I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  Suspect Naposki left the United States shortly after Johnston was incarcerated, and according to our investigation, either ended or seriously curtailed his relationship with Johnston, Detective Tom Voth wrote in his final report, dated September 18, 1997. A $100,000 reward was offered by the victim’s family for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrator(s). No information was ever received in response to that reward. I have maintained contact with the victim’s family and other involved subjects but no workable leads have been developed at this time. Pending further information this case will be held in abeyance.

  At the time, Voth said, he felt pretty frustrated to have to shelve the case.

  “You never want to take a homicide case and put it in that type of criteria, because that basically means unless something comes to you or you stumble on something, that case will just sit there and not get any work done on it.... You really can’t get angry at it. It’s nobody’s fault that it’s not getting prosecuted.”

  He said K. Ross Johnston continued to call him for quite some time, but much of the information he provided seemed “vindictive” and unusable.

  Memories markedly differ about the reasons why murder charges were never filed in the 1990s. It’s evidently a sensitive subject, involving reputations, high emotions, and strong personalities—not to mention recollections that are imperfect after the passage of nearly two decades.

  Voth recalled that at least a year before he wrote that last report in 1997, he and Detective Bill Hartford “hand carried the case to [prosecutor] Debbie Lloyd in her office. We were told that absent the murder weapon, a corroborated confession, or some other strong evidence against Eric or Nanette, she could not file the case.”

  Voth said he felt so strongly about the case that he subsequently approached a second prosecutor, Laurie Hungerford, but she passed too.

  “I thought I had a better chance when I took it to her because we’d just finished a big case [together],” Voth said.

  A former NBPD official, who didn’t want to be named, backed this recollection. “I think the police department had more than enough to go to trial then. The DA elected not to,” he said, adding that the prosecutor passed because “it wasn’t a slam dunk, tie-it-up-with-the-bow [case]. We ended up settling with the ugly sister,” referring to the charges of theft and fraud, which were easier to prove in court.

  That said, the official acknowledged that the detectives’ overall effort “could have been more aggressive.” Given that this was Voth’s first murder case, he said, “someone should have taken Voth by the hand, and they didn’t.”

  At that time, the forensic tests of the bullet casings were not as sophisticated as they are today. They showed that the Beretta was a possible murder weapon, but so were twenty-seven other types of guns. (Neither the Taurus nor the Astra, owned by Bill McLaughlin, however, were on that list.)

  Debbie Lloyd, who retired in 2009 after being promoted to assistant district attorney, has a dramatically different recollection of the case history. As she told prosecutor Matt Murphy and DA investigator Larry Montgomery, she always believed that this case was “solvable.” But the message she got from the NBPD, she said recently, was that “Newport just didn’t want to be told what to do, and they would handle it without me.” When she offered suggestions on how to move the investigation forward, she said, “they laughed at me.”

  Frustrated as the months and years passed with no action, she repeatedly asked around her office if she could resurrect the case and get it “worked up.” If the detectives had ever gathered strong enough evidence to prosecute, she said, they never shared it with her.

  “It was never, ever presented for filing to me. Ever,” she said. “This is the irony. For twenty years, that case bothered me.”

  Was this simply a matter of semantics, that certain forms weren’t filed to make this an official “presentation” of the case? Lloyd insisted she never saw any such document, and Voth said his case notes don’t cover that period. But he said he was never offered any help from or approached by a DA investigator until Larry Montgomery came along many years later.

  It’s possible that Voth believed Lloyd had ultimately “rejected” the case for prosecution when she was simply telling him he needed to investigate further and to come back with better or more detailed evidence so she could file charges and win the case. Whatever the reasons, it’s clear that communication broke down between the NBPD and the DA’s office, and the case went cold.

  Lloyd, who was honored as California’s “Prosecutor of the Year” in 2001, had a reputation for having a strong personality and knowing what she needed to win a case beyond a reasonable doubt, but she said she was never known for being too scared to try a tough case. As she pointed out, she prosecuted three murder cases in which the victims’ bodies were never found, and even one case in which a bloodhound was her primary witness.

  “Before DNA, all our cases were circumstantial,” she said.

  Investigator Larry Montgomery confirmed that as he was transferring from the DA’s Homicide Unit to its TracKRS Unit (Taskforce Review Aimed at Catching Killers, Rapists, and Sexual Offenders), Lloyd personally pulled him aside and urged him to take a look at the McLaughlin case. She’d known Montgomery since his days at the Irvine Police Department, when they’d worked the bloodhound case together.

  “I just think if you have the time, you can solve this thing,” she told him.

  The bottom line is that she and the detectives all felt this case was winnable—with the right evidence.

  Back in the 1990s, Voth acknowledged that the evidence “wasn’t all there and maybe wasn’t presented properly. . . . Maybe I didn’t have the proper experience to convince the DA to do it. But I think they both wanted smoking-gun kind of cases.”

  “I put some blame on myself as not being as experienced as, say, Larry [Montgomery], but what do you do? You do what you can,” he said recently. “Without Suzanne Cogar, I don’t know how the case would have gone.”

