I'll Take Care of You (29 page)

 

 

Eric's attorneys had counseled him about his courtroom behavior, yet he continued to act cocky and sure of himself, smirking and laughing at the counsel table. He even turned around and winked at Rosie, who sat in the gallery with John Pappalardo.

“I told Eric that if he didn't stop acting like he was, he might as well plead guilty,” Pohlson said later.

Eric told his attorneys that he understood how his behavior came off, and by the third day of his trial, his persistent and open challenging of Murphy had eased off. When the prosecutor played Kevin McLaughlin's almost incoherent 911 tape, it was no laughing matter. For anyone.

The tape was absolutely wrenching to listen to, even for those who had never met the twenty-four-year-old. It was so hellish for his family that Kim McLaughlin put her fingers in her ears while the tape played.

But it wasn't long before Eric started acting out again.

“Pro athletes, they tend to believe that they're invincible and they know what they're doing,” Pohlson said later. “They [believe you] have to attack, or you have to do it your way. He was convinced that his way was the best way, and he didn't want to take any guff from Murphy.”

 

 

Suzanne Cogar, one of the prosecution's most important witnesses, testified for about seventy-five minutes that day, relating Eric's comments about wanting to have Bill's plane blown up because he was angry that Bill “had been making sexual advances” toward Nanette.

Pohlson objected to the answer as hearsay. After a sidebar with the judge, he said he wanted to register a continuing objection to all of Cogar's testimony about her conversations with Eric, which Froeberg overruled.

Cogar said she ended the first conversation with Eric “freaked out over that statement because he seemed so serious.... I didn't like what I was hearing, and I just didn't want to hang out with somebody who would talk like that.”

On cross-examination, Pohlson tried to diminish Cogar's credibility. “Eric Naposki never threatened you, did he?”

“No,” she said.

“You used the word ‘paranoid,'” a point about which Pohlson reminded her—and the jury—several times throughout her testimony. “Are you normally paranoid?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you when he's doing this ‘blown away' conversation that Nanette wanted Bill McLaughlin killed?”

Cogar said no, not that she recalled.

“Were you jealous of her?”

“No.”

After Cogar admitted that she'd seen Nanette going into Eric's apartment a dozen times, Pohlson said, “Kinda sounds like spying, doesn't it?”

“No,” she said. “I saw everyone who walked by.”

Once he'd established that Cogar knew Bill McLaughlin lived in Newport, he asked, “You thought Eric Naposki was serious about having him blown away. You, of course, called McLaughlin to warn him, right?”

“I did not,” she said, acknowledging that she didn't call the police either.

“Because you didn't think Eric Naposki was going to kill him, did you?”

“It was hard to believe,” she said, acknowledging that for the most part she'd seen Eric be nice to people around the apartment complex.

Asked if Eric mentioned how he planned to blow up Bill's plane, Cogar quoted him as saying, “I know how to have that done.”

“Do you ever remember him saying to you . . . he was going to be wealthy, or he was going to make money, or he was going to have more money?”

No, she said, she didn't.

On redirect, Murphy got Cogar to say that she believed Nanette had been dating both men, even if Eric didn't realize it.

“That wasn't anything Mr. Naposki told you?”

“That was my own thoughts on the situation.”

Pohlson came back with more innuendo, implying that Cogar showed up at Eric's apartment late at night in a bikini for a Jacuzzi because she was romantically interested in him.

“Did that indicate that you wanted to have more of a relationship, kind of move to the next level, you might say?”

“To me, it didn't.”

On cross, Murphy asked if she did what she “told him Nanette should just do if something inappropriate is going on,” which, in Cogar's case, was when the naked linebacker started kissing her.

“That's right,” Cogar said. “Just leave.”

“I have nothing further,” Murphy said.

 

 

On day four, Murphy called Gary Rorden, a baseball team coach whose kids played with Nanette's son Kristofer, to show that Eric and Nanette were increasingly brazen and open with their relationship, even among people in Newport Beach who knew Bill personally.

Judge Froeberg was not easily ruffled. Once the attorneys had finished asking their questions, he often stepped in to ask a witness, including Rorden, to clarify or elaborate on certain answers.

Rorden's testimony was a bit surprising in that he admitted to liking the defendant, an accused killer, more than Bill McLaughlin, the murder victim. He said he didn't care much for Bill personally, although he explained to the judge that he was admittedly “in awe” of the man for showing up at the baseball field with Nanette, who was so attractive and so much younger than Bill.

Rorden described Eric as “a very nice gentleman” who had helped him out with batting practice one afternoon in Newport Beach. However, Rorden admitted he also thought “hmm” when he saw the professional athlete showing up at games with Nanette, and being “friendly—very friendly”—because Rorden knew she was living with Bill. He acknowledged during cross-examination that Eric and Bill were never at the field at the same time.

“We knew the McLaughlin family, so it was just kind of awkward,” he said, adding that he didn't think Nanette was aware of that knowledge. “In my mind, it was clear something was going on . . . and [Nanette and Eric] weren't trying to hide it.”

 

 

Murphy called Detective Tom Voth to the stand and introduced the tape of Nanette's first interview with police the night of the murder. This allowed the jurors to hear the low, scratchy, and monotone voice of the “black widow” who stole from Bill and cheated on him with the defendant, leaving them to wonder if she sounded that way because she'd been screaming at her son's soccer game, or if she was simply unemotional about Bill's death.

Although she was not in the courtroom, this tape was just one brick in the wall that both sides were building to convince the jury that Nanette was one of the world's most evil, greedy, and manipulative women.

