“Do you do any armed work?” Van Horn asked, meaning that he carried a gun.
“No, I don’t do any armed,” Eric said.
“Not even in uniform?”
“No, even in uniform. I don’t even have a sidearm. That takes at least six months to get.”
Asked about his relationship with Nanette, Eric described her as a “pretty good friend,” whom he’d met two and a half years earlier when he was running a kids’ program at a gym in Irvine. He said he had two kids of his own, and that’s why he and Nanette got along. They started working out together, and he also liked doing things with her kids. In fact, he’d just taken them Christmas shopping, he said, because Nanette had to move.
“She’s going through some hard times this week,” he said, “so I told her I’d take the kids.”
“How about Bill McLaughlin?” Van Horn asked.
“I never met Bill.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“I just know of him . . . and his, you know, his partnership with Nanette, as far as business goes and stuff like that.”
Eric said he didn’t know anything more about Nanette’s relationship with Bill and didn’t believe it was his place to ask. “It wasn’t like that. She didn’t ask me about my ex-wife, and I didn’t ask her about her ex-husband.”
Asked how he viewed Nanette’s relationship with Bill, Eric said, “From what I gathered, it was kind of a mentor—almost like a father-daughter—type thing.... Nanette is a pretty smart girl. She’s aggressive businesswise, and I think she learned a lot of that from Bill, you know, kind of like a . . . I don’t know what you call it, apprentice, or someone, you know, like that or higher stature.”
“You didn’t see it as a romantic relationship or a boyfriend-girlfriend?”
“No, I didn’t,” Eric said.
Eric said she’d had boyfriends before she got romantically involved with Eric. As a matter of fact, even since they’d been dating, and he still didn’t see them as being exclusive. “I wouldn’t say [it’s] a solo, total [relationship], like, I have girlfriends, you know, and people that I date also.” Rather, he said, he saw it as a “dating relationship that has potential, you know, to get better.”
“Do you think this is headed toward a serious relationship? A marriage or engagement or—” Van Horn asked.
“I hope it is, yeah.”
During the search of Eric’s car, detectives also found a green towel with reddish brown marks, and a floor mat with brown stains.
“When the officer looked in your car, there’s a towel there he says looks like [it] has blood on it,” Van Horn said. “Do you know what that is?”
Eric pointed to his chin. “Yeah, right here. See a little, it’s a shaving nick.... I think I still have the scar.”
“I can’t see a scar there,” Voth said.
“I got it the other day.”
“How long ago?”
“I’d say two days ago, when I shaved.”
“Okay, you said there’s also some brown stains on the floor. Do you know what that is?”
“I have no idea.”
“Any blood or anything that’s been in there?” Voth asked.
“No.”
Eric said he didn’t know why they needed to search his car.
“We’re investigating a murder,” Van Horn said.
“I want to be totally helpful to you guys, not play good guy/bad guy,” Eric said, “because I know I’m a good guy and I’m on the outside of this thing. I mean, I’m on your side.”
“Have you ever been to the house on Balboa Coves?” Van Horn asked.
“No,” Eric said, adding that he’d only been to the house on Seashore Drive, “like, one time, you know, and that was probably way back closer to when I first met her. I saw her down on the beach when she was out there.”
Asked where he was the night of December 15, he said he was with Nanette at the soccer game. Afterward, she dropped him off at his apartment in Tustin, where his truck was, “somewhere in the vicinity of nine, nine-fifteen. . . . [Then] I got dressed and went to work later on, probably around nine-thirty, quarter to ten.”
He said Nanette didn’t come inside while he changed for work. “I was in a rush because I had to get to work and she was in a rush . . . to get to the mall.”
Asked for his typical work schedule, Eric said he might get to the Thunderbird at 8:00 P.M. if he had a meeting, but not till 9:00 or 10:00 P.M. if he didn’t. But he said he didn’t have a meeting that night. “No, we have a meeting tonight.”
“You said you don’t own any firearms at all?” Van Horn asked.
