True Crime Campfire - Love Will Tear Us Apart: The Murder of Larry McNabney, Pt 2

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

When we left you last week, attorney Larry McNabney’s attempt to become the biggest personal-injury attorney in Nevada had just crashed and burned like the Hindenberg, thanks in no small part to his new wife, Elisa. Elisa was a small-time thief and fraudster from Florida who had thrown the state and her whole life in the rear-view mirror to avoid the possibility of some brief jail time. She’d struck gold when she was hired as an office manager by high-flying attorney Larry in Las Vegas, and rapidly climbed the emotional ranks from employee to mistress to girlfriend to wife. But she had trouble keeping her itchy fingers out of the law firm’s cash register, which led to the state bar banning her from working there and reprimanding Larry. Looking for a new start, the couple moved to Sacramento to try and set the whole business rolling again, and at the start of 2000 Elisa hired 19-year-old Sarah Dutra to help her out with the business. But “helping” was not exactly what she did. Join us for part 2 of this chilling true crime story.Sources:Cold Blooded by Carlton SmithMarked for Death by Brian J. KaremABC's 20/20, episode "Hell in Heels”Investigation Discovery's "Evil Stepmothers," episode “She Can’t Hide”Seattle Met: https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2022/11/jz-knight-ramtha-yelm-washington-school-of-enlightenmentHerald-Tribune: https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/2002/03/15/woman-sought-in-california-murder-has-ties-to-florida/28711016007/Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. When we left you last week, Attorney Larry McNabbney's attempt to become the biggest personal injury attorney in Nevada had just crashed and burned like the Hindenburg. Thanks in no small part. to his new wife Elisa. Elisa was a small-time thief and fraudster from Florida, who had thrown the state and her whole life in the rearview mirror to avoid the possibility of some brief jail time.

She'd struck gold when she was hired as an office manager by high-flying attorney Larry in Las Vegas and rapidly climbed the emotional ranks from employee to mistress to girlfriend to wife. But she had trouble keeping her itchy fingers out of the law firm's cash register, which led to the state bar banning her from working there and reprimanding Larry. Looking for a new start, the couple moved to Sacramento to try and set the whole business rolling again, and at the start of 2000, Elisa hired 19-year-old Sarah Dutra to help her out with the business. But helping was not exactly what she did. This is part two of Love Will Tear Us Apart, the murder of Larry McNabney.

Sarah grew up in Vacaville, California, about midway between San Francisco and Sacramento, and by all accounts, you'd think she'd be set up for a happy, successful life. She graduated in the top 10% of her class. She was on the drill and swim teams and the student council, and she was senior class president. Pretty much everybody had nothing but good things to say about her. She was fun and friendly and helped out her buddies whenever they had trouble with their classes. She was a good friend to have. And this popular, apparently trouble-free life continued in her college career at Sacramento State University.

Right before she started work at McNabbney and Associates and her life took a sideways turn, Sarah had her own web page, which people sometimes did back then and, you know, the early middle ages. MySpace was still about four years away. Sprinkling her sentences with lots and lots of exclamation points, Sarah laid out where she was and what she hoped for. I am an art student with high hopes of graduating this spring and will continue on to graduate school ASAP. I know this must sound crazy, but I love school and I never want it to stop. It sure beats being a grown-up.

Amen to that, sis. I'd go back and be a student forever if I could. And Sarah liked to smoke a lot of weed, which I'm just going to go ahead and assume is probably not that unusual for a teenage art student in California. I suspect when you first signed up for classes in Cali back then, you know, before it was legal, they probably gave you your student ID, the number of a weed dealer who wasn't creepy, and the number of another one who was kind of creepy, but could give you a good deal. And like a lot of stoners, bless them, Sarah just would not shut up about weed, about how

it expanded her consciousness and made every part of her mind work better. And look, if an art student wants to be stoned more than half the time, you know what? Go for it. Knock yourself out. You're only young ones. Probably not so great, though, if you're supposed to be helping run a high dollar law firm. A bohemian stoner like Sarah was kind of a weird choice for Elisa McNabney to hire as her receptionist and personal secretary, although I guess we don't know what the other applicants were like. It seems clear that Elisa gave Sarah the job because she liked her, rather than because she had the necessary competencies for the work.

She and Sarah hit it off right away, two lively, chatty women who saw something of themselves and the other. and Elisa had a con artist's understanding of business. All that really mattered was that you looked the part. When she'd rolled into Vegas years ago, she hadn't had much of a career besides shoplifting and check fraud, but she'd known how to rock a pants suit and sound like she knew what she was talking about. Image was all she understood, and Sarah looked like she fit in at a law office, so she got the job. When Elisa hired another secretary the following year, it would be Ginger Miller, a former exotic dancer. Elisa was like one brunette away from starting her own Charlie's Angels

franchise. If the angels were led by a narcissistic, selfish freak and their only missions were spending money and ruining people's lives, maybe Charlie's Devils? Well, Charlie's Angels would imply the existence of a Charlie's devil. Yeah, I like it. Within a couple of months of Sarah's starting work at McNabney and Associates, she and Elisa were practically joined at the hip. They were always together at the office, although their days were just as likely to be spent shopping together as doing any actual work. Afterwards, they'd sometimes go out for an expensive dinner or to a club. Ginger said they were like husband and wife. Of course, Elisa already had a husband, Larry, and he and Elisa's new gal pal did not get along, at all.

