I'll Take Care of You (22 page)

CHAPTER 31

In 2002, on Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy's first day in the Homicide Unit, he took over the caseload for Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Irvine, and Laguna Beach from Debbie Lloyd, the original prosecutor on the McLaughlin case.

“There's a bunch of cases you're going to want to review,” she said. “You're going to want to take a look at McLaughlin, because I think it's solvable.”

Murphy didn't have time to get into the case right away, because he had a full plate and much to learn. But, luckily, he was a quick study.

Born to a U.S. Air Force doctor and a nurse in Taiwan in 1967, Murphy attended an all-boys Catholic prep school in Los Angeles. He studied political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he became vice president of his Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity house, and worked with disabled kids.

The rape of a close friend inspired him to start a mandatory program on campus called Greeks Against Rape, which aimed to educate pledges about the possible consequences of drinking too much and getting into inappropriate sexual situations with female students. This experience sparked his motivation to go to law school at the University of San Diego in 1990. He began clerking at the Orange County DA's Office in the summer of 1992, and was hired full-time after graduation.

Along the way, he accrued victories in the juvenile gang, felony and sexual assault units before he was transferred to homicide at age thirty-four. As of 2012, he hadn't lost a single homicide case, although he did have his first hung jury in the penalty phase of a trial that year.

Over the years, Murphy made a name for himself in Orange County for his cutting and sarcastic cross-examinations, persuasive opening statements and closing arguments, and for artfully handling complex circumstantial cases involving intricate financial and legal machinations. He took pride in annihilating defense witnesses' credibility on the stand, exposing hypocrisy and pointing out inconsistent testimony. He also enjoyed ripping apart those criminal defendants who claimed to be innocent because they were good, practicing Christians—or, in this case, a churchgoing pathological liar who claimed to be innocent of murder because she was a loving mother.

A career bachelor, Murphy watched his single friends get married as he took trips to Indonesia to go surfing or to the desert to play golf with his buddies, because becoming submerged in a case—and winning it—was enough for him.

His successful prosecutions have been chronicled in several true-crime books, including
Dead Reckoning
by this author, about the murder of Tom and Jackie Hawks. Murphy also chalked up face time on national TV crime shows for winning convictions against Skylar Deleon and Insane Crips member John F. Kennedy, who tied the Hawkses to the anchor of their yacht, then threw them overboard—alive—in 2004. Skylar Deleon and Kennedy were sentenced to death row in 2009, and Skylar's wife, Jennifer, got life without the possibility of parole. The couple was dubbed the “Bonnie and Clyde of Orange County.”

Murphy also put serial killer Rodney Alcala back on death row after Alcala, known as “The Dating Game killer,” successfully appealed his two previous convictions. Even though he'd won a date as a contestant on
The Dating Game,
Alcala creeped out the woman so much that she refused to go out with him. Good choice.

 

 

In late 2007, while Murphy and NBPD Sergeant Dave Byington were preparing for Skylar Deleon's trial, they discussed the McLaughlin case and agreed it was worth resurrecting with the help of Larry Montgomery, a DA investigator who had already proved invaluable on the Hawks case. Montgomery was now conducting case reviews as part of the TracKRS Unit.

Murphy and Byington had first met on the prosecutor's virgin homicide call in May 2002. In late 2004, Byington called Murphy to report his suspicions that the Hawkses were not only missing, but most likely dead, and that Skylar had been identified as the prime suspect. After three years of putting that “murder for financial gain” case together, Murphy and Byington had become close friends and didn't want their self-described “man love” working relationship to end.

The Hawks case proved to be similar to the McLaughlin case in more ways than just the capital charges. Both involved conspiracies, and some of the killer-couple suspects' acts prior to the murders were also parallel: Nanette Packard and Jennifer Deleon both used their children as pawns in schemes to manipulate their victims, and both couples went shopping for million-dollar homes they planned to purchase with their victims' money.

“The last time someone writes a quarter-million-dollar check and then someone dies,” Byington said, “that's a clue in this business.”

Bill McLaughlin must have thought something was amiss, he added, or at the very least, he'd changed his mind about getting married to Nanette.

“She was going to get caught. It was just a matter of time. He wasn't a fool.”

Byington and Murphy figured that because quarterly tax payments were due in January 1995, Nanette realized that she had to kill Bill before he noticed the missing money and checks with his forged signatures. If the timing of the murder had been random, Byington said, Nanette would have bought Bill a Christmas gift and had it ready for him under the tree. Instead, “she bought stuff for everyone else”
but
him.

 

 

Sergeant Byington assigned Detective Joe Cartwright to work on the case with DA Investigator Larry Montgomery. Cartwright, a former marine who had cut his detective's teeth on the Hawks case, was feeling inspired and gratified by the department's success.

“Definitely something I wanted to keep doing, keep bringing that kind of closure to people,” he said.

The first thing he did was go downstairs to the property/evidence room and look through the items collected during the three years the McLaughlin case had been open: the blood evidence in the freezer, the keys the killer left behind, Bill's bathrobe, riddled with bullet holes and steeped in blood, the expended shell casings, the photos, the financial documents, and the binders of police reports from the homicide and fraud investigations. He made two copies of all the paperwork, one for him and one for Montgomery.

Byington was “blown away” by Cartwright's thorough and meticulous work on the case. “He was just awesome,” he said. “He did a great job on it.”

During several initial meetings, Murphy, Byington, Cartwright, and Montgomery went through all the files and evidence together. They had never seen these materials before, so the significance of certain aspects of the case was not immediately clear. As they continued meeting, their strategy evolved as the overall puzzle came together.

