I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  The beach house on Seashore Drive was also going to be hers, she told Sharp. It was just a matter of time. “Glenn, be patient,” she said. “Within six months, I’m going to own this beach house outright.”

  At first, Sharp was sucked in by Nanette’s spiel. “It was five months of living on the edge. She had a lot of money. I guess Bill McLaughlin was very wealthy. She took me to a lot of places, told me about a lot of things that she was doing. For me, I got kind of caught up in living in the fast lane in Newport Beach.”

  Asked how she would deal with a sudden loss of income, Sharp replied, “She couldn’t handle it. I don’t think I could have ever seen Nanette working a nine-to-five job.”

  Sexually, she could get wild, he said, and be rather, well, “extroverted.” To a virile young man like him, that was pretty exciting.

  “Would you call her deviant?” Hartford asked.

  “Yeah, she had some kinky ways about her,” he said.

  “Anytime, anywhere, anyplace. I think that certain things represented a challenge to her. She liked to play with fire, in other words—see how far she could push it to the end of the envelope.”

  Although she claimed Bill was just her boss, Sharp said, “it always seemed to me that she appeared to be more to him than just a business associate.” She and Bill went on a two- or three-week cruise-and-dive trip to the South Pacific, for example, and took numerous excursions in Bill’s private plane.

  After a while, Sharp questioned her claim that she was just renting a room in Bill’s house—but not too closely, because he was enjoying himself.

  “For me, she was just fun to date,” he said. “She wasn’t putting any kind of pressure on me.” But he eventually realized that “she was just jerking my chain.”

  He also began to take note of some rather troubling and puzzling stories she told him. For instance, she described a rocky relationship with her ex-husband, whom Sharp met at a Little League game. Nanette alleged that K. Ross “would expose himself to her when she would drop the kids off over at his residence—things of that nature. Always trying to make him out to be a little bit of a deviant.”

  To Sharp, it seemed as if “things were going on in her head that maybe had happened in her past, maybe things she was dealing with, as far as her childhood or her growing up. She just seemed like, at times, that she was very angry about things. Very angry.”

  Nanette also lied to Sharp about being pregnant with his child.

  “I know that she was a very, very disturbed young woman,” he told Hartford. “It was all just one big lie.”

  She regaled Sharp with stories about Bill as well, saying that he’d spent time in Vietnam in the early 1960s in a clandestine unit, and had had a hard time dealing with that. “He was basically an alcoholic,” she told Sharp. “She said he could be violent when he drank. He could get very upset.”

  Having never met Bill, Sharp didn’t know what to believe, but he never saw anything in the well-kept house that supported her claims or indicated that Bill was a destructive person.

  After five months, Sharp decided he’d had enough. He and Nanette had gone out for dinner and dancing at Peter’s Landing, a collection of restaurants on the marina in Huntington Beach, which is between Newport Beach and Long Beach. Sharp had to work the next morning in Long Beach, so they left his car at the gym and drove to the restaurant in her car.

  During dinner, Nanette got irritated with the way he’d called over the waitress to bring them drinks.

  “I don’t know exactly what was on her mind that night,” he recalled. “You never knew what Nanette was thinking at times. And she just went off [and] left me. Literally, left me there.”

  He went outside to wait by her car to get a ride back to his vehicle, and she kept him waiting there for quite some time. She closed the club at two or two-thirty in the morning before meeting him at the car, where they “got into it.”

  “She tried to back over me with the car, with the car door open, then proceeded to leave the scene and then came back,” he recalled.

  After some persuasion, she agreed to drive him back to get his car at the gym, but it started all over again, once they got there. She stopped, got out of the car, and he had to “fend her off. I knocked her down, basically, getting her away from me,” he said.

  As he jumped into his car, she grabbed his door and got her hand caught as he was closing it. “It was everything I could do to get the door back open, and get her away from me so I could get out of that parking lot.”

  When Nanette threatened to call the police, Sharp challenged her to follow through.

