After the murder, Tuomisto said, he’d flown out of town for Christmas. By the time he got back, the club had let him go. He continued to live a few blocks away for almost a year, but Eric never contacted him.
“That struck me as odd too,” Cartwright recalled, noting that if Tuomisto was “Eric’s alibi guy,” why had Eric never mentioned this to the club owner or contacted Tuomisto personally to say, “Hey, I need you. You’re my alibi”?
Later, when Tuomisto talked with Tom Gleim, Pohlson’s private investigator, Tuomisto changed his story to say he didn’t really remember that period of time very well.
CHAPTER 35
In addition to the charges of first-degree murder for financial gain, Eric was also charged with discharging a firearm. If found guilty, the expected sentence for him and Nanette was life without the possibility of parole, otherwise known as LWOP.
At her arraignment on May 21, 2009, Nanette mouthed “I love you” to her family as she stood in her navy blue jail-issued jumpsuit to face the charge that she’d conspired to kill Bill McLaughlin.
Billy McNeal and Nanette’s now-adult children, Kristofer and Lishele, returned the “I love you,” flashed her the “OK” sign, and blew her kisses—all of which prompted a warning from the bailiff not to communicate with the prisoner.
Nanette was being held on no bail, but her attorney, Barry Bernstein, argued that she needed to go home to breast-feed Cruz and take care of Jaycie, who was now in elementary school. He got a bail hearing scheduled for May 26, and he managed to delay her arraignment until June 8.
The bail hearing, held in a Harbor Justice Center courtroom that could seat ninety people, was attended by her immediate family and about sixty friends, at least ten of whom said they were willing to cosign loans pledging their savings, retirement accounts, or houses to back her bail bond so she could go home. Nanette had been hanging out with a group of about eight women who had met at the pole-dancing studio, went out partying together, and exchanged Christmas gifts.
Bernstein submitted a motion to set a “fair and reasonable” bail amount for Nanette, arguing that she hadn’t committed any violent crimes during the years she’d been free since Bill McLaughlin was murdered. He also underscored that the only crimes she’d ever committed—grand theft and making false financial statements—were now fifteen years old.
Attached to the motion were a half-dozen letters of character reference from neighbors and friends, including the pastor of Legacy Church in Anaheim, a woman who had attended Bible study sessions at the McNeals’ home, as well as Cruz and Jaycie’s pediatrician.
The packet also included a letter from Nanette’s friend Stacy Mallicoat, a criminal justice professor at California State University, Fullerton, who praised Nanette for her church and volunteer school activities, as well as for creating the fashion-design charity, “Jaycie Girl.” Mallicoat commended Nanette for donating the proceeds to a good cause, apparently unaware that Nanette had kept the profits for herself.
The professor went on to commend Nanette for helping Lishele raise money to visit Rwanda on a ministry mission, and for helping out Mallicoat with a personal situation in Christmas 2007, when she and her husband had by “unforeseen circumstance” been unable to buy a gift that her twelve-year-old stepson had been eagerly awaiting. They were shocked and pleased to receive a card in the mail a few days later, with enough money to cover the gift.
This simple generous act made my stepson’s holiday, Mallicoat wrote. This demonstrated to me her commitment towards helping others in random acts of kindness that have monumental effects for those around her.
None of this did any good, however. Judge Karen Robinson pointed out that by law Nanette couldn’t be released on bail with capital charges against her.
Outside the courtroom, prosecutor Matt Murphy told reporters that Nanette’s supporters were “well-intentioned people, but I can’t imagine that they have any clue about what she is really like.”
After Nanette was denied bail, Bernstein filed a motion to dismiss the charges, arguing that under the clauses of due process and double jeopardy in the state and federal constitutions, Nanette shouldn’t be prosecuted for murder because she’d already completed her sentence for previous charges that were made based on the “same investigation and the same facts.”
But the court rejected that argument as well.
Dissatisfied with Bernstein’s performance, Billy and Nanette decided she needed a new attorney. Nanette wrote a letter to the court requesting Bernstein’s “immediate discharge.” First, because she had no more money to pay him, and second, because she had “grievances” against him.
Hiring another criminal defense attorney to represent Nanette would have cost about $1 million, so a PI, who had been working with Billy on Nanette’s case, tried to help find a public defender to take the case in early August.
The investigator also suggested that Billy hire an attorney for himself, so Billy spent $5,000 to retain the controversial but successful Newport Beach attorney Allan “Al” Stokke, who made news for expressing insensitive comments about the sixteen-year-old female victim of a gang rape while Stokke was representing one of the alleged perpetrators.
Nanette’s case ended up in the hands of Deputy Public Defender Mick Hill, who was well respected in his office, where he had defended—and lost—only one murder case: that client, James Duff, was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for putting his hand over the mouth of an eleven-month-old boy to stop him from crying, thereby suffocating him.
Hill enjoyed going up against the establishment. Born in Cork, Ireland, in 1970, he grew up at a time when many of his countrymen were being released from prison after being wrongly accused of murders and IRA bombings because of corrupt police, prosecutors, and judges. Think Guildford Four and Birmingham Six.
