The stunning marriage of Larry and Elisa, conducted at the Reno Hilton, with Haylei in attendance, is only the curtain raiser on the central mystery of the McNabney tragedy, which is, after all, why? Why in the world would Larry McNabney have married a woman he then knew for certain was a thief? Why would he have stayed with her during all the years that followed? Why was he still with her on September 11, 2001, the day he disappeared from a hotel at a quarter horse show east of Los Angeles, never to be seen again, until months later, when he was finally, indisputably dead?

Indeed, asking why even begs the question: why in the world would Larry McNabney ever have hired Elisa Redelsperger in the first place, way back in June or July of 1995? Why did he put Elisa in virtually complete control of the law firm he had sunk so much money into, and worked so hard to build up? Hadn’t he realized that Elisa was not to be trusted, if not already a convicted criminal? Larry was, after all, an experienced criminal lawyer—he’d had plenty of encounters with the criminal element before. He knew the talk, he knew the walk, and he certainly knew how to find out what someone’s past was all about. And by the summer of 1995, Larry was aware, at the least, of Elisa’s immediate past: her brief marriage to Kenneth Redelsperger had to have been a warning flag of the reddest hue. Larry would have to have been a fool not to have consulted the Las Vegas businessman about his own unhappy experience with Elisa the year before, and if there was one thing Larry was not, it was a fool. Indeed, it later became apparent to some of Larry’s Reno friends that Larry had actually met Redelsperger and had talked with him about Elisa. The story in Reno was all too familiar: that Elisa had met Redelsperger by going to work in his office, had dazzled him, married him, and then run off with a substantial amount of his money, all in just a few months. It is inconceivable that Larry would not have known this history.

So what gives? Why would Larry not only continue his association with Elisa/Laren Sims Jordan/Redelsperger, but actually make her Mrs. McNabney Number Five?

For the likely answer to this, we’ll have to make a brief side trip to the movies.

Later Nancy Eklof could recall the scene, the setting: the Rapscallion Seafood House & Bar in Reno. There Nancy, Larry and Elisa often had lunch in the fall of 1995, before the ill wind of Jeffrey Moore had made Elisa suspect. Elisa, Nancy recalled, would enjoy a plate of “Angels on Horseback,” scallops wrapped in bacon, while Larry went for the turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy. Nancy loved to recite well-known lines from famous movies, to the amusement of Larry and Elisa. One of her favorites was from the 1962 cult classic, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? There is a scene in the movie where Joan Crawford, playing the role of Blanche, a one-time movie star, an alcoholic now confined to a wheelchair, is tormented by her younger sister, also a former film star, Bette Davis, playing the role of Jane.

“You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair,” Blanche tells her sister. Jane is quick to respond:

“But cha AAH, Blanche, ya AAH in that chaiaah!”

As Nancy voiced these lines, including the accent adopted by Bette Davis, Larry and Elisa roared with delight. And from then on, and for years afterward, right up until the fateful day, each persisted in calling the other “Blanche.”

Because they both were in that chair, and there wasn’t a thing either one of them could do about it—not without destroying themselves in the bargain.

The outlines of this pact of Mutually Assured Destruction between Larry and Elisa are vague, it is true, but nevertheless discernible in the events that were to mark the course of their six-year relationship.

First, it seems more than possible that when Larry professed “shock” at Elisa’s tapping of the client trust account, he was being disingenuous. By early December of 1995, he had already had conversations with Nancy Eklof about the unpaid advertising bills, and had almost immediately had them paid—nearly $100,000. So it seems possible that Larry had instructed Elisa to dip into the trust money to pay off the advertisers in a sort of float game—planning to repay the money to the account when later insurance settlements came in. But then Elisa’s use of the account later to buy the horse resulted in the bounced check, alarming Barbara Westerlund, who told Moore, who in turn, agonizing about what this might mean to his career, told Durney and Brennan. Once the cat was out of the bag, Larry had no choice but to put all the blame on Elisa if he wanted to save his law license and even prevent his possible arrest for criminal embezzlement. Of course, Elisa might well have responded that she’d bought the horse only after Larry had told her to pay off the television advertising bill with the client trust money—in other words, Larry was as guilty as she was, and Larry had a lot more to lose than she did. Elisa had learned the extortion game very well while working for Larry, the personal injury lawyer.

