I'll Take Care of You (11 page)

As the years progressed, Nanette posed for photos in which her belly was pregnant and swollen, in a high-necked white church dress, with three-quarter sleeves and big ruffles down the front. These shots provided another dramatic contrast to the revealing boudoir photo she later used in her notorious singles ad, in which she wore a white teddy and a feather boa.

K. Ross delivered their first child, Kristofer, at home in the summer of 1985, feeling “beyond ecstasy” to be a parent. Lishele was born two summers later.

“We were very much in love, very much happy to be parents,” K. Ross recalled.

 

 

Meanwhile, on the professional front, the Johnstons both worked in sales at the Federated Group electronics store. Later they sold time-shares as K. Ross moved into real estate financing.

Nanette's résumé listed the Bud Crawley Real Estate School, although owner Bud Crawley couldn't confirm that she'd attended, and the Arizona Department of Real Estate doesn't have licensing records that old. However, California records show that she did obtain a real estate license in 2006 under the name of Nanette Anne Packard while she was working in Ladera Ranch, an affluent community in Orange County. That license expired in 2010.

When she and K. Ross were first together, he saw Nanette's desire for more money and nice things as a healthy desire and a sign of ambition.

“I didn't think it was out of the ordinary,” he said. “I couldn't afford any of the things that she would like.”

As Nanette's ambitions evolved, so did her sexuality, evidenced by the changes in her figure and the fashion choices featured in photos that were found on her computer years later. She grew her hair into long, bushy curls, which she either chemically lightened or were bleached by the sun. Her shorts and skirts got shorter, and she went from modest one-piece bathing suits to more skimpy bikinis.

Her loving behavior changed too. “She was dating men before we were separated,” K. Ross said, explaining that he discovered she'd been lying to him about going to business meetings at night.

His first clue came when he found one of her business cards on the windshield of an expensive car with this notation:
You caught my eye while driving down Scottsdale Road. If you are unmarried, I'd love to meet you. I will be at “What's Your Beef?” tonight looking for you. Nanette.

She grew increasingly reckless about hiding her indiscretions. On Thanksgiving Day, she showed up in a new BMW, which she said a man named Ted had bought for her. K. Ross ultimately learned that Ted, who lived in Tempe, found out that she'd been cheating on him with a man named Doug, so Ted had the car repossessed about a month later. She owed Ted $1,000, but after writing him a check, she put a stop payment on it. Ted talked to K. Ross by phone and sent him the stop-check notice as proof.

K. Ross's heart was broken. Being a religious man, he also couldn't take the unfaithfulness. Nanette moved out ten days short of their five-year anniversary, and he filed for divorce in February 1989.

“It was five hundred dollars to get a divorce and I had to make payments,” he testified, saying that the attorney took half up front and the rest in installments. “There were no assets of any significance.”

In family court, K. Ross won sole custody of their two small children. Nanette was ordered to pay $538 a month for child support, and she was allowed time with them every other weekend. The couple was ordered to split the $38,000 debt they owed to K. Ross's parents—but only if Nanette's monthly income grossed more than $2,500.

He moved to California in September 1989. That same year, Nanette got caught writing bad checks—seven of which were bundled into two misdemeanor cases, for which arrest warrants were issued. Two were deemed “not sufficient funds,” and the others were written on closed bank accounts, according to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.

Detective Tom Voth called Maricopa County officials in January 1995, requesting faxed copies of the backup materials on those warrants.

Both charges were ultimately dismissed in paperwork filed as late as 2000, a spokesperson said recently, adding that the two warrants had been “quashed” by the judge and deemed inactive. No additional details were available.

 

 

K. Ross Johnston wrote in a 1998 court filing that he moved Nanette to California, paid all her expenses, packed her belongings into a U-Haul truck, and drove it out himself, because he was hoping for a reconciliation.

But she did not follow through,
he wrote.
She quickly obtained a post office box and within thirty days, she was gone again, leaving the children with me.

K. Ross recalled this story differently when he testified in 2012, saying that Nanette came out to visit him in California, and surprised him by saying she wanted to get back together. He wanted to forgive her, to feel the bliss they'd once felt together.

“I was ecstatic,” he recalled. “An answer to prayer. Many prayers.”

The day she moved in, he got a call from her father asking where she was.

“She's right here,” K. Ross told him.

He handed the phone to Nanette, who told her dad that she and her ex-husband were getting back together. K. Ross didn't quite know what to make of this. Why hadn't she told her family that they were reuniting?

“It was a shocker,” K. Ross recalled.

They'd been together for four days when one of Nanette's ex-boyfriends showed up at the home of K. Ross's nephew in Arizona. The boyfriend, also unaware of her whereabouts, asked where she was.

“She's at Kevin's,” the nephew said, referring to K. Ross.

“No way,” the boyfriend said.

By this point, K. Ross recalled, he could see that she wasn't serious about giving him another chance. And the renewed possibility of a future together quickly faded to black, once he learned that she was placing singles ads in magazines. Within a month, she was gone, looking for the next big thing.

