Over 1996 and into 1997, Larry and Elisa grew more and more isolated from Larry’s life-long friends. True, Larry was embarrassed about the bar association investigation, and even more embarrassed when people asked him why in the world he’d married someone like Elisa, who had stolen from him. He was never able to explain to people, and eventually he simply stopped frequenting places where he could be recognized.

Later, some thought that this was Elisa’s method of setting Larry up: keep him away from those who could protect him from himself, as they had always done over the years. Eventually, in fact, Larry and Elisa would leave town for good, the better to keep Larry isolated from those who could save him, some of his friends thought. On the other hand, there were those who thought Larry was just too ashamed to stay in the town he had grown up in.

Elisa also strove to isolate Larry from his own family—or at least, that’s what his adopted daughter Tavia, who also lived in Reno, came to believe. “She didn’t like me,” Tavia said later, referring to Elisa. It was also clear that Tavia didn’t think much of Elisa, either; Tavia later decided that Elisa had kept her away from Larry because she was afraid that Tavia would unmask Elisa as a gold-digger. Eventually, in fact, Elisa convinced Larry to write a new will—one that shared all Larry’s assets between herself, Haylei, Joe and Cristin, but which cut Tavia out completely. Larry signed. Then Elisa told Joe and Cristin the news: that Tavia had been “cut out.”

Late in 1998, Larry and Elisa decided to move to the Sacramento, California, area and start anew. They opened a new law office on Howe Avenue in Sacramento, re-cut some of the old television commercials for airing in California, and tried to drum up some business. For Larry, there was at least one advantage in starting over: while Elisa had been barred from the office in Nevada, that wasn’t true in California—indeed, that may have been the real reason why Elisa’s name was deleted from the Nevada bar’s reprimands of Larry. That way, Elisa could work in Larry’s new office.

Looking back, it doesn’t seem that Larry’s heart was really in the business anymore.

“He’d lost a step,” one of his Reno friends observed, “the way a ballplayer loses it. He just wasn’t as fast as he used to be, and it was like he’d lost his confidence in himself. The Larry I knew—he was gone.” What remained was a man who was past his prime, at least in the law business.

How much any of this had to do with Larry’s apparent Faustian, ball-and-chain bargain with Elisa isn’t certain. By the time he and Elisa opened the new incarnation of McNabney and Associates in Sacramento, Larry had turned over almost all of the real responsibility for the law practice to Elisa—someone who wasn’t licensed to practice law, and who, indeed, was a fugitive felon. But Larry may have simply given up by this point.

He and Elisa began their life in California by renting a house in Fair Oaks, a small town just east of Sacramento. While Elisa drove into Sacramento each day to operate the law business in her husband’s name, Larry spent much of his time playing golf and drinking. The idea was that tort claimants would see Larry’s advertisements, call the office to hire him to represent them, and that Elisa would then close the deal with the insurance company. All Larry would have to do was sign the complaints and approve the settlements. Elisa would handle all the paperwork, including the banking.

Later, in 1999, Larry and Elisa would move to a town-house in Elk Grove, some miles southeast of Sacramento. By this point, Haylei and Larry weren’t getting along anymore; Haylei, then 15, considered Larry an abusive drunk and could barely stand to be around him. Elisa found places for Haylei to stay with friends, and eventually would rent an apartment for her daughter, hiring someone to stay with her. Haylei wasn’t happy, but what could she do? She had always been subject to her mother’s mercurial whims.

Meanwhile, Larry’s son Joe, who had lived with Larry and Elisa for part of the year in Reno after they were first married, was living in Sacramento. Unlike his sister Tavia, Joe got along well with Elisa. One day in the summer of 1998, Elisa invited Joe over for dinner. After the meal, Elisa and Haylei were in another part of the house, while Larry and Joe watched a game on television. Larry had been drinking, Joe admitted later. But he could tell that his father was unhappy in his marriage. In fact, Joe said, he had the impression that his father was afraid of Elisa.

“Maybe not quite afraid, but something weird was definitely up …” He indicated to me, she’s a compulsive liar. I think he says, she takes medication for it. And that he never would be able to leave her. He told me that—I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t really want to butt my nose into it. It didn’t sound good, the way he was expressing it to me, it didn’t look good. I just thought, you know, I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know what the two of them are doing, but I’m not—I’m not going to butt into their business so—But I knew she was faulty.”

Joe was pressed for more details, but he said he didn’t know any.

