I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  Along the way, he accrued victories in the juvenile gang, felony and sexual assault units before he was transferred to homicide at age thirty-four. As of 2012, he hadn’t lost a single homicide case, although he did have his first hung jury in the penalty phase of a trial that year.

  Over the years, Murphy made a name for himself in Orange County for his cutting and sarcastic cross-examinations, persuasive opening statements and closing arguments, and for artfully handling complex circumstantial cases involving intricate financial and legal machinations. He took pride in annihilating defense witnesses’ credibility on the stand, exposing hypocrisy and pointing out inconsistent testimony. He also enjoyed ripping apart those criminal defendants who claimed to be innocent because they were good, practicing Christians—or, in this case, a churchgoing pathological liar who claimed to be innocent of murder because she was a loving mother.

  A career bachelor, Murphy watched his single friends get married as he took trips to Indonesia to go surfing or to the desert to play golf with his buddies, because becoming submerged in a case—and winning it—was enough for him.

  His successful prosecutions have been chronicled in several true-crime books, including Dead Reckoning by this author, about the murder of Tom and Jackie Hawks. Murphy also chalked up face time on national TV crime shows for winning convictions against Skylar Deleon and Insane Crips member John F. Kennedy, who tied the Hawkses to the anchor of their yacht, then threw them overboard—alive—in 2004. Skylar Deleon and Kennedy were sentenced to death row in 2009, and Skylar’s wife, Jennifer, got life without the possibility of parole. The couple was dubbed the “Bonnie and Clyde of Orange County.”

  Murphy also put serial killer Rodney Alcala back on death row after Alcala, known as “The Dating Game killer,” successfully appealed his two previous convictions. Even though he’d won a date as a contestant on The Dating Game, Alcala creeped out the woman so much that she refused to go out with him. Good choice.

  In late 2007, while Murphy and NBPD Sergeant Dave Byington were preparing for Skylar Deleon’s trial, they discussed the McLaughlin case and agreed it was worth resurrecting with the help of Larry Montgomery, a DA investigator who had already proved invaluable on the Hawks case. Montgomery was now conducting case reviews as part of the TracKRS Unit.

  Murphy and Byington had first met on the prosecutor’s virgin homicide call in May 2002. In late 2004, Byington called Murphy to report his suspicions that the Hawkses were not only missing, but most likely dead, and that Skylar had been identified as the prime suspect. After three years of putting that “murder for financial gain” case together, Murphy and Byington had become close friends and didn’t want their self-described “man love” working relationship to end.

  The Hawks case proved to be similar to the McLaughlin case in more ways than just the capital charges. Both involved conspiracies, and some of the killer-couple suspects’ acts prior to the murders were also parallel: Nanette Packard and Jennifer Deleon both used their children as pawns in schemes to manipulate their victims, and both couples went shopping for million-dollar homes they planned to purchase with their victims’ money.

  “The last time someone writes a quarter-million-dollar check and then someone dies,” Byington said, “that’s a clue in this business.”

  Bill McLaughlin must have thought something was amiss, he added, or at the very least, he’d changed his mind about getting married to Nanette.

  “She was going to get caught. It was just a matter of time. He wasn’t a fool.”

  Byington and Murphy figured that because quarterly tax payments were due in January 1995, Nanette realized that she had to kill Bill before he noticed the missing money and checks with his forged signatures. If the timing of the murder had been random, Byington said, Nanette would have bought Bill a Christmas gift and had it ready for him under the tree. Instead, “she bought stuff for everyone else” but him.

  Sergeant Byington assigned Detective Joe Cartwright to work on the case with DA Investigator Larry Montgomery. Cartwright, a former marine who had cut his detective’s teeth on the Hawks case, was feeling inspired and gratified by the department’s success.

  “Definitely something I wanted to keep doing, keep bringing that kind of closure to people,” he said.

