I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  “I prepared the best I could,” Voth recalled, adding that he’d spent many hours reviewing his files, but he didn’t know what questions prosecutor Matt Murphy was going to ask him.

  No one could change the fact that fifteen years had passed since the murder occurred, memories had faded, details had dissipated, and evidence had disappeared. Which was precisely the point emphasized by both defense teams.

  “Mick kicked their butt the first day,” Billy recalled recently, adding he didn’t believe Murphy did the best job of presenting his witnesses.

  Murphy shrugged off the criticism, explaining that he’d intentionally focused on the technical aspects of the case in a presentation designed specifically for this judge (whom Murphy had met while clerking in the DA’s office), not for people watching in the gallery.

  “It’s not about making a good show. It’s about knowing your audience,” Murphy said. “Drama at a prelim means nothing. It doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s unnecessary, and you could actually be damaging your own credibility [with the judge].”

  Eric’s defense attorneys Gary Pohlson and Angelo MacDonald, who both cross-examined witnesses, saw Voth referring to a binder of extensive handwritten case notes that the defense had never seen before. They demanded to get their own copy.

  Things looked better for the prosecution on the second day.

  “[Investigator Larry] Montgomery did a great job on the stand, and Mick had a hard time with him because he knew his stuff,” Billy said. “He was a rock-solid witness.”

  That said, it didn’t go unnoticed that Montgomery paused for about ten seconds before answering Hill’s question about whether Newport Beach police had “adequately” investigated Eric’s phone call “alibi” in the 1990s.

  “I think that more could have been done,” Montgomery finally said. “However, not enough information was available to determine if that was a valid alibi or not.”

  Hill asked the judge and court reporter to make sure that Montgomery’s uncomfortable silence was noted for the record.

  For Billy, Murphy’s closing was the turning point, as he outlined how the murder went down, “point by point, minute by minute.”

  “As soon as Bill McLaughlin realizes that Nanette is stealing from him, I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that their relationship is not going to be healthy,” Murphy said. “The evidence is overwhelming that these two people conspired and murdered him.”

  Voth may not have remembered all the minutiae of the case, Murphy said later, but on the technical areas he’d asked the detective to prepare, “Tom was a rock star.” And the bottom line came in the final ruling by the judge, who found enough evidence to bind Eric and Nanette over for trial.

  As soon as the ruling was announced, Nanette started shaking, and the back of Eric’s shaved head and neck grew red with anger—visible even under the makeup—as his blood pressure rose.

  Billy walked out of the courtroom with his feelings confirmed: Nanette was guilty as it gets.

  If I put myself in the shoes of a juror, it all makes sense, and it’s very believable, he thought.

  Unlike Billy, however, Eric Naposki’s fiancée, Rosie, stood by her man.

  Billy had always been able to handle a lot of stress without losing the fight. But this was different. This was a battle like no other he’d seen before, and it seemed like it would never end.

  “You can never measure the pain and time and suffering, and all the emotional baggage and damage,” he said.

  In the couple of months before the prelim, it had become difficult for Billy to keep visiting Nanette. In addition to the time-consuming and tedious trips to jail with the baby, the letter-writing on her behalf, and the checks he sent so she could buy things from the commissary, the dark truths he’d been learning about her were making it hard for him to hide his feelings. He couldn’t look at her and talk to her the way he used to, feeling as betrayed as he did.

  After the prelim, she noticed that he wasn’t telling her he loved her when they talked on the phone as often as he once had.

  “Are you going to leave me?” she asked. “Are you seeing somebody?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  This was a lie. He had, in fact, started dating someone, but he didn’t let on. It wasn’t time yet.

  After seeing the evidence Murphy had presented against his wife at the prelim, Billy began to help the prosecution team any way he could.

  “I know she did it,” he told his sister and brother-in-law.

  By early 2010, he went back to the same child psychologist to discuss what to do next. Not surprisingly, she advised him to stop taking Cruz to visit Nanette.

