I'll Take Care of You (13 page)

CHAPTER 16

After Nanette and K. Ross Johnston divorced, they agreed that she would introduce him to anyone she was dating, because he wanted to meet the men spending time with his children. Even so, she never told him that she was romantically involved with Bill McLaughlin, let alone that they were engaged. Instead, she concocted a story that she was paying $800 a month to rent a room at a house with Bill, whom she described as an “old man” who was hardly ever home.

“I just knew he was gone a lot, traveling, business,” K. Ross said later.

K. Ross met Bill just once, in the spring of 1994, when K. Ross came to pick up the kids. Nanette had said that Bill hated him, so K. Ross was quite surprised when Bill ran over to shake his hand and appeared very pleased to meet him. Nanette, on the other hand, did not look happy.

During this time, Nanette said she was “working deals, looking at options, buying stocks” with Bill, and was also helping him with a Mexican village development. Still, she said it wasn't like working a real job.

Nanette's ex knew something was up because she'd been driving an old car and suddenly showed up in a brand-new red Infiniti. She claimed that she'd bought it with a commission from a really good deal she'd done with Bill.

K. Ross initially thought she was holding to their agreement because she'd introduced him to other men she was dating, who were all closer to her own age, such as Eric Naposki. Eric was around for multiple sports seasons, first as a friend, and later as a lover, a change that became obvious when she started sitting in his lap.

“I didn't see any that were fat and ugly,” K. Ross said, listing off half-a-dozen men she'd brought to games or birthday parties while living with Bill.

One day, Kristofer had two games. She brought Eric to the one in the morning, then showed up with a different guy that afternoon. Eric came by for the second game as well and stuck around to watch. At the end of the day, Nanette said good-bye to the other guy and left with Eric.

Although he had no proof, K. Ross figured she was dating Bill as well “because of the amount of time they were spending together,” he said. “I'm thinking, ‘What's going to happen?'”

But as it turned out, Nanette had no worries about running into Bill while she was with Eric. After raising three kids of his own, Bill had told her that he had no interest in going to watch Kristofer's sporting activities.

 

 

While Bill was busy fighting his legal battle with Jacob Horowitz, and flying back and forth to Las Vegas, Nanette was playing both sides against the middle.

Eric was obviously not the first man she slept with behind Bill's back. Eric simply lasted longer than the others. In 1993, she was seeing a guy named Scott Weisman, who told detectives that she'd broken up with him to start seeing Eric.

By May 1994, things were going well enough with Eric that she secretly took him to Chicago to meet her grandmother and then on to Jamaica for a romantic vacation.

Two months later, she and Eric were house hunting at the Turtle Rock Summit Estates development in Irvine, where model home prices ranged from $800,000 to $2 million, completely out of the couple's range. Nanette came to look by herself the first time, and returned a week later with Eric, telling realtor Sharon Hedberg that they had a family with four kids. They never said they were married, but that was Hedberg's impression.

Nanette and Eric seemed excited about two particular lots, priced between $900,000 and $930,000, with a $25,000 down payment. The couple said they were looking for a home that would be ready by spring 1995, because they didn't have the money to buy just yet.

Nanette told Hedberg that she wrote business plans for money, and Eric was planning to form a security company. They asked if Hedberg knew anyone who needed security services, and Hedberg referred them to someone at Standard Pacific who might be interested. The realtor never saw or talked to them again.

 

 

On the nights that Bill was out of town, Nanette stayed at Eric's apartment in Tustin, hung out with him at the Seashore house, or went to dinner and clubbing with his friends. She also often picked up the check as she spun tales that made her seem wealthier, more educated, and more successful than she really was.

As the relationship between her and Eric grew more serious, he invited her and her kids to New York for Thanksgiving with his family. They left on November 14, shopped and saw the sights in New York City, and took photos of themselves with the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers in the background.

On the same trip, she took him to her sister's wedding in Baltimore, where she caught the bouquet, and in a very public display, Eric slipped the garter belt on Nanette's upper thigh. Typically, both of these wedding milestones are signs that the “lucky” guests are about to get married.

When Nanette was with her family back east, Eric was her boyfriend and Bill was a fatherly mentor. But at home with Bill, Eric was Nanette's six-foot-two, 250-pound, Polish-Italian secret.

 

 

Meanwhile, Nanette was also trying to work her family-planning wiles with Bill, presumably as a way to guarantee access to his assets for the long term.