So perhaps the best thing for all concerned was to keep the whole thing secret—television ads and horse alike. Which may have been why Moore emerged, for a while at least, as “the golden boy,” why Larry treated him so well—at least up until the time of the marriage. Moore even remembered that a week or so after she was banned from the law office, Elisa called him a second time to tell him how grateful she and Larry both were that he had reported the defalcation to Durney and Brennan; left unsaid was the gratitude of Larry and Elisa that Moore hadn’t called the bar instead.

Then, when Pinkerton talked to Elisa to get her side of the story, Elisa asked him if the bar and anyone else could force her to testify against Larry if they were married. This happened, Pinkerton was sure, before the marriage actually took place. Elisa’s statement seems to indicate that she had possible knowledge of Larry’s involvement in the trust account diversion: that indeed, the price of her silence was a marriage license.

The entire situation over the trust account reeked of quid pro quo, of mutual blackmail. And over the ensuing years, there would be still other clues to the nature of this “wheelchair” alliance. Tom Hogan, the Florida lawyer who had represented Laren Sims Jordan and Laren’s family near Brooksville, would say that he was surprised to have received a telephone call from his old client, Laren, in the late summer of 1995. By that point, Laren/Elisa had been out of contact with her family for more than two years. Hogan recalled that Elisa asked him what it would take for her to square things with the authorities in Florida so she could return without fear of going back to jail. Laren/Elisa would only tell him that she was in Nevada, but wouldn’t give him a telephone number; she would call him, she said. Hogan told her he would check around, and did; in a subsequent conversation, he told Laren/Elisa that if she paid the court-ordered restitution to her victims, the chances were very good that she wouldn’t have to do any more time. At that point, the amount was certainly less than $5,000. Laren/Elisa told Hogan that she’d get back to him.

Then, some months later, Hogan said, Laren/Elisa called him back and said that she had married a Nevada lawyer. When Hogan asked her about her plans for the restitution and recovering her freedom in her own name, she told him that she’d talked the whole thing over with her new husband, the lawyer, and he had told her to sever all contact with Hogan, and not to trust him. Still later, after she was finally arrested in connection with Larry’s death, Hogan said, Laren/Elisa told him that Larry had insisted that she not turn herself in on the outstanding Florida charges in order to have something with which to control her. Thus, each partner in the marriage would have something to hold over the other: Larry’s involvement in the trust account diversion for Elisa, Elisa’s criminal record for Larry, even-steven.

There is also the story that Larry himself told his son, Joe, sometime during the summer of 1998. When Joe observed that Larry didn’t seem to be happy with Elisa, Larry—a bit drunk, according to Joe—told his son that he couldn’t afford to leave Elisa, that she could “ruin” him. To Joe, that sounded like Elisa was blackmailing Larry.

And finally, there is the most interesting clue of all: throughout their relationship, right up until September 11, 2001, Larry and Elisa/Laren called each other by their own pet nickname: “Blanche.”

It also seems clear that by December of 1995, Larry’s drinking and drugging and spending were out of control—that is, he’d lost all comprehension of how much he’d actually spent, or even where. Larry’s acquaintances during this time repeatedly mentioned that Larry was prone to go off on “runners”—binges of drinking and drugging in which he would simply disappear for days at a time, a sort of Lost Weekend of the nineties. By early 1996, in fact, Larry had an unpaid American Express bill of about $80,000 which had to be addressed. By borrowing money from Combs, Brennan and Durney, and Atcheson, Larry was able to replenish the missing trust account money and to get rid of the burgeoning American Express bill.

