I'll Take Care of You (23 page)

Meanwhile, Montgomery checked Irvine police records from the same timeframe at the department's business license division, searching for software companies with owners by that name. He found two, but neither said he'd called the NBPD.

On July 22, 2008, Montgomery pulled Nanette's cell phone records from the evidence. If she'd been having secret meetings about investing Bill's money, he thought she might have used her cell phone, rather than the victim's home phone, to avoid getting caught.

The next day at the Haines Publishing headquarters in Fullerton, Montgomery searched through the Orange County Criss+Cross Directory from 1994, looking for matches on Nanette's phone bill with anyone named Robert or any computer software company. (The Criss+Cross Directory lists published phone numbers with associated street addresses and residents' names.) But he found nothing.

After that, he flipped through the 1995 directories, and came across a number listed for an R. Cottrill. Although the directory didn't list an address, Montgomery recognized it as an Irvine number and got a rush, hoping he had a match. Excitedly calling Cartwright, Montgomery told him he might have a lead.

Cartwright ran the name of Robert Cottrill through the DMV database and found a Robert T. Cottrill in San Clemente, which is in southern Orange County. Checking other databases, Cartwright saw that Cottrill had headed a software company in 1994, had lived in Irvine, and had married a woman named Dori in 1995. The lead looked even more promising.

On July 24, the two investigators drove to Cottrill's house, where they spoke to a woman house-sitting for the vacationing homeowner. By the time Montgomery got back to his office that afternoon, he already had a message from Cottrill, so he called him immediately.

By all appearances, Montgomery was generally a low-key guy. But that day he was jumping on the inside, frankly ecstatic that all this legwork had proved fruitful. Cottrill indeed was their man.

“That was pretty big,” Montgomery recalled later, remarking how much he enjoyed his job. “You can't get that thrill from doing too many other things.”

Cottrill told the investigators again that Nanette had claimed she couldn't invest any money in his business right away because it was offshore, noting that she'd also told him that she'd just broken up with a bodybuilder boyfriend who worked out at the same gym. And that ex-boyfriend wasn't very happy when she started dating Eric Naposki.

 

 

In January 2009, Montgomery listened to a taped call between Detective Tom Fischbacher and a woman named Suzanne who said she'd been too scared to call the NBPD before because she feared for her safety. The call was on March 3, 1998, six months after the investigation had officially been shelved.

Suzanne told Fischbacher that she'd been Eric Naposki's neighbor at an apartment complex in Tustin in 1994. She'd called police in 1995, but the case detective wasn't available and a woman who answered told her to call back. She said she didn't call for the next three years because she was worried that Eric would seek revenge. She then proceeded to recount Eric's comments about blowing up Bill McLaughlin's plane, the keys, and the gun, and the “maybe I did, maybe I didn't” remark. She said she still wasn't willing to testify against Eric, but she did agree to meet with Fischbacher.

On the same tape, Montgomery heard Fischbacher calling Suzanne two days after she'd canceled. A receptionist answered, “Charles Dunn” before transferring the detective to Suzanne's voice mail, where he left a message. The next call was a conversation between Suzanne and Sergeant Pat O'Sullivan.

Montgomery and Cartwright were unable to find any other tapes involving this witness. Montgomery searched online for Charles Dunn and found a company in Newport Beach, while Cartwright went through the case files and located one labeled
Suzanne Cogar,
detailing a woman born November 24, 1964, who had a driver's license with an Irvine address. It had to be her.

O'Sullivan had since retired from the NBPD and was now an investigator for the DA's office. Because O'Sullivan was the last one to speak with Cogar, Montgomery asked him to call her and relay the message that Montgomery wanted to discuss her statements from thirteen years ago.

 

 

When Suzanne Cogar got the call from O'Sullivan, she was pleased that the police hadn't forgotten about the case after all these years, because it had continued to bother her.

By this time, Cogar felt safe and was 100 percent “willing to testify.” She regretted not meeting with the police all those years ago, she said. After telling O'Sullivan so much about herself before, she wanted to look him in the eyes “so he would see that I was credible, that what I was telling him was on the level.”

When they met at her house, O'Sullivan asked her to review the tapes of her statements from 1998, then meet with Larry Montgomery. She agreed.

