The Problem with Erik | 1. Car Talk
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long time no see it's a clear october afternoon in raleigh north carolina in 2021 two men are sitting across from each other at a picnic table outside a brew pub the sun is setting and families are chattering around them a year and a half earlier these men worked together on a surveillance operation that snowballed out of control two people wound up dead one of the guys at the table was the killer

The other had become a federal informant. Are you okay to talk here? I'm okay with it. I chose this because there's no cameras on this anywhere in here and it's spread out enough to where it's flipping. Yeah, this is fine, but number one is we don't bring up old shit.

The footage from this video is shaky and the framing is off. That's because the camera was embedded in the informant's FBI-issued watch. It's angled up at the killer, a 30-something guy who could blend into any crowd. Checkered button down, mirrored sunglasses, ball cap. This is him talking. Why don't these guys hire soft dudes to go get them the right profit, too? I'm going to bring you a chick.

The idiot, in this instance, was a guy who lived a thousand miles away, who had no idea FBI agents had written his name into their investigation reports. A guy named Eric Mond.

And I know it sounds weird, but in order to explain his situation, I have to tell you about a car dealership in Austin, Texas. You know that big, inescapable car dealership that runs a bunch of annoying ads on the radio? The one with the giant American flag, the flapping windsock people, the sea of sparkling cars? Every city in America has a place like this. And in Austin, it was Charles Montoyota.

Since 1957, the Mond dealerships sold Cadillacs, Volkswagens, and Toyotas in Central Texas. In recent years, Charles Mond Toyota was one of the top Toyota dealerships in the country. This was a car empire, and there was an expectation that the next generation would take on the family business. So you have to understand, Eric Mond, the grandson of the late Charles Mond, had been born set for life.

In the 27 years I've been writing for Texas Monthly, I haven't really covered murders. More often, it's con men. There was the guy who embezzled $17 million from a small-town fruitcake empire, the brazen pilot down on the Texas coast who crashed cars and downed planes for the insurance money, the Austin DWI attorney who thought he could steal from a Colombian drug cartel. None of these guys were violent, but they did think they were smarter than everyone else, that the rules were flexible,

As one guy explained, "Rules were man-made, and he too was a man who could make rules." Eric's not a con man, but it seems like this philosophy would have resonated with him. That would at least begin to explain his actions in March of 2020, when a stranger blackmailed him, threatening to expose his affair with an escort. Because Eric didn't go to the cops. He didn't pay the money the blackmailer requested.

Instead, over the course of two weeks, Eric's life spiraled out of control in a bizarre series of events involving Charlie Sheen's former bodyguard, a wannabe hitman, and a simple surveillance operation that escalated into a disastrous murder-for-hire scheme. And I promise you, the story gets stranger.

Eric even left a Google review for the middleman who facilitated the whole thing. It said, quote, "They get the job done in an expedited time. Couldn't imagine using anyone else." He gave five stars. Usually, the guy with the money gets what he wants. The winds are at his back, and if he finds himself in trouble, a few payoffs to the right people make all of his problems go away. But just once in a while, he's treated like the rest of us: caught and held accountable.

And when that happens, the favorable winds turn against him with a force he'd never imagined. I'm Katie Vine, and this is The Problem with Eric, an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Anna Wuerl. This is Episode 1, Car Talk.

At Charles Mond Toyota, you'll save thousands on every new Toyota. We making it rain! Charles Mond Toyota was an institution. At one point in recent years, they sold more new and used vehicles than any other dealership in Austin. You hurry to Charles Mond Toyota and get our best savings on our best selection of barely driven Toyotas. This is not the voice of Charles Mond. That's an actor. A fact that disappointed locals who thought the car guy was just that peppy.

But members of Austin's old power circles would recognize Charles Mond's grandson, Eric, on site, a 6'3" white guy with short brown hair capping his boxy head and heavy-lidded eyes tucked under a straight brow. In early 2020, the 44-year-old was an executive at the Mond Automotive Group, which sold hundreds of millions of dollars in cars each year. He was married to a woman who used to work at the dealership, and together they'd raised two kids.

The Mons had some money. One former employee of Eric's said the Mons were approached to purchase the Dallas Cowboys before Jerry Jones bought them. Eric owned a boat, a lake house, and a 7,000 square foot white brick mansion. It was right by the Austin Country Club golf course, where he teed off with a close-knit group of friends. On Sundays, he had brunch at the club with his family. He got along with the pro shop workers and the locker room guys. And why wouldn't they like him?

