I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  “He seems pretty easygoing to me,” she said. “I grew up with somebody who had a really bad temper.”

  The night of the murder, she said, she dropped Eric off at his apartment because he was in a hurry to get to work. “He was supposed to be at work at, like, eight, and our game ran him late.... He said he was going to take a shower and stuff because he . . . had a baseball cap on . . . and he wasn’t dressed.”

  While she was Christmas shopping at the mall that night, she said, she stopped to look at sports coats in the men’s department at Nordstrom, because Bill had said he wanted one. But “their prices are outrageous,” so she didn’t buy one. She went to Crate & Barrel, then to Bullock’s, and then headed home when the mall started to close.

  Asked if she ever threw her keys to Eric and let him drive her car without her, she said no. Nor had he ever driven any of Bill’s cars, or been to Balboa Coves.

  In long, evasive, and vague statements, she again minimized her interest in guns. She said she had no personal knowledge of Eric’s “gun or guns or whatever guns he may or may not have had, other than what he’s told me, you know, that somebody lost one or this or that . . . and that was only, like I mentioned, in passing.”

  “Has Eric ever told you he was going to go to a range to shoot or anything like that?”

  “He mentioned going to a range one time,” she said, neglecting to tell them that he took her with him.

  “When was that?”

  “I really don’t remember, just a long time ago.”

  “Six months, a year ago?”

  “He mentioned that he wanted to teach me how to shoot, you know, for, like, self-protection. . . . I don’t like guns.... I have shot one once, when I was young, and it scared me a lot ’cause my stepdad let me shoot and it, like, kicked me all the way back, so that was the context on which it came up.”

  “So, basically, you tell him you don’t want to do that?”

  “I don’t have very much interest in that. I figure I don’t have any need. My thoughts on that are if you have one in your house, you’re more than likely to get shot with it yourself. So I had no intention of keeping one under the mattress.”

  “Did Eric ever ask you, maybe, about keeping a gun here or bring a gun over?”

  “No, uh-huh.”

  “As far as you knew, he never had a gun when he was with you?”

  “No.”

  Jackson pointed out that she wouldn’t get any life insurance settlement if they found out she was implicated in this murder.

  “Well, you’re not going to find me implicated, because I’m not, so the only way you could find that is by fabricating it,” she said.

  “I’m not going to fabricate anything,” Jackson said. “I don’t want to have to yank you away from your kids, but if I find you’re lying to us or you’re an accessory—and ‘accessory’ can mean different things. You can plan the murder, or once you knew . . . this murder happened, you—in some way—don’t tell us everything . . . because you feel for Eric. I know you do. It’s obvious when you talk about him, your eyes get all misty, and that’s fine. He means a lot to you. But if I find you are covering up for him somehow, we will come after you.”

  “Well, you won’t because I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I have been trying to help you in any way that I can.... When Detective Voth told me, ‘Oh, well, somebody ID’d Eric in a gun store with a woman . . . ,’ I’m, like, well, that’s garbage because I was never in any gun store. If anybody ID’d me in any gun store, they’re totally lying. Or you’re lying.... I don’t want to be railroaded into something because you’re lacking leads in other areas.”

  Jackson warned Nanette that they would not stop working this case, and he urged her to try to help them solve it rather than lie to them. Then he made this prescient statement: “If you’re hard-core and you think you’re streetwise, and you’re gonna pull the wool over our eyes . . . maybe you might for a little while, [but] we’ll catch up to you.”

  The next day, Detective Frizzell called Eric to confront him about why he had Bill’s license plate number scribbled into his notebook.

  “It was about me doing some checking why the guy was knocked off, if my girl was in trouble,” Eric replied.

  Eric said he wasn’t sure when he wrote down the number, “but I know I wrote it down, ’cause I got a phone call from a buddy of mine . . . soon after that.”

  Pressed further, Eric paused and said, “Ah, I don’t want to go into my sources.”

