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I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of One Reshow American scandal, we bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history presidential lies, corporate fraud, corruption in sports. In our new series, we look at a decades long campaign by federal law enforcement to target activists fighting for racial justice. Federal agents went after everyone from Billie Holiday to Martin Luther King Jr. and would ultimately face a public reckoning. Subscribe to American Scandal on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, join one plus to listen and free in the Wanderin.

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She can lie to you, make love to you, kill you all the same week and not even cry at the funeral.

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She was living that dream California lifestyle. You talked about Housewives of Orange County. She could have been on the show. She wrapped around her finger just like she wrapped so many men around her finger. She had it all. Waterfront home, fancy cars, millionaire boyfriend, quite the life until the shots were in sets of two. He saw his attacker, her lover, gunned down who wanted him dead.

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And that would have not done it because there was no financial gain for her in this. But what about her secret friend, the former NFL linebacker, who lied to them? For one thing, I did. The mystery was unsolved. Then came a prosecutor who took on big waves and cold cases. Could he find the key to this one?

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This isn't just a motive. It's a motive on steroids. Keith Morrison with deadly trust.

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There's a place called a pot of gold at the end of ambition of the American Dream, a place to fill in the lucky, build their mansions by the sea. Newport Beach, Orange County, California, where the most unexpected event would be. Murder. Things like this rarely happen in Newport Beach, let alone in an area that's as secure as this area. Let alone involving people like this attractive, charismatic, living large. Like Nanette Johnston, Packard, McNeil, she had a beautiful home.

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She drove an expensive car and she was sort of living that dream California lifestyle. She talked about Housewives of Orange County. She could have been on the show. Yes.

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In fact, she told a friend she turned down an offer to be on that show about over-the-top excess in Orange County. No, she did end up on a TV show called American Thunder about motorcycles showing off her own excess, including a bike she bought for 50 grand.

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What's your favorite part of the bike? I love the way it looks.

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Man in the mirror. And then there was Eric Naposki, we houselights for breakfast, ex football player, personal trainer, wannabe actor who starred in a never aired reality show called The Newport 40.

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But here is where the show ends and the real begins because of what happened in that house behind the gates a long time ago.

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It was December 15th, 1994, 9:00 p.m. The shots were patterned in the sets of two, two shots, two shots, a pause and then two shots. Detective Tom Volz arrived to find a millionaire entrepreneur dead on his own kitchen floor. His name was Bill McLaughlin, 55 years old.

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Nice guy, deeply religious and a true believer in the American dream, a man who made his come true. Kind of a self-made guy, right? Absolutely, yes, Bill said his daughter, Jenny, was the first in his family to go to college, the first to found a company, the first to end up with million.

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Now, Tom, what do you think would wind up murdered, but here he was, you could tell that there was not a physical struggle, there were things that were knocked off counters or things like that. You could tell that both Bill McLaughlin saw it coming, saw his killer, one of his movements was to put his hand up and try to block a shot, and he got shot through the underside of a finger.

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So he saw his attacker.

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Now, votes needed to figure out who was that last person Bill McLaughlin saw.

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You're trying to take everything in and you're trying to remember as much as you can write down what you feel is important, what's going to come up in the investigation, what was important, what wasn't.

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It was hard to know in those first few hours, as you can see in this never before seen video the police shot the night of the murder. The house was as need as a pin except for a glass on the table, some papers askew from a lawsuit brought by an ex business partner. And there were six bullet casings on the kitchen floor. And one more thing, a Post-it note from his girlfriend, Nanette, stuck to the side of a lamp.

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She'd be home late. Her son had a soccer game. Bennett Johnston, as she was known back then before reality shows in a couple of more marriages, had been Bill's girlfriend for more than three years, and they seemed happy despite the almost 30 year age difference, said his daughter, Kim.

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They seem to be good companions.

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And she was like your age. She was my age.

