I'll Take Care of You (12 page)

“I'm paying the bills. I treat you nice. With respect,” he said. “You're a whore. Why would you be looking elsewhere?”

“Because I have to,” she said. “You've made me do that.”

“We're over,” he said.

He had no idea what would happen next. This was her house, after all. But before he had a chance to say that he was leaving her, she surprised him again.

“So what,” she said, “I'm leaving you. I've already got a place. You're so stupid, you didn't even know what's going on. Why would I stay with someone who can't even tell I'm cheating on them?”

Things escalated from there. In 2012, as he recounted the following events, he said some of the memories may have blended together from two separate incidents when the Newport Beach police were called in January 1991. However, this was his best recollection of what happened.

Nanette started packing and loading up her van, starting with his little TV.

“No, you don't,” he said. “That's mine. I paid for that.”

Nanette took the TV out of the van and purposely dropped it on the ground. The glass screen shattered—a warning of sorts. Then she turned around and walked into the house to get more stuff. He followed her up the stairs, hoping to get an explanation of what was happening.

She turned to him with a callous, snide expression and said, “I've got you by the cojones.”

Then she slapped the inside of her arm hard enough to leave a red mark. “You just did that,” she said.

“You fucking liar,” he said.

But he was taken aback even more when she flew at him in a flurry of fists, knees, and feet. It was all he could do to fend her off. He threw her down on the couch to get her off him.

Oh, my God
, s
he's setting me up,
he thought.

He ran upstairs to the master bedroom to get away from her and try to process what was going on. In the meantime, she called the police.

When the cops arrived, Nanette told them that Reynolds had attacked her.

“He assaulted me for no reason,” she said.

Reynolds tried to explain to the police what had happened, just as he did several years later when they questioned him during the McLaughlin murder investigation.

“She was actually assaulting me,” he said. “I actually pushed her away. She went down on the couch.”

Police didn't immediately arrest Reynolds that first time in 1991. They tried to tell him to leave the house and cool off somewhere, but Reynolds was insistent that they understand his side of the story.

“Wait a minute,” he said, “
she
did this.”

“Don't make me tell you again,” the officer said. “Hit it. Walk on down the sidewalk. Go to a friend's.”

Reynolds tried again. “But wait a minute. You don't understand.”

When he wouldn't leave, as instructed, the police arrested him on charges of domestic violence and kept him overnight in the lockup.

“All of a sudden, there's this just vicious, hating person, lying or saying you're a loser, and I'm trying to explain things to police,” he recalled recently.

He came home the next morning, but because he didn't have his keys, he had to climb through the window. Nanette didn't return for a couple of days, and he later learned that she'd claimed she'd been in the hospital with an injury to her spleen.

In 1994, Reynolds acknowledged to Newport Beach police that after they'd arrested him in 1991, someone from the DA's office said they had to file charges against him. But he also said he'd watched Nanette sign paperwork at the DA's office, admitting that the fight was mutual and that her injuries were unintentional. However, he still had to attend a diversion program, and the charges were expunged after six months.

In 2012, the NBPD had no record of the 1991 arrest, because it shreds records after a certain period of time, unless they pertain to a homicide. Reynolds said he didn't keep any of his paperwork, because this was not an incident he wanted to remember, and no criminal court records of this incident exist today.

According to family court records filed by K. Ross Johnston in 1998, Nanette called him after Reynolds was arrested, asking K. Ross to pick up the kids because she was going to the hospital after fighting with Reynolds, and he was going to jail. Those records also quote K. Ross as saying that Nanette filed charges against Reynolds, but then dropped them. This wasn't technically accurate, but it did support Reynolds's story.

While Nanette was purportedly in the hospital, Reynolds said he met with K. Ross, who brought a six-inch-thick file of incriminating evidence against Nanette. “He came over to my house and he wanted copies of everything I had,” Reynolds recalled.

K. Ross told him he was interested in getting something on Nanette in case they had custody issues and she tried to stop him from seeing the kids. The two men shared some of the same stories about hearing unfamiliar male voices on the answering machine and her lies about going to business meetings at night when she was really out on dates with other men. Reynolds now knew where his missing $2,500 in Las Vegas winnings had gone.

