I'll Take Care of You (28 page)

Judge Froeberg denied the motion, but said the defense could raise the issues again after the trial, once he saw how things had played out.

 

 

In what the
Orange County Register
billed to be “the most anticipated trial of the year,” Nanette Packard and Eric Naposki were set to be tried together in front of the rather easygoing Judge Froeberg, who had served longer on the local bench than most.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, Riverside, Froeberg earned his law degree from Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and passed the bar in 1974. His wife, Roseanne, headed up the DA's Sexual Assault Unit.

First appointed to the bench in 1986 by Republican Governor George Deukmejian, Froeberg was subsequently elected unopposed.

“Generally his reputation is he's a very fair judge to try your case,” Pohlson said. “He's probably considered prosecution-oriented by some, but I think he's a really good judge. He's really easy to try a case in front of. I'm always pleased when I'm assigned there.”

On the eve of the trial, slated to begin on Monday, June 13, 2011, Eric's and Nanette's trials were severed, which was the prosecutor's choice. Eric's case was set to go first, and that's when the finger-pointing between defendants began.

Jury selection began on June 15, resulting in eight women and four men being chosen to serve on the panel.

To counter Pohlson's comments that this was a “totally circumstantial case,” Murphy pointed out that “the idea that circumstantial evidence is somehow bad evidence is a very commonly believed myth. But it is a myth. The law is crystal clear on that.”

After the successful and high-profile prosecution of killer Skylar Deleon, prosecutor Matt Murphy was ready for round two with his now-familiar rival, Gary Pohlson.

Murphy and Pohlson had completely different courtroom styles. Murphy could be as sarcastic as they come, while Pohlson had more of the friendly-uncle approach. But the two men respected each other's capabilities.

“Everybody likes Gary,” Murphy said. “Gary Pohlson has one of the very best reputations in the Orange County legal community.... Even though he appears doddering sometimes, it's part of his schtick. . . . He's extremely effective with juries.... He's such a good, sincere person, he doesn't have to act because that's actually who he is.”

Of Murphy's reputation, Pohlson said, “He's supposed to be really good. Got a great courtroom presence. He's got that flair for the dramatic, you know. I've never heard anything negative about him.”

But in this East Coast versus West Coast legal cage match, Murphy had the home court advantage over Angelo MacDonald, which the defense would later accuse Murphy of using to try to win points with the jury. This was especially evident when MacDonald tried to question the effectiveness of the police detectives' investigation techniques, a tactic that historically hasn't played well in Orange County.

As Murphy prepared for Eric Naposki's trial, he planned to use some of the same strategies and present some of the same types of evidence that had helped him win the largely circumstantial conspiracy-to-murder case for financial gain against Skylar and Jennifer Deleon.

Like that case, this one also involved cross-checking the conspirators' phone and bank records to form a timeline of the conspiracy, the murder, and the financial benefit that followed. Ironically, the four-minute call to Nanette's car phone after Eric finished his shift at the Thunderbird the night of the murder pinged off the same cell phone tower in Newport Beach as the call that was made by the Deleons' co-conspirator, John F. Kennedy, as they were sailing into the harbor on their victims' yacht after killing them offshore.

With Investigator Larry Montgomery's help, Murphy spent two years putting together twenty-two pages of questions to ask Eric on cross-examination. Because Eric had displayed so much bravado and arrogance, Murphy was pretty confident that he wouldn't be able to resist testifying.

The prosecutor prepared for trial by listening repeatedly—at the gym, over holiday breaks, any chance he got—to every tape of the police interviews with Eric, as well as his call with Jenny McLaughlin, until he knew them backward and forward and was ready to catch Eric in a contradiction or error on the stand. Murphy also practiced his delivery of confrontational questions, hoping to make the hothead so angry that he exploded in the witness chair.

“You have to know that she murdered him and yet you move into the beach house?” Murphy planned to say. And when Eric was staying at the beach house, Nanette was in jail and Kevin came back to change the locks, “Tell us about Kevin's expression when you opened the door!”

 

 

At a hearing before opening statements and outside the jury's presence on June 20, the defense argued its “402” motion to introduce verbal evidence of Eric's “missing” credit card bill in an effort to prove he made the pay phone call from Denny's at 8:52
P.M.

Eric's original attorney, Julian Bailey, who had known Pohlson and Judge Froeberg for forty years, testified that he had personally seen the phone bill. At least he thought he had.

Before taking on Eric's case, whom, he said, he didn't recognize now, Bailey explained that he'd worked as a prosecutor, and had then handled more than thirty homicide trials as a criminal defense attorney. He went on to work as a “referee” in the juvenile and superior courts.

When he was a defense attorney, Bailey said, James Box was “pretty much” the only investigator he'd used. They'd worked together ever since Box was a police officer in Garden Grove, before he was an investigator in the DA's office, and before he'd gone into private practice.

“Why's that?” Pohlson asked.

“I found him to be competent and honest, hardworking, smart.”

Pohlson showed Bailey the letter he'd written to then-prosecutor Debbie Lloyd in 1995, mentioning Eric's phone call—“there is a record of its time and place”—and asked Bailey what he remembered about it.

“I don't remember anything about it,” Bailey said, but he added, “It's my belief that I saw a bill and that that's the reason I specifically stated that. It's also my belief that I gave that bill to James Box.”

Bailey said he'd gone through some files recently in his cellar, his home, his storage unit, and his work office building from that time, but he'd found nothing. When his former partner finally located Eric's file, he acknowledged, “it did not contain a phone bill.”

