I'll Take Care of You (16 page)

CHAPTER 21

Based on the notebook journal that police found in Eric's car, he was well aware of his past mistakes, character flaws, and financial weaknesses, as well as his need for self-improvement.

In an entry dated February 13, 1994—the day before Valentine's Day, and soon after he'd begun dating Nanette—the twenty-seven-year-old wrote up a list of ten rules to live by, pledging to build a better relationship with his two daughters and to support them both financially and emotionally; to be honest with himself; to stay disciplined in pursuing his short- and long-term goals, and to remember that money isn't important or necessary to have fun. (
Enjoy the free things life has to offer. Go back to the basics!
) He pledged to keep his body “strong and perfect” so his soul could “prosper”; to develop a strong spiritual life without any excuses; to avoid being “sidetracked by bullshit”; to stay positive, and not to fear success or failure.

 

 

Despite Eric's claims that he'd never hurt anyone or lost his temper, his coworkers said he sometimes had a hard time keeping his anger and frustration under control.

He was fired from the Metropolis nightclub, where he worked as a bouncer, after becoming unglued during a skirmish with a patron in the parking lot. Roy Rauschklob, who had hired Eric, told detectives that Eric was a good employee, but he had a temper and a difficulty brushing off verbal attacks from patrons, which contributed to his termination.

Eric admitted to Newport Beach police that he'd gotten aggravated at work one night, when a guy he'd thrown out of the club a month earlier came up to him, got into his face, and said, “See you later, motherfucker,” then took off. Eric said he told the guy to wait, but he didn't, so Eric followed him into the parking lot, where the guy ran to the passenger side of his car, and Eric grabbed him.

“I hold him in a hold, didn't hit him once, didn't hurt him,” he said. “Why did I go after him? Well, for the same reason, I wanted to see why the fuck he was coming in my face, swearing at me, and leaving the club.”

Eric noted that he was trained in hand-to-hand combat in martial arts, and yet, “I've never raised my hand to anybody.”

 

 

In late 1992, while he was still working at Metropolis, Eric attended an eight-hour training session run by Combative Concepts, a company that taught “close-quarter battle” or combat tactics, to local police departments, the DEA, SWAT, and other special-ops teams. The company was run by two former Navy SEALs and a private investigator named Joseph “Joe” Stoltman Jr., who did security for nightclubs in Orange County, including Metropolis.

In an interview with Detective Voth in February 1995, the PI said that Eric, Roy Rauschklob, and other Metropolis bouncers participated in a training session for Irvine's SWAT team, in which Eric pretended to be a terrorist during a paintball skirmish. Eric, who told the participants he'd been trained in handguns in boot camp, did so well that he was complimented on his performance.

The paint guns they used that day were tweaked to inflict pain. “If you're coming around a corner and you get shot, and you think it's a game, no big deal,” Stoltman explained. “If it actually stings, leaves a welt, or maybe breaks the skin, then they're not going to make the same mistake twice.”

Stoltman's experts taught the trainees a number of different shooting techniques that day, including the “double tap,” which involved taking two shots at the target in the lower-chest area—
pop pop
,
pause
—drawing back to evaluate whether you hit the target, then taking two more shots—
pop pop
,
pause
,
pop pop
,
pause,
and so on, until the target was no longer a threat.

They also taught the trainees the “two-man rule” (always stick with your buddy, don't leave him behind), to stay out of fatal funnels (dangerous areas like hallways, where you can't hide, all you can do is engage or retreat), and to “clear,” “corner,” and “pie.” The latter technique, also known as “slicing the pie,” involved peeking and then slicing around a corner, keeping about an arm's-length distance from the wall so as not to get shot.

 

 

When Stoltman first met Eric at Metropolis, he remembered how Eric used to talk longingly about getting a 9mm Beretta.

“Beretta's the gun, man,” Eric said. “I want to carry a ‘nine.' Joe, look it up. Sell me your Beretta.”

Eric also wanted to be a part of Stoltman's company and handle the security together for the Roxbury South nightclub. When Stoltman applied for a license, Eric said he'd already told the Roxbury that they were licensed, which was a lie. When Stoltman said he wouldn't lie, Eric told him to forget it. Stoltman found out later that Eric got the contract.

Witnesses told police that Eric grabbed a manager one night at the Roxbury. When questioned later by Newport Beach police about the incident, Eric denied it, saying he'd simply stated, “Get out of my face,” and pushed the manager away.

“He was a guy that worked for me that stabbed me in the back,” Eric explained. “It cost me my account, and I still didn't hit him. Do you know anybody that wouldn't? . . . Instead of looking at me as the aggressor in the situation, I would say, ‘Damn, Eric, you did a pretty good job of holding your fucking temper, 'cause if someone did that to me, I would've killed him,' right?”