  “So somebody gave it to you?” Frizzell asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  In 2011, Eric told police that he’d had his friend Todd Calder follow Nanette back in October 1994, when he was having some trust issues with her, and Calder relayed the Mercedes plate number back to Eric. This statement was essentially an admission that before the murder, he did know where Bill had lived. How else would Eric have the plate number in his journal among items he wrote in December?

  But when Calder was questioned by police about Eric’s story, he told investigators that he’d never been to Bill’s house for any reason. In fact, Calder got so angry that Eric had said he was involved, Calder wanted to go down to the jail and confront Eric about it.

  Eric’s response: Calder didn’t want to get involved, so he lied to police.

  CHAPTER 18

  In contrast to Nanette, who was not only secretive about her past but also fabricated much of it, Eric Naposki’s life was much more open to scrutiny.

  He was born in Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan on December 20, 1966, and grew up in the Bronx with his single mom, Ronnie. He never met his biological father, Joel Boyce, and had no father figure until he was nine, when Ronnie married John Naposki. After that, his family grew by one half sister, Angela, who was about twelve years younger, and two half brothers, John and Frankie—the latter of whom ultimately committed suicide.

  Eric grew up as a standout athlete, playing baseball, football, and basketball with John Pappalardo, a friend with whom he forged a relationship that would last for decades. After Pappalardo became a defense attorney, their definition of “team strategy” took on a whole new meaning as their friendship was tested on a field bigger than any Little League diamond.

  Eric and John met while playing pitcher and shortstop on the Navajos, a team in the Tuckahoe Youth Association. John was about seven, Eric was a little older, and Eric’s stepfather coached the team. The boys also played five seasons of Pop Warner football together with the Eastchester Blue Devils.

  “Even back then, he was the most gifted athlete in the league,” Pappalardo recalled recently as he sat in the courthouse cafeteria in Santa Ana, adding that he still had video of Eric carrying opponents on his back as they tried to tackle him.

  Eric attended high schools in Tuckahoe and Yonkers, finally landing at Eastchester High School, about twenty-five minutes outside New York City, where he played linebacker, tight end, and running back during his senior year in 1983 and 1984.

  “He was an animal on defense,” said Chris Fiore, who was a year behind Eric in school, and played against him on football, baseball, and basketball teams when they were growing up. By 2012, Fiore had gone on to become Eastchester High’s assistant principal.

  The educator reminisced about Eric in almost sports-hero terms. “He was always striving for greatness. He was a very hard worker, kind of a blue-collar guy. He wouldn’t complain. He would just go, do his job, put in his time. He knew success was going to take hard work, and he was willing to put in that work.... He had a plan and he didn’t deviate from that plan. He didn’t take shortcuts.”

  Off the field, Fiore said, Eric had a reserved demeanor and a quiet confidence. “To people who didn’t know him, he really wasn’t loud. He wasn’t showy. He really didn’t look for attention. He wasn’t trying to bring it on himself—almost an unassuming kind of person.”

  Fiore said Eric was a popular, good-looking, and respectful guy with a “laid-back, friendl
y nature” when he wasn’t suited up, a contrast to the powerhouse people saw during games.

  “He didn’t seem to have an anger issue in dealing with people or situations. You didn’t really see it in him unless he was out on the field . . . where his aggression would come into play,” he said. “He was so freakishly big and fast. [At a time when other players were] either big or fast, he was both. So he was kind of an anomaly. He was big enough to throw you down and fast enough to chase you down.”

  Eric’s performance on the high-school team must have caught the attention of some scouts, because he was offered scholarships to the University of New Hampshire and the University of Connecticut (UConn). He chose to play for the UConn Huskies, a Division 1–AA team in the Yankee Conference, and became an “all-time letter-winner.”

  On a visit home, Eric went for a drink at Pat’s, a neighborhood bar where high-school alumni hung out, hoping to catch a glimpse of former classmates. Chris Fiore, who had always looked up to Eric, noticed a few physical developments in him that night.

