Vandaveer went on to say that he’d headed the committee that had chosen Eric to head up security for Tiller Days, a three-day annual agricultural festival in Tustin.
Voth couldn’t believe it. “Did he have any keys made?” he asked hopefully.
“Yeah, he had a couple keys made,” on a couple of different occasions, sometime after Tiller Days, which was in October, Vandaveer said. “You might want to talk to one of my guys. He made something else for him.”
Vandaveer’s employee Michael Rivers told Voth that he’d responded to an unusual request from Eric. “I made a fake silencer for him,” he said.
Rivers explained that Eric had come in to get a key copied around the time of Tiller Days, and asked if they could make a silencer for his nine-millimeter Beretta to use as a movie prop. Rivers said yes, he could rig something up. He went in the back to put a contraption together, using a piece of plumbing pipe with an adapter at the end. Eric said he was worried about scratching his gun, so they discussed taping the device to the weapon.
If Eric’s gun was stolen in the summer, as he’d told police, then why did he ask for a fake silencer to fit it in October or November? For Voth, this wasn’t a question of whether the silencer would work. Rather, it was more important in the context of Eric’s conflicting statements about when he still had possession of the nine-millimeter. The detectives also never found any evidence that Eric had been involved in a movie in which he needed such a prop.
In another key-related incident, Detective Hartford interviewed Bill’s college buddy Don Kalal, who said he was going to stay at Balboa Coves for a couple of days two months before the murder. Nanette was supposed to mail him the house keys, but he never received them.
Bill said that he’d sent the keys in an envelope, with a return address in Las Vegas, and assumed they’d gotten lost in the mail, because the envelope never came back. When a week went by and the keys still hadn’t shown up, Bill confirmed with Kalal that he had sent it to the correct address.
On January 26, 1995, the same day as this interview with Kalal, Nanette’s attorney called the detectives and told them not to speak to his client any further.
Roy Rauschklob, who had been the head of security at Metropolis and hired Eric to work there in August or September 1992, told police he saw Eric and Nanette at the movies at Triangle Square on February 20, 1995. Nanette looked stressed-out.
When Rauschklob asked them how they were doing, Nanette replied, “Ninety percent of what is in the news is made-up, and only ten percent is true.”
On February 23, 1995, police booked into evidence a “change of address” form authorizing Bill’s mail to be forwarded from Balboa Coves to the house on Seashore Drive. It was dated December 28, 1994, with the alleged signature of William McLaughlin, who had been dead for two weeks. Detectives saw this as Nanette’s attempt to divert incoming mail and hide her covert activities from Bill’s family.
During this time, detectives conducted a multitude of timed driving tests on various routes from the soccer field in Diamond Bar to Eric’s apartment in Tustin and then to possible drop-off areas near the McLaughlin house. They also drove directly from the field to Balboa Coves, which took thirty-five minutes to drive the 35.7 miles.
In every scenario they tried, they determined that the trips—the longest of which took forty-one minutes—still left enough time for Eric to shoot Bill before the 911 call, then walk or run across the bridge to the Thunderbird, where coworkers remembered seeing him between 9:30 and 10:00 P.M.
In addition, the detectives tested Nanette’s story by timing the trips from Eric’s apartment to South Coast Plaza, where they parked and went inside Crate & Barrel. The earliest arrival time got them inside the store by 9:19 P.M., leaving her ten minutes to buy what she needed before the nine twenty-nine time-stamped on her receipt. The maximum drive time of fourteen minutes still got her inside by 9:26 P.M.
On March 2 at 4:30 P.M., the detectives carried out a search warrant at the Seashore house. After Nanette had made such a fuss about not wanting any guns around her kids, the police found two of them: a nine-millimeter Astra, dating back to the World War Two era, and a .380 Davis. Neither was on the ballistics test list of possible murder weapons, but Voth found it curious that Nanette would have them at the house.
“They’re Bill’s guns,” she said. “I brought them here for protection.”
