play into how you made the show?

Ana Worrel: Well, it was wild to see everyone in real life.

Katy Vine: Yeah. It makes a big difference. I’ve read a lot of trial transcripts, and it just doesn’t, it’s not the same, even when you get to see somebody in person. I mean, for example, the person we call Red: when he comes into the courtroom, he is a very large man. I mean, the court reporter isn’t going to write that. She’s not going to write how nervous he is on the stand. She isn’t going to write that there are men guarding him from the back of the courtroom who enter the room with him and leave with him. So you can tell this guy is extremely nervous about being on the witness stand, right? None of that is going to enter the record. But you can see it in the courtroom. So that informs the way that we write about him.

Brian Standefer: Yeah. You know, it’s fascinating, the sense of character. And when you brought this in, we were all just very excited to work with you and to do this story. And one of the reasons was this, that just instantly everybody glommed onto the fact that the sense of character was so strong in this. And there’s not a mystery. There’s no mystery to the story. We’re just telling the story, but it’s this character-driven thing that you leaned into heavily with, with how you, how you produced it.

Katy Vine: No, I was just going to say that even without the mystery, watching all of these, sort of, fates collide I think was something that we started to see and discuss when we would go home after the trial every day and just think, like, “This person X who testified that day or the situation that we heard about that day, that could have gone a different direction so easily.” Like, that just kept coming up. Like every night we’d be talking about it and eating dinner in our Airbnb and going like, why did they take this left turn instead of this right turn? Why did they decide this is the way to go instead of that’s the way to go? And watching all of these decisions kind of come to this point where two people are murdered in a parking lot. I think that’s what we decided ultimately that story is. It’s these characters who all have their different motivations and they just collide in this fateful way.

Patrick Michels: What about Erik Maund, getting to know who he is? Like, you’re only going to learn so much from the trial about his upbringing and what kind of guy he is and what he’s thinking. How were you able to learn more about him to bring to the show?

Ana Worrel: It was kind of tricky actually, because when we initially started the project, we were hoping to talk to a lot of people from his community. And not a lot of people wanted to speak publicly. 

Katy Vine: We did get out of the trial, you know, his prenup, how much money he had, how he handled that money, how he talked to people like Gil Peled and Jim DeMayo, his colleague who put him in touch with Gil Peled in the first place. So we were able to paint the stuff that was most important to this situation of being extorted. Everything outside of that we had to pull a lot from people who would just talk on background. And then, the Shithole.

Patrick Michels: The Shithole.

Katy Vine: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Patrick Michels: You know, you think of the smoke-filled rooms where decisions are made that affect the city, you always think of the Headliners Club, where you meet with Wallace Lundgren at the end of the show. But it’s kind of delightful to know that the real place is actually this dumpy converted office space in the back of a gas station. How did you learn that this place existed in the first place? 

Ana Worrel: Well, so Wallace Lundgren is my friend’s uncle. And my friends and I were talking about this story. He’s also from Austin. He’s also actually a podcast producer. His name’s Lloyd and he’s great. And he was like, you really should talk to Wallace because he knows he talks to all these guys. And so we would have phone calls, and he would let me record them. And yeah, just in one of the calls, I was like, how do you know this information? Because he would say very specific things about what Erik was doing, like, in jail. He just was like, “Oh, well, it’s from the Shithole.” 

And so the moment I heard him say that, I was like, okay, well, obviously that would be a great place to go to and a great kind of community to tap into, since we don’t have access to this Austin Country Club community. But that was also a tricky game because, like, definitely like all-male, kind of like clubhouse vibes. Wallace ended up telling me one time after the trial that he was going to a party thrown by the guys. 

Katy Vine: We were here!

Ana Worrel: We were working on the show, and I was like, can we go? And he took us with him, and we met Salem, the owner. And I was still scared that even meeting him, he wouldn’t let us go.

Katy Vine: I thought that was going to get shut down fast.

Ana Worrel: Yeah. But he was like, maybe sometime next week. And we exchanged numbers and just kept following up. And it was very exciting for us to actually go, because we’d heard about it for months. It was kind of infamous, you know, in our heads. But I had no idea what it looked like or what.

Katy Vine: And people were telling us stories at the party, which happened, by the way, at noon.

Ana Worrel: Yeah, it was like one.

Katy Vine: It’s like lunch. We’re drinking wine at one o’clock. It was a Christmas party, right? I think. Yeah, Salem, I think he was wearing, like, this bright red jacket, right, this holiday jacket, and said come on by. And he was shockingly welcoming, both at the party and then also at the place itself, giving us the full tour of every photo in the room and . . .

Ana Worrel: Yeah, he became a guide. He was very . . . yeah, he was just a very interesting character, but also a great person to kind of, like, dive into this new world with.

Katy Vine: They had so many great stories that were totally unrelated to any of this. They were just their own stories about each other. But I can’t remember how many times we visited before they even let you turn on the recorder. 