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Then that helped Bill look after a disabled son, Kevin, who suffered a severe head injury after being hit by a drunk driver.

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And she helped with some business ventures.

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He found that interesting about her, that he could have possibly a romantic relationship, but also sort of a mentoring relationship and possibly a business partner. He had hopes for this. I think he did.

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They live together in Bill's house on the Newport Bay, as did her two little ones part of the time. And she brought some children.

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Correct. Did he like that? Yes. He thought that was important. He thought that it showed she was compassionate.

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On the night Bill was killed, Nanette was with her children at her son's soccer game. The kids went to their dad's house afterwards and then they headed to the mall to go Christmas shopping.

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She arrived home to a crime scene and to Detective Voelz, anybody involved has a possibility of being the murderer. So both question Nanette and Bill's own grown kids couldn't eliminate anybody yet.

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We looked at the girlfriend and we also looked at the daughters because anyone that stands to gain money in this situation is a potential suspect.

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Bill's ex-wife was way off in Hawaii.

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They'd been divorced for years. Still, the detectives talked to her and there was Kevin Bill's disabled son and the only other person in the house at the time of the murder. It was shortly after nine p.m. when Kevin heard the gunfire, he was upstairs still debilitated by those car accident injuries, and he labored to make his way down to the kitchen where he found his father.

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Oh, I can't say too disabled to explain that he needed help, someone was dead, Kevin was a suspect, that we needed to find out the validity of his statements, whether he had gunshot residue on his hands, whether he was even able to shoot a gun, given his physical disabilities. But I suspect they checked his hands for gunpowder residue. Negative. You have to look at everybody, unfortunately, sometimes hurts feelings, but you have to get down to the facts on it, too.

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But facts can be tricky things and in this case, far more elusive than anyone might have imagined.

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When we come back, some clues were elusive, but some were right out in the front, like the two that dramatically narrowed down the circle of suspects.

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Those are huge. It eliminates everybody down to only those people that have access to those two keys when deadly trust continues.

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In the days that followed Bill McLaughlin's murder, his children wandered overwhelmed through the essential events that followed a sudden death. A funeral must have been, I don't know.

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The funeral was horrible because we were in shock and we had to hold up. I don't remember much, but I do remember that sitting in the front with each child on either end and they were both bawling at the top of their lungs. And then I remember my brother speaking to me at the funeral and telling everybody what amazing man he was and what a great dad he was for him.

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Bill's girlfriend, Annette, moved out of the house where Bill was killed to another house he owned right on the beach. Kim and her sister moved back into the family home with their brother. They clung to each other for dear life.

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We cried on each other's shoulders and did a lot of counseling and therapy and grieving.

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What made it worse was they didn't know who did it or why any more than did the Newport Beach police. One of the thing like this happens, I mean, it's a really an execution style killing. This was obviously somebody who intended to kill your dad. You must immediately have, you know, wonder who.

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Right. Or you wonder if it's a completely random act as some stranger and it was a mistake or an accident or you you develop a list of people that might have have a reason to have shot him to police.

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It didn't look random. Nothing was taken. The killer struck with precision accuracy and got clean away. But there was something that intrigued detective vote that night. It was a clue they found in Bill McLaughlin's closet. We do a search of the House with the permission of Kevin. And in that we're told that there were weapons in a closet upstairs. And when you come across a lot of weapons like that, it's it's surprising.

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In the few years before his death, Bill had become an avid gun collector. He kept dozens of them at his Newport Beach house, but not just antiques. There were pistols and revolvers and semiautomatic weapons, including seven modified M 16 assault rifles, dangerous stuff in the wrong hands.

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We didn't know if somebody maybe was upset with the sale of a gun or something, and that was worried about that, too.

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Ninet told us that Bill was dealing with a lot of shady people, gun dealers, and that was one theory.

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But there was something else, too, or rather someone else.

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The only person that we knew was frustrated with him was his business partner, who he was in the lawsuit with all of them bills, kids.

