I'll Take Care of You (10 page)

But things apparently backfired with Baker. “Her son started calling me ‘Daddy' a couple of times,” he recalled, and “all of a sudden, things changed.... The kids were getting too attached to me.”

Nanette also didn't like Baker chatting with her ex-husband at Kristofer's baseball games.

“She always wanted to keep us away from each other,” he said. “She got really upset and tried to stop that from happening, as though he would find out what she was doing.”

By May 1992, Nanette was acting strange and distant. Then she sent Baker a letter, saying a friend had come to town and she no longer had feelings for Baker. He didn't get it, so when she called and later sent him a Christmas card, he didn't respond.

“I just avoided her,” Baker said. “I turned and I never came back.”

Sometime after they stopped seeing each other, he saw Nanette “all kissy-face” with a big guy, right in front of Baker, at a gym called Club Met-Rx. Baker was quite surprised when he saw the news stories about Bill's murder.

Nanette had a purpose for the men with whom she chose to be involved, Detective Byington told Baker. “She uses some people for fun, some people for finances,” he said.

But her interaction with Baker, he said, was one of the closest to a relationship they'd seen.

Other than Eric Naposki, that is, who was likely the big guy Baker had seen kissing Nanette at Club Met-Rx.

 

 

Once detectives obtained Nanette's various records—from her car phone, for example—they took note of a few telling calls from the night of the murder, as well as some other curious activity. Back in those days, mobile-phone bills were nowhere as detailed as they are today. For one thing, they did not list originating numbers for incoming calls, only the time and duration.

On December 8, 1994, a call was made to the Jewelry Exchange in Tustin. When police went through Eric's notebook, they found a notation in the journal for December 23 that stated
the diamond store
on the same page as
Insurance New York.
He also had the store's business card in his wallet, which indicated they were ring shopping—together.

From that, they extrapolated that some of those entries were made before they flew back east over Thanksgiving. (After minimizing their relationship to the police in 1994 as “not solo, total,” he confirmed** in 2011 that he and Nanette had been talking about getting married and were ring shopping around December 1994.)

On the day of the murder, the detectives learned, Nanette had purchased a $364 pair of horned alligator boots and a matching belt, exchanging a cheaper pair of black lizard boots she'd bought two weeks earlier for the nicest boots in the store.

“These are for my boyfriend, who plays in the NFL,” she told the clerk.

Later that night, at eight twenty-four, a call was made from Nanette's car to pick up voice mail messages, followed by a call a minute later to a number that was one digit off Eric's business phone.

At 9:52
P.M.
, Nanette's car phone received a two-minute call, just minutes after she was done shopping and before she pulled up to the house. This could have been an “all-clear” or “done-deal” message, signaling that it was okay to return to Balboa Coves.

Police believed that Nanette checked her voice mail at 8:24
P.M.
as she and Eric were driving toward Newport Beach. She dropped Naposki off somewhere—it's unclear where, although they both claimed that she took him to his apartment—but police believed she probably dropped him at the bridge next to Balboa Coves before she sped off to the mall.

The detectives found it curious that shortly after they interviewed her and escorted her back to the Seashore house at 12:51
A.M.
, she went outside to retrieve her messages from her car phone at 1:36
A.M.
Nanette then called Eric's pager at 1:37
A.M.
rather than using the landline inside. Was this so the call wouldn't show up on the bill, or was she driving while talking? The detectives believed it was the latter, because she got a four-minute incoming call two minutes later.

The detectives timed the drive, and it took four minutes to get from the Seashore house to the Thunderbird, which was about 450 feet—a little longer than a football field, or a two-and-a-half-minute walk—from the McLaughlin house. Eric had just started working at the nightclub on December 1. Coincidence?

Police believed it was Eric who called Nanette back at 1:39
A.M.
, and that she picked him up at the Thunderbird. They don't know whether she took him home to his apartment in Tustin, or back to the house rented by his friend and on-and-off-roommate, Leonard Jomsky, where Eric may have parked his truck, as he later claimed.

