Although Eric grumbled that he didn’t want to talk without an attorney, he wasn’t under arrest, they didn’t read him his rights, and he kept on talking.
As Voth and Frizzell pushed Eric to talk more about his nine-millimeter, he became agitated, contending he had no idea where it was.
“That’s my statement,” he said. “I don’t want to waste time talking about that anymore.”
Pressed further, Eric hemmed and hawed, saying he’d actually purchased three guns: two .380s and the nine-millimeter.
“How could you confuse giving Joe David [Jimenez] a nine-millimeter, not a .380?” Frizzell asked.
“I didn’t confuse it,” Eric said.
“You misled us?”
“I misled you, yeah, ’cause I felt scared.... We played the old mind-fuck game between each other that night, okay? I mind-fucked you with the gun, and you mind-fucked me with what happened to me that night,” he said, referring to their bringing him in at 2 A.M. on a traffic warrant arrest to question him about the murder.
He claimed again that he’d mailed one of the .380s to his father for protection after he’d been mugged, but he was concerned that his dad would get into trouble because it was probably illegal for him to have the gun at his house in New York. Growing confrontational, Eric said he bought the other Jennings .380 at the same gun shop in Dallas, but at another time.
Eric said he could get the gun from his father if the cops really wanted it, but his mother had been ill for years with ulcerative colitis, and he didn’t want to worry her because stress worsened her condition.
“Do you want to verify that it’s not the murder weapon?” he asked. “Is this it?”
“We want to verify he got the .380, and your story,” Voth said.
As the interview went on, Voth noticed that Eric’s timeline for the night of the murder kept putting him at a greater distance from the crime. Although Eric had originally said the nine-millimeter had gone missing in the summer of 1994, he said he always kept it “hidden very tightly in a cleaning box,” even during the security job at an apartment complex in Lake Elsinore that Eric worked with two of his buddies, which turned out to be in December.
Confronted now with the fact that the detectives knew he hadn’t bought the nine-millimeter until August 1994, Eric claimed that the gun was actually stolen around the same time that he lost the Jennings .380. He’d concealed the Beretta in a towel in the backseat of his Pathfinder, he said, and it went missing too.
For Frizzell, Eric’s new story didn’t make sense on its face. “You’re going to leave a six-hundred-to-seven-hundred-dollar, nearly brand-new, Beretta nine-millimeter in the truck that night? And that location at that apartment complex, which is so despicable that they have to hire security guards?”
“That’s the deal,” Eric said. “I do not have my gun. I would love to give it to you, okay? Unfortunately, uh, I do not know where it is.”
Later police called the Texas shop where he’d bought the .380 and learned that he’d only bought the one there. And as the police pointed out to Eric, he’d called Kevin McDaniel around Thanksgiving, asking what to do about reporting the loss or theft of his nine-millimeter.
“That is a gun that disappeared sometime back in July? August?” Frizzell asked rhetorically, calling out Eric on his lie.
Eric said he never bought ammunition for the nine-millimeter, but he’d heard from Nanette that they were reportedly seen buying ammo at the B&B gun shop. The detectives confirmed that yes, the couple had been ID’d in lineups at the gun store. Eric countered that either the gun clerk or the cops were lying.
“I’m not a liar, you understand. I’m not,” Eric said. “I’ve got, you know, kids.”
Moving on to the sad state of his personal finances, he admitted that his credit was so shot that he’d been forced to ask his parents for an American Express card, and then he’d run that up too. He also admitted that he was in debt and “didn’t have a pot to piss in,” whereas Bill had a lot of money, and much of it was flowing to Nanette. And yet he still denied that any of this gave him a motive to murder Bill.
“You can stay on my ass for my whole life and we will grow old together.... You will never, ever, ever find any reason to think that I had any motive to kill this guy.”
As he had in the first interview, Eric continued to try to minimize the seriousness of his relationship with Nanette. But then he changed his story about the rest of that evening.
He said he got dressed for work, drove by his friend Leonard Jomsky’s house, where the lights were out and no one was home, so he didn’t stop. Then, Eric said, he got a page from the bar manager—“Mike Teresmo? Or, like, Mike something”—at the Thunderbird nightclub. So he stopped at a pay phone on Seventeenth Street in Tustin, most likely at the Denny’s, to return the page.
“I know I made a phone call to work that night.... He said, ‘I want to know what time you’re going to be in.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m coming in.’”
Asked if he knew what time he was paged, Eric said, “I know, how about we go look at my phone bill and see what time exactly I made the call, and maybe then, if I made the call at a certain time, you guys can leave me alone.”
“That might help,” Voth said.
“Even if I rushed, then you’re telling me I could have made it in time to do the killing?”
“Yeah, because Nanette made it all the way to South Coast Plaza and was buying something in time,” Voth said.
Clearly feeling backed into a corner, Eric became even more agitated. “Do you guys think I’m a fucking idiot? Would I do something like that and walk across the street to work? I mean, come on, man, give me a break.”
Police contended that he did have a motive to kill Bill: jealousy. After falling in love with Nanette and finding out that she was having sex with another man, Eric got so mad that he killed Bill.
