I'll Take Care of You (8 page)

The Thunderbird was one of about twenty nightclubs scattered around the peninsula, where the young, affluent, and attractive twentysomething patrons paid enormous cover charges to gain entrance.

“They were the pretty people. Everyone went there to be seen,” said Dave Byington, the retired homicide sergeant. “Always had a line out the door.”

Eric worked security at the front door. In those days, the NBPD's vice squad was busy monitoring these nightclubs and chasing down narcotics crimes: “Coke was huge, high-end prostitutes, escorts,” Byington recalled.

 

 

Frizzell followed up on Eric's gun story by trying to interview Joe David Jimenez, who had reportedly lost Eric's nine-millimeter gun. But Jimenez was in Texas visiting his parents for the holidays, so Frizzell talked to Jimenez's roommate, Robert Trednic, instead. Trednic, who had worked with Eric at Metropolis, described him as a sneak and a liar.

According to Trednic, Eric had said, “If there is a shooting going on, don't worry, I'm holding,” although Trednic said he'd never actually seen any gun. Trednic also said he'd never known Jimenez to carry one either.

Reached by phone the next day, Jimenez confirmed that Eric had loaned him a gun as protection for a few nights on a security job in August 1994, but it wasn't a nine-millimeter. It was a Jennings-Bryco .380, he said, and it was never stolen. That's just what he'd told Eric the day he'd pulled up on a motorcycle that Eric said his girlfriend had bought for him and asked Jimenez for the gun.

Jimenez told Detective Frizzell that he'd sold the gun to his boss, Art Menaldi, for $240—fully loaded, not empty of bullets, as Eric had claimed—after Eric failed to pay him that same amount for the security job. When Eric finally paid Jimenez his $240, Jimenez offered to repay Eric the $100 that Eric said the gun was worth. Records showed that Eric had bought the .380 from a pawnshop in Dallas, Texas, in January 1994.

Jimenez said Eric called him at one point and said he'd lost his nine-millimeter gun
and
his .380, so he was unsure which one he'd actually loaned to Jimenez—apparently trying to solicit a statement that other weapons could have been stolen out of his car at the same time. That's when Jimenez confessed to Eric that he'd actually sold the .380 to Menaldi.

Eric called Jimenez in Texas the same day Frizzell did. But before Eric could say anything, Jimenez asked him what was going on.

“The police are calling me, asking me questions about you and a murder or something.”

Eric got quiet for a moment and said, “Someone's trying to frame me.”

“Oh,” Jimenez said.

Then Eric hung up abruptly.

The NBPD tracked down the .380 and got it back from Art Menaldi's brother, Dominic, who told police that Eric had asked for it some weeks earlier, saying he needed it because of some problem. Describing the gun to Dominic as “a small, snub-nosed, little piece-of-crap gun that fits in your hand and looks like a nine-millimeter,” Eric apparently wanted to prove to police that it hadn't been fired recently.

A few months later, Jimenez passed a lie detector test and also turned over six Hydra-Shok bullets that he'd removed from Eric's .380 before Dominic Menaldi had returned it to police. This was the same type of bullet that had killed Bill McLaughlin, who had no such ammunition in his arsenal.

When the detectives learned that Eric had paid $540 for the Beretta 92F, nearly twice the value of the .380, they knew that Eric wouldn't have confused the two guns. Why would Eric lie and say he'd loaned the 9mm to Jimenez?

“There's no reason in the world [for Eric] to lie about that, unless that gun was used in the crime,” Detective Voth said.

Voth wondered what role Eric might have played in the crime. Was he the shooter? Or was Nanette the shooter and he simply helped her? Under the law, Eric was just as guilty either way.

 

 

At the end of December 1994, Detectives Frizzell and Hartford located Kevin McDaniel in Los Angeles. McDaniel had sold the nine-millimeter Beretta to Eric in June or July 1994, about six years after they'd met on a bodyguard job in Mexico through Art Menaldi's company, MPP Bodyguards.

McDaniel told detectives that he'd only just spoken to Eric, who still owed him $1,400 of the $2,000 he'd loaned him. Eric had written some checks that bounced and said he was going through some “stuff right now,” but he would try to repay McDaniel as soon as he got some cash.

Before Thanksgiving, Eric had told him that he'd loaned the Beretta to Jimenez, but it had been stolen from Jimenez's car, a similar story to what he'd told police.

“You need to report my gun stolen,” Eric said.

But McDaniel told Eric no, that
he
should be the one to report the gun stolen, because it was no longer McDaniel's weapon. The detectives thought it was looking more and more like this Beretta was the gun that had killed Bill McLaughlin—and that Eric was the shooter. Now if they could just find it.

CHAPTER 11

Kim and Jenny McLaughlin soon discovered that their concerns and dislike for Nanette had fallen tragically short of reality.

Kim didn't know where her father had really met Nanette, but Kim didn't appreciate the fact that Nanette was only one year older than she was, or that Nanette's kids had moved into Bill's daughters' bedrooms within a few months of meeting Nanette.