  “Well, why don’t you?” he demanded.

  But she didn’t carry out her threat, nor did they see each other again, which was fine with him.

  “I think she stopped seeing me or didn’t really ever push anything because she didn’t want Bill to find out,” he recalled.

  That said, she continued to call him at the fire station. After the second call, he warned her that he would contact Bill if her harassment continued, and the calls stopped.

  He saw her at the gym sometime later, when she made a point of flaunting herself in a flirtation with a construction worker named Bart, for whom she’d always had a thing. But by that point, Sharp didn’t care.

  “Her bubble just didn’t go to the top, so to speak,” he said.

  Pausing, Sharp posed a question to Hartford that he’d been wanting to ask about all these queries concerning him and Nanette and the late Bill McLaughlin.

  “Is it okay to ask how he passed on?” Sharp asked.

  “He was murdered.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear about that, because from what I knew about Bill, he was a good family man.”

  A couple of months later, the Newport Beach police got a call from Richard Baker, a forty-two-year-old businessman who had seen the news stories and wanted to help.

  Baker told Detectives Voth and Byington that he’d met Nanette in February 1992 (shortly before Sharp) while in-line skating on the boardwalk near 14th and Oceanfront in Newport. Nanette was there with her son, Kristofer, when she and Baker started talking. He gave her his phone number and she called him.

  “I don’t think I should be doing this,” Nanette said mysteriously.

  She told Baker the same story, that she lived with a wealthy man named Bill McLaughlin, with whom she had a purely platonic business relationship.

  “He’s a mentor. We have everything in writing,” she said, adding that she got a certain percentage of the business deals they did together.

  She seemed very intelligent, so he didn’t question her story that she’d graduated from ASU with a 4.0 grade point average. At the time, Baker recalled, he had no reason to disbelieve her.

  By the sound of it, Nanette had big plans and was already off to a good start. She said she’d made her money through a business deal involving a company that made plastic hairbrushes, which absorbed water from hair, and showed him some samples. She’d bought the company for $250,000 of her own money, she said, then sold it for more than $1.1 million within four months.

  Bill, she said, received about $4 million in royalties each year, of which she was interested in “draining off” about $1 million. She also said she’d kicked in $400,000 toward Bill’s second house, a $1.2 million property on Seashore Drive, and she intended to buy out Bill’s majority share.

  Given that Baker’s job involved working with big corporations, he saw Bill as a potential source of funding and wanted to meet him. He asked at least five times, but Nanette never made it happen.

  At some point, Baker started noticing that some of her claims were inconsistent. Why, if Bill was paying her so much and they were dealing with such big-dollar amounts, did she buy a computer and start learning how to use Quicken accounting software, which was geared toward households and small businesses?

  It also seemed odd to him that when she gave him photos of herself, she always asked for them back, saying she wanted to give them to her fa
ther.

  But she really seemed to like Baker, spending hundreds of dollars each month on daily cell phone calls to him. And after they’d been dating for about six weeks, she took him to Arizona to attend a high-school friend’s wedding.

  Of course, there was also plenty of sex. They slept together in her downstairs bedroom at Balboa Coves, but she never took him upstairs. They had sex about ten times there, and additional times at the beach house, but only at night, when the house was empty, and Bill was out of town.

  Baker got into Balboa Coves by driving through the main gate off Pacific Highway, using the code Nanette gave him to get in, and entering the house through the garage door. He rang the doorbell or knocked on the front door, and Nanette let him in through the garage by hitting the remote opener from the inside.

  “She had the power of a man, which she has developed well,” he told detectives. “Makes you drop your defenses very easily. She’d use her kids a lot to help her do that. Her kids are part of her arsenal.”

  But things apparently backfired with Baker. “Her son started calling me ‘Daddy’ a couple of times,” he recalled, and “all of a sudden, things changed.... The kids were getting too attached to me.”

  Nanette also didn’t like Baker chatting with her ex-husband at Kristofer’s baseball games.