Murphy also played the tape of Eric Naposki's first police interview, in which he jocularly described his football career, so jurors could hear for themselves Eric's attempts to hide his deep feelings for Nanette. Then, in his second interview, they heard his increasingly confrontational exchanges with the detectives as they confronted him with his conflicting statements.

The prosecutor asked Voth to reiterate whether anyone knew early on that a 9mm gun had been used in the murder.

“Outside the police department, not that I'm aware of,” Voth said, acknowledging that gunshot residue could be washed off or go undetected if a killer wore gloves. He added that the murder weapon being a nine-millimeter didn't come out publicly until early February, when the media wrote about the search warrant affidavits.

“Now, in the seventeen years since this murder, has Mr. Naposki's Beretta nine-millimeter ever turned up?”

“No, sir.”

 

 

Matt Murphy spent a good portion of the trial going over the numerous driving-time tests that the detectives conducted during the 1990s and again in recent years to prove that Eric had plenty of time to kill Bill McLaughlin before the 911 call was made.

Murphy showed the jury a videotaped drive, maps of the possible routes from the soccer field to Eric's apartment and on to Balboa Coves, and had several witnesses discuss these trips. It was tedious, but, as it turned out, important to the jury.

The defense came back with many questions for these witnesses, asking about changes in traffic patterns and challenging the thoroughness of NBPD's investigation, with the hope of showing that the passage of time had dramatically reduced Eric's ability to get a fair trial.

When Murphy asked a question that implied Eric had enough time to commit the murder, Angelo MacDonald objected, saying the question was “conclusionary.” Froeberg sustained the objection.

Nonetheless, the prosecutor remained collegial with the two defense attorneys. At the end of the day, as the three of them headed back to the judge's chambers to discuss a few issues, MacDonald touched Murphy's back as he walked behind him—the same way male athletes pat each other during a game.

But that collegiality would soon turn to contentiousness.

 

 

As many experienced attorneys do, Murphy, Pohlson, and MacDonald had forged a pretrial agreement not to launch unnecessary objections, believing they were disrespectful to the judge, slowed things down, and sometimes served no purpose except to make the lawyers look bad to the jury.

Murphy was prepared for MacDonald to be more aggressive than his usual Orange County opponents might be, because the defense attorney had nothing to lose. Being from New York, MacDonald wouldn't have to appear before this judge again. Murphy also figured that MacDonald would likely try to slip in a mention of Jacob Horowitz, which Murphy believed was inappropriate.

Under the rules governing a third-party culpability defense in California, Murphy explained later, an attorney has to have “actual evidence that somebody did it, you can't just point your finger at somebody.”

The attorneys had agreed to let some evidence come in for purposes of streamlining the case. However, when MacDonald slipped into a question that Horowitz had just lost his lawsuit with Bill, implying that Horowitz had a strong motive for murder, Murphy dealt with the issue by talking to defense attorneys privately rather than object in front of the jury. Then he “cleaned it up” in open court with a slide he'd prepared for this explicit purpose.

“I wasn't upset about it,” he explained later. “I fully anticipated that they were going to do that.”

But as a result of this type of courtroom sparring, the pretrial agreement broke down, prompting Murphy to repeatedly object to certain defense questions—no matter how they were asked—until he was effectively able to block them.

Tit for tat, the defense also started lodging objections, and even the judge agreed that Murphy hadn't laid enough foundation for a certain question. As Murphy grew visibly and audibly irritated, his voice dripped with sarcasm as he asked questions in such a way that the jury knew he was upset: “Are you familiar with this thing we have in the United States called ‘states'?” he asked.

By this time, even the judge had noticed the friction that had developed between the attorneys.

“My, the mood has changed,” Froeberg said.

 

 

On cross-examination, MacDonald grilled Detective Voth about nitpicky details, implying that the investigation had wrongly overlooked them, such as why police never interviewed the soccer players' families, the referee, grounds crew, or record keeper from the game on the night of the murder. Why he didn't look for pieces of torn clothing caught on the barbed wire around Balboa Coves, or follow up on getting Eric's phone records?

Then came a surprise for the prosecution team. MacDonald flashed a page from Nanette's check register on the overhead screen, showing that she'd written a check to Frankie's Lock and Key in November, the same time frame that the prosecution had claimed that Eric was getting keys copied.

Seeing this unexpected piece of evidence, Murphy's heart started to race.

Oh, my God,
Murphy panicked.
We just lost the trial. How did we miss the fact that, days before the murder, she's got a record of getting keys made?

It was right before noon. As soon as they broke for lunch, Murphy, Larry Montgomery, and Detective Joe Cartwright rushed out to start Googling and digging through boxes of evidence. To their relief, they discovered that Frankie's was actually a key shop in Arizona, where some of Nanette's family lived. And once they reviewed the check register, they realized that the Frankie's key shop transaction actually occurred in November
1993—
more than a year before the murder.

Heaving a collective sigh of relief, Murphy and his team were able to come back to court to present the full picture, which also allowed the prosecutor “to take some shots” at the defense in front of the jury.

“It's part of the duel,” Murphy said later. “It's nothing slimy.”

Even so, he believed that the defense took a credibility hit from the exchange.

 

 

On June 29, Murphy went quickly through the forensic evidence from the autopsy with Dr. Anthony Juguilon, the county's chief pathologist, subtly hinting to the jurors that he didn't want to waste anyone's time by going into more detail than necessary about the victim's bullet wounds.

“Every one was potentially fatal, independently,” Juguilon said, and each one would have killed Bill McLaughlin quickly.

Asked which was the fatal shot, the pathologist said, “If you're asking me what the most serious one would be, it would be the one that passed through the aorta,” explaining that bullets also tore through the abdominal cavity and lacerated the intestines, pancreas, liver, and vena cava.