I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  Then, around four o’clock, the jury asked to hear the testimony from Larry Montgomery about his time trials from Diamond Bar to Eric’s apartment, to Jomsky’s house, and on to Denny’s. The jury quit for the day at 4:20 P.M.

  The next morning, the panel listened to the testimony about the time trials, then took a fifteen-minute break. For Reynolds, it didn’t make sense that Eric would drive in the opposite direction from work to stop by Jomsky’s house if he was in such a hurry to leave the soccer field to get to a meeting.

  “Maybe my three-year-old nephew of mine might buy that one,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  Her fellow jurors, she said, also thought it was ridiculous to claim that the phone bill was so important, and yet neither Bailey nor Box had saved it. But after going over the timeline in great detail, the jury realized that it didn’t really matter whether he made the call or not. The jurors believed the prosecution’s argument that Eric still had time to commit the crime.

  “Realistically, listening to his statements to the police, and his phone call to Jenny, I mean you can’t sit here and tell me that this guy didn’t buy everything that [Nanette] was saying and everything that she was doing . . . and that this guy wasn’t picturing these millions and millions of dollars going into his pocket.”

  At eleven-fourteen, the jury asked to hear Suzanne Cogar’s testimony about Eric’s “maybe I did, maybe I didn’t” remarks after Bill’s murder.

  The panel took a ninety-minute break and resumed deliberations for one last hour before notifying the bailiff at 2:35 P.M. that it had reached a verdict. After fourteen days of trial, the jury took seven and a half hours to reach a unanimous decision.

  Froeberg gave everyone about an hour to get back to court.

  Once all the attorneys were assembled at 3:38 P.M., the court clerk read the jury’s verdict aloud. As Eric heard the words come out of her mouth, he shook his head in disbelief: “‘We the jury in the above entitled action find the defendant guilty of Penal Code 187(a)—murder—in the first degree as to count number one of the original information. ’”

  The jury also found the special circumstance of murder for financial gain to be true, and that Eric “personally discharged a firearm during the commission of the offense.”

  Eric looked shocked, exchanging looks of disappointment with his attorneys. As Eric was being led out with his hands cuffed behind his back, he turned toward the galley, where his fiancée, Rosie, was crying.

  “I love you. Don’t worry, babe,” Eric told her. “Everyone makes mistakes, including these twelve.”

  For Pohlson, the verdict came as a devastating blow.

  “I was so incredibly disappointed by that verdict,” he recalled eighteen months later. “It was a very hard verdict to take. I’ve lost a lot of big cases. I’ve had my ups and my downs. But this was a very frustrating case. I just felt they got it wrong.”

  “All of the defense team believes that Naposki was not the guy who pulled the trigger,” Pohlson said. “I think we all believe that . . . still today.... That’s not to say that Naposki wasn’t involved.”

  Kim McLaughlin cried with tears of relief and joy as she hugged her sister. She then went over to Rosie—apparently seeing her as another victim in this tragedy—and tried to comfort her with a hug, a true sign of the benevolence, charity, and grace that Bill McLaughlin had taught his children.

  Even Detective Tom Voth’s eyes welled up as it hit him how many years it had taken Bill’s daughters—with the family’s cumulative level of tragedy heightened by Kevin’s severe brain injury, caused by a drunk driver, and then his subsequent drowning—to win the justice they deserved.

  But for the McLaughlin sisters, this case was not over yet. They still had to sit through another trial, hoping that Nanette Packard would also get what she deserved.

  The same was true for juror Adrianne Reynolds, who had lived with this case for three and a half weeks, finding it difficult not to be able to discuss it with anyone.

  This case was different from her last jury trial, when a defendant faced charges of grand theft auto a decade or so earlier. This one had captured a place inside her. It was important for her to see the McLaughlin family get the justice, closure, and peace they’d been waiting to get for so long.

  “I still think of Kim and Jenny, how horrible it was that they had to endure this for [seventeen] years,” Reynolds said in late 2012.

