“The ‘Ice Queen’ has got to melt sometime,” he said.
Asked how Nanette had drawn in and manipulated him and the other men, he made an analogy to the recent best-selling erotic novel.
“You’ve heard of Fifty Shades of Grey? Well, this was fifteen hundred.”
Inside, the courtroom filled with many of the same people who had attended the two trials, although this time Nanette’s family was noticeably absent. The only recognizable supporter was a pretty friend named Laura, whose well-groomed hair had gone from light brown to red and now to highlighted blond during the course of the court proceedings.
The bailiff led a grim-faced, handcuffed Nanette to the corner of the jury box at the judge’s right, where she sat with her back to the single TV pool camera behind her. The bailiffs seated her there to keep her separated from Eric, who, in previous courtroom appearances, had sat at the defense table in front of the judge.
Her hair was pulled back into a long ponytail. Her blond skunk stripe cut across her dark waves and her thin face looked even more drawn than before. Wearing a long-sleeved pale pink sweater over the same simple black dress she’d worn at trial, she kept her gaze trained straight ahead, where no one could look her in the eye.
Nanette had been so tight-lipped about her past that she’d even been unwilling to speak in her own defense to the probation officer who had prepared her sentencing report, which typically includes a social history and any abuse, criminal acts, and other personal details. She’d been so guarded that even her own attorney, Mick Hill, said he didn’t know that much about her. Because this was not a death penalty case, he’d never had to research her family background or look for mitigating factors to try to save her life.
“Beyond her just growing up in Arizona, and then hooking up with K. Ross Johnston, I don’t know anything,” Hill said later, adding that he didn’t think she had a very good relationship with her first husband.
Hill took the chair next to Nanette, which blocked even a side view of her from the gallery and made it just as difficult for the print photographer to get a decent shot of her face.
That’s when the drama started.
Eric had announced to his attorney, Gary Pohlson, that he didn’t want to come out of the holding cell, knowing, perhaps, that no one was going to make him. If the judge granted more time for the due process motion, Eric wouldn’t be sentenced that day. The attorneys filed into the judge’s chamber, apparently to discuss how to handle this, given that Eric had a right to be present at the proceeding and to hear the discussion, which, at least theoretically, could affect his case.
When the group emerged from the powwow, Hill returned to his seat in the jury box. The bailiff opened a little wood-framed door that served as a window into the eight-foot-by-eight-foot holding cell, where defendants were kept until they were brought into the courtroom. Pohlson, who had been seated at the defense table, stood up so Nanette and her attorney could move and sit there. But when the head bailiff motioned to Nanette and Hill to sit at the table, they didn’t budge. The bailiff punched in a code and opened the regular door to the holding cell, allowing Eric, who had no speaker or microphone in there, to hear the judge and vice versa.
“Mr. Naposki,” Judge Froeberg said without looking in Eric’s direction, “you don’t want to be out here in court?”
“No, thank you, Your Honor,” came a disembodied voice from the cell, from which Eric was unable to see into the courtroom, even with the window and door open.
“You have the right to,” Froeberg said.
“No, thank you, Your Honor.”
As Pohlson told the judge he needed more time to finish the new trial motion, the judge expressed his displeasure that they were ten months past Eric’s conviction and yet the defense was still asking for another postponement. He said he wasn’t inclined to give any additional delays, making this the last one he would grant. Eric’s new sentencing date was set for three months out, on August 10.
Commenting on the “due process” portion of the motion, Murphy summed up the prosecution’s position that the issues had already been adjudicated, the missing records for the alleged 8:52 P.M. call in particular. Eric had told police that Nanette had dropped him at his apartment and he’d then driven by Leonard Jomsky’s house before making that call, a story that Murphy deemed physically impossible.
After hearing the evidence presented at both trials, Froeberg agreed, saying he was even “less convinced than ever that the receipt [for that phone call] ever existed,” and that he believed his current reading of the situation only reinforced the accuracy of his original ruling, which was to deny Eric’s due process motion. Froeberg also denied Nanette’s motion for a new trial, which was based on similar grounds.