But Eric disputed that theory. “You guys are the first person ever to tell me that there was a relationship between Nanette and Bill,” he said.
Nonetheless, Eric did seem rattled and all over the map emotionally, alternating between saying he didn’t know or care—or even ask—what Nanette was doing with other men. He seemed surprised to learn from detectives that morning that she and Bill were having regular sex and that she bragged about it to Bill’s friends.
Eric also claimed ignorance that she and Bill were engaged, that she didn’t own the Seashore Drive house, and that she’d gotten all of her money, her nice car, and her expensive clothes just for being Bill’s girlfriend.
“From looking at paperwork and businesses, she didn’t get it for doing her business work,” Voth told him. “I can guarantee you that right now.”
“So you think he bought her?” Eric asked.
Eric didn’t seem to want to buy any of this—or, if he already knew, he was a very good actor.
“I still don’t think you’re right about their relationship thing,” Eric said. “Call me an idiot, okay?”
But he also seemed to want it both ways, acting cocky about this supposedly new information, as if he wasn’t upset by it.
“Even if, like, I found out mysteriously, you know, some way that this was going on, am I a jealous guy to do something like that? Hell no.”
“What do I have to gain when he goes?” he asked. “I had Nanette—I’ve always had her. There was no question in my mind. I talked to her every night, had her any night that she was free.”
“You didn’t have her living with you,” Voth said.
“If she’s doing some other dude for money, do you think I’d want her permanently? You’re thinking a lot lower than I am.”
“Maybe you just lose it,” Frizzell said.
“Oh, please, I don’t lose it. I’ve never lost it in my entire life.”
After pointing out that Eric’s former nightclub coworkers would argue with that statement, the detectives asked if he was sure that Nanette didn’t shoot Bill.
“Of course I know that she did
n’t shoot him,” Eric replied.
“You don’t know if she’s responsible or not?”
“How else would she be responsible?” Eric asked.
“A lot of other people will take money for doing that kind of thing,” Voth said, referring to a hit man for hire.
Eric did not respond or react to this remark—an irony that would become clear when the topic came up again—sixteen years down the road.
Detective Byington spent forty-five minutes grilling Leonard Jomsky about Eric’s relationship with Nanette and whether Eric had told him anything about the murder. Jomsky replied that he knew Eric and Nanette were a couple, but he knew nothing about the killing.
When Jomsky had moved to Orange County a couple of years ago, he said, he’d lived with Rob Frias, who worked as the front-door manager at Metropolis, where Eric was head of security. After that, Jomsky worked with Eric and Frias at the Roxbury, a nightclub frequented by celebrities in the 1980s and early 1990s, then later joined Eric at the Thunderbird.
Police had already interviewed Frias, who was also a friend, former roommate, and business partner of Eric’s. The two of them had started a security company called Harbor Security Management. After Frias moved to Miami, Eric formed his own company, Coastal Elite Security.
Frias said Eric owned one black and one silver semiautomatic handgun, which he thought Eric kept in his dresser drawer. He recalled that Eric had gone to a shooting range with Nanette, where she’d either bought or had been given a handgun.
Jomsky said the Thunderbird job came about at the same time that Jomsky was working nights for Coastal Elite at an apartment complex in a questionable area of Lake Elsinore, where they were supposed to ensure that people weren’t breaking into cars or doing anything suspicious. The complex had had problems with gangs tagging the area, leaving graffiti, and breaking into apartments. Frias worked the Lake Elsinore job too.
When Byington was done with Jomsky, the detective listened to his colleagues interviewing Eric in the next room and became annoyed with the way things were going. He wished the detectives would get more aggressive with Eric, who kept trying to run the show.
They are just getting ramrodded, Byington thought as he searched through Eric’s things. Don’t let him get away with this.
Maybe it was Eric’s overbearing personality or maybe it was just that he was physically imposing, but he had a habit of trying to steer the interrogation, and he was often successful. The detectives may have had a game plan to let him think he was in control as a way to elicit information from him, but it didn’t seem to be working. Within a couple of minutes, Eric was the one asking the questions.
Byington was not part of the homicide team. He’d just been brought in to write the search warrants. However, he didn’t like the way Eric was dressing down Voth and Frizzell, the latter of whom had the same type A personality as Eric. There was a lot of testosterone in the room that day, but it wasn’t working for the detectives. It was working against them.
When he couldn’t take Eric’s attitude anymore, Byington decided to try to disrupt the balance of power and tip it back to the good guys. He couldn’t stop himself from knocking down cocky suspects with his cutting, dry wit, and he saw plenty about Eric to poke at.
“Eric had rows of hair plugs back then, way down on his forehead,” Byington recalled recently. “Nobody was buying that it was real. It was like it was drawn on. You could see the individual plugs.”
Also, during the search, Byington found some paraphernalia for steroid use, including syringes in the bathroom, which were illegal to possess without a prescription. And even though Eric seemed excitable and aggressive, the detectives took note of Byington’s find but didn’t press charges.
“He was definitely juicing. He had the syringes,” Byington said. “He was running a gym. He had to stay in shape.”
