I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  In a strategy largely dictated by Matt Murphy, Cartwright coordinated a game plan with Sergeant Tom Kelly and Detective Jeff Stempien, of the Greenwich Police Department, who agreed to watch Eric for a couple of weeks to learn his habits and schedule.

  After scoping out the situation, they learned that Eric lived with Rosie in a duplex owned by her father, a two-story brick building at the end of a long driveway off a windy two-lane road. Eric usually left between 6:30 or 7:00 A.M. in a bright yellow truck that had the name of his gym emblazoned on its side. He stopped at a gas station down the street for a newspaper and coffee; then drove to work in Mount Kisco, New York.

  Cartwright went through the same exercise monitoring Nanette’s comings and goings in Ladera Ranch, California. Sitting in a van with dark windows, parked a block from her house, he watched Billy McNeal leave for work. From there, Cartwright followed Nanette to a private school nearby and saw her drop off Jaycie. Most days Nanette stayed close to home, though, because she’d only recently had baby Cruz.

  The plan was to keep both suspects “in pocket” until the DA investigator, Larry Montgomery, could arrive in Connecticut with Newport Beach Detectives Cartwright, Steve Rasmussen, and Elijah Hayward on May 18. The police would arrest Eric and Nanette simultaneously on May 20, and make it a competition between the detectives on both coasts to see if they could get one suspect to turn on the other.

  “We wanted one of them to flip,” said Byington, who was staying in Orange County to make the drop on Nanette with his team in Ladera Ranch.

  The hope was to get one suspect to cooperate by calling the other on a taped line and elicit incriminating statements.

  Cartwright took the search warrant affidavit for Eric’s house to the Connecticut Chief State Attorney’s Office for approval, and the affidavit to search Eric’s gym to the New York State Attorney General’s Office in Westchester County, New York. But both warrants were denied.

  “It had been too long,” Cartwright said. “The expectation was ‘Hey, maybe we’ll find the gun. Maybe he’s stupid enough to keep it.’ We don’t catch the smart ones.”

  Because Eric’s house was set so far back from the narrow, twisty street, the Greenwich police wanted their Special Response Unit (SRU, similar to a SWAT team) to arrest Eric in a “felony stop” after pulling over his car.

  “If we were to arrest him at the house, we had the challenge of Rosie possibly being there, the father-in-law possibly being there, and going up the driveway,” where Eric would be able to see them coming, Cartwright said. “We’d lose the element of surprise.”

  Instead, Detective Stempien dressed in a Greenwich patrolman’s uniform to take advantage of “Click it or ticket” week—a time to remind drivers to buckle up. He parked across the street, then stood at the top of Eric’s driveway, stopping cars as if he were routinely enforcing the ticket law.

  When he saw Eric driving his truck down the driveway, he would radio the other officers—a team of six waiting to nab him down the road, rifles ready, in a marked car and a black SUV with dark windows.

  While the Connecticut team waited for Eric to leave the house, the California team waited for Nanette to show up at hers, thinking she was out.

  Eric started down his driveway at eight-fifteen that spring morning, only he wasn’t driving the truck. He was in a sporty black Nissan 350Z two-seater, a nice ride for a guy who couldn’t afford his child support payments.

  Detective Stempien stopped a car so Eric would have to stop behind him. Eric cruised up and rolled down his window to talk to the officer.

  “Love to see the enforcement out here,” Eric said. “They’re always speeding through here like it’s a highway.”

  “It’s ‘Click it or ticket’ week. Make sure you have your belt on,” Stempien replied.

  “Yes, I have it on, officer.”

  But Eric surprised them again, by driving in the opposite direction from the gas station.

  “He’s not going south. He’s not going south. He’s going north,” Stempien repeated into his radio.

  The Greenwich detectives and patrol supervisors sped to catch up to Eric a quarter mile down the road and pulled him over. They ordered him to throw his keys out the window, show his hands, kneel on the road, and lie facedown in the middle of the street.

