I'll Take Care of You (9 page)

A fax from U.S. Funds showed that between November 17 and December 14, 1994, six checks totaling $611,096 and signed by William F. McLaughlin had cleared. Two of those checks, totaling $105,000, were made payable to Bill's PriMerit trust account.

As Ringler tracked the money, he could see that sums were flying between accounts, with Bill appearing to have signed off on the transfers. However, these transfers continued after his death between accounts Nanette was allowed to access, but also between those she was not. Subsequent statements showed that the balance of the W.F.M. Holdings account had dropped from the $650,303 to only $40,000 by January, then to a pitiful $10,788.

Other discrepancies turned up as well. Checks were written out to Nanette, and yet the official register listed another entity, such as contributions to World View. There were also what appeared to be some legitimate payouts for Bill's property investments, such as three checks totaling about $256,000, which went to Rancho Mirage Associates, Salomon International Investment, Co., and W.F.M. Hacienda, L.P.

One questionable check for $11,000, written on the W.F.M. Hacienda account, dated December 12, 1994, was cashed on January 5, 1995, by Nanette. It was made out to her, and allegedly signed by Bill. Nanette was not authorized to sign checks on that account.

Ringler turned over all of these documents and his analysis to the NBPD, which then forwarded the stack of canceled checks to its documents expert, Detective Charles Beswick. Comparing the signatures to those found on other documents, Beswick determined that Nanette had forged Bill's signature on the $250,000 check, as well as on checks from the W.F.M. Holdings and W.F.M. Hacienda accounts. Everything else was taken out of his trust account once he died, as she wrote checks to herself and paid her credit card bills.

By the time Ringler finished his calculations, he'd identified $341,000 worth of checks that Nanette appeared to have stolen from Bill's various accounts. He and the McLaughlin family decided they should remove Nanette as trustee before she could do any more harm. In addition to the amount she stole, Ringler suspected that Nanette may also have been counting on getting paid $5,000 a month for her work as an estate trustee.

By this point, Captain James Jacobs, of the NBPD, had decided to separate the McLaughlin investigation into two parts, assigning Detective Hartford to lead the financial-fraud aspect and having Detective Voth continue as lead investigator on the homicide.

After serving a number of search warrants for Nanette's bank records, computers, and other financial documents, Hartford's team found more discrepancies and raised the amount stolen to nearly $500,000, figuring they probably hadn't even found all of the illegal transactions.

Meanwhile, Nanette, who continued to claim that Bill's Cadillac was hers, had Barry Bernstein, her attorney, fax Kim's attorney a DMV certificate of title. The title showed that Bill had signed the car over to Nanette on July 3, 1994. However, upon closer examination, Detective Beswick determined that Nanette had forged this signature as well.

Apparently, the diamond promise of being married to Bill someday had not satisfied Nanette's need for short-term gratification. She'd been spending this stolen cash on luxury items for herself, dinners out, and gifts for her boyfriends. And she continued to spend Bill's money after his death.

On January 9, 1995, Nanette paid for her and Eric Naposki to join Club Met-Rx for three months. After that, she told the manager, they would be leaving the area.

CHAPTER 12

As the detectives began looking into Nanette's background, a pattern began to emerge: Eric was the latest in a series of men younger than Bill, whom she'd met at the gym and slept with behind Bill's back.

On December 17, 1994, while looking through police reports associated with the victim and his friends and family, the detectives found a report that listed Glenn Sharp as Nanette's “boyfriend” and a witness to a traffic collision involving Nanette two and a half years earlier in Costa Mesa.

In an interview with Detective Hartford at Sharp's home in Mission Viejo on December 28, 1994, Sharp said he'd met Nanette at the Sports Connection juice bar in April 1992. They struck up a conversation and started dating a week later, in between a week-long ski trip she took to Mammoth with her boss, Bill McLaughlin.

Nanette said she and her kids were living full-time with Bill, but her relationship with him was all business. Bill was often away, she said, traveling to Palm Springs and Palm Desert to work on his development projects.

“I was under the impression that she was working for him, doing his books or whatever,” Sharp said.

Before meeting Bill on the bike path with some friends, she said, she'd been living on the peninsula, making good money working for a medical-supply company. Sharp never understood how she came to live and work at Bill's house, but she made it sound like she needed to be at his beck and call. It was just easier for them this way.

Sharp worked as a firefighter, and she called him at the station when Bill was out of town. He got the idea pretty quickly about their no-strings arrangement, which suited him just fine as a single man in his late twenties going through a divorce and seeing a number of women.

Still, Nanette had some strange rules: She could call him, but he was not allowed to call her. They had sex in the Balboa Coves house, but he was not to go upstairs. She took Sharp to the house on Seashore Drive as well, but their rendezvous had to be prearranged—and only when Bill was out of town.