  The first thing he did was go downstairs to the property/evidence room and look through the items collected during the three years the McLaughlin case had been open: the blood evidence in the freezer, the keys the killer left behind, Bill’s bathrobe, riddled with bullet holes and steeped in blood, the expended shell casings, the photos, the financial documents, and the binders of police reports from the homicide and fraud investigations. He made two copies of all the paperwork, one for him and one for Montgomery.

  Byington was “blown away” by Cartwright’s thorough and meticulous work on the case. “He was just awesome,” he said. “He did a great job on it.”

  During several initial meetings, Murphy, Byington, Cartwright, and Montgomery went through all the files and evidence together. They had never seen these materials before, so the significance of certain aspects of the case was not immediately clear. As they continued meeting, their strategy evolved as the overall puzzle came together.

  “The checks were a big thing, trying to figure out what the scam was,” Murphy said, noting that Nanette had also written a number of checks to Eric and his security company.

  Detective Tom Voth, who had retired in 2006, was asked to come back part-time to help. As the lead detective on the original case, he was also expected to testify and be on call to answer questions if the case made it to trial.

  Just because this was a cold case didn’t mean that Murphy was any less involved in monitoring the investigation. As things progressed, he often discussed developments with Montgomery three times a day; they went no longer than a couple of days without talking.

  Montgomery, who had worked thirty years as a police officer—twenty-three as a homicide detective with the Irvine Police Department—often conducted interviews with Cartwright as they followed new leads and reexamined old ones.

  Over the next eighteen months, Montgomery listened to sixty-three audio interviews with witnesses and the primary suspects, Nanette Packard and Eric Naposki, and reviewed two thousand pages of documents. He conducted his own driving-time trials as well, including several he videotaped with Voth.

  Early on, Murphy asked the team of investigators to run new DNA tests, given that the technology had improved so much since 1994. So they retested Bill’s robe as well as the shell casings and the keys.

  “I was very confident we’d get DNA off that key and also off the shell casings,” Murphy said, acknowledging that he hadn’t realized at the time that no one had ever retrieved DNA from a shell casing.

  Cartwright was hopeful as well. “Back then, you had to cut a piece of material and soak it to get DNA,” he said. “Now you can take a swab to get DNA. So maybe, we thought, the killer got close enough to leave DNA on the robe or grab it.”

  While they waited the eight weeks for results, Montgomery made some headway in other directions, but the DNA and fingerprint tests both came up empty. They figured the killer must have worn gloves.

  Wondering if they still had a case, Murphy asked Montgomery to weigh in.

  “What do you think, Larry?” Murphy asked. “Can we win it?”

  “They absolutely did it,” Montgomery said, “and we absolutely can win it.”

  Twice a year, Jenny McLaughlin had been making regular calls to the NBPD, urging them not to forget about her father’s murder.

  “Please always keep my dad’s case open,” she pleaded. “We’re still hopeful.”

  After being forced into the deep, dark world of Nanette Johnston, the McLaughlin sisters had learned far more than they’d ever wanted to know about her lying and stealing ways. They were sure she’d murdered their father.

  But they couldn’t stay in that darkness. Instead, they tried to focus on the good in their lives
, surrounding themselves with positive people and avoiding negative activities. Kim stopped watching TV and reading about crime in the newspaper, for example.

  “We’ve really tried to live in our dad’s honor and remember the good times and try to put all the evidence, and, ugh, that horrible tragedy behind us,” Kim said in 2012. If they’d continued “to go on with anger in our hearts,” she said, then Nanette would have stolen their ability to be happy too.

  Kim and Jenny both moved out of Orange County to escape the memories. Kim and her husband relocated and got a teaching job on the island of Coronado in southern San Diego County, where her husband had grown up. Jenny and her husband landed on a horse ranch, running an equestrian business in Valley Center, in northern San Diego County.

  As if losing their father weren’t enough, the McLaughlins had to endure another tragedy seven years after Bill’s murder. While living with Sue in Hawaii, Kevin drowned in the ocean one evening after going to church on October 23, 1999.