  “There’s no physical contact,” she told him. “You’re only going to confuse the child. The only needs that will serve is the mother’s.”

  Billy had been hanging in for Nanette’s kids, so they didn’t feel as though he’d abandoned them too.

  “I didn’t want it to just disintegrate,” he said. All her kids had left “was me, and they didn’t think she did it. No way, uh-uh.”

  But he couldn’t stand to face Nanette—physically or psychologically—any longer. He didn’t believe anything she said anymore, and he felt hardened by his anger and resentment toward her.

  Right before Jaycie’s birthday on March 20, he decided he was ready to tell Nanette their marriage was over. He went to visit her that day for the last time.

  “Are you seeing someone?” Nanette asked him again.

  This time, he looked her straight in the eye and said nothing, the same response she’d given him when he’d asked her for answers all those months earlier. The moment had arrived. He was finally ready to confirm her suspicions.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am seeing somebody else.”

  Furious, Nanette proceeded to blast him with a stream of expletives.

  They had one more conversation by phone when she called his sister’s house to talk to him.

  “How’s the asshole who ruined my family?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not the one who’s sitting in jail,” he said.

  When she laid into him again, he told her he didn’t want anything from her, and he wasn’t going to try to take her house either. He would even help her sell the thing and be done with it.

  Bill’s next emotionally tough task was to tell Nanette’s daughter Lishele and her husband, Shawn, that he was seeing someone. They weren’t so much hurt by the news as they were shocked and disappointed that he was leaving Nanette.

  He told them he didn’t want them to feel alone. “Know I’m here,” he said. “I’m just not with your mom.”

  Billy’s father and stepmother continued to take Cruz to visit Nanette, but it wasn’t easy.

  “My stepmom had a hard time dealing with the immensity and magnitude [of the case],” he said. Being very religious, “they would pray with her and share God’s word with her. . . . Cruz was the first baby [my stepmom had] spent time with. She had this great fear that if Nanette gets out, she’s going to take this child away from all of us, and she didn’t want to take that risk.”

  It was difficult for Billy to decide what to do about Jaycie. Although John Packard was her biological father, Billy felt he was much closer to her than John was.

  “She called me ‘Papa,’” he said. “I was more her dad than anyone had ever been in six years.”

  As he struggled with what to do, he delayed severing legal ties with Nanette for the children’s sake. But on May 24, 2010, he finally filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences,” an understatement given that she was behind bars. Even though she’d been in jail since May 2009, Billy told the court that they hadn’t officially separated until March 20, 2010.

  Noting in court papers that he and Cruz were living with his sister’s family in Winchester, he wrote, I request that I have sole legal and sole physical custody with no visitation to respondent until further order of the court.

  Nanette
responded a month later, saying she didn’t consent to his terms. Although she acknowledged that she was incarcerated, she wrote, Once released I want custody of my child back in full. She said the extent of separate property and debts of each party was unknown at that time, so she reserved the right to address those issues later.

  But in the meantime, she wrote—with a shocking level of narcissism and arrogance—that she wanted legal and physical custody and was “willing” to grant visitation to Billy. She also said she wanted him to pay her spousal support and “such other and further relief” as the court “deems just and proper.”

  Billy countered with a filing that said there was “no possibility of reconciliation,” and that no delay in ending their marriage would help resolve the issues between them.

  There is only one piece of community property to divide, a painting purchased on our honeymoon, he wrote, referencing a Greek painting valued at $3,500. All other property had been deemed separate under an agreement they signed on April 26, 2007, eight months after they were married.

  The last time Billy’s parents took Cruz to see Nanette was in June 2010. They got a flat tire on the way and Cruz had a meltdown. Billy finally put his foot down and said he wouldn’t allow them to take Cruz to visit Nanette anymore, and they conceded that that was the right decision.