If Eric saw a club staff member at Davenport Liquor just down the road, he'd offer to pay their total at checkout. To some, he commanded the kind of reverence you'd expect from someone whose surname has been blasted on TV for decades.

Well, yeah, if you say the modern name in Austin is a 7-Eleven, two people say I bought a car from him. This is Wallace Lundgren. He's a retired car dealer, and from 1985 to 2012, he ran Wallace Lundgren Chevrolet. Wallace Lundgren Chevrolet in Elgin, an American revolution.

Wallace is a dapper, white-haired 78-year-old who's often wearing a suit and running around town, wheeling and dealing from one business deal to another, even when it's 100 degrees outside. He knows all the bigwigs of the Central Texas car dealer world, the Hennas, the Coverts, and of course, the Mons. Well, the Mons dealerships were...

The late Charles Mond founded Charles Mond Oldsmobile Cadillac in 1957.

It would eventually grow into several dealerships under the Mond Automotive Group umbrella. Charles Mond and Wallace were friends. He was a fun guy. Not the kind of fun you brag about, you know, but we had drank lots of whiskey and we really had a good time, you know. We didn't kill anybody. My producer Anna and I first got in touch with Wallace to talk about the Austin car dealership world.

We hoped he might give us some context for Eric's mindset in March 2020. Just a typical rich kid that never had... Here's what we used to say. Here's a guy who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. At the time we were talking, Eric was behind bars, and we were having some trouble finding sources who were willing to go on the record.

Eric was at the center of the rumor mill at the country club, but the Mons were a powerful name in Austin. Despite what people thought about the whole thing, speaking about the family in this moment wasn't something anyone wanted to do.

But Wallace was willing to talk. And as we formed a relationship over the phone, it became clear that he knew a lot about what Eric was doing behind bars, who he was keeping in touch with, what card games he was playing, what books he was reading. And it does say something for his intellectual capacity that he's requesting books, you know, and these aren't like pornographic books. These are real books, you know, different things.

We had to ask at some point, how do you know all this? Well, please excuse my language. There's a group of people and their place of business is behind the gas station and it's called the shithole. The shithole. Basically a man cave for a certain set of Austin's aging movers and shakers. Business owners, gamblers, car dealers.

Because I've known them, you know, 50 years. They're pretty much all too tired to break the law anymore. Wallace said the shithole is where he picked up all this gossip about Eric Mond. It's owned by a man named Salem Joseph. Salem Joseph, head motherfucker in charge of the shithole. And late last year, Salem invited us to come check it out. Holy, are y'all lost? Is there a beauty contest in town? Look at these girls.

I like that. The shithole is in the back of a mechanic shop in central Austin. Anna and I wondered if a couple of reporters would rattle the group's vibe, but the five or six guys sitting at the round table in buttery leather chairs were friendly enough. They handed us water bottles and offered us Twinkies as we took in the scene. Imagine the pool hall version of the waiting room at your local car dealership.

There's a wooden toilet seat hanging on one wall and a massive widescreen TV playing ESPN mounted over a dripping sink. When we asked to go to the bathroom, everyone screamed, "No!" We went next door instead. The walls feature pictures of sports legends, women in tight clothes, but the gas station vibes are elevated by some modern touches. It looks a lot better now that I've put new floors in. Yeah, I noticed that.

It wouldn't be a clubhouse without rules. And here, they're on a sheet of printer paper, stapled to the plaster right by the door. Rule one, if you have thin skin, don't come in. Rule two, if idle chatter and making fun of you or your business and friends bother you, turn around and leave. Rule three, people come in here are rude, unethical, and stupid. That's why it's called the shithole.

On a regular day, guys will stop by, grab a donut from the box, scooch up to the round table, and listen to the latest gossip or the same old stories.

Salem tells this one where the FBI tapped his phone and somehow got the idea that gumbo was a code word for something nefarious. Isaac was overweight. You're missing a part of the story. You told Isaac, don't touch the gumbo. Yeah, he said, what do I do? I said, don't touch it till I get there. Because he was afraid that Isaac would eat the gumbo. Because he'll eat it all. He would cook and eat it before I got there.