  It was a shame, she said, that Suzanne Cogar hadn’t gotten “a little braver, a little earlier,” and that Kevin McLaughlin had not only died before the case was resolved, but was also accused of being the killer by an audacious defense team. “Those are the things that really irritate and stick with me.”

  Reynolds said she would never forget the experience of serving on this jury. Knowing “how hard everybody worked, and all the tests,” she said, “it really took me over and I had to see the whole thing come to a complete close for me to be okay.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Within a couple months of the verdict, Eric Naposki asked to speak to Matt Murphy. He said he had some important information to convey about who had really killed Bill McLaughlin.

  On September 8, Murphy went to the jail to meet with Eric, whom he’d named “the Superbouncer.” He brought along DA Investigators Larry Montgomery and Susan Frazier, paralegal Dena Basham, Detective Tom Voth, and two other NBPD detectives. Representing Eric were Gary Pohlson and his investigator, Tom Gleim.

  Apparently expecting a one-on-one with the prosecutor, Eric seemed surprised and uncomfortable at the number of people who crowded into the room. Murphy said they spent the next eighty minutes listening to Eric essentially say, “I know who did it, but I’m not going to tell you.”

  Eric told the prosecution team that Nanette had paid someone to kill Bill. He said he knew the man, but he didn’t want to disclose the name because he was worried for his family’s safety back east. They got a little more of the story—although still not enough—after Murphy told Eric to give up some more details without naming the guy. Eric refused.

  Frustrated, Murphy’s team started packing up to leave. Pohlson had been getting upset too. He’d promised Murphy that Eric would reveal the full story, and now his client was playing games.

  “You need to come clean with what you said you were going to tell them,” Pohlson said.

  With Eric still reluctant, Pohlson asked for a time-out. He talked softly with Eric in the corner for a few minutes, after which Eric finally agreed to disclose the man’s name: Juan Gonzales (pseudonym).

  “I am one hundred percent sure my gun was used,” Eric said, explaining that the last time he’d seen his Beretta was about a week before the murder, when it was under the seat of his car. Nanette was the only person who could have taken it.

  He also said that the killer must have switched out the bullets with Hydra-Shoks, because he always stacked his gun with alternating soft-tipped and hard-tipped bullets, not the deadly hollow points.

  After the meeting, Detective Voth went home to search his files for any evidence that would confirm or disprove this new story. As he looked through the pages they’d copied from Eric’s notebook in December 1994, Voth discovered the only reference to this alleged hit man that he could find anywhere. In the journal, where Eric kept track of money he owed and had received, he’d written $2,000 next to the name Juan.

  “So . . . why’s he paying [Juan] two thousand dollars?” wondered Voth, who showed the page to Murphy and Montgomery.

  Eric claimed that the presence of Juan Gonzales’s number on Nanette’s phone records for December 8, 13, and 14, 1994, supported his story. Although the detectives apparently didn’t explore this connection in their original investigation, Montgomery subsequently did look into it. He learned that Gonzales had that number in 1995, but it was also used by a man named Ira Chroman, who told Montgomery that he had it for a few months when he lived in North Hollywood. However, he couldn’t remember exactly when that was. And, besides, he didn’t k
now Nanette or Gonzales.

  Detective Scott Smith called Gonzales, who had since moved to Arizona, for a taped interview while Voth listened. After Montgomery reviewed the tape, he was satisfied that Gonzales wasn’t involved in the murder. Gonzales didn’t try to delay the interview, nor did he sound evasive, as a guilty man might have. In fact, he seemed genuinely cooperative.

  As soon as Montgomery heard Gonzales’s response to Smith’s first question, he felt confident that Gonzales didn’t know anything about the case.

  “Eric was murdered?” Gonzales asked.

  As a matter of course, the NBPD and the prosecution team had been monitoring Eric’s visits, phone calls, and correspondence since he’d been in jail. In reviewing Eric’s statements to Rosie, Montgomery found even more reasons to believe that Eric’s new story was false.

