“I don’t even want to know if you did it,” she said again, still unsure whether he could have done it himself or had someone else do it.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” he said, still smirking.
That remark made her think that he really could have done it himself. “Why [else] would he leave himself in the pool of possibility?” she said later.
On the other hand, she still wasn’t sure if any part of his story was true.
“His demeanor was creepy,” she recalled. “The expression on his face was unnerving.”
Then Eric told her about the key the killer had left in the entryway of Bill’s house, a key copied at a store right down the street from their apartment complex in Tustin.
And as if that weren’t enough, Eric knew about the killer’s gun too. “The gun that was used was the same kind of gun that I own, but they’re not going to find it on me because I don’t have it anymore,” he said. “I loaned it to a buddy of mine.”
All these incriminating statements were making her very uncomfortable, but given that she hadn’t read the newspaper or watched the TV news lately, she was still skeptical that there had even been a murder. (At this point, the detectives didn’t know where the keys had been made, so those details hadn’t been released to the public, including what type of gun the killer had used.)
Trying to avoid any conflict with Eric, Cogar pretended to agree not to talk to the police and tried to encourage him to leave her apartment without letting her true feelings show. The last thing she wanted to do was to provoke or upset him, but she didn’t think she’d be able to deny anything he’d said to anyone.
If he’s capable of having someone killed, then he could do the same to me.
Eric called a few months later to chat and touch base, and perhaps, she thought, to check to see if she’d spoken to the cops, which she still had not. During the conversation, which seemed to have no other particular purpose, he reported that his relationship with Nanette was flagging.
“Things aren’t working out,” he said.
Cogar figured they were breaking up, but that it wasn’t “one hundred percent over.” All she could think was Well, you got yourself into this, and for what?
By this point, it seemed to her that Eric had left Orange County. This gave her a little more peace of mind, and she felt safer about reporting his comments to the police. Especially after she had watched the news and confirmed for herself that Bill McLaughlin had actually been murdered. Nanette, to whom they referred as Bill’s fiancée, was also featured. Cogar recognized her walk, with those short, quick, confident steps.
Cogar dialed the NBPD and got a woman on the phone. Cogar said she had information about a murder, and wanted to give a statement. However, no one was in the detective bureau to talk to her, so the woman asked her to call back.
“It took so much nerve for me to make this phone call that I will likely not call back,” Cogar replied.
The woman didn’t seem to know what to do—and as Cogar had warned, she didn’t have the nerve to call back.
Three years later, in March 1998, Cogar was living in a different apartment with a roommate, and they had gotten nearly twenty hang-up calls in the past month. As the two women wracked their brains, trying to figure out who the caller could be, Cogar thought of Eric.
Maybe he’s checking up on me.
After having pushed his disturbing comments out of her mind, this harassing episode brought them back to the forefront of her conscience.
I can’t live with suppressing this anymore. I’m going to call the police again.
This time she reached a detective, Tom Fischbacher. As she recounted her story, Fischbacher took an edgy tone with her, as if to say, “Why should we believe you?”
When she said she was scared, he also didn’t reassure her that she would be protected from Eric if she was ever called to testify. So, after mulling it over, she left a message canceling the appointment to meet with him.
About five days later, Sergeant Pat O’Sullivan called to apologize for Fischbacher’s abrasive manner and asked if she would meet with him instead. As she elaborated on her story, she found him much nicer and easier to talk to, but she still wanted to remain anonymous. He told her that her information was important, but “it isn’t enough to make an arrest.”
After all that, it just goes to show that I know nothing about law enforcement.
Nonetheless, she felt as if she had done her part, and that her safety was intact.
CHAPTER 23
Tricia Stearns would never forget the night of December 15, 1994. She and her boyfriend Fernando Leguizamon were in bed asleep when the phone rang, sometime around midnight. It was Nanette, which took them by surprise.
Leguizamon picked up the receiver and put the call on speakerphone. In her usual monotone voice, Nanette delivered some sad news.
“There’s been a death in my family, and I’m very sorry, but I won’t be at the game tomorrow,” she said, referring to a Lakers game to which she’d been planning to take Kristofer’s team.
“That’s fine. We’ll take care of it,” Leguizamon said.
But Nanette wasn’t finished. “I was at [the mall] and I was Christmas shopping, when I got the call that somebody died,” she said. She didn’t mention any names, or what relation this person was to her.
Stearns and Leguizamon went back to sleep and got quite a shock when they saw the article in the Daily Pilot that Saturday morning, describing the murder and mentioning Nanette as Bill’s live-in girlfriend.
“We were like, ‘Wow. Oh. My. God,’” Stearns recalled. “It blew our minds, because it couldn’t have been further from what we thought we knew.”
Stearns and Leguizamon decided pretty quickly that Nanette’s midnight phone call must have been part of her plan to establish her shopping trip as an alibi. As they began to put the whole thing together, they both felt frightened.
“You know, the kids can never go over there again,” Leguizamon said. “I don’t care who has the gun. The kids are never going to be around any of this. Ever.”
