Original subtitles

- Harlan, over here.

- Ladies and gentlemen, Harlan Coben.

[applause]

- He's the greatest thriller writer.

- Oh, go on.

- Coben's written over 30 "New York Times" best-sellers.

- With over a dozen hit TV shows and movies.

[stirring orchestral music]

♪ ♪

- Just when you think you have it all figured out,

think again.

[eerie music]

♪ ♪

I'm Harlan Coben.

This crime, like so many I write about in fiction,

is about the secrets we keep.

Most of us have a public face.

It's not necessarily a lie.

It's simply the version of ourselves we're most

comfortable showing the world.

And usually, that's enough.

We see the smile, the confidence,

the way someone moves through life,

and we think we have them figured out.

But we don't.

Holly Williams and Bill Lanway were hard not to notice.

They were magnetic, larger than life.

The kind of couple who seemed completely at ease

in their own story.

But a facade doesn't have to be a deception.

It just has to conceal.

And that's where our mystery begins.

- In the early morning hours of March 13, 2020,

some construction workers discovered a car wreck.

- The police thought they were approaching

a motor vehicle accident.

And pretty quickly, they realized that's not the case.

One of the deceased victims

was in the front passenger seat

stuffed down into the compartment

where your feet would be.

The female victim behind the driver's side,

she's crouched down in a fetal position.

She has a very obvious close-range shot to her temple.

- It turned from a accident investigation into a homicide.

- We're looking into this now as, like,

is somebody tying up a loose end?

We released surveillance footage to the news.

- We were really at a loss.

Every one of those tips led to a dead end.

- This is one of those cases that was just unbelievable.

Wealthy individuals,

military, special ops.

[gunfire]

- It's about sex, greed, and murder.

- [screaming]

- Four suspects in three different states.

It was a pretty unusual set of circumstances.

Nobody was really sure what this was.

[eerie music]

- A crime happened here.

The past isn't what it seemed.

The story told turns out to be deception.

And just when you're sure have the answer--

- 911, what's the address of your emergency?

Hello?

Anyone there?

- There's one final twist.

[suspenseful music]

- March 13th of 2020, I was notified by phone,

there was a vehicle that was wrecked off an embankment,

and the people inside were deceased.

But it wasn't a crash.

- Someone drove the car to that spot.

The car had been pushed off a gravel road.

It had rolled down an embankment and struck a tree.

- The windows of the car

appeared to have been shot out.

There were also bullet defects

in the passenger side door.

♪ ♪

- When I got there, the investigators

were waiting for a tow truck to winch the car out.

They were able to determine who was most likely in the vehicle

by the registration.

- The vehicle was registered to Holly Williams,

and the male victim was Bill Lanway.

- Holly Williams was in her early 30s.

She worked as an aesthetician

and had done some modeling.

- Being an aesthetician, this is what she wanted to do.

This was her passion.

She was really good with people,

talking to them, connecting with them.

- She had a dog who she adored.

- The first time I met Holly was at a friend's house.

You know, my friends were kind of partiers.

♪ ♪

I saw Holly a lot of times in the bar scene,

different clubs.

Holly was the life of the party,

so we always had fun laughing and cutting up.

- Nashville has a lot of people

who are living on hopes and dreams,

people who've seen the odds

and decided they can beat them,

whether it's in music

or business or law or life.

[gentle music]

- I've known Bill since middle school.

He was always around my house.

He was just that fun-loving, energetic kid.

- Bill Lanway was in his mid-30s.

He'd had a variety of jobs.

- Before Holly, Bill had a child from a past relationship.

- Bill became a father, and when he had Maddie

was one of the greatest moments of his life.

Bill and Maddie's mom weren't married,

but he was a great dad.

He was always talking about that little girl.

You could see the joy in the way

that that little baby angel brightened him.

When Maddie got cancer,

she was very young.

It rocked him.

- I don't know, felt like the whole world

just came crashing down.