  Ultimately the case did move forward, but the planets needed to align and the timing had to be right for Matt Murphy, a master prosecutor of complex circumstantial cases, to have Montgomery review the cold case and get it ready for trial.

  CHAPTER 28

  Using a method that had worked for her before, Nanette Johnston returned to the personal ads, where she’d found her first rich, older man. This time, she landed a catch who would prove to be just as wealthy, if not more so, than Bill McLaughlin.

  In April 1997, only four months out of jail, Nanette answered an ad placed by real estate developer John Packard, who, like the other men in her life, fell for Nanette’s mystique and her tried-and-true Supermom con. Almost immediately after they began dating, he later testified, “we started interacting like a family.”

  She told him a variation on the same story, that she made a living writing business plans for medical ventures developed by her former business partner, Bill McLaughlin.

  Nanette had started calling herself “Annette” Johnston, and had mail sent to her under that name to her home. John not only knew about this practice, he made light of it. In a letter dated May 11, 1997, he began, Dear Annette, Oh, My Gosh! Now you have me saying it. What’s next?

  It’s unclear why she decided to use a different first name (her middle name is Anne), although it’s not uncommon for someone with a criminal record to use an alias.

  Nanette told John that her ex-husband, K. Ross Johnston, was a bad man, and John believed her because K. Ross kept pestering him after they met in September.

  “He was constantly calling me up, saying Nanette was a murderer,” John said. “It was oppressive.”

  John finally had to ask a friend to write K. Ross a “cease and desist” letter to force him to back off.

  Nanette and John were engaged by October 1997. Nearly fifteen years her senior, he stood head to head with her at five feet six inches.

  She immediately started trying to get custody of her kids away fro
m her ex-husband. In court papers, Nanette claimed she’d had no input into the original divorce decree and was “coerced” into signing the paperwork. Respondent is 6’2” and weighs approximately 220 pounds, she wrote. He was far more intimidating to me in 1989 than he is today, but I still am intimidated by him.

  She said neither of them ever followed the original court order for custody and visitation, claiming that when he moved to California, he’d left the kids with her. She wrote that she came out in mid-1990, with the thought in mind that we might reconcile. However, that was short-lived and we only lived together less than a month.

  Since then, she wrote, they’d been sharing custody of the kids fifty-fifty, but the kids now wanted to live with her and attend regular school, not be homeschooled by K. Ross and his girlfriend, Julia. Nanette didn’t like the homeschooling, she wrote, nor did she condone K. Ross’s use of “corporal punishment” on the children. Besides, she said, K. Ross and Julia had a baby who was almost two years old, and they were expecting a second child in the spring.

  K. Ross countered that Nanette had gotten violent with him during an argument at his house on January 17, 1998, triggered by her attempt to exchange custody days so she and John could take the children skiing.

  “You never do anything with the kids,” K. Ross quoted her as saying. “All you do is make them clean the house and hang out at home.”

  “That’s not true,” K. Ross said.

  “That’s why the kids want to live with me. I go places with them. I do things with them. I buy them things. They have fun with me. I’m sure they would have more fun skiing with me than staying here with you.”

  “Nanette,” he said, “how can I compete with someone who is unemployed and has half a million dollars of stolen money to spoil the kids?”

  [That] is when she began punching me in the face, leaving my lip swollen, yelling bad language and then drove away, K. Ross wrote.

  Nanette and John were married on Valentine’s Day in 1998 at the Westin Hotel, only ten months after they’d met. And it didn’t take long before the thirty-three-year-old femme fatale got herself—and her husband—in trouble with the law again.

  Still on five years’ probation, Nanette was prohibited from writing “any portion of any checks.” She also was to “have no blank checks in possession . . . not have a checking account nor use or possess credit cards or open credit accounts unless approved by probation.”

  On April 2, 1998, four Newport Beach police detectives conducted a surprise probation search of her house in Lake Forest, where they found a number of receipts for wedding-related purchases, including some freshwater pearls at Zales jewelry store and some flowers at Greenworks, Inc., all made by check.

  Asked if she had written the checks, Nanette said no, it was her husband John; she’d only delivered them to the businesses. After finding John’s letter to “Annette,” Detective Tom Fischbacher’s antennae went up and he called John for more information.

  John said he’d written and signed the checks. However, after further investigation, the detectives learned that he and Nanette had lied to detectives, trying to cover for her.

  John also faxed over copies of canceled checks on which he’d “fraudulently altered the information” in an attempt to “conceal” his wife’s connection to the check so she wouldn’t be sent back to jail on a probation violation, the police report noted.

  Packard related that suspect Johnston was very well aware of the terms and conditions of her probation, the report said, noting that John also contradicted earlier statements to the police about the matter. Packard’s offering of fraudulently altered checks to the NBPD during the course of this investigation constituted a violation of 132 PC (Section 132 of the Penal Code) for being an accessory after the fact; Packard also provided false statements to investigators, the report pointed out. (John, however, was never charged with a crime.)

  As it turned out, these personal wedding items were charged to John’s business account for Pacific Housing and Development Corp., on which only John and his partner were authorized signees.