  On August 27, 2011, Eric wrote to Rosie, It’s now my turn to show all the mistakes. Right the wrongs, speak out in my defense and come home. I know you think I could of [sic] done it in May ’09, but it was not an option. Trust me.

  Then, three days after Eric’s September 8 meeting with the prosecution team, he wrote this to Rosie: I’m so glad you know what is going on now. It’s been harder than hell to hold it all in all 27 months.

  When she came to visit him in jail on October 8 and 9, he didn’t tell her he’d already released the “hit man’s” name. And when he wrote her on November 6, he said he was still gearing up to do it.

  We must put this crime to bed and let everyone know I am innocent and who is guilty, he wrote, adding that he would have his friend John Pappalardo release the information to the media and also fill in the Greenwich and Monroe Police Departments so they could watch over Rosie. I sure hope that this person does not try anything stupid, but he is well connected and well funded.

  Warning Rosie to be careful going forward, and to keep an eye out for “anything strange,” he said he felt he had no choice at this point but to release the hit man’s name.

  Eric wrote to his son, Eric Junior, about this as well. In a November 7 letter, Eric described how he was wrongly arrested in 2009 and said he wasn’t able to prove his innocence because he’d lost his “stuff.”

  The other day I told them everything I know, he wrote. Now they are faced with a question of what to do.

  Summing up Eric’s excuses as nonsense, Murphy noted that Eric was so scared for the safety of Rosie and his family that he waited fifty-nine days to tell them that he’d just released the hit man’s identity to the authorities, information he claimed to have kept secret all these years because it would have put his loved ones in danger.

  But unlike Murphy, Eric’s family was convinced that the story was true. As a result, they were living in fear of an angry hit man outed by Eric Naposki, and some said they were too scared to show their faces in the photo section of this book.

  Eric told the prosecution team that he’d informed Pohlson two years earlier that Juan Gonzales was the hit man, but Pohlson couldn’t come up with anything. However, when Pohlson talked with Montgomery in October 2011, he said they’d done no investigation into this angle because Eric hadn’t wanted to take his defense in that direction.

  In late 2012 Pohlson confirmed that Gonzales’s name had come up within the first month of Pohlson taking the case in 2009, but “there were reasons [Eric] wouldn’t allow us to bring it up. In the end, there were still going to be theories that Naposki was involved. The only value to that would have been if Naposki wanted to make a deal, to plead guilty, and to testify.”

  Citing attorney-client privilege, Pohlson said he couldn’t say anything more than this: “We didn’t pursue that.”

  When Montgomery ultimately confronted Eric about the delay in the disclosure to his family, Eric said he was referring to his worries about revealing the information to the media. But that excuse held no water for Murphy and the team of investigators.

  After looking into Eric’s claims, they concluded that he was, once again, lying to save his own skin. He told a similar story to 48 Hours, which aired a rare second show on the case. McLaughlin family advocates saw both shows as overly sympathetic to Eric Naposki, but many viewers who didn’t know the players personally stated on the 48 Hours Facebook page that they believed or wondered if Eric was innocent.

  Voth and Montgomery went on their own to meet with Eric a second time, on December 23, 2011.

  This time, Eric said that he’d actually parked his truck at his friend Leonard Jomsky’s house—where he’d said during the 2009 interview that he was living, not at his own apartment in Tustin—before the soccer game on the night of the murder. Montgomery said he believed this new story could actually be true, because it fit with the theory that rather than dropping Eric off at his apartment, as Nanette and Eric told police from the beginning, that she’d actually dropped him off at the Newport Boulevard Bridge near Balboa Coves so he could use the key to get through the pedestrian gate, kill Bill, and run across the bridge to work at the Thunderbird.

  Following that theory further, Montgomery said Eric must have paged Nanette after work that night because he wanted her to pick him up and drive him to get his truck at Jomsky’s. If she and Eric had told the truth in the first place about Eric leaving his truck at Jomsky’s, Montgomery said, they ran the risk of Jomsky telling police that Eric’s truck had been sitting outside his house until late that night, thus contradicting the couple’s initial claims that he’d driven it to work after Nanette dropped him off at his apartment.