You know, one minute you have a healthy little girl.

The next moment, you're seeing her--tubes coming out

of her body laying in a hospital bed motionless

wondering if she's ever gonna wake up again.

[gentle music]

- Maddie was five years old when she died.

It left a hole in his heart.

He was still the same guy, but he was not nearly as happy.

He didn't have the joy that he used to have,

and that really changed him a lot.

♪ ♪

Around 2017, Bill and Holly met and started dating.

Even though they never married,

they seemed like they just bonded together.

But then, after a while, there were some ups and downs.

- There had been some domestic issues.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- I lived above Holly.

She was nice.

I didn't really see anybody else coming and going

on a regular basis, except for Bill.

Everything was pretty quiet there for quite a while,

until it wasn't.

Early one morning, I heard a lot of yelling,

and it wasn't the first time I'd heard

them yelling and screaming.

And it sounded pretty bad.

I thought she was in trouble,

so I ended up calling the police.

[sirens wailing]

They knocked on the door, they talked to her,

and they left.

Nothing ever happened,

until several weeks later

when I had to call the police again.

- They had a very tumultuous relationship.

There was a cycle of fighting and making up,

and it was pretty regular.

♪ ♪

- It wasn't a stable relationship.

It wasn't a healthy relationship.

- Holly told me that after things became violent

that she was trying to get out of the situation

before something bad happened.

- She had taken out a restraining order against him

alleging that he had committed acts of personal violence

against her.

This was a fractious relationship.

♪ ♪

Maybe it had finally reached the brink.

Maybe this is a murder-suicide.

♪ ♪

- Car in a ditch.

Two bodies.

Already, the whispers about Holly

and Billy's volatile relationship

are steering this toward the easiest answer,

a lovers' dispute gone fatal.

But a troubled relationship can be part of the story

without being the entire story.

[dramatic music]

- The scenario that I'd gathered

was that it was a murder-suicide,

that Bill had killed Holly.

That devastated me in a whole different type of way.

- But the police, ultimately, decided

the facts did not bear that out.

[tense music]

- When we pulled Bill and Holly out of the car,

we didn't see a gun.

- If it was murder-suicide,

there would have to be at least

a firearm in the vehicle.

- He was shot at close range in the temple,

shot in the torso area multiple times,

and shot in the back of the head.

They pieced it together that this was not murder-suicide.

- These were two individuals who were murdered

in cold blood, shot to death, put in a car,

and left for dead.

How did these people get to this point?

♪ ♪

- We were really focused on trying to find a motive.

- It's a very difficult case, because there's no eyewitness.

There's no video.

No one can tell us what happened.

We had no obvious culprit.

♪ ♪

- We had to learn as much about Bill and Holly as we could.

♪ ♪

- There were no cell phones found at the scene,

but we were able to get cell phone records

from their providers.

♪ ♪

- In the days leading up to Bill and Holly's murder,

there's some very eye-catching messages.

- There was one number being used

to send and receive text messages

to both Holly and Bill.

♪ ♪

So that caught my attention.

♪ ♪

- The messages resolved to a burner account.

That was very suspicious.

- I asked from the burner phone company

for any emails associated with it,

any phone numbers, any usernames.

And we got back an email address

for the name of Jimmy Green.

♪ ♪

- We had some suspicions that that was not

the real name of the person.

♪ ♪

- It didn't seem like a real name to me.

People use burner phone numbers to mask their identity.

So then I asked that email company for all the emails

ever sent and received by that email account.

We found an email where he had used a username Agent 47.

I immediately knew what that was.

I grew up playing PlayStation.

- Agent 47 is the name of a fictional character

in a video game who's a hitman.

So this was progress.

- This burner number is being used

to send and receive text messages

to both Holly and Bill.

Every time a message is sent from the burner phone number,

it logs an IP address.

So we just asked the cell phone company

whose real phone number

had the same IP address at these specific times

on these specific days,

and they came back with

tens of thousands of phone numbers.