“No, I bought one, [but] I haven’t seen it in so long. I bought one in Dallas that I gave my dad. It was a .380, a little . . . I forgot what kind it was called. But my dad was mugged in New York, dropping asbestos off in the Bronx.”
Later in the interview, completely unsolicited—and before the murder weapon had even been analyzed by the crime lab—Eric brought up the fact that he’d bought a nine-millimeter Beretta about four or five months earlier. But he said the gun was stolen in June after he’d loaned it to a coworker, Joe David Jimenez.
“Had the gun three weeks, never fired it, never taken out,” Eric said. “He was supposed to get ammo.”
Eric said he’d never reported the gun stolen because he was hoping it would show up. “He could have sold the fuckin’ thing, for all I know.”
Asked where he kept his belongings, Eric said they were in his car and hotel room at the moment.
He never inquired why the detectives had pulled him over on a traffic warrant in the middle of the night to question him about a murder, which Voth saw as a natural query from an innocent man.
The detectives gained Eric’s consent to search his hotel room at the Ramada in Costa Mesa, where they found muddy shoes and a receipt for a $599 Movado watch, paid for in cash, at Bullock’s in South Coast Plaza the morning of December 22. They also found his Wells Fargo bank statement for December showing a balance of only $956.
After one of Eric’s friends posted bail for him, the police let him go, released his car to him, and continued their surveillance. They subsequently followed him to a storage facility in Tustin, which he’d never mentioned. They also got a call from a confidential informant who said Eric had rented a storage unit in Huntington Beach on December 20, and had requested that no one give out information about it.
By placing a tracking device on Eric’s car, the detectives were able to find the storage unit in Huntington Beach. During a search there on January 19, police found the three motorcycles Nanette had paid for after Bill’s funeral on December 21.
Working in private security, Eric clearly knew he was being tailed and began to use countersurveillance techniques—making abrupt U-turns, turning off his lights, or suddenly pulling over to the curb—which indicated to police that he had a guilty conscience.
A closer examination of Eric’s notebook pages, which involved cross-checking Eric’s statements with notations he’d entered in the journal chronologically, revealed that a series of letters and numbers—2WWL034—was written in early December, before the murder. Checking DMV records, they matched that entry to the license plate number for Bill McLaughlin’s white Mercedes, which was parked in the garage in Balboa Coves when Bill was in town.
Why would Eric have Bill’s plate number, they wondered, and how would he get it if he’d never been to the house? To Detective Voth, it meant that Eric was involved in the murder, and the detective’s suspicions only increased as Eric continued to change his story.
The Orange County District Attorney’s homicide division works as a “vertical unit” with law enforcement agencies. That means prosecutors and DA investigators are supposed to work closely with detectives, starting at the crime scene if possible.
For example, a prosecutor—and sometimes a DA investigator—might sit in on police interviews with witnesses or suspects, observing and passing notes with suggested questions. In some cases
, a veteran DA investigator might even conduct the interview.
The night of the murder, Detective Bill Hartford called Deputy District Attorney Debora “Debbie” Lloyd, who was relatively new to the Homicide Unit, having transferred about a year earlier from the Sexual Assault Unit, and she signed off on the consent search of the house.
Within a week, Lloyd came down to the NBPD for a roundtable discussion with about eight of the police officials working the case. Lloyd was the only woman at the table. In her view, Nanette was the prime suspect.
“The evidence looked pretty strong that she was involved,” Lloyd, who has since retired, recalled recently. “They, on the other hand, were more interested in Naposki.”
At that point, she said, the detectives didn’t “have a whole lot of information, but there was enough. I suspected that she did it, and maybe she had him help her, so that’s kind of what I went away with.”
Lloyd received some updates from detectives in the beginning, she said, but because homicides were so rare in Newport Beach, she didn’t know the detectives well and hadn’t had much chance to work with them. She also got the sense that they didn’t want her help—a belief she felt was confirmed when she asked a veteran DA investigator to offer his help in putting the case together.