In Kim's view, Nanette was a mooch, quitting her sales job as soon as she moved in. She also sucked up to Bill for his money, persuading him to send her kids to soccer camp and to take them all on exotic vacations. Kim told police that the only people she could see wanting Bill dead were Jacob Horowitz and Nanette Johnston.

Kevin McLaughlin, who lived with the couple, saw things a little differently. Although Nanette had her own bedroom, he often saw her go into Bill's room at night.

“They didn't think I knew what was going on, but I knew,” he told police.

Then again, he also didn't know that Nanette was seeing anyone on the side.

After Bill's murder, Kim and Jenny told Nanette that they were taking Kevin for a weeklong trip for Christmas to their mother's house, their childhood vacation home on Hanalei Bay, Hawaii. They planned to mourn their father's death together, clear their heads, and scatter their father's ashes on the bay he'd loved. Nanette, they said, could take that time to move her things out of Balboa Coves and transfer them to the Seashore house, per Bill's will.

When the four of them returned from Hawaii, however, they were shocked to see that half of Bill's home office had been cleared out: his desktop computer, fax and copy machines, as well as various boxes of corporate documents and files. Nanette also had taken the Cadillac, even though Bill's will had specifically provided her with the Infiniti. To top it off, even his favorite baseball, signed by Babe Ruth, was gone.

As they went through Bill's walk-in closet to pack up his things, they found a pair of red high-heeled pumps, the size of Nanette's feet, next to his Armani suits, as well as a matching red teddy and a vibrator.

“So she took care of him in that respect,” Sandy Baumgardner said.

They noticed that she'd left behind photos of her and Bill together. However, she'd taken the portraits of herself, which Bill had kept on his desk at Balboa Coves, including those of her wearing a lacey bra while posed on a motorcycle.

When the McLaughlins went to the Las Vegas house to go through his things, they were repulsed to find a poster-size photo from the same motorcycle shoot. Knowing that there were no small children around in Las Vegas, Bill had apparently felt free to display a much racier shot of Nanette—leaning back, topless, showing off the fake breasts that he, as her benefactor, had bought for her.

“Kim hated her so much,” Sandy said. “She just wanted to stomp on it and tear it apart.”

The McLaughlins tried once more to explain to Nanette that they would give her the Infiniti, which was in Las Vegas, if she would please return the Cadillac, per Bill's living will. Yet, she still continued to ignore their pleas.

 

 

After evading police for weeks, Nanette finally agreed to take a polygraph test on January 5, 1995. Although she tested as truthful when she answered “no” to the question “Did you shoot Bill McLaughlin?” she came up as deceptive when she responded with “no” to these three questions:

“Do you know for sure who shot Bill McLaughlin?”

“Do you know for sure where the gun is that was used to shoot Bill McLaughlin?”

“Did you participate in any way in shooting Bill McLaughlin?”

She said she'd never said anything to Eric that would have made him want to kill Bill, but she thought that Kevin and some of his buddies could have committed the murder.

She made an excuse that she had to pick up her kids and couldn't stay for the follow-up interview after the polygraph. When she came back the next day, she was told that her initial test came up as deceptive and said she didn't want to complete the process. Eric refused to take the test from the start.

In an interview on January 6, Nanette said she felt guilty for giving out so many keys to workers around the house, including gardeners, painters, housecleaners, and such. The detectives asked if she stood to gain anything from Bill's death, and she said no. She stood to gain more if he'd lived, because that way they could carry out the business deals they'd been working on together. She noted that although the life insurance policy would give her $1 million, she would have gained $10 million in royalties if she'd married him.

Bill was everything to her, she said, contending that he'd known about Eric being a friend who did things with her that Bill didn't like to do. She said she knew Eric wasn't involved in the murder, because he didn't even know where Bill lived. She started out saying they were just friends who hung out during the day, and besides, Eric had a girlfriend. But later in the interview, she admitted that Eric was a lover—just not someone she could settle down with, and certainly not a marriage partner. She didn't love him that way, she said, and she assumed the feeling was mutual.

She said Eric came to the Seashore house after the break-in to install an alarm, and was planning to put in a better one soon. Police later learned that there was never an alarm in that house.

The detectives asked if Eric had ever shown Nanette any paperwork where he'd handwritten the license plate number for Bill's Mercedes, and she said no. Asked why he would have the number if she'd never shown him the car, her response was “I don't know.” She claimed that she never told him exactly where she lived, and that all she'd bought him for Christmas was a pair of sweats.

Detective Voth told Nanette that they had more incriminating information showing that Eric had killed Bill, but they couldn't tell her about it, because Eric might run if he found out. Voth said he hoped Eric hadn't asked her for any money.

Nanette said he hadn't. “I don't have any anyway. Well, some, but . . . ,” she said, trailing off.

This revealing statement was only a hint of what the McLaughlin family and the NBPD were about to uncover.

 

 

Around this same time, Kevin McLaughlin confronted Nanette directly at Balboa Coves one day when she was gathering some of her belongings. Later he recounted the scene to his girlfriend, Sandy.

“Did you have my dad killed?” he asked.

“Nooooooo,” Nanette replied, acting shocked.