- We started digging into these numbers

trying to identify a pattern.

♪ ♪

- Detectives are sifting through phone records,

bank statements, text threads, personal messages,

the paper and digital trail we all leave behind

without ever realizing it.

You can destroy evidence and change your story,

but we all know the uncomfortable truth.

Privacy doesn't really exist in today's world.

We're always being watched, tracked, recorded,

like it or not.

♪ ♪

- While we're tracking down cell phone records,

we discovered that Holly had security cameras

in her apartment.

♪ ♪

One on the outside, facing the entrance and exit door

of her apartment,

and then two on the inside of her apartment.

This wasn't any kind of security system

that the apartment complex offered.

This was a security system that was installed by Holly.

We believed that she installed the cameras

because of the problems that she was having with Bill.

The security cameras had SD cards in them

as well as Cloud service.

The very first thing we do is, we take the memory cards

from the cameras and download all the video,

and then we reach out to the Cloud company

to get any kind of video that they have.

- Detectives started painstakingly going through

this security footage

hour by hour, day by day,

even minute to minute.

- I watched every bit of that video.

We could see that Bill had entered her apartment

when he wasn't allowed.

I don't know if he forced his way in

or if he just used the passcode.

[knocking]

- On several occasions, you see one or more men knocking

on Holly Williams' door.

- But the way they're doing it is unusual.

They have coverings over their faces.

♪ ♪

They're trying not to have their face captured on camera.

They are not identifying themselves.

They're not saying who they are.

[knock at door]

- She's creeping around her apartment

because she doesn't want them to know that she's inside.

She puts a door bar on her door,

and Holly is hiding from these men.

Why are these men knocking on Holly's door?

- What do they want from her?

♪ ♪

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- For now, investigators have something to work with,

blurred footage of unidentified men

near Holly's door careful to keep their faces hidden.

I mean, what's going on with that?

But what I find fascinating here,

and this happens in fiction writing, too,

is that the digital evidence may give us some answers.

But what it really does is raise new

and even more compelling questions,

questions that are impossible to ignore.

♪ ♪

[knocking on door]

♪ ♪

- Are these men connected with her murder or not?

- This is what we're trying to figure out

as we're seeing these men come to the door.

Who are they?

These guys were clearly not trying to be caught on film.

And it's very suspicious behavior.

- We released some images from the video of the men

on the news in hopes that someone could identify them.

♪ ♪

A tip had come in that it was some bikers.

And when we pulled up the photos,

it looked just like the guy with the beard.

I was pretty excited when I saw his photo,

and I was like, that's the guy.

That's the guy with the beard.

- In the meantime, we get another lead.

- We had a lot of very good cell phone data.

- What we wanted to know was, which phone number

had all of those IP addresses

for Jimmy Green

and Agent 47.

We got two phone numbers.

One of them came back to a guy named

Adam Carey from North Carolina.

- This is a couple months after the murders

of Bill and Holly.

When the detective pulled the driver's license photo

from Adam Carey,

right away, they see a face

that they think they recognize.

He looked like one of the men at the door

on the surveillance footage.

Now, we have two leads on the mystery man at Holly's door.

- And then we found out that the biker

that came in as a tip

from the photos, he had recently died.

It had been declared a suicide.

- The first thing that we did was

start looking at the crime scene photos

of that person's death.

He had .22-caliber pistols,

.22-caliber rifles,

and Holly and Bill were killed with .22-caliber bullets.

♪ ♪

But I was able to determine by evidence at the scene there

and then using the biker's phone

to track his electronic whereabouts around the time

that Holly and Bill were murdered

that there is no connection between him, Holly and Bill,

or whoever killed them.

We ruled out the biker, but we know that Adam Carey

is the man in the footage.

- Boy, have I written this scene before.

A mysterious figure is finally identified, and for a moment,

it feels like the finish line.

