“The $60K Option” (TM Audio Exclusive)

Transcript

Katy Vine (voice-over): Close to midnight on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, Gil Peled put on his seat belt and prepared himself for a fateful conversation. It was a humid 70-degree night in Austin, and as he drove, he passed stores and schools that faced uncertain futures. 

A week earlier, the city had canceled the South by Southwest festival. The local grocery chain HEB was inundated with customers stocking up on toilet paper and sanitizer. 

Gil turned into an upscale west side neighborhood, with wide streets lined with live oak trees, and pulled up to a gated white-brick house with floor-to-ceiling arched windows. Erik Maund opened the passenger door and slipped inside. 

The world was shutting down in the face of a deadly pandemic. But in the car, Erik had a more immediate problem. Here’s federal prosecutor Rob McGuire.

Rob McGuire: Maund is telling Peled that William Lanway has called his house. Peled said that Maund was freaking out, that they needed to do something. Everything is at a fever pitch, and that’s when Gilad Peled says, “The guys on the ground have offered to take him out”—talking about William Lanway. And Peled said that Erik Maund jumped on it and said something to the effect of, “How much does something like that cost? Five hundred thousand dollars?”

Bryon had quoted Gil $120,000—$60,000 each for Bryon and Adam.

Rob McGuire: And he said, “Yes, five hundred thousand dollars should cover it.” 

It’s still hard for people who knew Erik to understand why he considered this. Did he really think a team run by Charlie Sheen’s former bodyguard could make the blackmailer just disappear? 

Back at the Shithole, Salem Joseph and Joe Turner wondered if Erik should have just given in to the demands.

Salem Joseph: Her boyfriend was just asking for twenty-five thousand. If he wanted to take a chance, take a chance for twenty-five thousand to get rid of him.

Joe Turner: See, you’re a gambler. I want to solve the problem. And I’d solve the problem by saying, “Go tell your wife what you’ve been doing.”

Joe Joseph: Exactly right.

Joe Turner: “And just be honest about it. Come clean on it. Go to marital counseling, quit your drinking, go to rehab.” I’d have given him some better advice than, “Hey, look, we’re going to try to pay off these people,” or, “We’re going to try to get them to shut up.” That was a horrible decision.

According to Salem, Erik wasn’t the type of person who would kill someone. So there had to be something else influencing his decision-making at the time. 

Salem Joseph: I mean, he’d be scared to death to do anything like that, unless you’re drunk. And when you’re drunk, you get the liquid courage. “Here’s the way we can do it. We can get rid of him, and be gone out of your life.”

In fact, the evidence shows that when the option to kill Bill Lanway was presented to him, Erik was all for it. 

Rob McGuire: And so, Gilad Peled said that he tried to tell him to think about it—”This is a big decision”—but that Maund was insistent and said, you know, “They’re not going to stop.” And so, Gilad Peled left, and he called Bryon Brockway and said that the client was in—he was ready to pay for the murder of William Lanway.

But right after Erik agreed, the plan . . . evolved.  

Rob McGuire: And that’s when Bryon Brockway added something else, and said that they—being he and Adam Carey—thought that the girl is in on it, and that they needed to take her out too.

Holly’s involvement was not mentioned in Erik and Gil’s discussion in the car. 

Rob McGuire: And Peled said later that he wasn’t sure how Maund was going to react to that—because, obviously, Maund had had a relationship with Holly—and didn’t know if that was going to be the hesitation that was going to stop this whole plan from going into motion.

But Erik didn’t hesitate, and he and Gil negotiated a new price: $750,000 for the murders of Bill and Holly. 

I’m Katy Vine, and this is The Problem With Erik, an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Ana Worrel. This is episode four: “The 60K Option.” 

Katy Vine: Who decided that Holly needed to be killed? Why did they make that call?

Rob McGuire: Ultimately, Erik Maund decided it—ultimately because he said he would pay for it. But after Gilad Peled met with Erik Maund around midnight on the twelfth, he called Bryon Brockway. And Brockway told Peled that, “We think the girl was is in on it, and we think she needs to be taken out as well.” Now, why he said that, I don’t know. I don’t know if . . . I don’t know.