“It was really a shaky deal,” he said.

There was also a more serious problem. “She had a hot temper. She could be violent at times,” he said. “That was one of the reasons why I finally had to break it off with her.... She tried to run me over twice with her automobile.”

A couple of months after they met, they had an evening that raised some concerns. It was a Monday night, May 19, when Bill was away, so she and Sharp went out to dinner and listened to some jazz. They drank their fill of alcohol, he said, then started driving south to Newport on the 55 freeway. Sharp was in his car and Nanette was in her brand-new 1991 red convertible Infiniti M30.

“She decided that she wanted to race me,” he recalled. She took off, and Sharp tried to catch up and get her to slow down, but driving faster than one hundred miles per hour got to be too much for him. He slowed down at Victoria, near where the highway ended. That's when Nanette lost control of her car, spun out, and crashed, taking out a gas pump at a Union 76 station and totaling the Infiniti.

“I thought, for sure, it killed her,” he said.

A bystander called 911, which brought out the police and fire departments, and an ambulance took her to the emergency room.

When a police officer told her to pee in a cup and warned that she might have to go to jail, “she pitched a fit,” Sharp said. After being arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, she was released to Sharp.

“That accident was never reported to Bill the way it really happened,” he said. “She swept it under the rug, kept him in the dark about her activities.” Bill was simply told that Nanette got into an accident and broke her nose.

“Would you call her a player?” Hartford asked.

“Definitely a player, yeah,” Sharp said. “She liked the life in the fast lane. She liked the money and she liked to spend it.”

Nanette told Sharp that Bill was paying her six figures. Based upon her incredible wardrobe and collection of accessories, Sharp believed it. She had to be “bringing in money from somewhere.”

Nanette was quite a talker, aiming to impress, and it worked on Sharp. She boasted that she had a potential deal going with hair care mogul Paul Mitchell, with whom she said she was meeting in Beverly Hills. She had “something to do with some fandangled brush and comb” that had just come out in Europe, which she was trying to peddle to Mitchell. On top of that, she had an idea for a pet-grooming supply business. She bragged that she had some Hollywood connections as well, saying that when she and Bill went out to the desert, they had dinner at Frank Sinatra's house.

The beach house on Seashore Drive was also going to be hers, she told Sharp. It was just a matter of time. “Glenn, be patient,” she said. “Within six months, I'm going to own this beach house outright.”

At first, Sharp was sucked in by Nanette's spiel. “It was five months of living on the edge. She had a lot of money. I guess Bill McLaughlin was very wealthy. She took me to a lot of places, told me about a lot of things that she was doing. For me, I got kind of caught up in living in the fast lane in Newport Beach.”

Asked how she would deal with a sudden loss of income, Sharp replied, “She couldn't handle it. I don't think I could have ever seen Nanette working a nine-to-five job.”

Sexually, she could get wild, he said, and be rather, well, “extroverted.” To a virile young man like him, that was pretty exciting.

“Would you call her deviant?” Hartford asked.

“Yeah, she had some kinky ways about her,” he said.

“Anytime, anywhere, anyplace. I think that certain things represented a challenge to her. She liked to play with fire, in other words—see how far she could push it to the end of the envelope.”

Although she claimed Bill was just her boss, Sharp said, “it always seemed to me that she appeared to be more to him than just a business associate.” She and Bill went on a two- or three-week cruise-and-dive trip to the South Pacific, for example, and took numerous excursions in Bill's private plane.

After a while, Sharp questioned her claim that she was just renting a room in Bill's house—but not too closely, because he was enjoying himself.

“For me, she was just fun to date,” he said. “She wasn't putting any kind of pressure on me.” But he eventually realized that “she was just jerking my chain.”

He also began to take note of some rather troubling and puzzling stories she told him. For instance, she described a rocky relationship with her ex-husband, whom Sharp met at a Little League game. Nanette alleged that K. Ross “would expose himself to her when she would drop the kids off over at his residence—things of that nature. Always trying to make him out to be a little bit of a deviant.”

To Sharp, it seemed as if “things were going on in her head that maybe had happened in her past, maybe things she was dealing with, as far as her childhood or her growing up. She just seemed like, at times, that she was very angry about things. Very angry.”

Nanette also lied to Sharp about being pregnant with his child.

“I know that she was a very, very disturbed young woman,” he told Hartford. “It was all just one big lie.”

She regaled Sharp with stories about Bill as well, saying that he'd spent time in Vietnam in the early 1960s in a clandestine unit, and had had a hard time dealing with that. “He was basically an alcoholic,” she told Sharp. “She said he could be violent when he drank. He could get very upset.”

Having never met Bill, Sharp didn't know what to believe, but he never saw anything in the well-kept house that supported her claims or indicated that Bill was a destructive person.