  Kim theorized that Kevin got carried out into deep water, where he swallowed some of it, and was unable to cough it out because of the scar tissue from his tracheotomy. A couple walking along the beach under the full moon pulled his body out of the water later that night.

  Some months after the cold-case investigation was under way, the detectives contacted Jenny because Murphy wanted to meet with the McLaughlin sisters to ask them some questions. But, not wanting to give false hope to the sisters, the detectives didn’t mention the explicit purpose of the meeting.

  When Jenny told Kim about the request to bring to the OC whatever relevant financial documents they had, Kim couldn’t help but get her hopes up once again. But after all these years without an arrest, she tried to temper her emotions.

  “Really? They want us to come up?” she asked Jenny. “That means it’s still open!”

  When the McLaughlins arrived, they saw none of the detectives who had originally worked with them on the case and had become like members of their extended family. The faces at the table—Murphy, Montgomery, Cartwright, and Byington—were all unfamiliar.

  That’s when Murphy told them they were taking another look at the case.

  “I just want to let you guys know that we’re pursuing this as a murder investigation,” he said.

  By this point, these men had already been working the investigation for most of the year, but they didn’t elaborate, just in case they didn’t make it to trial. However, just hearing that the case had been reopened made the McLaughlins so happy, they cried.

  When months went by and they didn’t hear anything more, however, the sisters felt as if they’d been left hanging once again.

  On one of the many audiotapes Montgomery listened to, he heard a reference in a phone conversation between Detective Jeff Lu and a woman who had called the station to report that she thought Eric and Nanette had killed Bill McLaughlin. Claiming to have founded a medical company that was going to make her a millionaire, Nanette had expressed interest in investing in the software business of this caller’s fiancé, who knew Nanette from the Sporting Club.

  When Lu asked the woman to put her fiancé on the phone, she called him by name. It was so faint that Montgomery had to put on a high-quality headset to enhance the sound: She called him “Robert.”

  Robert, who didn’t identify himself to the detective, said Nanette claimed that she was living on the royalties from a medical device she’d sold to Baxter Healthcare, and in November 1994 she said she might want to invest $100,000 to $200,000 in his company.

  Robert said his call was prompted by news reports about the murder, which named Nanette as a suspect, saying his suspicions were raised as soon as he heard how Bill had made his fortune. The original interview tape ended midsentence, however, so Montgomery called Detective Cartwright to tell him about the promising anonymous caller.

  Cartwright called the Sporting Club in Irvine, asking to search their member records from 1994 and 1995, with the hope of finding this man named Robert something.

  Meanwhile, Montgomery checked Irvine police records from the same timeframe at the department’s business license division, searching for software companies with owners by that name. He found two, but neither said he’d called the NBPD.

  On July 22, 2008, Montgomery pulled Nanette’s cell phone records from the evidence. If she’d been having secret meetings about investing Bill’s money, he thought she might have used her cell phone, rather than the victim’s home phone, to avoid getting caught.

  The next day at the Haines Publishing headquarters in Fullerton, Montgomery searched through the Orange County Criss+Cross Directory from 1994, looking for matches on Nanette’s phone bill with anyone named Robert or any computer software company. (The Criss+Cross Directory lists published phone numbers with associated street addresses and residents’ names.) But he found nothing.

  After that, he flipped through the 1995 directories, and came across a number listed for an R. Cottrill. Although the directory didn’t list an address, Montgomery recognized it as an Irvine number and got a rush, hoping he had a match. Excitedly calling Cartwright, Montgomery told him he might have a lead.

  Cartwright ran the name of Robert Cottrill through the DMV database and found a Robert T. Cottrill in San Clemente, which is in southern Orange County. Checking other databases, Cartwright saw that Cottrill had headed a software company in 1994, had lived in Irvine, and had married a woman named Dori in 1995. The lead looked even more promising.