Salem Joseph is a self-proclaimed gambler and, quote, old guy collecting Social Security. And he asked us to introduce him as the grandson of poor Lebanese immigrants. He came to this country. And look what he's done. Look around you what I've accomplished in here. His family has operated several Austin businesses throughout the years. We had a Don Club back, was it Bar, Titty Bar on 6th Street? Uh-huh. And then my daddy owned all the buildings there and we rented all of them.

and then we opened up a vineyard company triple j amusement and then we had a water company music mountain water i started it wasn't always easy to keep salem and the other guys on topic i won't put this on the big screen he was talking about me and panties right okay okay is that about eric no they didn't want to hear about your panties i know but they did know eric mond

Here's Salem's brother, Joe Joseph. He's the most simple, rich person you've ever met in your life. I don't know how else to say it. He's a simple, rich person. Wasn't hurt a fly. I mean, he was just as happy as he could be just being what he was. Here in the shithole in December 2021, it was major news when Eric was arrested for murder.

One day, he was making small talk with these guys. Another day, he's on the front page of the paper, and not in a good way. What was the reaction when, like, even here, in this room, like, when you first heard? I could not believe it. What? I don't believe it. No way, no way. You know, all rich kids, they're all, even my kids aren't perfect, you know.

They like to get in trouble. You can talk to them, tell them, they've got to learn from their own selves. But Eric, I've known Eric a long time. I mean, I never would dream that he would do this. I don't think he really wanted to. It was more like, it just started and it was like a tumbleweed. It just ran with it. And before you knew it, it was over with.

After Eric's arrest in December 2021, almost two years passed before he got his day in court. The trial was at a federal courthouse in Nashville, and Anna and I were there. The case involved a woman who was murdered. Her name was Holly Williams.

One day we took a break to meet up with a friend of Holly's named Shantae Joyner. We met at a public library in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where she showed me pictures and videos of Holly, a petite brunette with dark arched brows, long lashes, and straight white teeth. Shantae scrolled through an endless grid from Holly's 32nd birthday party at Dave & Buster's in 2019. And that's at 11.30 p.m., like it tells you the time stamp.

And who knows how late we stayed up. I mean, like, when we would take pictures, this is how many pictures we would take. In the pictures, Holly is smiling, dressed in a unicorn crown and a white bustier. Her dark hair is curled and her makeup is sleek, cheekbones highlighted, eyes glistening with iridescent shadow. Shantae landed on a video from the night. Holly's sitting next to her boyfriend, Bill Lanway, a tall man with a reddish beard, wearing a gray hoodie.

He lights the candles on her double-tiered unicorn cake as the waiter calls for the table's attention. All right, everybody, listen up. That's you over there, Phil. That's you over there. It is this beautiful young lady's birthday today on the count of three. One, two, three, let's go. As her friends sing, Holly gets emotional. She puts her hand over her face and giggles, a little embarrassed but happy. Bill smiles at her.

Holly was born in January 1987 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a suburb about 35 miles southeast of Nashville. She had an older brother and eventually a younger sister and half-brother. Holly's parents divorced when she was a kid, and she went on to live with her dad and stepmom. While friends told us her mom wasn't a big part of the picture as she grew up, we don't have a lot of details about their relationship.

We reached out to Holly's family when we were in Nashville, but they didn't want to talk. They're still grieving. Some of Holly's friends wanted to talk, though. Like Matt Garrett, an old friend from Murfreesboro. I don't think it was poverty, but very blue-collar. You know, she didn't have money. It was just like me. I mean, just middle class.

She started modeling as a teenager and worked as an amateur model for years, often traveling to cities like Tampa and Atlanta. In one online profile, she listed some gigs from her late teens and early 20s. A poolside shoot. A swimsuit calendar. First place in the club drink bikini contest. We talked to another friend of Holly's, Marie Carroll, who was raised in the Nashville music scene. She admired Holly even before she met her. She thought she looked like a Kardashian.

I do remember we had a photo shoot with the same photographer in town. And so I remember looking through the photographer's photos and I remember seeing her pictures. And I just remember thinking like how beautiful she was. And I mean, I was 17 at the time. So I'm like, oh, I wish I looked like her, even though we were around the same age.

Holly was 5'4", but stood out in a crowd. Whenever we went out to one of the bars, it was like, you know, like a Marilyn Monroe movie where the men come up and light her cigarette. There's six men around her, and that's how it was whenever we went out. Everyone just swarmed her, especially the men.

And Holly loved to go out. She was really into electronic dance music, and she went to EDM festivals and concerts where she could dress up with glitter and face paint and dance until the early morning hours. When Holly went out, she'd make an effort to help her shy friends come out of their shells. She was a generous friend. She was just so outgoing and kind. And like, when I was having a bad time with the relationship I was in at the time, and I really wanted to go to that show for Valentine's Day, she's like, "You can be my date."