  “What’s your name?” Stempien asked, standing over him with Cartwright.

  “Eric Naposki.”

  “Joe,” Stempien said to Cartwright, “is this Eric Naposki?”

  Cartwright confirmed that it was, in fact, the bulky former linebacker, who had shaved his head and grown a goatee since the NBPD detectives had last questioned him in Newport Beach in 1995.

  “What is this about?” Eric asked. “This is a mistake. I haven’t done anything.”

  “You’re being placed under arrest as a fugitive from justice,” Stempien said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The state of California has a warrant for you for the murder of Bill McLaughlin,” Cartwright said.

  “Bill McLaughlin?”

  The Greenwich police brought a very defiant Eric Naposki into the interview room back at the station, where Montgomery and Cartwright were waiting.

  While the two men conducted the interview, Newport Beach Detectives Rasmussen and Hayward questioned Eric’s fiancée at the elementary school in Greenwich, where she was teaching.

  “When did you guys get here?” Rosie asked.

  “A couple of days ago.”

  “Why couldn’t you have done this yesterday?” she asked. “I just sent out all the wedding invitations.”

  Although Eric said he was on his way to court to pay his child support, Cartwright didn’t believe that he would have gone there wearing gym clothes.

  During a search of Eric’s car, the detectives found a gym bag containing vitamin supplements and what Eric later described** as “AndroGel. It’s a rub-on for men who want a little boost to their, whatever, testosterone [levels].” He said it was nothing like full-blown steroids, as the detectives had suggested. Even so, the clear odorless topical gel, which comes in a pump bottle, does require a prescription, so it’s also not a harmless, over-the-counter supplement.

  The interview room was about eight feet by ten feet, but Eric’s imposing stature made it feel as if the three of them were in a cramped two-foot-by-two-foot space.

  “Eric takes up half the room, with one arm hooked to a bar on the wall,” Cartwright recalled, noting that he’d imagined Eric jumping across the table and grabbing one of them. “He’s got the other arm in front, leaning forward, pointing at us, threatening that he was going to sue the police department.”

  Once Eric got to trial in 2011, Cartwright said, “he looked kind of pudgy. But at the time of the arrest, he was really muscular, really cut up, didn’t have much fat on him. Larry and I were sitting across from this guy, and we were going, ‘Wow.’”

  After listening to Eric’s police interviews from the 1990s, they were prepared for him to try to dominate the questioning. Although they’d hoped to thwart that effort, Eric was still very aggressive as Montgomery and Cartwright tried to get a word in edgewise.

  Knowing that Eric hated the NBPD, Cartwright dressed in street clothes. Montgomery, who wore a suit, introduced himself as an investigator from the DA’s office and Cartwright as his “partner.”

  Eric was just as cocky as ever. “You kidding me?”

  “Nope,” Montgomery said matter-of-factly.

  “I’m under arrest for murder?” Eric asked, demanding to see the warrant. “If you’ve done your homework—”

  “Yes, I have,” Montgomery said.

  “I haven’t done shit,” Eric said, asking what new evidence they’d gathered since deciding not to arrest him all those years ago. “I have all the respect in the world, but you’re about to fucking kill me. . . . You’re about to ruin my life again. And I worked hard to build what I have back up. All right? I’m not a criminal. I’ve never done anything wro
ng, anything. I have no record, nothing. I don’t know why I’m arrested.”

  When Montgomery told him about Suzanne Cogar’s statement, Eric leaned toward him. “All right,” he said, “I’m going to give you a straight-ass answer. Look into my eyes.”

  “Okay.”

  “I did not kill him back then. I did not kill him now, you understand me? . . . I think you know I didn’t do it.... Look at me, don’t look down. You know I didn’t do it.”

  “I know you did,” Montgomery replied.

  “Come on, all right, you know, let’s go to court. I want you to put me on a plane to California today. I want my trial right now.”

  Cartwright was thinking that if Eric had nothing to do with this, “who volunteers to go to jail in California, with no bail, and sit, for a couple of years at least, [waiting] for a trial?”