Why were Adam Carey and Bryon Brockway bringing up killing anyone? Bill hadn’t been making any physical threats. Adam and Bryon could have just knocked Bill’s knees out. They could have threatened him back. But kill him? And kill Holly? 

To understand how the surveillance operation escalated to this point, you need to know more about one of the two men on the ground in Nashville on March 12, 2020.

Katy Vine: If you could describe Adam Carey in one sentence, how would you describe him?

Christopher Cross: I can describe him in one word. Sociopath. 

This is Officer Christopher Cross, a retired marine who was working as a state trooper in Onslow County, North Carolina, when he met Adam Carey. This was back in 2016. It was a summer night in July, around two in the morning.

Christopher Cross: I was on patrol on U.S. 258 outside the city of Jacksonville. I was traveling south toward the city, and I met two vehicles, only the two vehicles on the road. And they appeared to be running about sixty-seven, sixty-eight. I got a clock on them about sixty-eight.

So I turned around and initiated a stop. That particular area, I believe, at the time was a fifty-five zone. But where it was, there was a bit of a dip in the highway, so the cars were out of sight for a brief second. I turned my vehicle around, and as I crested to go down into that sag in the highway, I could see emergency lights in the rear panel of what appeared to be a patrol vehicle. I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, that guy must’ve been a cop, or whoever.”

Onslow county troopers drove Dodge Chargers, just like the car up ahead. So Officer Cross turned on his blue, flashing lights, thinking he was pulling up to a fellow patrolman who’d just stopped another car. And then this happened. 

Christopher Cross: My blue lights come on, and his lights immediately turn off. Which I thought was kind of strange. And so I pull up alongside him, because it’s a Dodge Charger. I’m like, “Hey, man; everything good?”

And he’s, “Oh, yeah—this guy was weaving,” or whatever he said. And then something just clicked. I’m like, “Dude, who do you work for?” Because it didn’t jive.

The driver was a twentysomething guy dressed in cargo pants and a polo shirt, holding a pair of handcuffs. No badge, though. It was Adam Carey.

Christopher Cross: I went and talked to the driver that he had stopped. Young kid—no idea what was going on. It was him and his buddy. I was like, “Man, everything cool?” They weren’t drinking or anything. I sent them on their way.

Officer Cross called for backup and asked Adam to stick around. 

Christopher Cross: I went back, and I got to talking to him, and . . . everything about it was wrong.

When backup arrived, they agreed something wasn’t adding up.  

Christopher Cross: The use of red lights, unauthorized use of red lights, is a misdemeanor. Okay. So now I have the misdemeanor. I place him under arrest for that, search the vehicle, and that’s when I found the silenced pistol wedged between the seats, lockpick kits. You open up the trunk, and he had an arsenal.

I think I was doing evidence for like a good day and a half. He had a hundred and forty-three rounds of 5.56 AR-15 ammo. Had that in the trunk, flash-bangs, silenced weapons.

Three flash-bang grenades, a rifle with a silencer, a pistol with a silencer, and a ton of ammunition, all just . . . in his car.   

Christopher Cross: And I’m not going to swear, because I don’t know what the limit is on that, but let’s just say that he used the f-word several times when I opened the trunk. Because I think it was, I’m finding all this stuff now.

We put him in the front seat, and he said it like three or four times, you know what I mean? Equate it to you getting caught doing something that you ain’t supposed to be doing, and you’re like, “Arr, they got me.” You know what I mean?

Officer Cross took Adam to jail. And then he started to piece some things together.

Christopher Cross: To give you some backstory on this—during this time, within the previous couple months, maybe, we had had an issue in Onslow County where an individual was riding around in a Dodge Charger, and he was stopping women.

This had the public spooked, frankly—because we drive Dodge Chargers. So we were looking for this cat. Well, lo and behold . . . I don’t know if it was him that I stopped, but let’s just say that once he was stopped and locked up, we didn’t have this problem anymore. It just went away.

Adam was ultimately charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer and possessing weapons of mass destruction—the latter of which was eventually overturned. 

At his court hearing, the judge told him, quote: “I think you are an intelligent individual, but you have presented [poor] judgment, and it’s scary. It’s scary to the jury, and scary to law enforcement.”