And I was like, you don't have to do that. She's like, no, you're going to be my day. She got me a gift and a little bag. And this is going to sound crazy, but I still have the bottle of wine. I haven't even opened it.

Holly studied at a beauty school in Murfreesboro called the Georgia Career Institute, and in June 2017, she got a certificate in aesthetics. She launched her career in skin care with a specialty in laser treatments and lashes. By 2018, she was living in Nashville with her dog, a little white Maltese named Max, and her Facebook bio listed the following. Medical esthetician, dog mom, free spirit, music lover, Nashvilleian.

Around this time, Holly got close with Marie. So 2018, I met Holly on a rooftop. We had a mutual friend in common and we just decided to all go swimming that night. I had heard a lot about Holly through the mutual friend and he wanted us to meet because we had so much in common. And so we just instantly hit it off.

For starters, they were both Capricorns. I mean, Capricorns, they're honest to a fault. So I think that's why we connected so much, because we're so honest with each other. We weren't afraid to tell the truth because we knew there was no judgment there. We are people pleasers. Usually with Capricorns, they're in the people pleasing industry. So I think that's why we connected.

Of course, loving all things beauty, why we went into a servicing industry as well. They both worked in beauty salons, and they both loved working with lasers to remove tattoos and treat hyperpigmentation. She says Holly was good at it, too. The place I was working at at the time, we were hiring on, and so I was like, I know exactly who I want in here.

Though they didn't end up working together, they still had plenty to bond over. Just the fact that we've always loved beauty and I think that's also, I mean at least for me, a reason why I got into it because it's, you know, the more beautiful I can be, men will like it. And just with our similar stories, I can also see that within her. When you say that you had a similar background, can you talk about what that means?

So I know she had family problems. I don't know to what extent, but I also had family problems, mainly with my dad. And so growing up, I would always try to seek Mel's attention just to fill that void. She did the same thing from a lot of the stories that she told me.

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When you think of Austin, you might think of Austin city limits, South by Southwest, Barton Springs, musicians, hipsters, bachelorette parties. But Eric lived in a different part of Austin, Westlake. It's a little more moneyed than Austin, more manicured. The Westlake School District is separate from Austin's, and the average home value is $2.1 million.

With a population wealthy enough to fundraise for anything they need, Westlake schools stay insulated from the rest of the state school funding shortages. For the last school year, the district raised an extra $2.65 million to pay for teachers and staff. And the public high school looks like a college campus. Their football stadium even has a jumbotron. And the team is a powerhouse. This football team, I think you can just do the math.

We'll go down as one of the greatest high school football teams because of just the sheer production on both sides of the ball. Eric Mwand was a student athlete here, too. He played on the golf team and graduated in the early 90s, though his path wasn't entirely smooth. He was 17 when he got his first DWI. Seven months later, he got his second.

He eventually attended St. Edward's University in Austin and a car dealer school in Virginia called NADA Academy. And then he was set to enter the family business. Eric's grandpa, Charles Mond, grew up poor near the Louisiana border in a town called Hemp Hill, Texas. He was 16 years old, pumping gas for a living, when a local banker lent him $500 to buy a used car. Charles fixed it up and sold the car at a profit.

From that first transaction, his life changed forever. At age 19, he started selling cars. And when he turned 30, he moved to Austin and opened his first dealership, Charles Mond Oldsmobile Cadillac. And keep in mind, Charles Mond, they called him Lucky. And how he got the dealership, we never figured that out.

I called Wallace to talk about what the car dealership world was like when Charles Monde started out. Well, who were the prototypical car kings who created the mold that folks like Charles Monde followed?

Well, there was no old Charles Mons, but he was the only Cadillac dealer in town. And that's before they had Lexus or Mercedes or anything. And they had some rich people in town. And you didn't have to be real bright to sell a Cadillac. You're the only guy in town that had them. And rich people only bought Cadillacs. Roy Butler sold Lincolns. Mons sold Cadillacs. I mean, Saddam Hussein could have owned those dealerships and made money.

Over the years, Charles Mond climbed his way to the top of the business world. There's this one story we heard a lot, including from Salem one day at the shithole, about Charlie and three real estate moguls. Charlie and Hudson and Padgett and another guy named Dick Matz formed a company, and they called it 3S&M, Three Sharks and a Mullet. Three Sharks and a Mullet. Mullet like the fish, not the haircut.

