“It totally backfired [for the defense],” he recalled. “Matt is taking notes, waiting for Mick to finish,” then the prosecutor stood up and piled on some more.
By the time Billy got off the stand, he felt good. Unburdened. “I was pretty pumped up,” he said.
Contrary to the defense’s point of view, Billy said later, he didn’t think Nanette was a great mother, because she had two small children who could have lost their mother to prison if she’d been convicted of Bill McLaughlin’s murder in the 1990s.
And yet, he said, “she made that horrible decision two more times with Jaycie and Cruz, bringing in two more children, knowing there was a possibility that she could leave them motherless, and leave the fathers fending as single parents, and that the children and the fathers and the McLaughlins didn’t have a choice in the matter. None of us had a choice.”
CHAPTER 44
Once the defense presented its case, Nanette’s attorney only put on a few character witnesses, including Bill’s housekeeper, Mary Berg; Nanette’s second husband, John Packard; and her older daughter, Lishele, who was several months pregnant. In total, defense witness testimony lasted about an hour and twenty minutes.
During his brief time on the stand, John Packard looked entirely annoyed and uncomfortable, responding with the shortest answers possible.
“I thought it was very odd that he acted that way,” Detective Tom Voth said later. “Maybe because he didn’t want to say anything bad.... It just seemed like it was just an imposition for him to be there.”
Voth was also surprised that K. Ross had been less forthcoming as a prosecution witness. In fact, Voth thought K. Ross even seemed to downplay Nanette’s behavior, a marked contrast to their many conversations in the early years.
“I was still getting calls from him five or six years” after the murder, Voth said.
Lishele teared up during her brief time on the stand. Although she tried to describe Nanette’s maternal traits in glowing terms, she still managed to paint her mother in a bad light as she recounted the story of Jaycie’s fashion show and talked nostalgically about Nanette’s enormous collection of sparkly clothes and shoes. Even so, Lishele’s testimony was the only time during the entire investigation and trial that Voth saw Nanette soften and look at all emotional.
As the months after the arrest went by, Nanette’s house in Ladera Ranch went into default and then foreclosure. When friends from church came over to help Lishele box up Nanette’s designer wear, Lishele testified it took them two days to fill twenty or thirty boxes. She thought they’d finished—until she looked in the closet.
“It didn’t even look touched,” she said.
Lishele said she didn’t really think of Nanette as her mother.
“She’s always been my best friend. If we were ever upset, we’d go shopping.... We called it ‘retail therapy.’ Some people turn to drugs. We shop.”
Lishele had a dance recital the night her mother was arrested in 2009. When Nanette didn’t show up, her daughter knew something was wrong. Nanette had never missed any of her performances.
After Nanette went to jail in the 1990s, Lishele said, she and her brother, Kristofer, went to live with K. Ross and Julia. She said she still remembered how K. Ross took away the photo album of Bill McLaughlin that Nanette had made for them, and she never saw it again.
Lishele said disapprovingly that she’d always thought her father and his wife had “a disturbing obsession” with Nanette, the way they helped police and spoke so ill of her on Hard Copy. It upset Lishele to talk about the case, and she wasn’t happy with her father for “kind of, like, airing it to everyone.”
“I think he wanted people not to like her,” she said.
Earlier in the trial, I’d asked Lishele if she would agree to an interview for this book, even if she wanted to say only positive things about her mother.
“I’ll pray on it,” she said.
Ultimately she didn’t grant an interview, and K. Ross didn’t want to either, for fear of further upsetting his daughter.
CHAPTER 45
Just before the closing arguments began that afternoon, Judge Froeberg announced that the court was entitled to take “judicial notice” of certain facts, which the jury could consider as evidence in this case.
On March 22, 1996, Nanette Johnston pleaded guilty to one count each of theft and forgery, the judge said. She’d signed the plea agreement and declared under the penalty of perjury that everything in it was “true and correct,” specifically that on December 14, 1994, [she] forged another name on a $250,000 check with the intent to pass the check and defraud.