Larry was jealous of Sarah, with some justification. Elisa was spending a lot more time with Sarah than she was with him and seemed closer to her too. Larry was starting to feel like a third wheel in his own marriage. As to just how much reason he had to be jealous, well, who knows? There's a lot of speculation surrounding this case about whether Elisa and Sarah were, you know, banging. They both said they weren't, and most people who knew them have said that they didn't have that vibe. Ginger Miller remembers them as both being kind of homophobic. Larry told at least one friend that he'd caught the pair of them fooling around in bed,

but, you know, he could sometimes be a little prone to exaggeration, so who knows? Sometimes women have very intense, but totally platonic friendships. For her part, most of what Sarah knew about Larry was from exaggerated complaints about him from Elisa. According to Elisa, Larry would just lie stinking in bed for days at a time, drinking and verbally abusing her. Like, she said one time he called and said, you bitch, bring me more wine, you fucking bitch. She said Larry sometimes went off on weeks-long alcohol and drug binges, and she'd have no idea where he was. One time, she had to hire a private detective who found Larry at the Mustang Ranch brothel just outside of Reno, where he'd apparently been staying for weeks. Now, here's the thing.

We know Larry had some issues with substance abuse, especially wine, for sure. But we also know that Elisa lied, like, a lot. If her lips were moving, she was probably lying to you. and you couldn't trust a word she said. But Sarah didn't know that, at least not yet. So to Sarah, Larry seemed like an abuse of lush, a parasite living off of Elisa's hard work at the law firm. She thought he was a bastard. Okay, remember that American quarter horse Elisa wrote a bad check for when they were living in Nevada?

Well, she kept that horse, and in 1999, she and Larry bought another one. Alisa had apparently convinced Larry that there was money to be made in quarter horses, which is true. A really outstanding horse might go for seven figures for breeding. And that's just breeding. Like, you get them back. You can just keep making, it's like a license to print money. But those are pretty long odds, and it's super expensive to take care of horses, like two grand a month each. So it's not like this was a practical plan.

They'd probably be better off hitting the craps table in Vegas. The truth is, showing fancy horses as more of a rich person's hobby than a get-rich-quick scheme, and that's mostly how Larry approached it. The last time he was completely burned out with the law, he ran up north and joined Rantha's School of Enlightenment. Touring the horse shows of the West Coast was a little less bizarre, but it wasn't any less expensive. Larry and Elisa hired some horse trainers to look after their animals, a guy named Greg Waylon and his daughter Debbie. They taught Larry how to show his horses, and he loved it. He started devoting a lot more attention to the horses than the law firm

and started to see some rewards for his efforts. Each showing of a horse earned points depending on its performance, and by the end of 1999, Larry was the leading first-year amateur in the whole country. The American Quarter Horse Association sent him a big silver belt buckle with his name and AQHA rookie of the year on it. I feel like more sports should involve sparkly belt buckles. Yeah, it's just rodeo and wrestling. Both sports involve wearing fancy boots and a ring.

Is there a connection? At the start of 2001, Larry bought a promising nine-month-old colt called Just a Lot of Page, which actually, that's another connection. Horses and wrestlers have crazy names. It's a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy. He had his heart set on showing him at the World Championships that fall in Oklahoma City, so he and Elisa spent a lot of time touring horse shows that year. It probably won't surprise you to learn that the show horse crowd can be kind of stuck up,

and these events were as much about showing off your bank balance as your horses. Larry and Elisa bought a luxury horse trailer with comfy sleeping quarters for the people and the animals. Larry was apparently unaware that they bought the trailer on credit. Elisa handled the business and always assured him things were going great. So Larry just never worried much about money. My dude, this is the woman who ran your business into the ground in like three months back in Nevada. Like, really? This is hard to watch.

And it wasn't even their own credit that Elisa bought the trailer on. She bought it in the name of Larry's grown son from his second marriage, Joe. She'd later say this was a favor to Joe to help him build credit. credit. Yeah, I'm sure he felt real grateful months later when creditors told him he still owed 60 grand on a horse trailer he'd never seen. Oh my God. Joe, by the way, was the only one of Larry's kids Elisa got along with and was even willing to spend time with, probably because all the rest were daughters. And in her weird psyche, that made them rivals for Larry's attention. It reminds me so much of Dante Satorius, if you guys remember her from forever ago. Like, she had that

same weird jealousy of her husband's adult daughters. Joe's mom, Jody, always thought Elisa wanted to get along even better with Joe. She thought she wanted to get him in the sack, which is just, if true, insane. Girl, no, you are married to his dad. Gross. Larry also splurged on a duly, a truck with dual rear wheels on each side, powerful enough to pull the trailer. He had the money to, right? Right? I mean, it wasn't like Elisa was robbing him and his company blind again, right? Elisa ran the law firm, and every day she'd bring home papers for Larry to sign.

Larry, having at least learned a little lesson from Elisa's previous shenanigans in Vegas, also examined every check issued by McNabney and Associates. So Elisa brought home carbon copies of every company check she wrote. But she hit on a simple trick, where when she wrote the actual check, she'd just put some stiff cardboard between the check and the carbon so it didn't make an imprint. Then she'd put some thin paper over the carbon and fill in some fictitious details. So, in one example, Larry thought he was looking at evidence of a reasonable $400 check for car insurance when Elisa had actually written one for $5,000 in cash, which went straight into her pocket.

