I'll Take Care of You (35 page)

The courtroom was packed. Nanette's daughter Lishele, who was three months pregnant, had told a McLaughlin family member that she didn't want to attend the entire trial for fear of traumatizing her baby. But she was there that day, bracing herself for the outcome. Her father, K. Ross Johnston, and her most recent stepfather, Billy McNeal, were also there, waiting to see justice served on the woman who had lied to and taken advantage of both of them.

At 1:41
P.M.
, the judge signaled for the jurors to come in. Their faces somber, they walked single file into the jury box.

As the clerk read the guilty verdict and confirmed the finding of the special circumstance of murder for financial gain, Nanette sat stoic, motionless, and silent, staring straight ahead as her attorney put his arm around her to offer comfort.

Reminiscent of Bill's funeral, Lishele was the one who broke down sobbing as the reality struck her.

“It's just a hard thing for her to take,” Hakala speculated. “The sadness is that all these things were in the paper. Maybe it was the best thing for this young girl.... She will not be a mother like her mother was.”

Judge Froeberg announced that Nanette would be sentenced on May 18. Lishele left before the jury was dismissed.

Matt Murphy had done it again, raising his extraordinary homicide trial stats to 39 and 0.

The judge, who was smiling ear to ear, told the jurors they'd made a good intellectual and conscientious decision. He ordered them not to talk to any media for profit for ninety days.

Jenny and Kim, crying happy tears, thanked Murphy. Kim hugged Billy, who had brought his fiancée. Then she hugged K. Ross as well.

 

 

Billy McNeal felt relieved that the whole ordeal was over, and that he wouldn't have to fight this vengeful woman for custody of his son. He'd had a tiny concern that the jury wouldn't convict her, but as soon as he learned that the panel had deliberated for such a short time, he knew she was going down.

He also felt grateful for the opportunity to get a fresh start, and “to be happy again, not to have that dark cloud hanging over [me] . . . thankful that God had given me the strength to get through the whole thing and keep my wits.”

And he was pleased to see the McLaughlins get the satisfaction and closure they deserved. Here he'd been complaining about going through his own nightmare for two years, he said, when they'd been suffering for more than seventeen.

“I couldn't imagine,” he said. “I was glad for them. Good people.”

The one lesson he'd learned from all this: Trust your gut. If your significant other tells you something that doesn't sound quite right, or conflicts with something he or she said before, confront that person about your doubts.

Looking back, he said, he'd felt such twinges many times, but he'd never pursued them because they'd never seemed important enough to start an argument. But even if he had, he still couldn't be sure it would have changed anything, because Nanette was such a good liar. He figured that her siblings had never exposed her because they didn't want to deal with any more conflict after what they'd been through with their mother and stepfather.

“They were afraid of [Nanette],” he said. “All the hard times they'd had with the family, the last thing they wanted was to stir up the past . . . so they were all paddling the same boat. And I think Kris and Lishele didn't want to bring up the past. They were afraid [too, and were probably thinking,] ‘I'm not going to rat my mom out.'”

 

 

The jury requested a special elevator to get downstairs and safely away from the reporters, who were gathered on the second floor, where news conferences were held.

In front of a dozen news cameras, Matt Murphy, Tom Voth, and Larry Montgomery stood with the McLaughlin sisters, as the winning prosecutor described how Nanette had blown through all kinds of money after Bill's death, then had the gall to sue his family for more. And today that money was all gone.

Kim and Jenny thanked the police, Murphy's team, and the jury, saying that the system had worked. They felt as if their father had been at the proceedings in spirit.

“He was a wonderful man, who was always loving his family . . . and caring for his family tremendously,” Hakala remarked later, noting that the verdict must have lifted a huge burden from Bill's daughters.

“It was a lot of peace” for the family, she said, adding that at the same time “our hearts went out to Nanette's daughter, who was pregnant.... You can't understand the damage this woman [Nanette] has done.”

 

 

That evening, the McLaughlin family and friends, detectives, and the prosecution team celebrated a victory long in coming at the Yard House on Fashion Island, where Kim expressed her gratitude to everyone once again.

The next day, on January 24, a family court judge confirmed the custody award of Cruz to Billy McNeal, stating that Nanette “shall have no contact with the parties' son, unless specifically provided by court order.”

The judge ordered Nanette to repay Billy the $5,000 he'd paid to attorney Al Stokke, as well as the $24,290 partial payment he'd made to cover Nanette's obligation of the $150,000 loan. The judge also said that neither party had to pay spousal support. Ever.

CHAPTER 46

On March 23, 2012, Larry Montgomery finally received the “package” of information from Eric for which he'd been waiting since their first meeting in September 2011. Eric had also promised to send over his “notes” after their subsequent meeting.