Looking back, some of Larry’s closest friends decided that Elisa had played a critical role in Larry’s eventual demise. They believed she’d served as Larry’s willing enabler whenever he went off on one of his binges. In contrast to the first four wives, some thought, Elisa made no effort to rein in any of Larry’s appetites. Some thought, in fact, that Elisa played a role in actually fueling those appetites, particularly when they had been in Las Vegas together; there was a vague sense that Elisa had cocaine connections in Las Vegas that she had helped Larry tap into, although this might have stemmed merely from the fact that most people knew that Elisa had grown up in Florida, associated in the popular mind with cocaine ever since the days of Miami Vice. Certainly Larry hadn’t needed anyone’s help before in locating drugs.

After their marriage, some of Larry’s friends tried to get Elisa to work on him to quit drinking and drugging, but she said she was powerless to make him stop. At one point, she told them, she’d tried to get Larry to go back to rehab, but he wouldn’t do it. Later, looking back, some of the same friends decided that indulging Larry’s penchant for drugging and drinking was part of Elisa’s plan from the start: “She got him coked up to control him,” said one friend. Or as another put it, “She allowed him to do whatever he wanted … she told him everything was under control so he didn’t have to worry, she would take care of it for him.”

Nancy Eklof was later to vividly recall a trip to Cancún, Mexico, that Larry and Elisa took that spring with Nancy and her boyfriend. There was a gigantic hassle, Nancy recalled, about getting a passport for Elisa, who did not have one, and who probably couldn’t get one as a fugitive felon. Nancy recalled that Larry did something—pulled some strings somehow—and a passport somehow was produced, perhaps under the name Redelsperger; Nancy wasn’t exactly sure. But the trip came off. Nancy was to remember Larry and Elisa arguing much of the time, and Elisa crying a lot. Nancy also recalled her boyfriend, who was skeptical of Elisa, mentioning that if Elisa wanted to murder Larry, Cancún was a good place to do it. Nancy thought the remark odd at the time.

What may have actually occurred in the trouble over the passport was that Larry finally and for the first time realized the extent of Elisa’s criminal history, including the warrant out for her arrest from fleeing probation in Florida; indeed it was shortly after this trip that Elisa had the conversation with Hogan in which she said that her new husband, the lawyer, had advised her not to trust her old lawyer, and to sever all connection with him.

Whatever transpired on this trip, one result seems to have been that Elisa somehow convinced Larry to let her back into the law office. Nancy Eklof recalled that Larry had assured her that Elisa had no access to any of the law firm accounts or even his own personal credit cards, and others in Reno recalled something similar. In fact, Larry used his control over the money as a means to keep Elisa on a leash, some in Reno remembered; it was a bit like being a lion tamer, with the money as the whip, and it appealed to Larry’s appetite for living dangerously.

The re-emergence of Elisa in the law office created fear and trepidation among the staff members, too, Moore said. Most knew that once she was back, it wouldn’t take Elisa long to get rid of the people she’d seen as disloyal to her, particularly Jeffrey Moore, his legal assistant Johanna, Barbara Westerlund, and several others. On March 8, 1996, Elisa sent around a memo, telling Moore and Johanna that a staff meeting that had been scheduled for the following day had been cancelled. The memo, said Moore, was seen as undisputed proof that Elisa had regained total control. That evening, he and Johanna and others in the firm who feared Elisa’s retribution stayed late, copying documents and checks that Elisa had signed as far back as September of 1995. When Elisa’s own assistant caught them making the copies, and ordered them out of the office, the anti-Elisa faction knew their days with McNabney and Associates had come to an end. Within a matter of days all had been fired or forced out, including Moore.

Within a week or so of his departure, Moore contacted the State Bar of Nevada and asked an anonymous question: would a non-lawyer law firm employee (he hadn’t yet taken the bar examination) have the same obligation to report a lawyer’s wrongdoing as a licensed attorney? The answer was yes. Over the next month or so, Moore composed a letter to the state bar, accusing Larry and Elisa of “numerous” ethical and legal violations. From September of 1995 through December, Moore informed the bar, Elisa had used the McNabney client trust account improperly, “for an extravagant lifestyle, which included routine trips in Lear jets, leased Jaguars, purchase of jewelry, a fur, trips abroad and purchase of equine,” or, in another word, the horse.