Adam spent four months in a North Carolina prison in 2018 and was honorably discharged from the Marines. But this incident wasn’t his only transgression. Adam had also been charged with domestic violence and cyberstalking.

According to court documents, one time, he decked himself out in camo and hid in the woods to spy on his ex-girlfriend. When he saw her and her boyfriend together, he pulled a pistol on them and threatened to shoot her boyfriend—and himself. Adam’s ex persuaded him to back down and leave. 

He was questioned by authorities again after another stalking incident related to his ex-girlfriend. Authorities found multiple rounds of ammunition, one of which—according to a report—“had the name of the victim written on it.” Adam explained that he had written her name on the cartridge in order to give it to her as a “gift.”

By March twelfth, Adam Carey and Bryon Brockway were the only two still working on the ground in Nashville. But, unlike Adam, Bryon had no such incriminating history. And by his brother Chad’s account, he was a lovable guy.  

Chad Brockway: Everywhere he would go, everybody immediately liked my brother. It didn’t matter where we went, what we were doing. He was the guy that everybody just immediately associated to and became friends with.

So it’s hard to say why Bryon suggested the murder plot to Gil. Maybe he just wanted it resolved. Maybe he needed money, or maybe he missed the action of his old days, parachuting and “taking over the world.” Maybe he wanted to impress Adam, who looked up to him. We just don’t know. 

We also don’t know why he targeted Holly, too. Here’s federal prosecutor Brooke Farzad:

Brooke Farzad: We did not uncover any evidence during our investigation to show that Holly Williams had anything to do with the extortion of Erik Maund.

And what would Holly have to gain from it? As an escort, she told friends she could make upwards of $25,000 in a weekend. 

In the weeks leading up to the blackmail, she had been working on promoting her business—creating ads, updating her website, taking new pictures to attract clientele. 

Red even wrote in the situation report a few days earlier that it would be professional suicide for Holly to turn on her own clients.

But at some point, someone on the team started to think differently. According to Gil’s testimony, Bryon told him that the team members saw Holly and Bill carrying bags from Best Buy, and a theory eventually formed: Holly and Bill were extorting her clients together and spending a lot of money. 

On March twelfth, Adam and Bryon set a new price: $200,000 total, $100,000K per shooter, to kill both Bill and Holly. 

Gil listened and ran the idea up the chain of command. Since Erik already thought five hundred grand was about right for this kind of job, Gil must’ve figured the sky was the limit. The price he quoted Erik? $750,000. 

Rob McGuire: It was understood that Peled would pay the actual killers out of his share of that $750,000. And they even, at some point, discussed that Maund would overpay Peled so that Peled could claim the payments on his taxes and make it look like legitimate security expenses.

The morning of March twelfth, Adam packed his things, and Bryon checked out of his hotel. Then Adam went back to Holly’s apartment. But there was something different about how he approached her door this time: he was wearing gloves. And though you can’t see his face as he reached up and adjusted the position of her security camera, the new angle did show the back of his head as he walked away.

Rob McGuire: He ended up moving it to where the angle of the camera only captured the front door and, mostly, the wall outside of Holly Williams’s house. Pushing that camera off to the side prevented any footage of Holly Williams’s parking lot.

Around noon, Adam scoped out a remote area just three miles away from Holly’s apartment, in the woods adjacent to a construction zone. They called the spot the dump site.

Gil emailed Erik, asking him to start communicating via an encrypted app called Signal.

Rob McGuire: At around one-thirty on March twelfth, Erik Maund wired a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Gilad Peled’s business account. 

And with the down payment in place, the plan was in motion.

The day before the murders, Holly seemed to have reached a breaking point with Bill. On top of everything he’d done that week—taking her car without her permission, not fixing the flat tires right away, nearly causing her to get into an accident—she discovered that he had stolen $350 from her.

And this was just two months after he’d attacked Holly—when he covered her nose and mouth so she couldn’t breathe—and then took her dog, Max, and left him for dead. She’d filed charges against Bill, and was considering dropping them, but now she texted him, quote:

“You’ll really be sorry when I call back the district attorney’s office and confirm that my statement was all true!!” 

