I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  Just to mess with her, they picked out the ugliest pieces they could find, so she wouldn’t wear them. They were right.

  Then they searched her house. Under her bed, apparently so her husband wouldn’t find them, the detectives found a stash of credit card statements in a box, with tens of thousands of dollars past due.

  And, to their amusement, they found the stripper pole that Byington mentioned, along with a homemade DVD of her and her girlfriends flitting around like strippers. They later learned that Nanette worked out at S Factor, a “striptease fitness” company that teaches women how to do pole dancing and lap dancing for exercise.

  The detectives seized her computer, where they found some correspondence with Eric, which contradicted the former couple’s claims that they had stopped communicating.

  Billy McNeal was at his desk at his company, Custom Blow Molding in Escondido, when his cell phone rang around 2:00 P.M.

  “Hey, it’s me,” Nanette said in an unusually serious voice. “I need you to come home.”

  “Okay,” Billy said, wondering what was up. “What’s going on?”

  “Well,” she said, “you know that murder I told you about [from] fifteen years ago?”

  “No,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “There was a murder fifteen years ago and the police are here to arrest me, because they think I did it.”

  Billy sat silently in disbelief with the phone against his ear, not knowing what to say or think. Figuring there had to be a simple explanation, he was finally able to form a few words.

  “Okay, I’ll get there as fast as I can.”

  We’ll talk this through. They’ll go away and everything will be all right again, he thought. There’s no way this could be true. It’s just craziness.

  Before they hung up, a detective got on the phone and tried to make sure Billy didn’t do anything stupid or reckless.

  “Don’t drive crazy,” he said. “It’s fine. Just get here when you can. Your son is fine. We’ll wait here for you.”

  When Billy arrived, he saw the news vans outside and assumed the police or the DA’s office had leaked the story. As he ran inside, Byington and another detective stopped him in the foyer. About eight guys with badges around their necks were going through the house, carrying out computers and other belongings.

  “We already took her away,” the detective said. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “No, I have no clue,” Billy said.

  As the detectives told him the story of Bill McLaughlin’s murder, Billy shook his head. It sounded so crazy he couldn’t even process what they were saying. All he could think of was taking Cruz in his arms.

  “I just want to be with my son right now,” he told them. “Take me to my son.”

  Upstairs, he found one of the neighbors sitting next to the crib in which Billy’s son was napping. Billy leaned over and just stood there, staring at the baby, until his mother and sister arrived. They joined him in feeling at a loss for words, and just looked at each other. They finally sat down together on the floor to let the news sink in while Cruz slept the sleep of the innocent.

  Detective Cartwright and Investigator Montgomery flew back to Orange County, leaving behind the other detectives to take Eric to the extradition hearing later that week, and bring him back to California.

  When Cartwright returned to his desk, he was delighted to find a huge bouquet of balloons and a card signed by the McLaughlin family.

  Thank you for making justice prevail, the message read.

  Cartwright was touched. “They were overjoyed, and their patience was to be commended,” he said.

  Attorney John Pappalardo got a call from his childhood friend, Eric Naposki, the day of his arrest.

  The next day, Pappalardo drove up from New York to the Bridgeport Correctional Center in Connecticut, along with another attorney, who had a license to practice law in that state.

  “This is crazy,” Eric told Pappalardo. “We went through all of this fifteen years ago.”

  “Let’s get you back to California,” Pappalardo said. “We’ll deal with it. Let’s find out what’s going on.”

  “Don’t leave me alone out there,” Eric pleaded.

  “I’ll come out and find you the right person.”

  At the time, Pappalardo planned to help his friend with the extradition process and then find him an attorney in California. But Eric begged Pappalardo to take his case for the long haul.

  Pappalardo told Eric it would be difficult to defend Eric by himself. He had no license to practice law in California, and it would be expensive and time-consuming to put together a fifteen-year-old murder case.

  As time went on, however, Pappalardo decided that he could work it pro hac vice—for this one particular occasion—meaning that he or an affiliate of his firm could serve as co-counsel with a California attorney who had the chops to handle a potential death penalty case.

  When he spoke to Julian Bailey, Eric’s attorney from 1995, Bailey said he was no longer a practicing attorney because he was on the bench. But more important, he no longer had a copy of Eric’s file. Bailey recommended that they get in touch with Gary Pohlson, an attorney with a solid reputation for representing murder defendants facing the death penalty.

  CHAPTER 33

  The next day at Eric’s hearing in Stamford, he winked and blew a kiss to his family and friends in court, where Judge William Wenzel ordered that Eric’s $2 million bail be revoked so he could be transported to Orange County for trial.

  “Do you consent to return to the state of California for the purpose of facing the charges against you?” the judge asked.

  “Absolutely,” Eric replied.

  As he was being led out by a marshal, Eric turned toward the gallery and said, “Good-bye, everyone.”

  “We love you, Eric,” his friends and family called to him. “We’re here for you, bro!”

  After the hearing, John Pappalardo defended his friend to reporters.

  “He looks forward to getting out to California to address the charge against him,” he said. “He is one hundred percent innocent.”