Either way, the records showed she called him at his apartment at 9:09
A.M.
later that day.

CHAPTER 13

It wasn't all that easy to piece together the intimate details of Nanette Anne Maneckshaw Johnston Packard's life, especially her childhood and formative years. The few close friends and family who were still standing by her formed a pact not to talk to anyone, apparently to keep her background private and her secrets from being revealed.

“They're a close family, but they don't like to address issues,” said Billy McNeal, her third husband, whose last name she never took.

Keeping secrets has always had an underlying purpose for Nanette. As she progressed from one stage of her life and one con to the next, it's evident that she tried to keep her various groups of friends and associates away from each other, to prevent them from comparing stories. This enabled her to perpetually reinvent herself and to tell different stories in different situations to her benefit, so much so that it was difficult for the people who knew her—or thought they knew her—to determine what was fact and what was fiction.

“It's crazy the lengths she went to to create these stories and compartmentalize everything,” Billy said. “It was the perfect puzzle no one could ever put together.”

Despite Nanette's efforts to keep the truth hidden, however, in the end she couldn't hide who she really was: a person who spun a web of deceit, told tall tales of the person she truly wanted to be, and adopted the accomplishments of the people she most admired.

In the final analysis, it seems that what she really wanted was to be someone successful and respected—and, most of all, someone other than herself.

 

 

On July 3, 1965, in Chicago, Nanette was the first child born to Adi and Margaret “Marge” Ann Maneckshaw.

Now in his early seventies, Adi immigrated to the United States from Bombay, India, on a thirty-day voyage aboard the
Queen Mary,
during which he had to eat so much spaghetti that he vowed never to eat it again.

From photos, Marge, whose maiden name was Johnson, appears to have had reddish brown hair and freckles. She graduated in the class of 1961 from the now-defunct Alvernia High School, an all-girls Catholic school run by the School Sisters of St. Francis, on the Northwest Side of Chicago.

Adi's dark complexion and Indian features were passed on to Nanette's brother and two sisters. Nanette has her father's dark eyes, but her skin tone and hair seem lighter than her siblings'. Nanette also appears to have inherited her mother's nose, chin, and facial shape, features that she wanted to alter through cosmetic surgery.

Nanette's oldest daughter, Lishele, whose married name is Wigand, is a brunette with an even lighter complexion than Nanette. A trace of her Indian heritage is still visible in her features, but she seems more proud of and open about them than her mother was.

In Lishele's cooking blog, “Nutrish by Lish,” she took note of her family's ethnic ancestry, sharing recipes such as curry crusted chicken. The dish's caption read:
Since I am Indian, I have to master the curry dishes!
(She also noted that
I met my husband in church and married him quickly.
)

Adi and Marge had four children: Nanette, Michele, Jimmy, and Stephanie, in that order. They apparently moved to Maryland at some point, and the couple ultimately got divorced. Nanette later told Billy McNeal that while she was growing up, she and her brother fought with her father.

“Lots of drama,” said Billy, who described Nanette, Michele, and Jimmy as “kind of aggressive,” compared to Stephanie, who was a “meek, little peacemaker.”

Adi, an engineer who worked at the Pentagon, subsequently married a mother of three named Carol, with whom he's been ever since. Adi and Carol now live in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where their grown children and extended family come together for a reunion every summer.

After her parents split, Nanette and her siblings moved to Arizona with their mother. Over time, Nanette apparently healed any old wounds from fights with her father, because she had a number of photos featuring the two of them together in family reunion portraits. Nanette, whom Billy characterized as the “mother hen” of her siblings, was still talking by phone with Michele and Jimmy every other week in 2009. That closeness did not exist with her mother, however, from whom Nanette, Michele, and Jimmy had long been estranged.

