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 thi
s?” 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.
“I’m paying the bills. I treat you nice. With respect,” he said. “You’re a whore. Why would you be looking elsewhere?”
“Because I have to,” she said. “You’ve made me do that.”
“We’re over,” he said.
He had no idea what would happen next. This was her house, after all. But before he had a chance to say that he was leaving her, she surprised him again.
“So what,” she said, “I’m leaving you. I’ve already got a place. You’re so stupid, you didn’t even know what’s going on. Why would I stay with someone who can’t even tell I’m cheating on them?”
Things escalated from there. In 2012, as he recounted the following events, he said some of the memories may have blended together from two separate incidents when the Newport Beach police were called in January 1991. However, this was his best recollection of what happened.
Nanette started packing and loading up her van, starting with his little TV.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “That’s mine. I paid for that.”
Nanette took the TV out of the van and purposely dropped it on the ground. The glass screen shattered—a warning of sorts. Then she turned around and walked into the house to get more stuff. He followed her up the stairs, hoping to get an explanation of what was happening.
She turned to him with a callous, snide expression and said, “I’ve got you by the cojones.”
Then she slapped the inside of her arm hard enough to leave a red mark. “You just did that,” she said.
“You fucking liar,” he said.
But he was taken aback even more when she flew at him in a flurry of fists, knees, and feet. It was all he could do to fend her off. He threw her down on the couch to get her off him.
Oh, my God, she’s setting me up, he thought.
He ran upstairs to the master bedroom to get away from her and try to process what was going on. In the meantime, she called the police.
When the cops arrived, Nanette told them that Reynolds had attacked her.
“He assaulted me for no reason,” she said.
Reynolds tried to explain to the police what had happened, just as he did several years later when they questioned him during the McLaughlin murder investigation.
“She was actually assaulting me,” he said. “I actually pushed her away. She went down on the couch.”
Police didn’t immediately arrest Reynolds that first time in 1991. They tried to tell him to leave the house and cool off somewhere, but Reynolds was insistent that they understand his side of the story.
“Wait a minute,” he said, “she did this.”
“Don’t make me tell you again,” the officer said. “Hit it. Walk on down the sidewalk. Go to a friend’s.”
Reynolds tried again. “But wait a minute. You don’t understand.”
When he wouldn’t leave, as instructed, the police arrested him on charges of domestic violence and kept him overnight in the lockup.
“All of a sudden, there’s this just vicious, hating person, lying or saying you’re a loser, and I’m trying to explain things to police,” he recalled recently.
He came home the next morning, but because he didn’t have his keys, he had to climb through the window. Nanette didn’t return for a couple of days, and he later learned that she’d claimed she’d been in the hospital with an injury to her spleen.
In 1994, Reynolds acknowledged to Newport Beach police that after they’d arrested him in 1991, someone from the DA’s office said they had to file charges against him. But he also said he’d watched Nanette sign paperwork at the DA’s office, admitting that the fight was mutual and that her injuries were unintentional. However, he still had to attend a diversion program, and the charges were expunged after six months.
In 2012, the NBPD had no record of the 1991 arrest, because it shreds records after a certain period of time, unless they pertain to a homicide. Reynolds said he didn’t keep any of his paperwork, because this was not an incident he wanted to remember, and no criminal court records of this incident exist today.
According to family court records filed by K. Ross Johnston in 1998, Nanette called him after Reynolds was arrested, asking K. Ross to pick up the kids because she was going to the hospital after fighting with Reynolds, and he was going to jail. Those records also quote K. Ross as saying that Nanette filed charges against Reynolds, but then dropped them. This wasn’t technically accurate, but it did support Reynolds’s story.
While Nanette was purportedly in the hospital, Reynolds said he met with K. Ross, who brought a six-inch-thick file of incriminating evidence against Nanette. “He came over to my house and he wanted copies of everything I had,” Reynolds recalled.