“I don’t know how it got brought up, [but] it did. But it wasn’t crying a sad story or anything. He was just telling me what this woman was all about.”

“Did he tell you why he couldn’t leave her?” Joe was asked.

“No.”

“Did he mention to you that she knew things about him?”

“No. That’s what I probably figured or something. That’s what was going through my head.”

“Did he mention to you that Elisa—if he left her, Elisa could destroy him?”

“No, he didn’t—No. Not in those words, no.”

“What words did he use when he talked about that subject?”

“Just that he couldn’t leave her. Never would be able to leave her and that was that. I didn’t ask him why, he didn’t tell me why. I just—That was that.”

During these years there had been a number of developments in the case of Larry’s old murder client, Jack Mazzan. More than twenty years after his conviction, Mazzan was still trying to avoid the death penalty for the killing of Richard Minor. Even before Larry and Elisa left Reno, new lawyers for Mazzan were contending that the Reno police had withheld critical information from Larry at the time of Mazzan’s trial—that in fact, the police had information that two drug-dealing acquaintances of Minor’s had come to town just before the killing, and that one of them felt that Minor had ripped him off. The police said this wasn’t so—they’d given Larry the information, but Larry had decided not to follow it up before Mazzan’s original trial. By the late 1990s, the issue was working its way up to the Nevada Supreme Court, with Mazzan’s new lawyers complaining that the “secret” police report meant that Mazzan should get a new trial. It appears that no one bothered to consult with Larry about the matter, however, or for that matter, with Nancy Eklof, who later said that Larry had long before told her that Mazzan was actually guilty, not only of Minor’s murder but also that of April Barber.

Then, in January of 2000, the Nevada Supreme Court held that the actual report on the other two suspects had been improperly withheld from Larry, and that they had never been sufficiently investigated by the police. The court ruled that Mazzan was entitled to a new trial. A tentative trial date was set for the fall of 2001. And while Larry couldn’t legally be a witness in any new trial, he certainly knew enough to throw the case into a huge uproar if he ever blabbed about what he knew, as he already had, at least once, to Nancy Eklof.

It was while Mazzan’s latest appeal was still winding its way through the Nevada courts that, in 1999, Larry and Elisa decided to move to Elk Grove, southeast of Sacramento. In June of that year, the McNabneys met the Whalens, and Larry developed a new interest: showing American quarter horses.

Just how all this came about was a little fuzzy. There were at least two versions of the events. In one, the introductions were made when Elisa, who had always had an interest in horses since her childhood as Laren Sims, met Greg Whalen’s daughter Debbie Kail one day in June of 1999 when their horses were stabled next to one another at a horse show in Oregon.

In the other version, told by Greg Whalen himself, Larry and Elisa were introduced to him by another Sacramento-area horse trainer at about the same time. In any event, a few months after the introductions were made, Greg and Debbie Whalen, along with Debbie’s husband Bob Kail, agreed to train Elisa’s horse—apparently the same animal that she’d purchased with the bad check from the client trust account, the one that had started all the trouble in Nevada. Greg was to recall that in the spring of 1999, Larry and Elisa bought a second quarter horse from a breeder, who had recommended that they take the horse to Whalen for training. At some point after that, Whalen would recall, Elisa’s horse was sold, and then the McNabneys added another to take its place. It appears that Elisa had convinced Larry that a good living could be made from the quarter horse industry; she also handled all the financial arrangements, according to Greg. As Greg would later point out, the care, feeding and training of a quarter horse was not cheap: the tab ran about $2,000 a month—per horse.

As Larry and Elisa hung around the Whalen ranch near Lodi more and more, they got to be good friends with the Whalen clan. Whalen would later observe, “we thought a lot of Larry and Elisa, both of them.” At one point, in fact, the McNabneys gave Greg Whalen a gold Rolex watch for his birthday.

As this relationship developed, Larry became increasingly interested in the horse show business. But this was typical of Larry: just like criminal law, just like Ramtha, just like torts, Larry’s initial enthusiasm propelled him along. Larry soon learned that the big money in quarter horses—at least for the owners, as opposed to the trainers like Whalen—came from the buying, selling and breeding of the animals. The Whalens taught him how to “show” the horses at the ever-occurring horse shows, and how, by winning points and climbing the ratings ladder, the shown horse could be made to increase in value.

For Larry, this was fun—all he had to do was look good. It appealed to his desire to be the star, at the center of attention. It was practically brainless, too, once one learned the ropes.

