Elisa McNabney (Laren Sims): Poisoning, Manhunt, and Confession

Elisa McNabney was the name Laren Renee Sims used during her marriage to Sacramento personal injury attorney Larry McNabney, whom she murdered in September 2001 by dosing him with horse tranquilizers. A lifelong con artist from Florida with an FBI rap sheet running to 113 pages and at least 38 aliases, she concealed the killing for months, looted her husband’s law practice and estate, and became the target of a nationwide manhunt before Okaloosa County, Florida deputies caught her in March 2002. She confessed in writing, then hanged herself in a Florida jail cell before California could extradite her.¹²

The Con Artist Behind the Name

She was born Laren Renee Sims in 1967 in Brooksville, Florida, the second of four children in a well-to-do family. A reported IQ of 140 and strong grades did not keep her in school; she dropped out of high school, married at eighteen, and had two children by two different men, a son named Cole and a daughter, Haylei Jordan.¹

After her first marriage ended, she moved through a pattern of theft and identity manipulation that lasted the rest of her life. She acquired victims’ credit cards and checkbooks, sometimes marrying the men she targeted. By the early 1990s she had been married three times and served several stints in jail. Her convictions spanned credit card theft, grand theft, and fraud in multiple states, including seven months in Florida for parole violations on grand theft and fraud.³ She once cut off an ankle monitor and fled to Las Vegas. Her aliases included Elisa Redelsperger, Melissa Godwin, Tammy Keelin, Elizabeth Barasch, and Shane Ivaroni. Elisa McNabney was simply the longest-running of them.

How She Married Larry McNabney

Larry McNabney was a 46-year-old personal injury attorney in Nevada and a serious quarter horse competitor when Sims walked into his law office in 1995, using the name Elisa Redelsperger, and demanded a job. He hired the 29-year-old as his office manager. His daughter Tavia Williams later said her father was immediately taken with her and called her “brilliant.” They began dating, and Sims introduced him to the quarter horse show circuit, eventually persuading him to buy a stable and compete.¹

They married in January 1996. By December of the previous year, an audit of the law office had already turned up at least $74,543 missing from a client trust account, taken by Sims. The Nevada State Bar censured McNabney in 1997 for allowing the embezzlement to happen. He stayed with her anyway. His friend Tom Mitchell later said, “He knew what she had done, and he knew that he would constantly have to worry about her, that he couldn’t trust her. But he wanted to be with her.”⁴

The couple moved to Sacramento, California, where McNabney opened a new practice. Williams said her contact with her father became restricted after the marriage.¹

The Poisoning at the Horse Show

On September 10, 2001, Larry McNabney attended the Pacific Quarter Horse Classic in the City of Industry in Los Angeles County. According to Sims’ later confession, she and Sarah Dutra, a young secretary at the Sacramento law firm, put horse tranquilizers in his drink that morning. When he collapsed, they brought him back to the hotel room and injected him with additional doses.¹

The following day, September 11, witnesses at the show saw him disoriented and being pushed in a wheelchair. That was the last time anyone outside the conspirators saw him alive.⁵ Sims and Dutra had planned to bury him in the desert on the drive back to Sacramento, but he was still breathing. He died at the couple’s home. They placed the body in a refrigerator in the garage and sealed it with duct tape. It stayed there for months. In late December 2001, the body was buried in a shallow grave at a vineyard in San Joaquin County, California.

Erasing Her Husband and Emptying His Practice

With McNabney dead, Sims kept operating his Sacramento law practice, negotiating with attorneys and spending settlement money that belonged to his personal injury clients. She sold off his assets and gave away his personal belongings. She bought herself a new red Jaguar convertible and gave Dutra a red BMW that Dutra later described as a “going away present.”¹

To explain his absence she told a shifting set of stories: he was in drug rehab, he was on vacation in Puerto Rico, he had moved to Costa Rica, he had joined a religious sect in Washington state, he had filed for divorce. The inconsistency drew attention. By October 2001, Larry’s children from an earlier marriage suspected something was wrong and hired a private investigator.

Sims closed the Sacramento practice on January 7, 2002.⁶ Four days later she was seen leaving in the red Jaguar. Investigators later estimated she had misappropriated at least $500,000 in the months after the murder.

The Body Is Found and the Manhunt Begins

On February 5, 2002, workers at a vineyard in the Linden area of San Joaquin County discovered human remains in a shallow grave. The body was Larry McNabney’s. An autopsy found the cause of death was a lethal oral overdose of horse tranquilizer.⁷

The San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department led the investigation, recovering two veterinary drug kits and the refrigerator that had held the body. In a horse trailer at the property they also found a legal file containing Sims’ real name: Laren Renee Sims Jordan. Running that name through FBI databases exposed her identity and criminal history. The FBI issued a federal warrant, and Sims became one of the country’s most wanted fugitives.

She had traveled with her 17-year-old daughter Haylei through Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, and Alabama, sticking to tourist towns and paying cash. Both changed names. Sims used the alias Shane Ivaroni, pilfered credit cards, and eventually settled in the Florida Panhandle, taking work as a paralegal and as a waitress at a chophouse in Destin.⁸ Authorities once tracked her to Destin but missed her by roughly an hour.