Ana Worrel: Yeah, it was definitely a couple of weeks, I think, of . . . I brought my equipment every time, and I do feel like there were a couple of times where we would talk to them and I was like, do you mind if I record this? And they were like, absolutely . . .

Brian Standefer: Slide it out onto the table…

Ana Worrel: Yeah, like that would shut down. And so, you know, I wanted to respect that. I was really drawn to the idea of, like, a gossipy way for people to kind of discuss a story that happened to one of their own. And we kind of got that with the Shithole.

Katy Vine: Talked about them as being the Greek chorus for the show. Sort of the group that you go back to who can explain what’s happening and sort of process it with you.

Patrick Michels: Okay, Brian, I want to talk about the music.

Brian Standefer: Oh yeah. 

Patrick Michels: So at what point in developing the show do you start thinking about what it’s going to sound like, and how did that go for this one?

Brian Standefer: It’s early on, for sure. When, when you start thinking about just the story itself, when you have a treatment, you can kind of read that and see, kind of get a vibe for the show. But I usually like to set up and share a playlist, like a Spotify playlist, and just share it with everybody and everybody can dump songs onto it. So we went like, we bounced around like at first we’re like, “Oh, this has got to be like Tom Waits hitting metal things” or, like, you know, or, maybe electronica, kind of like a perpetual motion, sort of meditative kind of vibe.

And, and then and then Ana actually brought in this track from the Black Angels that we wound up licensing for the intro and the outro. And we all listened to that. We were like, “Oh, well, this is it.” You know, this is like, kind of a psych rock kind of thing, you know? But it’s, you know, heavy guitars, and the lyrics were perfect. And we were just like, okay, that’s it.

Patrick Michels: Literally, driving on I-35.

Brian Standefer: Yeah, and it sort of had this vibe of like, headed toward something. In the song, it could be good, it could be bad, but it just was definitely like heading toward your destiny. Which, we always saw the show as kind of like, we’re on this ride, you know, and we know how it’s going to end. It’s not going to end well. And the song had that driving kind of feel to it. So that really inspired everything. And so I started writing . . . I wrote, like, maybe fifteen or twenty cues, and so I write things that are kind of slower tempo, things that are more transitional, things that are, you know, more tense and sad. And then I take all these and, and for this show I wanted drums, and so I brought in a drummer and a bass player and a guitar player, and literally just set up with them in the cutting room, and kind of conducted through these songs with them. And they were all just A-list kind of studio guys and, and just picked it up just like that.

Patrick Michels: They’d played on other Texas Monthly podcasts, some of them?

Brian Standefer: Yeah, yeah. Glenn Fukunaga on bass, a longtime bass player with the Chicks and, and many different Austin musicians and touring acts. And he and I have known each other forever and I just, I just knew kind of like this was, he was the guy to call for this. And, and he was gracious and came in and, and did it. And then we had Pat Manske on drums, uh, who, uh, is the head engineer at this recording studio called the Zone that we did it at. And so, yeah, they were all pros. And they didn’t have to, there wasn’t a lot of practice. They just kind of just read the charts. After we got that done, the, the guitar player came in and did some overdubs here at Texas Monthly.

Patrick Michels: That’s Jon Sanchez?

Brian Standefer: Yeah, Jon Sanchez, who’s amazing and has played with everybody. And so he came in and we just mic’d up an amp and it just did layers of, you know, get that wall of guitars on some of the tracks. And then with the idea of like it, you know, building these songs, but also knowing that I could strip them back or just use like, just the guitar part or just take away the drums. So you can kind of, at that point, you can kind of, like, mold them to each episode a little bit.

Patrick Michels: Where’s it going now, then, for Erik Maund and for the rest of his coconspirators? They haven’t been sentenced yet, as of the recording now, but when do you think that’s going to happen?

Katy Vine: What we’re hearing is it sounds like they’ll know more in October, November, when the sentencing is gonna be. But right now it’s all still kinda up in the air.

Patrick Michels: And the way the show tells it, there’s not a lot of doubt, really, about what their sentences will be, except maybe for Gil Peled, is that, is that your impression?

Katy Vine: Murder for hire with death resulting is a mandatory life sentence. Gil Peled is definitely a different case, because he worked with the prosecution, and so there may be some leniency there. I don’t know what the rules are, but everybody else is looking at a lot of years, yeah.

Patrick Michels: Well, thanks for doing this, guys.

Katy Vine: Thanks Patrick.

Ana Worrel: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Patrick Michels: And thanks to you for listening. We’ll have another bonus episode for you next week, which will be a great one. It’s Katy’s conversation with two of the guys behind what’s probably still the most infamous hitman trial in Texas history: the trial of Charles Harrelson—Woody Harrelson’s father—who was convicted in the early eighties of murdering a federal judge. We’ll see you then.