00:00:07
- When a murder's committed,
it's always a race against time to find the truth, to
separate fact from fiction,
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to catch the killer, and to make sure that
justice is served. What happens when the truth
vanishes with the victim?
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I'm Dr. Richard Shepherd, and
I've spent my entire career as a forensic pathologist
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performing nearly
23,000 autopsies, including on some of
the most high profile cases of recent times.
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I've learned that the
dead don't hide the truth and they never lie. Through me, you'll be hearing
directly from the victim,
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from a state-of-the-art
laboratory with groundbreaking technology that uses digitally
scanned sample bodies.
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I'll be investigating a
series of intriguing murders where from the victim's
bodies, I'll be revealing
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to you the truth behind
those horrific crimes. [camera clicks] [gentle music] December the 15th, 1994,
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a man was shot dead
in his own kitchen and the killer escaped. To catch this murderer,
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the police had to piece
together dozens of tiny clues from the victim's body. And while America is no
stranger to gun violence,
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this crime scene was surprising. A million dollar home in one
of California's most wealthy
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and privileged
communities, Newport Beach. - The quintessential dream image of California is Newport Beach.
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There's a bay where people can
have a hundred million dollar yachts docked at their house.
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It's got a lot of money there, but it also has a really
kind of cool beach vibe.
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Surfers, beautiful women
in bikinis, rollerblading. - You have yachts,
you have marinas,
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you have fancy
restaurants on the water, you have beautiful
mansions on the water.
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- [Matt] Picture Beverly
Hills meets the sea. That's what Newport Beach is. - [Richard] But on
December the 15th, 1994,
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this idyllic atmosphere
was shattered. [gunshots firing] - Kevin McLaughlin, who
was upstairs in his home
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where he lived with his father, and he hears what
sound like gunshots. He suffered severe disabilities,
he had problems moving.
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He walked with a severe limp. He gets downstairs and he
sees his father face up on his back in the kitchen,
and as he's watching his father
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die on the kitchen
floor, he dials 911. - [Operator] 911,
what's your emergency?
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- And it's this heart
wrenching 911 call where he's trying to communicate through his deeply
affected speech
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that his father's been shot. - And the cops got there. And once they got there,
they were able to see exactly
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what was inside the house, which was Mr. McLaughlin
on the kitchen floor with bullet holes in his body.
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- Paramedics couldn't save him. He was declared
dead at the scene. All the police could
do was gather evidence
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about this terrible crime. And that started with being
sure who the victim was. As a pathologist, my first
job is to identify the body
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that's in front of
me, and I can show you on this sample body. Bodies never lie.
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Often the simplest
way to identify a body is to look at the teeth. Teeth are fantastic things
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because they're strong,
they're really resilient. They resist decomposition
and all sorts of damage.
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But also, particularly by middle
age, they'll all be unique. There'll be fillings, there'll
be other evidence repair.
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There'll be teeth that have
been lost through accident or through disease. And so looking at the teeth
can be a fantastically useful
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way of identifying someone. When we compare it to the dental records
held by the dentist.
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In this particular
case, we can see that there are gaps
in the left, upper and lower molars.
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We can see that there's
a left upper wisdom tooth still present. There's also various
irregularities of the teeth
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that are all going to be
unique for this individual. But if the uniqueness
of teeth isn't enough,
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we can look at the uniqueness
of the fingerprints. But they're much more
susceptible to damage
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by decomposition and by trauma. And they too need to be
compared with a record that held somewhere else,
usually by the police.
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At the time of this case, the
1990s DNA was a research tool, but identification by DNA
was not common practice.
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But fortunately, when
the pathologist came to look at this particular body, the dental records
were excellent.
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And so they made a
positive identification of Bill McLaughlin,
a 55-year-old male.
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The police knew that every clue
they could find at the crime scene might help bring Bill
McLaughlin's killer to justice,
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for example, he still
had his watch on. In fact, nothing was missing
from this wealthy home.
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- We have no information. Anything was taken, so therefore it probably
wasn't a robbery.
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If nothing's taken
except for the life, it's probably a murder. - [Richard] What the police
did find were shell casings
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from the murder weapon. - The casings that
were on the floor and the bullets that came
from the body were determined
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from the lab that they were
from a nine millimeter handgun. - We know that the ammunition
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that was used is what's called
federal Hydra-Shok ammo, which is a particular kind of
bullet that has a post in it
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and it's hollow point round. - And those are bullets
specifically made for killing somebody.
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They're too expensive to
use for target practice. They're used for deadly force.
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[gunshots firing] - [Richard] The
shots heard by Kevin and the neighbors had
a distinctive pattern.
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- It was three sequences
of two shots with bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. - [Richard] The early
evidence was pointing
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towards a targeted killing. On the table, near Bill's body were some financial documents,
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which may have been significant. - Bill was entirely self-made. He had grown up on the
south side of Chicago,
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kind of from a
modest background. He invented a medical
device that was able to separate plasma from blood.
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- [Matt] It was a
huge advancement in modern medical science. It saved thousands of
lives over the years,
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and it's still in use today. - And he made a
fortune with that. And so he was well off.