“You've got to get that vasectomy reversed,” Nanette said to him one Friday night in June 1994 as she ogled the babies at the next table at JACKshrimp, where they were having dinner with Kevin and Sandy. It seemed like a casual comment made in passing, just a blip in the conversation before they moved on to other topics, but Nanette could be subtle that way.

Bill clearly enjoyed the company of Nanette's children, and he treated Lishele and Kristofer with love and kindness. Apparently having no idea she was cheating on him, Bill seemed to give Nanette more latitude in his business affairs, or, perhaps, she was just taking it without his knowledge. He surely couldn't have known that she'd started pretending to
be
Bill McLaughlin, claiming that
she
had invented the blood-separator device, and telling people that she had hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in various projects.

Bill's cousin Barbara LaSpesa said she thought Nanette must have been a “smooth talker” and that the couple must have discussed Nanette's needs and wants. He probably believed he deserved to be happy, and if it “cost him a few dollars, it cost him,” Barbara said, speculating that he gave Nanette what she wanted because he was scared of losing her.

Barbara said that because Bill had forced his ex-wife, Sue, to live so frugally, “I sometimes wonder if he felt guilty about that, because he did lose her and [tried] to make it up with this woman.”

After Bill was so careful with his money while married to Sue, Barbara said, she couldn't believe how different he was with Nanette. “I remember he had a boat, and then he got rid of the boat, because it cost so much for gas and he wasn't using it.”

He had to have known “what he was getting into when he answered the ad, because it plainly stated what this woman was looking for. I wondered if after he'd lost his wife, maybe it dawned on him, ‘I have to pay for it.'”

Barbara speculated that some male ego was at work as well. “He's buying everything she's giving him, but he's going to believe it, because who's going to lie to Bill? He's so smart. That's what kills me about this whole thing. He puts her on a life insurance policy. . . . He ends up being with this woman who took all his money.”

Nonetheless, she said, “he shouldn't have died for it. That's the unfortunate part. He had Kevin living with him. . . . The whole thing is tragic. I just feel bad for all of them.... There were red flags there—and, obviously, he didn't see them, didn't want to see them.”

Bill's brother Patrick, however, believes today that Bill actually did have a clue. When the two men talked the night before Bill was murdered, Patrick sensed that Bill was on edge, angry, and “extremely shaken by what he thought was happening.”

“He thought he was a wanted man or a guy who was a targeted man, for whatever reason, and I think he also felt that he should try to be up for whatever came his way, and he was going to fight 'em off,” Patrick recalled recently.

Bill never mentioned who was after him or why, but he did tell Patrick that night that “he'd stocked his home with firearms and ammunition.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Patrick asked his brother, confused because Bill had never mentioned his gun collecting.

“Broth, you have no idea,” Bill said, using the nickname the two brothers had called each other since they'd started working together in business many years earlier.

Patrick said he also believes that Bill never disclosed any of this previously because he was too proud and embarrassed.

“Bill always prided himself with not pulling the wool over his eyes, and that may have been why we never discussed it,” he said.

But he also wonders if Bill might have finally figured out that Nanette had been “helping herself to his checking account.”

 

 

At least in the short term, Nanette's children got something out of their mother's double-dealing behavior, because they benefited from Bill's money, the lavish trips he paid for, and the extra fatherly attention that he gave them. And when Bill said he didn't want to traipse around to soccer, basketball, or baseball games, it didn't matter because Nanette had Eric for that, and the kids liked him too.

Nanette played the part of the soccer mom well, driving Kristofer and his teammates to games and bringing them sliced oranges to eat at halftime. She even went one better and became assistant coach to Kristofer's basketball team during the 1994 fall season.

But even then, Nanette didn't impress everyone with her Supermom act.

“She was trying to definitely let the world think she was a good mother with her two older kids,” said Patricia “Tricia” Stearns, who lived down the street from the Seashore Drive house, which Nanette said was hers. Basketball star Dennis Rodman lived in a house somewhere in between them.

Stearns's boyfriend, Fernando Leguizamon, coached Kristofer's National Junior Basketball League team and chose Nanette—over the team fathers who were also interested in the job—to be his assistant coach.

“She's the best one of the bunch,” Leguizamon told Stearns. “She really knows the game.”

Nanette told Stearns that she was very pleased—and genuinely surprised—to be selected.