“Why has it taken all these years?” she asked Montgomery, who explained that the case had gone “cold” some months before her call in 1998, but he was taking a new look and applying “fresh eyes” to the evidence.

In March 2009, she met with him a second time. Montgomery also brought along the prosecutor, Matt Murphy. Both men could see that Cogar's testimony would be very important to the case, so Murphy tried to reassure her.

“I don't want to scare you, but your testimony is really key here,” he said.

Cogar, who could tell that Murphy wanted “to close the door on this horrible injustice,” told him she wasn't surprised.

“I figured as much,” she said.

CHAPTER 32

Detective Joe Cartwright tracked down Eric Naposki in Greenwich, Connecticut, and spoke with the local police department there in early May 2009 about the NBPD's plans to arrest Eric for murder.

Cartwright and his boss, Sergeant Dave Byington, worked together on the arrest and search warrant affidavits, with Byington contributing the evidence gathered in the 1990s, and Cartwright adding the new evidence that he, Larry Montgomery, and Tom Voth had collected.

In a strategy largely dictated by Matt Murphy, Cartwright coordinated a game plan with Sergeant Tom Kelly and Detective Jeff Stempien, of the Greenwich Police Department, who agreed to watch Eric for a couple of weeks to learn his habits and schedule.

After scoping out the situation, they learned that Eric lived with Rosie in a duplex owned by her father, a two-story brick building at the end of a long driveway off a windy two-lane road. Eric usually left between 6:30 or 7:00
A.M.
in a bright yellow truck that had the name of his gym emblazoned on its side. He stopped at a gas station down the street for a newspaper and coffee; then drove to work in Mount Kisco, New York.

Cartwright went through the same exercise monitoring Nanette's comings and goings in Ladera Ranch, California. Sitting in a van with dark windows, parked a block from her house, he watched Billy McNeal leave for work. From there, Cartwright followed Nanette to a private school nearby and saw her drop off Jaycie. Most days Nanette stayed close to home, though, because she'd only recently had baby Cruz.

The plan was to keep both suspects “in pocket” until the DA investigator, Larry Montgomery, could arrive in Connecticut with Newport Beach Detectives Cartwright, Steve Rasmussen, and Elijah Hayward on May 18. The police would arrest Eric and Nanette simultaneously on May 20, and make it a competition between the detectives on both coasts to see if they could get one suspect to turn on the other.

“We wanted one of them to flip,” said Byington, who was staying in Orange County to make the drop on Nanette with his team in Ladera Ranch.

The hope was to get one suspect to cooperate by calling the other on a taped line and elicit incriminating statements.

 

 

Cartwright took the search warrant affidavit for Eric's house to the Connecticut Chief State Attorney's Office for approval, and the affidavit to search Eric's gym to the New York State Attorney General's Office in Westchester County, New York. But both warrants were denied.

“It had been too long,” Cartwright said. “The expectation was ‘Hey, maybe we'll find the gun. Maybe he's stupid enough to keep it.' We don't catch the smart ones.”

Because Eric's house was set so far back from the narrow, twisty street, the Greenwich police wanted their Special Response Unit (SRU, similar to a SWAT team) to arrest Eric in a “felony stop” after pulling over his car.

“If we were to arrest him at the house, we had the challenge of Rosie possibly being there, the father-in-law possibly being there, and going up the driveway,” where Eric would be able to see them coming, Cartwright said. “We'd lose the element of surprise.”

Instead, Detective Stempien dressed in a Greenwich patrolman's uniform to take advantage of “Click it or ticket” week—a time to remind drivers to buckle up. He parked across the street, then stood at the top of Eric's driveway, stopping cars as if he were routinely enforcing the ticket law.

When he saw Eric driving his truck down the driveway, he would radio the other officers—a team of six waiting to nab him down the road, rifles ready, in a marked car and a black SUV with dark windows.

While the Connecticut team waited for Eric to leave the house, the California team waited for Nanette to show up at hers, thinking she was out.

 

 

Eric started down his driveway at eight-fifteen that spring morning, only he wasn't driving the truck. He was in a sporty black Nissan 350Z two-seater, a nice ride for a guy who couldn't afford his child support payments.

