"The Problem With Erik"

Storytelling CATEGORY — SHOWCASE certificate of merit

Texas Monthly
Contributors: Katy Vine, Ana Worrel

06/17/2024

In The Problem With Erik, Texas Monthly writer Katy Vine and producer Ana Worrel unravel a disastrous plot by a well-known Austin auto executive to maneuver out of a blackmail attempt following an affair. Over six episodes, listeners hear how a perfect storm of secrets, mistaken identities, and miscommunications—involving a team of special ops contractors, including a Hollywood stuntman and Charlie Sheen’s former bodyguard—turned into a tragedy that left two people dead.

To tell the story, the production team spent weeks covering the federal murder-for-hire trial of auto executive Erik Maund and his coconspirators. Texas Monthly met with sources close to the victims and the killers, acquired video and audio footage from the FBI investigation, and talked their way into a secret clubhouse for wealthy Austin gamblers and car dealers that club members affectionally call the Shithole. The story builds to a climactic sequence of undercover tape—recorded from a device hidden in an informant’s wristwatch—as investigators close in on the killers one by one. Maund, having left a glowing Google review for the contractor who coordinated the killings and been caught on tape ordering yet another hit on one of his hired killers, is caught completely by surprise when he’s arrested.

As host, Katy Vine balances this criminal farce with a caring portrait of Holly Williams, who’d turned to sex work to find independence after a tough, working-class childhood and who was killed almost as an afterthought. It’s in Williams’s life and death, told through reflections from her closest friends, that the story finds its moral grounding in this stew of privilege and machismo. The Problem With Erik tells an uncommon story of the downfall of a rich and well-protected man, but Vine and Worrel ultimately argue that, despite the cast of rich men and hired killers, Williams’s death is also a too-common story of a woman victimized by a male partner.

The show was selected by The Guardian as one of the best podcasts of the week in July 2024, and it was named one of the top true crime podcasts of the year by the Irish Independent. Artificial intelligence was only used in this production for automated transcription of some interviews with third-party software programs Rev and Descript.

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Submitted by Meher Yeda.