I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  “I think it would be better if we would just wait till she goes somewhere, and we take the car there,” he said.

  Gendron asked another friend to help him. For three hours before work every morning, the two men sat in a white Toyota truck across from the house, waiting for Nanette to drive away.

  They were about to give up when the garage door opened three days later, on April 14, and they saw Nanette loading her kids into the car, with Eric standing by.

  As they were pulling away, Gendron called the Newport police to inform them about the Cadillac repossession. Noting that it was a civil matter, a detective said he wanted to look in the car as soon as the McLaughlin estate had possession of it once again.

  “Just call when you get the car,” he said.

  Gendron followed Nanette to Interstate 5, heading north to the 57. He had no idea where she was going, but he hoped it wasn’t on a long trip.

  She got off at the Brea Canyon Boulevard exit, headed west, and stopped at a private Christian school on Brea Canyon Road, where she dropped off Kristofer. From there, she drove to a McDonald’s in the Diamond Bar/Walnut area, leaving the car near the double doors while she and Lishele went inside.

  Acting quickly, Gendron hopped out of the truck, unlocked the Cadillac, and started up the car. Hearing the engine noise, Nanette turned around. As Gendron was driving away, she ran outside and waved her arms, but he kept right on going.

  Assuming she would report the car stolen, Gendron called to arrange to meet the Newport Beach detectives in Costa Mesa and headed for the southbound 57. Given Nanette’s response, he wanted to deliver the car to the police right away, so he wouldn’t get pulled over in a “stolen” car.

  In the trunk, the police found five banker’s boxes of the financial records Nanette had taken from Bill’s office at Balboa Coves. The cops seized them as part of the investigation.

  Gendron went to work from there. On his way home, his girlfriend called to warn him that he had voice mail messages waiting from a very upset Nanette Johnston and an angry Eric Naposki.

  “They were extremely hostile and extremely agitated about the car being gone,” Gendron testified later.

  Gendron had no idea how they’d gotten his home number, but he didn’t like it. Later he figured that when Nanette reported the car stolen, the Newport Beach dispatcher had told the Walnut Police Department that Gendron was the repo man, so they probably broadcast his phone number over the police radio and also gave it to Nanette.

  As Gendron and his girlfriend were discussing options, the phone rang. It was Nanette, screaming about “stuff that she needed in the car, and how could I take it and leave her stranded in Walnut,” he explained later.

  “Hey, I just was asked to do this,” he told her. “I have nothing to do with it. I returned the car to its rightful owner.”

  Then Eric got on the phone and threatened to find out where Gendron lived. The gist was “Give us back the car. We’ll do this the easy way or the hard way. It’s only a matter of time before I find you.”

  Gendron was so scared that he immediately called the phone company to have the line disconnected and get a new number.

  That same day, Detective Voth asked Jenny to call Nanette and tape the conversation, hoping that Nanette would say something incriminating. Jenny started the call by letting Nanette vent about the day’s events.

  “Well, they left me, like, up in Diamond Bar,” Nanette said, “with four kids.... All Kristofer’s sports equipment is in the car. My camera . . . just everything.”

  “I understand that you thought that we weren’t supposed to take the car,” Jenny said.

  “Well, obviously, it was my car.”

  Jenny said they didn’t have any records to that effect, noting that Bill’s will specifically left Nanette the Infiniti, not the Cadillac.

  Nanette countered that she was the only one who ever drove the Cadillac—and, besides, Jenny knew it was Nanette’s car.

  “Well, no, I don’t know,” Jenny said.

  “You know your dad bought that car for me,” Nanette repeated, as if that would make it so.

  “So it was his intention to leave it to you?”

  Nanette said that was her impression. “I have the title that he signed that you guys were supposedly disputing, saying that I signed it myself.”

  She said she’d faxed a copy of the title to the McLaughlins’ attorney, but Jenny said he needed to see the original, because it hadn’t been filed with the DMV.

