I'll Take Care of You (27 page)

CHAPTER 37

In July and August 2010, prosecutor Matt Murphy and DA Investigator Larry Montgomery spoke with Nanette's first ex-husband, K. Ross Johnston, who was going to testify for the prosecution, and his wife, Julia. The couple offered some interesting details that they hadn't previously told police.

For one, before Nanette got out of jail in December 1996, Julia said Eric had called her to complain that Nanette refused to let him come back to California to see her until she had a chance to get back on her feet for a couple of months. Julia also said that Nanette told her she was going to be staying at the Ritz-Carlton when she was released, because Eric had some contacts there. As it turned out, Nanette ended up at a Motel 6.

Another tidbit: K. Ross said Nanette had taken out a $250,000 life insurance policy on
him
before Bill was murdered. After the shooting, K. Ross asked her—and she refused—to cancel the policy. K. Ross had to force the matter by starting legal proceedings against her. When she finally said she'd canceled it, he called to confirm and discovered that she was lying. He confronted her, which made Nanette so angry at his distrustful behavior that she threatened not to cancel the policy after all. Ultimately she conceded.

 

 

Early on in the case, Eric's defense attorneys Angelo MacDonald and John Pappalardo came out from New York for a court appearance and engaged in their ongoing “plea bargain dance” with prosecutor Matt Murphy, informally discussing the case to explore various resolutions.

Murphy took them to a restaurant and then to a bar in Manhattan Beach. Along the way, MacDonald said that as a former prosecutor, he would have tried the case back in 1995.

On October 22, 2010, the Orange County District Attorney's Office announced it wouldn't be seeking the death penalty. This came as no surprise to the defense teams, however, because they were already aware of this.

Murphy, who was on the committee that decides on which cases the DA will choose to seek the death penalty, explained later that this case didn't meet the criteria, partly because of the case's age and the anticipated problems with witnesses' memories. But, he added, as “diabolical” as it was, this was “essentially a domestic violence case for murder,” and the DA rarely sought death on such cases.

“Death penalties are reserved for the most heinous of heinous,” he said.

 

 

In January 2011, the prosecution team decided to run a new slate of ballistics tests on the nine-millimeter bullets that had killed Bill McLaughlin. This proved to be a winning idea.

When the results came back, they saw that the more modern analysis had dramatically narrowed the field of guns that could have fired the bullets to just one: The murder weapon was, in fact, a Beretta 92F, the same type of gun that Naposki had purchased, lied to police about, and had claimed was lost or stolen.

Investigator Larry Montgomery conducted a new series of driving-time trials to test Eric's “alibi,” to see if his story made sense, and to determine if it was even possible to do what he'd claimed: to drive from the soccer field in Diamond Bar, stop at his apartment, go by Leonard Jomsky's house, then make the call at Denny's by 8:52
P.M.
The answer was no.

“Skedaddling” away from the field at 8:20
P.M.
—as K. Ross described it—took Montgomery three minutes to walk to the parking lot. He left the lot at 8:23
P.M.
, but made it only as far as Eric's apartment before he ran out of time.

“The result was, driving as fast as I could, without getting into an accident, I was able to get to his apartment about a minute before eight fifty-two,” he testified later. “I couldn't fathom” that he could get to Denny's in time to make a call by that time, he said, let alone stop at Leonard Jomsky's beforehand. It took the investigator six minutes to drive from Eric's apartment to Jomsky's.

Montgomery also tested whether Eric, even if he had made the 8:52 call at Denny's, could still get from there to Balboa Coves in time to shoot Bill by 9:10
P.M.
—stopping at the bridge near the stairs, running down them to the bike path, going through the pedestrian-access gate and across the street to Bill's house—and the answer was yes.

Leaving the Denny's parking lot at 8:55, he arrived at the bridge at 9:08
P.M.
and eight seconds, leaving a slim window of about two minutes—but a window, nonetheless—to commit the murder.

