Bill McLaughlin | Truth About My Murder | FilmRise True Crime | Forensic Files

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

Forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd investigates the murder of Bill McLaughlin, killed by his fiancee, Nanette Packard, and her new boyfriend, Eric Naposki.

In The Truth About My Murder, Dr. Richard Shepherd showcases a state-of-the-art digital autopsy table featuring digitally scanned sample bodies to investigate a series of intriguing murders where the victims' bodies help reveal the truth behind horrific crimes.

For More FilmRise Check Out Our Other Channels: FilmRise Television: https://www.youtube.com/⁨@FilmRiseTelevision⁩ FilmRise Movies: https://www.youtube.com/@FilmRiseMovies Highway to Heaven - Full Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@HighwaytoHeavenFullEpisodes

Brief Summary

Bill McLaughlin was murdered in 1994; forensic evidence led to the arrest of his girlfriend and her NFL boyfriend for the crime.

Key points

A Murder in Paradise. A shocking murder disrupts the idyllic life of Newport Beach, California.
The Victim's Identity. Forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Shepherd identifies the victim through dental records.
Suspicion Falls on Nanette. Nanette Johnston's behavior raises eyebrows after the murder of her boyfriend Bill.
A Dangerous Love Triangle. The police suspect a love triangle involving Eric and Nanette may have led to murder.
Nanette's Financial Motives. Nanette stands to gain significantly from Bill's death, raising suspicions.
New Evidence Emerges. A new team of investigators uncovers crucial evidence that could solve the case.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Bodies never lie.

Dr. Richard Shepherd on forensic evidence.

3:48WatchFeb 8, 2026

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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