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And Nanette told detectives about that business partner, Hal Fishel, because he and Mr. McGlothlin were in a heated multiyear lawsuit over the invention of the device.

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The device bill had made his millions from a revolutionary medical invention, a machine that separates plasma from blood. It's still in use today worldwide.

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Just the sort of thing Bill wanted to do, something useful, helpful and make lots of money to be enjoyed, learning new things, discovering new things, and especially if it if it help people benefited people.

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You know, if he could make money off of an idea.

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How official had worked with Bill on an early phase of the machine? It was after Fitial left the company that the money came rolling in. Fitial thought his contribution to the invention deserved more than what he got. So he sued his former friend and partner, Bill McGlaughlin. And here's the thing, it was just two weeks before the murder that the courts decided or Bill, any day he was to get the nine million he and Fitial had been fighting over four years.

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So was it a revenge killing?

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Sounded at least plausible, except for something the killer left behind, something official didn't have access to. No, it wasn't DNA, not fingerprints, something more mundane than that.

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When we got here, the door on the right was open and there was a key stuck in the lock right here. In addition to that, there was a key on a mat laying right next to the door here.

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Two keys, two clues. One was a brand new copy of the front door key. The other was a key to the community pedestrian gate, not a copy.

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Those are huge because it it eliminates everybody in the world from being a suspect down to only those people that have access to those two keys.

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The circle of suspects is getting smaller. Coming up, police focus on one particular suspect who did have access to those keys and to something else, he bought a nine millimeter in the summer, a Beretta 92 if you lied to them.

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For one thing I did. When Dateline continues, we get support from F.C. store if you have an FSA account.

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You can log into your account any time. Send a message to your counselor and you'll get timely and thoughtful responses because you're doing all this online, you won't ever have to wait in a waiting room. Instead, you're scheduling weekly video or phone sessions with your counselor. They also know that you might not click with someone right away. And that's OK. Better help makes it easy and free to change counselors if you need to. To get ten percent off your first month visit, better help dotcom slash DL.

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Two keys that demanded attention. One of them was stuck in the front door the night Bill McGlaughlin was murdered. The other was dropped on a mat outside. The person who killed Bill had obtained those keys, which meant whoever it was was in his inner circle or had access to it. Now, police began looking very closely for relationships like maybe secret ones.

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What is your involvement or relationship? That's a very good friend of mine.

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And that's how they found Eric Naposki, who they learned was living in a studio apartment in one of those Southern California Melrose Place sort of complexes, just not quite as nice. Naposki had played football, but his promising career as a linebacker had fizzled. Too many injuries, too many hours on the bench. By the early 90s, he was trying to figure out what to do next.

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I was in Seattle with the Seahawks when I retired, when I left and I drove down the coast.

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And it was a great place to land, be kind of nirvana for a guy like you. It was. Good looking ex football player like him is easy to get work and women in Southern California like Ninet, he met her while working one day at this gym. What do you think when you saw her?

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I thought she was a snob when I first got here, a little stuck up. She had the sunglasses on, you know, the expensive watch. And she was a little snobby.

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Well, she was at first, but. So what made you friends?

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Proximity. She was fun. Girl. We worked out together, I'd say we probably worked out together more than we did anything else together. He was impressed by her intelligence, by what she told him about herself, that she had a business degree. For example, she graduated early from high school and she graduated early from college in February 1994, ten months before Bill McGlaughlin was killed.

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Nanette's affair with Eric was in full bloom, which, given that Eric was not exactly flush, turned out to be just fine because she had no loss for money as she talked about things and as she drove her new cars and as she footing the bill for everything we did together.

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So what did Eric know about Bill and Bill's relationship with Nanette?

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The cops asked him another bill. You know who I just knew? I knew him. I knew him and his you know, his partnership with with Internet as far as business cards and stuff like that.

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Eric told us Nanette said she invented things, medical equipment, blood separators, sound familiar? And Bill, she told Eric, guided her through the process. That was her mentor.