Eric told Stoltman in 1993 that he was engaged to Samantha, who had moved to Texas. Eric later told Nanette that he broke up with Samantha because she didn't want him sending money to his kids.

In June 1994, Stoltman said, Eric told him he was seeing Nanette, and that she had paid for his toupee. Nanette wanted to support him, Eric said, but he didn't want that. He wanted his own business.

In October 1994, Eric told Stoltman that he was having second thoughts and some trust issues with Nanette. He said he was planning to ask her to marry him, but he wanted Stoltman to follow her while she was on a business trip in Palm Springs to see what she was up to. But after Stoltman quoted him a price of $1,500 to $2,000, Eric never called back.

Later he told Stoltman that he'd taken care of the situation himself. Whatever issues Eric had with Nanette must have been resolved before he took her home to meet his family that Thanksgiving.

 

 

Still trying to get to the bottom of Eric's gun stories, the detectives interviewed other friends and former coworkers, including Roy Rauschklob, cross-checking their statements with other evidence.

Eric practiced at a firing range at least twice that fall and winter. Rauschklob told police he went with Eric during a September trip, noting that Eric didn't have a gun with him so he used his friend Tony Diaz's, who had a Beretta 92F. Diaz, a former Metropolis bartender, said Eric had told him he was planning to buy a similar model, and by mid-1994, he'd done so.

Rauschklob also saw Nanette, Eric, and his friend Jamsheed “Jayme” Amirie at the Firing Line range in the next month or two. Eric told Amirie that it was Nanette's first time shooting.

Rauschklob recalled that Eric said Nanette didn't like the trigger pull of the .380, so he'd bought her a 9mm Beretta for Christmas in 1993. Eric also told him he'd been carrying his nine-millimeter during the Lake Elsinore security job.

In Eric's journal—on the page
before
he wrote Bill's license plate number—he noted that the Lake Elsinore job took place over three weeks of evenings in December 1994. An invoice for the job said it lasted from December 3 to 17.

If Eric was carrying his nine-millimeter in Lake Elsinore, how could it have been missing since the summer, as he'd originally told police? Detective Voth ran a gun ownership database inquiry on Nanette and found no gun registrations for her, and no record of a second 9mm gun for Eric.

Eric's off-and-on roommate, Leonard Jomsky, said he went shooting one Saturday afternoon in late summer 1994 with Eric, Nanette, and Todd Calder. They fired at targets—including the silhouette of a person and a set of concentric rings—for a little more than an hour with Eric's .380 and Calder's nine-millimeter.

They each went through two or three clips, or a total of twenty or thirty shots, which they bought at the range. Nanette stood with the gun in front of her, with one hand supporting the other. When Eric tried to show her a certain technique, she said, “I know,” as if she didn't need to be instructed.

Jomsky and Nanette both struck the targets, but Jomsky said that “hers was a little bit better than mine. It was the second time I shot a gun. She made a point of that, once we returned back to the house, to let everybody know that she shot better than I did. She mentioned that someone else had taught her how to shoot a gun, so it wasn't her first time shooting.”

Jomsky said Eric loaned him the same .380 in December 1994 when they worked the Lake Elsinore job, and he gave it back when the gig was over.

CHAPTER 22

In the summer of 1994, Eric Naposki met an attractive blonde named Suzanne Cogar while lying out at the pool at the Newpointe Apartments in Tustin. Cogar, who worked for a high-end shoe distributor, lived in a mirror-image studio on the ground floor near his. Cogar and Eric became friends, hanging out at the pool and taking Jacuzzis together. They went out for some food with his friends one night, and to a movie together another night.

Cogar appreciated that he was nice-looking, had a muscular body, and seemed likeable and charming, but she didn't see any romantic potential.

“As far as intellectualwise, I kind of thought he was a meathead,” she said in 2012. “I'm more the brainiac type and he's not. I knew it was going to be a friendship thing as soon as we started talking.”

She added that she didn't feel like Eric was pursuing her either, even though she did sense an attraction between them.

“Otherwise, I don't think he would have given me the time of day,” she said. “So it worked being friends.”

From her only window, a sliding glass door onto her patio, Cogar could see him coming and going from his apartment. Sometimes he was with a blonde who often had two children in tow, and they all hung out by the pool. She usually saw the woman on weekends during the day, never on a weekend
without
the kids, and some weekends Cogar didn't see her at all. If she ever came over at night, Cogar didn't notice.

What's the deal?
she wondered.
Why is she here only part of the time?

Curious, she asked Eric about their relationship. “Is that your girlfriend?”

“We hang out sometimes,” he said vaguely.

