I'll Take Care of You (37 page)

Noting Nanette's haggard appearance, Murphy said, “Jail clearly hasn't been good to her. Today she got what she ultimately deserved.”

Everyone agreed that the victim's family shouldn't have to make more than one set of victim impact statements, he said. Everyone except Eric Naposki, who was “afraid to come out of his cell and face these two women. He was a gigantic coward.... He threw his binky down today.”

“He did it. He knows he did,” Murphy said, and maybe that's why he didn't come out, because he had “some sense of shame.”

Nanette was the most pretentious of nouveau riche defendants, he said, but now, instead of going to lavish salons to color her dark hair blond, she had to settle for the best of what the Orange County jail system had to offer. Nanette now had to stoop to getting “contraband dye for her hair and grind[ing] up magazines for her makeup.”

“She leaves a trail of destruction and shattered lives everywhere she goes,” Murphy said. “Today is the end of her rip-offs and con games.”

Asked why Eric's sentencing was delayed, Murphy said Eric had blamed Jacob Horowitz, Kevin McLaughlin, Nanette Packard, and random drug dealers for the murder and now he was blaming someone else. The defense wanted more time to investigate those claims, which Murphy characterized as “story number five.” But as far as he was concerned, he said, “none of it has borne any truth.”

 

 

On June 18, 2012, Nanette Packard, inmate #WE4559, was sent to the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, where she joined another murderess successfully prosecuted by Matt Murphy: Skylar Deleon's now ex-wife Jennifer, who goes by her maiden name, Henderson.

And in July, Billy McNeal married the woman he began dating after Nanette was in jail, a new law-abiding mother for his son, Cruz.

CHAPTER 49

On August 10, 2012, the final chapter of this saga was set to take place, nearly eighteen years after the fatal shooting in Balboa Coves.

True to form, Eric was all hepped up for his sentencing hearing and unwilling to go to prison without a fight. Because the prosecution team hadn't believed him or found any substance to his newest story, Eric had alerted the media as he'd threatened, but that had done him no good either. He was still behind bars. Had he really thought the DA would drop the charges against him in the wake of a successful conviction?

Now that the main event—Nanette's sentencing—had passed, the throngs of McLaughlin family and friends coming to watch the proceedings had thinned out, as had the number of media outlets and detectives who had worked the case.

Kim McLaughlin Bayless and her husband sat with Jenny's longtime friends Krissy and Jason Gendron, along with the family's former housekeeper, Mary Berg, Bill's college friend Ken Baumgardner and his daughter, Sandy. Tom Voth and Larry Montgomery came as well, as did former juror Adrianne Reynolds. Jenny McLaughlin, who had been battling an illness, was too sick to attend.

None of Nanette's people or ex-husbands were there, and neither was John Pappalardo, Eric's lawyer friend. The only identifiable person there for him was his fiancée, Rosie Macaluso, whose face reflected the strain of fatigue and anxiety as she sat with defense attorneys Angelo MacDonald and Gary Pohlson.

Both networks had already run their episodes, but the
48 Hours
and
Dateline
producers were there to catch the last hearing for updated reruns in the future. Both producers had pregnant bellies, evidencing the passage of time since the trials, when they were both in court with flat stomachs.

When the
48 Hours
episode aired its second interview with Eric, the producers ran a tease by intimating that they would release the name of the alleged hit man. However, they ultimately chose not to mention it, presumably because the prosecution had dismissed the story as ridiculous.

Eric came out of the holding cell in a long-sleeved pink shirt and mouthed a greeting to Rosie in the gallery. After sitting down at the defense table, he smiled and nervously riffled through papers as he chatted with Pohlson.

The hearing started off as routine. MacDonald went over the high points of the defense motion to dismiss the guilty verdict and to ask for a new trial on the constitutional grounds of due process, jury misconduct, error of law, and prosecutorial misconduct, based on the “unnecessary and unjustified prosecution of Mr. Naposki.”

Setting aside the verdict, he said, “would not be a popular thing to do . . . but it would be the just and right thing to do.”

Judge Froeberg, noting that he'd already indicated he hadn't changed his mind about the due process motion, officially denied it.

“After reviewing the extensive testimony in this case, I did not find anything—any evidence—presented at trial that would change the court's position,” the judge said.