“Would you have written a letter to the district attorney, providing an alibi for a client just based on the word of the client, or would you have to have more proof?” Pohlson asked.

Bailey said he wouldn't have just taken a client's word. “That would be fraught with danger, and . . . it's just not the way I practice law,” he said. “That's why I believe I saw the phone bill.”

On cross-examination, Murphy, who also had known Bailey for years and had even worked on his election campaign for a superior court judgeship, felt awkward about having to question a judicial officer about the “interesting language” he'd used in his letter to Lloyd. Still, he pressed on and asked why Bailey hadn't attached a copy of the bill.

“It seems like you could have ended this whole issue by stapling a copy of it, sending it to Debbie,” Murphy said.

“You're absolutely right,” Bailey said. However, he added, he wasn't happy that the media had been publishing the DA's version of the case, or that the search warrants had been leaked to the media but not to him, so he decided he should keep “what few cards we had close to the vest.”

 

 

Box got up to testify next, sounding very sure of himself.

“Do you have any doubt as you're sitting there right now that you saw that phone bill or that it was communicated to you that on the phone bill there was an eight fifty-two time?” Pohlson asked.

“I have no doubt,” Box said.

On cross, Murphy pointed out that Box seemed “tentative on exactly what you saw versus what you were told. Is that fair to say?”

Box began to hem and haw. “Well, I did see something, and I'm assuming it was the bill. I mean, if it wasn't the bill, I'm sure I would have asked, ‘Where's the bill?'”

“Why don't you remember the phone bill?” Murphy pressed. “You see a document that exonerates somebody for a murder. I'm just trying to understand. It seems like that's not an everyday sort of thing.”

Murphy asked if Bailey had a copy machine in his office, which Box could have used, again noting the absence of the phone bill in the file. “It didn't occur to you to make a copy of the phone bill?”

As Box answered a series of related questions, Murphy diced his credibility, his memory, and his professionalism into slivers. Box couldn't definitively tell Murphy that he remembered seeing Eric's phone bill, or what it looked like. At one point, he was so tentative that he said, “I was told it was discovered he made a phone call.”

Under further questioning by Pohlson, Box said that to the best of his recollection, he was sure he'd seen the bill. However, he subsequently told the judge that he couldn't be absolutely sure.

 

 

For the moment, the bottom line of the hearing was this: After the attorneys stipulated that the calling-card bill could not be found, the judge decided that Bailey and Box could testify that they'd seen the bill, which meant that someone—not the defendant in particular—used a calling card to make the 8:52
P.M.
phone call. But only Eric himself could say he made the call, and to do that he would have to take the stand.

Although the defense essentially won its motion, this hearing did more to expose these witnesses' weaknesses to Murphy, which would only help him shred Box on cross-examination in front of the jury. By this point, Murphy had all the ammunition he needed to make the jury doubt there ever was a phone call, let alone a phone bill, or it surely would have been in the attorney's file.

CHAPTER 38

The seats in Judge Froeberg's courtroom quickly filled before opening statements began after lunch that day. As word spread throughout the courthouse, defense attorneys and prosecutors filtered in to watch the start of the high-profile trial, and Murphy's performance in particular.

In addition to the McLaughlin family members and friends, who had been waiting nearly two decades for this trial, the proceedings also drew well-heeled Orange County looky-loos who had heard about the case in the news. The media was there in force as well, taking up several rows of seats near the crowded power outlets.

During Murphy's two-hour presentation, he gave the jury a case overview with a timeline for the murder and a rundown of the relationships between the key players. The defense team decided to delay its opening until after the prosecution had rested.

Anticipating the defense's case based on points raised during the preliminary hearing and in the due process motion, the prosecutor deftly laid out the most damning evidence that implicated Nanette Packard in a conspiracy with Eric Naposki to shoot Bill McLaughlin for financial gain.

Characterizing Nanette as a greedy, unfeeling woman out for Bill's money, Murphy said, “Nanette asks very few questions of the officers at the scene. You're going to listen to this [interview] tape. She didn't ask to see Bill and she didn't cry.”

Murphy said the evidence would show that Eric not only stood to gain from Bill's death, but that the penniless football player had purchased a nine-millimeter Beretta 92F in August 1994—the same type of firearm that had killed Bill McLaughlin.

Noting that such guns cost about $700, Murphy said, “This gun is a beautiful gun in the gun world. It's Italian made. It's very popular,” adding that it was the same model used by heroes in movies such as
Die Hard
and
The Terminator.

Murphy described the layout around the McLaughlin house in Balboa Coves, including the locked gates and the barbwire fence that surrounded the community, which made it “a tough place to get in or out of,” he said.

Kevin McLaughlin didn't need a key, he pointed out, “because he was already in the house,” and he also tested negative for gunshot residue. Nanette, however, who was “an active Rollerblader,” was missing her key to the pedestrian-access gate.

As he flashed a series of crime scene photos on the overhead screen, featuring Bill's body on the white tile floor, with blood smears and scattered bullet casings around him, Kim McLaughlin covered her eyes.

“Three of the bullets remained in his body and three passed through his body,” Murphy explained, referring to the evidence that, in addition to the two keys, the killer left behind. “We know the killer escaped, which means he got to a car or he had someplace to run to.”

“Now, Nanette, . . . of course, she had keys to the house, but, in addition to keys, Nanette had a very big secret. And Nanette's secret was Eric Naposki,” he said, showing photos of the “happy couple.”

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.”

Summing 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.