“She really sold herself well,” Stearns recalled. “The guys teased Fernando, ‘Oh, you picked her over all of us.'”

Stearns and her boyfriend, who had a boy and a girl about the same age as Kristofer and Lishele, thought Nanette had only one boyfriend—Eric Naposki, because he was the one who accompanied her to many of Kristofer's games and practices. Stearns knew that Eric had his own apartment, but she got the impression that he spent quite a bit of time at the Seashore house.

When Leguizamon's kids went down to play with Nanette's on the beach, Eric was often there as well, talking to the boys about working out.

“The kids loved him because he was a football player,” said Stearns, who believed that this idolization also contributed to Nanette's landing the coaching position. “Fernando's son was just enamored with Eric.”

Stearns, on the other hand, felt very different. “I couldn't stand him,” she said. “He was an arrogant SOB. He's a ne'er-do-well, as it turned out.”

Stearns met Nanette early in the season. As they chatted during the weekly practices and games, Nanette told her that she had an MBA, that she wanted to start a professional women's basketball league, and that she wanted to play too.

“She professed to be an absolute fanatic on basketball,” Stearns recalled.

But within just a few short weeks, Stearns had figured out that Nanette was not what or who she claimed to be.

“She always boasted about her background and her education and how smart she was,” Stearns said.

Stearns worked in the health care field and was familiar with Baxter Healthcare and Bill's plasma-separator device. So when Nanette claimed to have invented it herself and described Bill as her business partner, Stearns immediately knew she was lying.

“It was to a point that I knew too much,” she said.

Nonetheless, she didn't want to confront Nanette, especially after the murder, so she kept quiet.

“It was so obviously an inside job,” Stearns said. “You had to have had a key.”

CHAPTER 17

On the morning of January 19, 1995, half-a-dozen detectives showed up with a search warrant at Eric's two-bedroom condo in Irvine, where Nanette, Eric, his twenty-five-year-old roommate, Leonard Jomsky, and a couple of Eric's visiting friends were hanging out after a night of partying.

As Detective Voth talked briefly with Eric outside the apartment, Eric said he'd heard the murder involved a love triangle.

“Why me?” he asked.

While several detectives searched the apartment, Tom Voth and Craig Frizzell interviewed Eric for several hours. Detective Dave Byington pulled Jomsky into the bedroom to question him, and Lieutenant Mike Jackson and Sergeant John Desmond took Nanette back to the Seashore house to interview her there.

Although Eric grumbled that he didn't want to talk without an attorney, he wasn't under arrest, they didn't read him his rights, and he kept on talking.

As Voth and Frizzell pushed Eric to talk more about his nine-millimeter, he became agitated, contending he had no idea where it was.

“That's my statement,” he said. “I don't want to waste time talking about that anymore.”

Pressed further, Eric hemmed and hawed, saying he'd actually purchased three guns: two .380s and the nine-millimeter.

“How could you confuse giving Joe David [Jimenez] a nine-millimeter, not a .380?” Frizzell asked.

“I didn't confuse it,” Eric said.

“You misled us?”

“I misled you, yeah, 'cause I felt scared.... We played the old mind-fuck game between each other that night, okay? I mind-fucked you with the gun, and you mind-fucked me with what happened to me that night,” he said, referring to their bringing him in at 2
A.M.
on a traffic warrant arrest to question him about the murder.

He claimed again that he'd mailed one of the .380s to his father for protection after he'd been mugged, but he was concerned that his dad would get into trouble because it was probably illegal for him to have the gun at his house in New York. Growing confrontational, Eric said he bought the other Jennings .380 at the same gun shop in Dallas, but at another time.

Eric said he could get the gun from his father if the cops really wanted it, but his mother had been ill for years with ulcerative colitis, and he didn't want to worry her because stress worsened her condition.

“Do you want to verify that it's not the murder weapon?” he asked. “Is this it?”

“We want to verify he got the .380, and your story,” Voth said.

As the interview went on, Voth noticed that Eric's timeline for the night of the murder kept putting him at a greater distance from the crime. Although Eric had originally said the nine-millimeter had gone missing in the summer of 1994, he said he always kept it “hidden very tightly in a cleaning box,” even during the security job at an apartment complex in Lake Elsinore that Eric worked with two of his buddies, which turned out to be in December.

Confronted now with the fact that the detectives knew he hadn't bought the nine-millimeter until August 1994, Eric claimed that the gun was actually stolen around the same time that he lost the Jennings .380. He'd concealed the Beretta in a towel in the backseat of his Pathfinder, he said, and it went missing too.