  Asked why Cogar would say such things about him if they weren’t true, Eric replied, “I don’t know. . . . I made out with the girl one time and, you know, the whole time we lived together, we sat in a hot tub once and we went to the movies once. I don’t know why, and, to be honest, I don’t think she said that stuff, ’cause I never said that stuff.”

  Eric said it was impossible for him to have killed Bill because he was at the soccer game and then Nanette dropped him off at Leonard Jomsky’s house, where he was living with Jomsky at the time. (This was the first time he said this to explain why he had driven by Jomsky’s when it was in the opposite direction from work. Back in 1994 and 1995, he and Nanette originally had said she dropped him at his apartment in Tustin; then he changed his story to say he was driving by Jomsky’s for some other reason on his way to work when he got paged.)

  But clearly confused about which stories he’d told all those years ago, Eric said that maybe his car had been parked at Jomksy’s house, after all.

  “Now I remember,” he said.

  As he repeated the rest of his previous story—that he’d gone from Jomsky’s to Denny’s, where he’d answered the page with the 8:52 P.M. call on his way to work—it became clear to Cartwright that Eric thought his phone record was a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, the reason that he hadn’t been arrested back in the 1990s, and that the alibi would set him free once again.

  But when Cartwright asked him to describe what the phone bill looked like, Eric shrugged off the question and tried to change the subject.

  “If you understand it, are you going to unhook me and let me out of here?” Eric asked.

  “No.”

  “So what the fuck’s the difference?” he said.

  Eric grew increasingly agitated as he went back and forth with Montgomery about why he’d lied about the 9mm gun fifteen years ago.

  “This is bullshit. You guys are fucking with me. . . . Let’s all get famous on fucking TV for nothing.”

  The investigators could see they were getting nowhere, so they decided to see if they could trick him into admitting that he’d been to Bill McLaughlin’s house, even though they’d never found any of his fingerprints, clothing fibers, or DNA there. But when they told him they’d found his DNA on the keys and bullet casings at the crime scene, Eric didn’t go for it.

  “There’s no way,” he said.

  On to the next ploy, Montgomery told Eric that he had a chance to be the first to turn on his partner in crime. If he called Nanette and got her to talk, they would record the call. However, he only had so much time to do it.

  “Within the next three hours, four hours, she is very possibly going to know that you’re in custody and then there’s nothing we can do,” Montgomery said. “I mean, she’s not going to believe you or any kind of phone call.... I know you’re in a pickle.”

  While Eric rejected their overture, he also didn’t implicate Nanette in the murder.

  “On my children, on my parents, on my life, I’ve not talked to the girl since that shit went down,” he said. “Did she lie to me? Yes. Is all that shit? You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I didn’t kill anybody. . . . I ain’t got no blood on my hands, ever. You got the wrong guy.”

  Around 11:00 A.M., after the Newport Beach detectives had left the Greenwich station, Eric complained that he didn’t feel well. He said he was sweating, and he felt extremely hot and nauseated. He was taken to a local hospital, where he was treated and released, thereby missing his arraignment in court.

  After being held overnight at the Greenwich jail, which Stempien said was like the Holiday Inn compared to state prison, Eric was taken to court in Stamford the next day.

  From there, he was transferred to the state correctional facility in Bridgeport to await his extradition hearing. In the meantime, he was held on $2 million cash-only bail, which meant that no one could get him out on a bond, which only required a 10 percent payment.

  After the arrest, Montgomery and Cartwright wanted to share the good news with the McLaughlin family, one of the more gratifying parts of their job. They tried to reach Jenny first, but got no answer, so they called Kim, who was in Hawaii on sabbatical from her teaching job, helping her mother take care of Kim’s grandmother. The time difference made it six hours later in Connecticut than in Hawaii.

  Sue McLaughlin answered, handed the phone to Kim, and told her who it was.

  “Do you know where I am?” Cartwright asked.

  “Um, no.”

  “I’m in Connecticut.”