Because the guns weren’t listed on the warrant, the police couldn’t seize them. Detective Dave Byington told Nanette’s attorney that she needed to bring them down to the station because they didn’t belong to her.
The next day, James Box, the investigator working for Eric’s attorney, Julian Bailey, brought in the guns as requested.
“Nanette was paying for everyone’s attorneys . . . with Bill’s money,” Voth said. “Where else would she get any money to pay for it?”
CHAPTER 16
After Nanette and K. Ross Johnston divorced, they agreed that she would introduce him to anyone she was dating, because he wanted to meet the men spending time with his children. Even so, she never told him that she was romantically involved with Bill McLaughlin, let alone that they were engaged. Instead, she concocted a story that she was paying $800 a month to rent a room at a house with Bill, whom she described as an “old man” who was hardly ever home.
“I just knew he was gone a lot, traveling, business,” K. Ross said later.
K. Ross met Bill just once, in the spring of 1994, when K. Ross came to pick up the kids. Nanette had said that Bill hated him, so K. Ross was quite surprised when Bill ran over to shake his hand and appeared very pleased to meet him. Nanette, on the other hand, did not look happy.
During this time, Nanette said she was “working deals, looking at options, buying stocks” with Bill, and was also helping him with a Mexican village development. Still, she said it wasn’t like working a real job.
Nanette’s ex knew something was up because she’d been driving an old car and suddenly showed up in a brand-new red Infiniti. She claimed that she’d bought it with a commission from a really good deal she’d done with Bill.
K. Ross initially thought she was holding to their agreement because she’d introduced him to other men she was dating, who were all closer to her own age, such as Eric Naposki. Eric was around for multiple sports seasons, first as a friend, and later as a lover, a change that became obvious when she started sitting in his lap.
“I didn’t see any that were fat and ugly,” K. Ross said, listing off half-a-dozen men she’d brought to games or birthday parties while living with Bill.
One day, Kristofer had two games. She brought Eric to the one in the morning, then showed up with a different guy that afternoon. Eric came by for the second game as well and stuck around to watch. At the end of the day, Nanette said good-bye to the other guy and left with Eric.
Although he had no proof, K. Ross figured she was dating Bill as well “because of the amount of time they were spending together,” he said. “I’m thinking, ‘What’s going to happen?’”
But as it turned out, Nanette had no worries about running into Bill while she was with Eric. After raising three kids of his own, Bill had told her that he had no interest in going to watch Kristofer’s sporting activities.
While Bill was busy fighting his legal battle with Jacob Horowitz, and flying back and forth to Las Vegas, Nanette was playing both sides against the middle.
Eric was obviously not the first man she slept with behind Bill’s back. Eric simply lasted longer than the others. In 1993, she was seeing a guy named Scott Weisman, who told detectives that she’d broken up with him to start seeing Eric.
By May 1994, things were going well enough with Eric that she secretly took him to Chicago to meet her grandmother and then on to Jamaica for a romantic vacation.
Two months later, she and Eric were house hunting at the Turtle Rock Summit Estates development in Irvine, where model home prices ranged from $800,000 to $2 million, completely out of th
e couple’s range. Nanette came to look by herself the first time, and returned a week later with Eric, telling realtor Sharon Hedberg that they had a family with four kids. They never said they were married, but that was Hedberg’s impression.
Nanette and Eric seemed excited about two particular lots, priced between $900,000 and $930,000, with a $25,000 down payment. The couple said they were looking for a home that would be ready by spring 1995, because they didn’t have the money to buy just yet.
Nanette told Hedberg that she wrote business plans for money, and Eric was planning to form a security company. They asked if Hedberg knew anyone who needed security services, and Hedberg referred them to someone at Standard Pacific who might be interested. The realtor never saw or talked to them again.
