Cold Blooded

Irresistibly Seductive, No One Ever Doubted Her. California attorney Larry McNabney was a wealthy and well-connected legal ace and the proud owner of a champion show horse. When his wife Elisa reported him missing in September, 2001, she claimed he abandoned her after a heated argument and joined a cult. Lethally Cunning, No One Ever Knew Her. When Larry's body was found in a shallow grave three months later, Elisa was gone. Driving a red convertible Jaguar, her brown hair bleached blonde, Mrs. McNabney was already speeding toward a new life in Florida-and a new identity.Who was Elisa McNabney? She was a female fugitive wanted in the murder of her trusting husband. She was an insinuating beauty with 38 aliases, and a rap sheet 113 pages long whose criminal career was about to come undone. But in the wake of Elisa's stunning confession and conviction, there was one more shocking surprise yet to come from the poisonous black widow... Carlton Smith was an award-winning journalist for The Los Angeles Times and The Seattle Times in the 1970s and 1980s. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting in 1988, he now works full-time as a true crime author. He lives in San Francisco. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. September 2001City of Industry, CaliforniaThe sun was still below the eastern horizon as Gregory Whalen left his hotel room on his way to the barns and the horses. He always fed at 5, and the horses knew it, so they would be waiting for him. The early morning air was cool, but it would soon warm up.Ahead in the early morning darkness, on a strip of grass walking her dog, Whalen saw his client—one of them, at least. Elisa McNabney was a beautiful woman—tall, dark, slender, with a vivacity that was inescapably seductive, at least to men. Elisa could look at you with her merry dark eyes and pin you with your own thoughts, even if you were, like Whalen, 72 years of age and old enough to know better.Elisa looked up as Whalen approached.“You’ll never guess what happened,” she said.“What?”“Larry’s gone,” Elisa said.“Gone? Where the hell did he go?”“He left last night,” Elisa said. “We had an argument. He left. He’s said he’s going back to the cult.”Nonplussed by this disclosure, Whalen said nothing. Elisa’s dog, Morgan, a Jack Russell terrier, sniffed at the grass. “So Larry won’t be showing anymore?” Whalen finally asked, coming to grips with the practical implications of this surprise. That was Greg: forget the philosophy, focus on the immediate.“No,” Elisa said. “He said he’s done with showing.”Whalen nodded. He turned and headed toward the barns, thinking the whole thing was strange, but then, rich people tended to be strange—at least, that was Whalen’s experience with them. After all the work that had been done, all the money that had been spent, to just throw it all away on a whim—to go join a cult? It wasn’t like Larry—or was it? As he entered the hotel elevator, Whalen thought back over the past few days, and when he replayed them in his mind, he realized that something had been brewing, all right.They had arrived at the horse show in the City of Industry, about forty minutes east of Los Angeles, on the Wednesday before, September 5. Whalen had brought the horses down from northern California in his trailer, accompanied by his daughter, Deborah Kail, like her father, a trainer, as well as an insurance broker who specialized in casualty coverage on expensive show horses, like those of the McNabneys’. Larry and Elisa had followed them down in Larry’s shiny new red Ford pickup truck, the one with the dark-tinted windows and dual rear wheels—a “dually,” it was called—that had cost Larry close to $50,000 earlier in the summer. They’d all checked into the Pacific Palms hotel and prepared for the Pacific Quarter Horse Classic, the first of two four-day shows where trainers and owners of American quarter horses, like Greg and Debbie, and Larry and Elisa, put their prized animals on display. “Just like a big dog show,” as Debbie Kail described it later, although it had as much in common with a fashion show as anything else. As the McNabneys’ trainers, it was Whalen and his daughter’s job to get the McNabney horses ready for the exhibitions. That meant exercising them, washing them, grooming them, all to make them look pretty as well as muscular. It was a full-time job, at least for Greg Whalen.Whatever one said about Larry and Elisa, the McNabney horses, at least, were champions. One, Justa Lotta Page, Larry’s yearling stallion, was worth at least $30,000 and maybe, quite soon, even a lot more. Tall, handsome, well-muscled, the sorrel-colored colt had a promising future in the American quarter horse sweepstakes. If things went right, Justa Lotta Page could eventually be sold to a breeder for many times what he had originally cost—just $12,500—when Larry McNabney had bought him as an 8-month-old colt from Whalen at the first of the year.Quarter horses were Greg Whalen’s business—had been for more than forty years, ever since he’d quit riding rodeo bulls in his native Texas, and started making money from horse fanciers instead. It was a long way from the days when Whalen’s father had raised broncos for the U.S. Army, back before World War II. From his ranch near Clements, California, north of Stockton, Whalen was something of a cross between a coach, a confessor, a barber and a chauffeur. His stock