The statement certainly didn’t set a hopeful tone for Nanette’s future. To say she seemed doomed was no understatement.
Saying he’d been waiting four years for this day, Murphy started his closing with one of his favorite analogies: one ingredient alone does not make a chicken salad, just as one piece of evidence alone does not make a guilty verdict.
“It’s when you consider every piece of evidence in light of every other piece of evidence,” he said.
Pointing out that Hill had elicited more witness testimony about Nanette’s bad behavior than he had, he tossed aside the defense’s entire case—that she was a bad person, but a great mother and not a killer—with one swoop.
“To a very large extent, I don’t care,” he said. “I’m not asking you to convict her because she’s a bad person . . . [or] if she’s promiscuous, because she is.... I’m asking you to convict her because she’s a murderer.
“That woman is responsible for the murder of Bill McLaughlin,” he said, pointing at Nanette. “She could be Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler, I don’t care. The question is, did she aid and abet Eric Naposki in this murder?”
Murphy also dismissed Hill’s strategy—to try to cheapen Nanette’s relationship with Eric, to make it seem that she didn’t care about him enough to leave Bill. “Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t bear out his theory,” he said.
“That woman,” as he continued to call her, had more than just the $1 million life insurance “chump change” payout coming to her once Bill was dead, because he’d made her a trustee to his estate.
“People have killed other people for a lot less,” he said, noting that she’d purposely set up the Krishel corporation to launder “large amounts of stolen money,” as evidenced by the $250,000 forged check, most of which she deposited into the newly formed corporate account in January 1995.
“How do you get the man you really want and keep the money you so dearly love? There’s only one way to do that. Hope that Bill McLaughlin gets struck by lightning—or you kill him.” How else, he asked, could Nanette think she could get away with marrying Bill when she’d introduced Eric as her boyfriend at her sister’s wedding in November?
“She knows Bill McLaughlin is going to die,” he said.
Bill treated Nanette well, Murphy said. “He was a good man. Just like Jenny and Kim, just like Kevin. She used him. She took him for everything he was worth, and then when he wasn’t good enough, she murdered him with Eric Naposki. . . . They were together in the murder. Now, that woman is responsible for that man’s death, no matter how you look at this.... You have the opportunity to make it right.”
That evening, John Packard brought Jaycie to dinner at California Pizza Kitchen, along with Lishele and her husband, Nanette’s father and stepmother, and one of Nanette’s friends, who had come to both trials. Just like Nanette had looked the night before Bill’s memorial service, these people sat and chatted with each other as if it were any random evening out for pizza. If you hadn’t known they’d spent the entire day at a murder trial for the woman who connected them all, you never would have guessed.
It was, in a word, surreal to sit right next to them. Thankfully, they didn’t even notice me.
The next morning, Mick Hill, wearing a dark suit and a serious expression, began his closing argument by contending that this was actually an “anticonspiracy” case
.
Nanette and Eric did nothing to hide that they were a couple, he said. They showed up at the soccer game together in front of fifty or sixty people. They went shopping at the mall, and they flew to San Francisco.
“A conspiracy, by definition, is something secret,” he said.
But there were no witnesses, no incriminating statements, and no real evidence that Nanette was the killer, he said, and no witnesses who could testify that she didn’t drop Eric at his apartment before going shopping at the mall. “Not a single witness who ever saw or heard her and Eric Naposki conspire in any way.”
Hill criticized the NBPD for its “disgraceful lack of effort,” and for not gathering important evidence during the 1990s, such as videotapes from security cameras at the mall, which could have proven that Nanette was telling the truth about where she was at the time of the murder, show how long she’d been shopping, and illustrate whether she’d acted anxious or upset.
Because now that seventeen years had passed, that evidence had been destroyed, which meant that he couldn’t prove where his client was or show her state of mind. “That is incredibly important.”