Draws like this were probably just to fund Elisa's shopping and partying with Sarah. She had Sarah take the checks to the bank and come back. with cash. She couldn't do it herself, Elisa told Sarah, because Larry kept hold of all her IDs to make sure she couldn't leave him. The truth, of course, was that Elisa was an alias. Her whole West Coast life was a lie, and she was a minor league fugitive, and that was why she didn't have ID. But this was a useful way of making Sarah hate Larry even more. More significant was Elisa's new business venture, a website called Hunt Seat Horses, which is not a great name for a website because when it's all one word you bring really wants to read it

as hunt sea forces still i suppose it's better than the one for pen island dot com or the worst one i've ever seen therapist dot com yeah take a minute spell it out in your head not great no elisa's website was supposed to sell high-end westernware or maybe it was supposed to be an online marketplace for horse trading. Elisa's story on the business, as was true for most of her stories, changed depending on who she was talking to. Regardless, hunt-seat horses didn't actually seem to do any business at all, but in just a few months during 2001, its bank account had somehow swelled to $145 grand. I say somehow, but there's really no mystery. She was funneling McNabney and Associates' money into her own hands, and there wasn't a lot of that money left. In

1999, the firm had brought in around a million dollars, but most of that was residual payments from old Nevada settlements. The new business in California wasn't doing so well at all, but still had to outlay hefty sums each month for offices and salary, as well as the pricey new horse enterprise of Lairies. And of course, Elisa was both stealing money and burning through it to have fun by herself and with Sarah. Sarah won a dream year abroad at an art school in Florence. Elisa paid for her to fly back for frequent visits and on one of those trips gave Sarah a fur coat and a laptop must be nice damn I've never had people buy me shit like in my whole life you always hear about like oh this person got a car or whatever I must have not used my feminine

Wiles right or some shit I don't know if only I could go back you use them for all the work you use them for good not evil I know damn it I'm such a sucker what a nerd Oi. Who flies back for a visit during a friggin' year abroad in Florence? Like, stay there and enjoy it. Lord have mercy. It's bonkers. When she came home for good, Elisa gave her a BMW. Oh my God. Throughout the spring of 2001, Elisa was bouncing checks left, right, and center, and taken out credit cards in her friend's names. Isn't that nice? The McNabney's finances were in trouble, and she was the only one who knew it. So she bought herself a new BMW, right? Why not? I think you can apply Carpe Diem to lots of things in life, but financial planning probably isn't really one of them. But Elisa, as always, lived her life like the whole planet

was going to explode in the morning and solve all her problems. Larry was very much not a dumb guy, but he seemed oblivious to these troubles, possibly because he was out of it for most of the year. Elisa told her friends, like it was a joke, that she was slipping ketamine, or sometimes Vicodin into Larry's wine. And everybody laughed because, you know, it was just a joke.

It wasn't a joke, of course. She was actually dosing him. I know. I know we give people the benefit of the doubt, but I don't know anybody who makes these types of jokes. And like, it's hard to understand how you could let a joke like that slide and be like, wait a second, what do you mean? Unless it's like a self-soothing mechanism, like, oh, they couldn't pass them.

I couldn't be friends with a horrible person, but I just, I can't, I can't imagine. I think that's it. I think it's just, you know, no one would do that. That's insane. There's some suggestion that Larry was mixing drugs with his booze himself, but then why would at least a joke about it like that? It'd be another of her endless stories about what a degenerate Larry was, if he was actually doing that.

The truth is, she was both encouraging Larry to drink and take drugs more and actively spiking his drinks. This might have been partly to keep Larry's nose out of the books and partly to give Elisa more time to spend with Sarah. Elisa was a horrible influence on Sarah. Some people who knew them claimed Sarah was the dominant one in their relationship, that she was the one making all the decisions. There were events surrounding the conclusion of this case that kind of explained why people push that theory, but personally, I don't buy it at all. I mean, look, when they met, on one side, you have a teenage art student whose only experience with the seedy side of life was buying weed. And on the other, you have a 33-year-old ex-con and current fugitive who has no qualms

about living an entirely invented life and helping herself to whatever she wants. Yeah. Someone who fires people without a second thought and who steals without compunction from her friends and partner. And you're trying to tell me it's the teenager who's driving the bus to Crazy Town. Come on. Yeah. Like, good manipulators are very good at getting their targets to believe they're the ones

making the decisions. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a good way of keeping the best. them close, and they'll say something like, I wish we could do X, but I know, I know, it's not a good idea. Then their target, who they've already gotten obsessed with pleasing them, will say, well, why couldn't we? We should do it.

That way, when it all goes to shit, the con artist can exonerate herself. I said it wasn't a good idea, but you insisted. Remember guys? She insisted. It's really effective and pretty nefarious. Also, it was Sarah who changed after getting together with Elisa. When she came back from Italy, she was kind of superior and short-tempered, just like Elisa. Her boyfriend, Jason, said he felt like she started treating him like a servant.

Sarah's parents didn't like Elisa, and they thought her relationship with Sarah was weird. Why didn't this apparently high-flying legal professional have friends her own age? And I'm guessing they had the worries reasonable parents should have if their young daughter starts spending all her time with someone older? Is this person just trying to get her into bed? On one visit home, when her mom asked her about Elisa, Sarah got real pissy and disdainful, hitting her parents with the teenage special,

that they didn't understand anything about real life at all. Yeah, hey, kid, why don't you come back with that when you're old enough to shop at Liquor Barn, okay? Jason was so unimpressed by this little performance that he dumped Sarah's ass right after, although she did successfully crawl back to him a few months later. In August of 2001, Larry and Elisa started making plans to move further south, closer to the horses. Elisa and Sarah drove down to check out a house for rent in a fancy gated community just outside of Lodi.

When they met the owners, Elisa introduced Sarah as the girlfriend of Lara McNabney, the TV attorney. Just one of her weird lies that served no purpose at all. Elisa signed the $2,400 monthly rental agreement and agreed that they'd move in at the start of September. After that first rental payment, the McNabbies would have a couple of American quarter horses, a fancy trailer and truck, a BMW, and $141 in their bank account. Oh, my God. All of Elisa's check juggling wouldn't keep the truth from Larry much longer. He was going to find out they were broke. And then?