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He was a businessman, had
a lot of opportunities, have lots of deals
to make money.
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- [Richard] He sold the
company he co-founded for tens of millions of dollars. 20 years ago, he bought a
luxury six bedroom mansion
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in this gated
community, Balboa Coves in Newport Beach, California. - Now this is a multimillion
dollar beautiful Bayside home
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with its own dock. - [Richard] Bill had
a jet set lifestyle. Just hours before he was killed,
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he'd flown back from Las
Vegas in his private aircraft. But those financial papers
found at the crime scene,
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told a different story,
one of conflict and strife. - He was being sued by a
former partner who didn't feel
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that he was treated fairly. And so there was about $12
million in like an escrow fund
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that was gonna be
determined who was gonna get that 12 million depending
on how the lawsuit went.
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- [Richard] Bill and his
former business partner had been arguing in
court for four years
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about how the proceeds of
the sale of their company should be divided up. - And it turned
out that just days
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before Mr. McLaughlin
discovered that he won that. And so all that money was
gonna be going to him.
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- They did not like each other. Bill McLaughlin and
his former partner. So he was immediately
suspected as being,
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maybe he had something
to do with it. - Anybody who loses $12 million
in a lawsuit might be angry.
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- [Richard] But the
police quickly established that Bill's business partner
was over a hundred miles away
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at the time of the murder. - This man lived
in Santa Barbara and he had an alibi where
he was getting a haircut.
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His wife backed it up
like he did not do it. - [Richard] Other clues
at the crime scene
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suggested Bill was killed
by someone he trusted. - There's a brand
new key freshly cut,
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an Ace Hardware key
stuck in the lock of the deadbolt of the door. And there is a pedestrian
access gate key
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sitting on the mat. There's a gate for pedestrians to go out right across
from the McLaughlin home
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so you can gain access to
that part of the community with that gate key. - Somebody actually came
in and did this with keys.
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That's a huge clue. They didn't have any
cameras back then, so anybody who entered
could go directly
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to Mr. McLaughlin's house from
that gate without being seen. - People were terrified
in the community
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'cause nothing like this
had ever happened in a nice, wealthy, gated area
of Newport Beach.
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And people were afraid
that there was, you know, a killer on the loose. - [Richard] The chilling
conclusion was that
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the killer got keys
to Bill's house from a member of his family. - Who has access to keys that
could get into the complex,
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and who has access to keys
to get into his house. How did they get those keys? - [Richard] Bill had been
married to Susan McLaughlin
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for 24 years. The divorce just four years
earlier had been messy, and there was now a lot
more money to be inherited.
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- They got married very young, and it was one of those things
that just the relationship
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itself, they had
three wonderful kids and it just kind of ran
outta steam, I think.
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And she'd moved to their
beautiful home in Hawaii where she still lives. She was immediately eliminated
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because she was so
far away at the time. - [Richard] The
couple's son, Kevin, who had suffered brain damage
in an accident a few years
00:10:40
earlier, was in the house
at the time of the murder. - They interviewed Kevin and very quickly they know
that this kid had nothing to do
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with the murder of his father. And it's pretty obvious. And he is incredibly distraught.
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- [Richard] The couple
also had two daughters. - Bill McLaughlin's
daughters were Kim and Jenny.
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Jenny was down in San Diego. Kim was actually
in Japan teaching. And when police talked to 'em,
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they were appropriately
emotional. They were devastated by
the murder of their father.
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They cooperated in every way. The police were
very quickly able to eliminate the entire
McLaughlin family
as being suspects.
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- [Richard] So who else
had access to Bill's keys and who knew the truth
about his murder?
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- This was one of the
most sensational cases in Orange County history, and it's kind of this
bizarre love triangle
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that ends in murder. [suspenseful music] - Bill McLaughlin, a
wealthy businessman,
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was shot dead in his home in
Newport Beach, California. Police hoped that his
body would tell the truth
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about what happened
in his murder. They thought been murdered
by someone very close to him.
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And then just hours
after his murder, Bill's girlfriend
Nanette Johnston arrived at the crime scene.
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Nanette and Bill first
met four years earlier. - Nanette Johnston
was beautiful,
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vivacious 20 something
mother of two, and everybody describes
her as very beautiful,
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but also really smart and savvy. - Nanette was slender. She worked out a lot at the
gym, very fit, very tan.
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She was that type of girl. - [Matt] Nanette put
an ad in a newspaper and it was a, basically
a singles magazine prior
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to internet dating that
said, wealthy man only, I know how to take
care of my man
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if he knows how to
take care of me. - And it appears that that was
the ad that Bill had answered
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and got to know her
through because of that ad. - [Richard] Sometime
in early 1991,
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Bill and Nanette started dating. She was much younger than him, just 25 years old while
he was in his early 50s.
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But the romance seemed real. Quite soon, Nanette
moved in with Bill and they started living together
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in his Newport Beach mansion. She had two young children
who lived most of their time
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with her ex-husband. Bill welcomed them into his life and showed them real affection.
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- She would take them to Bill's
house once every other week, and they had their own bedrooms
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and they got to go
flying in his plane, and they got to go
be in Bill's boat. So they enjoyed, it was
like a vacation house.