  Not surprisingly, Judge Michael Naughton awarded sole legal and physical custody to Billy that July. The divorce was granted on May 24, 2011.

  CHAPTER 37

  In July and August 2010, prosecutor Matt Murphy and DA Investigator Larry Montgomery spoke with Nanette’s first ex-husband, K. Ross Johnston, who was going to testify for the prosecution, and his wife, Julia. The couple offered some interesting details that they hadn’t previously told police.

  For one, before Nanette got out of jail in December 1996, Julia said Eric had called her to complain that Nanette refused to let him come back to California to see her until she had a chance to get back on her feet for a couple of months. Julia also said that Nanette told her she was going to be staying at the Ritz-Carlton when she was released, because Eric had some contacts there. As it turned out, Nanette ended up at a Motel 6.

  Another tidbit: K. Ross said Nanette had taken out a $250,000 life insurance policy on him before Bill was murdered. After the shooting, K. Ross asked her—and she refused—to cancel the policy. K. Ross had to force the matter by starting legal proceedings against her. When she finally said she’d canceled it, he called to confirm and discovered that she was lying. He confronted her, which made Nanette so angry at his distrustful behavior that she threatened not to cancel the policy after all. Ultimately she conceded.

  Early on in the case, Eric’s defense attorneys Angelo MacDonald and John Pappalardo came out from New York for a court appearance and engaged in their ongoing “plea bargain dance” with prosecutor Matt Murphy, informally discussing the case to explore various resolutions.

  Murphy took them to a restaurant and then to a bar in Manhattan Beach. Along the way, MacDonald said that as a former prosecutor, he would have tried the case back in 1995.

  On October 22, 2010, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office announced it wouldn’t be seeking the death penalty. This came as no surprise to the defense teams, however, because they were already aware of this.

  Murphy, who was on the committee that decides on which cases the DA will choose to seek the death penalty, explained later that this case didn’t meet the criteria, partly because of the case’s age and the anticipated problems with witnesses’ memories. But, he added, as “diabolical” as it was, this was “essentially a domestic violence case for murder,” and the DA rarely sought death on such cases.

  “Death penalties are reserved for the most heinous of heinous,” he said.

  In January 2011, the prosecution team decided to run a new slate of ballistics tests on the nine-millimeter bullets that had killed Bill McLaughlin. This proved to be a winning idea.

  When the results came back, they saw that the more modern analysis had dramatically narrowed the field of guns that could have fired the bullets to just one: The murder weapon was, in fact, a Beretta 92F, the same type of gun that Naposki had purchased, lied to police about, and had claimed was lost or stolen.

  Investigator Larry Montgomery conducted a new series of driving-time trials to test Eric’s “alibi,” to see if his story made sense, and to determine if it was even possible to do what he’d claimed: to drive from the soccer field in Diamond Bar, stop at his apartment, go by Leonard Jomsky’s house, then make the call at Denny’s by 8:52 P.M. The answer was no.

  “Skedaddling” away from the field at 8:20 P.M.—as K. Ross described it—took Montgomery three minutes to walk to the parking lot. He left the lot at 8:23 P.M., but made it only as far as Eric’s apartment before he ran out of time.

  “The result was, driving as fast as I could, without getting into an accident, I was able to get to his apartment about a minute before eight fifty-two,” he testified later. “I couldn’t fathom” that he could get to Denny’s in time to make a call by that time, he said, let alone stop at Leonard Jomsky’s beforehand. It took the investigator six minutes to drive from Eric’s apartment to Jomsky’s.

  Montgomery also tested whether Eric, even if he had made the 8:52 call at Denny’s, could still get from there to Balboa Coves in time to shoot Bill by 9:10 P.M.—stopping at the bridge near the stairs, running down them to the bike path, going through the pedestrian-access gate and across the street to Bill’s house—and the answer was yes.