  Pappalardo hooked up with Gary Pohlson by phone, then the New York attorney flew out to the OC with Angelo MacDonald and Richard Portale to “get a lay of the land” before the arraignment. As the attorneys walked through the Santa Ana courthouse together, Pappalardo could see that everyone knew and respected Pohlson, who had handled so many murder cases he couldn’t remember if this was his ninety-third or ninety-fourth.

  Pohlson started his college education at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, but changed direction after three years because he decided he wanted a family. He finished his bachelor’s degree at Santa Clara University, then attended law school at the University of California, Los Angeles.

  From there, he landed a prosecutor’s job at the Orange County DA’s office in 1975. After three and a half years of public service, Pohlson left to pursue his goal of becoming his own boss. Forming a firm with a friend, he began trying death penalty cases in 1981.

  Pohlson was a ruddy-faced man who wore nice suits, but he exuded the spirit of a man who could just as easily have worn a monk’s robe, the benevolence shining through his kind eyes and easy grin.

  “I see it more as a vocation than a job,” he said. “I’m doing what I should be doing. God gave me some talents and I’m just doing the best I can.”

  Modesty and self-deprecating humor are two Pohlson trademark characteristics that make him a likeable attorney who can garner goodwill in the courtroom even while defending some of the most hated criminals.

  “I really love it,” Pohlson said. “It’s really important to make sure a person’s rights are protected. They are the underdogs in these situations. The DA’s office has all the resources, the money, and the evidence, usually. So if nobody is going to fight for these people, they’re always going to go down.... They’re people too.”

  Among his professional honors, he has been dubbed a “Super
Lawyer” by Los Angeles magazine every year since 2006 and was named “Criminal Trial Lawyer of the Year” by the Orange County Trial Lawyers Association in 1999. He was a Court TV commentator during the OJ Simpson trial, was chosen to be president of the county bar association in 1995 and served for a decade on its board of directors. Pohlson has appeared on 48 Hours, 20/20, Snapped, and various shows on Investigation Discovery.

  Pohlson was such a nice man that even victims’ families couldn’t help but like him. He knew what they were going through. After losing his father to murder and his niece to a fatal drunk-driving incident, he was always polite and empathetic with these families, so his words came across as sincere and genuine.

  Another advantage in using Pohlson was that he’d gone up against prosecutor Matt Murphy in a high-profile case once before—quite recently, in fact—when Pohlson represented Skylar Deleon at trial in 2008. Deleon had just been sentenced to death row at San Quentin when Pohlson agreed to take Eric’s case.

  Once Pohlson was on board, Pappalardo committed to sticking with the case until the end. Although he didn’t sit at the counsel table, he was usually part of strategic discussions and sat in the gallery for support during court proceedings.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Eric told him. “I know you guys are away from your families.”

  But Pappalardo, who Pohlson described as “an unbelievably loyal friend” to Eric, said he felt strongly about seeing this through.

  “We’re committed,” Pappalardo said. “This is what I do. This is what we do.”

  Pappalardo ultimately entrusted the litigation of the case to his mentor, Angelo MacDonald, one of the lawyers affiliated with his firm with whom he went back a long way—to the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office, where they both rose to be senior attorneys.

  MacDonald knew that Pappalardo went back even further with Eric Naposki, and that was good enough for him.

  “We’re fighters,” MacDonald said in 2012. “We believe in what we do. We’re very principled people. We believed in [Eric]. I still believe in him.”

  MacDonald had prosecuted more than sixty homicide cases before going into private practice, while Pappalardo had prosecuted homicides, robberies, burglaries, and assaults before leaving in 1998 to work with his father, another attorney.

  “Apparently, [Pappalardo’s] father is a really upstanding guy, so the acorn really didn’t fall far from that tree,” Pohlson said.

  Born in Detroit, Angelo MacDonald graduated from the University of Michigan and went to law school at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. His dark good looks, affable personality, accessibility, and charismatic oratory style made him a media-darling as a regular commentator on the former Court TV, now TruTV, who has also been featured on MSNBC and Nancy Grace on Fox. In addition, he served as legal consultant to Robin Cook, who has authored more than two dozen best-selling medical thrillers since Coma in 1977.

  In 2011, MacDonald split his time living in New York City and Toronto, where his wife worked as a TV reporter. She had previously headed the investigative unit at Fox News and also was a reporter for A Current Affair.

  MacDonald left law for a while to run an Internet company, which he ultimately sold, and then did business development for a number of client companies in the World Trade Center. September 11, 2001, was a defining moment for him because so many people he’d worked with died that day.

  A short time later, John Pappalardo called and asked him to get involved in a case. MacDonald slowly found himself getting sucked back into practicing law, and eventually became officially affiliated with the firm of Pappalardo & Pappalardo and two others.

  The Pappalardo firm, located in Westchester County, New York, has handled a number of NYPD cases in which it defended police officers charged with crimes ranging from white-collar offenses to murder. The firm has also represented New York politicians, professional athletes, recording artists, and corporate executives, boasting that the attorneys are fluent in handling high-profile cases that get covered by major media, including the New York Times.