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And so they were treated
very well by Bill, and I think he liked them a lot. - [Richard] At the
time of the murder,
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Bill and Nanette had been
living together for four years. The couple had made
business plans together,
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and Nanette handled all of
the couples joint finances. - She had checkbooks
that she had access to,
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had used his credit
cards to buy things, and she had access
to all the accounts and everything that
he was working on.
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[dramatic music] - [Richard] On December the
15th, 1994, only an hour after the murder, Nanette
arrived at her home.
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- And they were able
to contact her outside and then interviewed her
in one of the police cars.
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From what she said, sounded that she was
very upset about this. - [Richard] Nanette
told the police
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that she spent the
afternoon and early evening watching her son at a soccer
game in a town 30 miles away.
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After that, she went shopping. - She was at a pretty
large shopping mall, maybe 20 minute
drive from there.
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During the time of the crime, she was buying
Christmas presents. - Here's the receipt,
which puts her about
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five or six miles away at
the time of the shooting. She couldn't possibly
have committed the murder.
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- So Nanette had a strong alibi. The police had to look
for a different suspect for this brutal murder.
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My job as a pathologist to is
examine the body as carefully as I can to find any
information that may be of use
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to the police in
their investigation. In this case, the
pathologist found that there were six injuries
to the front of Bill's chest.
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Six small injuries that
were absolutely typical of gunshot entry wounds. When they looked
at his back though,
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they found there were
only three wounds that were much larger,
much more irregular
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and contained muscle and bone that were
absolutely typical of gunshot exit wounds.
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So three bullets had
gone right through, but three bullets
remained in the chest.
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So looking at the
grouping of the injuries to the front of Bill's chest, it shows that the killer must
have been standing directly
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in front of him, looking
at him at the time the shots were fired in
very quick succession.
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And it shows that
whoever killed Bill, clearly, deliberately
intended to do so. After such a shocking murder,
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it's no wonder Nanette
said she was frightened. She told the police at the
scene that she was worried
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the killer might come
back to shoot her. - I heard Nanette
in the interview saying that she was scared.
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She said, "I could
have been the target. I was supposed to be
here at that time,
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and I've pissed off
people in my life. I could have been the target." So that was a very
important thing for me,
00:16:33
because that statement, if true, then she must be afraid
of whoever did this. She said, "I don't
want to be here.
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I don't want to stay here." She said, "I am gonna
go somewhere else." - [Richard] So she took
Kevin and drove them both
00:16:49
to Bill's beach house just a
mile away on Seashore Drive. But while this was a
perfectly sensible precaution,
00:16:57
something about
Nanette's behavior didn't seem right to the police. - What's curious, one of the
things is she had a car phone.
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This is on the cusp of
cell phone days, right? And she sat in the car for
over an hour at the scene,
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and she didn't call anybody. Bill McLaughlin had an ex-wife. He had two adoring daughters.
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And you got Kevin,
he's got relatives, he has friends in the community. And she never called
anybody, which was curious.
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Not, you know, just kind of off. - [Richard] Nanette also
seems strangely unemotional,
00:17:30
almost detached, even
at Bill's funeral. - According to every
witness that we interviewed,
00:17:36
they get into the church
for Bill's funeral, and everybody is crying, including her two kids
except for one person.
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And that was Nanette. She had no emotion the
night of the murder. Now she's got no
emotion in the funeral.
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She goes back to the
beach house, she changes, and she drives directly to a
place called Champion Yamaha,
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which sells dirt
bikes, motorcycles. And she goes, and she
buys three motorcycles
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right after the funeral. - [Richard] Nanette was
not the kind of woman who rode motorbikes, and
Kevin couldn't ride one.
00:18:05
So who could they have been for? The clue came from
something strange that Nanette's son
said at the funeral.
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- Her son said, "My mom's
boyfriend plays in the NFL." And people at the
funeral were like,
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mom's boyfriend is in
that coffin up there. Like, what are
you talking about? And that's the first anybody
in the McLaughlin family
00:18:26
learned about the
existence of another guy. - [Richard] To find out
who this other man was,
00:18:32
the police put Nanette
under surveillance. - [Larry] They decided
they were going
00:18:37
to stake out the Seashore
house where she was staying. And so they had the
place surrounded.
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- They have undercover
narcotics officers do this. The report is just
very two dimensional.
00:18:47
It's, we were on the beach. We could see, you know,
Nanette Johnston inside with her two children
decorating a Christmas tree.
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- The curtains are open,
the windows are open. She's out there in
the living room.
00:18:59
Anybody can look in it and see. This is not the
actions of a woman who appears scared
for her safety.
00:19:05
- Why is she in the
house in a place where anybody could see her? Matter of fact, there is a
man with a gun in the sand
00:19:13
outside her house at that time. It's a police officer, but
he's there and he's got a gun,
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and she can, he could shoot her
if he wanted to right there. So how fearful is
she of this man
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who she thought
might be after her? - [Richard] And then the
surveillance officers
00:19:31
saw something extraordinary. - [Matt] They see this
guy come tooling up in a black Nissan Pathfinder,
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- Big guy, strong
guy, formidable. I mean, he's a somebody
to be reckoned with. - And he walks into the
beach house like Santa,
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he's got a big bag full
of Christmas presents. And he walks in and his
head is not on a swivel,
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he is not looking around. And he just goes
into the beach house where he was actually living.
