I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

As Murphy described Eric and his history, the defendant sat at the defense table, his shaved head reflecting the fluorescent light and his bulky torso straining his blue dress shirt. But unlike Nanette, who remained expressionless when she got to trial, Eric made no effort to hide his cocky smirk and swagger as he chortled and whispered to his attorneys throughout Murphy’s presentation, exhibiting a flagrant disrespect for the proceedings.

  Murphy painted Eric as a penniless, deadbeat dad whose various setbacks included the loss of several jobs because of his temper and aggressive attitude. Meanwhile, he said, Eric’s relationship with Nanette “was progressing nicely,” as she paid his rent, bought him clothes, dinners, and expensive gym memberships and took him on vacations.

  “On that same trip after Chicago, they went to Jamaica, all paid for, of course, by Bill, unbeknownst to Bill,” he said, adding that Nanette also bought Eric a pair of size-twelve alligator boots the day of Bill’s murder—with Bill’s credit card.

  Neither Eric nor Nanette had money of his or her own, and yet the two of them were shopping for $900,000 homes in July 1994. And while Nanette was discussing a possible $200,000 investment with Robert Cottrill, she also “told him she planned on marrying Eric.”

  Murphy then ran through Eric’s incriminating remarks to Suzanne Cogar, noting that he had keys and a phony silencer made to fit his nine-millimeter at Tustin Hardware in November and December. He also noted that Eric and Nanette were seen at a shooting range during that same period, before they went back east for Thanksgiving and her sister’s wedding.

  Putting up the photo of Eric slipping the garter belt up Nanette’s thigh in front of all the wedding guests, Murphy brought the juxtaposition home for the jury. “This is our happy couple again.... This is just a couple of weeks before Bill is brutally murdered in his kitchen.”

  During this time, he said, the couple’s public displays of affection “kick[ed] into overdrive,” even in Newport Beach, where Bill lived and knew people, as the amount of money Nanette was stealing from him increased exponentially.

  “I’m not even going to try to get into all the various different kinds of thefts she was doing but the bank account forgeries by themselves,” he said, “because they’re nice and clean.” He noted that the $250,000 check she wrote to herself on Bill’s account the day before the murder “went into the bank on Saturday morning,” two days after the murder.

  Laying out a timeline for the crime with his PowerPoint presentation, Murphy said, “Around nine minutes after nine, the killer used the original pedestrian-access key to enter Balboa Coves. At nine-ten, the killer used an Ace Hardware key to enter the gate—in the front door. We know the key got stuck. The evidence is going to show that he dropped the pedestrian-access key, nine-ten murdered McLaughlin. . . . At nine-ten and one second, right after Bill McLaughlin’s heart stopped beating, Nanette Johnston became a millionaire, at least on paper. At nine-eleven, Kevin dialed 911. Every police car in Newport sped to the scene.”

  “The evidence, ladies and gentlemen, is going to be crystal clear that during the time of the murder, nobody at the Thunderbird nightclub is going to say Eric Naposki is there.”

  When Nanette showed up at the house, he said, she didn’t mention Eric. In fact, she gave detectives the impression that she’d gone to the game and went shopping by herself. Later, after being dropped at the beach house, even though “there’s an active landline [there] . . . what does Nanette do? The evidence shows that Nanette goes back down to her car and checks her messages on her cell phone.”

  At 1:36 A.M., “she paged Eric Naposki,” then received a “four-minute incoming call immediately thereafter,” the same amount of time it took to drive to the Thunderbird, he said, displaying the route on a map.

  In the aftermath of Bill’s murder, when his daughters were distraught as they tried to figure out how to meet Bill’s financial obligations and take care of Kevin, Eric and Nanette’s experience “was entirely different. The aftermath for them involved a lot of shopping.”

  Nanette didn’t cry at the funeral, he said, after which she immediately paged Eric, used Bill’s credit card to pay for three motorcycles, and cashed a check for several thousand dollars at her bank, while Eric moved into a hotel.

