I'll Take Care of You

by Caitlin Rother

  One memo chronicled a driving-time trial by Box from Denny’s to Balboa Coves that took twenty-one minutes and forty-seven seconds to go 12.5 miles. The defense argued that it was thus “impossible” for Eric to have committed the crime by 9:10 after making the 8:52 P.M. phone call.

  Another memo described Box’s interview of Tustin Hardware manager David Vandaveer, in which the defense claimed that Vandaveer made statements that were arguably different from what he told police and/or different from how police characterized his remarks in their search warrant affidavit, constituting “at best, misleading information,” and “at worst, complete fabrication,” which therefore challenged the prosecution’s credibility.

  The original affidavit stated, Vandaveer advised Detective Voth that there was no way to be positive that those were the exact key copies he had made, but stated his hardware store used the same type of key blanks to make their duplicates. According to the Box memo, Vandaveer had said the silver key could have been cut at his store or several other Ace Hardware stores, but that the gold key “was not cut at his store.” He also said he was certain the keys made for Eric at his store were not stamped “do not duplicate.”

  When Detective Tom Voth saw these memos, he had a funny feeling in his gut about the convenient timing of their discovery after they’d supposedly been lost, with the paper file thrown away and the electronic file destroyed when Box’s hard drive crashed in 2000.

  The more he looked at the documents, the more he questioned their authenticity. To him, it looked as if they had different fonts and phone numbers on copies of the same memo, and that the newly discovered memos listed different phone numbers than were on the memos the NBPD had received in the 1990s.

  Voth presented his concerns to Murphy, who agreed something seemed off. After looking further into it, Murphy realized that certain portions of early versions of the same memos had been reworded or deleted in later versions.

  “It’s about him writing and then rewriting [the memos],” Murphy said in 2012, referring to a practice to which Box admitted during the trial. “It looks shady because it is shady. Police don’t write multiple reports . . . with different information in different versions.”

  After doing some research, Voth and Montgomery learned that the boat parade didn’t even start until December 17 in 1994—two days after the murder—so Tuomisto’s claims about traffic in the Box memo didn’t even make sense.

  The defense motion also made the case that Kevin McLaughlin could have killed his father, with the help of his friend Daniel Ziese: [Ziese] was very likely Kevin’s accomplice in the murder of Bill McLaughlin.

  Kevin had motive, the defense argued, because he and Bill were at war over his drug use, evidenced by the drug test kits that Bill kept in the refrigerator. Ziese, the defense said, had motive because Bill had denied his request for a $20,000 loan, because he thought Ziese’s business plan was “deficient to the point of being humorous.”

  The defense bolstered the accusation against Kevin with statements in a Box interview of Rosemary Luxton, a neighbor who said she hadn’t seen anyone leaving the McLaughlin house. The defense argued, [This] strongly suggests that the person who committed the crime never left the home. Furthermore, because Luxton and Kevin were both dead, neither could be called to the stand to testify or be cross-examined. As such, Mr. Naposki has been robbed of yet another witness critical in establishing his alibi and third party culpability defenses.

  Not surprisingly, this last accusation particularly enraged the McLaughlin sisters and Kevin’s former girlfriend, Sandy Baumgardner. As if losing Bill wasn’t enough, Kevin wasn’t even alive to defend himself against what they saw as a ridiculous allegation.

  In March 2011, Judge William R. Froeberg held a hearing on the motion, during which defense attorney Gary Pohlson argued that his client had “suffered acute prejudice” because of the undue length of time between the crime and the trial. At this point, neither defense team appeared to be blaming the other defendant for the crime.

  If Eric had an alibi, then Nanette was also not guilty by association, said Deputy Public Defender Denise Gragg, who accused prosecutors of unethical conduct and the NBPD of incompetence for purposely letting the “evidence disappear.”

  “There was an alibi that we can’t put in front of a jury anymore,” Gragg said. “That’s prejudice.”

  Keith Bogardus, a deputy district attorney working with Murphy, responded that the defense attorneys were “little more than paper tigers,” and that the prosecution didn’t believe the phone call was ever made. To believe otherwise, Bogardus said, was just “notoriously riddled speculation.”

  Judge Froeberg denied the motion, but said the defense could raise the issues again after the trial, once he saw how things had played out.

  In what the Orange County Register billed to be “the most anticipated trial of the year,” Nanette Packard and Eric Naposki were set to be tried together in front of the rather easygoing Judge Froeberg, who had served longer on the local bench than most.

  After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California, Riverside, Froeberg earned his law degree from Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and passed the bar in 1974. His wife, Roseanne, headed up the DA’s Sexual Assault Unit.

  First appointed to the bench in 1986 by Republican Governor George Deukmejian, Froeberg was subsequently elected unopposed.

  “Generally his reputation is he’s a very fair judge to try your case,” Pohlson said. “He’s probably considered prosecution-oriented by some, but I think he’s a really good judge. He’s really easy to try a case in front of. I’m always pleased when I’m assigned there.”

  On the eve of the trial, slated to begin on Monday, June 13, 2011, Eric’s and Nanette’s trials were severed, which was the prosecutor’s choice. Eric’s case was set to go first, and that’s when the finger-pointing between defendants began.