  “Once he went to college, he really changed,” Fiore recalled, noting that was when the rumors started that Eric was taking steroids. (Eric admitted in a jailhouse interview in 2012** that in college he’d “used steroids a little bit, and that was about it.”)

  Fiore had heard reports that Eric had also developed a temper. “He just became huge, an absolute monster. I don’t know how you get that big. He had muscles. I’m sure that’s where some of the anger stemmed from,” he said.

  In the years after that, Fiore said, Eric stayed very muscular. “When he had a brief stint with the Jets [in 1990], he was still pretty big,” he said. “I think I came up to his chest. It was like standing in front of a wall.”

  During Eric’s sophomore year at UConn, his girlfriend, Kathy O’Connell, whom he had known since the fifth grade in Tuckahoe, got pregnant. They were married in November 1985. The problem was that football players on scholarship, even fathers-to-be, weren’t allowed to work.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to support myself,” Eric told the head coach, Tom Jackson, who, according to Eric, promised to help find him a good summer job.

  But Eric claimed he didn’t get the financial help he needed, so he had problems putting food on the table for his wife and baby, Krista, who was born in June 1986.

  After Eric suffered a separated shoulder during his third season, he took off one game to recover for the upcoming Homecoming match against Boston University. When he went back to practice, Coach Jackson told him he wasn’t part of the starting roster anymore. His replacement had done pretty well—better, in fact, than Eric.

  Eric spent most of the Homecoming game on the bench, because the coach didn’t want to send him in until the last part of the game. By that point, Eric, who was still nursing his shoulder, felt there wasn’t much point to chancing a reinjury in the closing minutes of the game. With that in mind, he said he didn’t want to play.

  The tensions between him and Jackson continued during the next practice, when Eric ultimately walked off the field, feeling like he was “being treated like shit” by the coach.

  “Why are you home?” Kathy asked when he walked in the door early.

  “I quit,” he said. “I’m not playing football anymore. I have no money. I’m going to go out and get a job.”

  At the time, he said, they had about thirteen cents in the bank, and Kathy wasn’t working because she was taking care of Krista. That night, Eric’s team members came over and tried to persuade him to come back. It almost worked. That is, until he talked to his mother, who had called the coach to find out what was going on.

  The message she relayed to Eric—or at least how he heard it—was “Your son isn’t good enough to play anymore. The guy who took his place is better.”

  Eric was offended, not just by the message, but also because the coach had delivered it to his mother and not to him personally. When Coach Jackson asked him to come back, Eric said no.

  “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do for my family,” Eric said.

  In 2009, Jackson told the Hartford Courant, “[Eric] was a very good player, but at the time I had him, he was kind of immature and thought he would do it his way.”

  The day Eric quit the team in the fall of 1986, he landed a job as a trainer at a local gym. And that spring, he signed up for the U.S. Army Reserve to earn some extra money. He also enrolled in its college loan repayment plan.

  “I wanted a challenge, a possible secondary career,” he said.

  He went through boot camp at Fort Benning, Georgia, for ten weeks that summer, where he learned “everything that’s necessary to be a soldier,” from firing machine guns, rifles, and rocket launchers to shining boots.

  “They teach you how to shoot people,” he said. “That’s their job.”

  Tired of being yelled at in boot camp, he decided he wanted to be an officer, so he also joined the ROTC in August 1987. Being in both the Reserve and the ROTC, known as the Simultaneous Membership Program, meant that he could graduate as a first lieutenant rather than a private first class or a sergeant, and earn more money doing it.

  “You learn to tell people to blow people up,” he recalled in 2011**, using words that would prove revealing later.

  Still working as a trainer, he thought it would be smart to stay involved in organized athletics. In the fall of 1987, he tried out for the UConn basketball team—and made it.