Comparing his drive times with those the police had done in 1995, he found that they had taken even less time to get from the soccer field to the bridge—only thirty-five minutes as compared to his thirty-seven and a half minutes. And because the prosecution team didn't believe Eric had truly stopped to make that call, they determined that he had plenty of time to leave the soccer field at 8:23 and get to Balboa Coves in time to commit the murder before Kevin called 911 at 9:11
P.M.

 

 

Nanette's attorney was moving forward with his third-party culpability defense until he saw a copy of the new ballistics report. All this time, Mick Hill had thought that Eric Naposki had had nothing to do with killing Bill, but with a single report, everything changed.

Oh, my God, he
did
have something to do with it.

From that point on, Hill switched his strategy to proving that Eric was the shooter. He also sought to prove that Nanette was a good, loving mother who was also a liar, a cheat, and a thief, but not a killer. His goal was to persuade the jurors that they shouldn't let their distaste for her bad sexual and moral behavior affect their judgment on the murder charge against her.

There was one nagging problem, however. In 2010, Nanette wrote a letter to Eric, her ex-boyfriend and now codefendant, from one Orange County jail inmate to another, expressing condolences about his mother's death and saying she was devastated—spelled “devasted”—to hear about it.

You are strong, you're a warrior and we
will
make [it] through this nightmare with a testimony and a story that needs telling,
she wrote.
Your mom loved you and I know that she is watching over you right this very moment.
Nanette closed by saying that she was praying for him, and predicted that they soon would be “celebrating our victory.”

Hill knew he needed to keep that letter out of the jury's hands, and he ultimately succeeded.

His best course of action, Hill decided, was to show how proficient Nanette was at spinning her lies, “different sets of lies to different people, depending on the circumstances.... She's really, really good at being a con woman. She completely had McLaughlin fooled, so why was she going to kill him?”

And so evolved Hill's “golden goose” argument: why would Nanette kill her wealthy fiancé, Bill McLaughlin, to be with a penniless loser like Eric Naposki, when she had much more to gain from Bill if he were alive?

 

 

In late July 2010, Eric's defense team filed a motion to dismiss the case, claiming that his state and federal rights to due process and a fair trial had been violated. The gist of the motion was that the NBPD had conducted “a grossly negligent investigation” in the mid-1990s, an injury compounded by the DA's delaying prosecution of the case for so long that Eric couldn't get a fair trial because of the lost records, witnesses, and memories.

Within a month, documents suddenly surfaced from Eric's original defense effort, including several memos that summarized the investigative work of James W. Box, a former police officer who had worked for the DA's office before becoming a private investigator, and had worked on Eric's case when Julian Bailey was his attorney.

Pohlson wrote Pappalardo that the records were recently discovered in an old storage box. The file, Pohlson later explained, was found by Bailey's former partner, Jim Brott, when he was moving offices.

In March 2011, before Eric's trial, the defense filed a supplemental brief that included the meat of these newfound documents, claiming that its case for dismissal was even stronger.

The documents included the letter from Bailey to prosecutor Debbie Lloyd, discussing Eric's phone call alibi and the fact that the credit card bill existed.

They also included a memo from Box to Bailey, dated February 18, 1995, summarizing Box's interview with Mike Tuomisto, in which the bar manager said he observed heavy traffic coming into Newport Beach on the night of the murder, and assumed it was related to the boat parade.

Shortly before 9:00 P.M. he paged Eric Naposki to inform him that he probably should try and leave a little earlier because of the heavy traffic,
Box wrote.
Within a few minutes Eric Naposki returned his page and told him that he was on his way to work. . . . Sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 P.M. he went into the club portion of the nightclub and saw Eric Naposki working as security and noticed nothing unusual about his demeanor, appearance or attire.

One memo chronicled a driving-time trial by Box from Denny's to Balboa Coves that took twenty-one minutes and forty-seven seconds to go 12.5 miles. The defense argued that it was thus “impossible” for Eric to have committed the crime by 9:10 after making the 8:52
P.M.
phone call.