If Murphy couldn’t force Eric to come out to face the family of the man he’d killed, allowing them to avoid making another set of victim impact statements down the road, then he was going to verbally skewer him for it. But by this point, one of the bailiffs, who had not been informed of the plan, had already returned Eric to the bus that would take him back to jail.
Murphy was left to state his thoughts about Eric for the record.
“Mr. Naposki is a coward . . . for not facing these people today to hear what they have to say,” he said, summing up Eric’s behavior as “a final blaze of no-class cowardice.”
With that, Jenny McLaughlin began reading her statement, describing the scene she imagined in the kitchen the night her father’s killer pointed a gun at him while he was helpless to defend himself. He must have felt sickened, shocked, and horrified, she said.
She talked about the sadness she’d felt being deprived of her father’s presence at her wedding, how she’d cried through Kim’s entire marriage ceremony as well, and that she was also sad that her husband had never gotten to meet her father.
“‘I feel very grateful for having such a wonderful father in my life for as long as I did,’” she said. “‘I wish he could have stayed with us longer and that God would have chosen his time to leave rather than a person with a gun and a greedy heart.’”
Then it was Kim’s turn. Disappointed that Eric wouldn’t hear the statements she’d prepared for him and Nanette, she walked to the podium, and edged it over to the right a few inches, trying to get to a vantage point—beyond the obstruction of Nanette’s face by Hill’s self-admittedly large head—where she could look directly into the eyes of the woman who had orchestrated her father’s murder. But Nanette kept slinking behind Hill.
Kim started off by reading her take on a poem, “Imagine a Woman,” originally written by Patricia Lynn Reilly. Kim had written Reilly for permission to use parts of the original, informed her that she was going to read it to her father’s killers, and had even sent her a copy of it. Kim had written her own version about the positive qualities her father had instilled in her—qualities she felt that Nanette lacked entirely.
She aimed to make her words poignant and from the heart. But unsure of what Nanette would take in, she hoped that Nanette wouldn’t just shut out her message. Kim and her sister ultimately decided that these statements were more important for them to deliver, regardless of Nanette’s response, as a way of carrying out their father’s legacy and of challenging Nanette to be “a woman of integrity.”
The first line of her poem was this: Imagine a woman who others aspire to be.
What followed was a long list of this woman’s good qualities, such as being compassionate and tenderhearted, someone who told the truth and refused to surrender. Kim ended the poem by telling Nanette that this woman was everything Kim’s father had taught her to be: Everything you are not.
The schoolteacher then launched into the vile and astounding “destructive trail of deceit” Nanette had left in her wake.
“‘Your web of lies has caught up with you finally and your true nature has been revealed by this team of law enforcers,’” she said. “‘Your trial revealed what an abomination your life has been. We are appalled and rep
ulsed.’”
Kim said Nanette had no right to do this horrible deed to a man who had been so good to her for four long years—let alone do this to her own children, Lishele and Kristofer.
“‘What a despicable, disgraceful disappointment you are to your family and the children you dared to bring into this world,’” Kim said. “‘Your one life, Nanette Johnston Packard McNeal, has been a complete and utter waste.’”
While Kim was speaking, Nanette remained expressionless until Kim mentioned her children. Only then did Nanette shake her head in disagreement—a reaction that went largely unseen except by those sitting nearby at the prosecution table.
Kim concluded by saying that she hoped and prayed that while Nanette sat in prison for the rest of her life, she would eventually own up to her part in the murder of Bill McLaughlin.
The last of three speakers was Bill’s friend Don Kalal. Reading a letter written by Bill’s brother Patrick, who could not make it out from Chicago for the hearing, Kalal was the most overtly emotional. His voice cracked as he read the short missive, which labeled Nanette as “a true black widow” who had ruined the lives of everyone with whom she’d come into contact.