  So began the routine of getting up at 4:30 A.M. to run with the ROTC, then lifting weights and doing conditioning with the basketball team at 3:00 P.M.

  But this regimen didn’t last long. During practice one day, he sprained his ankle, “because linebackers shouldn’t play basketball,” he said. “I overburdened myself, but you can’t say I didn’t try.”

  In the spring of 1988, Eric still had NFL aspirations. When he saw a professional football agent timing players running the forty-yard dash, Eric bet the agent a cup of coffee that if he could run it in 4.5 seconds, the agent had to sign him. Eric won the bet.

  Eric was never an All-American or an All-Conference player at UConn. But still smarting from his fallout with Coach Jackson, he felt he had something to prove.

  When the annual open tryout for the New England Patriots came around that April at Sullivan Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, Eric decided to go for it. But because he hadn’t gone through the proper process of getting an invitation, he snuck onto the field through an opening in the fence, grabbed a number at the check-in desk, and pinned it on his chest. He ran a 4.52.

  By the end of the day, he said, 205 guys had tried out. It came down to him and one other athlete, and Eric was chosen. His agent, who had been watching from the stands all day, was there to sign Eric to his first NFL contract.

  “Went from college worker, student, cadet, basketball reject, father, to under contract with the Patriots,” Eric recalled. He couldn’t wait to call his parents to tell them the great news.

  Base salary for a rookie back then, he said, was about $55,000—if you made the team. “If you get cut, you get nothing.” But compared to his $6-an-hour job at the gym, this was the big time for this twenty-one-year-old, who was ecstatic to receive a $500 check for travel expenses at the end of minicamp.

  When news of Eric’s signing with the Patriots hit the newspaper, his former UConn coach told a reporter that he was going to suit up for the next open tryout, as if to say, “If [Eric] can do it, anyone can.”

  Eric’s response: “Just tell him I’ll look forward to playing with him next year.”

  Word had it that Eric’s stepfather had moved him from high school to high school to give Eric the best possible leg up in getting a college scholarship. But John Naposki might have had other influences over Eric’s life as well. It’s unclear how old Eric was when this started, but John, who was a big, burly man, became abusive to Eric’s mother, Ronnie.

  In the summer of 2003, Ronnie was separated from John when she obtained a restraining order to s
top him from harassing her. After John was arrested for violating the order, Eric moved Ronnie into his house for her protection. She didn’t see John again.

  “I don’t take kindly to women getting abused, but it’s not enough to convince me to kill somebody,” Eric said in 2012**, two years after his mother had died.

  In November 2003, while John and Ronnie were going through a divorce, he threatened to burn down his vacant house because she wanted to sell it. John, who owned an asbestos removal business in Yorktown Heights, doused the house with gasoline, flicked his lighter to start the fire, set off the fire alarm, and died of smoke inhalation. Firefighters found an empty five-gallon can, John’s car keys, and a lighter on the floor near the alarm. Apparently, he’d tried to douse the flames in the first-floor bathroom, but the water had already been turned off.

  By his own account, Eric had some shady associates in his past. He told a friend in Orange County that he’d once been arrested for beating up a guy while helping a loan shark collect a debt—an incident that involved a pushing match with the debtor and a confrontation with the debtor’s bat-wielding son. Eric said the records of this incident had been sealed, which would explain why Newport Beach police couldn’t find them.

  Joe Naposki, Eric’s uncle, also had a criminal history. In May 1989, Joe confessed to a priest at a church in Salem, Oregon, that he was tired of running from charges related to an attempted murder, robbery, and gunfight among cocaine dealers and undercover narcotics agents in 1984. The priest helped Joe find a lawyer. After a brief Naposki family reunion, Joe surrendered to police in New York, and like Eric, made the news.

  CHAPTER 19

  In the years before and after Eric met Nanette, he tried to make something of himself in the world of professional football, going for the big time in the stressful and uncertain world of the NFL, an acronym that some people joke is short for “Not For Long.”