  “She always wanted to keep us away from each other,” he said. “She got really upset and tried to stop that from happening, as though he would find out what she was doing.”

  By May 1992, Nanette was acting strange and distant. Then she sent Baker a letter, saying a friend had come to town and she no longer had feelings for Baker. He didn’t get it, so when she called and later sent him a Christmas card, he didn’t respond.

  “I just avoided her,” Baker said. “I turned and I never came back.”

  Sometime after they stopped seeing each other, he saw Nanette “all kissy-face” with a big guy, right in front of Baker, at a gym called Club Met-Rx. Baker was quite surprised when he saw the news stories about Bill’s murder.

  Nanette had a purpose for the men with whom she chose to be involved, Detective Byington told Baker. “She uses some people for fun, some people for finances,” he said.

  But her interaction with Baker, he said, was one of the closest to a relationship they’d seen.

  Other than Eric Naposki, that is, who was likely the big guy Baker had seen kissing Nanette at Club Met-Rx.

  Once detectives obtained Nanette’s various records—from her car phone, for example—they took note of a few telling calls from the night of the murder, as well as some other curious activity. Back in those days, mobile-phone bills were nowhere as detailed as they are today. For one thing, they did not list originating numbers for incoming calls, only the time and duration.

  On December 8, 1994, a call was made to the Jewelry Exchange in Tustin. When police went through Eric’s notebook, they found a notation in the journal for December 23 that stated the diamond store on the same page as Insurance New York. He also had the store’s business card in his wallet, which indicated they were ring shopping—together.

  From that, they extrapolated that some of those entries were made before they flew back east over Thanksgiving. (After minimizing their relationship to the police in 1994 as “not solo, total,” he confirmed** in 2011 that he and Nanette had been talking about getting married and were ring shopping around December 1994.)

  On the day of the murder, the detectives learned, Nanette had purchased a $364 pair of horned alligator boots and a matching belt, exchanging a cheaper pair of black lizard boots she’d bought two weeks earlier for the nicest boots in the store.

  “These are for my boyfriend, who plays in the NFL,” she told the clerk.

  Later that night, at eight twenty-four, a call was made from Nanette’s car to pick up voice mail messages, followed by a call a minute later to a number that was one digit off Eric’s business phone.

  At 9:52 P.M., Nanette’s car phone received a two-minute call, just minutes after she was done shopping and before she pulled up to the house. This could have been an “all-clear” or “done-deal” message, signaling that it was okay to return to Balboa Coves.

  Police believed that Nanette checked her voice mail at 8:24 P.M. as she and Eric were driving toward Newport Beach. She dropped Naposki off somewhere—it’s unclear where, although they both claimed that she took him to his apartment—but police believed she probably dropped him at the bridge next to Balboa Coves before she sped off to the mall.

  The detectives found it curious that shortly after they interviewed her and escorted her back to the Seashore house at 12:51 A.M., she went outside to retrieve her messages from her car phone at 1:36 A.M. Nanette then called Eric’s pager at 1:37 A.M. rather than using the landline inside. Was this so the call wouldn’t show up on the bill, or was she driving while talking? The detectives believed it was the latter, because she got a four-minute incoming call two minutes later.

  The detectives timed the drive, and it took four minutes to get from the Seashore house to the Thunderbird, which was about 450 feet—a little longer than a football field, or a two-and-a-half-minute walk—from the McLaughlin house. Eric had just started working at the nightclub on December 1. Coincidence?

  Police believed it was Eric who called Nanette back at 1:39 A.M., and that she picked him up at the Thunderbird. They don’t know whether she took him home to his apartment in Tustin, or back to the house rented by his friend and on-and-off-roommate, Leonard Jomsky, where Eric may have parked his truck, as he later claimed.

  Either way, the records showed she called him at his apartment at 9:09 A.M. later that day.