But putting a name to someone doesn't solve the mystery.

It only gives investigators a new place to begin.

♪ ♪

- Once detectives learn Adam Carey's identity

and that he is from North Carolina,

they begin to realize that this is

a multi-jurisdictional case.

And they bring in the FBI to help them

with the investigation.

They begin to look into Carey's background,

and they find that he is a former Marine.

♪ ♪

- He had done multiple tours of duty.

He was actually, a marine MARSOC,

which is a special operations capable unit

within the Marine Corps.

And at one time, he was a sniper.

- And they also discovered

he does have a criminal background.

- After the military, he was arrested

and convicted for impersonating

a police officer.

Adam Carey lived in Beulaville, North Carolina,

hundreds of miles away from Nashville.

- So at this point, detectives

have figured out who Adam Carey is,

but they have no idea why he's there.

How is he connected to the murders?

- We were getting additional phone records,

additional Cloud information on Adam,

but there was nothing that clearly described

exactly what happened.

- At the same time, we were also looking more

into Holly and Bill's history

expecting to find a direct connection to Adam Carey.

- Bill didn't owe anybody any kind of money

or anything like that.

Holly didn't owe anybody any kind of money.

We start looking into, like, did they make somebody

mad enough to harm them?

- When we looked further into Holly,

we started finding email accounts

for a name we hadn't come across,

someone named Layla Love.

♪ ♪

It led us to an escort site.

That's when we realized

Holly was living a secret life.

♪ ♪

[sirens wailing]

[eerie music]

- In my novels I've explored secrets of all kinds.

And once you shape your life around that secret,

the downward spiral begins.

Your secret snowballs, leads to another,

and soon the line between privacy and deception

completely disappears.

♪ ♪

- Detectives discovered Holly Williams

had an additional job on top of being an aesthetician.

They discovered that she was a high-priced escort.

She went by the stage name of Layla Love,

and she had several clients in the area

and also outside of Nashville.

- She used a service that would vet clients.

She was doing it the smartest and safest way she knew how.

She wouldn't see anybody unless they went through

this vetting process.

- Holly had always told me

that this service looked out for them,

that these clients were really wealthy people,

and it wasn't just like, you know, some regular escort,

prostitution kind of thing.

- The term "girlfriend experience" is used,

an opportunity for a man to take a beautiful woman out

to dinner and show her off,

go to a location,

and she will act like she is that man's girlfriend.

- The clients pay for not just the sex

but the emotional intimacy or the companionship.

- From the evidence that we reviewed,

she would sometimes go on expensive vacations with them

and stay at very nice hotels.

- It wouldn't be uncommon for her to charge

tens of thousands of dollars for a weekend.

You've got a lot of businessmen,

a lot of doctors, lawyers.

- She had some regular clients that she would just

have friendly dinners with, and then she had clients

that she would spend an entire weekend with.

- So the first thing we want to do with that

is identify people on that list.

We had an entire conference room that we locked down,

and on all four of the walls were anybody

that we could identify.

We printed out their picture,

and we put them on this timeline

of when they were involved in Holly's life.

- We seized Holly's prior clients' phones,

took a look at them,

and based on the phone data and the interview

were able to determine those weren't the suspects.

And we eventually cleared them.

- OK, this is kind of amazing to me.

Holly used a vetting service to screen her potential clients.

Wow. It makes sense, of course.

And yet, I'm not sure I've ever heard of anything

quite like this before.

Now, Holly's clients were vetted,

but Bill was not.

- We knew that Bill and Holly had

a pretty rocky relationship

fraught with a lot of arguing,

and Bill didn't treat Holly all that well.

So as detectives dig a little deeper into Bill Lanway's

background, they learned that as a young child

he witnessed his father murder his mother.

- When he was three years old,

his father had taken Bill hostage and was arrested,

served a little time but had gotten released

and then immediately came back to the house

and stabbed his mother multiple times

in front of him.