CHAPTER 14

That next big thing, as it turned out, was a six-foot-tall twenty-eight-year-old named Tom Reynolds, who had literally been a choirboy.

One night in September 1990, Nanette showed up at the Red Onion in Santa Ana and stood by the front door, talking to Reynolds, who was working security. He offered to “buy” her a drink, a perk of his job, and followed up with another.

As they were sipping Long Island Iced Teas, she said she'd just left Arizona and was still getting situated in Orange County, trying to get away from her ex-husband, who was attempting to win primary custody of her two young children. Although she didn't mention where they were that night—and Reynolds didn't ask—she said she was scared that her ex would take them away from her.

Alluding to an arrangement with a landlord, Nanette said she was going to live in a house on the peninsula in Newport Beach, but because the place was undergoing renovations, she didn't really know where she was going to sleep that night. Not one to ignore an obvious opportunity to take an attractive and willing woman home, Reynolds brought her back to the three-bedroom house he shared with two female roommates in Huntington Beach.

Months later, he learned that Nanette had nowhere else to go that night because she'd been evicted from her apartment for not paying rent. In contrast, Reynolds said, he had perfect credit and had been working two jobs since he'd moved to Orange County from upstate New York recently.

There was no courtship, and no dating; Nanette just never left. What started as a one-night stand sped straight into a hot and heavy sexual tryst, followed by a relatively quick decision to move in together at her new place—a two-bedroom duplex that had just been remodeled out of a two-story home. Because it was unfurnished and she had no job, Nanette expected Reynolds to pay the move-in expenses and buy all new furniture.

Within the next several months, Reynolds's life and his relationship with Nanette would take a short trip to hell, putting him $91,000 in debt, with a domestic violence arrest on his record and a bankruptcy filing, to boot.

 

 

In the first few weeks of meeting Nanette, Reynolds went to his two jobs, but he had no idea what she did during the day except go to the beach and supposedly look for a sales job.

She showed up at the Red Onion at night, but after Reynolds told her she couldn't keep hanging around the door with him, she didn't seem to mind mingling with other patrons. And when they got home, she was always sexually available, which was a good trade-off for a guy who had been happily uncommitted before this woman started laying a claim to his bed every night.

Nanette never said much about her upbringing. She didn't talk about her father and virtually dismissed the subject of her mother, whom she painted as a pathetic woman with substance abuse and emotional problems. Reynolds pictured an older woman sitting alone in a cluttered apartment in Arizona, with a bottle of gin in hand, a lifestyle that Nanette seemed determined to rise above.

Characterizing herself as a victim, Nanette made it sound like “she was going to end up being someone much better, and she was going to succeed at what she did,” Reynolds recalled in 2012, now a businessman with his own company, a husband of thirteen years and a father of four.

Once, after sex, they were examining each other's scars and telling the stories behind them. After showing Nanette the gash on his knee from the swimming hole in New York, he asked about the small, round scar on one of her butt cheeks. Nanette replied vaguely that it was from a cigarette burn. Reynolds didn't push for more details, because it was the appropriate size and shape to fit that story.

Nanette indicated she'd been born and raised in Arizona, or at least let Reynolds believe that's where she was from, and said she'd put herself through college there. She mentioned a sister somewhere back east, but no other siblings.

From how she talked about her family—or didn't—Reynolds got the idea they wouldn't be attending any intimate family dinners together at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Other than her two kids, Nanette made it sound like she was doing it alone and depended on Reynolds to take care of her needs, especially given her ongoing custody battle with her ex-husband.

She said she'd “gotten weighed down by her ex, who had pretty much forced her to flee Arizona with her kids to California.” When she'd first mentioned K. Ross, she gave the impression that she was hiding from him. And then it was “Oh, my God, he's found me.”

When Reynolds had driven across the country to California in a U-Haul van some months earlier, he hadn't wasted any time before taking off for his first-ever trip to Las Vegas, which coincided with the grand opening of the upscale Mirage hotel and casino.

During his stay there, he scored a surprising win of $28,000 while playing blackjack at a $5 table, and left town before he could lose it. He was subsequently courted by the hotel, which treated him like a “whale,” meaning that he was assigned a personal casino host to persuade him to continue betting and spending money. When he took Nanette with him, they were treated with extra special personal service.

“Oh, this is your beautiful companion,” the host said. “Is there anything I can get you?”

Given this royal treatment, Nanette most likely believed that Reynolds either had money to spend, or that he was willing to burn through whatever cash he had so they could live in style. She proceeded to help him do so, not only racking up charges on his several credit cards, but taking advantage of their cash-advance features as well.

“I need something for Kristofer,” she told him.

 

 

They'd been together about six weeks, when Reynolds saw the first red flag, right after another winning trip to Vegas. This time it was $8,000.