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That was her business partner. And she can make her own schedule. She can work out all morning, grab lunch, do whatever she has to do, go pick up the kids and take them to practice and be the teen mom.

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Pretty nice job, Eric in the Nets. Spend time at what she said was her house right on the beach. What do you think?

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As beautiful, beautiful house, right on the beach, right in Newport.

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The upstairs downstairs, fully furnished. She had a picture of herself in the upstairs bedroom, a blown up look like kind of a glamour, kind of a glamour shot. Yeah. It never occurred to me said that Nanette and Bill did more than just business together. It was a business relationship. And if you looked at Nanette and took into account her age and you looked at Bill and took into account his age, you know, why would you think.

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Orange County, California, hello.

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I guess I'm a rookie to Orange County, but when it comes to murder and relationships, sometimes two's company three's a motive. If Eric found out that Bill was much more than just the next mentor, was it a motive for murder? So in their interview, investigators got right to the point. What was he doing that night?

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I was with the man at the soccer game. She got me off and took off and I got dressed and went to work later on the night. The curious thing about Eric's job, he was a bouncer at a nightclub about a football field and a half away from the McGlaughlin house, not that far for a linebacker.

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So the cops asked a few more questions. If you do any harm, you know, I don't know. But that didn't mean he didn't own any guns. Just took them a while to tell the detective that case. You don't go fire. So, no, I bought one I had was here, so I bought one in Dallas. Then I gave my dad.

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We first ask him if he has that he owns any weapons. He says he doesn't own any. And then he says, Oh, that's right. I did buy one in Texas, little three eighty. But I sent it to my dad in New York and then we talk a little bit longer. And he said, Oh, I bought another three eighty.

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Did you have to register and sign registration?

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The light must have gone off in his head that we were going to find out by checking and registration, because a few minutes after that, he says that he bought a nine millimeter earlier in the year, in the summer, a Beretta.

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Ninety two F now that was interesting. A nine millimeter was what killed Bill McGlaughlin, and no one knew that at the time but the cops and the killer. And there are lots of nine millimeter guns around. But why did Eric Naposki seem so dodgy about is where is your knife?

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No, I have no idea. You have no idea. That's my statement.

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If he thought he was helping himself, he wasn't. Why didn't you ask for a lawyer?

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I didn't think I needed one. Innocent people don't need lawyers, do we? But you said some things that didn't help you out, that's for sure. Absolutely. You lied to them for one thing.

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I did. Of course, lying doesn't make you a killer, but jealousy maybe. Did Naposki know he was in a love triangle? Did he want Bill out of the way?

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And if so, did Ninet quite literally hold the key? When we come back, the young girlfriend on the mic with a shady past, she was trying to hide in the big, bold print, it was basically looking for a wealthy man.

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I'll take care of you if you take care of me when deadly trust continues. On the afternoon of the day he was murdered, Bill McGlaughlin drove from a house he kept in Las Vegas to McCarran Airport. He climbed into the little airplane he owned and flew it up above all his troubles. This is where he was free and happy, pure joy up here. Just around sunset, he landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, called Ninet to tell her he was back and drove home to Newport to the place he was about to die.

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But for all their efforts, investigators could find not one bit of evidence in those final movements of his. Nothing that would link him to the man who was fast becoming their prime suspect, Eric Naposki. Back at the house, Bill's daughters took it upon themselves to sort through all their dad's financials. Maybe there'd be a clue there. He had to figure all that out yourself to be very complicated.

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It was very complicated. And we did not trust many people at that point, understandably so. Bill's daughters pored through it all the little stuff and the big stuff. There had been a failed real estate deal in the desert, two houses to deal with in Nevada. Soon, money would be coming in. But when he died, millionaire Bill McGlothin was low on funds and things were missing.