The defense's main issue dealt with the “phone call that was supposedly placed from the Denny's at eight fifty-two,” he said. Siding with the prosecution, Froeberg said it was clear from the numerous time trials that it would have been “impossible” for Eric to have been dropped off at his apartment in Tustin, go by Leonard Jomsky's house, and then make the call from Denny's by 8:52
P.M.
The jury didn't believe the claim, and neither did he.

“It defies logic,” Froeberg said, adding that the only way the call could have been made was on Eric's way from the soccer field to Newport Beach.

Froeberg then listed the allegations in the motion and his corresponding responses:

Jury misconduct: Juror number one was reported to have said to another juror that Eric “creeps her out.” When the judge questioned her about the comment, she said Eric was “too serious and should smile more.” Froeberg stood by his decision to let her stay on the jury.

Prosecutorial misconduct: Murphy demonized the defendant as a bully and improperly called attention to MacDonald's being an out-of-towner from New York City, a dynamic to which the judge contributed. Froeberg countered that he was trying to “lessen the tension that was rampant in the courtroom,” and dismissed the “us versus them” remarks by Murphy as pretty tame. The court and the prosecution “have said a lot worse things than that,” he said, and they haven't been overturned.

Froeberg noted that Eric had filed a declaration stating that he was no longer in fear for his life and was now willing to name the contract killer who murdered Bill McLaughlin. The judge explained that the key requirement to grant a new trial motion was evidence that wasn't known
before
trial. He looked at this offer with suspicion because Eric had provided so many variations of the truth during this case. Evidence supporting the claim that the NBPD had failed to follow leads had already been presented, he said, and “the jury was free to accept or reject that.”

Was there sufficient evidence to support the guilty verdict? Yes, the judge said, and he wasn't going to go through the “mountain of circumstantial evidence” at the hearing, but in his view it was “overwhelming.”

Then, in a highly unusual scene more reminiscent of a TV courtroom drama than a real-life hearing, the judge allowed Eric to make a statement. What was perhaps most surprising was that Froeberg let Eric vent without interruption, even as his voice grew louder and he admitted that he was getting angry. Froeberg also didn't stop him from making audible comments while the victim's friends and family read their statements into the record.

This was high courtroom drama at its best as Eric went on a freestyle rant, the back of his neck turning bright red like a thermometer, just as it had at the preliminary hearing in 2009. After complaining seventeen years earlier about the media cameras documenting the police's reputation-damaging allegations against him, Eric now appeared to be trying to use those same cameras for his own purposes.

He said he'd written a statement, but he had changed his mind at the last minute and decided to improvise. But, clearly, he'd been practicing this speech
for months.

“What happened in this courtroom a year ago is about the worst thing the justice system can do,” he began.

Referring to his inch-thick stack of papers, he proceeded to repeat many of the same points he'd made to me during our jailhouse interviews.

He admitted that he had lied and “made some bad decisions. Did I lie to protect myself, Nanette, her children, and my children? Yes, absolutely. But I won't sit here and be scapegoated,” he said, proclaiming his innocence.

“Guilty by association, Your Honor, is not guilty. There's a big difference, Your Honor, between sleeping with someone and committing murder for them.”

Although Nanette was the orchestrator and “catalyst” for this murder, he said, he wasn't the shooter.

“I was never, ever convinced by Nanette Johnston to commit a murder. . . . I did not do the crime and I will prove it,” he said. (It was unclear, however, what more proof he thought he was going to get if this statement didn't work its magic to free him.)

He said he couldn't come forward with proof before his trial because he didn't have access to the discovery materials until afterward: “I didn't have that information until . . . when, Gary? . . . January.”

Eric said he knew he was seventeen years late in admitting that it was the “hit man,” Juan Gonzales, who had carried out the murder. “I apologize to the McLaughlins for that.”

But blaming everyone but himself, Eric claimed that perpetuating this “scam”—i.e., labeling Eric as the shooter—was, in effect, “robbing the McLaughlins of the most important thing—[the ability] to solve the crime.”

“It was a sloppy investigation, Your Honor,” he said. “I'm innocent and that will never change. Those twelve people made a mistake.”

 

 

Following up on Eric's indignant and righteous performance, Sandy Baumgardner led off the victim impact statements, responding to Eric's remarks as though she'd heard them in advance.

As she charged him with making “an absolute spectacle of himself' and touting the “flagrant lie” that Bill McLaughlin was a rapist, Eric smiled and shook his head.