In those days of computer-network infancy, he wasn't able to deposit his out-of-state profits directly into his Bank of America account, so he wired the money back to Nanette and asked her to deposit it in two chunks for tax purposes: $3,000 one day, and $5,000 the next. But when he got home and looked at his account balance, he saw that it was $2,500 short. He asked the bank to check, but the money was just, well, gone.

This was his first relationship since he'd been in California. When Reynolds asked Nanette about the money, she came up with some excuse he didn't really believe, but the seed was planted. Something wasn't quite right.

“I confronted her,” he recalled, but “it didn't escalate to anything.”

The fact that they were about to move in together had something to do with it. Two days after he returned from Las Vegas, they used most of his remaining winnings to buy $4,800 worth of furniture for the duplex on Balboa Boulevard, which rented for something like $1,800—no small sum in 1990.

“I wasn't used to having money,” he said. “It was like winning the lotto.”

It was Nanette's idea that they move into the beach house together. There was plenty of room, she told him, and they would have more privacy than they did in his bohemian apartment life, with roommates roaming around all the time.

“We're better than this,” she said. “We're a couple. They've got friends coming and going.”

Besides, he was pretty taken with Nanette by this point. He quit his job at the Red Onion so he could spend more time with her, and he also traded in his job selling audiovisual equipment in Lakeview for a more prestigious gig selling luxury cars in Newport. It was a step up the career ladder, he thought, and a more fitting job for this new chapter in his life. To top it off, he got to drive a new Jaguar instead of his ratty old Supra.

He and Nanette took more trips to Vegas, spending as much as $7,000 for room service at the Mirage. On one trip in October 1990, they got ringside seats for the Evander Holyfield versus Buster Douglas boxing match. And because they were spending good money at the hotel, they were comped with Dom Pérignon and shrimp in their room before the fight.

But mostly, he and Nanette spent too much of Reynolds's money trying to keep up with their new image and lifestyle at the beach house.

“Here I was, living it up,” he said. “It was something I was not accustomed to.”

Some of his friends tried to warn him when they saw him living on the edge of financial responsibility.

“What, are you an idiot?” one buddy asked. “Are you following your [penis] now?”

Still, Reynolds wanted to trust her. Wasn't that what you were supposed to do when you lived with someone? Plus, she'd started contributing some money toward the rent.

Reynolds felt a little better once Nanette finally got a job—as a sales rep for an industrial cleaning-materials company. She worked out of the house, and the firm supplied a Dodge Caravan for her to meet with clients and to carry samples. Her frequent “business trips” however, soon became a source of conflict.

One time, when she was supposedly out of town, he tried to call her at 10:30
P.M.
and she spoke to him as if he were a stranger. Claiming she was in a meeting, she acted cold and distant, and didn't call him back until the next morning.

Then, around Christmas, Nanette began playing psychological games with him. Chatting with her sister on the phone, he overheard her say, “Tom is probably going to get me a ring for Christmas, but it will just be a ‘this-woman-is-taken' ring. It definitely won't be an engagement ring.”

“Well, that's a nice thing to say,” he said, feeling hurt. “What if I did want to get you an engagement ring?”

The next red flag was a guy named Bob, whom Reynolds found pacing outside the duplex one evening. Bob, one of Nanette's ex-boyfriends, said he was looking for her because she'd racked up a bunch of charges on his credit card.

“You'd better watch out,” Bob cautioned. “Don't trust her.”

When Bob said Nanette liked to keep a “jackhammer” next to the bed, Reynolds figured he had to know something, because Nanette definitely liked her vibrator.

But when he mentioned Bob to Nanette, she dismissed him as “some crazy stalker.” Yes, she'd known him, she said, but “he was infatuated” with her and “couldn't get enough.”

Reynolds came home another evening to find a phone message for Nanette from a guy named Dan. After that, he started hitting redial on the phone as soon as he walked in the door.

“I was watching my back all the time,” Reynolds recalled.

After he'd caught her lying again, in January 1991—saying she was out of town when friends had seen her around Newport Beach—he decided to investigate more closely. Although his mother had taught him never to go searching through a woman's purse, he thought dire measures were in order. He climbed into her van for a look-see, and what he discovered only confirmed his suspicions.

 

 

In a small lockbox, which he pried open with a screwdriver, he found a collection of letters addressed to a post office box, photos from men introducing themselves with platitudes about how they liked taking walks on the beach, and a canceled $25 check for a personal ad in
Singles Connection.

He immediately went out and bought a copy of the magazine, a sort of “
AutoTrader
for sex.” He was horrified to see a softly lit glamour shot of Nanette, wearing a skimpy “come-hither” top in the ad, titled, “For Wealthy Men Only.”

When Nanette showed up, he confronted her. “What the fuck is this?” he asked.

Her response completely surprised him. “Well, what do you expect?” she said coldly. “You're a loser. You're going nowhere. You drove me to this.”

After being so angry, Reynolds somehow found himself on the defensive, trying to stick up for his manhood and deny that he was pathetic. But he quickly returned to feeling angry.