00:19:56
So very soon after this murder, police realized Nanette
Johnston has moved in with another man.
00:20:03
So the police obviously
wanna know who he is. - [Richard] When challenged
by investigators,
00:20:09
Nanette identified
him as Eric Naposki. Eric was a professional
sportsman, a
football linebacker.
00:20:17
He played for both the
New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts,
but he never hit the big time.
00:20:23
- [Larry] Eric did not
make a lot of money in the football field. - He played for in the NFL.
00:20:28
And he wound up
playing for a while in the Canadian Football League. And he played for
a NFL Europe team
00:20:33
called the Barcelona Dragons. What a lot of people don't
know is when you're on practice
00:20:36
squads, and you're not in
the, with the Big Boys League, minimum is not very much money.
00:20:41
They basically get
all the french fries they can eat in training camp. - [Richard] By the time
Nanette met Eric Naposki,
00:20:47
he was working in security. He still had his looks and
physique, but not much else.
00:20:53
- [Matt] He's working as
a bouncer in a nightclub. - He was making poor money. He wasn't making a lot.
00:20:59
He was hanging around
with a lot of rich people in Newport Beach. But he was living in a single
studio apartment in Tustin
00:21:09
and barely could make rent. - [Matt] So he's broke. - [Richard] Nanette said
she met Eric at the gym
00:21:15
in the early 90s. At first, she insisted that
they were just friends, but soon she admitted they
started dating early in 1994
00:21:27
when she had already been living
with Bill for three years. The police urgently
needed to speak to Eric.
00:21:35
- And so the police actually
did some checking on him and discovered he had a
warrant for his arrest,
00:21:39
just a minor traffic warrant. - He got some stupid
traffic ticket, and he never showed up to court.
00:21:45
That means the judge has issued
a warrant for his arrest. So the police arrest him,
00:21:50
and they do what's called an
impound search of his car. He's got a notebook in his car.
00:21:55
And as they're flipping through
these pages on the notebook, there's a bunch of letters
and numbers written down
00:22:01
that strike One of these
very observant detectives, like it might be
a license plate,
00:22:05
and they run it as
a license plate. And lo and behold, it comes back to Bill McLaughlin's Mercedes.
00:22:11
We tried to figure
out kind of the dates of a lot of these notes and looked like it's
probably about a month
00:22:17
before the murder. - And that really
started the ball rolling in regards to looking at
Eric as a possible suspect.
00:22:26
- [Richard] Eric Naposki was
now in the police's sights, but they didn't know where he
was on the night of the murder
00:22:33
until they were
tipped off that Eric and Nanette were together watching her son's
soccer game that day.
00:22:40
- The Newport Police got a
very interesting phone call from Kevin Ross Johnston,
Nanette's ex-husband saying,
00:22:47
"Hey, just so you know, she
was not alone at that game. My ex-wife was there
with her boyfriend, Eric,
00:22:53
and she contacted me and said, don't tell the police that
I was there with Eric.
00:22:57
He's got nothing
to do with this." So of course, he calls and
says, "Hey, my crazy ex-wife
00:23:02
wants me to specifically lie
to you about who she was with. So, and I'm not gonna do that.
00:23:06
She's with this big,
big dude named Eric." - It made them very
suspicious that Eric
00:23:13
and her may have done
something, he may be involved. And they started to focus
on that relationship.
00:23:20
- [Richard] The
police were now sure that Bill was at the heart
of a dangerous love triangle,
00:23:25
but they couldn't prove that
this led to Bill's killing unless they could tie
one of the suspects
00:23:31
to the murder weapon. - The community was
very, very concerned that there was a
killer on the loose.
00:23:46
[suspenseful music] - Police in California
were on the hunt for the killer of
Bill McLaughlin.
00:23:59
At autopsy, the body
had revealed the truth of what had happened. The killer was standing
very close to Bill,
00:24:06
and this was a
deliberate assassination. The police had a suspect. Eric Naposki, a former
football player,
00:24:14
turned nightclub bouncer. He was no stranger
to physical force. But did he fire the fatal shots?
00:24:21
To prove that, the police
had to find the killer's gun. The police thoroughly
searched the area
00:24:29
around the murder scene, but
they came up empty handed. - We had divers in the channel,
00:24:36
which is the water
right behind the house. We had the Navy came out and sent divers trying
to find the gun.
00:24:40
They checked storm
drains, we never found it. That gun could be anywhere. - [Richard] All the police
could do was question Naposki
00:24:49
about his guns,
which wasn't easy. - Mr. Naposki is a very
strong-willed individual.
00:24:56
He likes to control. He's a big man and he does
not like to be controlled. - I start listening
to one of the tapes
00:25:04
and it was Eric Naposki
yelling at the police. That's how he conducted
these interviews.