Were Larry's bonds with Elisa tighter than his anger would be? She was wife number five, after all. Larry's record made it pretty clear that he wouldn't hesitate to call the whole thing off when the going got tough. And he might not have exercised his skills in a while, but he'd been a brilliant attorney for years. The last person you'd want to face in a contentious divorce. It was highly likely that Elisa's latest round of thefts and frauds would come out. She could go to jail. Of course, if Elisa funneled the $145,000 she'd stolen back to where it should be, the problem would be solved.

at least for a while, which was as far in the future as Lisa ever looked. But she wanted to keep that money. It was hers now. She'd stolen it, fair and square. In fact, she'd moved just over half that money into her own account at the end of August, just a couple of weeks before Larry would go missing. That sure sounds like someone getting ready for an exit, but there was Larry. What to do about Larry? On September 5th, Larry and Elisa arrived with their horses for a show just outside Los Angeles in the aptly named city of industry, 70,000 jobs, 264 residents.

Their trainers and friends, Greg Whalen and his daughter Debbie, came down with them and remember the pair being unusually bitchy with each other. When Debbie asked Elisa if anything was wrong, she said Larry's drinking was the problem and that she was, quote, getting tired of taking care of him and picking up after him. That quote, by the way, comes from the book Cold-blooded by Carlton Smith, one of our main sources for this case, which you should definitely get if you want to learn more. This was a familiar complaint from Elisa, and Debbie just shrugged it off. It was also kind of ridiculous, because while Elisa always liked to be well put together herself, she was kind of a slob in every other aspect of her life. Larry was the neat freak of the two, and he'd be the one doing the picking up. Both trainers thought Larry was off from the moment he got down there, just kind of vague and blue and not excited to show the horses.

Debbie had to remind him to go put on his fancy Western gear to walk the horses around. This was not like Larry, at all. As you might expect for a former trial attorney, he usually liked to talk a lot and talked well, and he'd always loved the performance aspect of showing the horses, being the center of attention and getting the applause. Debbie thought he might be depressed. Given what happened later, there's every chance he'd been drugged and was being kept that way by Elisa.

Elisa was one of those people who just can't stand being by herself. She and Larry were joined at the hip, until Sarah drove down a couple days later and Elisa fixed herself to her hip instead. It was perfectly clear who Elisa's favorite was, and it won her husband. Either that afternoon or the next, Debbie overheard Elisa telling another woman about how she was going to go out dancing that night with Sarah. Elisa said, We'll make sure Larry has enough to drink tonight that he passes out,

so Sarah and I can go meet up with you and party tonight. Jesus Murphy. Larry was a serious drinker at this point in his life and not really a passing out kind of guy. Elisa dosed him with some horse tranquilizer, probably a heavy dose of ketamine. Larry was certainly acting weird the next morning. Elisa got up early to help feed the horses.

Because there were no vacancies at the hotel, Sarah had slept on the couch in Larry and Elisa's room. She was startled awake by Larry poking her in the back. He looked glassy-eyed and confused. used. Blanche, he said, still poking her. Blanche. Blanche. Sarah asked him what the hell he was doing. He didn't seem to hear her, then did the whole thing again poking her and calling her Blanche three times. This was too weird for Sarah, and she left. When she asked Elisa what was wrong with Larry,

she just shrugged it off. When Larry showed his horse that morning, he was disoriented and stumbling. Greg Whalen usually made a point of only having Larry show in the mornings because in the afternoons, Larry would usually have a glass of Chardonnay in his hand, often spiked with vodka, and be well on his way to Tipsy Town. But in the mornings, he was usually great. This was weird. On Sunday night, September 9th, Sarah had to make the six-hour drive up to Sacramento because she had a busy day on Monday.

She had to open the law office, show the new secretary, Ginger Miller, the ropes, and then go to class. The next day was an off day at the horse show. Elisa and the trainers looked after the horses while Larry got steadily hammered in the barn. Debbie told Elisa she wished she could give one horse Ace, the sedative Ace Promazine, to settle it down, but show regulations forbid it. Elisa casually asked if Ace would be fatal to a person. Debbie said, Elisa, if it would tranquilize a 1,400-pound horse, it would definitely kill a person. Way to flound with the radar there, girl. Geez, Louise. Larry perked up in the afternoon. He'd just learned that he and his prize

colt, just a lot of page, had got enough points from the show to qualify for the world championships in Oklahoma, and he talked with Greg Whalen about doing shows in the east as well as the West Coast. And this is pretty solid evidence that Larry had no clue at all about his dire financial straits. Showing horses that far from home was a venture that could run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Larry skipped dinner with the other than a lot of the other, Greg and Debbie heard him on Elise's phone asking her to to bring him some soup and wine. They would never see or hear from Larry again.

As horse people often do, Greg Whalen got up early the next day. His horses were used to being fed at 5 a.m. Out in the cool pre-dawn gloom, he saw Elisa walking her little Jack Russell Terrier Morgan. You'll never guess what happened, she said. Larry's gone. Where the hell did he go? Greg said. He left last night. We had an argument. He left. He said he's going back to the cult. Greg, like most of Larry's friends, knew all about his time at Rant the School of Enlightenment. He focused on the immediate question. So Larry won't be showing anymore? No, Alisa said.

He said he's done with showing. This was definitely weird. Larry had devoted the past three years of his life and God knows how much money to establishing himself in the horse world. To a practical guy let Greg, throwing that all away was unthinkable. But then Larry had gone on. off to rant the once before. Just before seven, Greg went back to his hotel room. Elisa and Sarah, who was supposed to be 600 miles away, came in right after.

Greg's daughter Debbie was there, right in front of the TV, her eyes wide. You won't believe what just happened, she said. You won't believe what just happened, Greg said. Larry's left, ran away to join a cult. Debbie didn't take her eyes away from the screen, and Greg took a look at it himself. The date was September 11, 2001, so I'm sure you know what they were looking at. As they watched, the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in a huge cloud of smoke and rubble. When Debbie asked Elisa where Larry had gone, Elisa said he'd gone to Florida to join a cult.