Moore went on to say that he’d reported the situation to “two attorneys in Reno,” and that as a result, Larry had tried to repair the problem by borrowing money to repay the client trust fund. “I know that at least three trust fund checks were returned to the bank for insufficient funds,” Moore added. In fact, Moore said, he suspected that the bank also tried to cover up the scandal.

Finally, said Moore, “Mr. McNabney literally threatened my hopes of practicing law in the state of Nevada. This has been a souring experience in my endeavor to pursue a legal career.” In other words, Larry had in effect blackballed Moore, so that he was unable to find a law job anywhere in Nevada.

At some point after this, the state bar association began an investigation of Larry McNabney and Associates, and as it turned out, Elisa did have to testify.

This took place in March of the following year, when the bar’s disciplinary board held a hearing to decide what to do. Larry’s private audit had been completed on the accounts Elisa had been using, and had shown that a total of $74,000 had been improperly taken from the client trust account, transferred into the law firm’s general account, and then paid out on “various liabilities of the firm … as chief operating officer for respondent’s law firm,” as the bar later characterized it. “It was Ms. Redelsperger [Elisa] who actively generated the financial transactions necessary to accomplish the above.”

The bar’s language in describing the events is as cautious as it is curious: it doesn’t say that Larry was unaware that Elisa was using the client trust account in this fashion, it only notes that it was Elisa “who actively generated” the transfers to satisfy “various liabilities of the firm …”

For her part, Elisa told the bar, she realized that it was wrong to transfer the money from the trust account. To make up for it, she said, she’d transferred at least $60,000 of Larry’s own money back into the trust account, using telephone and facsimile transfers from the various accounts. She told the bar investigators that she anticipated that a “big case” would come in, which would make it possible to put all the accounts back in order. Instead, Moore had spilled the beans to Durney and Brennan.

Although Pinkerton had told Larry that Elisa would have to be kept out of the law office, and Larry had agreed, she had crept back in, which was why Moore and his fellow anti-Elisans were thrown out. True, Larry had maintained iron control over the money. But now that the bar association had had its say, Elisa was finally, definitely, legally barred from the office. Larry wasn’t happy; he had come to rely on Elisa running things while he was out having fun. But the bar association made it clear that if Larry wanted to keep his license, Elisa would have to go, and for real this time.

In March of 1997, the bar found Larry guilty of two counts of unprofessional conduct, including failing to properly supervise the employees in his law firm, and improperly permitting his client trust account to be misused. For admitting these counts, the bar proposed that Larry be given a “public reprimand” and two “private reprimands.”

These reprimands were more than just a slap on the wrist. In a tight-knit town such as Reno, such a public censure was damaging in the extreme—they certainly would have negated all the expensive advertising that Larry had bought over the previous two years.

In a hearing held on March 6, 1997, Larry, Brennan, Durney, the auditor and Elisa all testified before a panel of the bar’s disciplinary board. For some reason, one of the panel members wanted all references made to Elisa Redelsperger McNabney contained in the reprimands to be deleted, and the full panel agreed to this. The purpose of this wasn’t entirely clear, although it may have been intended to keep Elisa’s name out of the news, and thus, may have been a part of some sort of bargain she’d made with Larry and/or the board. In any event, the reprimands, “as modified,” were made part of the public record. From that point forward, anyone who wanted to check the McNabney firm’s reliability with the bar would have access to this evidence of the firm’s checkered history.

After this, things began going downhill for McNabney and Associates. Some thought Larry was embarrassed by the scandal, while others, knowing him better, realized that he was simply tired of answering the question of why he had married Elisa. By May of 1997, he had sold the Buckaroo Court house, taking a $43,000 loss on the property. He and Elisa moved into another house in Caughlin Ranch, a rental, and then still later, an apartment, definitely heading down-market, some thought. Larry seemed discouraged, people agreed—depressed. He avoided many of his old friends, and went off on periodic benders. He had tried to become the King of Torts of Nevada, and had failed, and failure wasn’t something that a McNabney ever did.