The real estate guys were the Sharks. The mullet was Charlie, just a car-set car guy. Together, they bought a big ranch in South Texas. They'd fly a plane in and take their friends hunting and fishing. Later on, the Sharks were getting in trouble in the 80s and early 90s. The real estate market was closing. So the mullet, Charlie, bought them all out. So the mullet took over the Sharks, like in the shark tank. The mullet wins it.

And Charlie ended up with the big ranch. And that's how it went for Charles Mond. He came from nothing, made the right deals, and found himself swimming with the big sharks. He lived the American rags-to-riches dream. And he built an empire for his family, especially his son Doug, Eric's father, who was positioned to inherit the throne.

But it does sound like Charles never completely dropped certain instincts. There's one story that kept coming up where Charlie and Doug got into a knife fight at the country club. Oh, this was in probably 95. I mean, that's common knowledge. I mean, everybody knows that. Friends said that Doug never quite developed his father's street smarts. The guys at the shithole felt that Charlie's descendants weren't truly as scrappy and resourceful as the men who built the empire.

No one can make it like the old-timers. Isn't it true of the whole generation, though? I mean, I think this generation... This guy talking to Salem is former federal prosecutor Joe Turner. He's now an Austin defense attorney, known for some big cases. He defended Willie Nelson when the singer got caught at a checkpoint with marijuana, and Matthew McConaughey when he was arrested after playing bongos naked in his house at 2 a.m. We have spoiled this whole generation. Even the poor kids have iPhones.

Right? So you're...

I worry about the next generation. I worry about the future of this country because you had people like Mr. Mond who started business, worked hard, understood what it's like to be poor. Now these new generations have been entitled and they haven't had to be, they have never missed a meal in their life. They've always had a car given to them. Their parents pay for their phone bill. Everything is taken care of. But you know what?

There's a quote that somebody told me a long time ago. It said, success is never owned. It is rented. And the rent is due every day. Wallace seemed to agree. And I think you already got the idea early in life that if you had money, you could get away with anything you wanted to. Holly Williams, unlike Eric, carved her own path.

She had her own company, Sparkle Aesthetics. But after a while, some friends like Shantae started to wonder if this was her sole source of income. I go to an esthetician, so I knew she wasn't. Like, things just don't add up. Like, you can't party all night and then not get up until 3 o'clock in the afternoon and still have a job. Turns out, Holly was an escort. She wasn't open about it with everyone, but some people close to her found out.

Here's her friend Matt again. She didn't talk about it then. Later on she did, and she showed me the site and everything. But yeah, she told me about kind of how business works. She said it was pretty much like you got reviews on there. And so she had to be of some standard to continue to get these high-quality dates because apparently these guys were paying her like $20,000 or $30,000 for a weekend.

Yeah, and she would, like, go hang out with them and, I guess, just accompany them, be their girlfriend for the weekend away from their wives. She had several clients that were, like, she'd call them whales. Like, you know, they just had, they were just loaded like that. This line of work had its own problems, though. Holly didn't recommend it to her friends. She's like, you know, it's not the life you want to live. She's like, I wish, you know, I didn't do all that stuff. I mean, the benefit is you get paid.

Of course, Holly tried to be as safe as she could. She installed cameras at her doorway and inside her apartment.

She had a profile on a website called Preferred411, where escorts could vet clients. It was like a referral system for sex workers. They had the opportunity to warn each other about troublesome or dangerous clients. Still, you never knew exactly what would happen after the client gets there, or even after they leave. Meanwhile, Eric was an established manager in the family business, though it sounds like his heart wasn't really in it.

He wasn't a good car man. I mean, you know, how good a car man do you have to be if you've got a Toyota dealership? I mean, a blind dog with a motor on his neck can make money at work. I wanted to talk to someone who actually worked for Eric. So I got a hold of Justin Wright, a former employee of his.

He lives in Oklahoma now, so we talked on the phone. About two weeks, two to three weeks before 9-11, my future ex-wife and me moved to Austin. And so my first job, I got a job at the Volkswagen dealership. Well, Eric was the salesman. He was kind of just the overall manager of the Volkswagen dealership. He wasn't the one that you most of the time took the deals to or whatever. He was just there.

And I guess we kind of bonded because we were similar age. We both dipped. And then, you know, he was always just kind of an asshole. You know, he was just down on everybody. He just, you know, kind of like a rich kid that always got what he wanted and never really had to work for it and was just kind of didn't really care about other people. But we spent a little time. I don't know if the Yellow Rose of Texas is still there. Yeah.