  Nanette had an excuse for everything. She said she didn’t file it with the state because she wanted to talk to the McLaughlins first and went through her attorney so it wouldn’t look “suspicious,” an odd choice of words. She also said she didn’t file the DMV paperwork because Bill’s insurance rates were one-third of hers.

  Jenny countered that if it really was Nanette’s car, didn’t it make sense that she file the pink slip with the DMV?

  “I didn’t know he was going to die,” Nanette replied defiantly.

  Moving on to the questionable bank checks the McLaughlins had been trying to discuss with Nanette, Jenny said, “If we have those analyzed, they’re not from my dad’s signature.”

  “It is your dad’s signature,” Nanette argued.

  Asked when he’d signed them, Nanette was evasive. “Which one are you talking about, the big one?”

  “Well, there’s one for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Jenny said, “and then there are a couple other ones where the signatures don’t check out.”

  Nanette claimed she often signed for Bill, with his permission. When Jenny expressed her skepticism, Nanette stood firm. “Oh yeah, I signed his name on many things.”

  “Huh,” Jenny replied in disbelief. “He never let us do that.”

  “Whenever he was out of town and something needed to be done, he told me to sign for him, and I’ve signed on so many things, you could be checking my signature against his.”

  “So, did you sign his name, then, on that two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar check?” Jenny asked.

  “No, I did not sign that one. He signed that one.”

  Asked when, Nanette said there were so many checks that she wasn’t sure, but she thought it was about a week before his death.

  “Oh, really?” Jenny asked. “When did you put it through the bank?”

  “Not until afterward, because it was supposed to go in the corporation, but I hadn’t opened the checking account yet.”

  “If it was supposed to go in the corporation, then why was it made out to Nanette Johnston Trust?”

  “Because he had signed it and written it, then I went after he died, ’cause I hadn’t made it. I had not opened that account yet. I wrote that part.”

  “He signed a blank check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

  Nanette proceeded to concoct a scenario where Bill was supposedly signing checks every week, leaving the rest blank for Nanette to fill in as she paid bills or transferred funds among his various accounts. They wrote so many checks, she said, that she and Bill had been in the process of setting up a system so she could wire transfer funds between accounts on her own.

  When Jenny told Nanette that they’d already found a couple of checks where they’d noticed that the payee had been changed to Nanette’s name, Nanette played ignorant.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about—on that you have to show me,” she said. “I can’t remember every single thing. I signed so many things for him and I did tons of . . . that.”

  Jenny said she also couldn’t find any paperwork on the McDonald’s or Burger King franchises that Nanette claimed they’d been thinking of buying. Furthermore, Jenny said, she’d never heard anything about those deals from her father.

  Nanette replied that the paperwork was in those boxes in the Cadillac’s trunk, which had since been confiscated by police. “So I have no idea where anything is now.” Besides, Nanette added rather cattily, “he doesn’t tell you guys everything. We
looked at many things. Every time, we . . . he told you something we were looking at, you always scoffed at it.”

  As for Nanette’s personal belongings in the Cadillac, Jenny said, Nanette could go to the NBPD station to pick them up. But Nanette wanted them brought to the Seashore house.

  “Why can’t you get it from the police station?” Jenny asked.

  “Well, I’d rather not,” Nanette said, claiming that she was worried about theft. “There’s a lot of expensive stuff in there.”

  “The police station seems like a pretty good place to me,” Jenny retorted. “I mean, at least somebody will be there and your stuff is sure to be safe.”

  Although Nanette claimed she was concerned her things would get stolen from the yard where they took the cars, it’s more likely that she simply didn’t want any more contact with police.

  Once Nanette realized she wasn’t going to get the Cadillac back, she started asking when she could get the Infiniti. Jenny explained that Dave Mitchell, Bill’s friend and realtor in Las Vegas, was in a coma after having a heart attack, so they couldn’t make the transfer at the moment.