Billy said Marge Johnson worked as a teacher and later as a probation officer for juvenile offenders in the Phoenix area. At some point, Marge hooked up with a man who Nanette later claimed had inflicted extreme physical abuse on her and her brother. Nanette told Billy that her stepfather had also abused alcohol and drugs, sexually abused one of her siblings, and went to prison for a while on drug-related charges.

“Nanette went as far as to tell me that he broke her arm or leg, and he used to beat her up pretty bad,” Billy said.

None of this could be confirmed through official sources, because Nanette never mentioned her stepfather's name, but Billy said he believed her story.

“I'm imagining there's something to it,” he said, because to his knowledge Stephanie was the only one of Nanette's siblings who still talked to their mother. The others did not, apparently blaming their mother for allowing the alleged abuse.

Jimmy was in pharmaceutical sales, Billy said, and Stephanie taught grade school in Scottsdale, Arizona, where in the mid-1990s she got married. Michele lived in the Baltimore area. Before Michele had a baby in 2009, Billy said she'd worked in marketing at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

Unlike Nanette, who was obsessed with materialism and appearances, Billy said Nanette's siblings “could[n't] care less about money. They live humbly,” he said. Even Jimmy, who had done well in his sales career, “doesn't live beyond his means.”

 

 

Nanette claimed to have graduated early from Greenway High School in Phoenix, leaving at sixteen
and
as the class valedictorian. Nanette purported to K. Ross—whom she met when she was seventeen and he was five years her senior—“that she had ROTC scholarships . . . and that her father wanted her to do that instead of marrying me,” he said.

According to Classmates.com, of which Nanette has been a member since 2001, she was in the class of 1983 at Greenway, where her classmates remembered her as “ambitious.” Because she didn't come up in an online search of the 1982 or 1983 yearbooks, it looks like she dropped out sometime after 1981, the last year her photo appeared. She later went on to earn a GED, an unnecessary step for a valedictorian.

Nanette also claimed that she'd played on the basketball team (it's unclear if she was referring to high school or college or both), noting that she and her teammates would get really hungry, then go out for hamburgers. But anyone who saw her try to dribble or shoot baskets as an adult could see that she lacked the skills to be a starter, and that she was better suited for the bench or helping out the team manager. That said, she did seem to know quite a bit about the game.

Nanette and Billy McNeal had been together less than a year when she took him to her twentieth high school reunion in 2003. Her former classmates seemed to recognize her, even though she looked quite different since they'd last seen her.

Once they were no longer together, Billy searched through Nanette's personal belongings, looking for answers about the woman he'd thought he'd known. He found a checklist dating back to 1998, noting that she wanted her cheeks, chin, breasts, and nose done. Based on a comparison of recent photos with those taken during her late teens and early twenties, she seemed to have fulfilled her wish list.

Oddly, though, she vehemently insisted to Billy that her ample breasts were real. He said he didn't know any better because he didn't see any of the usual scarring he'd seen with previous girlfriends who'd admitted to having enhancement surgery.

“From day one, she said, ‘They're real. They're real. They're real,'” he recalled in 2012.

But she went even further: She also posted a multicolored sparkly sticker with the message
Yes, they're real
in her closet, and that sticker came with her whenever she moved to a new house.

Later he realized that she'd never shown him any photo older than 1999. “Obviously, that was intentional on her part,” he said.

Billy recalled a summer around 2007 when they made the annual pilgrimage to Delaware for the Maneckshaw reunion. About twenty relatives were hanging around the house, including Nanette's three siblings, who were gathered together on the couch, paging through photo albums.

“Billy, you've got to see this picture,” they said, beckoning him over.

As he examined the snapshots of the girl with the short, curly dark brown hair, he sort of recognized Nanette as a teenager, then a little older, cradling a baby or two.

“Who do you think this is?” they asked.

“Oh, don't show him those pictures,” Nanette said, laughing.