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Bills and bank statements, check registers, that kind of thing. The sisters turned to Nanette for help because she was the person that handled Bill's day to day money matters. In fact, she was a trustee of the trust that held most of Bill's money. But everybody grieves in his or her own way.

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And then that was very hard to reach. She just disappeared.

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Yes, we contacted her over something missing and sometimes she would return our calls and sometimes she wouldn't.

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She wasn't far away, mind you. Just at the house. On the beach in his will. Bill left Nanette quite a consolation prize.

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A million dollars in life insurance, 150000 in cash and the use of the beach house for a year.

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But it was hardly enough, frankly, to fund the lifestyle to which she'd become accustomed to me, pay for everything for a couple of cars and even plastic surgery.

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Well, he he treated her very well.

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He provided a very posh lifestyle for she and her children, which made Bill's daughters move Nanette down the list of suspects.

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I said in front of her, I believe. Well, of course, that would have not done it because there was no financial gain for her in this.

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After all, had Bill survived the that and her two children might have lived very well indeed. And then Bill's daughters noticed something odd about his books.

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I noticed in one of his business accounts a two hundred fifty thousand dollar check that was written to a lot of money. Oh, a heck of a lot of money. The check, dated December 14th, one day before Bill was murdered, was made out to mean that Johnston trust yourself this evening. Yes, it looked like your father's signature to. And I showed it to the police detectives.

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Didn't like the looks of it either.

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Hello. Oh, hi, Nina. This is Jenny.

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The detective told the daughters to give me another call and recorded.

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Well, first of all, a lot of check there. There are a lot of times that I sign for him on anything with his permission to sign his name. Your permission to sign his name. I signed his name on many things. Huh? Never let us do that.

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Although I told Jenny she was sure Bill had signed that particular check. But then the detectives got involved and they found more money missing from Bill's account, nearly half a million dollars, and also discovered that that wasn't exactly the person she had portrayed herself to be.

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Detectives learned she'd grown up in Phoenix.

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You can barely recognize her from her high school yearbook picture shoot, so transformed herself. And despite what she told Eric, she never studied business, never even got a college degree. She never invented anything but her own back story.

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Married at eighteen to kids by 22, divorced at 23, and determined to leave dusty Arizona behind for the coast of California, in particular, Newport Beach.

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So this was the place she wanted to move into and said, let's move in together. It wasn't even a museum being built.

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It turns out before Bill, before Eric Naposki there was Tom.

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He met Nanette at a nightclub, and six weeks later, he found himself moving them both into a brand new townhouse in the heart of Newport Beach.

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She'd actually found the place before she even met him. What was attractive to you about her?

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Smart, intelligent, definitely very determined, forging ahead on on her own two feet and wanting to make things happen.

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Oh, and she did she just happen to like shortcuts, which Tom discovered when he found something Jeanette had been hiding?

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And add in the big, bold print, it was basically looking for a wealthy man. I'll take care of you if you take care of me. Did you confront her after you found this time? Absolutely. Nanette denied it was her, but soon enough she had moved out and up and in with Bill McGlaughlin. It was clear to detective vote that Nanette Johnston was greedy and would stop at nothing for money, it was clear to him that she'd been cheating on Bill was also clear to him she'd been cheating on Bill with Eric.

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He even knew that her key to the community pedestrian gate was missing.

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And I remember there was one found could have been it on the mat at the murder scene. But did all that make her a killer? She and her lover Eric, to remember what you thought at the time.

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I thought the police would be able to have a closed case, wishful thinking, as it turned out, probably naive.

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In fact, it looked like someone or two someones. I just get away with murder. Coming up, if that's what they thought, they reckoned without this man, you're always nervous when you try an old case and without this story from a new witness, she said, I don't even want to know if you had anything to do with this. And he said, maybe I did. Maybe I did. When Dateline continues. Hi, I'm Brooke. And I'm Erica and where the hosts of Even the Rich, a show about people with a lot of money and a lot of feelings.