Luckily, the basketball season was coming to an end, so they were able to distance themselves and Leguizamon’s kids from Nanette and Eric without making a big deal about it.
Stearns said she and Leguizamon each called separately and left messages with the police, but no one ever called them back. Stearns couldn’t understand why.
“We thought it was important that she’d called us at that time,” she said.
Leguizamon subsequently developed cancer. And even on his deathbed at the City of Hope, a cancer center in Orange County, he kept bringing up Nanette’s call. It was odd, Stearns said, that the sicker he got, the more he seemed to want to talk about it. As he lay on life support, he kept saying that the police needed to know what he and Stearns knew about Nanette and Eric.
“Honey, you need to call the police again,” he insisted.
After Leguizamon died in May 1998, Stearns said she tried to call the NBPD again, to honor her dying boyfriend’s request, and asked to speak to a detective or whoever was involved with the Bill McLaughlin case.
“Someone will get back to you if they need the information,” she was told.
But still, no one called her back.
“It always bothered me,” Stearns said. “Personally, I think the police did a pathetic job. I felt like I was being a pain in the ass, which is why I didn’t call back more.... I think they made mistakes all the way along.”
After seeing that Nanette and Eric had been arrested and were going to trial, she forwarded a written statement to the department in 2010. Stearns really wanted to attend the trials, but she couldn’t see flying all the way back from San Antonio, Texas, where she’d since moved.
“I wanted Nanette and Eric to see me,” she said in 2012. “I’ve lain awake nights, thinking about this.”
CHAPTER 24
In interviews with Bill McLaughlin’s children, Detective Hartford asked if their
father had ever given them permission to sign his name. They all said no. Nor did they think Bill would have let anyone else sign for him on a document or check. All three of them also denied knowing anything about business plans that Bill had with Nanette. In fact, Jenny recalled Bill telling her that he planned to divest himself of the majority of his investments because they weren’t profitable. The only area in which he felt knowledgeable enough to make money was the biomedical field, something about which Nanette only pretended to know.
In February 1995, the police began to receive anonymous calls and packages of information that put Nanette in a negative light, such as a copy of the “Wealthy Men Only” singles ad, which arrived at the NBPD in a yellow envelope. The police later learned that the packages and anonymous calls had come from K. Ross Johnston’s girlfriend, Julia, who also told detectives that Nanette had been fired for forging customers’ signatures at the company that published the Donnelly phone directory. Julia wanted to stay anonymous because she feared that Nanette would sue her.
Julia said that after Nanette broke up with Tom Reynolds, she was driving a late-model Mercedes, wearing a Rolex watch, and throwing around details about a trip to Europe. Julia also said that Nanette had been bragging about owning a residence on Seashore Drive and being “a millionaire on paper.”
When Voth followed up with Donnelly, he learned that Julia was telling the truth about Nanette being fired. She was terminated on May 14, 1990, after less than six weeks of working there.
Tom Reynolds also supplied the singles ad to police, claiming that he was due some of the reward money, but Voth told him he’d already received that information from another source.
Nanette and Eric were named as suspects in Bill’s murder in search warrant affidavits that were released to the media in early February 1995. After keeping this information to themselves for fear that the McLaughlin family might confront Nanette, who would then flee, the detectives notified Bill’s daughters that the information was about to hit the papers. The McLaughlins, in turn, sat down with Kevin’s girlfriend, Sandy Baumgardner, to fill her in.
Recalling the gist of Kim’s words, Sandy said: “Nanette is absolutely nasty. She’s dated a bunch of other guys. [There was] something about getting into a car accident and breaking her nose. She told Bill a different story, but she was out with some other guy. She was dating this guy Eric Naposki. She didn’t have custody of her kids—she had joint [custody]. She’s not educated. Everything she said was a bunch of BS.” There was also the cockamamie story she’d told Bill about taking her grandmother on a cruise to Jamaica, when, in fact, she’d taken her boyfriend Eric.
As expected, front-page stories came out over the next couple of days in the Daily Pilot and the Orange County Register, in which Nanette denied, denied, denied. The Los Angeles Times also covered the story.
“It’s all garbage. It’s been a living nightmare,” Nanette told the Register. “I’m in limbo. I’ve lost somebody and now I’m being pointed at as being involved somehow.”
As soon as K. Ross Johnston read the stories describing Nanette as Bill’s “fiancée,” he asked her about it.
“The reporters got all that wrong,” she told him. “I’m going to sue them.”
The news stories prompted various people who knew or recognized Nanette and Eric to call the NBPD with possible leads.
Sharon Hedberg, the sales rep for Turtle Rock Summit Estates, for example, told Voth about the couple’s house-hunting trip to the Seven Oaks development in July 1994.
Voth and Hartford checked with Bill’s accountant, Brian Ringler, who said that Bill had never mentioned any interest in buying a new million-dollar home. More important, he said, Bill never would have been able to purchase such a home, because of his cash flow problems.