This phenomenon had “a big, big impact on me when I was growing up,” he said. As a result, “I was very happy to stand up for the underdog, because I could relate to it.”
When Mick was nineteen, his family moved to Los Angeles, where his developer father, Finbar Hill, was transferred for his job. Today, Mick’s father is Ireland’s honorary consul general in Los Angeles, and he likes to watch his son’s court cases.
Mick Hill attended Loyola Marymount University, Bill McLaughlin’s alma mater, then graduated from the law school there in 1995, a year after Bill’s death, but never heard a thing about the murder. Hill worked at a civil-litigation firm for about a year before he decided the private sector wasn’t for him.
“When your life is reduced to billing in six-minute increments, your life is over,” he joked.
Hill moved to Orange County in 1997, and has worked for the public defender’s office there ever since.
“I absolutely love it. I get up every morning and look forward to going to work,” he said. “Being paid by the government to fight the government is quite heartwarming.”
He noted that the irony of working as a public defender was that the better lawyer you were, the tougher the cases you were assigned, and “the more you get promoted in the office, the less chance you have of winning,” he said. “We don’t have an opportunity to say ‘no’ to the client to represent them.”
In the weeks after Hill got the case, Billy McNeal came to his office several times to defend Nanette and extol her virtues. She was a successful businesswoman in her own right, Billy said. Why would she have been motivated to kill Bill McLaughlin?
“She didn’t do it,” Billy told Hill, who just sat and listened. “She’s a good mom.”
When Hill went to visit Nanette in jail for the first time, on August 12, 2009, he thought she seemed nothing like the cold, emotionless predator others perceived her to be when her case finally got to trial nearly three years later.
“She seemed to be a very, very scared, terrified person who didn’t understand why she was facing the charges she was facing,” he recalled in 2012.
Asked if this could have been an act, Hill replied that, i
n his view, she’d acted like an innocent person after Bill was murdered. “If you were guilty of this, I wouldn’t have stayed living in Southern California. I would have moved somewhere else . . . where people didn’t know anything about me.” The fact that she didn’t, he said, “is not indicative of a guilty person.”
He noted that she also seemed to be happily married at the time of her arrest, with a baby at home, “whom she was missing terribly,” as well as her nine-year-old daughter, Jaycie.
As he continued to meet with Nanette, he spent eighteen months going through at least fifty-seven boxes of discovery, and a strategy began to emerge. After reading up on Bill McLaughlin’s lawsuits with Jacob Horowitz, he believed that a third-party culpability defense—arguing that Horowitz had killed Bill—was the way to go.
The first few months after Nanette’s arrest were a blur for Billy McNeal. Night after night, he lay awake as his mind whirled with the same thoughts that also consumed him during the day: who could help him with this or that, and when was this nightmare going to end?
Exhaustion soon set in as he tried to care for his newborn son alone, while also running his business and trying to understand the unimaginable case against his wife.
Is this really happening to me? What are the odds?
“The stress level was just incredible,” he said. “It was just survival mode.”
As Billy tried to cope with his new role as a single father, he met with a child psychologist to make sure he did right by his infant son, who had essentially lost his mother.
“He absolutely has to bond with another woman in less than twelve months,” the psychologist told him. “It’s critical.”
Knowing what he needed to do, Billy packed up in June, left their big house in Ladera Ranch and moved into his sister’s modest home in Winchester, in neighboring Riverside County. He slept in his nephew’s bed without even changing the boy’s baseball sheets, placing the new crib he’d bought for Cruz at his feet so they almost touched. He wanted his son to sleep as close to him as possible in the tiny ten-foot-by-ten-foot room.
Billy’s sister watched Cruz during the day, and Billy took over when he got home from work.
Meanwhile, Nanette, stuck behind bars, wanted him to come see her every day she was allowed to have visitors, which was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But Billy could barely handle two visits a week. Each trip ate up six hours, including the drive to Santa Ana and back, and the time waiting in line to get in, which was tough with a baby.
“Despite my life and our family’s life around us being devastated and destroyed . . . I still felt obligated to let her see her son,” he said.
But that, too, would change.
For the first month, he brought Jaycie with him as well, until Jaycie went back to live with her father in Long Beach, after which Billy took her to visit only once a month, the only weekend he had custody of her.
Taking the baby to jail was never pleasant. In fact, it was downright stressful for both of them. He had to change Cruz’s diapers on the dirty sidewalk outside, then try to hold the wiggly six-month-old in one arm while he sat on a metal stool, talking to his wife on the phone through a pane of glass.
Cruz cried, squirmed, and screamed to get down, but Billy held on tight because he didn’t want his boy crawling around on the filthy linoleum floor. On the freeway, stuck in traffic sometimes for three and a half hours on the way back to his sister’s, Cruz wailed some more, wanting to get out of the car seat, where he was strapped in, feeling like a captive himself.
But they were in this together, and in the end, Cruz was the one person who could bring Billy any peace and serenity amid the chaos.
“No matter how bad it was, all I had to do was pick him up and it just didn’t matter.”
At first, Billy was convinced that Nanette hadn’t killed anyone, so he focused his energy on ensuring that she had a strong defense. He tried to be a good husband and give her the benefit of the doubt, encouraging their friends to rally around her.