00:25:09
I mean, it is, he is aggressive
and you guys lied to me. And now I'm, that's it, you
know, that's my statement.
00:25:15
- [Eric] 'Cause
obviously that's a lie. Now this is where you guys
are lying about something
00:25:19
because corpse's
lying, you're lying. Someone's lying, 'cause
I know I'm not lying.
00:25:22
- [Detective] You're
using a strong word lying. - Yeah, yeah, so I
tried to mislead you.
00:25:25
What's the big deal? You guys arrest
me, I mislead you, you know, are playing
this mind F game.
00:25:30
Like just, it's unbelievable. They ask him, "Do you
have any firearms?" And he goes, "No, I
don't have any guns."
00:25:38
And then it's like, "Well
I did have this 380, a Jennings 380, which
is a very small,
00:25:43
like Saturday night special
type of semi-automatic handgun. But I gave that to my dad in
New York after he got mugged."
00:25:49
- Absolutely.
- Yeah, he has a Jennings 380, just like I said. - Okay.
- Same model, same model
00:25:53
and everything. - An hour later as
they're wrapping it up, they're like, okay, so
just so we're clear,
00:25:58
he just had the one
gun and no other guns. He's like, "Oh, well, I did
have a Beretta nine millimeter."
00:26:05
- [Richard] A Beretta
nine millimeter. The bullets that killed
Bill were nine millimeter,
00:26:10
but Naposki claimed that
that gun had disappeared. - I gave it to my buddy
Joe David Jimenez,
00:26:16
when he was doing a
security job for me. And he got it stolen out
of his car, and they go
00:26:21
and they hit up his
friend Joe David Jimenez, who was, in fact,
is cooperative. And he said, "Yeah, I did work
his security job for Eric.
00:26:31
He gave me a gun,
just like he said, but he didn't give
me a Beretta of 92F. He gave me a piece
of junk Jennings 380.
00:26:38
I told him that the gun
got stolen outta my car, but what I really did is
I sold it to my friend.
00:26:44
I can get that gun for you." So he gets the gun
from his friend, turns it into the Newport
Beach Police Department,
00:26:51
and it was loaded with
federal Hydra-Shok ammunition. - So a gun Naposki
admitted he once owned,
00:26:59
turned up loaded with the
same make of ammunition, used to kill Bill McLaughlin,
00:27:04
which means the police now knew
he owned Hydra-Shok Bullets. At the autopsy, it
was important to find
00:27:12
just how much damage had
been caused by these bullets. And it was found that
one of the bullets
00:27:17
had in fact gone right
through the heart, causing extensive injuries
that was on its own fatal
00:27:26
for this particular case. But the pathologist said
that all six bullets could have killed
Bill on their own.
00:27:34
And why was that? The reason is there were so
many crucial parts to the chest. There's the heart, the lungs,
the major blood vessels
00:27:43
of the aorta, and the superior and inferior vena
cava, the spine. So many areas that
were critical to life,
00:27:50
all of which had been
damaged by the passage of these six bullets. The type of bullets
used were Hydra-Shok.
00:27:57
These had been designed
for the FBI especially to spread when they
hit the human body.
00:28:03
And this is designed so that
maximum damage is caused, and the chances of the
bullet going right through
00:28:09
are minimized. So Bill had been hit by
six of these bullets. He clearly didn't
stand a chance.
00:28:17
And the only possible reason
for using bullets of this sort is to make sure that
you kill someone.
00:28:25
But the gun, the police
suspected was used to kill Bill McLaughlin,
a Beretta 92F,
00:28:31
which Eric had admitted to
once owning had disappeared. So the police couldn't connect
Eric to the murder weapon.
00:28:40
They made more progress tracking
his movements on the night of the murder, starting from
Nanette's son's soccer game.
00:28:47
- [Matt] The games went
into triple overtime and they really hustled
back to the car.
00:28:53
- [Richard] Nanette and
Eric left the soccer field at 8:20 pm. They were in such a hurry.
00:28:58
They didn't even wait to see Nanette's son
receive his trophy. Naposki claimed he was in a rush
00:29:04
to get back to work on time. He had no time to commit murder. But when the police
drove the same route,
00:29:10
they had time to spare. - They could easily drive
all the way to Balboa Cove and let Naposki out, and she
can easily drive to the mall
00:29:23
and start shopping. He can easily go in with the
keys, open the door, shoot him,
00:29:27
and then actually it's
only a few hundred yards to where he worked. And he could easily
go under a bridge
00:29:34
and be at work within literally
minutes after shooting Bill. And so it all fit very nicely.
00:29:44
- Ask 'em again. They're like, "Hey, you
don't have an alibi." And he goes, and you
see his brain work.
00:29:50
He goes, "Oh, well,
she dropped me off. And then I went up to my
friend's house up in Tustin
00:29:56
to see if they're there. And then I got a page. So I went over the Denny's
to return the page."
00:30:02
It's a completely
different story than the original
one that he told. So they drove that and
they retraced the route.