But the most amusing find for Byington was a large, vibrating dildo in Eric’s bedside table, which he waved with amusement in the suspect’s face. “Is this on your side of the bed? Is this for you?”
“Fuck you,” Eric retorted.
“Nice hair,” Byington said, wondering if Eric was going to fight back and attack him.
If this guy gets up, I’m going to have to shoot him in the kneecaps.
Byington was getting dirty looks from Frizzell and Voth, who didn’t see the humor in his interrupting their interview, so he left the room.
The detectives didn’t end up finding anything else of use to the investigation that day, but Byington certainly enjoyed the opportunity to take Eric down a notch.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Jackson and Sergeant Desmond grilled Nanette for two and a half hours for details on her relationship with Eric, which she, too, played down.
“Did you ever spend the night at his place in Tustin?” Jackson asked, noting that people had described her as “the rich girl with the Cadillac who spends the night.”
“Occasionally,” she said, “but never the whole night, because I always came back to take care of Kevin.” She admitted that she usually left at six or seven in the morning, but she apparently didn’t consider that to be the entire night.
Nanette said she and Bill had been engaged for two years, but they were waiting to get married until he could settle the lawsuit with Jacob Horowitz “because of the liability if he, well, what he wanted to do is put everything in my name if he lost . . . and if we were married, then you couldn’t do that.”
She said they didn’t tell everyone, just his family and his close friends. She hadn’t told her ex-husband, for example.
“Did Eric know?” Jackson asked. When she said no, the detective asked, “Did you wear the ring with Eric?”
“I never wore it when I went to the gym and stuff, ’cause the first time I wore it to the gym, it broke.... I usually didn’t wear it during the day.”
She said she’d never really thought about why she didn’t tell Eric about the engagement, but she seemed to know the answer. “Just because he would not like that, that’s why.”
“Were you afraid if you told Eric that you were engaged to Bill that you would lose Eric?”
Nanette skirted the question, saying that they started out as friends, when he had a girlfriend. Later, after they began dating casually, she never got around to telling Eric, and he never asked. She assumed that Eric thought she and Bill “mostly just did business together.”
“So although you want to marry Bill, Eric somehow fills some kind of void in your life, yes?”
“Yes,” she said.
She also admitted to seeing Glenn Sharp and Scott Weisman while she was with Bill, and Tom Reynolds before Bill.
“He was violent and he was a real jerk,” Nanette said, referring to Reynolds. “I knew him for, like, a grand total of two months and he actually hit me one time and I was in the hospital in Newport Beach.... [He] threatened me, [and] I tried to get a restraining order against him, and the cops were of no help. . . .” She added that he finally left her alone after she threatened to tell his probation officer that he was bothering her, a completely different rendition of events from Reynolds’s.
“Bill ever ask you about dating other guys?”
“No,” she said. “Bill, in some areas, he knew where maybe there were some short things that weren’t fulfilled, and he kinda knew, but didn’t want to know, you know?”
“Yeah, it’s the ’90s,” Jackson said.
“He never said anything. I mean, it’s like we had a really good relationship, and there were certain things emotionally that really kept us together and where we were really good for each other. I’m sure if you talk to all his friends . . . they will tell you that we never fought.... We got along really well.”
Because he knew he couldn’t fulfill all her needs, she said, she and Bill had a “kind of unspoken” agreement that she could date younger guys on the side.
“We didn’t sit down and say it that way, but yes . . . in a roundabout way . . . ’cause that’s not the kind of th
ing you want to talk about.”
In the beginning, she said, he wanted her to move in and quit her job, which she didn’t want to do. So, instead, they made a deal: He would teach her the business and be “the brains” of it all. They would work together “and it will work well for everybody.... ‘Just don’t embarrass me . . . and be discreet, or just whatever you feel you need to do, but be here for us and the kids.’”
What Nanette described to the detectives went to the very heart of her personal ad. In essence, what Bill was saying, she claimed, was “I’ll take care of you, if you take care of me.” But she clearly had her own interpretation of the arrangement.
Asked what Bill knew of Eric, Nanette said he knew Eric was a friend she worked out with several times a week, but he knew nothing about their Jamaica trip. She didn’t want to rub Bill’s nose in it, so she said she let him think she was visiting her grandmother in Chicago the whole time.
She said she’d been using Eric lately as a “little bit [of] a shoulder,” because she’d been having nightmares since the murder. He’d come over to the Seashore house to make the windows more secure because it had been broken into before and she was feeling nervous.
But as for Bill’s murder, she said, “I know that I wasn’t involved, and I feel pretty sure that [Eric] wasn’t involved.” She said she was “real nervous that maybe somebody could target me also, if it had anything to do with business or whatever.”
Asked if she loved Eric and wanted to marry him, she said, “I don’t know I would say ‘love.’ I would say I care about him a lot. I care about him as a person, I mean.” However, she said she didn’t want to marry him. If he’d proposed before the murder, she would have said no.
She sounded as though she had no idea he was going to propose, and had only learned from the police that his journal said something about it. If he’d asked and she turned him down, she said, he’d probably be upset, but she’d never seen him angry and they never argued.
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