The NBPD also never interviewed Eric’s previous wives, such as the one who filed a restraining order against him, to flesh out his history of aggressive behavior, he said.
But after countless hours of more recent investigation, Hill said, he and his staff found evidence that Nanette didn’t do the crime. She started spending money after Bill was killed, he argued, because she simply panicked that her money stream was going to get cut off.
“Eric Naposki acted by himself,” he said.
Eric was the one who saw Nanette as the golden goose. Hill maintained that Nanette had no intention of marrying him, “because Eric is a deadbeat loser, pauper,” and her pattern was to lie, cheat, and steal, but never to leave Bill.
Eric was the one fired because of his bad temper, the one using steroids, and the one making threats, such as “I’m going to get that guy. I’m going to blow up his plane.” And he was the one cursing angrily at police and engaging in countersurveillance tactics. Not Nanette.
“Bill was worth more to Nanette alive than he was dead,” he said. “Hate her as much as you want for being a thief, a liar, and a cheat, slut—whatever you want—but you can’t vote guilty based on that.”
As a father who had coached his daughter’s soccer team for eight years, Hill couldn’t see Nanette and Eric screaming at the sidelines and thinking, “We’d better leave soon.... We’ve got to kill a guy,” he said, tapping his watch to illustrate. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Then, in a blustery and self-congratulatory epiphany, Hill told the jury that he’d just discovered a huge detail that the prosecution had overlooked: The key left on the doormat was not stamped “do not duplicate.” Therefore, it couldn’t have been Nanette’s.
At this point, some observers were confused about why this was such an important detail for the defense, just as they were about earlier explanations of how and why only certain keys in evidence were stamped, and by whom. However, Hill made it sound as if he was sure this “new” information was going to shed some light on all of that—and also win the case for Nanette.
While Hill went on with his argument, Murphy sat at the prosecution table, shaking his head as Hill told the jury that the prosecutor had been wrong all along.
Because “if she’s part of a conspiracy, she’s going to give [Eric] keys that work,” Hill said.
His voice dripping with drama as he held up the key in its evidence envelope, Hill walked over to Murphy, looking him in the eye, and said, “How did she have a key that says ‘do not duplicate,’ but the killer didn’t?”
Matt Murphy practically leapt out of his chair to respond in his rebuttal argument, quickly pointing out the defense attorney’s fatal gaffe, which, ironically, was to claim that he’d caught the prosecution in a mistake.
Noting that this was his 114th trial, he said, “I’ve never heard a defense attorney invent his own Perry Mason moment, but that’s what he just did.... It’s extraordinary.” Hill may have just learned that the key didn’t say “do not duplicate,” Murphy said, but the prosecution team had known that since they started looking at the case again four years ago. “That’s never been an issue.”
Everyone in the McLaughlin household had a key to the pedestrian-access gate, because no one wanted to walk all the way down to the main entrance to get to the peninsula, or to use the jogging path, especially Nanette, an avid Rollerblader, whose key chain was missing one of those keys, he said.
“She can shake her head all she wants,” Murphy said, his arms crossed and his dander up as he called attention to the defendant’s gestures at the defense table as she tried to negate what he was saying. “I’m so fired up. I don’t want to put in my PowerPoint yet.”
Claim by claim, Murphy rebutted each explanation Hill had given for Nanette’s lack of involvement in the murder. Murphy also defended the NBPD, mistakes and all, saying that Hill wanted the jury to believe that the detectives did a “sloppy job” because they didn’t interview all the kids on Kristofer’s soccer team.
“It’s a dumb argument, and I ask you, don’t buy it,” he said, adding that the NBPD was one of the finest law enforcement agencies in Orange County, which showed “no ego . . . no politics, zero,” when it asked DA Investigator Larry Montgomery to pick up this cold case and reexamine it.