For Frizzell, Eric's new story didn't make sense on its face. “You're going to leave a six-hundred-to-seven-hundred-dollar, nearly brand-new, Beretta nine-millimeter in the truck that night? And that location at that apartment complex, which is so despicable that they have to hire security guards?”

“That's the deal,” Eric said. “I do not have my gun. I would love to give it to you, okay? Unfortunately, uh, I do not know where it is.”

Later police called the Texas shop where he'd bought the .380 and learned that he'd only bought the one there. And as the police pointed out to Eric, he'd called Kevin McDaniel around Thanksgiving, asking what to do about reporting the loss or theft of his nine-millimeter.

“That is a gun that disappeared sometime back in July? August?” Frizzell asked rhetorically, calling out Eric on his lie.

Eric said he never bought ammunition for the nine-millimeter, but he'd heard from Nanette that they were reportedly seen buying ammo at the B&B gun shop. The detectives confirmed that yes, the couple had been ID'd in lineups at the gun store. Eric countered that either the gun clerk or the cops were lying.

“I'm not a liar, you understand. I'm not,” Eric said. “I've got, you know, kids.”

Moving on to the sad state of his personal finances, he admitted that his credit was so shot that he'd been forced to ask his parents for an American Express card, and then he'd run that up too. He also admitted that he was in debt and “didn't have a pot to piss in,” whereas Bill had a lot of money, and much of it was flowing to Nanette. And yet he still denied that any of this gave him a motive to murder Bill.

“You can stay on my ass for my whole life and we will grow old together.... You will never, ever, ever find any reason to think that I had any motive to kill this guy.”

As he had in the first interview, Eric continued to try to minimize the seriousness of his relationship with Nanette. But then he changed his story about the rest of that evening.

He said he got dressed for work, drove by his friend Leonard Jomsky's house, where the lights were out and no one was home, so he didn't stop. Then, Eric said, he got a page from the bar manager—“Mike Teresmo? Or, like, Mike something”—at the Thunderbird nightclub. So he stopped at a pay phone on Seventeenth Street in Tustin, most likely at the Denny's, to return the page.

“I know I made a phone call to work that night.... He said, ‘I want to know what time you're going to be in.' I said, ‘Yeah, I'm coming in.'”

Asked if he knew what time he was paged, Eric said, “I know, how about we go look at my phone bill and see what time exactly I made the call, and maybe then, if I made the call at a certain time, you guys can leave me alone.”

“That might help,” Voth said.

“Even if I rushed, then you're telling me I could have made it in time to do the killing?”

“Yeah, because Nanette made it all the way to South Coast Plaza and was buying something in time,” Voth said.

Clearly feeling backed into a corner, Eric became even more agitated. “Do you guys think I'm a fucking idiot? Would I do something like that and walk across the street to work? I mean, come on, man, give me a break.”

Police contended that he did have a motive to kill Bill: jealousy. After falling in love with Nanette and finding out that she was having sex with another man, Eric got so mad that he killed Bill.

But Eric disputed that theory. “You guys are the first person ever to tell me that there was a relationship between Nanette and Bill,” he said.

Nonetheless, Eric did seem rattled and all over the map emotionally, alternating between saying he didn't know or care—or even ask—what Nanette was doing with other men. He seemed surprised to learn from detectives that morning that she and Bill were having regular sex and that she bragged about it to Bill's friends.

Eric also claimed ignorance that she and Bill were engaged, that she didn't own the Seashore Drive house, and that she'd gotten all of her money, her nice car, and her expensive clothes just for being Bill's girlfriend.

“From looking at paperwork and businesses, she didn't get it for doing her business work,” Voth told him. “I can guarantee you that right now.”

“So you think he bought her?” Eric asked.

Eric didn't seem to want to buy any of this—or, if he already knew, he was a very good actor.

“I still don't think you're right about their relationship thing,” Eric said. “Call me an idiot, okay?”

But he also seemed to want it both ways, acting cocky about this supposedly new information, as if he wasn't upset by it.

“Even if, like, I found out mysteriously, you know, some way that this was going on, am I a jealous guy to do something like that? Hell no.”

“What do I have to gain when he goes?” he asked. “I had Nanette—I've always had her. There was no question in my mind. I talked to her every night, had her any night that she was free.”