On the nights that Bill was out of town, Nanette stayed at Eric’s apartment in Tustin, hung out with him at the Seashore house, or went to dinner and clubbing with his friends. She also often picked up the check as she spun tales that made her seem wealthier, more educated, and more successful than she really was.
As the relationship between her and Eric grew more serious, he invited her and her kids to New York for Thanksgiving with his family. They left on November 14, shopped and saw the sights in New York City, and took photos of themselves with the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers in the background.
On the same trip, she took him to her sister’s wedding in Baltimore, where she caught the bouquet, and in a very public display, Eric slipped the garter belt on Nanette’s upper thigh. Typically, both of these wedding milestones are signs that the “lucky” guests are about to get married.
When Nanette was with her family back east, Eric was her boyfriend and Bill was a fatherly mentor. But at home with Bill, Eric was Nanette’s six-foot-two, 250-pound, Polish-Italian secret.
Meanwhile, Nanette was also trying to work her family-planning wiles with Bill, presumably as a way to guarantee access to his assets for the long term.
“You’ve got to get that vasectomy reversed,” Nanette said to him one Friday night in June 1994 as she ogled the babies at the next table at JACKshrimp, where they were having dinner with Kevin and Sandy. It seemed like a casual comment made in passing, just a blip in the conversation before they moved on to other topics, but Nanette could be subtle that way.
Bill clearly enjoyed the company of Nanette’s children, and he treated Lishele and Kristofer with love and kindness. Apparently having no idea she was cheating on him, Bill seemed to give Nanette more latitude in his business affairs, or, perhaps, she was just taking it without his knowledge. He surely couldn’t have known that she’d started pretending to be Bill McLaughlin, claiming that she had invented the blood-separator device, and telling people that she had hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in various projects.
Bill’s cousin Barbara LaSpesa said she thought Nanette must have been a “smooth talker” and that the couple must have discussed Nanette’s needs and wants. He probably believed he deserved to be happy, and if it “cost him a few dollars, it cost him,” Barbara said, speculating that he gave Nanette what she wanted because he was scared of losing her.
Barbara said that because Bill had forced his ex-wife, Sue, to live so frugally, “I sometimes wonder if he felt guilty about that, because he did lose her and [tried] to make it up with this woman.”
After Bill was so careful with his money while married to Sue, Barbara said, she couldn’t believe how different he was with Nanette. “I remember he had a boat, and then he got rid of the boat, because it cost so much for gas and he wasn’t using it.”
He had to have known “what he was getting into when he answered the ad, because it plainly stated what this woman was looking for. I wondered if after he’d lost his wife, maybe it dawned on him, ‘I have to pay for it.’”
Barbara speculated that some male ego was at work as well. “He’s buying everything she’s giving him, but he’s going to believe it, because who’s going to lie to Bill? He’s so smart. That’s what kills me about this whole thing. He puts her on a life insurance policy. . . . He ends up being with this woman who took all his money.”
Nonetheless, she said, “he shouldn’t have died for it. That’s the unfortunate part. He had Kevin living with him. . . . The whole thing is tragic. I just feel bad for all of them.... There were red flags there—and, obviously, he didn’t see them, didn’t want to see them.”
Bill’s brother Patrick, however, believes today that Bill actually did have a clue. When the two men talked the night before Bill was murdered, Patrick sensed that Bill was on edge, angry, and “extremely shaken by what he thought was happening.”
“He thought he was a wanted man or a guy who was a targeted man, for whatever reason, and I think he also felt that he should try to be up for whatever came his way, and he was going to fight ’em off,” Patrick recalled recently.
Bill never mentioned who was after him or why, but he did tell Patrick that night that “he’d stocked his home with firearms and ammunition.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Patrick asked his brother, confused because Bill had never mentioned his gun collecting.
“Broth, you have no idea,” Bill said, using the nickname the two brothers had called each other since they’d started working together in business many years earlier.
Patrick said he also believes that Bill never disclosed any of this previously because he was too proud and embarrassed.