Detective Stempien stopped a car so Eric would have to stop behind him. Eric cruised up and rolled down his window to talk to the officer.

“Love to see the enforcement out here,” Eric said. “They're always speeding through here like it's a highway.”

“It's ‘Click it or ticket' week. Make sure you have your belt on,” Stempien replied.

“Yes, I have it on, officer.”

But Eric surprised them again, by driving in the opposite direction from the gas station.

“He's not going south. He's not going south. He's going north,” Stempien repeated into his radio.

The Greenwich detectives and patrol supervisors sped to catch up to Eric a quarter mile down the road and pulled him over. They ordered him to throw his keys out the window, show his hands, kneel on the road, and lie facedown in the middle of the street.

“What's your name?” Stempien asked, standing over him with Cartwright.

“Eric Naposki.”

“Joe,” Stempien said to Cartwright, “is this Eric Naposki?”

Cartwright confirmed that it was, in fact, the bulky former linebacker, who had shaved his head and grown a goatee since the NBPD detectives had last questioned him in Newport Beach in 1995.

“What is this about?” Eric asked. “This is a mistake. I haven't done anything.”

“You're being placed under arrest as a fugitive from justice,” Stempien said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The state of California has a warrant for you for the murder of Bill McLaughlin,” Cartwright said.

“Bill McLaughlin?”

 

 

The Greenwich police brought a very defiant Eric Naposki into the interview room back at the station, where Montgomery and Cartwright were waiting.

While the two men conducted the interview, Newport Beach Detectives Rasmussen and Hayward questioned Eric's fiancée at the elementary school in Greenwich, where she was teaching.

“When did you guys get here?” Rosie asked.

“A couple of days ago.”

“Why couldn't you have done this yesterday?” she asked. “I just sent out all the wedding invitations.”

 

 

Although Eric said he was on his way to court to pay his child support, Cartwright didn't believe that he would have gone there wearing gym clothes.

During a search of Eric's car, the detectives found a gym bag containing vitamin supplements and what Eric later described** as “AndroGel. It's a rub-on for men who want a little boost to their, whatever, testosterone [levels].” He said it was nothing like full-blown steroids, as the detectives had suggested. Even so, the clear odorless topical gel, which comes in a pump bottle, does require a prescription, so it's also not a harmless, over-the-counter supplement.

The interview room was about eight feet by ten feet, but Eric's imposing stature made it feel as if the three of them were in a cramped two-foot-by-two-foot space.

“Eric takes up half the room, with one arm hooked to a bar on the wall,” Cartwright recalled, noting that he'd imagined Eric jumping across the table and grabbing one of them. “He's got the other arm in front, leaning forward, pointing at us, threatening that he was going to sue the police department.”

Once Eric got to trial in 2011, Cartwright said, “he looked kind of pudgy. But at the time of the arrest, he was really muscular, really cut up, didn't have much fat on him. Larry and I were sitting across from this guy, and we were going, ‘Wow.'”

After listening to Eric's police interviews from the 1990s, they were prepared for him to try to dominate the questioning. Although they'd hoped to thwart that effort, Eric was still very aggressive as Montgomery and Cartwright tried to get a word in edgewise.

Knowing that Eric hated the NBPD, Cartwright dressed in street clothes. Montgomery, who wore a suit, introduced himself as an investigator from the DA's office and Cartwright as his “partner.”

Eric was just as cocky as ever. “You kidding me?”

“Nope,” Montgomery said matter-of-factly.

“I'm under arrest for murder?” Eric asked, demanding to see the warrant. “If you've done your homework—”

“Yes, I have,” Montgomery said.

“I haven't done shit,” Eric said, asking what new evidence they'd gathered since deciding not to arrest him all those years ago. “I have all the respect in the world, but you're about to fucking kill me. . . . You're about to ruin my life again. And I worked hard to build what I have back up. All right? I'm not a criminal. I've never done anything wrong, anything. I have no record, nothing. I don't know why I'm arrested.”

When Montgomery told him about Suzanne Cogar's statement, Eric leaned toward him. “All right,” he said, “I'm going to give you a straight-ass answer. Look into my eyes.”