Meeting with Mick Hill at his office with investigator Jeff McCormack, Billy helped them go over the information the defense team had turned up, and also reviewed information the DA’s office had sent over. Everyone was trying to solve the mystery: who was the real Nanette Packard? But mostly what they learned was who she wasn’t.
One day, they received a document from the DA’s office listing dozens of claims that Nanette had made about her personal and professional life. Hill kept asking whether Billy knew more about this or that item, and the answer was almost always “no.” By the time they were done, Hill had verified that every single claim was false.
“The only thing that was true on it was her name,” Billy recalled.
It’s just an avalanche of lies and mistruths, Billy thought. How could it all just be made-up? Is any of our relationship true? How do I even process all of this?
Billy felt angry and stupid. He just couldn’t believe how much Nanette had taken advantage of him. Once he reached this cold, ugly realization, he knew what he needed to do.
If these stories are true, then anything can be true, so now I’ve got to go hunting myself, so I know what’s true and what’s not.
With a thousand questions, he started at the source: Nanette. But when he tried to confront her with some of the lies he’d discovered, she just shook her head and gave him a blank stare. They both knew the jail was recording their visits.
“It was frustrating,” he recalled. “So frustrating.”
Billy resorted to going through her personal papers and photos, which is how he confirmed that the face he’d fallen in love with wasn’t the one with which she’d been born. When he found the list of cosmetic surgery procedures she’d wanted since 1998, he realized she’d had them all done, with some liposuction too.
It was during this search that he learned John Packard had been sending her $17,500 in support payments each month, not the $6,500 she’d claimed. He cringed as he remembered Nanette’s insisting that he pay for all those lavish dinners and nights out. Her level of greed was astonishing, even more so in retrospect. (In September 2009, John Packard asked the court if he could stop the monthly payments to Nanette, given that she was in custody and also that his business had had to file bankruptcy. By that point, he said, he’d already paid Nanette $1.2 million.)
Billy also discovered that she’d been making false claims about her first husband, K. Ross. Just as she’d done with the other men in her life, she’d painted K. Ross to Billy in a negative light, presumably to keep Billy from wanting to talk to him and learning things that would make Nanette look bad.
Nanette had claimed, for example, that while they were still married, K. Ross had pushed her into the closet and forced her to have sex with him—a similar type of story, he would soon learn, that she’d told Eric Naposki about Bill McLaughlin. This incident, she’d told Billy, made her feel paranoid and scared around K. Ross because he was so big.
Billy had thought it was an odd tale at the time, given that K. Ross was her husband. But now he realized that this was Nanette’s manipulative way of shaping his perception of her ex-husband for her own benefit.
She’d also told Billy that K. Ross had molested Lishele when their daughter was seven or eight. Nanette had said that she, Lishele, and Kristofer were on a sunset cruise when Lishele burst out sobbing. Asked what was wrong, Nanette quoted Lishele as saying, “Dad, he touched me.”
When Billy talked with Lishele about this story later, the poor girl said Nanette had even tried to convince her that this had happened. Over time, however, Lishele had come to realize that it just wasn’t true.
CHAPTER 36
By the time the preliminary hearing started on November 6, 2009, at the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach, Billy McNeal believed it was more likely that Nanette would be found guilty than innocent.
On the outside, he pretended to be a supportive, loving husband, but inside, he knew things looked “really, really bad” for his wife as he sat
in Judge Robert Gannon’s courtroom with Nanette’s friends, who rolled their eyes during the proceedings. They still had no idea who she really was.
Nanette had one attorney at the defense table to Eric’s three. From where Kim and Jenny McLaughlin were sitting behind Eric, they could see that he’d applied makeup to the back of his neck, apparently to cover all the tribal-design tattoos he’d gotten since the 1990s.
As Detective Tom Voth testified that day, he gave numerous “I don’t recall” answers under heated cross-examination by Mick Hill, who flailed his arms as he implied that the NBPD had not done a thorough job. Hill got so worked up that his Irish brogue grew thicker as he spoke faster and faster, prompting the judge to stop him.
“Slow down,” Gannon said, adding that Hill also needed to refrain from asking compound questions.
“I get excited,” Hill said with his usual mirthful charm.
Voth felt that Hill was obsessing over unimportant details, such as why he hadn’t questioned the parents or children at the soccer field, and whether he knew how many parking spaces were in the parking lot.
Sergeant Dave Byington, who couldn’t go into the courtroom because he was a witness, asked Sandy Baumgardner during a break in the hallway how it was going inside.
“Did this guy not prepare?” a frustrated Sandy replied, referring to Voth. “It doesn’t seem to be going very well. I assume he’s had all summer to go through the material.”
Byington tried to reassure Sandy and the McLaughlin sisters, who were also concerned, that this was nothing to worry about.
“We knew this was going to happen,” he told them.
Later, Voth said he didn’t take Hill’s questioning personally, knowing that defense attorneys typically attacked a police investigation that led to charges against their clients. To Voth, his job was simply to explain decisions made by “those ultimately responsible,” meaning the sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and even the chief, who had directed the investigation.
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