00:30:09
And guess what, he
still had enough time. - And we did it
numerous times to see,
00:30:14
and that's what it was. - [Richard] So the police proved that Naposki could have
been at the murder scene,
00:30:20
but they couldn't prove that
he was at the murder scene. They could, however,
show that Eric
00:30:27
and Nanette were very
intimate with each other and even took holidays together. - They went to Eric's house
where his family lived,
00:30:35
and the kids met his
family along with Nanette, and they then went to
New York with the kids
00:30:41
and had a full tour of New York. And then they went to a
wedding for Nanette's sister.
00:30:50
Bill thought that she had gone
back east just with her kids, had no idea that Eric
Naposki went with her.
00:30:57
- [Richard] And the
police could also prove that Eric and Nanette
had been making big plans
00:31:01
for their future,
just the two of them. - You're talking about a
woman who has no skills,
00:31:07
and you're talking about a guy who is completely broke
working as a bouncer. Those two people were meeting
with real estate agents
00:31:14
and looking at
multimillion dollar homes, and they're talking about
being able to pay for it
00:31:18
sometime after the
first of the year. Nanette Johnston
clearly believes that she's coming
into money soon.
00:31:24
- The only way Nanette
would've been able jto come into money like
this, if his Bill was dead.
00:31:30
- [Richard] Bill
McLaughlin had a $1 million life insurance policy,
and Nanette was the
sole beneficiary.
00:31:37
And that wasn't the only way
she'd profit from Bill's death. - She has a provision on the
will for, I believe, $150,000.
00:31:43
She's got the right to live
in the beach house rent free, and she's got title to
the convertible Lexus.
00:31:51
And in addition to all that, she finagled herself
in becoming the trustee of Bill's estate,
right after he has won
00:31:58
this big lawsuit
against his partner. So he's about, there's about to be $12
million in that account.
00:32:04
- [Richard] But it turned out that Nanette had
been helping herself to Bill's money
even before he died.
00:32:10
- About a month
after the murder, Kim and Jenny McLaughlin contact the Newport Beach
Police Department.
00:32:17
So these are Bill's daughters,
there should be millions of dollars in his bank accounts.
00:32:22
And when they get
into the bank accounts and they get access
to everything, they see that there's
virtually no money left.
00:32:27
- They were able
to determine that Nanette started
probably in January, so good 12 months earlier,
00:32:34
pilfering money
from his accounts. - Bill had a series
of bank accounts and Nanette did not have
access to those accounts,
00:32:41
but she did have a
joint checking account that belonged to both of
them with the same bank.
00:32:48
So it was actually very
clever what she was doing. She would simply,
she would fake checks
00:32:52
and do transfers from
one account to the other. - They got more and more and more as the months went by.
00:32:59
- She started out
with, you know, $7,000, I think was the
first check that was, that she did this with.
00:33:05
And then pretty soon it
was 10, then 15, then 20. The most disturbing
one is the day
00:33:11
before Bill McLaughlin was
murdered, they found a check for $250,000, a quarter
million dollars check
00:33:18
the day before Bill
McLaughlin's murdered. - By the first of the
year when all the,
00:33:22
they start looking for
taxes and everything, she was gonna be found out. If he's dead, she's
kind of free and clear.
00:33:27
There's no, you know,
she can say that, oh, I, this was normal. He wanted me to do
that, or whatever.
00:33:32
So that was a big red flag. - [Richard] In
total, Nanette stole nearly half a million dollars
from Bill's bank accounts.
00:33:42
In March, 1995, Nanette
Johnston was prosecuted for forgery and grand theft. She pleaded guilty and was
sentenced to a year in jail.
00:33:51
- The police believed that
there's enough to charge her with murder and also
Eric Naposki with murder.
00:33:57
But the DA disagreed. They come back, they're
like, she's stealing, she's cheating.
00:34:02
And it got refused again. The DNA is in its
infancy at that point. We've got no eyewitnesses,
there's no fingerprints.
00:34:10
There's no confession. And so for the DA's that are
looking at that, at the time,
00:34:16
they just didn't feel like
there was enough evidence to proceed with the case. - [Richard] When Nanette
was released from jail,
00:34:24
six months later, she
and Eric separated. - She gets married
to this guy Packard.
00:34:30
He goes back East, gets
married, I believe, and then divorced and
has at least one child
00:34:36
on the East Coast. And they essentially both
go on with their lives. - [Richard] The case went
cold, the murderer seemed
00:34:43
to have got away with it. But what they didn't know was that lurking in the
files was the evidence
00:34:48
that would one day convict them. - This was one of
the most diabolical and heartbreaking cases I
ever tried as a prosecutor.
00:35:05
[suspenseful music] - The killers of Bill
McLaughlin had gone unpunished for more than seven years.
00:35:13
His body had revealed the
truth about the bullets that were used and
the deliberate nature
of the killing.
00:35:18
But the case had gone cold. The suspects were getting
on with their lives while Bill's family
was still grieving.
00:35:26
But a new team of
investigators were determined to crack this case. In 2002, Deputy District
Attorney Matt Murphy,
00:35:35
had just started the new
job with the homicide unit for the Orange County
District Attorney's Office.