  CHAPTER 13

  It wasn’t all that easy to piece together the intimate details of Nanette Anne Maneckshaw Johnston Packard’s life, especially her childhood and formative years. The few close friends and family who were still standing by her formed a pact not to talk to anyone, apparently to keep her background private and her secrets from being revealed.

  “They’re a close family, but they don’t like to address issues,” said Billy McNeal, her third husband, whose last name she never took.

  Keeping secrets has always had an underlying purpose for Nanette. As she progressed from one stage of her life and one con to the next, it’s evident that she tried to keep her various groups of friends and associates away from each other, to prevent them from comparing stories. This enabled her to perpetually reinvent herself and to tell different stories in different situations to her benefit, so much so that it was difficult for the people who knew her—or thought they knew her—to determine what was fact and what was fiction.

  “It’s crazy the lengths she went to to create these stories and compartmentalize everything,” Billy said. “It was the perfect puzzle no one could ever put together.”

  Despite Nanette’s efforts to keep the truth hidden, however, in the end she couldn’t hide who she really was: a person who spun a web of deceit, told tall tales of the person she truly wanted to be, and adopted the accomplishments of the people she most admired.

  In the final analysis, it seems that what she really wanted was to be someone successful and respected—and, most of all, someone other than herself.

  On July 3, 1965, in Chicago, Nanette was the first child born to Adi and Margaret “Marge” Ann Maneckshaw.

  Now in his early seventies, Adi immigrated to the United States from Bombay, India, on a thirty-day voyage aboard the Queen Mary, during which he had to eat so much spaghetti that he vowed never to eat it again.

  From photos, Marge, whose maiden name was Johnson, appears to have had reddish brown hair and freckles. She graduated in the class of 1961 from the now-defunct Alvernia High School, an all-girls Catholic school run by the School Sisters of St. Francis, on the Northwest Side of Chicago.

  Adi’s dark complexion and Indian features were passed on to Nanette’s brother and two sisters. Nanette has her father’s dark eyes, but her skin tone and hair seem lighter than her siblings�
��. Nanette also appears to have inherited her mother’s nose, chin, and facial shape, features that she wanted to alter through cosmetic surgery.

  Nanette’s oldest daughter, Lishele, whose married name is Wigand, is a brunette with an even lighter complexion than Nanette. A trace of her Indian heritage is still visible in her features, but she seems more proud of and open about them than her mother was.

  In Lishele’s cooking blog, “Nutrish by Lish,” she took note of her family’s ethnic ancestry, sharing recipes such as curry crusted chicken. The dish’s caption read: Since I am Indian, I have to master the curry dishes! (She also noted that I met my husband in church and married him quickly.)

  Adi and Marge had four children: Nanette, Michele, Jimmy, and Stephanie, in that order. They apparently moved to Maryland at some point, and the couple ultimately got divorced. Nanette later told Billy McNeal that while she was growing up, she and her brother fought with her father.

  “Lots of drama,” said Billy, who described Nanette, Michele, and Jimmy as “kind of aggressive,” compared to Stephanie, who was a “meek, little peacemaker.”

  Adi, an engineer who worked at the Pentagon, subsequently married a mother of three named Carol, with whom he’s been ever since. Adi and Carol now live in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where their grown children and extended family come together for a reunion every summer.

  After her parents split, Nanette and her siblings moved to Arizona with their mother. Over time, Nanette apparently healed any old wounds from fights with her father, because she had a number of photos featuring the two of them together in family reunion portraits. Nanette, whom Billy characterized as the “mother hen” of her siblings, was still talking by phone with Michele and Jimmy every other week in 2009. That closeness did not exist with her mother, however, from whom Nanette, Michele, and Jimmy had long been estranged.

  Billy said Marge Johnson worked as a teacher and later as a probation officer for juvenile offenders in the Phoenix area. At some point, Marge hooked up with a man who Nanette later claimed had inflicted extreme physical abuse on her and her brother. Nanette told Billy that her stepfather had also abused alcohol and drugs, sexually abused one of her siblings, and went to prison for a while on drug-related charges.