“‘Prosecutor Matt Murphy's numerous points on what an “innocent Eric Naposki” would have done seventeen years ago are now a matter of record,'” she said. “‘What the now “guilty Eric Naposki” has done since his arrest in 2009 has been no better. His stories changed numerous times as he exhausted every possible avenue to avoid accountability. And even after the verdict last July, he continues to weave his tall tales of innocence.'

“‘It's an established phenomenon that many a convicted murderer goes to his own grave feverishly denying his guilt, and Mr. Naposki is certainly no exception. His recent attempts to occlude the facts that led to his conviction last summer are absolutely ridiculous and frankly callous.'”

As the next speaker took to the podium, Eric toned down his facial expressions, stopped smirking, and looked down as Krissy Gendron, Jenny McLaughlin's childhood friend, read into the record the same statement that Jenny had read at Nanette's sentencing.

But Eric's behavior changed when Kim McLaughlin Bayless got up to read her statement, drawing attention to himself in a display that came off as disrespectful for the grief and loss the McLaughlin clan was still feeling, surely heightened even more now that Jenny was in ill health.

Just as Kim had done during Nanette's hearing, she turned the podium so she could look the convicted killer in the eye. But, unlike Nanette, Eric turned his chair toward her so he could meet her gaze from about ten feet away—and with bravado, no less. His apparent lack of humility and compassion came off as arrogance and insensitivity—the epitome of narcissism.

Kim started off by saying that it was important for Eric to hear how close she'd been with her father, and what a “very sweet friendship” they'd shared. They met on weekends, she said, and he brought her on business trips to train her how to sell his products.

As she continued, Eric shook his head and smiled again.

“‘Eric,'” she said, “‘you have no idea of the far-reaching devastating effects'” of this murder.

Speaking up for her brother Kevin, fingered by Eric's defense team as the likely killer of his own father, Kim's voice broke with emotion.

“‘My dad's murder really messed with him. He was so angry and so frustrated. Kevin never got over the image of his dad lying on the kitchen floor, lying in a pool of blood in the house that we grew up in.'”

Kim said her family was grateful that Kevin was upstairs in his room at the time of the shooting, “‘or we're sure you would have taken him from us as well.'”

As for the claim that Eric had never set foot in the house, she said, “‘That's a lie.'”

“It's not a lie,” Eric interjected. “Your father knows.”

Crying now, Kim continued. Whatever the motive was for the murder—jealousy or anger or greed—she couldn't grasp it. But the one thing Eric couldn't take away from her and her family was the “intense” and “abundant amount of love” that Bill McLaughlin had given them, and the way he'd taught them to do random acts of kindness for others.

Eric looked away as Kim challenged him to honor Bill McLaughlin, the man he murdered, to change his “horrific ways” and to live by the same credo.

 

 

With that, Judge Froeberg pronounced the only sentencing option for Eric based on the charges and conviction before him: life without the possibility of parole for murder in the first degree with the special circumstance of financial gain, as well as the additional weapons charge, which added four more years.

After the bailiffs had cuffed Eric's hands behind his back, he stood up from the defense table and leaned his shaved head toward prosecutor Matt Murphy to deliver one last message.

“You blew it,” Eric said. “You fucking blew it.” Murphy, who always enjoyed an opportunity to spar with a defendant, spoke right up. “Bye-bye,” he said from his chair.

“I'll see you again,” Eric fired back.

Afterward, spectators in the gallery shook their heads with disbelief. “The Eric Show” had been remarkable, even to the most veteran court watchers.

Murphy and Pohlson said later that they were shocked by Eric's behavior, and Pohlson was embarrassed, to boot. Neither attorney had ever seen a defendant challenge a victim's family member while he or she was reading a statement at sentencing.

“I did support Eric Naposki, but I did want him to have some class,” Pohlson said. “No matter what happened, those people deserved the utmost respect.”

Angelo MacDonald said he wasn't surprised, but “I was not happy about it. We repeatedly told him not to say things, not to react.” But in this case, “I think [Eric] felt he needed to respond. ‘I've got to let them know I didn't do this.' That's who he is.”

MacDonald said he didn't believe that Eric meant to be disrespectful, however, he noted that such outbursts are much more common in Eric's birth state of New York, where people are more vocal and animated in general.

But, thankfully for the McLaughlin family, this was the last they would have to see of Eric Naposki—other than in his TV interviews.

 

 

Outside the courtroom, a reporter asked MacDonald why the defense never presented any information about the alleged hit man, Juan Gonzales.