If Eric really was telling the truth that he was innocent, it was the DA investigator's job to make sure the prosecution didn't send an innocent man to prison. But try as he might, Montgomery just couldn't find any truth to Eric's story.

It was highly unusual for a convicted man to come up with a story like this
after
his trial, but as Montgomery wrote in a letter to the defense's private investigator, Tom Gleim, he'd still
[put in] months of time, effort and investigation into trying to determine if Naposki's “new” story is consistent with innocence and [Gonzales's] guilt.

Montgomery told Gleim that he'd gone through Eric's police interviews and reviewed all his past actions,
considering the totally
different mindset
he would have if his new story is true.
Bottom line was that Montgomery had found nothing that made Eric look innocent, but he had
found even
more
things that are consistent with his guilt.

On April 23, Montgomery completed his report on the information that Eric had provided in September. Two days later, Gleim delivered yet another package from Eric, but the new information didn't change Montgomery's viewpoint—or Matt Murphy's—one iota.

CHAPTER 47

My second interview with Eric Naposki lasted nearly five hours, in May 2012. This time, he was even more charming as he made self-deprecating jokes about the “pretty toupee” he'd worn in the 1990s.

Nanette never responded to the letter I sent before her sentencing in which I said I wanted to hear her side of the story. So much for her claim to want to tell everything when the case was “all over.”

After being bombarded with Eric's explanations for “mistakes” in the prosecution's case, I walked out of the Theo Lacy Facility almost believing his story, which was exactly what Matt Murphy said he'd been worried would happen if Eric had testified: He sounded so confident and sure of himself, a juror just might believe him. I was also curious to read the thick stack of papers he kept holding against the glass during our lengthy interview.

Since his trial, Eric said, he'd gone through six thousand pages of discovery to which he hadn't had access before his trial, and that was why he'd taken so long to come out with this new version of what happened. And that, he said, was why he was now able to provide documentation for his claim that Nanette had used Bill's own money to put a hit out on him.

Eric pointed to certain calls on her car phone bill, saying these showed she was making arrangements with the guy in the final days before Bill's murder. He said he'd also tabulated all the smaller amounts of money she'd taken throughout 1994 to come up with a payment of approximately $30,000 for the hit man.

“To hear Matt Murphy try and use the [SWAT] training as a precursor for killing Bill with an unknown teaching called ‘double tapping' was one hundred percent absurd and ridiculous,” he said. “I never thought in my wildest dreams that my assistance in helping law enforcement would render me an expert assassin.”

Holding a photo of his two younger children against the glass, he told me, “I swear on my babies” that he was telling the truth.

This time, he told me the name of the “hit man”: Juan Gonzales, whose identity I'd already learned through other sources. Eric said he was going to announce it at his next court hearing.

He said he'd known Gonzales for about a year before the murder, and they'd been putting together Midnight Moon Productions with Nanette's help. While they were meeting to talk business, Nanette brought up the story that Bill had raped her, and Gonzales offered his help.

“I've got people to handle rapists,” Gonzales reportedly said.

“I'm not interested in help,” Eric told Gonzales. “I'm fine. I'm handling it with Nanette.”

Ultimately, he said, Gonzales went ahead on his own with Nanette, but it was over Eric's protests. Eric insisted that he personally had nothing to do with the shooting.

“I don't know who [Juan] had shoot Bill, or if he did it himself. What I do know is it was sloppy and deliberate,” he said.

Eric pointed to a statement from one of Bill's neighbors, who told police that she'd seen “an expensive white-over-black sports car parked just outside the gate” at Balboa Coves the night of Bill's murder. Eric said the reflection of a street light must have caused the car to look two-toned.

He then pointed to a police report that quoted a Thunderbird valet saying that
“[a club employee] would sometimes arrive with Naposki in the Pathfinder, or, about the same time, in a 1989 or 1990 black BMW. . . . A male white, 25 yrs., 5'11”, 200 lbs., full-face, with black hair.”
Eric said this was Gonzales. (I subsequently checked with police, and Gonzales was never an employee there.)

The details of Bill's alleged rape of Nanette had escalated since our last interview. Looking back later, I wondered if he thought his earlier story about the “rape” hadn't been shocking or salacious enough to convince the prosecution team or the media, so he had to take it up a notch. The new details were that Nanette had told him that Bill was a drinker with sexual performance issues, and that he'd raped her with one of his guns. (His attorney Angelo MacDonald later told me that the gun-rape detail actually wasn't new; Eric had described this to him and Pohlson from the very beginning. But based on Eric's next statement to me, this seemed more likely to be one of Nanette's concoctions.)