  By the time the detectives finished getting search warrants, obtaining copies of other checks, and going over the accounts again, they found she’d written more than two dozen checks. When confronted, she said she called John “most of the time” to tell him what the checks were for, but she admitted that she’d lied to detectives because she was “nervous,” and they had caught her “off guard.” She then claimed that she hadn’t written any checks after the wedding, which the police also found to be false.

  This investigation revealed that suspect Johnston, while on formal probation for two separate felony cases, wrote portions of at least twenty-five (25) checks, totaling $17,695.03, in direct violation [of her probation], Detective Jeff Lu wrote in an October 1998 report. Lu submitted his conclusions and evidence to the Orange County Probation Department and to the DA’s office for possible prosecution and punishment for the probation violation.

  Deputy District Attorney James Marion subsequently called Lu to tell him that the DA’s office had decided not to prosecute the case after meeting with Paul Meyer, Nanette’s new attorney. Marion told Lu that Nanette’s probation conditions had been modified such that only future violations would count against her. The case was “exceptionally cleared.”

  In 1999, Nanette got pregnant with their daughter, Jaycie, who was born in March 2000. Having a rich man’s child was a pretty good way to assure his financial commitment in the long term—and plenty of cash in the short term to feed Nanette’s frenzied materialistic taste for clothing, shoes, cars, and cosmetic surgery.

  That said, John Packard was clearly no innocent. He and his partner in Pacific Property Assets (PPA) were accused in a consolidation of investors’ lawsuits of defrauding and soliciting $90 million in investments from elderly folks in an alleged Ponzi scheme of condo developments.

  Packard and his partner denied the allegations, which they chalked up to the poor economy, claiming to have operated successfully for more than a decade and acquiring more than one hundred properties, refinancing the buildings and selling 40 percent “for very significant gains.” However, the two cofounders testified that they misled investors by reporting investment funds received as revenue on their income statements, which allowed them to appear profitable. According to the WTF Finance news site, these activities weren’t all that different from the practices of big banking corporations that overstated their assets during the recent Wall Street mess.

  But Packard’s legal troubles didn’t stop there. In 2012, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint in federal court against him and his two partners, alleging they’d “engaged in a scheme to defraud potential investors” by boasting a false track record of a 60 percent return and $100 million in net equity on their previous venture, PPA, when they launched a new corporation, Apartments America, in 2009.

  In fact, Apartments America was formed only three months after PPA had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and had defaulted on $91.6 million in promissory notes held by 647 investors whose investments had been pooled to buy apartment complexes, according to the SEC complaint.

  The complaint was still pending when this book went to press. Attempts to reach John Packard for comment on these allegations and others by Nanette, detailed in this book, were unsuccessful.

  Before John Packard lost big in the real estate market collapse, he was quite well off, and Nanette took full advantage of his healthy income. That continued even after their marriage went south.

  We had a very lavish and extravagant lifestyle, Nanette later wrote in divorce papers, noting that during happier times in the marriage, she’d never wanted for anything. It wasn’t uncommon for her to spend $10,000 to $15,000 at a time on designer clothing.

  He’d always bought her jewelry and had been “very generous” with her older children, she said, estimating that they’d spent $37,170 per month for basic expenses, not including vacations. [But] to punish me fo
r divorcing him, she wrote, petitioner has essentially cut off all available funds to me. He has canceled all my credit cards and refuses to put any significant money in my checking account. And yet, she said, he’d just bought himself a $125,000 Mercedes.

  Nanette spoiled their daughter, Jaycie, and volunteered at her school, all the while still fussing over Lishele and Kristofer. She never missed one of Lishele’s dance recitals and still took birthday cupcakes to her class, even during college.

  Still unsatisfied, however, Nanette remained out on the hunt. On July 13, 2002, she met a handsome young man named Billy McNeal, a senior financial analyst for PepsiCo who was in his last year of graduate business school at the University of Southern California (USC). Billy, who was six years younger than Nanette, was also married.

  In court, Billy described his first interaction with Nanette as “a social meeting, chance encounter up in L.A.” He later elaborated to say that they were both out in Hollywood, with respective groups of friends, and noticed each other while passing through a hotel lobby. They stopped and struck up a conversation that resulted in the two groups leaving together for cocktails. After that, he and Nanette began dating—and cheating on their respective spouses.

  “It was a little complicated, because there were marriages involved,” Billy testified in 2012. “We dated for quite some time,” but it “got serious rather quickly.”

  Billy said he’d already “checked out” of his marriage about six months earlier and had been “looking elsewhere” ever since. He and his wife formally separated on August 14, 2002—only a month after he’d met Nanette—and his wife filed for divorce three months later, citing “irreconcilable differences.” With no children, the claim went uncontested. The divorce was final on December 20, 2003.

  Billy said some of the problems in his marriage stemmed from the difference in their personalities and conflicting interests in how they spent their free time. Billy’s first wife liked staying home; Nanette and Billy both enjoyed going out. Even so, he said, he was pretty busy with school and working full-time when he met Nanette, so he didn’t have “a lot of time to gallivant.”