He couldn't believe he was looking at the same woman. Nanette had apparently started coloring her hair blond early on, and later, while she was with Billy, she also had it chemically straightened every five months or so. But the girl in the photos looked
really
different.

“That's crazy,” he said.

At the time, it didn't register that the young Nanette was flat-chested in those photos, because he was focusing on her face. But she was dead set on keeping her secret.

Early in their relationship, Billy had expressed concern that Nanette's left breast felt stiff and hard to the touch.

“You've got to get that checked out,” he told her.

Right before their son was born, he urged her more forcefully to talk to a doctor, because he wanted to see whether she could, in fact, breast-feed their baby. But Nanette dismissed his concerns, telling him that she'd already talked to a physician and there was no problem. Her breast had been this way at least since she'd had her third child, Jaycie.

“A breast can get hard from breast-feeding,” she said. Given that she was a mother, three times over, and he was about to have his first child, he didn't question her further.

After Cruz was born, Billy saw her breast-feeding their son, so he didn't worry any more about it. He didn't put two and two together until later, when he found a letter showing that she'd sued the manufacturer of her silicone implants, which had gone bad, and had won a $10,000 settlement.

All of this to hide her breast implants showed just “how far she would go to perpetuate her stories, lies, whatever,” Bill said, adding that she also seemed to believe her own lies, which made them harder to detect.

 

 

Graduating high school early wasn't a grand enough lie for Nanette. She also bragged that she'd graduated at nineteen from ASU. Her résumé from the early- to mid-1990s, which spelled her name with two
n
's—as
Nannette A. Johnston
—stated that she'd earned a business administration degree there in 1984.

According to a university spokesperson, Nanette did apply to the college as an undergraduate, but she never enrolled in or attended any classes. Nanette apparently did visit the campus while she and K. Ross were married, but she may have just been walking around, trying to meet men.

Nanette also claimed that she'd earned advanced degrees, including an MBA from ASU. Her marriage license to John Packard stated that she had nineteen years of education.

Under the education section on her résumé, she listed the Bobby Ball Academy, which K. Ross paid for her to attend. According to the
Arizona Republic,
the academy offered training in acting, modeling and stunts to both children and adults. The talent school/agency was run by the late Roberta Helen Ball, who died at eighty-one in April 2009. Those skills must have come in handy when Nanette pretended to be someone she wasn't.

Her résumé also listed Ford Schools, but it didn't specify whether she meant the modeling school or the one that offered continuing education in health and insurance licensing and securities in Phoenix and Tucson.

Finally the résumé stated that she held a life, health, and disability license, which she did, in fact, obtain in 1986, when she lived in Mesa, Arizona. It expired in 1991.

 

 

K. Ross Johnston met Nanette Maneckshaw while they were both working at a Nautilus health spa in Arizona. She started there as an aerobics instructor, joined him in sales, and soon became a manager.

In a photo from that period, the short-haired Nanette wore a big grin as she held a game box labeled
The SEX Education Game,
which covered all but two words on the front of her orange-sleeved baseball shirt:
I'm Kevin's.

Other photos featured the young girl, with soft eyes and a quiet smile, looking almost shy and optimistic. Her unadorned, unrevealing, and almost tomboyish way of dressing as a teenager marked a stark contrast to her later style, which included pricey designer gowns and short strappy dresses, with plunging necklines that revealed cleavage and dipped down in the back.

K. Ross said neither of them made much money back then, noting that Nanette had about $2,000 when they got married in Mesa on November 11, 1983.

In their wedding photos, she looked wide-eyed and virginal in her simple, modest white veil and conservative white dress, which covered her arms with sheer fine netting, showed no cleavage, and was topped with lace that crept up her neck. The happy groom, who had brown hair and a thin, dark moustache, wore a white tuxedo with tails, a dark red bow tie, and a white ruffled shirt, with red edging. As they cut the four-tiered white cake, adorned with decorative wedding bells on the top layer, Nanette appeared to be quite content with her new husband.