“There's a reason why Suzanne Cogar and I had that conversation,” Eric said. “I had a reason to hate Bill.... [Nanette's] intent was to incite me.” (This is the same conversation that Eric had previously denied having with Cogar.)

So, I asked, why not turn in Nanette during the police interview in Greenwich when he was arrested in 2009?

Eric said he kept quiet in that interview because he was sure that Julian Bailey was “going to go down to the DA's office within twenty-four hours and get me out.”

“Do you regret doing that now?” I asked.

“Do you think?” he replied facetiously. Then he quickly went back to discounting the prosecution's allegations. But “when you tell me something I know is wrong, you call me a murderer . . . and I have proof that I'm innocent, I'm going to tell you to go fuck yourself.”

I asked him about his steroid use, and he said he wasn't using them around the time of Bill's murder or anytime after college, for that matter. In a surreal but telling show of his personality, Eric smiled as he flexed his biceps for me, pointing out that even after three years in jail he was still very muscular. Swearing again on his children's lives, he said, “I'm two hundred sixty pounds. I've got twenty-two-inch arms. I don't need steroids. I'm just naturally a big guy.”

I asked him what it was about Nanette that had drawn him and all these other men to her. He said she tended to have “highly sexual relationships” that didn't last long. When he and Nanette were just friends, she used to tell him “about the size of a man's penis, if it was unusually large or unusually small. You lie to the person you're with, but you're honest with your friends, because there's nothing at stake.... She had no reason to lie to me.”

Over time, they found they had a lot in common and decided to give dating a shot. “I didn't fall head over heels for Nanette,” he said. “She grew on me and she was cool.... I loved her kids and that's how she gets you. . . . To me, Nanette was a single mom, just like my mom.”

He said he loved Nanette's kids as well, and what they did together typically revolved around Kristofer's games. “I had Lishele in my arms, my baby,” he said. “She wrote me a letter here that I was her favorite boyfriend that her mom had. I loved that girl.”

He showed me a photo of Nanette shooting a rifle at a carnival booth, with Kristofer's arm resting on Eric's back. “You can't make kids lie,” he said. “Bill McLaughlin had to know about me in some respects.”

While he, Nanette, and her kids were on the East Coast in November 1994, he said, they spent ten days together—with no mention of Bill. “She talked about how we were going to be a big, fat family and live in California, maybe one day move back.”

He said he was shopping for rings around Christmas in 1994, and also applied for a $10,000 loan. “Why would I need a loan for ten thousand dollars if I'm about to become ‘Mr. Rich' and my girlfriend has hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank? Isn't that silly?”

Yes, Eric Naposki was very convincing that day, so I waited to write these last chapters until I could do more research and look deeper into his claims, just as Larry Montgomery and the NBPD had.

But after I'd spent nearly two years going through all the evidence and documentation myself, after I'd sat through both trials, interviewed witnesses, detectives, and the prosecution team, and after I'd compared the various versions of Eric's evolving story, I have to say that I, too, found a whole lot of discrepancies.

For me, the final point that really undermined Eric's credibility was this: I checked the California secretary of state's website for Midnight Moon Productions and saw that it wasn't registered as an LLC until June 1995. The business plan that police found on Nanette's computer during the search of her home in Dove Canyon, where Eric insisted he wasn't living but his truck was parked, was dated August 14, 1995—eight months
after
the shooting. Even if he truly wasn't living there, why would he go into business with Nanette and a guy who he knew was a killer and had reportedly threatened him? And, as Voth and Murphy had pointed out, why would a hit man need to borrow Eric's gun?

When I talked with Suzanne Cogar about Eric's latest story, she summed it up like this: “He's throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks.”

“My gut feeling is that he pulled the trigger,” she said. “I guess it's the circumstantial evidence that convinces me. The fact that he worked close to Bill's house, the timeline of him not having an airtight alibi, because I know how fast you can get from that apartment to that part of town [in Newport Beach]—ten minutes!”

After living in that same apartment complex in Tustin for six and a half years, she said, “I didn't drive it and time it, like the cops did, but at nine o'clock at night, traffic wasn't an issue.”

 

 

To this day, Murphy and investigators involved in this case remain quite confident that Eric was the shooter.

If you're going to get yourself an alibi during a murder-for-hire, Murphy said, “You're going to be in Vegas, sipping a piña colada with an Elvis impersonator—on video. That's what somebody does when they get a hit man.”

As an investigative journalist trained to be objective, I'm not here to make judgments, so I will let the readers weigh both sides for themselves. But facts don't lie. Killers do.