“He came back and said they weren’t interested in us getting involved,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh, man,’ and there was nothing I could do because it wasn’t our case. We can’t take a case away from a police department.”
As the NBPD continued to check into the background of Eric Naposki, Detective Craig Frizzell talked with folks at the Sporting Club, an exclusive gym in Irvine, where Eric had worked as a fitness instructor for about three months in 1993 and where Nanette had also been a member. Eric had been fired for having a bad attitude and for threatening the staff after they had his motorcycle, which he’d knowingly parked illegally, towed away. Nonetheless, Eric returned to the gym to work out with Nanette, who paid for his $200 membership.
Frizzell interviewed two valets at the Thunderbird, who said that Eric routinely gave them his keys to park his car in a loading area rather than paying the $4 parking-garage fee. But neither of them could remember what time he came to work the night of the murder, or whether they’d parked his car.
The Thunderbird was one of about twenty nightclubs scattered around the peninsula, where the young, affluent, and attractive twentysomething patrons paid enormous cover charges to gain entrance.
“They were the pretty people. Everyone went there to be seen,” said Dave Byington, the retired homicide sergeant. “Always had a line out the door.”
Eric worked security at the front door. In those days, the NBPD’s vice squad was busy monitoring these nightclubs and chasing down narcotics crimes: “Coke was huge, high-end prostitutes, escorts,” Byington recalled.
Frizzell followed up on Eric’s gun story by trying to interview Joe David Jimenez, who had reportedly lost Eric’s nine-millimeter gun. But Jimenez was in Texas visiting his parents for the holidays, so Frizzell talked to Jimenez’s roommate, Robert Trednic, instead. Trednic, who had worked with Eric at Metropolis, described him as a sneak and a liar.
According to Trednic, Eric had said, “If there is a shooting going on, don’t worry, I’m holding,” although Trednic said he’d never actually seen any gun. Trednic also said he’d never known Jimenez to carry one either.
Reached by phone the next day, Jimenez confirmed that Eric had loaned him a gun as protection for a few nights on a security job in August 1994, but it wasn’t a nine-millimeter. It was a Jennings-Bryco .380, he said, and it was never stolen. That’s just what he’d told Eric the day he’d pulled up on a motorcycle that Eric said his girlfriend had bought for him and asked Jimenez for the gun.
Jimenez told Detective Frizzell that he’d sold the gun to his boss, Art Menaldi, for $240—fully loaded, not empty of bullets, as Eric had claimed—after Eric failed to pay him that same amount for the security job. When Eric finally paid Jimenez his $240, Jimenez offered to repay Eric the $100 that Eric said the gun was worth. Records showed that Eric had bought the .380 from a pawnshop in Dallas, Texas, in January 1994.
Jimenez said Eric called him at one point and said he’d lost his nine-millimeter gun and his .380, so he was unsure which one he’d actually loaned to Jimenez—apparently trying to solicit a statement that other weapons could have been stolen out of his car at the same time. That’s when Jimenez confessed to Eric that he’d actually sold the .380 to Menaldi.
Eric called Jimenez in Texas the same day Frizzell did. But before Eric could say anything, Jimenez asked him what was going on.
“The police are calling me, asking me questions about you and a murder or something.”
Eric got quiet for a moment and said, “Someone’s trying to frame me.”
“Oh,” Jimenez said.
Then Eric hung up abruptly.
The NBPD tracked down the .380 and got it back from Art Menaldi’s brother, Dominic, who told police that Eric had asked for it some weeks earlier, saying he needed it because of some problem. Describing the gun to Dominic as “a small, snub-nosed, little piece-of-crap gun that fits in your hand and looks like a nine-millimeter,” Eric apparently wanted to prove to police that it hadn’t been fired recently.
A few months later, Jimenez passed a lie detector test and also turned over six Hydra-Shok bullets that he’d removed from Eric’s .380 before Dominic Menaldi had returned it to police. This was the same type of bullet that had killed Bill McLaughlin, who had no such ammunition in his arsenal.