The detectives also checked with Marjorie Taft, one of Bill’s business partners in the desert development project, and learned that she and another partner, Lou Glisan, had taken a $20,000 loss on the project and had been forced to relocate to Colorado. She described Bill as a pleasant person to deal with, but said Nanette had appeared cold, antisocial, and didn’t participate in their business dealings.
Voth said that Taft and Glisan were cleared of suspicion once the detectives learned that Bill had rolled over the $1 million insurance policy on the project to cover Nanette instead.
The day in February 1995 that the news stories came out, the McLaughlin family got a call from a neighbor on Seashore Drive that the garage door to the beach house was wide open. Sandy immediately drove Kim, Sue, and Kevin over there to secure the property.
As soon as they walked inside through the open garage, they didn’t like what they saw. Upstairs, Nanette had set up an office with a new and rather expansive wraparound desk. They recognized the fax and copy machines she’d snagged from Bill’s office while they were in Hawaii. It looked like this woman had been busy.
What the hell is she doing? they wondered. She’s never had a job before.
As they wandered into Nanette’s bedroom, they were greeted by a poster-size, silhouetted image of her, which was resting on an easel and revealed the outline of her naked breasts as she arched her head and her back with abandon. And shut away in the walk-in closet was Goldie, who emerged, wagging her tail.
The police had asked them to retrieve a recent photo of Nanette in case she decided to flee, so they were on a mission to pluck one of the many shots Nanette had once displayed throughout the dining area at Balboa Coves, which were now arranged around the beach house. The one they grabbed subsequently made its way onto a news broadcast.
After about twenty minutes of snooping around, they went outside. Sandy and Kevin were standing in the alley when a man driving Bill’s Cadillac pulled up and motioned for them to move out of the way so he could pull into the garage. He did so, then closed the door from inside.
It was Eric Naposki, and the fact that he was driving the Cadillac directly conflicted with Nanette’s claim that he never drove her car or had access to her keys when she wasn’t with him.
A few days later, Nanette left Sandy a pissy message on her answering machine, complaining, ironically, that they had rifled through her things and had stolen something of hers.
“You took that picture,” she said. “That’s theft.”
In early March, the Orange County crime lab asked the NBPD detectives to obtain a sample of Eric’s blood to see whose blood was on the towel found in his car. Eric agreed and gave them the sample on March 7. The test came back positive for Eric’s blood, but there was no sign of Bill’s.
At the request of the NBPD, a Yorktown Heights police officer went to chat with Eric’s mother, Ronnie Naposki, about Eric’s claims that he’d sent his father the .380 to protect himself. Immediately defensive, Ronnie stuck up for her son, saying he didn’t kill Bill McLaughlin. It was fifteen degrees out, and yet Ronnie didn’t ask the officer to come inside.
Eric never had anything to do with guns when he was living in New York, she said, although he did buy some when he was living in Texas. She said she never saw those weapons and she had no clue what type they were, but there were none in her house now.
She seemed to be familiar with Nanette’s engagement to Bill, but she said Nanette was seeing Eric now.
“Because she is some kind of slut who was living with some rich old man, they think my Eric killed him,” she said.
Shortly after the officer’s visit, Detective Craig Frizzell got a call from Eric, who was incensed that the police had bothered his mother. Frizzell said it was necessary because Eric still hadn’t given them the information they needed about the weapon. Eric said he would call back with it.
Four hours later, he called to say that he’d given his father a Davis Industries blue steel .380 semiautomatic, model p-380, with the serial number AP074982, which he’d bought two or three years before he’d bought the Jennings .380 in Dallas.
Upon checking, Detective Hartford found no legal record of Eric or his father ever owning a
gun in New York.
On April 9, 1995, Eric and Nanette went house shopping again, this time in Lake Forest, with her two kids, saying they had four kids between them.
The couple contacted Richard “Dick” Kurth, a former deputy finance director for the city of Newport Beach, about buying a four-bedroom home that Kurth was selling for $375,000.The deal would have been $50,000 down and $3,000 per month.
Nanette told Kurth that she had the use of the Seashore Drive house for a year, but she still wanted to move out in August. She said that she was expecting to receive some insurance money or a trust within a year, and that she alone planned to take title of the Lake Forest property, adding Eric to it later. Eric said he played football for the National Football Conference (NFC) and that he would be playing in the Canadian Football League (CFL) in Memphis the following season.
Two days later, Nanette called back. When Kurth asked about her finances, she said her attorney would call to discuss the deal. Kurth never heard from her attorney, but he did hear from Eric, who called about two weeks later to say they very much liked the house and were still interested in buying it, but they would have to wait until the controversy reported in the media had died down.
Failing to persuade Nanette to return their father’s Cadillac, Kim and Jenny McLaughlin called upon a friend, Jason Gendron. Gendron was living with a woman named Krissy, who had been Jenny’s best friend since kindergarten, and whom he later married. They asked if Gendron would go into the garage at the Seashore house and take the car with a key, but Gendron said he was uncomfortable doing that while Eric was hanging around.
I'll Take Care of You Page 17