  Bottom line: Voth and Montgomery just didn’t believe the hit man story.

  “I think it tells volumes as to his last and final story to us, to the DA’s office, and to the police department,” Voth said. “It’s just another lie and maybe he was trying to wiggle out of it, and if he was, he put himself right in the middle of it. Since when do hit men borrow guns?”

  CHAPTER 42

  As I was researching and writing this book, I wanted to look Eric Naposki in the eye and hear this hit man story for myself. So I made arrangements to visit him at the Theo Lacy Facility in the city of Orange on December 2, 2011.

  Anticipating that we would only get to talk for the regular hour-long visiting slot, I was surprised and pleased that the deputies, with whom he apparently got along well, let me stay for two hours after Eric asked them if I could stay longer.

  “Things are not always what they seem,” Eric said as soon as I sat down on the cold round seat, using one of my hands to hold the phone receiver, which was attached to the wall with a metal cord like the old-school pay phones, and the other hand to scribble in my notebook. “I told them what happened. I told them I’m not responsible for the murder in any way. . . . I’m doing someone else’s jail time.”

  I always find it fascinating and important, if I can, to speak directly with the killers I write about, so I can convey my impressions to my readers. Through my books, my hope is for all of us to learn lessons of inspiration and strength from the victims, and also to educate ourselves in how to identify the bad guys (and women, in this case) before we become victims ourselves.

  One thing I want to say right off the bat is that Eric, similar to other convicted killers I’ve interviewed in jail or in prison, was very charming, convincing, and didn’t seem at all threatening. He was also just as big as everyone said he was. And, as I’d heard, he talked about himself in the third person, a key indicator of narcissism.

  Granted, we had a pane of glass or plastic between us, but I went into the interview, as usual, with an open mind. I didn’t want him to think I was passing judgment or he wouldn’t open up to me. But even my one remark that I thought Matt Murphy had done a good job in court was enough to convince Eric that I already thought he was guilty. I didn’t argue with him. I simply told him I wanted to tell the truth and reveal both sides of what happened.

  Essentially, what I heard that day was yet another new version of the Eric Naposki story and a revisionist-historical account of his relationship with his codefendant
.

  Nanette, he said, was a “pathological, fucking liar,” and the instigator of Bill McLaughlin’s murder, because it was her “big mouth” that had gotten him killed.

  Eric claimed that she’d come to him, all shaken up, in October 1994, with her arms bruised and a fat lip, saying that Bill had “beat[en] her up and forced her into a sexual encounter” the night before. When Eric told her to move out, she said she didn’t have to, because Bill was moving to Las Vegas. But she must have told someone else, who killed Bill for abusing her, Eric said, someone who wasn’t as good with guns as he was.

  “I’m a better shot than that,” he said, adding that it wouldn’t have taken him six bullets to kill Bill. “I could hit a Dixie cup from fifty yards away.”

  No, he said, the shooter was a hit man to whom she’d paid something like $30,000. And the police had never found any such sum in any of Eric’s bank accounts because it had gone to the real killer.

  Nanette called Eric from jail in April 1995 “to bail her ass out,” he said, but he knew “zero” details about her embezzlement charges. After the police told him about the theft and forgery allegations, and that she’d had a sexual relationship with Bill, he confronted her.

  “Is what they’re saying about you and Bill true?” he asked her. “Because if it is, they have every right to look at me.”

  But she claimed it was all a big mistake. “She looked me straight in the face and said, ‘No,’” he said.

  Eric said he guessed the killer’s identity after the fact and “went to the people responsible. They couldn’t not admit it. I had proof.”

  But he said he hadn’t told anyone until now because the killer had threatened him: “If I hear that you’re talking . . . or doing anything like that, there’s going to be problems, a lot of problems.” And because of this, Eric was scared for his family’s safety.