  “Then there was more shopping,” Murphy said, noting that with less than $1,000 in his bank account, Eric bought Nanette a $600 Movado watch for Christmas.

  As Murphy went through the most telling and deceptive highlights of Eric’s first interview with police, he said the linebacker was “very, very convincing” as he described Bill as simply a mentor to Nanette, “almost a father-daughter–type thing,” and downplayed the closeness of his own relationship with the woman he’d been dating seriously for the past year.

  “Naposki planned to propose on New Year’s Eve,” Murphy said. “That’s something I hadn’t told you yet. He’s ring shopping. He plans on proposing seven days after this interview.”

  And then Eric lied again, telling police he had only one gun, Murphy said, a .380 he’d bought in Dallas and had given to his dad. Although twenty-eight types of guns were originally thought to be possible murder weapons, Murphy said, Thomas Matsudaira from the crime lab would testify that “there’s one gun, not twenty-eight, that could have ejected these shell casings, and that gun is a Beretta 92F.”

  Yet, when the police searched Eric’s apartment in January 1995, they found none of the accoutrements that most gun owners kept around. “They don’t find any ammo. They don’t find any gun-cleaning equipment, holsters, storage boxes, or anything relating to gun ownership.” To police, he said, that was like a hot dog without a bun.

  By now, Murphy said, reading aloud excerpts from Eric’s second interview with police, the defendant had become “hostile and confrontational.” He wouldn’t even talk about where his 9mm gun was, and he also changed his story about his route to work the night of the murder.

  And although Eric offered to produce his phone bill to prove he’d made the 8:52 P.M. call from Denny’s—and Detective Voth agreed it would be helpful if he did—Eric never came through.

  Curiously, the prosecutor noted, Eric never complained when the police searched his apartment, his car, or his hotel—only his notebook, where he’d scribbled Bill McLaughlin’s license plate number, and then accused the police of “illegal search and seizure.”

  After Bill’s children returned from Hawaii, Murphy said, they found his office had been cleaned out, and “Nanette is giving them the runaround. Then Kim and Jenny learn the horrible truth. They get in there, and the bank account that should have seven hundred thousand dollars in it, that they’re relying on to take care of all these financial matters in the short term, has eleven thousand dollars—actually less. It’s like ten thousand five hundred, okay? Leaves them high and dry.”

  After the McLaughlins’ friend Jason Gendron repossessed the Cadillac, Murphy said, “he starts getting all these angry phone messages from Eric Naposki, with Nanette screaming in the background.... The guy ended up so scared, he wound up changing his phone number.”

  Police arrested Nanette on grand theft and forgery charges, Murphy said, showing the jury a photo of her “peeking out of the custody tank, and, in tow, dutiful boyfriend Eric Naposki shows up in court.”

  When the family tried to regain custody of the beach house, Eric tried to stop them. He also called Jenny, trying to get back the Infiniti, and complaining about the police investigation, saying Nanette didn’t deserve to be in jail for such “bull-dinky stuff.”

  After Nanette got out, she used the $220,000 settlement in the palimony lawsuit to rent a house, where “police saw Mr. Naposki’s Pathfinder in the garage” eight months after the murder.

  “Our indications are this relationship lasts for about a year afterward. We don’t have a real set time/date,” he said. “They’re living together on Foxhollow. They start a movie production company called Midnight Moon Productions . . . where Naposki is listed as a producer.”

  Summin
g up, Murphy connected the dots for the jury with precision. “The killer wanted to kill Bill. Mr. Naposki said he wanted to kill Bill.... The evidence will certainly show he is thinking in the month of October about ways to silence that [nine-millimeter] gun. The killer knew how to shoot. The evidence will show Naposki knew how to shoot.”

  The killer used the same ammunition that Eric kept in his Jennings .380, Murphy said. “Nanette tried to hide Mr. Naposki’s identity from the police,” and Eric had Bill’s license plate in his notebook. Eric also “lied about his relationship with Nanette. He lied about where he was that night, or at least he changed his story dramatically from the first interview to the second . . . and, of course, he lied about his nine-millimeter.”