  “Okay. What’s this about?” Kim asked as her heart started racing. After getting her hopes up before, she didn’t want to let herself go through that again. Still, she couldn’t help but hope just a little bit.

  “We need to let you know, we’ve just arrested Eric Naposki,” he said.

  Kim erupted with a scream. “Whaaat? You’re kidding me! You guys are unbelievable!”

  Crying with joy, Kim paused for a moment, then asked, “What about Nanette?”

  “We have patrol on Nanette and we will be arresting her,” he said. “We’re hoping to do it today. We’ll call you after we make the arrest.”

  Later, Kim recalled how happy she was to receive the good news so many years after she and her sister had thought the case had gone stone cold.

  “It was way too surreal and way too much of a beautiful shock and a huge surprise,” she said.

  Surrounded by five detectives and a couple of uniformed officers, Sergeant Dave Byington walked up in his raid gear to Nanette’s tree-lined stone-and-wood house in Ladera Ranch. After all these years, he wanted to be the one to arrest her and watch her reaction.

  When he knocked on her door at 1:45 P.M., Nanette opened it just a bit and peered out cautiously.

  “Nanette, remember me?” he asked.

  “No,” said Nanette, who was dressed in a casual T-shirt and sweatpants. Her dyed blond hair fell just above her shoulders and she looked a little scruffy, harder in the face and nowhere near as attractive as Byington remembered.

  “I remember you. I’m Sergeant Byington, Newport Beach Police Department,” he said. “I have a warrant to search your house and a murder warrant for your arrest.”

  “What murder?”

  “Well, I’m not sure how many you’ve committed, but this one is for the McLaughlin homicide,” he said.

  Nanette’s legs buckled slightly, but she quickly regained her composure and righted herself.

  “Why would I want him dead? He was worth more to me alive. Can we do this later?” she said, trying to close the door. “My baby is asleep upstairs.”

  “No, this is the program,” Byington said firmly. “We’re coming in. We have a warrant. I don’t want you shutting the door. I don’t want to embarrass you in front of your neighbors. My biggest concern is the welfare of your baby. You’re going to cooperate with us. If you do, we’ll do everything in our power to leave the baby with either a family member or friend as opposed to having the kid taken into custody by child welfare.”

  “You’re not taking my baby,” she said like a lioness guarding her cub.

  But Byington’s veiled threat got her atten
tion, and she let them inside the house, which was clean and nicely decorated.

  “The interior matched the neighborhood. High-end, wealthy,” he recalled. “Except for the stripper pole.”

  Byington had hoped that the shock of them showing up years later like this would catch her off guard and that she would just blurt out, “Yeah, Eric did it.”

  But that didn’t happen, even when he tried to prompt her and give her an out. “I know, you’ve had a lot of husbands,” he said. “I can’t even keep track of your boyfriends, but back in the day, I know Eric is overbearing, physically imposing. . . .”

  She still didn’t bite. “I didn’t have anything to do with that murder, and as far as I know, neither did Eric,” she said.

  Trying another tactic, Byington laid out possible scenarios for her to want to kill Bill, such as the claim she’d told Eric, that Bill had sexually attacked her. But she wouldn’t give in. He even tried telling her that Eric was getting the same offer on the East Coast.

  “Clock is ticking, kiddo. Eric is in custody right now and my detectives are telling him the same thing I’m telling you.”

  “I can’t tell you what Eric is going to tell you, but I don’t think he did it,” she said. “Why now? How did you find Eric?”

  Curious, yes, and a little concerned, but she still wouldn’t budge.

  Before they took Nanette out to the police cars in handcuffs, she asked if she could change into something else, knowing that the TV cameras were outside.

  “Can I please get some clothes out of my closet?”

  But Byington wasn’t going to give her that. He did, however, agree to send the officers upstairs to fetch her something to wear from her closet, which contained some of the most expensive designer clothing to be found in Orange County.

  “She had racks and racks and racks and racks of clothes that still had the tags on them,” he said.