And she ended up dying.

♪ ♪

- That set the tone for a difficult life for Bill.

And because of Bill's past, his childhood,

and what he experienced with his daughter,

he had a lot of troubles in his life.

- Bill Lanway, he had various jobs.

He was an Amazon driver at one point.

- He was a mobile mechanic.

He would moonlight as a card dealer for poker games.

- But he didn't really have a steady job.

- You know, it looked like he was in a position

where money was tight for him.

- Holly was used to being the one that was taken care of

in all the other relationships I knew,

but the roles were reversed here.

- Bill was Holly's boyfriend,

and although he enjoyed the money that Holly earned,

he didn't really want Holly to be an escort.

♪ ♪

- That was a source of tension in their relationship.

There were fights about it.

Bill would get jealous if she was later than she said

she would be with a client.

- Sometimes he would try to make contact with the clients

and pressure them into not seeing her.

And, well, Holly would counter with,

but who's paying the bills?

- We did notice in Bill's phone

that he had a screenshot of Holly's clients list.

- There's some very interesting messages.

In particular, one conversation from Bill

to a number he assumes belongs to one of Holly's clients

named Moore.

He says, you disrespected her

and had sex with her without a condom.

- Bill says to Moore,

this is what I want.

And he gives out a number.

It was $25,000.

- Bill responds back to Moore.

You have until 8:00 p.m. tonight.

Otherwise, I'm going to expose you and your family

that you have this relationship with this escort.

- That was an important discovery.

Bill Lanway was extorting Holly's clients.

♪ ♪

- In the kind of mysteries I've spent my life writing,

there's an almost unbreakable rule.

Blackmail doesn't just expose secrets,

it creates enemies.

In our case, it's burner phones,

aliases, and half-erased digital footprints.

What started as a crashed vehicle

has spun into a bizarre mystery more tangled than anything

this writer could have dreamed up.

[tense music]

- We definitely thought it was possible that Bill's extortion

might be connected to the deaths of the victims,

but it wasn't going to be enough evidence.

♪ ♪

- The people in the video were very strong

persons of interest.

They were still a strong lead for us.

- Looking back at the cell phone data in the burner

account that Adam Carey had established,

detectives see a reference to someone by the name

of Erik in the text messages.

- And Erik is spelled with a K,

which is a little unusual.

- Detectives use this information to determine

that Erik is actually a person out of Austin, Texas,

by the name of Erik Maund.

♪ ♪

Erik Maund is in his mid-40s.

He's from a wealthy family that has an upstanding

reputation in the community.

- His grandfather founded some auto dealerships

in the Austin area.

That was how he made his living.

- So hurry to Austin's number one volume sales dealer,

Charles Maund Toyota.

- And he made a good living doing it.

As we are looking into Erik Maund,

we're starting to learn who his associates are.

And one of the individuals that we learned about

was a guy named Gil Peled.

He was a native Israeli,

and he had served

in the Israeli military.

- Gil Peled came to Los Angeles

and had a pretty lucrative private security business.

He had worked for high-profile individuals,

one of whom was Charlie Sheen.

- Charlie, this way, Charlie.

- But at some point he was not getting steady work,

so he moved to Austin, Texas.

- One of the things that he did was

provide security for the Maund dealerships in Austin.

And that's how he came to know Erik Maund.

As we were starting to look at those connections,

we searched his iCloud account.

- We're sifting through all the records

in the iCloud account,

and I came upon this document called Tennessee Sit Rep,

a short for situation report.

♪ ♪

- It's a military term

for what someone on the ground

sends to someone in high command.

- Based upon the information in the Sit Rep,

detectives are able to learn that there was a team

that was sent to Nashville.

- And this Sit Rep described efforts

by former high-level military personnel

who were taking the skills that they learned

in the military and trying to put them

to use for private clients.

- It was written by two individuals,

one of which was the guy in the surveillance footage,

Adam Carey.