  Nanette volunteered to go to Las Vegas to get the car. “I have a key to the house, unless you changed the locks.”

  But Jenny was one step ahead of her. “Yeah,” she said, “we changed the locks.”

  CHAPTER 25

  After determining that Nanette had stolen at least $497,000 from Bill McLaughlin’s bank accounts by forging his name on fifteen checks, Detective Bill Hartford obtained an arrest warrant for grand theft and forgery, at 1:45 P.M. on April 17, 1995.

  Four hours later, a lieutenant, two detectives, and an officer arrested her at the Seashore Drive house. Taken to jail, she was held on $500,000 bail, a figure based on the amount she allegedly stole from Bill’s accounts.

  Searching her wallet, police found a State Farm Insurance check for $133, issued to Nanette Johnston and the McLaughlin Estate on April 6, 1995, along with $1,412 in cash. She also had an American Express corporate executive gold card, issued to Nanette Johnston and Bill Mac Development on March 3, 1995, and a regular American Express corporate card, issued in March 1994 to the same parties.

  After Bill’s death, she still had the authority to sign on the PriMerit trust account, to which she’d been illegally transferring money, but she had no control or signing authority on any of his other accounts or credit cards, nor the authority to obtain a credit card in his companies’ names. Those assets and accounts were under the purview of Kim McLaughlin, as the estate’s executrix.

  Nanette also had a plastic envelope that contained a single passport photo. The detectives thought one must be missing, because they typically come in pairs. The items were booked into evidence, and she was allowed to call her attorney, Barry Bernstein.

  Deputy District Attorney Debbie Lloyd said recently that she never supported the NBPD’s decision to split the detectives’ work into separate fraud and homicide investigations, and she’d made her feelings known at the time.

  With the help of Bill’s accountant, Brian Ringler, the McLaughlins compiled a binder of financial records that showed Nanette had been embezzling money, saying “they suspected that [Bill] found out about it and he was going to cut her off,” Lloyd recalled.

  “We definitely had a good case, so then the police immediately wanted to go arrest her on the fraud,” she said, because they thought they could strong-arm Nanette into talking about the murder.

  Lloyd said she and Joe D’Agostino, a fraud prosecutor, tried to dissuade the police from taking this approach.

  “She’s not going to talk. She did it,” Lloyd said. “Don’t do it.”

  After the NBPD went ahead and split the case, she said, D’Agostino handled the fraud portion and Lloyd held on to the murder case.

  “I still wanted to do the homicide,” she said. “I thought it was the more important.”

  Around eleven o’clock on the night of Nanette’s arrest, one of the detectives called her.

  “We arrested her,” he said.

  “What did she say?”

  “I want my attorney.”

  Perfect, she thought facetiously. Now she’ll never talk.

  The day Nanette was arrested, Kim McLaughlin decided to change the locks on the Seashore house to ensure that Nanette couldn’t cheat them out of anything else. Kim called a locksmith to meet her there, and she and her brother showed up half an hour early to look around.

  “We thought, who knows who’s been in the house? Who knows who has had keys to the property?” Kim recalled. “We don’t know what kind of condition the house is in.”

  Not knowing if Eric or someone else might be there, they knocked before entering. That’s when Goldie started barking, and they heard a man yell, “Hush, hush.”

  Kim and Kevin looked at each other with surprise, wondering, Who is that in the house? If it was Eric, neither of them wanted to confront him, especially after his threatening calls about the Cadillac. The police had already labeled him as a murder suspect, and that was enough for the McLaughlins to know he could be dangerous. So they headed back to Balboa Coves, called the police, and let them know what was going on.

  Nanette was set to be arraigned Wednesday, April 19, which turned out to be the same day as the Oklahoma City bombing.

  An Orange County Register article that morning quoted Eric’s attorney as saying that his alibi could be proven by records of the call he made with a calling card, a type of credit card, at 8:52 P.M. from a Denny’s at Seventeenth Street and Tustin Avenue, while on his way to work at the Thunderbird.