Thus, throughout the rest of 1999 and 2000, Larry spent his most sober attention on the horse shows, eventually taking up the showing of a gelding as an amateur exhibitor. As 1999 neared its end, Larry led the nation in first-year amateur points; for an award he received a large silver belt buckle with his name on it, along with the title “AQHA Rookie of the Year.” Larry was hooked. Throughout much of 1999 and 2000, Larry and Elisa traveled the country extensively, showing horses, often in the company of Greg Whalen.

Then, late in 2000, when he was starting to think about a new challenge in life as a horse breeder, Larry himself ran afoul of the law.

Getting caught while driving drunk is an inevitable fate for any alcoholic who drives. It simply cannot be prevented as long as the alcoholic continues to drink. For one thing, the alcoholic has become so used to having the drug in his or her system, there is no longer any awareness that one is impaired. Perceptions, reactions, all circuits seem perfectly normal. What is more, judgment is eroded: Since I seem perfectly normal, I must be; if I am, there’s nothing to prevent me from getting in my car and driving off. It was amazing, given all that he had drunk over the years, and all the drugs he had taken, that this was, as far as can be determined from the record, Larry’s first and only arrest for driving under the influence.

Of course, it may well have been that Larry had been stopped before—but that would have been in Reno, where he was well-known as a leading member of the bar (as well as the bars). But in California, to the California Highway Patrol, he was just another dangerous drunk on the road. The CHP had no special favors to perform for an unknown lawyer named Larry McNabney.

On the afternoon of December 5, 2000, Larry finished another round of golf at a course not far from the Whalen Ranch. Larry had been drinking—and drinking seriously. He got in his car, a 1994 blue Mercedes, and began driving home to Elk Grove. At one point on Highway 99, nearing Elk Grove, he swerved in front of another car, causing the driver to veer into the landscaped center median to avoid a rear-end collision. Larry seemed oblivious to what was behind him and drove off. The other driver was enraged at Larry’s discourtesy. Extricating his car from the divider, he called the California Highway Patrol on his cellular phone, and then set off in pursuit of Larry.

About twenty minutes later, Larry pulled up to the rented townhouse in Elk Grove, followed only minutes later by the aggrieved driver, and then the highway patrol. The Highway Patrol officers knocked on the door, demanding to see the driver of the Mercedes. Elisa told Larry that the police were there and wanted to talk to him. Larry ran out the back door of the house and made tracks as fast as he could. The CHP officers chased him and some minutes later brought him down with an open field tackle.

When he was brought into the Sacramento County sheriff’s station for processing, Larry first blew a .28 on the blood alcohol test, then a .27. More than three times the state’s legal limit, to achieve a .28, one would have to drink fourteen shot glasses of whiskey in an hour. People have been known to die of alcohol poisoning at .34, which is another illustration of how drunk Larry was.

This arrest seems to have depressed Larry more than almost anything else that had happened up until then. According to Elisa, he lost almost all interest in the law business, and began to spend most of his time drinking at home, only rarely coming into the office. And as he drank, he became more abusive, at least verbally, of Elisa. Yet he still seems to have had some good days. He was able to hire a lawyer, Georgeann McKee, a former Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy, to represent him on the drunk driving charge, and McKee, while realizing that Larry had a serious alcohol problem, also saw him as polite and contrite over his situation. She began working to try to extricate him from the arrest, while urging that he get some help. Larry made all the right noises about rehab, but didn’t seem motivated.

In the meantime, the driver who had been cut off by Larry was talking about suing. Elisa contacted McKee. McKee advised her to do nothing—let Larry’s insurance handle whatever the damages were, which appeared to be minimal. But Elisa insisted that they had to pay the other driver off. McKee was astounded one day to learn from Elisa that she’d given a check to the other driver for $25,000 to $35,000 dollars.

“I told her, ‘Elisa, you’re out of your mind,’” McKee recalled. “But she was insistent, they had to take care of this guy.”

This was certainly peculiar, McKee thought. It was only later that she wondered whether part of the problem was that Larry had no insurance—that Elisa might never have bothered to pay the premium.

Or maybe there was another angle: because Larry had been keeping Elisa on a tight leash with checks and credit cards since the State Bar of Nevada fiasco, maybe this was some sort of scam of Elisa’s—maybe Elisa saw in Larry’s misfortune a chance to pry some mad money for herself from the ordinarily controlling Larry. Maybe it was just Elisa’s way of scamming her own husband.

If that was the case, it was an omen of things to come.