00:35:41
- My predecessor, Debbie
Lloyd, looked at it and my very first day
in homicide, she said,
00:35:45
"You're gonna wanna look
at the McLaughlin case because I think if you
put some work into that,
00:35:48
you're gonna solve it." And I got assigned an
investigator to work with me as my partner in the homicide
unit named Larry Montgomery.
00:35:57
Larry's a legend
in law enforcement. So this case that had sat idle, we started working it up again.
00:36:04
- [Richard] Larry
Montgomery started reading all the old case notes and
listening to all the tapes
00:36:09
of the police interviews. - There's such a volume of work, and virtually nobody
has time to look at
00:36:18
that volume of work. And so I made a point of
listening to every single tape and take every
single bit of notes.
00:36:27
There's a lot of times where
there's something on that tape that's extremely important,
but nobody knew it at the time.
00:36:34
- [Richard] One of the 62
tapes Larry listened to was a recording of the
interview with Nanette
00:36:39
in the police car on
the night of the murder. - She said, "Well, I'm
gonna go to the other house
00:36:46
and I'm gonna go there." And I thought, interesting. If she knows, and she did know,
00:36:52
'cause the police told her
that the killer had keys to this mansion. Why is she willing to go to
another house belonging to Bill
00:37:00
and her and stay at that house? Who says the killer doesn't
have keys to that house?
00:37:06
And it struck me as odd. - [Richard] Over the next few
years, Larry was also able
00:37:11
to uncover new
incriminating evidence from the witness statements. - There was a woman who was
a neighbor of Eric Naposki
00:37:19
who said that he had talked
about Bill McLaughlin, how he hated Bill McLaughlin.
00:37:23
- She had been talking to Eric and he had mentioned Bill
McLaughlin on several occasions.
00:37:28
And at one point he told her
that he hated Bill so much, he wanted to blow up his plane.
00:37:33
- And then after the murder,
he ran into her again and said, "Hey, you know that
Bill McLaughlin guy, you know,
00:37:39
he got killed." And she said, "Oh my God, Eric, please tell me
you didn't do it."
00:37:42
And he smiled and said,
"Maybe I did, maybe I didn't." [suspenseful music] - An autopsy is not just to
establish a cause of death,
00:37:53
it's also there to seek
out any possible clues that might help
an investigation.
00:37:58
For instance, did the deceased
fight back in any way? Are there any bruises or
injuries to the knuckles
00:38:03
of the hand that will
show that he's fought back and punched someone, that
might enable the defendant
00:38:09
to claim self-defense
in the future? In fact, there aren't
any such injuries. What there was though was an
injury to his left eyebrow.
00:38:18
And that small mark on the
body is telling us so much. It's an injury that is
absolutely typical of the type
00:38:26
of wound that's caused
when someone collapses after they've been killed. And I'm sure that's what
happened in this case.
00:38:33
So there were no
signs of a struggle. There was no sign of a fight. And the pattern of
injuries grouped together
00:38:39
as they were suggests that
the killer came into the room, saw Bill was in front of
him, shot him very quickly,
00:38:46
Bill fell to the ground, dead and the killer made his
escape all within seconds.
00:38:54
And it would seem this
killing was planned weeks or maybe even months in advance,
00:38:58
made obvious by the keys
found at the murder scene. One newly cut from an
Ace Hardware blank.
00:39:05
- Ace Hardware blanks, I didn't know this before I
got this case can only be sold
00:39:09
at Ace Hardware, like
nobody else caries 'em. Ace Keys are made at Ace. So they go and they go to
the local Ace Hardware store
00:39:16
closest to Eric Naposki's house. And the guy goes,
sure, I know that guy. I made keys for him right
about the time of this.
00:39:23
Can't say that it was the same
key, but he looked at the key and he goes, this
looks like a key
00:39:28
that was cut on my machine. - Turns out there's several
different kinds of key machines
00:39:33
that will make the keys. And this apparently was
a high-end key machine, and there were very
few in the area.
00:39:41
It kind of made sense that
he had those keys made. - [Richard] So the police
could tie the newly cut
00:39:47
house key to Naposki. And when they checked
Nanette key ring, they found her original
pedestrian gate key was missing
00:39:55
exactly like the key
found on the mat. And new techniques could extract
more evidence from the six
00:40:03
empty shell casings
found at the crime scene. - There's a whole science
on expended shell casings
00:40:09
left at crime scenes. It's like a form of firearm DNA because the little
microscopic lands
00:40:14
and grooves that go into
expending a shell casing are unique to every firearm. So they're able to figure out
00:40:22
if they find a brass
casing in a crime scene, they can link it back
to a specific gun.
00:40:27
But if you don't have
the gun to compare it to, you can also look
at the firing pen
00:40:32
that was used in the
back of the ammunition. - [Richard] The
exact make of gun that was used in the murder
could now be identified.
00:40:41
- Originally, the murder
weapon was a known to be a nine
millimeter for sure, and the possibility of
about 27 or 28 guns,
00:40:50
different types of
guns could have shot that particular bullet. - But as time went on,
technology advanced,
00:40:58
and, you know, eventually we
were able to narrow that down to one specific firearm.
00:41:04
And that's a Beretta 92F. So by the time I
looked at the case, the only gun that could have
done it was a Beretta 92F.