When the detectives learned that Eric had paid $540 for the Beretta 92F, nearly twice the value of the .380, they knew that Eric wouldn’t have confused the two guns. Why would Eric lie and say he’d loaned the 9mm to Jimenez?
“There’s no reason in the world [for Eric] to lie about that, unless that gun was used in the crime,” Detective Voth said.
Voth wondered what role Eric might have played in the crime. Was he the shooter? Or was Nanette the shooter and he simply helped her? Under the law, Eric was just as guilty either way.
At the end of December 1994, Detectives Frizzell and Hartford located Kevin McDaniel in Los Angeles. McDaniel had sold the nine-millimeter Beretta to Eric in June or July 1994, about six years after they’d met on a bodyguard job in Mexico through Art Menaldi’s company, MPP Bodyguards.
McDaniel told detectives that he’d only just spoken to Eric, who still owed him $1,400 of the $2,000 he’d loaned him. Eric had written some checks that bounced and said he was going through some “stuff right now,” but he would try to repay McDaniel as soon as he got some cash.
Before Thanksgiving, Eric had told him that he’d loaned the Beretta to Jimenez, but it had been stolen from Jimenez’s car, a similar story to what he’d told police.
“You need to report my gun stolen,” Eric said.
But McDaniel told Eric no, that he should be the one to report the gun stolen, because it was no longer McDaniel’s weapon. The detectives thought it was looking more and more like this Beretta was the gun that had killed Bill McLaughlin—and that Eric was the shooter. Now if they could just find it.
CHAPTER 11
Kim and Jenny McLaughlin soon discovered that their concerns and dislike for Nanette had fallen tragically short of reality.
Kim didn’t know where her father had really met Nanette, but Kim didn’t appreciate the fact that Nanette was only one year older than she was, or that Nanette’s kids had moved into Bill’s daughters’ bedrooms within a few months of meeting Nanette.
In Kim’s view, Nanette was a mooch, quitting her sales job as soon as she moved in. She also sucked up to Bill for his money, persuading him to send her kids to soccer camp and to take them all on exotic vacations. Kim told police that the only people she could see wanting Bill dead were Jacob Horowitz and Nanette Johnston.
Kevin McLaughlin, who lived with the couple, saw things a little differently. Although Nanette had her own bedroom, he ofte
n saw her go into Bill’s room at night.
“They didn’t think I knew what was going on, but I knew,” he told police.
Then again, he also didn’t know that Nanette was seeing anyone on the side.
After Bill’s murder, Kim and Jenny told Nanette that they were taking Kevin for a weeklong trip for Christmas to their mother’s house, their childhood vacation home on Hanalei Bay, Hawaii. They planned to mourn their father’s death together, clear their heads, and scatter their father’s ashes on the bay he’d loved. Nanette, they said, could take that time to move her things out of Balboa Coves and transfer them to the Seashore house, per Bill’s will.
When the four of them returned from Hawaii, however, they were shocked to see that half of Bill’s home office had been cleared out: his desktop computer, fax and copy machines, as well as various boxes of corporate documents and files. Nanette also had taken the Cadillac, even though Bill’s will had specifically provided her with the Infiniti. To top it off, even his favorite baseball, signed by Babe Ruth, was gone.
As they went through Bill’s walk-in closet to pack up his things, they found a pair of red high-heeled pumps, the size of Nanette’s feet, next to his Armani suits, as well as a matching red teddy and a vibrator.
“So she took care of him in that respect,” Sandy Baumgardner said.
They noticed that she’d left behind photos of her and Bill together. However, she’d taken the portraits of herself, which Bill had kept on his desk at Balboa Coves, including those of her wearing a lacey bra while posed on a motorcycle.
When the McLaughlins went to the Las Vegas house to go through his things, they were repulsed to find a poster-size photo from the same motorcycle shoot. Knowing that there were no small children around in Las Vegas, Bill had apparently felt free to display a much racier shot of Nanette—leaning back, topless, showing off the fake breasts that he, as her benefactor, had bought for her.
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