Another memo described Box's interview of Tustin Hardware manager David Vandaveer, in which the defense claimed that Vandaveer made statements that were arguably different from what he told police and/or different from how police characterized his remarks in their search warrant affidavit, constituting “at best, misleading information,” and “at worst, complete fabrication,” which therefore challenged the prosecution's credibility.

The original affidavit stated,
Vandaveer advised Detective Voth that there was no way to be positive that those were the exact key copies he had made, but stated his hardware store used the same type of key blanks to make their duplicates.
According to the Box memo, Vandaveer had said the silver key could have been cut at his store or several other Ace Hardware stores, but that the gold key “was not cut at his store.” He also said he was certain the keys made for Eric at his store were not stamped “do not duplicate.”

When Detective Tom Voth saw these memos, he had a funny feeling in his gut about the convenient timing of their discovery after they'd supposedly been lost, with the paper file thrown away and the electronic file destroyed when Box's hard drive crashed in 2000.

The more he looked at the documents, the more he questioned their authenticity. To him, it looked as if they had different fonts and phone numbers on copies of the same memo, and that the newly discovered memos listed different phone numbers than were on the memos the NBPD had received in the 1990s.

Voth presented his concerns to Murphy, who agreed something seemed off. After looking further into it, Murphy realized that certain portions of early versions of the same memos had been reworded or deleted in later versions.

“It's about him writing and then rewriting [the memos],” Murphy said in 2012, referring to a practice to which Box admitted during the trial. “It looks shady because it is shady. Police don't write multiple reports . . . with different information in different versions.”

After doing some research, Voth and Montgomery learned that the boat parade didn't even start until December 17 in 1994—two days after the murder—so Tuomisto's claims about traffic in the Box memo didn't even make sense.

The defense motion also made the case that Kevin McLaughlin could have killed his father, with the help of his friend Daniel Ziese:
[Ziese] was very likely Kevin's accomplice in the murder of Bill McLaughlin.

Kevin had motive, the defense argued, because he and Bill were at war over his drug use, evidenced by the drug test kits that Bill kept in the refrigerator. Ziese, the defense said, had motive because Bill had denied his request for a $20,000 loan, because he thought Ziese's business plan was “deficient to the point of being humorous.”

The defense bolstered the accusation against Kevin with statements in a Box interview of Rosemary Luxton, a neighbor who said she hadn't seen anyone leaving the McLaughlin house. The defense argued,
[This] strongly suggests that the person who committed the crime never left the home.
Furthermore, because Luxton and Kevin were both dead, neither could be called to the stand to testify or be cross-examined.
As such, Mr. Naposki has been robbed of yet another witness critical in establishing his alibi and third party culpability defenses
.

Not surprisingly, this last accusation particularly enraged the McLaughlin sisters and Kevin's former girlfriend, Sandy Baumgardner. As if losing Bill wasn't enough, Kevin wasn't even alive to defend himself against what they saw as a ridiculous allegation.

 

 

In March 2011, Judge William R. Froeberg held a hearing on the motion, during which defense attorney Gary Pohlson argued that his client had “suffered acute prejudice” because of the undue length of time between the crime and the trial. At this point, neither defense team appeared to be blaming the other defendant for the crime.

If Eric had an alibi, then Nanette was also not guilty by association, said Deputy Public Defender Denise Gragg, who accused prosecutors of unethical conduct and the NBPD of incompetence for purposely letting the “evidence disappear.”

“There was an alibi that we can't put in front of a jury anymore,” Gragg said. “That's prejudice.”

Keith Bogardus, a deputy district attorney working with Murphy, responded that the defense attorneys were “little more than paper tigers,” and that the prosecution didn't believe the phone call was ever made. To believe otherwise, Bogardus said, was just “notoriously riddled speculation.”