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Brooke, what's the worst thing that can happen to a politician getting voted out of office? Hmm?

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How about driving your car off a bridge and leaving a young woman trapped inside, which is exactly what Ted Kennedy did in 1969. It was a scandal that rocked the nation and threatened to bring down the entire Kennedy empire.

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Subscribe to even the rich Chappaquiddick on Apple Podcast's, Spotify, the wonder app or wherever you're listening right now, join Wonder E-Plus in the Wonder app to listen ad free.

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Detectives thought he had a case there were the keys, the lies, the other lover, the stolen money. Circumstantial, yes, but he thought both Eric Naposki and Nanette Johnston committed murder together. I thought we had it solved as far as who the responsible parties were. It was just a matter of days. Office didn't feel comfortable with filing the case two times.

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Newport Beach police brought the case to the DA's office and two times the DA's office said the detective had not made his case. Nanette was arrested in the spring of 1995, but not for murder. They got her for fraud and forgery. She pleaded guilty, spent a year in jail, and though Eric waited for her, by the time she got out, she was ready to move on.

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She married a real estate mogul much richer than Bill McGlaughlin ever was. They had a baby girl. And once again, the net was driving a fancy car and living where rich people live and spending lots and lots of money on clothes and lunches and hairdos. And then, well, then she met someone else, another bill. So she divorced the real estate mogul and agreed to receive seventeen thousand dollars a month in child support. That had been her idea all along.

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The new bill did not have millions, and when he married, now that he signed a prenup, agreeing to let her keep for herself all the money she got from husband number two, who was at number three anyway, the real estate mogul, Eric Naposki, went back east, got married, had kids, got divorced, made that reality show that never got going. He was to play a big, scary, bad guy.

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I just have a slightly different interpretation of the law. And one of Bill's kids, they tried to live how their father would have wanted them to sort of the opposite of that, that he really wanted us to help make the world a better place.

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So he encouraged us to do things in the community. The three of us kids would go to nursing homes and put on a little talent show for the elderly.

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How unusual. You need to understand where my dad came from, a very low income family, as we'd call it today. And so he always appreciated what he had.

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And he worked very hard for it because children worked hard to supported libraries in the Third World. Orphanages in Africa gave wheelchairs to the poor in Latin America. Rewarding work, but as time passed, they began to think the fairy tale had it all wrong, seemed to them like it was the evil stepmother who got to live happily ever after, certainly not them. Five years after the murder in 1999, the sisters lost their brother Kevin in a drowning accident.

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He never did recover from the damage the drunk driver did or the trauma of finding his murdered father. So both men of the family were gone and hope for justice faded away. We thought those two will be arrested next week for killing my dad. And when it didn't happen, month after month after month and then year after year, we had to actually just release the pain and the anger we felt from it.

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And conscious of the fact that you had to work on that, very conscious of the fact.

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And that might have been the end of our story, but for him.

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This is Matt Murphy, surfer and prosecutor, with just possibly an excessive confidence in his ability to prosecute the murder of Bill McLaughlin. All those years ago, what you had was an old old case, pretty circumstantial stuff.

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A lot of evidence had been lost, degrades over time.

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Were you a little nervous about that?

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You're always nervous when you when you try an old case, but not a forgotten one. Cold case. Investigators kept digging.

[00:34:29]

They found a real estate agent who showed Nanette that Eric expensive houses after the pair said they were about to come into some money. They found a businessman who heard from the night before the murder that she was about to have lots of money to invest. And they found a neighbor of Eric's from that Melrose Place type building, a woman who had been too afraid to come forward at the time of the murder named Suzanne.

[00:34:54]

COGAT Suzanne Kuga was very, very important because, Suzanne, COGAT gave the best comprehensive understanding of the way Nanette manipulated the Polski into committing the murder.

[00:35:09]

Suzanne told them how she and Eric would chat by the pool, how one day in the fall of 1994, Eric was angry that his girlfriend's boss, meaning Bill McGlaughlin, had tried to rape her. Totally untrue.