in trade was his knowledge of the American quarter horse breed. Greg bred the mares, picked the foals, raised them, trained them, then groomed them, mostly while acting as the agent of a steady stream of paying customers who formed the backbone of the horse show circuit—people, for the most part with a superabundance of both time and money, and an animating interest in displaying both. Exhibiting an American quarter horse wasn’t for either the faint of heart or the weak of pocket, as more than one trainer like Whalen had pointed out to a would-be client. In a sense, participating in horse shows was a bit like owning a large yacht: if you had to ask how much it cost, you couldn’t afford it. A serious exhibitor, like Larry was turning out to be, could easily spend $100,000 in one year on obtaining a horse, training, board and care, veterinary fees, transportation, accommodations and entry fees, and if the horse was a dog—so to speak—the money could never be recouped.Whalen had known the McNabneys for about three years. Larry, he knew, was a big-time lawyer from Nevada who had made a pile in personal injury lawsuits, mostly in Reno. Elisa, almost twenty years younger than Larry, was his fifth wife. She was the one who handled all the money. As Elisa had explained it to Greg’s daughter, Debbie, Larry didn’t like to be bothered with financial details, that was her job. Larry’s income, when it came, came in great gushing gobs, Elisa had explained; it was the nature of the business of representing clients in personal injury cases—feast or famine, as Elisa put it. Money would grow tight for a bit, then wham!—in came a huge settlement for some lawsuit, and the coffers would be filled to overflowing again. It all depended how fast Larry could make the insurance companies settle up, and for how much.Still, it didn’t seem to Greg that Larry was practicing much law these days. Ever since Greg had sold Larry Justa Lotta Page, on January 1, 2001, Larry had spent most of his time—and a lot of money—showing the horse. So far, Whalen and the McNabneys had been pretty much all over the West with the prized animal: Scottsdale, Arizona; Las Vegas, Nevada; Central Point, Oregon; Monroe, Washington; Fallon, Nevada; and a number of venues in California where prize horses were similarly exhibited.Justa Lotta Page hadn’t been broken to the saddle yet. Instead, he had been entered in halter competition, common for yearlings. This was where Larry, or Greg himself, simply led the colt into the center of the ring by means of a head halter. Points were awarded by the judge or judges based on the way the horse looked—it’s “conformance,” that is, its shape and muscle tone, along with its ability to respond to the directions of the human holding the rope. So, too, was the halter handler judged—on his own looks and demeanor as he directed the horse through a series of paces.So far, Larry and Justa Lotta Page had done very well, although this was at least as much a function of the amount of money one was willing to spend as anything else—the more shows one entered, the more points might be accumulated. As of that morning, in fact, Larry was leading the nation in halter exhibition points; if he kept up his pace, it was possible that he would win the American Quarter Horse Association’s Amateur Horseman of the Year Award to go with his AQHA Rookie of the Year Award from two years before. The rookie award had netted Larry a prized silver belt buckle inscribed with his name.But it wasn’t the prizes or even the fame that interested Larry in quarter horse exhibitions, although everyone who’d ever known him agreed he loved being the center of attention. The way Larry saw things, this was to be a year off for him, away from the law, which, if the truth were to be told, had begun to bore him. It wouldn’t be a total write-off: instead, he hoped to lead Justa Lotta Page into the winner’s circle at the AQHA’s World Championship in Oklahoma City in October. A champion halter horse, a stallion with his best years still ahead of him, Larry knew, could make him rich. Larry saw Justa Lotta Page as Justa Lotta Dough, at least six figures, maybe even seven, once he had the title. Larry hoped to sell the horse for many times what he’d paid for him, thereby defraying all his exhibiting expenses (and Greg Whalen’s not inconsiderable boarding costs and training fees), and making him a healthy profit to boot.But now, if Elisa was telling the truth, Larry for some reason had decided to throw it all away.As he thought back, Whelan realized that Larry’s behavior had been off almost the entire weekend. True, he had been drinking: Larry was an inveterate imbiber of Chardonnay wine—he always seemed to have a glass in his hand. But Whelan knew that wine was only Larry’s cover: the reason the glass never seemed to be empty was Larry’s penchant for spiking it with vodka, and Larry’s capacity for vodka was prodigious. Bob Kail—Greg’s son-in-law, Debbie’s husband—had played golf once with Larry, and told Greg that by the time they’d reached the eighteenth green, Larry had swigged an entire bottle of vodka between swings.But Larry’s experience as a drinker didn’t account for his behavior that weekend. The booze usually made him ebullient, talkative, even boastful. In contrast, Larry that weekend had seemed withdrawn, quiet—almost spaced out, Whalen thought. Where usually Larry enjoyed interactin... Read more