She told him she’d thrown his belongings outside. She said he might want to come pick them up before she doused them in bleach. The relationship was clearly in a bad place, and this time it looked like Bill might be going to jail. “Have FUN in PRISON!” she wrote. “See you in court on the 16th motherf—er!”

So this was the mood when Bill went to Holly’s apartment for the very last time, on March twelfth. Of course, it’s possible they were about to patch things up one more time. There’s no way to know what they actually talked about that night. But I have to wonder if Bill had pieced together what was happening. Maybe he was more rattled from that encounter at the grocery store than he let on.

Because, whatever the reason, when Holly and Bill left her apartment at 11:40, they looked cautious. Holly’s surveillance camera shows that they crept out, careful to avoid making any noise. Holly wore a black beanie, and Bill, a ball cap. They walked down the short, dimly lit pathway to Holly’s car. Bryon and Adam were hiding nearby. 

Brooke Farzad: What Bryon Brockway and Adam Carey perhaps didn’t realize was that that audio from the camera was going to continue to record what happened in the parking lot, so, while their efforts to shield what was visible from the parking lot were successful, they were not successful in shielding the audio, which was very, very difficult to listen to.

Prosecutors played this recording at the trial. It is hard to listen to. We decided not to include it here. 

Rob McGuire: You can hear them get into a vehicle; you can hear that vehicle start up; and then you can hear screaming, shots being fired, glass breaking.

Bryon and Adam approached the car, and Bryon shot Bill. Bill fought back, and in the struggle that followed, the men bent the frame of the driver’s side door.

Brooke Farzad: You can hear William Lanway screaming, “What the f—?” And then the shots—there’s loud banging noises and shots that you can hear—and just high-pitched, awful screaming coming from Holly Williams, begging, “Please God, help me. Help me.”

And you can hear who we argued was Adam Carey say to her, “Get out of the vehicle.” It takes about ten seconds before you can hear Holly’s screams get louder and louder and louder. And at that point, we believe Holly was out of the vehicle, and that she was perhaps trying to run back toward her apartment and the front door, because the audio picks up her screams getting much louder, as if she’s closer to the front door. And then you hear her voice get quieter, and you hear a door slam, and you can hear one of the two males scream “F—” in the background. 

Adam and Bryon made sure Holly was secured in the car, then headed to the destination they’d scouted earlier that day. One of them drove Holly’s Acura, with Bill and Holly inside. The other trailed behind in Bryon’s rental car. 

Rob McGuire: You can hear Holly Williams screaming for several minutes, until you hear the car drive away and you hear her screams start to trail off.

The next morning—Friday, March thirteenth—Holly’s neighbors woke up, and dog walkers began their loop that passed in front of Holly’s building. A few of them noticed broken glass on the pavement. Her white Acura wasn’t in her parking spot. No one thought much of it. At least, not at first. 

Here’s Holly’s upstairs neighbor, Steve Roehm. He said he didn’t hear anything that night.

Steve Roehm: I think it may have been the next day, or soon after that. I was at the gym, and I had a peephole camera, so it would give me notifications of people coming up, and I kept seeing my notifications pop up on my phone. I’m like, “What’s going on in my house?” Then the phone rings, and it’s one of the maintenance guys, and [he] said, “Are you home?” And I’m like, “Look, I’ll be home in a few minutes,” and came home, and it was just police everywhere.

Three miles from Holly’s apartment, a team of construction workers arrived at their jobsite, a field off the highway next to a forest of dense trees and brush. It was still dark outside. They worked until 10 a.m. That’s when one of the workers first saw it. 

911 dispatcher: Metro Nashville 911. What is the address of your emergency?

Worker: There was just a wreck out here. We’re at a worksite. There’s two people in the car. Somebody drove off the road and hit a tree.

Holly’s white Acura had crashed after rolling down an embankment off the gravel road. A concrete worker called 911. 

911 dispatcher: Is anyone pinned? Can you tell?

Worker: Yeah, they’re both pinned. That’s what I’m saying. They’re real bad, and nobody’s moving.

Worker two: They’re dead.

Worker: Yeah, I think they’re dead, to be honest.