  In other words, Eric had called in the big guns, with a team of four attorneys representing him. He was confident they would get him off.

  While MacDonald got up to snuff on the case with Pohlson on the West Coast, Pappalardo continued to defend Eric to the media on the East Coast, including one article that ran in the Journal News in Westchester County, New York, right before Eric’s twenty-fifth high-school reunion.

  “There is no eyewitness. There is no DNA evidence. No forensic evidence,” Pappalardo told the reporter. “There’s nothing putting him at the scene because he didn’t commit the murder.... There’s no way he could have done what they claimed he did. He certainly didn’t kill anybody.”

  Eric’s friends and family set up a website, where they posted his letters from jail, the responses he received, and testimonials from people who had known him for years. Eric was often described as “a healer and a helper, not a killer,” as his attorney Richard Portale put it.

  If there was ever a chance for me to practice what I preach to everyone I train, this is it, Eric wrote. I fight to remain focused, positive, and determined to complete my goals, to prove my innocence and clear my name.

  The website also spelled out what was needed to get the job done: money.

  Eric needs a strong defense, the site stated. That defense is dependent upon monies to support California and NY legal representation in the form of: attorneys, private investigators, recreating [sic] scenarios from 15 years ago, travel, hotels and many other critical legal costs. There is no one else to turn to but Eric’s family and friends.

  Eric’s mother posted a personal note thanking those who had already donated to her son’s cause, and pleading for others to continue to drum up the necessary financial support to bring him home.

  If you have signed onto this website hopefully you have the love, respect and confidence in Eric and know without a doubt that he is innocent of all charges, Ronnie Naposki wrote. As many of his friends and associates, coaches and family members have said when they called me, “He’s just not that guy.”

  Some money was raised at fund-raisers and through the website, but it turned out to be just a fraction of what the case cost to put together.

  Pohlson was initially retained by Pappalardo. However, when the money from donations didn’t come through as they’d hoped, the New York firm wasn’t able to fulfill the agreement with Pohlson. Nonetheless, he agreed to stay on, went to court in California, and got appointed to continue representing Eric. (Pohlson is on a short list of private attorneys who can be paid by the state to represent indigent defendants on death penalty cases. And although this did not end up being a death case, the charges of murder with special-circumstance allegations made Eric eligible for a death sentence, so the court considered it as such.)

  In the end, Pohlson said, taxpayers funded perhaps 10 percent of the case because the state paid him only “a very modest fee.”

  Asked if he worked the rest of the case for free, he said, “It wasn’t pro bono. I probably made about ten dollars an hour.... Who paid for it was mostly Pappalardo.”

  “Realistically,” Pappalardo agreed, “I funded—we funded—the case.”

  Given that Pohlson also worked unpaid for a year on the case after the jury verdict, he acknowledged in late 2012 that “this was not a good financial move” for him.

  CHAPTER 34

  One of the important tasks for Larry Montgomery and Joe Cartwright was to see if they could prove or disprove whether Eric Naposki really did make that “alibi” phone call at 8:52 P.M., even though Cartwright said he “knew that in my mind’s eye that if [Eric] did make this call, he still had time to get over to the house and kill Bill McLaughlin.”

  In 1995, Eric’s then-attorney, Julian Bailey, had written a letter to prosecutor Debbie Lloyd, making reference to the phone records for the call. However, he did not attach them to the letter.

  This was a credit card
call, and therefore there is a record of its time and place, Bailey wrote. I will make available the names, addresses and phone numbers of persons who can verify my assertions in this letter.

  From the way the letter was carefully worded—“there is a record”—Cartwright suspected that Bailey had not actually seen the phone bill for himself. But, knowing that the phone records would “be something that they were going to use as a defense,” the detective called Eric’s phone company and tried to get a copy of them in June 2009. He was told, however, that they had been purged long ago.

  If this phone bill had been his alibi, Cartwright joked, “Personally, I’d have it tattooed to my back.”

  With no records to support Eric’s story, Cartwright tried to verify that Eric had talked to the person he’d claimed on that alleged call.

  Cartwright listened to Eric’s police interview in which he said he was paged by the bar manager, whom he mistakenly recalled as “Teresmo,” but the detective saw nothing in the file about police efforts to track this guy down.

  Knowing that nightclubs were a magnet for vice activity during the 1990s, Cartwright looked through that unit’s old files for a Thunderbird bar manager by that name. He found a couple of employees whose names were close, including a Mike Tuomisto, whom he tried to locate using database searches. He didn’t have much luck, although he did find Mike’s father in the Southwest. Cartwright called and asked for Mike’s number, saying he wanted to interview him for a cold case he was investigating. The father didn’t want to give it out, but said he would forward the request to his son.

  Mike Tuomisto called Cartwright from Sweden, where he was working as a commercial diver for nuclear power plants.

  “Yeah, I was the bar manager. I remember Eric,” he told Cartwright, “but I wasn’t in charge of security and I wouldn’t have any reason to page a security guy.”