“The checks were a big thing, trying to figure out what the scam was,” Murphy said, noting that Nanette had also written a number of checks to Eric and his security company.

Detective Tom Voth, who had retired in 2006, was asked to come back part-time to help. As the lead detective on the original case, he was also expected to testify and be on call to answer questions if the case made it to trial.

 

 

Just because this was a cold case didn't mean that Murphy was any less involved in monitoring the investigation. As things progressed, he often discussed developments with Montgomery three times a day; they went no longer than a couple of days without talking.

Montgomery, who had worked thirty years as a police officer—twenty-three as a homicide detective with the Irvine Police Department—often conducted interviews with Cartwright as they followed new leads and reexamined old ones.

Over the next eighteen months, Montgomery listened to sixty-three audio interviews with witnesses and the primary suspects, Nanette Packard and Eric Naposki, and reviewed two thousand pages of documents. He conducted his own driving-time trials as well, including several he videotaped with Voth.

Early on, Murphy asked the team of investigators to run new DNA tests, given that the technology had improved so much since 1994. So they retested Bill's robe as well as the shell casings and the keys.

“I was very confident we'd get DNA off that key and also off the shell casings,” Murphy said, acknowledging that he hadn't realized at the time that no one had ever retrieved DNA from a shell casing.

Cartwright was hopeful as well. “Back then, you had to cut a piece of material and soak it to get DNA,” he said. “Now you can take a swab to get DNA. So maybe, we thought, the killer got close enough to leave DNA on the robe or grab it.”

While they waited the eight weeks for results, Montgomery made some headway in other directions, but the DNA and fingerprint tests both came up empty. They figured the killer must have worn gloves.

Wondering if they still had a case, Murphy asked Montgomery to weigh in.

“What do you think, Larry?” Murphy asked. “Can we win it?”

“They absolutely did it,” Montgomery said, “and we absolutely can win it.”

 

 

Twice a year, Jenny McLaughlin had been making regular calls to the NBPD, urging them not to forget about her father's murder.

“Please always keep my dad's case open,” she pleaded. “We're still hopeful.”

After being forced into the deep, dark world of Nanette Johnston, the McLaughlin sisters had learned far more than they'd ever wanted to know about her lying and stealing ways. They were sure she'd murdered their father.

But they couldn't stay in that darkness. Instead, they tried to focus on the good in their lives, surrounding themselves with positive people and avoiding negative activities. Kim stopped watching TV and reading about crime in the newspaper, for example.

“We've really tried to live in our dad's honor and remember the good times and try to put all the evidence, and, ugh, that horrible tragedy behind us,” Kim said in 2012. If they'd continued “to go on with anger in our hearts,” she said, then Nanette would have stolen their ability to be happy too.

Kim and Jenny both moved out of Orange County to escape the memories. Kim and her husband relocated and got a teaching job on the island of Coronado in southern San Diego County, where her husband had grown up. Jenny and her husband landed on a horse ranch, running an equestrian business in Valley Center, in northern San Diego County.

As if losing their father weren't enough, the McLaughlins had to endure another tragedy seven years after Bill's murder. While living with Sue in Hawaii, Kevin drowned in the ocean one evening after going to church on October 23, 1999.

Kim theorized that Kevin got carried out into deep water, where he swallowed some of it, and was unable to cough it out because of the scar tissue from his tracheotomy. A couple walking along the beach under the full moon pulled his body out of the water later that night.

 

 

Some months after the cold-case investigation was under way, the detectives contacted Jenny because Murphy wanted to meet with the McLaughlin sisters to ask them some questions. But, not wanting to give false hope to the sisters, the detectives didn't mention the explicit purpose of the meeting.

When Jenny told Kim about the request to bring to the OC whatever relevant financial documents they had, Kim couldn't help but get her hopes up once again. But after all these years without an arrest, she tried to temper her emotions.

“Really? They want us to come up?” she asked Jenny. “That means it's still open!”

When the McLaughlins arrived, they saw none of the detectives who had originally worked with them on the case and had become like members of their extended family. The faces at the table—Murphy, Montgomery, Cartwright, and Byington—were all unfamiliar.

That's when Murphy told them they were taking another look at the case.

“I just want to let you guys know that we're pursuing this as a murder investigation,” he said.

By this point, these men had already been working the investigation for most of the year, but they didn't elaborate, just in case they didn't make it to trial. However, just hearing that the case had been reopened made the McLaughlins so happy, they cried.

When months went by and they didn't hear anything more, however, the sisters felt as if they'd been left hanging once again.

 

 

On one of the many audiotapes Montgomery listened to, he heard a reference in a phone conversation between Detective Jeff Lu and a woman who had called the station to report that she thought Eric and Nanette had killed Bill McLaughlin. Claiming to have founded a medical company that was going to make her a millionaire, Nanette had expressed interest in investing in the software business of this caller's fiancé, who knew Nanette from the Sporting Club.

When Lu asked the woman to put her fiancé on the phone, she called him by name. It was so faint that Montgomery had to put on a high-quality headset to enhance the sound: She called him “Robert.”

Robert, who didn't identify himself to the detective, said Nanette claimed that she was living on the royalties from a medical device she'd sold to Baxter Healthcare, and in November 1994 she said she might want to invest $100,000 to $200,000 in his company.

Robert said his call was prompted by news reports about the murder, which named Nanette as a suspect, saying his suspicions were raised as soon as he heard how Bill had made his fortune. The original interview tape ended midsentence, however, so Montgomery called Detective Cartwright to tell him about the promising anonymous caller.

Cartwright called the Sporting Club in Irvine, asking to search their member records from 1994 and 1995, with the hope of finding this man named Robert something.