911 Dispatcher: Was anyone thrown from the vehicle?

Worker: The driver . . . Well, I don’t think they were wearing a seat belt. They’re both pinned like real bad. And—what’s it called—the driver’s not here. So the driver left.

A three-inch bloodstain marked one of the sedan’s rear doors. Three of the four windows were broken. Inside, Bill’s body was inverted in the passenger seat, his head on the floor mat and his gray Converse shoes up toward the headrest. 

He was shot five times. 

Holly was hunched over on the back floorboard, exposing part of the tiger lily tattoo on her lower back. She had two gunshot wounds: one to the chest, one to the head. A few of her nails were missing, indicating a struggle. 

It was immediately clear this was not just a car crash. 

Marie Carroll: I remember I got a text from one of our mutual friends.

This is Holly’s friend Marie. 

Marie Carroll: And I just remember they said, “Did you hear about Holly? She’s murdered.” And my jaw dropped.

A lot of her friends, like Marie, were already worried about Holly’s relationship with Bill. Here’s Holly’s friend Matt. 

Matt Garrett: I automatically thought when they found both their bodies, it was murder-suicide.

Others who knew the couple thought they’d connected the dots pretty quickly too. 

Steve Roehm: Honestly, I thought he had killed her—the boyfriend—and this had been something like that.

Bill’s friend: I saw it on Facebook. Everybody thought that it was a murder-suicide, so they thought that he had killed her and then killed himself.

Marie Carroll: A lot of people were talking about it on forums, online, on Facebook. You had Holly’s side, that was just blaming Bill, and you had Bill’s side, that was saying he would never do that. But then we’re like, “He killed her dog.” It was seriously almost like a battle between Bill’s friends and Holly’s friends.

The police contacted Holly’s neighbor Steve several times. He was prepared to tell them about the abuse he regularly heard coming from Holly’s apartment. But to Steve’s surprise, they weren’t asking much about Bill, the abusive boyfriend. They were asking about two other men they needed help identifying. Men who had been lurking around Holly’s apartment before she was killed.

Steve Roehm: They showed me some pictures where the guys had been hiding up behind her door, or by her door—because there’s a little hidden way right by there—a couple of guys with hoodies on, and just asked me if I’d seen them kind of skulking around. And I think I may have seen one of them, actually, walking through the parking lot one day, but it was in passing, and when you get an apartment complex, people walking by is pretty common, so I didn’t think much about it. 

In the predawn hours after the murders, Adam Carey terminated the Pinger account he used to anonymously text Bill and Holly. Bryon dropped off his rental car. Then the two carpooled in Adam’s pickup to Memphis. They partied before Adam dropped Bryon off at the Memphis airport. Bryon had to get back for a family vacation to Florida. 

Soon after, Adam texted Red that they’d had a great time from Nashville to Memphis. 

“Found a couple girls,” he wrote. “Good couple of days.”

Red texted back: “You smash some Tennessee tail!?” 

“Of course bud,” Adam responded. “You missed out.” 

The conversation continued on a call. And that’s when Adam told Red that they ended up going with the “$60K option” he’d brought up to Red earlier. Code for: they ended up murdering the blackmailer. The client, Adam said, was satisfied. 

Red felt a surge of dread. But he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t go to the police. If Bryon or Adam found out, he could be the next target. So he stayed quiet. 

After Adam dropped Bryon off at the Memphis airport, he drove to Austin to get paid. And after Adam got to Austin, Bryon returned from his family vacation. 

The payment process went like this: Gil would take a few grand out of, say, a Chase ATM, then hand it off to Bryon in the parking lot. A couple days later, they’d meet up at a different ATM in a different parking lot, where they’d execute the handoff. This went on for two weeks. Once he’d gotten his money, Adam left Texas in his truck. He had to get back for skydiving lessons. 

Rob McGuire: Then, almost like clockwork, on the first of every month, Erik Maund wire-transfers Gilad Peled fifty thousand dollars. 

Between March 2020 and June 2021, Erik paid off the $750,000, plus taxes, for a total of $905,000 dollars. He paid out the cash installments for the murders like he was paying off another boat. 

One day at the Shithole, Salem told Ana and me that this whole time, Erik acted normal. 