[00:35:22]

They're engaged to be married. She'd been living at the house as boyfriend girlfriend for over three years, but Naposki apparently didn't know any of that and he was in a rage about it. He was in a rage about it.

[00:35:34]

After the murders, Suzanne, Eric sought her out, said if the police came around, tell them I'm a nice guy. She said, oh, my God, Eric, I don't even want to know if you had anything to do with this or not. And he smiled and he said, maybe I did. Maybe I didn't.

[00:35:48]

If you think about it, you're accused of a murder.

[00:35:50]

You didn't commit how those words are ever going to come out of your mouth incriminating, but hardly one of those tangible facts that get someone sent away for life.

[00:36:00]

This is one where every little piece of evidence had to be considered in light of all the other pieces of evidence.

[00:36:07]

In fact, just the type of challenge Matt Murphy was after. So on May 20th, 2009, more than 14 years after Bill McGlothin was shot dead in his kitchen, then that was plucked from her well short life and charged with murder, the that proclaimed her innocence and her Orange County friend stood by her.

[00:36:29]

I'm just going to tell you that she's my friend. She's a good person. She's been generous and kind and a wonderful mother and a wonderful neighbor across the country.

[00:36:42]

And Connecticut police picked up Eric Naposki and accused him of murder, too. Eric was also defiant. It wasn't Eric Naposki who shot Bill McLaughlin. This is a fact. And Matt Murphy's wrong. I'll tell you right now on my children, he's just straight wrong.

[00:37:00]

Did Eric kill Bill McGlaughlin? Did he conspired with that or was Matt Murphy in over his head up to a jury soon? Coming up, first, they had to face trial where Nanette's lawyer had an unusual defense in court. You called your client, I'm sure, and it's just because you've treated people before in your life does not make a murderer. What a jury agreed when deadly trust continues.

[00:37:40]

Afternoon, afternoon, 17 years after Bill McLaughlins life was brought to such a violent early end, Eric de Perskie went on trial here in the Orange County courthouse. What I want to do at this point, I want to take you folks through kind of an overview of the evidence.

[00:37:57]

This is my prosecutor, Matt Murphy told the jury, Eric, the Perski volunteered to be in that Johnstons deadly triggerman, that he'd been copying Keyes in November doing target practice.

[00:38:09]

And on August 2nd, Mr. Topolsky purchased a very expensive Beretta nine millimeter model, 92 of.

[00:38:19]

And then a few months later, it was Nanette's turn, Murphy told the second jury that Nanette's greed was insatiable, that she wrongly thought as trustee of Bill's trust, she'd control the money and that her stealing escalated as the murder date got closer.

[00:38:37]

She still forty eight thousand two hundred dollars in the month of October alone. So in the month of October alone, she has beaten the previous nine months combined with her thefts, and so the prosecutor argued she asked Eric to kill Bill before he caught on.

[00:38:55]

Eric's attorneys told the jury two things. One, Eric couldn't have done it 18 minutes before the murder. He was on a payphone at this Denny's, which isn't even in Newport Beach through the phone bill, which might have proved it had been lost. But the point was that his lawyers, he couldn't have made it all the way to Newport Beach in time to commit the murder.

[00:39:16]

And anyway, they said Nanette did it, that the evidence in this case and at this trial.

[00:39:24]

Shows that Annette Johnson is the person most likely to have committed this murder, Eric Naposki was merely the patsy.

[00:39:34]

But at Nanette's trial, her attorney said she was innocent and it was Eric who committed the murder.

[00:39:42]

Over the course of this trial, the evidence is going to show that he murdered Mr. Magoffin out of jealousy and out of greed on his own part.

[00:39:49]

Mutual finger pointing from him, though Nanette's attorney, Michael Hill, had to agree his client wasn't exactly a saint.