How's Larry going to get to Florida? Debbie said. All of the planes have been grounded. Elisa blinked, confused. She's lying, Debbie thought. A little later, Debbie saw Elisa and Sarah driving off in Larry's big new red duly truck. Larry couldn't fly out, and he obviously hadn't driven off. So how exactly had he left the city of industry? In the bed of the truck, what were a folded wheelchair, two shovels that looked shiny and new, suitcases, golf clubs, laundry bags, and a cooler.

As to what actually happened to Larry McNabbany, only Alisa and Sarah knew, and you couldn't trust either of them farther than you could kick them. But here is probably the most likely version. On the night of September 10th, Elisa called Sarah up in Sacramento and said she had to come back down to City of Industry because Larry had gone crazy. Sarah got one of the last flights before everything would be grounded the next morning and landed at about 10.30 p.m. They walked around the stables, smoked a lot of weed, then sat in Larry's truck. Elisa, first alone and then with Sarah, made several trips up to the hotel room to check on Larry through the night. Elisa told Sarah he was drunk and crazy.

In reality, she'd probably dosed him with more horse tranquilizers. One time, when they went up, Sarah waited outside and heard some kind of clumsy struggle inside. Then Elisa came out and showed her a mark on her tailbone where she said Larry had kicked her. Maybe he had, or maybe she threw herself into the edge of a table for verisimilitude. Who knows? When Elisa and Sarah were telling everyone Larry had run off to a cult, he was still upstairs in the room, getting ever more weird and loopy.

Elisa told Sarah they needed to move him to another hotel because of the way he was acting, embarrassing. So they rented a wheelchair from a medical supply place and rolled Larry out to the truck. He was docile now, mumbling and out of it. When Elisa said they were going to another hotel, he slurred out, Okay, Blanchy, okay.

Sarah said she didn't remember buying the shovels. She'd been a full night without sleep and had been smoking weed pretty much constantly throughout that night, so maybe. They put Larry in the back seat of the truck where he slumped down. Nobody could see him from outside. Once they were on the road, Elisa told Sarah to keep driving. What about Larry, Sarah said. Don't worry about it, Elisa said. We're going back to Lodi.

But as she gave Sarah directions, it was soon obvious that that wasn't true either. Elisa set them driving through the desert toward the Sierra Nevada Mountains. What's going on, Sarah said? For your own good, you should forget you ever saw Larry today, Elisa said. He was never in this truck. A little later, she told Sarah she'd given Larry an overdose of special K, ketamine. Maybe that was what she'd given him, although Elisa wasn't really a detail-oriented kind of gal, and she called all horse tranquilizers by the blanket term special K,

and figured they were all pretty much the same. She'd just grabbed some vials out of Greg Whalen's veterinary bag. Ketamine might fit with Larry's half-holucinatory state, especially if it was also in the water bottle Elisa kept handing back to Larry whenever he said he was thirsty. There were other drugs in Greg's veterinary bag that would have been far more deadly. Elisa had probably put some of the drug into either the soup or wine she'd brought Larry, probably the wine, as that was what he was most likely to finish. When he'd passed out, she'd dripped the rest into his mouth.

Larry, waking and starting to get weird, was unexpected. She'd expected Larry to just drift off into death, which he probably would have if she'd given him Ace Promocene. As they drove toward the mountains, Larry mostly dozed in the back, sometimes waking up enough to stare blankly out the windows of the truck. His weird, broken comments suggested he was hallucinating events from his past, which is just absolutely heartbreaking.

When they were up in the hills, Elisa had seen, Sarah turned down into Yosemite National Park. They drove through the trees with Larry mumbling in the back. Was this where Elisa had planned to bury Larry if he had died? Is that what the shovels were for? But Larry didn't die. Most people would have, but years of substance abuse had built up Larry's tolerance. One time when Elisa had spiked his wine with a hefty dose of Vicodin, he hadn't even noticed and it hadn't affected him at all. When it became obvious that Larry wasn't going to stop breathing. Elisa had Sarah head back to Lodi. When they eventually got back to the house, Elisa said she was going to put Larry to bed. Oh, good, we're home, he said, as she helped him to the

door. Sarah went home and immediately got into a huge fight with her parents. They'd just had a call from an auto dealer in Texas who told them the check Elisa had used to buy Sarah's BMW had bounced, and either they got the car back to him pronto or he'd have Sarah charged with auto theft. Thanks, best friend, right? Her dad had gone over to Sarah's apartment and got the car and also picked up her little Maltese terrier to look after with Sarah apparently gone for the night. So at around 10 p.m., Sarah drove over to her parents in the big red truck, grabbed her dog, and drove back down to Elisa's place in Lodi. When she got there, there was no sign of Larry, and she asked Elisa where he was. Don't worry about it, she said, just don't worry about it. Larry was upstairs in

bed, having been overdosed with another drug Elisa had grabbed from the veterinary bag, Zylazine. This was very dangerous stuff, and unless an overdose is treated at the hospital, it will usually lead to circulatory collapse and respiratory failure. And this one did the trick. When at Lisa checked on Larry at 6 a.m., he was dead. She woke up Sarah, who was sleeping on the couch, and told her. Sarah went up to look herself and saw Larry lying dead on the bed.