“Okay.”

“I did not kill him back then. I did not kill him now, you understand me? . . . I think you know I didn't do it.... Look at me, don't look down. You know I didn't do it.”

“I know you did,” Montgomery replied.

“Come on, all right, you know, let's go to court. I want you to put me on a plane to California today. I want my trial right now.”

Cartwright was thinking that if Eric had nothing to do with this, “who volunteers to go to jail in California, with no bail, and sit, for a couple of years at least, [waiting] for a trial?”

Asked why Cogar would say such things about him if they weren't true, Eric replied, “I don't know. . . . I made out with the girl one time and, you know, the whole time we lived together, we sat in a hot tub once and we went to the movies once. I don't know why, and, to be honest, I don't think she said that stuff, 'cause I never said that stuff.”

Eric said it was impossible for him to have killed Bill because he was at the soccer game and then Nanette dropped him off at Leonard Jomsky's house, where he was living with Jomsky at the time. (This was the first time he said this to explain why he had driven by Jomsky's when it was in the opposite direction from work. Back in 1994 and 1995, he and Nanette originally had said she dropped him at his apartment in Tustin; then he changed his story to say he was driving by Jomsky's for some other reason on his way to work when he got paged.)

But clearly confused about which stories he'd told all those years ago, Eric said that maybe his car had been parked at Jomksy's house, after all.

“Now I remember,” he said.

As he repeated the rest of his previous story—that he'd gone from Jomsky's to Denny's, where he'd answered the page with the 8:52
P.M.
call on his way to work—it became clear to Cartwright that Eric thought his phone record was a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, the reason that he hadn't been arrested back in the 1990s, and that the alibi would set him free once again.

But when Cartwright asked him to describe what the phone bill looked like, Eric shrugged off the question and tried to change the subject.

“If you understand it, are you going to unhook me and let me out of here?” Eric asked.

“No.”

“So what the fuck's the difference?” he said.

Eric grew increasingly agitated as he went back and forth with Montgomery about why he'd lied about the 9mm gun fifteen years ago.

“This is bullshit. You guys are fucking with me. . . . Let's all get famous on fucking TV for nothing.”

The investigators could see they were getting nowhere, so they decided to see if they could trick him into admitting that he'd been to Bill McLaughlin's house, even though they'd never found any of his fingerprints, clothing fibers, or DNA there. But when they told him they'd found his DNA on the keys and bullet casings at the crime scene, Eric didn't go for it.

“There's no way,” he said.

On to the next ploy, Montgomery told Eric that he had a chance to be the first to turn on his partner in crime. If he called Nanette and got her to talk, they would record the call. However, he only had so much time to do it.

“Within the next three hours, four hours, she is very possibly going to know that you're in custody and then there's nothing we can do,” Montgomery said. “I mean, she's not going to believe you or any kind of phone call.... I know you're in a pickle.”

While Eric rejected their overture, he also didn't implicate Nanette in the murder.

“On my children, on my parents, on my life, I've not talked to the girl since that shit went down,” he said. “Did she lie to me? Yes. Is all that shit? You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I didn't kill anybody. . . . I ain't got no blood on my hands, ever. You got the wrong guy.”

Around 11:00
A.M.
, after the Newport Beach detectives had left the Greenwich station, Eric complained that he didn't feel well. He said he was sweating, and he felt extremely hot and nauseated. He was taken to a local hospital, where he was treated and released, thereby missing his arraignment in court.

After being held overnight at the Greenwich jail, which Stempien said was like the Holiday Inn compared to state prison, Eric was taken to court in Stamford the next day.

From there, he was transferred to the state correctional facility in Bridgeport to await his extradition hearing. In the meantime, he was held on $2 million cash-only bail, which meant that no one could get him out on a bond, which only required a 10 percent payment.

 

 

After the arrest, Montgomery and Cartwright wanted to share the good news with the McLaughlin family, one of the more gratifying parts of their job. They tried to reach Jenny first, but got no answer, so they called Kim, who was in Hawaii on sabbatical from her teaching job, helping her mother take care of Kim's grandmother. The time difference made it six hours later in Connecticut than in Hawaii.