[00:39:58]

Hater as much as you want for being a thief, a liar, a cheese. Slot, whatever you want to call her, God seems to me in court, you called your client a slut. I'm sure I did. I can't just ignore the worst parts of choice. Just because you've treated people poorly in your life does not make you a murderer.

[00:40:16]

If she thought she was getting a million dollars, that life insurance policy, a million dollars is a lot of money.

[00:40:22]

A million dollars is a massive amount of money to people like me, but to a million dollars for her. That's a pittance. He was worth fifty five million when he died. So her long term plan is not to be with a deadbeat loser wannabe NFL player. So that's harsh. That's truth.

[00:40:39]

Which was in a way, the question we put to the prosecutor.

[00:40:42]

She was getting lots of money from him and she's probably stealing a little along the way and she could cheat at the same time. I mean, come on, why would he kill them?

[00:40:50]

The problem is, if he lives, he either finds out she's cheating or he finds out that she's stealing and she wins out. Best case scenario for her on the street with nothing. Worst case scenario, she goes to jail for the embezzlement. So this isn't just a motive. It is. It's a motive on steroids.

[00:41:05]

In the end, Murphy got his verdict.

[00:41:09]

Guilty, guilty of the crime of felony to it, violation after conviction. The oddest thing happened, an epilogue, if you like. Eric called up at Murphy from jail and said he was finally ready to tell the truth. Of course he told us to.

[00:41:28]

The first thing I wanted to do was clear up with Matt that I didn't do the crime. But I also wanted to share some other information with him that I hadn't heard anybody in 17 years.

[00:41:39]

Eric had a new story, if the Net wanted.

[00:41:43]

Bill McLaughlin did. Then Bill McGlaughlin was as good as dead, whether it was to get me to do it, whether to pay someone else to do it.

[00:41:51]

Eric's story now that Nanette asked him to kill Bill McGlaughlin and he refused but put her in touch with someone who could do it. And they used the Beretta, which said Eric wasn't his after all. He'd given it to Nanette as a gift, he said, and she supplied it to the hitman. So what did Matt Murphy think of Eric's new story? It doesn't make any sense. Here's the problem with Eric Naposki. The first story was I had nothing to do with it.

[00:42:18]

And then we arrest him and he says Nanette's totally innocent and I'm totally innocent. Then we get to trial and it changes to the next. Not innocent, but I'm innocent. And then I had nothing to do with that. I didn't know anything. Then we interview him afterwards and it changes again to something radically different.

[00:42:33]

Again, Michael Hill didn't buy it either. Have you ever heard of hiring a hitman? But then the hitman goes, Yeah, I'll take I'll take the job. But you know what? I don't have a gun. Could you loan me yours?

[00:42:44]

So Eric sits in jail and contemplates that long ago love affair with the that Nanette Johnston is the worst type of person.

[00:42:54]

She can lie to you, make love to you. Kill you all in the same week and not even cry at the funeral, and she was my girlfriend and that's what I have to. That's the price I'm paying. As for Bill's family, they say they're grateful, believing in their dad, Eric, are finally where they belong. How do you make sense of all of this stuff? There is no sense of it. They are just very sick, demented, selfish people.

[00:43:29]

When we actually started learning how Nanette's mind worked.

[00:43:34]

It was really hard to comprehend. And a very dark place to unravel. So she does what her father taught her. She lives for others as well as herself.

[00:43:49]

She flies like he did, and she looks for the light. It comes down to it or get taught us that's our goodness forward, make this world a better place and given to others who are less fortunate. And so we do that.

[00:44:04]

My sister and I both do that today. That's part of our mission in life.

[00:44:08]

And we go about with my dad, our dad as an angel on one shoulder and our brother as an angel on another shoulder. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt, thanks for joining us on. The Meet the Press Chuck Todd cast, it's an insider's take on politics, the twenty twenty election and more candid conversations with some of my favorite reporters about things we usually discuss off camera. Listen for free wherever you get your podcast.