Salem Joseph: He was on a hunting trip with his friends, and just like nothing happened.

Ana Worrel: How do you explain that?

Salem Joseph: Well, they thought they got away with it. What else you going to do? I mean, you’re not going to go tell everybody what happened. You thought you took care of it. That’s why you paid all that money, to silence everything. Well, you gotta act normal. I don’t know; I’m not inside his mind, but I guess it would bother him. But, I mean, he’s just got to act like everything’s fine.

And, even if Erik had been acting nervous or paranoid, who would have seen it? It was the start of the pandemic. Keeping a low to nonexistent profile would be easier than any time in history. 

After the murders, Erik and Gil kept in touch. Erik entered a new agreement with Gil, for Gil’s company, Speartip Security Group, to provide overnight security for Charles Maund Toyota. 

Rob McGuire: We uncovered a lot of evidence that showed that Gilad Peled and Erik Maund had an amicable relationship after the murders—that they would text; that there was one point where Erik had gone on a hunting trip, and he was saving Gilad Peled some deer meat from the hunting trip; that Gilad Peled would buy ammunition for Jim DeMeo, and Maund, and some other folks in their circle. That they just kind of kept on doing life.

At least once, Erik went back to Gil for more, quote, “security work.” One time, Erik’s wife was suspicious about a number she found in his phone. Erik decided the best way to prove he wasn’t cheating was for Gil to make a fake polygraph that Erik would present to his wife. 

Brooke Farzad: And the lie detector test report that Gil Peled falsified was meant to prove that Erik Maund had not been unfaithful to his wife, and that this person was not a female that she had found in his phone. So we know that they maintained a good relationship after the murders. 

Gil helped Erik out, and Erik helped Gil out too. 

Rob McGuire: There was another time in December of 2021 where Gilad Peled was soliciting Google reviews for his business, and he asked Bryon Brockway and Erik Maund for a positive Google review. And Erik Maund obliged, and gave him a five-star Google review, and said how satisfied he was with the job that Speartip Security had done.

This is the public review Erik left for Gil Peled’s company. Quote, “Speartip is very professional and on top of it. They get the job done in an expedited time. Couldn’t imagine using anyone else!!,” with two exclamation points.

This whole time, though, investigators in Nashville were following breadcrumbs that would lead to the killers’ doorsteps.

Rob McGuire: Once the bodies were found, they both had identification on them, so the police were able to identify who Holly and William were pretty quickly. They were also able to determine that Holly had been working as an escort pretty quickly, based on her website advertisements for her business. They were also able to determine that Holly and William had this tumultuous relationship.

But there was very limited evidence at the scene. Neither victim had a phone when their bodies were recovered, which was of significant interest to investigators, because it appeared that whoever had killed them had taken their phones. So that meant that they wanted to find out what was on those phones—that that might be a clue as to who killed them and why.

At the same time, in early April, investigators started sorting through all of Holly’s surveillance footage. 

Rob McGuire: And during their review of that footage, they find the images of, first, two men who knock on her door, and then one man who knocks on her door, in the days before her death. So all of that is very interesting, and trying to figure out who these people were was an initial serious effort.

Police released stills of the men from the surveillance video to see if anyone could identify them. Detectives were also able to get Holly and Bill’s text and call logs. They sorted through the phone records, looking for evidence that would lead them in the right direction. 

And that’s when they discovered that a Pinger account had texted both of them. 

Rob McGuire: As investigators unspooled this Pinger account, they tried to figure out who had started it. They isolated the IP addresses that were being used when that Pinger account was used. And there were two possibilities. One, a very limited possibility, was a middle-aged woman in Columbia, Tennessee. And the other one was Adam Carey.

Once police officers had the name Adam Carey, they started to figure out who Adam Carey was. One of the first things that they did was pull Adam Carey’s driver’s license, and Detective David Willover, when he saw the picture of Adam Carey’s driver’s license, he said, “That’s one of the guys in the video.” And at that point, Adam Carey became a suspect.

Investigators found Pinger messages that referenced an “Erik” with a k, plus Erik’s home phone number and his wife’s name. They learned that Erik Maund was a wealthy car dealer in Austin, though his tie to the murders was still unclear. 