This was no laughing matter, but Sandy got a kick out of the story. Kevin's speech difficulties could cause a lack of normal inflection, so he really had to put a lot of effort into doing voices and imitations. She was also proud of him for confronting Nanette.

The police were still interested in what Kevin had to say about the murder, given that he was a witness and had been in the house when Bill was shot. However, he had little substantive information to offer. He told them that although Bill had talked about marrying Nanette, he shared a private joke with Kevin that he was going to “dump” her when she turned thirty.

 

 

On January 13, Kim McLaughlin called Detective Voth to let him know that the family had decided to put up a $40,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of suspects in Bill's murder.

Five days later, Kim told Voth that she and Jenny had been going over her father's accounts, trying to get a handle on what bills and taxes needed to be paid, and had discovered some disturbing irregularities.

“We were trying to get things to Brian [Ringler], our accountant, and we couldn't get things paid and we couldn't get things done, and things weren't clear,” Kim said.

But when Kim and Jenny tried to question Nanette about these issues, she'd been strangely uncooperative and evasive.

“As things would come up, we would ask her questions about ‘Do you know this person?' or ‘Do you know about this situation? Can you enlighten us?'” Jenny recalled, but Nanette didn't return calls or follow through when she said she would get back to them.

Nanette simply didn't seem to understand—or refused to—that although she was a trustee of Bill's estate, she wasn't in complete control of or entitled to all his money. Jenny and Kim were very suspicious.

The bank statements from November 1994 showed a balance of $650,303 in Bill's U.S. Funds W.F.M. Holdings account, which was titled with his initials, as were several other accounts and properties. This was his biggest account, which received about $550,000 in Plasmacell-C royalties each quarter.

The McLaughlin trust was set up for asset protection and estate-planning purposes, with a PriMerit Bank account as the operating fund. For asset protection purposes, Bill couldn't sign on that account, so he made Nanette a managing trustee in November 1991. Ringler was a cotrustee, but only Nanette was authorized to sign and issue checks to pay the household bills and take care of small-scale financial matters. Kim was the successor managing trustee in line, who would take over if Bill should die.

The royalties went into the trust account, and then were transferred by the bank to the W.F.M. Holdings account, on which only Bill had signing power. But once he died, Nanette, as his estate trustee, could go down to the bank and stop that transfer of funds.

“We were extremely concerned,” Kim said.

The family asked Nanette for three months of bank statements, but she said she couldn't find the one from December, so they had to ask U.S. Funds for it, while Ringler did cash flow projections to keep the estate going and pay outstanding bills. They were worried to see a check for $30,000 had already cleared in January.

When the missing statement finally came in the mail, Kim made an even more disturbing discovery: Line items for a $250,000 check that had cleared four days after Bill's death and for a $75,000 check written in early December.

She immediately called Jenny. “I found it,” Kim said. “I found some evidence that she's stealing from us.”

 

 

Brian Ringler asked to see a copy of the actual $250,000 check so he could try to figure out what was going on. Once he received it, he saw that check #1158, paid to the Nanette Johnston Trust, appeared to have been signed by William F. McLaughlin on December 14, the day before his murder, when he had been in Las Vegas. Endorsed by Nanette, the check cleared on December 19, two days after the police allowed her and the McLaughlin family back into the house. The money was deposited into Nanette's First Interstate Bank account.

Why would Bill have paid his girlfriend such a large sum, especially when he'd been complaining of an increasing inability to pay his bills of late? The simple answer, Ringler thought, was that he wouldn't have.

“He was always very methodical, had great credit,” Ringler said. “He never would have [spent] a quarter million dollars while he was having all these problems.”

The next questions: Were there more checks like this one? And was there money moving between Bill's other accounts as well?

From there, Ringler and the family asked for statements from a half-dozen accounts, going back to 1993. When they couldn't get them by simple request from Nanette or the bank, they asked for the police department's help, which was subpoenaing records as well.

As soon as Detective Hartford heard about the $250,000 check, he asked Ringler to forward copies of all Bill's canceled checks from the past three months.

Ringler soon calculated that Nanette had written $125,000 in checks from another one of Bill's accounts shortly after his death, placed that money into the PriMerit trust account, then proceeded to spend at least $80,000 of it. (This was the household account that generally had a balance of $10,000 to $20,000.)

Upon closer inspection of the checks, they also found multiple credit card payments that went to Bill's various accounts, but to Nanette's credit cards as well. Nanette had chalked up at least $24,000 in charges to Bill's credit cards by signing as
Nanette McLaughlin
—both before and after his death.

Ringler went back through the handwritten ledger to 1992, where he saw that Bill had been paying Nanette $1,000 each month as an allowance. Once Ringler had the checks in hand, he compared the amounts on the documents with the amounts Nanette had entered into the ledger, and also with the amounts she'd entered into a computer Quicken register, which served as the official accounting record for the year.

He saw nothing of note in 1992 and 1993. However, starting in February 1994, he began to find discrepancies. Checks written for $3,000 and $5,000 were entered into the computer register for only $1,000, or sums were voided out entirely, meaning that she was taking thousands more dollars each month than her allowance. By October 1994, those amounts jumped significantly on multiple checks totaling $47,000.