I'll Take Care of You (7 page)

CHAPTER 10

Following up on Kristofer's comment at the memorial service, the Newport Beach police kept an eye out for a strapping guy who looked like he played football.

The next afternoon, around four-twenty, they were watching Nanette and the Seashore Drive house when a man pulled up in a black Nissan Pathfinder, with New York license plates. Nanette's kids ran outside to greet the athletic-looking guy, and they all went inside together.

Who is New York boy?
Detective Dave Byington wondered from his post near the house.
The way those kids are hugging him, he must be a relative.

The undercover officers, who watched the man leave about ten minutes later, hopped into an unmarked car to follow him, alerting dispatch to have a marked car do a “cold stop,” once they found some kind of probable cause. That wasn't too hard, the vehicle code book was full of potential violations.

An officer in a patrol car subsequently stopped him, took his name and address, and ran a background check. The man said he was Eric Naposki, and that he lived in an apartment in Tustin. But after the police let him go, they followed him to a Ramada Inn, where they learned he was registered. Why had he lied to the detectives?

When they discovered he had an outstanding warrant for “failure to appear” on a $343 traffic violation, they had a legal excuse to bring him in for questioning.

Later that night, uniformed officers followed him to the Thunderbird nightclub, where he worked. After he got off at 2:00
A.M.
, they arrested him on the warrant, brought him to the city jail, and searched his car.

In his Pathfinder, they found a notebook that served as a journal and datebook planner.

Once you get your ass out of this financial disaster, do not overextend yourself anymore,
he wrote.

Two other notations read:
Look into work positions in Lido
and
Get Nanette Ring $2,500 so far—Why?
And a calendar showed that he was planning to propose on New Year's Day.

 

 

Sergeant Van Horn and Detective Voth arrived a couple of hours later. After being briefed about the items found in Eric's car, they read him his rights.

“Am I in trouble for something?” he asked.

“I hope not,” Voth replied.

“I hope not too, because I don't understand.”

Voth told him he would understand things better soon.

Eric said he'd recently started working at the Thunderbird, which had only just opened in Lido Village two or three weeks earlier. He ran through all the football teams with which he'd played briefly, as well as the local jobs he'd had in between, including physical trainer at the Sporting Club and head of security at the Metropolis sushi bar and nightclub, both in Irvine. He was in between apartments, he said, was carting his belongings around in his truck, and had been living at the Ramada Inn for the past day or so.

“What other kind of security work do you do?” Van Horn asked.

Eric said he worked as a bodyguard for private clients, such as a clothing manufacturer in Glendale, whom he occasionally accompanied to Mexico. He said he also worked security at some apartment complexes with another guy.

“I'm just now getting kind of into it, because football for me just really ended this year, because I was in Canada to play in the Canadian League, but I've had so many injuries,” he explained.

“Do you do any armed work?” Van Horn asked, meaning that he carried a gun.

“No, I don't do any armed,” Eric said.

“Not even in uniform?”

“No, even in uniform. I don't even have a sidearm. That takes at least six months to get.”

Asked about his relationship with Nanette, Eric described her as a “pretty good friend,” whom he'd met two and a half years earlier when he was running a kids' program at a gym in Irvine. He said he had two kids of his own, and that's why he and Nanette got along. They started working out together, and he also liked doing things with her kids. In fact, he'd just taken them Christmas shopping, he said, because Nanette had to move.

“She's going through some hard times this week,” he said, “so I told her I'd take the kids.”

“How about Bill McLaughlin?” Van Horn asked.

“I never met Bill.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I just know of him . . . and his, you know, his partnership with Nanette, as far as business goes and stuff like that.”

Eric said he didn't know anything more about Nanette's relationship with Bill and didn't believe it was his place to ask. “It wasn't like that. She didn't ask me about my ex-wife, and I didn't ask her about her ex-husband.”

Asked how he viewed Nanette's relationship with Bill, Eric said, “From what I gathered, it was kind of a mentor—almost like a father-daughter—type thing.... Nanette is a pretty smart girl. She's aggressive businesswise, and I think she learned a lot of that from Bill, you know, kind of like a . . . I don't know what you call it, apprentice, or someone, you know, like that or higher stature.”

“You didn't see it as a romantic relationship or a boyfriend-girlfriend?”

“No, I didn't,” Eric said.

Eric said she'd had boyfriends before she got romantically involved with Eric. As a matter of fact, even since they'd been dating, and he still didn't see them as being exclusive. “I wouldn't say [it's] a solo, total [relationship], like, I have girlfriends, you know, and people that I date also.” Rather, he said, he saw it as a “dating relationship that has potential, you know, to get better.”

“Do you think this is headed toward a serious relationship? A marriage or engagement or—” Van Horn asked.

“I hope it is, yeah.”

During the search of Eric's car, detectives also found a green towel with reddish brown marks, and a floor mat with brown stains.

“When the officer looked in your car, there's a towel there he says looks like [it] has blood on it,” Van Horn said. “Do you know what that is?”

Eric pointed to his chin. “Yeah, right here. See a little, it's a shaving nick.... I think I still have the scar.”

“I can't see a scar there,” Voth said.

“I got it the other day.”

“How long ago?”

“I'd say two days ago, when I shaved.”

“Okay, you said there's also some brown stains on the floor. Do you know what that is?”

“I have no idea.”

“Any blood or anything that's been in there?” Voth asked.

“No.”

Eric said he didn't know why they needed to search his car.

“We're investigating a murder,” Van Horn said.

“I want to be totally helpful to you guys, not play good guy/bad guy,” Eric said, “because I know I'm a good guy and I'm on the outside of this thing. I mean, I'm on your side.”

“Have you ever been to the house on Balboa Coves?” Van Horn asked.