Rob McGuire: And that’s when the Metro Nashville Police Department decided it was time to reach out to the FBI. Early on, we obviously didn’t know what Erik Maund’s connection was to all this. I mean, he’s mentioned in these text messages, but he’s potentially a victim of extortion, based on what William Lanway put in these text messages.

Once investigators started looking into who Erik Maund and Adam Carey were talking to, they discovered the name Gilad Peled. And they began uncovering the money trail. 

Rob McGuire: Eventually, we found the wire transfer payments from Erik Maund to Gilad Peled, which was very significant. I mean, the fact that Erik Maund had transferred $150,000 to Gilad Peled the day of the murders was very significant.

And they learned even more when they got a warrant to search Gil’s iCloud.

Rob McGuire: Now, most of us don’t even know we’re backing stuff up to our iCloud. I certainly don’t. In Gilad Peled’s iCloud account was an email that was titled “Tennessee SITREP,” and “SITREP” is military nomenclature for “situation report.” Basically a kind of what’s going on on the ground. And this sitrep was dated March ninth of 2020, just before the murders. And it contained a discussion about surveillance of Holly and William. It contained an assessment of extortion threats to the client and some potential action that involved approaching Holly Williams and William Lanway.

Finding the sitrep was huge for the investigation. It included names, dates, a whole professional surveillance agenda. But the FBI didn’t reach out to any suspects right away. They wanted the investigation to remain covert. 

Rob McGuire: You don’t want the suspects to know that you’re investigating them. The idea is if a suspect knows that they’re under investigation, they’re going to change their patterns. They’re going to be more cautious in talking to people. They may flee; they may destroy evidence. There’s a whole lot of reasons in a serious investigation why you want to remain covert as long as possible.

Well, by the summer of 2021, we had really done everything that we knew to do covertly. There were no more bank records to search. There were no more phone records to obtain. There were no more iCloud data to gather. And we had a decision to make. We had identified who we believed the individuals were in Nashville in March of 2020 doing the surveillance. One individual—we knew he had left before the murders. He might not know everything, but he’s going to know a lot. 

That individual was Red. 

Rob McGuire: The concern in an investigation that has been covert up until that point is that if you approach someone, they could tell you that they don’t want to talk to you, and then they could tell all the people you’re investigating that they’re under investigation. But we didn’t really have a lot of other choices.

The FBI found their opportunity. In the fall of 2021, Red was pursuing a job at a federal agency that required a security clearance. And it wasn’t out of the ordinary for applicants to come into the federal facility in Virginia for security clearance. So the FBI swooped in and asked Red to come in for a security interview on September 21. But really, they had another discussion in mind. 

Rob McGuire: That was a big day in the investigation, because, again, we had been concerned that he might not want to cooperate and he might blow the whistle for the rest of the suspects, and that would be really challenging for our investigation.

Red arrived for his security interview. But instead of discussing his background, an FBI agent approached him with evidence. At first, Red pretended he had no idea that Holly and Bill were murdered. But eventually he gave in, and the truth spilled out. Red told them: Honestly? He couldn’t believe what Adam and Bryon had done. He said he thought Adam was young and inexperienced and “had watched too many movies.” 

When the FBI asked him to become an undercover source, Red certainly didn’t jump at the offer. He told the agent, quote, “You have to understand, if this gets back to Bryon I will be on the s— list.” Red thought about Holly and Bill. He said: “I could end up just like those motherf—ers.” 

And he was right. Working with the FBI would be incredibly dangerous. But with his security clearance in the balance, Red eventually saw it as the best way forward. He was in. 

Now, with a confidential source in the room, the investigation entered a new phase. It was undercover. 

Rob McGuire: It was also a big day because he agreed to make controlled phone calls and have controlled meetings with Bryon Brockway and Adam Carey, which was dangerous.

Phone calls and meetings that Bryon and Adam would come to regret. 

Officer: Date is September twenty-first, 2021.

Red: Can I go to this, here . . . ?

Adam Carey: What’s up, man?

Red: Hey, what’s up, man? How you been?

Adam Carey: Good. How are you?

Red: Oh, not bad.