Soon after that, Reynolds came home from work to find Nanette loading the new furniture he'd recently purchased into her van.

“You try and stop me,” she said, “and I'll have you arrested again.”

Accepting the dare, Reynolds called the police himself this time. When the officers arrived, Nanette tried to enlist them in helping her take his furniture.

“He's on probation. He's assaulting me,” she said. “Get him away from me.”

Reynolds told police to wait, because he had receipts for these items. Once he brought them proof, the officers told Nanette she needed to leave everything in the house, except her clothing and personal belongings. She'd have to fight Reynolds in civil court for the rest.

Even so, Nanette managed to get away with another television set. “That's my TV,” she told police.

Days later, Reynolds demanded that she bring back his TV. She did as he asked, then seduced him on the living-room floor. Reynolds chalked this up to irrational and lustful breakup sex, thinking to himself,
Why not?

“She just had her way,” he recalled recently. “She was very good at the things that she did.”

Not long afterward, Reynolds looked out his kitchen window to see Nanette making out with Dan, the contractor who had remodeled the duplex and had left that message on their answering machine.

“Do you think that [make-out session] was for your benefit?” Detective Voth asked Reynolds in 1994.

“I think so,” he said.

By this point, Reynolds was $91,000 in debt, part of which came from a $10,000 “marker” that his Mirage casino host told him about after the breakup. Apparently, Nanette had charged that amount to his account without his knowledge. Reynolds had to file for bankruptcy.

After Bill McLaughlin's murder in 1994, K. Ross's girlfriend, Julia, suggested that Detectives Voth and Hartford contact Reynolds, which they did.

During the interview, they told Reynolds that Nanette had, in fact, found her wealthy man—one worth about $55 million.

“He's now dead,” Hartford said. “Died at the hand of somebody else.”

“I'm not surprised,” Reynolds said, adding that he'd had his suspicions as soon as he heard about the murder on the news. He'd even called the Orange County jail to see if they had an inmate named Nanette Johnston.

“She was extremely manipulative,” he said.

CHAPTER 15

To Detective Tom Voth, the two keys left in the McLaughlins' front door and on their doormat seemed “key” to solving this case, because so few people had access to them. One of the keys was embossed with an Ace Hardware logo; the other key was simply stamped
Ace.

“You're boiling down to family, and friends of family, and Nanette,” he recalled in 2011. Although the housekeeper, Mary Berg, kept a house key pinned to the inside of her shirt, Voth saw no benefit to her killing Bill. Besides, she was never given a key to the pedestrian-access gate.

“It put the suspects into a little package, a percentage of less than one percent in the world,” he said, which got even smaller once the McLaughlin sisters passed their polygraphs.

Voth suggested to one of his supervisors that he take the keys to area hardware stores and show them a photo lineup featuring Eric, but he was told he would be wasting his time.

“Who's going to remember who's getting a key made?” the supervisor asked.

But Voth was determined to figure out the keys' origin. Searching through the phone book, he found an Ace Hardware store on West Main Street in Tustin, called Tustin Hardware, right down the street from Eric's apartment.

He went there and showed the keys to manager David Vandaveer, who said they used the same type of “blanks” as the one Voth showed him, embossed with the national chain's Ace logo. Although he said they usually stamped the store name and phone number on the back of their key copies, he said, they'd recently sold some without the stamp, like this one. Vandaveer later testified that he thought the key had been made in his store because of the way it was cut: he had a higher-quality key-cutting machine that cost three times more than machines used by other stores.

When Voth showed him the photo lineup, Vandaveer recognized Eric right away.

“Yeah, I know this guy right here,” he said, which surprised Voth as much as it did his supervisor. “This guy is from New York. He works for me.”

Vandaveer went on to say that he'd headed the committee that had chosen Eric to head up security for Tiller Days, a three-day annual agricultural festival in Tustin.

Voth couldn't believe it. “Did he have any keys made?” he asked hopefully.