- We discovered that he is communicating

via the Tennessee Sit Rep to Gil Peled,

Erik's security guy.

- From the Sit Rep, we learn that the team had

been sent to do surveillance.

- So we're wondering why?

- The Sit Rep is dated March the 9th,

three days before Holly and Bill are murdered.

These were several former military individuals.

They were hired for their expertise

to go and conduct surveillance,

to get some information out of Bill and Holly.

- Detectives are on to a wealthy man in Austin,

a security consultant on his payroll,

a team of ex-soldiers parked outside Holly's apartment

in Nashville.

What they don't have is a reason for all of this.

♪ ♪

- Then we find an email between Holly Williams's

Layla Love account and the client, Moore.

This message showed that Moore's first name was

also Erik spelled with a K.

- We immediately figured out that Erik Maund was the client.

- He was listed under a different alias, an Erik Moore.

Moore, this was the person who was being extorted

for money by Bill.

♪ ♪

- Text message said,

I'll reveal what I know about you

unless you give me $25,000.

You need to give me this money, or I'm gonna

expose your infidelity.

- Bill didn't know who Moore really was

or what he was capable of.

♪ ♪

- At that point in the investigation

we started looking into Maund's movements.

About a month before the murders,

Erik Maund flies on a private jet,

stays at a luxury hotel in downtown Nashville.

♪ ♪

- After returning from Nashville,

Erik Maund got an anonymous text message.

This was when Bill tries to extort Erik Maund.

♪ ♪

- Erik didn't know who it was, but he knows

that he's receiving messages talking

about blackmail, extortion.

- Erik Maund is married, had two children,

portrayed as a family man.

- So he reaches out to the guy who

he's hired for security at the dealership, Gil Peled,

to put a stop to it.

- Gil Peled hired an outside individual

to conduct a background check.

They were able to identify that Layla Love

was actually Holly Williams.

This report provided background information on where she lived,

her phone numbers.

- Gil Peled goes to the person that he knows and trusts,

Bryon Brockway, the director of operations

for a private security contractor group.

- Bryon hires Adam and two unidentified men

to go to Nashville

to figure out who is extorting Erik.

♪ ♪

- The guys on the ground find the apartment

to start doing surveillance.

♪ ♪

They buy some burlap, some zip ties.

They set up a place of concealment

that they can start observing.

They try to figure out when someone arrives at home,

when they leave home,

how many people are in the residence.

♪ ♪

They realize that there is an individual named

Bill Lanway, it's Holly's boyfriend.

♪ ♪

- They were trying to figure out,

was this the jealous boyfriend that was reaching out

to Erik Maund in his own capacity?

Was Holly involved?

They began reaching out to her and to Bill

so they could have a conversation.

♪ ♪

Adam Carey and another individual

would knock on her door.

[knocking on door]

They made use of that burner account.

♪ ♪

All of those attempts were unsuccessful.

On March 11th, the day before the murders,

Erik Maund gets a phone call on his home phone.

[phone ringing]

He can see it's the same phone number

that had messaged previously.

So Erik reports back to Gil Peled

that this person is now calling his home phone,

and his wife could pick up at any point.

♪ ♪

- The pressure is ramping up in Austin

for Erik Maund.

In Nashville, two of the guys that were originally hired

to do surveillance decided

they were getting out of town.

Bryon Brockway, who hired them,

and Adam Carey decides he's going to go to Nashville

to figure out what needs to get done and to do it.

So now, the two people on the ground

are Adam Carey and Bryon Brockway.

- Detectives can see in the bank records on March 12th

there is a bank transfer of $150,000

from one of Erik Maund's accounts

to one of Gil Peled's business accounts,

SpearTip.

♪ ♪

Early that morning, Adam Carey is seen again

on the surveillance footage.

This time he moves the camera

as far away as you could

so it wouldn't capture the parking lot.