  Murphy pointed out that the interview during which Eric lied about that gun took place on December 23, 1994—before the crime lab had even received the bullet casings to process, and at a time when only the killer and a half-dozen detectives knew that the murder weapon was a nine-millimeter.

  By the end of the trial, he said, “if you’re the group I think you are, you are going to hold this guy accountable for what he did. I guarantee it. Every one of you is going to be convinced to an abiding conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  After a brief recess, Murphy started off his seven days of calling two dozen witnesses, beginning with Kim McLaughlin Bayless. Kim, who continued her testimony the next morning, spent much of the trial wearing her emotional pain on her face and conveying it in her body language. She covered her ears, closed her eyes, leaned over in her seat, and curled into a ball. Other times, the sensitive schoolteacher walked out of the courtroom when the testimony was too hard to hear.

  Murphy used Kim to show that Bill and his son, Kevin, had a very close relationship, to proactively debunk the defense’s implication that Kevin was a suspect in his father’s murder.

  Even though Bill was hurt by Kevin’s pot-smoking habit, Kim said, “My dad loved his own son unconditionally.”

  After the murder, she said, Newport Beach detectives asked her to time how long it took Kevin to get down the two flights of stairs from his room, so she timed him “going as fast as he could.” It took him fifty-two seconds.

  On day two, Murphy called Bill’s accountant, Brian Ringler, to explain Nanette’s access to Bill’s various accounts. He also called Sharon Hedberg, the Turtle Rock real estate agent who showed the $900,000 homes to Eric and Nanette in the summer of 1994, when they said they wouldn’t move in until the spring. Robert Cottrill, the software developer who met with Nanette in November 1994 to discuss an investment in his start-up, was also called.

  Eric’s attorneys had counseled him about his courtroom behavior, yet he continued to act cocky and sure of himself, smirking and laughing at the counsel table. He even turned around and winked at Rosie, who sat in the gallery with John Pappalardo.

  “I told Eric that if he didn’t stop acting like he was, he might as well plead guilty,” Pohlson said later.

  Eric told his attorneys that he understood how his behavior came off, and by the third day of his trial, his persistent and open challenging of Murphy had eased off. When the prosecutor played Kevin McLaughlin’s almost incoherent 911 tape, it was no laughing matter. For anyone.

  The tape was absolutely wrenching to listen to, even for those who had never met the twenty-four-year-old. It was so hellish for his family that Kim McLaughlin put her fingers in her ears while the tape played.

  But it wasn’t long before Eric started acting out again.

  “Pro athletes, they tend to believe that they’re invincible and they know what they’re doing,” Pohlson said later. “They [believe you] have to attack, or you have to do it your way. He was convinced that his way was the best way, and he didn’t want to take any guff from Murphy.”

  Suzanne Cogar, one of the prosecution’s most important witnesses, testified for about seventy-five minutes that day, relating Eric’s comments about wanting to have Bill’s plane blown up because he was angry that Bill “had been making sexual advances” toward Nanette.

  Pohlson objected to the answer as hearsay. After a sidebar with the judge, he said he wanted to register a continuing objection to all of Cogar’s testimony about her conversations with Eric, which Froeberg overruled.

  Cogar said she ended the first conversation with Eric “freaked out over that statement because he seemed so serious.... I didn’t like what I was hearing, and I just didn’t want to hang out with somebody who would talk like that.”

  On cross-examination, Pohlson tried to diminish Cogar’s credibility. “Eric Naposki never threatened you, did he?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You used the word ‘paranoid,’” a point about which Pohlson reminded her—and the jury—several times throughout her testimony. “Are you normally paranoid?”

  “No.”

  “Did he tell you when he’s doing this ‘blown away’ conversation that Nanette wanted Bill McLaughlin killed?”

  Cogar said no, not that she recalled.

  “Were you jealous of her?”

  “No.”

  After Cogar admitted that she’d seen Nanette going into Eric’s apartment a dozen times, Pohlson said, “Kinda sounds like spying, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” she said. “I saw everyone who walked by.”