They wrapped him in a sheet, then wrapped the sheet with duct tape to hold it in. Then they dragged Larry's body out to the garage where there was a refrigerator. They took out all the shelves and crammed in Larry's body, still wrapped in the sheet and duct tape. They forced the door closed, but it opened a little while later, so Sarah wrapped the duct tape all the way around the fridge to keep it closed. They thought about burying him in the yard, or out at Greg Wayland's place, or just out in the desert, but in the end they just left. in there. The next day, Elisa had Sarah go search the law office for the title to Larry's $50,000 truck. She already had a prospective buyer set up, but she couldn't close the deal without the title. Elisa drove back down to the city of industry to help with the horses and seemed completely

unworthy about Larry supposedly running off to join a cult. Both Greg and Debbie noticed that Larry's gold Rolex was now on Elisa's wrist. She forged Larry's name on the title transfer for the truck and sold it for just over half of the $50,000 Larry had bought it for just a few months ago. On her way to the seller, with Sarah following in a Mustang, rented on a McNabbney and Associates credit card that was about to burst into flames, Elisa pulled over so she could toss the wheelchair from the back of the truck onto the sidewalk, saying they didn't need it anymore.

Yeah, but somebody will need it. Elisa, he rented the damn thing. But, of course, going a tiny fraction out of her way to do a normal, decent thing, was asking way too much from our girl, just toss the freaking thing on the sidewalk. walk. Unbelievable. And then, Elisa and Sarah carried on as if nothing had happened at all. They went to work at the law firm alongside their new employee, Ginger, and almost immediately had a big win. Well, sort of. They had a client, Michael Carter, who'd been in a car rack, and the insurance carrier offered to settle for $150,000. Larry had thought the case was worth twice

that at least, but Elisa took the offer right away. She wanted money right now, and not just the eight and a half percent the firm was entitled to. The settlement money would sit in the client trust account, and Elisa had no problem using that cash as her own. Within a month, there was only $593 left in the client trust account, with absolutely none of it going to the poor guy who'd been in that car wreck. Yeah, good luck what those medical bills, dude. God, this bitch is the worst. Look, that's, that's like some serious spending. That's crazy spending. It's insane. I don't even know how you would do it. Yeah, bananas. Lisa and Sarah were still touring the horse show circuit, with Elisa trying to cash in by selling

just a lot of page. This Ritsy horse scene was pretty close-knit, and there was plenty of gossip about the McNabbneys, that Larry had run off with another woman, that Elisa and Sarah were having La Dollar Bean sex, and that Elisa had murdered Larry, just harmless goss. People probably laughed when they said it. And there was even more gossip when somebody walked in on Elisa and Greg Whalen getting frisky in a horse doll. Oh, my God.

All this witness would tell people was that they should have gotten a motel room. Putting on a little show of their own, eh? Yeah. Greg would deny having an affair with Elisa, though. And when the cops asked him about it later, he'd say, I never had sex with that woman. Yep. Sounded just like Bill Clinton in 1998. And in the words of Larry David on curb your enthusiasm, I think she blew him.

There's a big difference between being a good liar and just lying a lot, and Lisa was definitely in the latter camp. She just couldn't get her story straight about what had happened to Larry. He'd gone to a cult in Florida. He'd gone to a cult in Costa Rica. He was in rehab. He was hiding from drug dealers. People talked, and they noticed the discrepancies.

Yeah, and things at McNabney and associates weren't going great either. People had a hard time getting in touch with anyone who could give them answers or make a decision on any matter, because Elisa, deliberately created confusion. When people called, she'd pretend to be Sarah, or would have Sarah pretend to be her, or they'd both pretend to be Ginger. They even invented a fake, incompetent employee, Tessa.

Tessa would take messages for Elisa or Larry, but wouldn't you know it, the dumb bitch just never passed him on. For God's sake, Tessa. Again, Tessa did not exist. She was a fictional employee. The most persistent callers, and the ones who got the run around most were Michael Carter and his wife. This was the guy who got in the car accident.

They had medical bills that McNabbney and associates were supposed to be paying as part of their settlement, and that wasn't happening. The few checks, Elisa did cut them, bounced. It was the shitty treatment of the Carter's that started Ginger Miller really thinking hard about her new job. She'd started on September 1st, and after a few weeks she realized that although Elisa and Sarah were always talking about Larry, She'd never actually met the guy herself. They told her, Larry's doing this or Larry's doing that, but they didn't always say the same thing.

Like, one day Sarah said Larry was skiing and Elisa said he was playing golf, two things that you really shouldn't try to do at the same time. In November, Ginger found out that Elisa hadn't paid the office's rent. The complaining calls ramped up, most often from creditors, including one very determined lady who wanted to talk about a missing wheelchair. error. Elisa just told Ginger to blame everything on Tessa. While Ginger was dealing with this never-ending wave of angry callers, Elisa and Sarah were usually out shopping. Elisa bought herself a $68,000 jaguar, although she bought it in Sarah's name. You know, to help her credit. And then

Ginger's paychecks started bouncing. Hungry mouths talk, she told Sarah, which I guess is marginally more polite than pay me, bitch, but the meaning was clear. And it's a stone cold line. What a mic drop. Hell yeah, Ging. I take back what I said about you being part of the Charlie's Devils. You're an angel for sure. After that, Sarah gave her the cold shoulder, but Elisa, for the first time, wanted to spend time with Ginger. She asked her to a party at Greg Whalen's ranch out in the country. By this time, Ginger had heard the rumors that Elisa might have killed Larry and decided, nah, I'm not going to do that. out. What she did instead, on the last day of November, was go to the Sacramento Sheriff's Department and slip a note under the door saying they might want to take a look at Elisa McNapney and Sarah Dutra. But at least initially, no one at the Sheriff's Department took Ginger's tip very seriously.

Other people were starting to get worried about Larry, though. He had a record of occasionally going off on wild drinking vendors, but he'd now been missing for about two months, far longer than he'd ever been gone before. His son Joe kept trying to get in touch. He and his dad weren't super close, but it was weird for them to go months without talking. So he kept calling. Finally, Elisa told him Larry was indeed out on a drinking binge,

but he was coming home soon and would check into rehab straight away. On December 13th, Elisa and Sarah drove to Vegas and Sarah's shiny new jag to go to the national finals rodeo. At first, they wanted to check into the enormous Balagio Hotel. Right after 9-11, it wasn't uncommon for parking attendants in big places like that to ask patrons to pop open their trunks for inspection. Sarah opened the trunk from the driver's seat, but Elisa hurried out of the car and slammed it shut again before the attendant could get a look. They changed their minds, she said. They'd stay somewhere else. What was in the trunk that she didn't want anybody to see? You can probably guess.