That same camera later that night,

about 11:45 p.m. shows Bill and Holly

leaving Holly's apartment.

♪ ♪

[engine turns over, starts]

- [screams]

- We hear what sounds like a scuffle,

glass breaking, and gunshots.

[indistinct screams]

- You hear her voice get louder

as if she is sort of running to the apartment.

- [screaming]

- And then you begin to hear it trail off.

- [fading screams]

- The next day, Holly is found with Bill in her Acura

about 3 miles away from the apartment.

- We believed Erik Maund, through Gil Peled,

paid Bryon Brockway and Adam Carey

to murder Holly and Bill

to cover up his affair.

- December 10th of 2021 almost two years after the murder

of Bill and Holly we finally were in a position where

we were able to arrest people.

And everything was organized so that it would be

a simultaneous arrest.

We arrested Adam Carey at his home

in North Carolina,

Bryon Brockway at a military facility in California,

and Gil Peled coming off of an airplane in Texas.

♪ ♪

Gil seemed to be the only person that had direct contact

with Erik Maund.

So Gil is brought immediately into an interrogation room

at the airport.

And that's when FBI Agent David Som

came up with a ruse.

- We needed to know what Erik's knowledge of the homicide was.

Was he someone who paid them just to do surveillance?

- This ruse was, one of the Nashville shooters

wants more money,

and what do we do about it?

- Gil then makes a phone call to Erik with the FBI,

and it's recorded.

- Uh-huh.

- Mm-hmm.

- We didn't know what Erik was gonna say.

He could have said, "I don't know what you're talking about"

and hung up,

or he could have said what he said.

- Peled asks Maund,

"Do you want me to take care of this?"

The clear implication being,

do you want me to have the Nashville shooter

who wants more money murdered?

♪ ♪

- The "like last time" ending to that statement

was critical.

♪ ♪

So, um...

We then took Erik Maund into custody in Austin, Texas,

and we start interviewing him.

♪ ♪

I start talking about Nashville.

- Erik Maund initially tries to act like he doesn't know Holly.

- [screaming]

- I wanted to see whether he cared,

whether he was afraid.

And his head dips.

[somber music]

♪ ♪

- New information tonight about

a bizarre murder-for-hire plot.

Four people are under arrest facing federal charges

in connection with a double murder

in the spring of 2020.

- I really couldn't believe it.

It was just a whole different level of

what in the world has happened?

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It's something straight out of a Hollywood movie script.

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- An Austin auto business partner arrested

in a murder-for-hire investigation soon heads

to Nashville to face a judge.

- It was hard for us going into the trial,

because we knew that Bill Lanway had

been trying to extort one of the defendants.

That is something that makes him look less sympathetic.

- We wanted the jury to set aside

whatever personal beliefs you might have

about the way Bill treated Holly

or what Holly did for a living

and just see the evidence for what it is.

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These were just two human beings at the end of the day

that did not deserve to die.

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Adam Carey and Bryon Brockway were found guilty

of conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire,

conspiracy to kidnap,

and kidnapping resulting in death.

Erik was found guilty of only the murder-for-hire.

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- It's still hard to talk about it in some ways.

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I've known Bill since he was young,

and I miss some of the conversations, some of the fun

that me and him would have.

We loved to laugh, just to have joy.

- When you went back and watched some of the footage

of Holly, you could see that

she was just a regular person,

just trying to make it on her own.

- We never found any evidence that showed that Holly was

involved in the extortion,

and we believed she wasn't involved.

- I still remember the fun times that we had

and some of our deeper conversations about life

and her pursuing her passion.

She was a good person.

Nobody deserves to die like that.

[somber music]

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- At first blush, the final twist here seems to be

about Holly's secret life.

But it's more about the two men in our story.

the one who used that secret life to extort money,

and mostly, exclusively really,

the man who decided that his own secret life

was worth killing Holly and Bill to protect.

I'm Harlan Coben.

Good night.

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[dramatic music]

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