  Once he’d established that Cogar knew Bill McLaughlin lived in Newport, he asked, “You thought Eric Naposki was serious about having him blown away. You, of course, called McLaughlin to warn him, right?”

  “I did not,” she said, acknowledging that she didn’t call the police either.

  “Because you didn’t think Eric Naposki was going to kill him, did you?”

  “It was hard to believe,” she said, acknowledging that for the most part she’d seen Eric be nice to people around the apartment complex.

  Asked if Eric mentioned how he planned to blow up Bill’s plane, Cogar quoted him as saying, “I know how to have that done.”

  “Do you ever remember him saying to you . . . he was going to be wealthy, or he was going to make money, or he was going to have more money?”

  No, she said, she didn’t.

  On redirect, Murphy got Cogar to say that she believed Nanette had been dating both men, even if Eric didn’t realize it.

  “That wasn’t anything Mr. Naposki told you?”

  “That was my own thoughts on the situation.”

  Pohlson came back with more innuendo, implying that Cogar showed up at Eric’s apartment late at night in a bikini for a Jacuzzi because she was romantically interested in him.

  “Did that indicate that you wanted to have more of a relationship, kind of move to the next level, you might say?”

  “To me, it didn’t.”

  On cross, Murphy asked if she did what she “told him Nanette should just do if something inappropriate is going on,” which, in Cogar’s case, was when the naked linebacker started kissing her.

  “That’s right,” Cogar said. “Just leave.”

  “I have nothing further,” Murphy said.

  On day four, Murphy called Gary Rorden, a baseball team coach whose kids played with Nanette’s son Kristofer, to show that Eric and Nanette were increasingly brazen and open with their relationship, even among people in Newport Beach who knew Bill personally.

  Judge Froeberg was not easily ruffled. Once the attorneys had finished asking their questions, he often stepped in to ask a witness, including Rorden, to clarify or elaborate on certain answers.

  Rorden’s testimony was a bit surprising in that he admitted to liking the defendant, an accused killer, more than Bill McLaughlin, the murder victim. He said he didn’t care much for Bill personally, although he explained to the judge that he was admittedly “in awe” of the man for showing up at the baseball field with Nanette, who was so attractive and so much younger than Bill.

  Rorden described Eric as “a very nice gentleman” who had helped him out with batting practice one afternoon in Newport Beach. Howeve
r, Rorden admitted he also thought “hmm” when he saw the professional athlete showing up at games with Nanette, and being “friendly—very friendly”—because Rorden knew she was living with Bill. He acknowledged during cross-examination that Eric and Bill were never at the field at the same time.

  “We knew the McLaughlin family, so it was just kind of awkward,” he said, adding that he didn’t think Nanette was aware of that knowledge. “In my mind, it was clear something was going on . . . and [Nanette and Eric] weren’t trying to hide it.”

  Murphy called Detective Tom Voth to the stand and introduced the tape of Nanette’s first interview with police the night of the murder. This allowed the jurors to hear the low, scratchy, and monotone voice of the “black widow” who stole from Bill and cheated on him with the defendant, leaving them to wonder if she sounded that way because she’d been screaming at her son’s soccer game, or if she was simply unemotional about Bill’s death.

  Although she was not in the courtroom, this tape was just one brick in the wall that both sides were building to convince the jury that Nanette was one of the world’s most evil, greedy, and manipulative women.

  Murphy also played the tape of Eric Naposki’s first police interview, in which he jocularly described his football career, so jurors could hear for themselves Eric’s attempts to hide his deep feelings for Nanette. Then, in his second interview, they heard his increasingly confrontational exchanges with the detectives as they confronted him with his conflicting statements.

  The prosecutor asked Voth to reiterate whether anyone knew early on that a 9mm gun had been used in the murder.

  “Outside the police department, not that I’m aware of,” Voth said, acknowledging that gunshot residue could be washed off or go undetected if a killer wore gloves. He added that the murder weapon being a nine-millimeter didn’t come out publicly until early February, when the media wrote about the search warrant affidavits.