“Bill always prided himself with not pulling the wool over his eyes, and that may have been why we never discussed it,” he said.
But he also wonders if Bill might have finally figured out that Nanette had been “helping herself to his checking account.”
At least in the short term, Nanette’s children got something out of their mother’s double-dealing behavior, because they benefited from Bill’s money, the lavish trips he paid for, and the extra fatherly attention that he gave them. And when Bill said he didn’t want to traipse around to soccer, basketball, or baseball games, it didn’t matter because Nanette had Eric for that, and the kids liked him too.
Nanette played the part of the soccer mom well, driving Kristofer and his teammates to games and bringing them sliced oranges to eat at halftime. She even went one better and became assistant coach to Kristofer’s basketball team during the 1994 fall season.
But even then, Nanette didn’t impress everyone with her Supermom act.
“She was trying to definitely let the world think she was a good mother with her two older kids,” said Patricia “Tricia” Stearns, who lived down the street from the Seashore Drive house, which Nanette said was hers. Basketball star Dennis Rodman lived in a house somewhere in between them.
Stearns’s boyfriend, Fernando Leguizamon, coached Kristofer’s National Junior Basketball League team and chose Nanette—over the team fathers who were also interested in the job—to be his assistant coach.
“She’s the best one of the bunch,” Leguizamon told Stearns. “She really knows the game.”
Nanette told Stearns that she was very pleased—and genuinely surprised—to be selected.
“She really sold herself well,” Stearns recalled. “The guys teased Fernando, ‘Oh, you picked her over all of us.’”
Stearns and her boyfriend, who had a boy and a girl about the same age as Kristofer and Lishele, thought Nanette had only one boyfriend—Eric Naposki, because he was the one who accompanied her to many of Kristofer’s games and practices. Stearns knew that Eric had his own apartment, but she got the impression that he spent quite a bit of time at the Seashore house.
When Leguizamon’s kids went down to play with Nanette’s on the beach, Eric was often there as well, talking to the boys about working out.
“The kids loved him because he was a football player,” said Stearns, who believed that this idolization also contributed to Nanette’s landing the coaching position. “Fernando’s son was just enamored with Eric.”
Stearns, on the other hand, felt very di
fferent. “I couldn’t stand him,” she said. “He was an arrogant SOB. He’s a ne’er-do-well, as it turned out.”
Stearns met Nanette early in the season. As they chatted during the weekly practices and games, Nanette told her that she had an MBA, that she wanted to start a professional women’s basketball league, and that she wanted to play too.
“She professed to be an absolute fanatic on basketball,” Stearns recalled.
But within just a few short weeks, Stearns had figured out that Nanette was not what or who she claimed to be.
“She always boasted about her background and her education and how smart she was,” Stearns said.
Stearns worked in the health care field and was familiar with Baxter Healthcare and Bill’s plasma-separator device. So when Nanette claimed to have invented it herself and described Bill as her business partner, Stearns immediately knew she was lying.
“It was to a point that I knew too much,” she said.
Nonetheless, she didn’t want to confront Nanette, especially after the murder, so she kept quiet.
“It was so obviously an inside job,” Stearns said. “You had to have had a key.”
CHAPTER 17
On the morning of January 19, 1995, half-a-dozen detectives showed up with a search warrant at Eric’s two-bedroom condo in Irvine, where Nanette, Eric, his twenty-five-year-old roommate, Leonard Jomsky, and a couple of Eric’s visiting friends were hanging out after a night of partying.
As Detective Voth talked briefly with Eric outside the apartment, Eric said he’d heard the murder involved a love triangle.
“Why me?” he asked.
While several detectives searched the apartment, Tom Voth and Craig Frizzell interviewed Eric for several hours. Detective Dave Byington pulled Jomsky into the bedroom to question him, and Lieutenant Mike Jackson and Sergeant John Desmond took Nanette back to the Seashore house to interview her there.
I'll Take Care of You Page 12
