“Nanette went as far as to tell me that he broke her arm or leg, and he used to beat her up pretty bad,” Billy said.
None of this could be confirmed through official sources, because Nanette never mentioned her stepfather’s name, but Billy said he believed her story.
“I’m imagining there’s something to it,” he said, because to his knowledge Stephanie was the only one of Nanette’s siblings who still talked to their mother. The others did not, apparently blaming their mother for allowing the alleged abuse.
Jimmy was in pharmaceutical sales, Billy said, and Stephanie taught grade school in Scottsdale, Arizona, where in the mid-1990s she got married. Michele lived in the Baltimore area. Before Michele had a baby in 2009, Billy said she’d worked in marketing at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
Unlike Nanette, who was obsessed with materialism and appearances, Billy said Nanette’s siblings “could[n’t] care less about money. They live humbly,” he said. Even Jimmy, who had done well in his sales career, “doesn’t live beyond his means.”
Nanette claimed to have graduated early from Greenway High School in Phoenix, leaving at sixteen and as the class valedictorian. Nanette purported to K. Ross—whom she met when she was seventeen and he was five years her senior—“that she had ROTC scholarships . . . and that her father wanted her to do that instead of marrying me,” he said.
According to Classmates.com, of which Nanette has been a member since 2001, she was in the class of 1983 at Greenway, where her classmates remembered her as “ambitious.” Because she didn’t come up in an online search of the 1982 or 1983 yearbooks, it looks like she dropped out sometime after 1981, the last year her photo appeared. She later went on to earn a GED, an unnecessary step for a valedictorian.
Nanette also claimed that she’d played on the basketball team (it’s unclear if she was referring to high school or college or both), noting that she and her teammates would get really hungry, then go out for hamburgers. But anyone who saw her try to dribble or shoot baskets as an adult could see that she lacked the skills to be a starter, and that she was better suited for the bench or helping out the team manager. That said, she did seem to know quite a bit about the game.
Nanette and Billy McNeal had been together less than a year when she took him to her twentieth high school reunion in 2003. Her former classmates seemed to recognize her, even though she looked quite different since they’d last seen her.
Once they were no longer together, Billy searched through Nanette’s personal belongings, looking for answers about the woman he’d thought he’d known. He found a checklist dating back to 1998, noting that she wanted her cheeks, chin, breasts, and nose done. Based on a comparison of recent photos with those taken during her late teens and early twenties, she seemed to have fulfilled her wish list.
Oddly, though, she vehemently insisted to Billy that her ample breasts were real. He said he didn’t know any better because he didn’t see any of the usual scarring he’d seen with previous girlfriends who’d admitted to having enhancement surgery.
“From day one, she said, ‘They’re real. They’re real. They’re real,’” he recalled in 2012.
But she went even further: She also posted a multicolored sparkly sticker with the message Yes, they’re real in her closet, and that sticker came with her whenever she moved to a new house.
Later he realized that she’d never shown him any photo older than 1999. “Obviously, that was intentional on her part,” he said.
Billy recalled a summer around 2007 when they made the annual pilgrimage to Delaware for the Maneckshaw reunion. About twenty relatives were hanging around the house, including Nanette’s three siblings, who were gathered together on the couch, paging through photo albums.
“Billy, you’ve got to see this picture,” they said, beckoning him over.
As he examined the snapshots of the girl with the short, curly dark brown hair, he sort of recognized Nanette as a teenager, then a little older, cradling a baby or two.
“Who do you think this is?” they asked.
“Oh, don’t show him those pictures,” Nanette said, laughing.
He couldn’t believe he was looking at the same woman. Nanette had apparently started coloring her hair blond early on, and later, while she was with Billy, she also had it chemically straightened every five months or so. But the girl in the photos looked really different.
“That’s crazy,” he said.
At the time, it didn’t register that the young Nanette was flat-chested in those photos, because he was focusing on her face. But she was dead set on keeping her secret.
Early in their relationship, Billy had expressed concern that Nanette’s left breast felt stiff and hard to the touch.
“You’ve got to get that checked out,” he told her.
Right before their son was born, he urged her more forcefully to talk to a doctor, because he wanted to see whether she could, in fact, breast-feed their baby. But Nanette dismissed his concerns, telling him that she’d already talked to a physician and there was no problem. Her breast had been this way at least since she’d had her third child, Jaycie.
“A breast can get hard from breast-feeding,” she said. Given that she was a mother, three times over, and he was about to have his first child, he didn’t question her further.
After Cruz was born, Billy saw her breast-feeding their son, so he didn’t worry any more about it. He didn’t put two and two together until later, when he found a letter showing that she’d sued the manufacturer of her silicone implants, which had gone bad, and had won a $10,000 settlement.
All of this to hide her breast implants showed just “how far she would go to perpetuate her stories, lies, whatever,” Bill said, adding that she also seemed to believe her own lies, which made them harder to detect.
Graduating high school early wasn’t a grand enough lie for Nanette. She also bragged that she’d graduated at nineteen from ASU. Her résumé from the early- to mid-1990s, which spelled her name with two n’s—as Nannette A. Johnston—stated that she’d earned a business administration degree there in 1984.
According to a university spokesperson, Nanette did apply to the college as an undergraduate, but she never enrolled in or attended any classes. Nanette apparently did visit the campus while she and K. Ross were married, but she may have just been walking around, trying to meet men.
Nanette also claimed that she’d earned advanced degrees, including an MBA from ASU. Her marriage license to John Packard stated that she had nineteen years of education.
Under the education section on her résumé, she listed the Bobby Ball Academy, which K. Ross paid for her to attend. According to the Arizona Republic, the academy offered training in acting, modeling and stunts to both children and adults. The talent school/agency was run by the late Roberta Helen Ball, who died at eighty-one in April 2009. Those skills must have come in handy when Nanette pretended to be someone she wasn’t.
Her résumé also listed Ford Schools, but it didn’t specify whether she meant the modeling school or the one that offered continuing education in health and insurance licensing and securities in Phoenix and Tucson.
Finally the résumé stated that she held a life, health, and disability license, which she did, in fact, obtain in 1986, when she lived in Mesa, Arizona. It expired in 1991.
K. Ross Johnston met Nanette Maneckshaw while they were both working at a Nautilus health spa in Arizona. She started there as an aerobics instructor, joined him in sales, and soon became a manager.
In a photo from that period, the short-haired Nanette wore a big grin as she held a game box labeled The SEX Education Game, which covered all but two words on the front of her orange-sleeved baseball shirt: I’m Kevin’s.
Other photos featured the young girl, with soft eyes and a quiet smile, looking almost shy and optimistic. Her unadorned, unrevealing, and almost tomboyish way of dressing as a teenager marked a stark contrast to her later style, which included pricey designer gowns and sh
ort strappy dresses, with plunging necklines that revealed cleavage and dipped down in the back.
K. Ross said neither of them made much money back then, noting that Nanette had about $2,000 when they got married in Mesa on November 11, 1983.
In their wedding photos, she looked wide-eyed and virginal in her simple, modest white veil and conservative white dress, which covered her arms with sheer fine netting, showed no cleavage, and was topped with lace that crept up her neck. The happy groom, who had brown hair and a thin, dark moustache, wore a white tuxedo with tails, a dark red bow tie, and a white ruffled shirt, with red edging. As they cut the four-tiered white cake, adorned with decorative wedding bells on the top layer, Nanette appeared to be quite content with her new husband.
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.
I'll Take Care of You Page 10