  Leaving the Denny’s parking lot at 8:55, he arrived at the bridge at 9:08 P.M. and eight seconds, leaving a slim window of about two minutes—but a window, nonetheless—to commit the murder.

  Comparing his drive times with those the police had done in 1995, he found that they had taken even less time to get from the soccer field to the bridge—only thirty-five minutes as compared to his thirty-seven and a half minutes. And because the prosecution team didn’t believe Eric had truly stopped to make that call, they determined that he had plenty of time to leave the soccer field at 8:23 and get to Balboa Coves in time to commit the murder before Kevin called 911 at 9:11 P.M.

  Nanette’s attorney was moving forward with his third-party culpability defense until he saw a copy of the new ballistics report. All this time, Mick Hill had thought that Eric Naposki had had nothing to do with killing Bill, but with a single report, everything changed.

  Oh, my God, he did have something to do with it.

  From that point on, Hill switched his strategy to proving that Eric was the shooter. He also sought to prove that Nanette was a good, loving mother who was also a liar, a cheat, and a thief, but not a killer. His goal was to persuade the jurors that they shouldn’t let their distaste for her bad sexual and moral behavior affect their judgment on the murder charge against her.

  There was one nagging problem, however. In 2010, Nanette wrote a letter to Eric, her ex-boyfriend and now codefendant, from one Orange County jail inmate to another, expressing condolences about his mother’s death and saying she was devastated—spelled “devasted”—to hear about it.

  You are strong, you’re a warrior and we will make [it] through this nightmare with a testimony and a story that needs telling, she wrote. Your mom loved you and I know that she is watching over you right this very moment. Nanette closed by saying that she was praying for him, and predicted that they soon would be “celebrating our victory.”

  Hill knew he needed to keep that letter out of the jury’s hands, and he ultimately succeeded.

  His best course of action, Hill decided, was to show how proficient Nanette was at spinning her lies, “different sets of lies to different people, depending on the circumstances.... She’s really, really good at being a con woman. She completely had McLaughlin fooled, so why was she going to kill him?”

  And so evolved Hill’s “golden goose” argument: why would Nanette kill her wealthy fiancé, Bill McLaughlin, to be with a penniless loser like Er
ic Naposki, when she had much more to gain from Bill if he were alive?

  In late July 2010, Eric’s defense team filed a motion to dismiss the case, claiming that his state and federal rights to due process and a fair trial had been violated. The gist of the motion was that the NBPD had conducted “a grossly negligent investigation” in the mid-1990s, an injury compounded by the DA’s delaying prosecution of the case for so long that Eric couldn’t get a fair trial because of the lost records, witnesses, and memories.

  Within a month, documents suddenly surfaced from Eric’s original defense effort, including several memos that summarized the investigative work of James W. Box, a former police officer who had worked for the DA’s office before becoming a private investigator, and had worked on Eric’s case when Julian Bailey was his attorney.

  Pohlson wrote Pappalardo that the records were recently discovered in an old storage box. The file, Pohlson later explained, was found by Bailey’s former partner, Jim Brott, when he was moving offices.

  In March 2011, before Eric’s trial, the defense filed a supplemental brief that included the meat of these newfound documents, claiming that its case for dismissal was even stronger.

  The documents included the letter from Bailey to prosecutor Debbie Lloyd, discussing Eric’s phone call alibi and the fact that the credit card bill existed.

  They also included a memo from Box to Bailey, dated February 18, 1995, summarizing Box’s interview with Mike Tuomisto, in which the bar manager said he observed heavy traffic coming into Newport Beach on the night of the murder, and assumed it was related to the boat parade.

  Shortly before 9:00 P.M. he paged Eric Naposki to inform him that he probably should try and leave a little earlier because of the heavy traffic, Box wrote. Within a few minutes Eric Naposki returned his page and told him that he was on his way to work. . . . Sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 P.M. he went into the club portion of the nightclub and saw Eric Naposki working as security and noticed nothing unusual about his demeanor, appearance or attire.