“Yeah, he had a couple keys made,” on a couple of different occasions, sometime after Tiller Days, which was in October, Vandaveer said. “You might want to talk to one of my guys. He made something else for him.”

Vandaveer's employee Michael Rivers told Voth that he'd responded to an unusual request from Eric. “I made a fake silencer for him,” he said.

Rivers explained that Eric had come in to get a key copied around the time of Tiller Days, and asked if they could make a silencer for his nine-millimeter Beretta to use as a movie prop. Rivers said yes, he could rig something up. He went in the back to put a contraption together, using a piece of plumbing pipe with an adapter at the end. Eric said he was worried about scratching his gun, so they discussed taping the device to the weapon.

If Eric's gun was stolen in the summer, as he'd told police, then why did he ask for a fake silencer to fit it in October or November? For Voth, this wasn't a question of whether the silencer would work. Rather, it was more important in the context of Eric's conflicting statements about when he still had possession of the nine-millimeter. The detectives also never found any evidence that Eric had been involved in a movie in which he needed such a prop.

 

 

In another key-related incident, Detective Hartford interviewed Bill's college buddy Don Kalal, who said he was going to stay at Balboa Coves for a couple of days two months before the murder. Nanette was supposed to mail him the house keys, but he never received them.

Bill said that he'd sent the keys in an envelope, with a return address in Las Vegas, and assumed they'd gotten lost in the mail, because the envelope never came back. When a week went by and the keys still hadn't shown up, Bill confirmed with Kalal that he had sent it to the correct address.

On January 26, 1995, the same day as this interview with Kalal, Nanette's attorney called the detectives and told them not to speak to his client any further.

 

 

Roy Rauschklob, who had been the head of security at Metropolis and hired Eric to work there in August or September 1992, told police he saw Eric and Nanette at the movies at Triangle Square on February 20, 1995. Nanette looked stressed-out.

When Rauschklob asked them how they were doing, Nanette replied, “Ninety percent of what is in the news is made-up, and only ten percent is true.”

On February 23, 1995, police booked into evidence a “change of address” form authorizing Bill's mail to be forwarded from Balboa Coves to the house on Seashore Drive. It was dated December 28, 1994, with the alleged signature of William McLaughlin, who had been dead for two weeks. Detectives saw this as Nanette's attempt to divert incoming mail and hide her covert activities from Bill's family.

 

 

During this time, detectives conducted a multitude of timed driving tests on various routes from the soccer field in Diamond Bar to Eric's apartment in Tustin and then to possible drop-off areas near the McLaughlin house. They also drove directly from the field to Balboa Coves, which took thirty-five minutes to drive the 35.7 miles.

In every scenario they tried, they determined that the trips—the longest of which took forty-one minutes—still left enough time for Eric to shoot Bill before the 911 call, then walk or run across the bridge to the Thunderbird, where coworkers remembered seeing him between 9:30 and 10:00
P.M.

In addition, the detectives tested Nanette's story by timing the trips from Eric's apartment to South Coast Plaza, where they parked and went inside Crate & Barrel. The earliest arrival time got them inside the store by 9:19
P.M.
, leaving her ten minutes to buy what she needed before the nine twenty-nine time-stamped on her receipt. The maximum drive time of fourteen minutes still got her inside by 9:26
P.M.

 

 

On March 2 at 4:30
P.M.
, the detectives carried out a search warrant at the Seashore house. After Nanette had made such a fuss about not wanting any guns around her kids, the police found two of them: a nine-millimeter Astra, dating back to the World War Two era, and a .380 Davis. Neither was on the ballistics test list of possible murder weapons, but Voth found it curious that Nanette would have them at the house.

“They're Bill's guns,” she said. “I brought them here for protection.”

Because the guns weren't listed on the warrant, the police couldn't seize them. Detective Dave Byington told Nanette's attorney that she needed to bring them down to the station because they didn't belong to her.

The next day, James Box, the investigator working for Eric's attorney, Julian Bailey, brought in the guns as requested.

“Nanette was paying for everyone's attorneys . . . with Bill's money,” Voth said. “Where else would she get any money to pay for it?”