00:41:11
Eric Naposki owned a Beretta 92F and Eric Naposki lied
about the Beretta 92F. - [Richard] But not
only had Naposki owned
00:41:18
exactly the same gun
as the murder weapon, the police also discovered
he had been training with it.
00:41:26
- That boom, boom,
boom, boom, boom, boom, turns out Eric
Naposki had just gone through a firearms training
course where he was trained
00:41:34
to shoot twice, re-aim, shoot
twice, re-aim, shoot twice. And that's, it's called
the double tap technique.
00:41:42
- Basically, it's a
technique to kill. - [Richard] The investigators
were also very skeptical
00:41:50
about how recently Naposki
had started his job at the Thunderbird Nightclub. - There were nightclubs
throughout Los Angeles
00:41:59
and Orange County,
hundreds of them. And of all of the nightclubs
that Eric Naposki can get a job
00:42:04
as a bouncer on December 1st, two weeks before Bill
McLaughlin's murder, he gets one a 136 yards
away from our murder scene,
00:42:13
yet with an easy,
like an easy way to run over a bridge and
be there in about a minute.
00:42:18
So that's not a
coincidence, it's just not. - [Richard] Larry even
found crucial evidence
00:42:25
in Nanette's Christmas shopping. - The night that
Bill died, she said, "I'm at the stores at the mall."
00:42:33
We have the actual receipts
for what she bought and the items that she
bought were for her family
00:42:39
and friends, nothing for Bill. Now, if she knew he was
gonna be dead by Christmas,
00:42:44
no reason to buy presents for, and Nanette even bought
Eric size 12 pair of $795 shoes that day
with Bill's credit card.
00:42:56
- [Richard] Matt and
Larry had pulled together a lot of complicated details, but at its heart, they
believed this case was simple.
00:43:03
Nanette had two huge motives
for wanting Bill dead. One financial, one emotional.
00:43:10
- She's embezzling money
from his bank account to the tune of hundreds
of thousands of dollars,
00:43:15
and she's got this lifestyle
where she doesn't have to work. Bill is financing plastic
surgeries, exotic vacations.
00:43:21
She gets to drive around
in a convertible Lexus. She's living the life,
she's cheating on him
00:43:27
and she's stealing from him. And whichever one of
those Bill McLaughlin finds out about first,
she's out with nothing.
00:43:34
She has to kill Bill McLaughlin if she wants to
get away with this. [suspenseful music]
00:43:41
- [Richard] It took several
years of hard reinvestigating to gather all the new evidence.
00:43:45
And in 2009, 15 years after
Bill McLaughlin's murder, Nanette Johnston and Eric
Naposki were finally arrested
00:43:54
and charged with murder. - I got one of these
awesome moments where I got to
call Kim McLaughlin
00:44:01
and I said, "Hey, just
wanna let you know that we filed charges in
the death of your father."
00:44:06
And there's this pause and
she said, "Against who?" And I said, "Well,
against Eric and Nanette."
00:44:12
And she started to cry
and she said, "For what?" And I said, "For the
murder of your dad."
00:44:16
And she cried and
cried and cried. - [Richard] Two years later,
Eric Naposki was tried
00:44:24
at the Orange County
Superior Court. 28 witnesses were called, and there were more
than 240 exhibits.
00:44:35
- I was absolutely utterly
convinced that Nanette Johnston and Eric Naposki
murdered Bill McLaughlin.
00:44:40
But you never know how
it's gonna be perceived, and you never know if your
witnesses are gonna come off
00:44:44
well, if they're not
gonna come off well. So you always, in
a case like this, you kind of go in
with your heart
00:44:49
and your throat a little bit. - [Richard] After three
weeks, the jury was sent out
00:44:53
to consider their verdicts. They deliberated
for seven hours. - The jury came back and
convicted Eric Naposki
00:45:00
of first degree
murder with a firearm, and also whats known as a
special circumstance of murder
00:45:05
for financial gain. Okay, so he was doing this
to help Nanette get money, and the sentence was life
without possibility of parole
00:45:11
in California State Prison. - [Richard] Nanette Johnston
was tried a year later.
00:45:19
The prosecution argued that while Nanette
didn't pull the trigger, she had planned the crime
and aided in its execution.
00:45:28
And so she should also
be prosecuted for murder. - The jury convicted her of
murder for financial gain.
00:45:35
Nanette was also sentenced
to life without possibility of parole in California
State Prison.
00:45:41
- [Richard] After
17 and a half years, Bill's family finally received
the justice they deserved.
00:45:47
- After the investigation
that was done and the trial was done,
I did meet his ex-wife
00:45:52
and I was also close
to his daughters and they're very nice people. It was nice to be able to
get some closure for them.
00:46:04
- Bill McLaughlin's
family never stopped their search for justice. In the end, it was the tenacity
of the investigating teams
00:46:12
that trapped these killers. But bodies never lie. Bill's body showed that
there had been no struggle.
00:46:20
He was shot in cold
blood by someone who intended to kill him. Eventually, justice was served.
00:46:27
[gentle suspenseful music]