After five months, Sharp decided he'd had enough. He and Nanette had gone out for dinner and dancing at Peter's Landing, a collection of restaurants on the marina in Huntington Beach, which is between Newport Beach and Long Beach. Sharp had to work the next morning in Long Beach, so they left his car at the gym and drove to the restaurant in her car.

During dinner, Nanette got irritated with the way he'd called over the waitress to bring them drinks.

“I don't know exactly what was on her mind that night,” he recalled. “You never knew what Nanette was thinking at times. And she just went off [and] left me. Literally, left me there.”

He went outside to wait by her car to get a ride back to his vehicle, and she kept him waiting there for quite some time. She closed the club at two or two-thirty in the morning before meeting him at the car, where they “got into it.”

“She tried to back over me with the car, with the car door open, then proceeded to leave the scene and then came back,” he recalled.

After some persuasion, she agreed to drive him back to get his car at the gym, but it started all over again, once they got there. She stopped, got out of the car, and he had to “fend her off. I knocked her down, basically, getting her away from me,” he said.

As he jumped into his car, she grabbed his door and got her hand caught as he was closing it. “It was everything I could do to get the door back open, and get her away from me so I could get out of that parking lot.”

When Nanette threatened to call the police, Sharp challenged her to follow through.

“Well, why don't you?” he demanded.

But she didn't carry out her threat, nor did they see each other again, which was fine with him.

“I think she stopped seeing me or didn't really ever push anything because she didn't want Bill to find out,” he recalled.

That said, she continued to call him at the fire station. After the second call, he warned her that he would contact Bill if her harassment continued, and the calls stopped.

He saw her at the gym sometime later, when she made a point of flaunting herself in a flirtation with a construction worker named Bart, for whom she'd always had a thing. But by that point, Sharp didn't care.

“Her bubble just didn't go to the top, so to speak,” he said.

Pausing, Sharp posed a question to Hartford that he'd been wanting to ask about all these queries concerning him and Nanette and the late Bill McLaughlin.

“Is it okay to ask how he passed on?” Sharp asked.

“He was murdered.”

“I'm really sorry to hear about that, because from what I knew about Bill, he was a good family man.”

 

 

A couple of months later, the Newport Beach police got a call from Richard Baker, a forty-two-year-old businessman who had seen the news stories and wanted to help.

Baker told Detectives Voth and Byington that he'd met Nanette in February 1992 (shortly before Sharp) while in-line skating on the boardwalk near 14th and Oceanfront in Newport. Nanette was there with her son, Kristofer, when she and Baker started talking. He gave her his phone number and she called him.

“I don't think I should be doing this,” Nanette said mysteriously.

She told Baker the same story, that she lived with a wealthy man named Bill McLaughlin, with whom she had a purely platonic business relationship.

“He's a mentor. We have everything in writing,” she said, adding that she got a certain percentage of the business deals they did together.

She seemed very intelligent, so he didn't question her story that she'd graduated from ASU with a 4.0 grade point average. At the time, Baker recalled, he had no reason to disbelieve her.

By the sound of it, Nanette had big plans and was already off to a good start. She said she'd made her money through a business deal involving a company that made plastic hairbrushes, which absorbed water from hair, and showed him some samples. She'd bought the company for $250,000 of her own money, she said, then sold it for more than $1.1 million within four months.

Bill, she said, received about $4 million in royalties each year, of which she was interested in “draining off” about $1 million. She also said she'd kicked in $400,000 toward Bill's second house, a $1.2 million property on Seashore Drive, and she intended to buy out Bill's majority share.

Given that Baker's job involved working with big corporations, he saw Bill as a potential source of funding and wanted to meet him. He asked at least five times, but Nanette never made it happen.

At some point, Baker started noticing that some of her claims were inconsistent. Why, if Bill was paying her so much and they were dealing with such big-dollar amounts, did she buy a computer and start learning how to use Quicken accounting software, which was geared toward households and small businesses?

It also seemed odd to him that when she gave him photos of herself, she always asked for them back, saying she wanted to give them to her father.

But she really seemed to like Baker, spending hundreds of dollars each month on daily cell phone calls to him. And after they'd been dating for about six weeks, she took him to Arizona to attend a high-school friend's wedding.

Of course, there was also plenty of sex. They slept together in her downstairs bedroom at Balboa Coves, but she never took him upstairs. They had sex about ten times there, and additional times at the beach house, but only at night, when the house was empty, and Bill was out of town.

Baker got into Balboa Coves by driving through the main gate off Pacific Highway, using the code Nanette gave him to get in, and entering the house through the garage door. He rang the doorbell or knocked on the front door, and Nanette let him in through the garage by hitting the remote opener from the inside.

“She had the power of a man, which she has developed well,” he told detectives. “Makes you drop your defenses very easily. She'd use her kids a lot to help her do that. Her kids are part of her arsenal.”