He talked a bit about the woman—Nanette—but he wouldn't give Cogar a straight answer whether they were actually dating. Cogar didn't feel the need to push for clarification, but did wonder why Eric was being so evasive about it.

One weekend in early September, Cogar showed up with a girlfriend at Eric's door around midnight, after a night of clubbing.

“Do you want to come to the Jacuzzi?” she asked, surprised to see that Eric was naked when he answered the door, groggy with sleep.

Looking first at Cogar's friend and then at Cogar, he said, “I don't know you, but I do know you.” He took Cogar by the wrist, pulled her inside his apartment, and closed the door on the girlfriend. He started to kiss Cogar and began backing her toward his bed, which was only a few feet away in the small studio.

As he bent her over the bed, she didn't resist at first. But after quickly determining that she didn't want to be kissing a naked linebacker, she tried to push her hands against his shoulders to signal that she wanted him to get off her. However, she couldn't budge him. He was just too big.

She felt completely defenseless. She didn't feel as if he was going to force himself on her, but she feared that if he did decide to get more aggressive, she wouldn't be able to stop him.

Thinking fast, she said, “Oh, my God, it's so cold in here.”

“Is it too cold?” he asked.

“Yeah, it's like a refrigerator.”

“I can turn it down,” he said, getting up to check the thermostat, mounted on the wall a few feet away.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, she jumped off the bed and bolted out the door. She wasn't in fear for her life; she just wanted to get out of there.

The next evening, Eric stopped by her apartment to apologize. “I'm sorry about last night,” he said. “I hope I didn't scare you, because you ran out.”

Cogar didn't want to hurt his feelings so she made up an excuse. “That's okay,” she said. “I had to get going. My friend was waiting for me and we wanted to go get changed and go to the Jacuzzi.”

Cogar accepted his apology, and they went back to chatting occasionally around the complex.

Then, in the middle of the night in October, Eric came banging on Cogar's door, around 2:00
A.M.
“I wanted to warn you,” he said in a voice other than his usual calm, smooth tone. He wasn't in a panic, but he seemed genuinely alarmed. “Some guys just tried to get into my apartment.”

“You scared the crap out of me,” she said, annoyed that he had overreacted to the situation and then jerked her out of a sound sleep. “Why did you have to come and tell
me
if they were banging on
your
door?”

“I just wanted to warn you because they ran down this way and I was wondering if you saw them,” he said.

“No,” she replied.

Later, Eric told police that he'd chased a man out of the complex after seeing the handle on his front door jiggling at 3:00
A.M.
in December (either he or Cogar misremembered the month and time of this incident). At first, he thought it was Nanette trying to get in. But when the jiggling got harder, he grabbed a big jacket and a sword—the only weapon he said he kept in the apartment—and ran after the guy who had been trying to break into the apartment.

“Now, if that was the case and I owned a gun, any gun whatsoever . . . I sure as fuck wouldn't have chased him with my sword,” he said. “If I had a gun, I still would have shot the motherfucker if he came into my house.”

Cogar, however, told police she didn't recall seeing him holding a sword that night. A sword wasn't something she'd miss.

 

 

In early November 1994, Eric showed up at Cogar's one evening as if he wanted to talk. Things clearly had changed between him and Nanette. He revealed that he felt stronger about her than he had about any other woman. In fact, he wanted to marry her. So he was quite incensed, he said, when Nanette told him that her wealthy, older business partner, Bill, had come into her bedroom and tried to force her to have sex with him.

“She's living with this guy?” Cogar asked with surprise and disbelief—this being the first time she'd heard about Nanette's living arrangement.

Cogar couldn't believe that Nanette wouldn't be involved with
any
man she was living with. It sounded like Nanette was seeing Eric on the side, a case of “money here, body there,” and that she was trying to pacify Eric by claiming that she wasn't romantically involved with Bill. Only later did Cogar decide that Nanette had said this to Eric intentionally, to get him riled up and jealous.

Although Eric seemed to sincerely believe that Nanette's so-called roommate was forcing himself on her, the story made no sense to Cogar.

“Do you really believe that?” she asked. “Why doesn't she just leave?”

“Because of the kids,” he said. “She has to stay because of the kids.”

Eric said that the kids didn't belong to the older guy, and Cogar knew from previous conversations that they weren't Eric's.

“She's feeding you a line of bull,” Cogar replied, thinking that any woman in her right mind would move out of the house if something like that had happened.

Doesn't she have a mom, siblings, Eric, or a hotel that she could go to?
she wondered.

But Eric was angry. So angry, he said, that he was going to do something about it. Bill had his own private jet, which he often flew to Las Vegas, and he was planning to go there over Christmas.

“I'm going to have him killed,” Eric said, “blown away. . . . I'm going to have his plane blown up.”