On March 18, 2002, Sims abandoned a stolen Dodge pickup at a Winn-Dixie supermarket. Okaloosa County deputies intercepted her as she walked from the beach toward a condominium pool, still wearing the blue jeans and red jacket police had described in alerts. When a deputy approached, she said, “I’m the one you are looking for,” and offered no resistance. A corporal at the scene told reporters she had “gotten tired of running.” She was booked on the San Joaquin County murder warrant and held without bail, with additional probation-violation warrants outstanding in three Florida counties. Haylei, found separately under the name Penelope Ivaroni, was not believed to have been involved in the killing.

Confession and Suicide

After her arrest, Sims wrote out a three-page confession. She admitted killing Larry McNabney with horse tranquilizers and named Sarah Dutra as her accomplice, describing the drink at the show, the additional injections in the hotel room, the refrigerator, and the burial at the vineyard. She wrote that she had been alone when she finally buried the body.⁹

San Joaquin County investigators traveled to Florida to bring her back. On the morning of March 30, 2002, guards at the Hernando County Jail found her hanging from a braided bedsheet in the medical unit. She died the next day, March 31, at age 36.² The criminal case against her ended there.

Sarah Dutra Was the Only Person Tried

Dutra, arrested at the Sheriff’s headquarters in French Camp after Sims implicated her, was the only person tried for Larry McNabney’s death. Deputy District Attorney Thomas Testa acknowledged that Sims’ written confession could not be used against her at trial, because one defendant’s statements generally cannot be introduced by prosecutors against a co-defendant.⁹

The trial in Stockton, before Judge Bernard Garber, opened on a special-circumstance murder charge carrying a potential life sentence. Prosecutors called Dutra a “partner in crime” who helped plan and carry out the poisoning. Evidence included an interrogation tape, testimony from Haylei Jordan, and testimony from a friend of the couple, Evan Rees, who said Sims had asked him about a year before the killing whether horse tranquilizer could kill a human. Rees also testified that Sims and Dutra had nicknamed each other “Blanchie,” a reference to the 1962 film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, in which a character is poisoned by her sister.¹⁰ The defense argued that Sims had manipulated Dutra and tried to raise questions about McNabney’s character, suggesting drug use and prostitutes; Rees said he had never seen any such conduct.

In April 2003, the jury convicted Dutra of voluntary manslaughter and being an accessory after the fact, sparing her the murder count. Judge Garber imposed the maximum sentence of 11 years and 8 months, finding “little remorse.”¹¹ After the sentence was vacated on procedural grounds and remanded,¹² Dutra served the full 11-year term. She was released from the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla at 4:45 a.m. on August 26, 2011, and paroled to Solano County under three years of active supervision.¹³

Disputed Abuse Claims and What Haylei Jordan Said Later

Accounts of Larry McNabney’s behavior toward Sims diverge. Haylei Jordan alleged that he was physically abusive toward her mother and threatened to kill both of them if Sims tried to leave, using her outstanding Florida arrest warrants as leverage.⁵ His daughter Cristin Olson disputed that, saying her father was not physically abusive.¹⁴ What is not disputed is that Larry McNabney had problems with alcohol and drugs, which his stepdaughter said left her feeling “constantly unsafe.”

Haylei Jordan stayed silent about her mother for more than two decades before speaking to ABC’s 20/20 in April 2024. She described an “erratic” childhood of constant moves, rarely more than six months to a year in one place. After the murder, she traveled with her mother through several states, believing at first she was helping her escape some unnamed threat. The truth surfaced during a move to Charleston, South Carolina, when Sims told her, “I need to tell you this, but I need you to not freak out. We killed him.” Jordan said the moment felt like “everything was just white noise.”⁵

Back in Destin, Jordan grew worried her mother was suicidal and called the police herself, a call that led to Sims’ arrest. “I was both incredibly relieved that she was okay and horrified that I had contributed to her worst nightmare happening,” she said. She stayed quiet for years, she explained, because she did not want to be defined as “Elisa McNabney’s daughter.”

1
Oxygen. Laren Sims Jordan Murdered Husband Larry McNabney With Horse Tranquilizers
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Plainview Herald. Murder Suspect Hangs Herself in Jail
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The Ledger. Woman Wanted for California Murder Hangs Herself in Cell
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ABC News. Larry McNabney and Elisa
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ABC News. Daughter of Female Killer Speaks for 1st Time
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News On 6. Woman Sought in Husband’s Death in California Is Arrested in Florida
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ABC News. Search for Elisa McNabney
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Los Angeles Times. Fugitive Arrested in Florida
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Los Angeles Times. Accomplice Arrest in McNabney Case
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Stockton Record. Witness Reveals Details
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KCRA. Dutra Sentenced in McNabney Murder
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FindLaw. People v. Dutra, Case No. C051198
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CBS News Sacramento. Woman Convicted in Death of Sacramento Lawyer Released From Prison
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ABC 7. Laren Sims, Larry McNabney, Haylei Jordan