K. Ross told him he was interested in getting something on Nanette in case they had custody issues and she tried to stop him from seeing the kids. The two men shared some of the same stories about hearing unfamiliar male voices on the answering machine and her lies about going to business meetings at night when she was really out on dates with other men. Reynolds now knew where his missing $2,500 in Las Vegas winnings had gone.
Soon after that, Reynolds came home from work to find Nanette loading the new furniture he’d recently purchased into her van.
“You try and stop me,” she said, “and I’ll have you arrested again.”
Accepting the dare, Reynolds called the police himself this time. When the officers arrived, Nanette tried to enlist them in helping her take his furniture.
“He’s on probation. He’s assaulting me,” she said. “Get him away from me.”
Reynolds told police to wait, because he had receipts for these items. Once he brought them proof, the officers told Nanette she needed to leave everything in the house, except her clothing and personal belongings. She’d have to fight Reynolds in civil court for the rest.
Even so, Nanette managed to get away with another television set. “That’s my TV,” she told police.
Days later, Reynolds demanded that she bring back his TV. She did as he asked, then seduced him on the living-room floor. Reynolds chalked this up to irrational and lustful breakup sex, thinking to himself, Why not?
“She just had her way,” he recalled recently. “She was very good at the things that she did.”
Not long afterward, Reynolds looked out his kitchen window to see Nanette making out with Dan, the contractor who had remodeled the duplex and had left that message on their answering machine.
“Do you think that [make-out session] was for your benefit?” Detective Voth asked Reynolds in 1994.
“I think so,” he said.
By this point, Reynolds was $91,000 in debt, part of which came from a $10,000 “marker” that his Mirage casino host told him about after the breakup. Apparently, Nanette had charged that amount to his account without his knowledge. Reynolds had to file for bankruptcy.
After Bill McLaughlin’s murder in 1994, K. Ross’s girlfriend, Julia, suggested that Detectives Voth and Hartford contact Reynolds, which they did.
During the interview, they told Reynolds that Nanette had, in fact, found her wealthy man—one worth about $55 million.
“He’s now dead,” Hartford said. “Died at the hand of somebody else.”
“I’m not surprised,” Reynolds said, adding that he’d had his suspicions as soon as he heard about the murder on the news. He’d even called the Orange County jail to see if they had an inmate named Nanette Johnston.
“She was extremely manipulative,” he said.
CHAPTER 15
To Detective Tom Voth, the two keys left in the McLaughlins’ front door and on their doormat seemed “key” to solving this c
ase, because so few people had access to them. One of the keys was embossed with an Ace Hardware logo; the other key was simply stamped Ace.
“You’re boiling down to family, and friends of family, and Nanette,” he recalled in 2011. Although the housekeeper, Mary Berg, kept a house key pinned to the inside of her shirt, Voth saw no benefit to her killing Bill. Besides, she was never given a key to the pedestrian-access gate.
“It put the suspects into a little package, a percentage of less than one percent in the world,” he said, which got even smaller once the McLaughlin sisters passed their polygraphs.
Voth suggested to one of his supervisors that he take the keys to area hardware stores and show them a photo lineup featuring Eric, but he was told he would be wasting his time.
“Who’s going to remember who’s getting a key made?” the supervisor asked.
But Voth was determined to figure out the keys’ origin. Searching through the phone book, he found an Ace Hardware store on West Main Street in Tustin, called Tustin Hardware, right down the street from Eric’s apartment.
He went there and showed the keys to manager David Vandaveer, who said they used the same type of “blanks” as the one Voth showed him, embossed with the national chain’s Ace logo. Although he said they usually stamped the store name and phone number on the back of their key copies, he said, they’d recently sold some without the stamp, like this one. Vandaveer later testified that he thought the key had been made in his store because of the way it was cut: he had a higher-quality key-cutting machine that cost three times more than machines used by other stores.
When Voth showed him the photo lineup, Vandaveer recognized Eric right away.
“Yeah, I know this guy right here,” he said, which surprised Voth as much as it did his supervisor. “This guy is from New York. He works for me.”
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