The Yellow Rose is a strip club in Austin. Well, they used to, in the newspaper, would do a lobster and steak special that if you clipped the coupon out of the paper, it was like $10 or something. And he loved going to that. And so that was kind of our thing for like once or twice a week, you know, going to have lunch at the Yellow Rose. And

The lobster was not that good, believe it or not. Now, I do remember sitting in the car with Eric and we were going to the Yellow Rose. This was right when his grandfather passed away. And he was, you know, he was kind of venting. He wasn't crying or anything, but he was definitely upset. You could see, you know, this is something even though they expected it, it hurt.

But I always remember this because what he was bitching about, he was like, you know, for the last couple of years, they had been trying to take assets out of his granddad's name. So I assume for tax reasons.

and that his granddad was making so much money that when he died, they were still finding $100,000 here, $200,000 there, like millions of dollars. So that's what I remember his major frustration about is, you know, his granddad was making so much money that they were going to have to pay taxes on that. I was barely making ends meet on doing everything I can to survive, and he's complaining to me about he has too much money. It's just that.

That's something that's always kind of, I've carried that with me.

But back at the office, Justin says he didn't see him work too much. Really, even though he was the manager of the Volkswagen, there was a sales manager and day-to-day, and then we had finance managers. So his part was just basically no shit, just sitting in his office, dipping and looking at the internet. That's what I believe 95% of his time at the dealership was. Despite his passive management style, though, Eric didn't like any challenges to his authority. The

By 2020, Eric had become a partner at Mond Auto Group.

He was still married. His oldest son had gone off to college in Nashville, and he was planning a trip to visit him in February. But there was someone else he wanted to see. On Monday, February 3rd, Eric messaged an escort who worked under the alias Layla Love. Layla Love was really Holly Williams, but Eric didn't know that. Just like she probably didn't know his real name either. He also used an alias when communicating with her.

The email address he used to message her, cartrash33@gmail, was associated with the pseudonym Eric Moore. Eric and Holly had met at least once before, on a prior trip he took to Nashville. This time he wrote, "Hey darling, I was thinking we'd meet at 9:30 at the JW Marriott. 90 minutes would be great so we're not rushed. If all sounds good, let me know." So Eric went to Nashville and met Holly at the Marriott.

He arranged to meet with a different escort the next night. And then his trip ended and he returned to Austin. He went back to his routine at the dealership, the country club, the golf course. Three weeks passed. Then on March 1st, Eric got a text from a stranger. The stranger said he was going to go public about the night Eric shared with Layla Love unless Eric gave him $25,000 to keep quiet. But Eric didn't hand over the money.

He didn't go to the police either. Instead, he went to the dealership and came up with a plan to handle the problem himself. Which is to say, he paid someone else to handle it. No one was supposed to be killed, at least not at first. But as you'll hear in the series, things got out of control. Eric's problem escalated, and he kept throwing money at it to solve it.

He might have in his mind thought he could do that and not get caught. No matter what happened and by who, this was very, very sloppy. It was rushed. It was uncalculated. They showed me some pictures where the guys had been hiding out behind her door. Like all the posts on Facebook and stuff and I'm just like, did he really like take her dog and just let it go and it get ran over?

You open up the trunk and he had an arsenal. AR-15 ammo, flashbangs, silenced weapons. Yeah, because I've never had anything like this happen, especially where I felt compelled to call somebody and be like, "Hey, I think you're gonna die." I thought it was a murder-suicide. It's definitely the twistiest case of my career, I mean, in the sense that every time we uncovered something, we said to ourselves, "What's gonna happen next?"

All of Eric's fateful decisions in March 2020 would come back to haunt him almost two years later when he heard that one of the killers wanted more money. What Eric didn't know, it was a ruse. The FBI had him in its sights. And one day, in December 2021, they were able to record him as he ordered yet another killing. So we need to take care of him.

And that's when it all came crashing down. I'll start from the beginning.

The Problem with Eric is an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Anna Wuerl. Our executive producer is Megan Kreit. The show is reported and written by me, Katie Vine, and written, produced, and reported by Anna Wuerl. It was produced and engineered by Brian Standifer, who also wrote the music.

Story editing and production by Patrick Michaels. Additional production is by Aisling Ayers. Additional editing by Karen Olson. Jacqueline Colletti is our fact checker. Studio musicians were John Sanchez, Glenn Fukunaga, and Pat Manske. Artwork is by Emily Kimbrough and Victoria Milner. Our theme is Entrance Song by the Black Angels. Westlake High School football news coverage is from KVUE. See y'all next week.

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