  Jury selection began on June 15, resulting in eight women and four men being chosen to serve on the panel.

  To counter Pohlson’s comments that this was a “totally circumstantial case,” Murphy pointed out that “the idea that circumstantial evidence is somehow bad evidence is a very commonly believed myth. But it is a myth. The law is crystal clear on that.”

  After the successful and high-profile prosecution of killer Skylar Deleon, prosecutor Matt Murphy was ready for round two with his now-familiar rival, Gary Pohlson.

  Murphy and Pohlson had completely different courtroom styles. Murphy could be as sarcastic as they come, while Pohlson had more of the friendly-uncle approach. But the two men respected each other’s capabilities.

  “Everybody likes Gary,” Murphy said. “Gary Pohlson has one of the very best reputations in the Orange County legal community.... Even though he appears doddering sometimes, it’s part of his schtick. . . . He’s extremely effective with juries.... He’s such a good, sincere person, he doesn’t have to act because that’s actually who he is.”

  Of Murphy’s reputation, Pohlson said, “He’s supposed to be really good. Got a great courtroom presence. He’s got that flair for the dramatic, you know. I’ve never heard anything negative about him.”

  But in this East Coast versus West Coast legal cage match, Murphy had the home court advantage over Angelo MacDonald, which the defense would later accuse Murphy of using to try to win points with the jury. This was especially evident when MacDonald tried to question the effectiveness of the police detectives’ investigation techniques, a tactic that historically hasn’t played well in Orange County.

  As Murphy prepared for Eric Naposki’s trial, he planned to use some of the same strategies and present some of the same types of evidence that had helped him win the largely circumstantial conspiracy-to-murder case for financial gain against Skylar and Jennifer Deleon.

  Like that case, this one also involved cross-checking the conspirators’ phone and bank records to form a timeline of the conspiracy, the murder, and the
financial benefit that followed. Ironically, the four-minute call to Nanette’s car phone after Eric finished his shift at the Thunderbird the night of the murder pinged off the same cell phone tower in Newport Beach as the call that was made by the Deleons’ co-conspirator, John F. Kennedy, as they were sailing into the harbor on their victims’ yacht after killing them offshore.

  With Investigator Larry Montgomery’s help, Murphy spent two years putting together twenty-two pages of questions to ask Eric on cross-examination. Because Eric had displayed so much bravado and arrogance, Murphy was pretty confident that he wouldn’t be able to resist testifying.

  The prosecutor prepared for trial by listening repeatedly—at the gym, over holiday breaks, any chance he got—to every tape of the police interviews with Eric, as well as his call with Jenny McLaughlin, until he knew them backward and forward and was ready to catch Eric in a contradiction or error on the stand. Murphy also practiced his delivery of confrontational questions, hoping to make the hothead so angry that he exploded in the witness chair.

  “You have to know that she murdered him and yet you move into the beach house?” Murphy planned to say. And when Eric was staying at the beach house, Nanette was in jail and Kevin came back to change the locks, “Tell us about Kevin’s expression when you opened the door!”

  At a hearing before opening statements and outside the jury’s presence on June 20, the defense argued its “402” motion to introduce verbal evidence of Eric’s “missing” credit card bill in an effort to prove he made the pay phone call from Denny’s at 8:52 P.M.

  Eric’s original attorney, Julian Bailey, who had known Pohlson and Judge Froeberg for forty years, testified that he had personally seen the phone bill. At least he thought he had.

  Before taking on Eric’s case, whom, he said, he didn’t recognize now, Bailey explained that he’d worked as a prosecutor, and had then handled more than thirty homicide trials as a criminal defense attorney. He went on to work as a “referee” in the juvenile and superior courts.

  When he was a defense attorney, Bailey said, James Box was “pretty much” the only investigator he’d used. They’d worked together ever since Box was a police officer in Garden Grove, before he was an investigator in the DA’s office, and before he’d gone into private practice.

  “Why’s that?” Pohlson asked.

  “I found him to be competent and honest, hardworking, smart.”

  Pohlson showed Bailey the letter he’d written to then-prosecutor Debbie Lloyd in 1995, mentioning Eric’s phone call—“there is a record of its time and place”—and asked Bailey what he remembered about it.

  “I don’t remember anything about it,” Bailey said, but he added, “It’s my belief that I saw a bill and that that’s the reason I specifically stated that. It’s also my belief that I gave that bill to James Box.”

  Bailey said he’d gone through some files recently in his cellar, his home, his storage unit, and his work office building from that time, but he’d found nothing. When his former partner finally located Eric’s file, he acknowledged, “it did not contain a phone bill.”

  “Would you have written a letter to the district attorney, providing an alibi for a client just based on the word of the client, or would you have to have more proof?” Pohlson asked.

  Bailey said he wouldn’t have just taken a client’s word. “That would be fraught with danger, and . . . it’s just not the way I practice law,” he said. “That’s why I believe I saw the phone bill.”