“Blow his plane up? That's crazy,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“I know how I would have that done,” he said.

Eric sounded so serious that he scared her.

“That's not something that you go around saying to people, that you want to have someone's plane blown up,” she said.

But Eric didn't seem to be paying attention to what she was saying, and Cogar lost all interest in continuing the conversation
or
their friendship.

 

 

Suzanne Cogar went home to visit her family for Christmas. When she came back in early January 1995, she walked by Eric's apartment and saw that it was vacant. One evening a couple weeks later, he knocked on her front door. He said he'd moved out on December 22, but he'd apparently come back to the complex specifically to have this talk with her.

“Have you seen any cops around here?” he asked with a profoundly curious tone.

“No, why?”

“Well, if you see any, just don't talk to them, and don't tell them that you know me,” he said. Eric added that he was worried the police might talk to the manager, who would tell them that he and Cogar were friends, and then they might try to question her.

“Did you hear that man is dead?” he asked.

“What man?” she asked. Remembering their earlier conversation, she asked, “You mean that man you told me about?”

Surely, he's not going to tell me
that
man was killed.

“Bill McLaughlin, the guy that Nanette was living with,” he said. “Somebody shot him and he's dead.”

Now Cogar really didn't know what to think. First, Eric had told her that he was going to have this guy blown away or his plane blown up, and now he was telling her that the guy had been shot? Was he getting off by shocking her? Was he trying to impress her somehow? Or was he for real?

“I don't even want to know if you did it,” she said, shaking her head and trying to push away the information.

“I didn't do it, but I might've had somebody do it,” he said, smirking.

Knowing he had a security company and the resources to pull this off, Cogar felt the weight of this grim possibility on her chest and shoulders. She'd known others in the security business and to her they seemed like “hotheaded wannabes.” Why had he laid this knowledge on her? What was she supposed to do with it?

“I don't even want to know if you did it,” she said again, still unsure whether he could have done it himself or had someone else do it.

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn't,” he said, still smirking.

That remark made her think that he really
could
have done it himself. “Why [else] would he leave himself in the pool of possibility?” she said later.

On the other hand, she still wasn't sure if any part of his story was true.

“His demeanor was creepy,” she recalled. “The expression on his face was unnerving.”

Then Eric told her about the key the killer had left in the entryway of Bill's house, a key copied at a store right down the street from their apartment complex in Tustin.

And as if that weren't enough, Eric knew about the killer's gun too. “The gun that was used was the same kind of gun that I own, but they're not going to find it on me because I don't have it anymore,” he said. “I loaned it to a buddy of mine.”

All these incriminating statements were making her very uncomfortable, but given that she hadn't read the newspaper or watched the TV news lately, she was still skeptical that there had even been a murder. (At this point, the detectives didn't know where the keys had been made, so those details hadn't been released to the public, including what type of gun the killer had used.)

Trying to avoid any conflict with Eric, Cogar pretended to agree not to talk to the police and tried to encourage him to leave her apartment without letting her true feelings show. The last thing she wanted to do was to provoke or upset him, but she didn't think she'd be able to deny anything he'd said to anyone.

 

 

Eric called a few months later to chat and touch base, and perhaps, she thought, to check to see if she'd spoken to the cops, which she still had not. During the conversation, which seemed to have no other particular purpose, he reported that his relationship with Nanette was flagging.

“Things aren't working out,” he said.

Cogar figured they were breaking up, but that it wasn't “one hundred percent over.” All she could think was
Well, you got yourself into this, and for what?

By this point, it seemed to her that Eric had left Orange County. This gave her a little more peace of mind, and she felt safer about reporting his comments to the police. Especially after she had watched the news and confirmed for herself that Bill McLaughlin had actually been murdered. Nanette, to whom they referred as Bill's fiancée, was also featured. Cogar recognized her walk, with those short, quick, confident steps.

Cogar dialed the NBPD and got a woman on the phone. Cogar said she had information about a murder, and wanted to give a statement. However, no one was in the detective bureau to talk to her, so the woman asked her to call back.

“It took so much nerve for me to make this phone call that I will likely not call back,” Cogar replied.

The woman didn't seem to know what to do—and as Cogar had warned, she didn't have the nerve to call back.

 

 

Three years later, in March 1998, Cogar was living in a different apartment with a roommate, and they had gotten nearly twenty hang-up calls in the past month. As the two women wracked their brains, trying to figure out who the caller could be, Cogar thought of Eric.

After having pushed his disturbing comments out of her mind, this harassing episode brought them back to the forefront of her conscience.

This time she reached a detective, Tom Fischbacher. As she recounted her story, Fischbacher took an edgy tone with her, as if to say, “Why should we believe you?”