“You didn't have her living with you,” Voth said.

“If she's doing some other dude for money, do you think I'd want her permanently? You're thinking a lot lower than I am.”

“Maybe you just lose it,” Frizzell said.

“Oh, please, I don't lose it. I've never lost it in my entire life.”

After pointing out that Eric's former nightclub coworkers would argue with that statement, the detectives asked if he was sure that Nanette didn't shoot Bill.

“Of course I know that she didn't shoot him,” Eric replied.

“You don't know if she's responsible or not?”

“How else would she be responsible?” Eric asked.

“A lot of other people will take money for doing that kind of thing,” Voth said, referring to a hit man for hire.

Eric did not respond or react to this remark—an irony that would become clear when the topic came up again—sixteen years down the road.

 

 

Detective Byington spent forty-five minutes grilling Leonard Jomsky about Eric's relationship with Nanette and whether Eric had told him anything about the murder. Jomsky replied that he knew Eric and Nanette were a couple, but he knew nothing about the killing.

When Jomsky had moved to Orange County a couple of years ago, he said, he'd lived with Rob Frias, who worked as the front-door manager at Metropolis, where Eric was head of security. After that, Jomsky worked with Eric and Frias at the Roxbury, a nightclub frequented by celebrities in the 1980s and early 1990s, then later joined Eric at the Thunderbird.

Police had already interviewed Frias, who was also a friend, former roommate, and business partner of Eric's. The two of them had started a security company called Harbor Security Management. After Frias moved to Miami, Eric formed his own company, Coastal Elite Security.

Frias said Eric owned one black and one silver semiautomatic handgun, which he thought Eric kept in his dresser drawer. He recalled that Eric had gone to a shooting range with Nanette, where she'd either bought or had been given a handgun.

Jomsky said the Thunderbird job came about at the same time that Jomsky was working nights for Coastal Elite at an apartment complex in a questionable area of Lake Elsinore, where they were supposed to ensure that people weren't breaking into cars or doing anything suspicious. The complex had had problems with gangs tagging the area, leaving graffiti, and breaking into apartments. Frias worked the Lake Elsinore job too.

When Byington was done with Jomsky, the detective listened to his colleagues interviewing Eric in the next room and became annoyed with the way things were going. He wished the detectives would get more aggressive with Eric, who kept trying to run the show.

They are just getting ramrodded,
Byington thought as he searched through Eric's things.
Don't let him get away with this.

Maybe it was Eric's overbearing personality or maybe it was just that he was physically imposing, but he had a habit of trying to steer the interrogation, and he was often successful. The detectives may have had a game plan to let him think he was in control as a way to elicit information from him, but it didn't seem to be working. Within a couple of minutes, Eric was the one asking the questions.

Byington was not part of the homicide team. He'd just been brought in to write the search warrants. However, he didn't like the way Eric was dressing down Voth and Frizzell, the latter of whom had the same type A personality as Eric. There was a lot of testosterone in the room that day, but it wasn't working for the detectives. It was working against them.

When he couldn't take Eric's attitude anymore, Byington decided to try to disrupt the balance of power and tip it back to the good guys. He couldn't stop himself from knocking down cocky suspects with his cutting, dry wit, and he saw plenty about Eric to poke at.

“Eric had rows of hair plugs back then, way down on his forehead,” Byington recalled recently. “Nobody was buying that it was real. It was like it was drawn on. You could see the individual plugs.”

Also, during the search, Byington found some paraphernalia for steroid use, including syringes in the bathroom, which were illegal to possess without a prescription. And even though Eric seemed excitable and aggressive, the detectives took note of Byington's find but didn't press charges.

“He was definitely juicing. He had the syringes,” Byington said. “He was running a gym. He had to stay in shape.”

But the most amusing find for Byington was a large, vibrating dildo in Eric's bedside table, which he waved with amusement in the suspect's face. “Is this on your side of the bed? Is this for you?”

“Fuck you,” Eric retorted.

“Nice hair,” Byington said, wondering if Eric was going to fight back and attack him.

Byington was getting dirty looks from Frizzell and Voth, who didn't see the humor in his interrupting their interview, so he left the room.

The detectives didn't end up finding anything else of use to the investigation that day, but Byington certainly enjoyed the opportunity to take Eric down a notch.

 

 

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Jackson and Sergeant Desmond grilled Nanette for two and a half hours for details on her relationship with Eric, which she, too, played down.