  On cross-examination, Murphy, who also had known Bailey for years and had even worked on his election campaign for a superior court judgeship, felt awkward about having to question a judicial officer about the “interesting language” he’d used in his letter to Lloyd. Still, he pressed on and asked why Bailey hadn’t attached a copy of the bill.

  “It seems like you could have ended this whole issue by stapling a copy of it, sending it to Debbie,” Murphy said.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Bailey said. However, he added, he wasn’t happy that the media had been publishing the DA’s version of the case, or that the search warrants had been leaked to the media but not to him, so he decided he should keep “what few cards we had close to the vest.”

  Box got up to testify next, sounding very sure of himself.

  “Do you have any doubt as you’re sitting there right now that you saw that phone bill or that it was communicated to you that on the phone bill there was an eight fifty-two time?” Pohlson asked.

  “I have no doubt,” Box said.

  On cross, Murphy pointed out that Box seemed “tentative on exactly what you saw versus what you were told. Is that fair to say?”

  Box began to hem and haw. “Well, I did see something, and I’m assuming it was the bill. I mean, if it wasn’t the bill, I’m sure I would have asked, ‘Where’s the bill?’”

  “Why don’t you remember the phone bill?” Murphy pressed. “You see a document that exonerates somebody for a murder. I’m just trying to understand. It seems like that’s not an everyday sort of thing.”

  Murphy asked if Bailey had a copy machine in his office, which Box could have used, again noting the absence of the phone bill in the file. “It didn’t occur to you to make a copy of the phone bill?”

  As Box answered a series of related questions, Murphy diced his credibility, his memory, and his professionalism into slivers. Box couldn’t definitively tell Murphy that he remembered seeing Eric’s phone bill, or what it looked like. At one point, he was so tentative that he said, “I was told it was discovered he made a phone call.”

  Under further questioning by Pohlson, Box said that to the best of his recollection, he was sure he’d seen the bill. However, he subsequently told the judge that he couldn’t be absolutely sure.

  For the moment, the bottom line of the hearing was this: After the attorneys stipulated that the calling-card bill could not be found, the judge decided that Bailey and Box could testify that they’d seen the bill, which meant that someone—not the defendant in particular—used a calling card to make the 8:52 P.M. phone call. But only Eric himself could say he made the call, and to do that he would have to take the stand.

  Although the defense essentially won its motion, this hearing did more to expose these witnesses’ weaknesses to Murphy, which would only help him shred Box on cross-examination in front of the jury. By this point, Murphy had all the ammunition he needed to make the jury doubt there ever was a phone call, let alone a phone bill, or it surely would have been in the attorney’s file.

  CHAPTER 38

  The seats in Judge Froeberg’s courtroom quickly filled before opening statements began after lunch that day. As word spread throughout the courthouse, defense attorneys and prosecutors filtered in to watch the start of the high-profile trial, and Murphy’s performance in particular.

  In addition to the McLaughlin family members and friends, who had been waiting nearly two decades for this trial, the proceedings also drew well-heeled Orange County looky-loos who had heard about the case in the news. The media was there in force as well, taking up several rows of seats near the crowded power outlets.

  During Murphy’s two-hour presentation, he gave the jury a case overview with a timeline for the murder and a rundown of the relationships between the key players. The defense team decided to delay its opening until after the prosecution had rested.

  Anticipating the defense’s case based on points raised during the preliminary hearing and in the due process motion, the prosecutor deftly laid out the most damning evidence that implicated Nanette Packard in a conspiracy with Eric Naposki to shoot Bill McLaughlin for financial gain.

  Characterizing Nanette as a greedy, unfeeling woman out for Bill’s money, Murphy said, “Nanette asks very few questions of the officers at the scene. You’re going to listen to this [interview] tape. She didn’t ask to see Bill and she didn’t cry.”

  Murphy said the evidence would show that Eric not only stood to gain from Bill’s death, but that t
he penniless football player had purchased a nine-millimeter Beretta 92F in August 1994—the same type of firearm that had killed Bill McLaughlin.

  Noting that such guns cost about $700, Murphy said, “This gun is a beautiful gun in the gun world. It’s Italian made. It’s very popular,” adding that it was the same model used by heroes in movies such as Die Hard and The Terminator.

  Murphy described the layout around the McLaughlin house in Balboa Coves, including the locked gates and the barbwire fence that surrounded the community, which made it “a tough place to get in or out of,” he said.

  Kevin McLaughlin didn’t need a key, he pointed out, “because he was already in the house,” and he also tested negative for gunshot residue. Nanette, however, who was “an active Rollerblader,” was missing her key to the pedestrian-access gate.

  As he flashed a series of crime scene photos on the overhead screen, featuring Bill’s body on the white tile floor, with blood smears and scattered bullet casings around him, Kim McLaughlin covered her eyes.

  “Three of the bullets remained in his body and three passed through his body,” Murphy explained, referring to the evidence that, in addition to the two keys, the killer left behind. “We know the killer escaped, which means he got to a car or he had someplace to run to.”

  “Now, Nanette, . . . of course, she had keys to the house, but, in addition to keys, Nanette had a very big secret. And Nanette’s secret was Eric Naposki,” he said, showing photos of the “happy couple.”