Hill was wrong when he said all the pertinent records had been destroyed and that this had prevented him from building a proper defense, Murphy said. The records from the bank, mobile and home phones, beach house, and bank account had all been presented in court, so the only missing records were those from Eric’s alleged alibi call from the Denny’s pay phone.
“So, for the purpose of assessing her guilt, what is the point?” Murphy asked.
Although Murphy noted that Hill kept saying, “I know where my client was at the time of the murder,” Murphy argued that point was irrelevant, because “she’s not the shooter. We know she’s not the shooter. Eric Naposki was the shooter.”
Mocking Hill’s “anticonspiracy” claim that Nanette wouldn’t have tried to call attention to herself, Murphy said, “Hey, if they committed a murder, and then they’re stupid about it, then that means they couldn’t have done it. Gang members all over California will be relieved about that.”
Murphy said he also didn’t understand the logic behind the defense that Nanette was a good mother, “ergo not the killer.”
“She’s not ‘Mother of the Year,’” he said, noting that she taught her eight-year-old girl how to scam money out of their neighbors and then lie about it.
Hill had also made a huge deal out of the soccer game, Murphy said, but the defense attorney didn’t address one important point. Why were Nanette and Eric in such a rush to leave the field, even before the medal ceremony?
“There’s a closing window of time,” Murphy said, answering the question. “Eric has got to get in there while Kevin is at his AA meeting.”
Murphy pushed to the inevitable finish, turning up the volume of emotion by playing the excruciating 911 tape once more, reminding the jury of who the real victims were here. As it played, Kim McLaughlin bent over in her chair, resting her forehead against the seat in front of her, and put her fingers in her ears. Her foot shook as Kevin’s voice sounded throughout the courtroom.
“That’s what we’re doing here. This is real. This woman put that together,” he declared, pointing at Nanette once again. “This woman is responsible for that moment, sure as I’m standing here right now. The evidence is all there.”
By this time, Kim was crying and trembling in the gallery as her husband kept his arm tightly and lovingly wrapped around her.
“I’m going to ask you from my heart,” Murphy told the jury. “You take care of business. You do what needs to be done and hold that woman accountable for what she’s done.”
Kim dabbed the tears from her eyes with a tissu
e her husband had handed her. Jenny wiped her eyes and nose as well, but she was smiling. Murphy’s closing was palpably painful for the family to hear, but they seemed to know that it would help the jury come to the right decision when they saw how much Nanette’s actions had hurt them.
The jury filed into the deliberation room at 2:42 P.M., and took a break after only fifteen minutes. The panel resumed talks until four-thirty that afternoon, and was back at it at nine-ten the next morning.
At 9:33 A.M., the jury issued two requests, one for some of K. Ross’s testimony to be read back, and two for a search through the trial record for any mention—outside of the closing arguments—of the words “duplicate” or “duplication.”
After a search by the clerk, at 11:07 A.M., the jury was told the words were not mentioned, and neither was the phrase “do not copy.” Ten minutes later, the jury announced it had reached a verdict, after barely three and a half hours of deliberations, most of which seemed to be spent waiting to confirm Murphy’s rebuttal argument that Hill’s “key moment” was nothing but theatrics.
Calls went out right away to alert the attorneys, the families of the victim and defendant, and the media that the verdict was in.
Donna Hakala, the sister of Bill McLaughlin’s college buddy Don Kalal, had attended many days of both trials, as had her brother. After getting a call from him at 12:45 P.M., she rushed as fast as she could to get to the courtroom on the wet roads, which were clogged with lunchtime traffic. It does rain in Southern California, but not often enough for the locals to get used to driving in it.
The courtroom was packed. Nanette’s daughter Lishele, who was three months pregnant, had told a McLaughlin family member that she didn’t want to attend the entire trial for fear of traumatizing her baby. But she was there that day, bracing herself for the outcome. Her father, K. Ross Johnston, and her most recent stepfather, Billy McNeal, were also there, waiting to see justice served on the woman who had lied to and taken advantage of both of them.
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