“No,” Eric said, adding that he'd only been to the house on Seashore Drive, “like, one time, you know, and that was probably way back closer to when I first met her. I saw her down on the beach when she was out there.”

Asked where he was the night of December 15, he said he was with Nanette at the soccer game. Afterward, she dropped him off at his apartment in Tustin, where his truck was, “somewhere in the vicinity of nine, nine-fifteen. . . . [Then] I got dressed and went to work later on, probably around nine-thirty, quarter to ten.”

He said Nanette didn't come inside while he changed for work. “I was in a rush because I had to get to work and she was in a rush . . . to get to the mall.”

Asked for his typical work schedule, Eric said he might get to the Thunderbird at 8:00
P.M.
if he had a meeting, but not till 9:00 or 10:00
P.M.
if he didn't. But he said he didn't have a meeting that night. “No, we have a meeting tonight.”

“You said you don't own any firearms at all?” Van Horn asked.

“No, I bought one, [but] I haven't seen it in so long. I bought one in Dallas that I gave my dad. It was a .380, a little . . . I forgot what kind it was called. But my dad was mugged in New York, dropping asbestos off in the Bronx.”

Later in the interview, completely unsolicited—and before the murder weapon had even been analyzed by the crime lab—Eric brought up the fact that he'd bought a nine-millimeter Beretta about four or five months earlier. But he said the gun was stolen in June after he'd loaned it to a coworker, Joe David Jimenez.

“Had the gun three weeks, never fired it, never taken out,” Eric said. “He was supposed to get ammo.”

Eric said he'd never reported the gun stolen because he was hoping it would show up. “He could have sold the fuckin' thing, for all I know.”

Asked where he kept his belongings, Eric said they were in his car and hotel room at the moment.

He never inquired why the detectives had pulled him over on a traffic warrant in the middle of the night to question him about a murder, which Voth saw as a natural query from an innocent man.

The detectives gained Eric's consent to search his hotel room at the Ramada in Costa Mesa, where they found muddy shoes and a receipt for a $599 Movado watch, paid for in cash, at Bullock's in South Coast Plaza the morning of December 22. They also found his Wells Fargo bank statement for December showing a balance of only $956.

 

 

After one of Eric's friends posted bail for him, the police let him go, released his car to him, and continued their surveillance. They subsequently followed him to a storage facility in Tustin, which he'd never mentioned. They also got a call from a confidential informant who said Eric had rented a storage unit in Huntington Beach on December 20, and had requested that no one give out information about it.

By placing a tracking device on Eric's car, the detectives were able to find the storage unit in Huntington Beach. During a search there on January 19, police found the three motorcycles Nanette had paid for after Bill's funeral on December 21.

Working in private security, Eric clearly knew he was being tailed and began to use countersurveillance techniques—making abrupt U-turns, turning off his lights, or suddenly pulling over to the curb—which indicated to police that he had a guilty conscience.

A closer examination of Eric's notebook pages, which involved cross-checking Eric's statements with notations he'd entered in the journal chronologically, revealed that a series of letters and numbers—
2WWL034
—was written in early December, before the murder. Checking DMV records, they matched that entry to the license plate number for Bill McLaughlin's white Mercedes, which was parked in the garage in Balboa Coves when Bill was in town.

Why would Eric have Bill's plate number, they wondered, and how would he get it if he'd never been to the house? To Detective Voth, it meant that Eric was involved in the murder, and the detective's suspicions only increased as Eric continued to change his story.

 

 

The Orange County District Attorney's homicide division works as a “vertical unit” with law enforcement agencies. That means prosecutors and DA investigators are supposed to work closely with detectives, starting at the crime scene if possible.

For example, a prosecutor—and sometimes a DA investigator—might sit in on police interviews with witnesses or suspects, observing and passing notes with suggested questions. In some cases, a veteran DA investigator might even conduct the interview.

The night of the murder, Detective Bill Hartford called Deputy District Attorney Debora “Debbie” Lloyd, who was relatively new to the Homicide Unit, having transferred about a year earlier from the Sexual Assault Unit, and she signed off on the consent search of the house.

Within a week, Lloyd came down to the NBPD for a roundtable discussion with about eight of the police officials working the case. Lloyd was the only woman at the table. In her view, Nanette was the prime suspect.

“The evidence looked pretty strong that she was involved,” Lloyd, who has since retired, recalled recently. “They, on the other hand, were more interested in Naposki.”

At that point, she said, the detectives didn't “have a whole lot of information, but there was enough. I suspected that she did it, and maybe she had him help her, so that's kind of what I went away with.”

Lloyd received some updates from detectives in the beginning, she said, but because homicides were so rare in Newport Beach, she didn't know the detectives well and hadn't had much chance to work with them. She also got the sense that they didn't want her help—a belief she felt was confirmed when she asked a veteran DA investigator to offer his help in putting the case together.

“He came back and said they weren't interested in us getting involved,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh, man,' and there was nothing I could do because it wasn't our case. We can't take a case away from a police department.”

 

 

As the NBPD continued to check into the background of Eric Naposki, Detective Craig Frizzell talked with folks at the Sporting Club, an exclusive gym in Irvine, where Eric had worked as a fitness instructor for about three months in 1993 and where Nanette had also been a member. Eric had been fired for having a bad attitude and for threatening the staff after they had his motorcycle, which he'd knowingly parked illegally, towed away. Nonetheless, Eric returned to the gym to work out with Nanette, who paid for his $200 membership.

Frizzell interviewed two valets at the Thunderbird, who said that Eric routinely gave them his keys to park his car in a loading area rather than paying the $4 parking-garage fee. But neither of them could remember what time he came to work the night of the murder, or whether they'd parked his car.