  On July 24, the two investigators drove to Cottrill’s house, where they spoke to a woman house-sitting for the vacationing homeowner. By the time Montgomery got back to his office that afternoon, he already had a message from Cottrill, so he called him immediately.

  By all appearances, Montgomery was generally a low-key guy. But that day he was jumping on the inside, frankly ecstatic that all this legwork had proved fruitful. Cottrill indeed was their man.

  “That was pretty big,” Montgomery recalled later, remarking how much he enjoyed his job. “You can’t get that thrill from doing too many other things.”

  Cottrill told the investigators again that Nanette had claimed she couldn’t invest any money in his business right away because it was offshore, noting that she’d also told him that she’d just broken up with a bodybuilder boyfriend who worked out at the same gym. And that ex-boyfriend wasn’t very happy when she started dating Eric Naposki.

  In January 2009, Montgomery listened to a taped call between Detective Tom Fischbacher and a woman named Suzanne who said she’d been too scared to call the NBPD before because she feared for her safety. The call was on March 3, 1998, six months after the investigation had officially been shelved.

  Suzanne told Fischbacher that she’d been Eric Naposki’s neighbor at an apartment complex in Tustin in 1994. She’d called police in 1995, but the case detective wasn’t available and a woman who answered told her to call back. She said she didn’t call for the next three years because she was worried that Eric would seek revenge. She then proceeded to recount Eric’s comments about blowing up Bill McLaughlin’s plane, the keys, and the gun, and the “maybe I did, maybe I didn’t” remark. She said she still wasn’t willing to testify against Eric, but she did agree to meet with Fischbacher.

  On the same tape, Montgomery heard Fischbacher calling Suzanne two days after she’d canceled. A receptionist answered, “Charles Dunn” before transferring the detective to Suzanne’s voice mail, where he left a message. The next call was a conversation between Suzanne and Sergeant Pat O’Sullivan.

  Montgomery and Cartwright were unable to find any other tapes involving this witness. Montgomery searched online for Charles Dunn and found a company in Newport Beach, while Cartwright went through the case files and located one labeled Suzanne Cogar, detailing a woman born November 24, 1964, who had a driver’s license with an Irvine address. It had to be her.

  O’Sullivan had since retired from the NBPD and was now an investigator for the DA’s office. Because O’Sul
livan was the last one to speak with Cogar, Montgomery asked him to call her and relay the message that Montgomery wanted to discuss her statements from thirteen years ago.

  When Suzanne Cogar got the call from O’Sullivan, she was pleased that the police hadn’t forgotten about the case after all these years, because it had continued to bother her.

  By this time, Cogar felt safe and was 100 percent “willing to testify.” She regretted not meeting with the police all those years ago, she said. After telling O’Sullivan so much about herself before, she wanted to look him in the eyes “so he would see that I was credible, that what I was telling him was on the level.”

  When they met at her house, O’Sullivan asked her to review the tapes of her statements from 1998, then meet with Larry Montgomery. She agreed.

  “Why has it taken all these years?” she asked Montgomery, who explained that the case had gone “cold” some months before her call in 1998, but he was taking a new look and applying “fresh eyes” to the evidence.

  In March 2009, she met with him a second time. Montgomery also brought along the prosecutor, Matt Murphy. Both men could see that Cogar’s testimony would be very important to the case, so Murphy tried to reassure her.

  “I don’t want to scare you, but your testimony is really key here,” he said.

  Cogar, who could tell that Murphy wanted “to close the door on this horrible injustice,” told him she wasn’t surprised.

  “I figured as much,” she said.

  CHAPTER 32

  Detective Joe Cartwright tracked down Eric Naposki in Greenwich, Connecticut, and spoke with the local police department there in early May 2009 about the NBPD’s plans to arrest Eric for murder.

  Cartwright and his boss, Sergeant Dave Byington, worked together on the arrest and search warrant affidavits, with Byington contributing the evidence gathered in the 1990s, and Cartwright adding the new evidence that he, Larry Montgomery, and Tom Voth had collected.