After the statements were done, the judge promptly sentenced Nanette to the expected LWOP term. Asked if she had any questions about appealing her case, Nanette said the only word she spoke the entire hearing: a soft-spoken “no.”
Froeberg rose abruptly from his chair and walked out of the courtroom without saying another word. As the bailiff cuffed the disparaged femme fatale once more and led her back to the holding cell, her face remained blank and she looked at no one.
Downstairs on the second floor, a throng of cameras gathered for a news conference as Kim and Jenny rode down in the elevator with Gary Pohlson.
“My client is a jerk,” he said to them apologetically.
Pohlson later acknowledged that he’d communicated that same sentiment to Eric.
“For him not to come out that first time during their victim witness statements was appalling to me, and I told him that,” he said. “I like Eric Naposki, but I was embarrassed by some of the things he did at the end.”
During the news conference, Murphy smiled as he made his typical cutting remarks, with Detective Tom Voth and DA Investigator Larry Montgomery on one side, and Jenny and Kim McLaughlin, who stood with their arms around each other, on the other.
Noting Nanette’s haggard appearance, Murphy said, “Jail clearly hasn’t been good to her. Today she got what she ultimately deserved.”
Everyone agreed that the victim’s family shouldn’t have to make more than one set of victim impact statements, he said. Everyone except Eric Naposki, who was “afraid to come out of his cell and face these two women. He was a gigantic coward.... He threw his binky down today.”
“He did it. He knows he did,” Murphy said, and maybe that’s why he didn’t come out, because he had “some sense of shame.”
Nanette was the most pretentious of nouveau riche defendants, he said, but now, instead of going to lavish salons to color her dark hair blond, she had to settle for the best of what the Orange County jail system had to offer. Nanette now had to stoop to getting “contraband dye for her hair and grind[ing] up magazines for her makeup.”
“She leaves a trail of destruction and shattered lives everywhere she goes,” Murphy said. “Today is the end of her rip-offs and con games.”
Asked why Eric’s sentencing was delayed, Murphy said Eric had blamed Jacob Horowitz, Kevin McLaughlin, Nanette Packard, and random drug dealers for the murder and now he was blaming someone else. The defense wanted more time to investigate those claims, which Murphy characterized as “story number five.” But as far as he was concerned, he said, “none of it has borne any truth.”
On June 18, 2012, Nanette Packard, inmate #WE4559, was sent to the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, where she joined another murderess successfully prosecuted by Matt Murphy: Skylar Deleon’s now ex-wife Jennifer, who goes by her maiden name, Henderson.
And in July, Billy McNeal married the woman he began dating after Nanette was in jail, a new law-abiding mother for his son, Cruz.
CHAPTER 49
On August 10, 2012, the final chapter of this saga was set to take place, nearly eighteen years after the fatal shooting in Balboa Coves.
True to form, Eric was all hepped up for his sentencing hearing and unwilling to go to prison without a fight. Because the prosecution team hadn’t believed him or found any substance to his newest story, Eric had alerted the media as he’d threatened, but that had done him no good either. He was still behind bars. Had he really thought the DA would drop the charges against him in the wake of a successful conviction?
Now that the main event—Nanette’s sentencing—had passed, the throngs of McLaughlin family and friends coming to watch the proceedings had thinned out, as had the number of media outlets and detectives who had worked the case.
Kim McLaughlin Bayless and her husband sat with Jenny’s longtime friends Krissy and Jason Gendron, along with the family’s former housekeeper, Mary Berg, Bill’s college friend Ken Baumgardner and his daughter, Sandy. Tom Voth and Larry Montgomery came as well, as did former juror Adrianne Reynolds. Jenny McLaughlin, who had been battling an illness, was too sick to attend.
None of Nanette’s people or ex-husbands were there, and neither was John Pappalardo, Eric’s lawyer friend. The only identifiable person there for him was his fiancée, Rosie Macaluso, whose face reflected the strain of fatigue and anxiety as she sat with defense attorneys Angelo MacDonald and Gary Pohlson.