Elisa was spending like a millionaire. By December, she'd burst. through all the settlement money owed to the Carter's, and all of the $145 grand she'd stolen from Larry. McNabney and associates were being evicted from their office for not paying four months of rent. Elisa couldn't pay for 16-year-old Haley to have her own apartment anymore, so she moved into the Lodi House. Sarah often stayed there, too, the three of them sharing one big bed like kids on a sleepover. At the start of 2002, two young women were jogging in Sacramento when they found a big silver, belt buckle. On it was engraved Larry McNabbney, AQHA Rookie of the Year, 1999. Figuring it was at least of sentimental value to its owner, one of them looked up McNabney in the phone book and found only one,

Larry's son Joe, who came over and picked up the belt buckle. He had no idea how it had gotten there. Elisa had Sarah and Haley dump Larry's clothes and personal belongings into city dumpsters, and one of them must have dropped Larry's prize buckle. Elisa then sold most of the furniture in the house, stashing whatever she wanted to keep in the horse trailer. Hands from Greg Whelan's ranch helped her throw stuff out. Elisa let them keep a few things, including the refrigerator from her garage. Oh my God. Yeah. Horrific.

Oh. She arranged for someone to tow the trailer down to Scottsdale, Arizona, where she was moving to. Ginger Miller called the sheriff's department again, and now, with an actual investigation started, into Larry's four-month disappearance, they took her seriously when she told them Elisa was getting ready to leave town. Deputies managed to get hold of the trailer before it left town, but Elisa was already on the road, with Haley and the Red Jaguar, zipping down toward the Grand Canyon. They didn't stop in Scottsdale long, though. As soon as she heard her trailer had been impounded, Elisa hit the road again with her daughter heading east. In the middle of January, Sarah learned that there was an open missing

person's case on Larry and came forward to the sheriff's department. Elisa had taken off in a jaguar that theoretically belonged to Sarah, and she was smart enough to wonder if Elisa intended for her to take the fall for more than just the car payments. This was the first of five police interviews with Sarah, which were full of contradictions and only maybe got close to the truth at the end. If she'd gone to an attorney first, or even if she'd just been honest in that first interview, things might have gone differently from her. But Like they say, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. When Larry's body was finally discovered on February 5th, Sarah was in a world of trouble.

The pathologist examining Larry knew a little about his love for horse shows, so she ran a talk screen for drugs on horses and discovered the xylazine in a system. A lot of it. 8 milligrams per liter. One person was known to have died from 0.3 milligrams. Oh, wow. This was, yeah, this was massive overkill. and made it next to impossible that Larry had administered the drug himself. He'd have passed out before he could get it all into his system. Investigators found the refrigerator Greg Whelan's ranch hands had taken from Elisa and Larry's house.

Brown stains on the bottom and on the door tested positive for blood in a preliminary exam. There was evidence of something sticky, like tape adhesive, on the inside. And the fridge was big, big enough that you could squeeze a six-foot-tall guy like Larry McNabdy into it. It wouldn't be easy, but you could do it. They were confident they'd found where Larry's body had been stored for most of the time between his disappearance and discovery. They were equally confident that Elisa McNamney was his killer. But she wasn't Elisa McNabney anymore. As Elisa and Haley hit the road out of Arizona, Haley wanted to know what was going on. Elisa told her she was wanted for kidnapping

from way back when she'd taken Haley out of Florida as an eight-year-old. That was why they'd always had to go by different names. And now Elisa would be Shane Ivoroni. Who did Haley want to be? She chose Penelope. Bless her heart. Motoring along in a $68,000 car, but with hardly anything in the way of actual cash, they soon hit New Mexico, where Elisa saw red lights flashing in the rearview mirror. Elisa thought, correctly, that she'd just been stopped for speeding, but she didn't have a license, and the car wasn't in her name. That's the kind of stuff that lands you in the county lockup with lots of questions being asked, but at least I hadn't forgotten the skills she'd learned way back in high

school. She turned on the flirty charm, flashed that big smile of hers, and the cop let her go without even asking to see her license. Good job, bro. She used her horse skills to work in Kentucky for a week or so, then drove on down through Tennessee and Alabama. It only takes a glance at a map to see she was slowly, one part-time job at a time, working her way back home to Florida. She was completely out of money, though. One time, she and Haley had to stay in a church homeless shelter, pulling up in their brand-new jag that Elisa couldn't sell because it was in Sarah's name. But Elisa landed on her feet as easy as a cat.

She was out driving when a guy in a jaguar just like hers pulled up alongside and said, Nice car. She smiled back and said, nice car, too. The guy took her to a casino, and within day, Elisa and Haley were living in this guy's condo in Destin on the Florida panhandle. He was pretty well off, the owner of a local furniture store, and this would have been a good place to lay low for a while. But you might as well tell a leopard to lose its spots as tell Elisa to change her behavior. She took out credit cards in the guy's name, with Shane Ivoroni

as an authorized user. He found out, of course, kicked her and Haley out of his condo and called the sheriff, giving them the number of Elisa's Jaguar. She knew this would bring all the California attention down on her, so Elisa picked up a guy and went home to bed with him. And while he was asleep, she stole $600 and some credit cards out of his wallet and the keys to his Dodge truck. Before dawn, she'd picked up Haley and was racing for the state line with Georgia. The next morning, Elisa's date, a dry cleaner, found his truck missing. But in its place was a jaguar convertible with the keys in it. He had to go to work so he took the jag and was almost instantly swarmed by cops,

looking for Larry McNabbney's murderer. Can you freaking imagine this poor bastard? By the time they knew to look for a red Dodge truck, Elisa was nearly in South Carolina. Haley, though, wasn't happy. The last time this had happened, she'd been eight years old, and her mom was the center of her world. Now she was 17, and she'd made friends in Destin, including a boyfriend, and now they were on the road again. What was going on? What about her own life? Didn't she have a right to that? They alternately argued and cried all the way to Charleston, and in a motel room there, Elisa, we should probably start calling her Lauren again now. Lauren told Haley most of what had happened, why they'd run from