  By this time, Eric had hired Julian Bailey, a well-known criminal lawyer, to help him deal with the NBPD’s well-publicized suspicions about his involvement in the murder. Bailey noted that Eric had cooperated with police by agreeing to the tests that showed the towel in his car didn’t have Bill McLaughlin’s blood on it.

  “We are aware of a number of other persons who have a motive, either personal or financial, to want Mr. McLaughlin dead,” Bailey said.

  In court that day, Nanette’s attorney, Barry Bernstein, asked the judge to delay Nanette’s arraignment for a few days so he could get up to speed on the case. He complained to reporters that the police had arrested Nanette in front of her children, instead of arranging for her to surrender. He also said that her bail of $500,000 was too high and he hoped to get it reduced to a more manageable $70,000.

  Eric complained to reporters that he and Nanette had been publicly named as suspects, proclaiming that he never knew Nanette had been romantically involved with Bill McLaughlin.

  “Do I look like the kind of guy who would need to date someone who already had a boyfriend?” he asked rhetorically.

  Eric said he had a phone bill to prove that he was in Tustin around the time of the shooting, and that he didn’t even get to Newport until 9:30 P.M., twenty minutes after Bill was killed. Faulting the police, he said, “I think they went public before they really knew the facts of that evening.... It was like they were ignoring the truth.”

  The police laughed off the criticisms. “That guy is a media whore,” one of the detectives said, laughing with his colleagues in the captain’s office after the hearing.

  Later that day, Eric called the Yamaha dealership in Costa Mesa, where Nanette had bought the motorcycles the day of Bill’s funeral—the same ones Eric had been keeping in his storage unit. Eric proposed to sell the items back, but when he was offered only $3,500, he yelled at the dealer and hung up, saying he would call back later.

  While Nanette was in jail, Eric began calling the McLaughlins on her behalf, trying to get the Infiniti back. Advised by the police to tape one of the conversations, Jenny did so when he called again, the morning of April 20.

  Eric said he was acting as a middleman because Nanette couldn’t make these calls herself. Trying to defend himself and Nanette, he said he’d been working with private investigators to compile information, clear himself as a murder suspect, and “point some finge
rs” in another direction.

  His directive from Nanette’s attorney, he said, “was to watch the house and protect the belongings,” take care of the dog and her kids’ stuff. So when Kim and Kevin had come over to try to change the locks, he explained, he’d just wanted to make sure they had “the right paperwork with them,” because no one had the right to enter the house at that moment.

  “I thought that was kind of weird that the day she goes to jail, someone tried to get in the house and tried to take it over,” he said, apparently missing the point that this “someone” was the murder victim’s son and daughter—the executrix of Bill’s estate.

  Eric said he’d never met Bill, and yet he’d almost gotten thrown in jail for his murder, “something I totally had nothing to do with.”

  And now that the police had ruined his life, he was going to sue everyone involved. “They’re going to pay for it,” he said. “. . . I should be away playing ball right now. They totally screwed that up.”

  Playing devil’s advocate, Jenny said it was a shame that he’d gotten dragged into this situation. It wasn’t fair that Nanette had never told him she was trying to marry Bill and have his children, while she was also having a relationship with Eric.

  “Are you sure she’s giving you a straight story?” she asked. “How come Nanette didn’t come to your defense on that and then try to help you out? . . . It sounds like, you know, you got screwed in this whole thing.”

  Eric agreed, but he said that didn’t mean he was going to walk away when he didn’t even know if she was guilty, or if she’d lied to him. To his knowledge, people were making accusations against her without asking her where the money was.

  Jenny said they had asked those questions and she’d lied to them, so they’d given up.

  “She’s lied to everybody she’s been involved with. According to my dad, you know, she’s lied to her family all along.... She’s just not trustworthy at all, as far as I can tell.”