Both networks had already run their episodes, but the 48 Hours and Dateline producers were there to catch the last hearing for updated reruns in the future. Both producers had pregnant bellies, evidencing the passage of time since the trials, when they were both in court with flat stomachs.
When the 48 Hours episode aired its second interview with Eric, the producers ran a tease by intimating that they would release the name of the alleged hit man. However, they ultimately chose not to mention it, presumably because the prosecution had dismissed the story as ridiculous.
Eric came out of the holding cell in a long-sleeved pink shirt and mouthed a greeting to Rosie in the gallery. After sitting down at the defense table, he smiled and nervously riffled through papers as he chatted with Pohlson.
The hearing started off as routine. MacDonald went over the high points of the defense motion to dismiss the guilty verdict and to ask for a new trial on the constitutional grounds of due process, jury misconduct, error of law, and prosecutorial misconduct, based on the “unnecessary and unjustified prosecution of Mr. Naposki.”
Setting aside the verdict, he said, “would not be a popular thing to do . . . but it would be the just and right thing to do.”
Judge Froeberg, noting that he’d already indicated he hadn’t changed his mind about the due process motion, officially denied it.
“After reviewing the extensive testimony in this case, I did not find anything—any evidence—presented at trial that would change the court’s position,” the judge said.
The defense’s main issue dealt with the “phone call that was supposedly placed from the Denny’s at eight fifty-two,” he said. Siding with the prosecution, Froeberg said it was clear from the numerous time trials that it would have been “impossible” for Eric to have been dropped off at his apartment in Tustin, go by Leonard Jomsky’s house, and then make the call from Denny’s by 8:52 P.M. The jury didn’t believe the claim, and neither did he.
“It defies logic,” Froeberg said, adding that the only way the call could have been made was on Eric’s way from the soccer field to Newport Beach.
Froeberg then listed the allegations in the motion and his corresponding responses:
Jury misconduct: Juror number one was reported to have said to another juror that Eric “creeps her out.” When the judge questioned her about the comment, she said Eric was “too serious and should smile
more.” Froeberg stood by his decision to let her stay on the jury.
Prosecutorial misconduct: Murphy demonized the defendant as a bully and improperly called attention to MacDonald’s being an out-of-towner from New York City, a dynamic to which the judge contributed. Froeberg countered that he was trying to “lessen the tension that was rampant in the courtroom,” and dismissed the “us versus them” remarks by Murphy as pretty tame. The court and the prosecution “have said a lot worse things than that,” he said, and they haven’t been overturned.
Froeberg noted that Eric had filed a declaration stating that he was no longer in fear for his life and was now willing to name the contract killer who murdered Bill McLaughlin. The judge explained that the key requirement to grant a new trial motion was evidence that wasn’t known before trial. He looked at this offer with suspicion because Eric had provided so many variations of the truth during this case. Evidence supporting the claim that the NBPD had failed to follow leads had already been presented, he said, and “the jury was free to accept or reject that.”
Was there sufficient evidence to support the guilty verdict? Yes, the judge said, and he wasn’t going to go through the “mountain of circumstantial evidence” at the hearing, but in his view it was “overwhelming.”
Then, in a highly unusual scene more reminiscent of a TV courtroom drama than a real-life hearing, the judge allowed Eric to make a statement. What was perhaps most surprising was that Froeberg let Eric vent without interruption, even as his voice grew louder and he admitted that he was getting angry. Froeberg also didn’t stop him from making audible comments while the victim’s friends and family read their statements into the record.
This was high courtroom drama at its best as Eric went on a freestyle rant, the back of his neck turning bright red like a thermometer, just as it had at the preliminary hearing in 2009. After complaining seventeen years earlier about the media cameras documenting the police’s reputation-damaging allegations against him, Eric now appeared to be trying to use those same cameras for his own purposes.
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