Florida, her thefts, how she'd killed Larry and kept him in a fridge for months before burying him pretty much the whole dirty deal. In the morning, they headed back to Florida, pulling into Destin that evening. Lauren put Haley in a cab so she could go stay with her friends, then wrote her daughter an eight-page letter. Then she took the last of her weed from the truck and headed for the beach. Her plan was to swim out into the ocean as far as she could until she was too

tired to make her way back and would drown. But she wanted one last joint first. The police had Haley's friends under surveillance and picked her up as soon as she arrived. She told him she was worried her mom would hurt herself, so they followed her directions to the beach and arrested Lauren as she sat

on the sand and smoked. Florida detectives interviewed her that night, She confessed to killing Larry, and half tried to justify it with tales of abuse and threats. The confessions, full of contradictions, mistakes, and easily proven lies, though. You can't trust Lauren. She threw Sarah under the bus, saying she'd been there for Larry's poisoning at the hotel and even administered some of it herself, but that didn't really fit with the admittedly confused timeline she offered. Sarah hadn't come back from Sacramento until hours afterwards.

As for the actual final fatal dose of xylazine, which Lauren still called special K, she said Larry had taken that himself on the evening of September 11th, back in the house in Lodi after his hallucinatory tour to Yosemite and back. He'd wanted to kill himself, Lauren said, so she showed him how and gave him the xylazine, which she's been keeping in a vizine bottle. Larry chugged it all down by himself. Lauren said she'd take him to the hospital if he wanted, but he didn't. Do you believe that?

You shouldn't believe that. No. Lauren murdered him. She'd been planning it for weeks. That was why she'd moved so much money into her own accounts the previous month. That was why she'd already made arrangements to sell Larry's truck days before he died. That was why, like the dumb ass she was, she'd been asking around if horse tranquilizers could kill a guy. When she'd gotten wind that the police were seriously looking into Larry's disappearance,

Lauren and Sarah had put his body in the back of the jag and driven to the road. you in Las Vegas, hoping to bury him somewhere there, which is a weird choice when you're driving through mountains and across deserts to get there, but there you go. Again, dumbass. But the land around Vegas was apparently too hard, so they drove home. At four in the morning, Lauren went out in the jag again and started digging a hole in a vineyard not far south of where they lived. At first, she suggested it was just her.

Then she said Sarah was there, too. It was dark and it was raining, and Lauren couldn't see much of what she was doing. She buried Larry as best she could. Then she drove around for hours shoving her and Larry's clothes into dumpsters all over the place. And then she went home where she and Sarah cleaned the jaguar in the fridge. Not long after Lauren signed her statement, Sarah was arrested in California. Lauren was infuriated when she watched the press conference about the arrest. She'd wanted to sell her story to the movies.

And these guys were just giving it away for free. Oh my God. Way to keep your priority straight, Lauren. She lawyered up and was soon transferred back to her hometown of Brooksville to away extradition. There, she had what I can only assume was a really strange jailhouse reunion with her family. In jail, Lauren wrote a letter to her attorney complaining that the guards weren't observing her as frequently as they should or providing the required access to a phone and shower. She said her family should have a good case against the jail. And later that night, she tore her sheet into strips to make a rope and hanged herself in her cell.

If she hadn't, there's every chance Sarah Dutro would have been offered a plea deal to testify against Lauren. Instead, the prosecution went after her for first-degree murder and tried to get a conviction by painting her as the driving force behind Larry's murder. That was a stretch. Lauren's statements in Florida were inadmissible, and Lauren was such a liar that they wouldn't have been much good anyway. The main evidence against Sarah was her own statements to the police, which showed a lot of evasiveness and lies in the early interviews before finally, maybe coming somewhere near the truth. The jury hung on the first degree murder charge. They hung on the second degree, too, by one holdout. Everybody else wanted to convict. So Sarah Dutro was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and accessory after the fact and given the maximum sentence, 11 years. She was

released in 2011 and she seems to have kept herself off the radar ever since. Yeah, so here we go again. another opportunist who managed to fall ass backwards into a great situation, a relationship with a guy who really loved her, with the potential to make plenty of money and show her plenty of fun. He'd been sober for years. She's the one that discouraged him from staying that way. Rather than embrace that and embrace him and be grateful for what she had, she had to let the greed goblin take over.

And like the greed goblin always does, it left nothing but ruin and heartbreak. Took out a good guy, left his family and friends heartbroken, and then took out Lauren slash Elisa herself. Not to mention Sarah Dutra. Was it worth it? Hell no. You know, money's great, y'all, but not when it's a sickness. We've got to fight that shit.

It'll eat us alive. So that was a wild one. Right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe. Until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Victoria, Morgan, Abby, Miriam, Shirley, Kathy, Kathy, Vail-Rue.

That was the next name that got me flummox there, Vail Rue, that's so pretty. And Sienna. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes even two, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10,

virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. For great TCCC merch, visit the True Crime Campfire store at Spreadshirt.com. And check out our website at truecrimecampfirepod.com. You can listen to us on YouTube now too. Thank you.