I'LL TAKE CARE OF YOU-Caitlin Rother

fiance's fortune their own. When McLaughlin was gunned down, authorities had suspicions, but no proof. Pulitzer nominated writer Caitlin Rother explores this chilling story of a woman who seemed to have it all until justice finally had its day. The book we're profiling this evening is I'll take care of You with my special guest journalist and author, Caitlin Rother. Welcome back to the program and thank you for a Greenness interview. Kaitlyn Rother.

a cold case. But I was working on the other book, which came out some years ago, and the detective sergeant that I had been working with getting information from and following along and calling and nagging him for various things, he said, yeah, I'm actually working on this arrest warrant. We're going to go after this woman. She was a piece of work. And I said, oh, tell me about this case. So that being this case, which was a

cold case by then. It took fifteen years for Annette and her lanebacker lover, Eric Naposki to be arrested for the murder of Bill McLoughlin. But it was just interesting that I was able to follow it from the beginning of this second phase and all the way through two trials and sentencings and what have you, and was able to work with some of the same people on this other book. So very different though in terms of the

way that they handled the investigation. So the Dead Reckoning was the Skylar DeLeon's case, and they handled that one beautifully. This one did not go so well in the first stage of the investigation, in the initial initial stage of it.

was on TV some years ago. But just the way that people seem to think that, you know, money and appearances are so important that that's one of the more thematic reasons that this case really really drew me in, because I feel like that's one of our major problems in our society today and in our culture, of how much importance people put on money and appearances, and you know, that leads to some people stealing from other people and committing fraud and having so much cosmetic surgery that you

can't even recognize them anymore. So those were a couple of the things that Nnnette ended up doing.

just could not believe just how extreme she was. She was an extreme liar and an extreme cheat and a fraud, and she was incredibly sexual and manipulative and seductive. And I just kept thinking to myself, what is it about her that drew in so many of these men? And what can people learn from this book? Because I don't want to just you know, I'm not writing books about murders to sensationalized violence. I am writing about murder to try to figure out what makes people do these things

to other people? What is it about them? What happened to them, was there anything in their background as a child, And I was not really able to pin that down with her because she was so good at creating these different,

you know, faces for herself that it was difficult. So I did end up getting some answers from her third husband, who you know, got close to her, and I think actually maybe the only husband, if you know, other than maybe her first husband when she was still seventeen when she first got married her third husband, it sounds to me like she really fell in love with him. But he ended up finding out a few things about her,

but he still didn't know who she really was. And that was who Nanette was, somebody who was different to everybody she met. She lied about who she was. She adopted other people's successes as her own. She told people that she was someone she wasn't, and she had cosmetic surgery to make herself into something she wanted to be. And frankly, I don't know even what that was, other than she wanted to paint herself as you know, as some of these reality stars.

like she was a supermom. But she attended every sports game of her sons and every dance recital for her daughter. She brought her kids cupcakes on their birthday, even when they were in college, and she was, you know, doing some of these things, dating all these men and getting money and spending money other people's money on her kids. So maybe they thought she was a great mom too.

I don't really know. But she used this mom thing to draw in these men, to make them feel like they were part of a family, and that was one of her manipulative mechanisms. So in the end, though, what my theory was that Nanette really just wanted to be somebody other than herself. I told you it was a long answer.

title of the ad. She dressed up in this white feather boa and had on this little come hither outfit, you know, frufreugh hair. It was a boudoir shot essentially, but head and shoulders, and she basically said, I'll take care of you if you take care of me, and so she pretty much came out and said it. So

Bill McLaughlin answered this ad. And the police know this because they found a stack of notes back back and forth, presumably because they were cards in a stack and Bill was very meticulous, and so he had a stack of them in the earliest one was at the bottom, which was the first one, and it was addressed to him

in the mail. So it's clear that, you know, he was answering her ad because her his kids did not want to believe that their dad would have answered a personal ad, but there there was proof that he did. He did mail this thing to her anyway, So she, you know, pretty much gave her measurements and height and and said a bunch of stuff that really ends up

not being true. I don't know when she met him, she told him she had an advanced college degree, when in fact, you know, and she graduated high school early. She was a valedictorian, she had finished college earlier than you know, the four years, and she had an advanced business degree. Well, in fact, she dropped out of high school and she was not valedictorian. She went to work at a gym, and she was really good at sales, and so she got promoted quickly. But all of this

stuff about her education was completely made up. So he moved her into his his house pretty quickly, and they got along great. And you know, he told his cousin Barbara, who I quote in the book, you know, I really met this, you know, pretty lady, and I really like her law, and we get along really well. And da da da da dah. Anyway, she she she weaseled her way into the house and into his eventually into his checkbook.

They weren't sure he was going to come back. So when he came out of it, he had some deficiencies and one of them was that he you know, when he got upset or when he got very anxious, he when he tried to talk, he sounded like he was drunk, so it was hard to understand him. He was kind of slurry, and he wasn't able to walk as well. He was wasn't as athletic obviously as he used to be. And he still had a hard time writing as well.

So he was working on that with the therapy, and he was living in the house and one of you know, he's very frustrated, so he was actually using drugs and drinking more than his dad appreciated. So you know, he's like, you need to get into AA and and I'm going and he made him sign a contract and he had

some drug testing kiss in the refrigerator. And meanwhile, Nannette was living with both of them in the house, and she had her two kids would come and stay because she shared custody, and they moved into Bill's daughter's rooms pretty quickly. And so the older Bill's daughters were a little taken aback by that Wow left and she's just moved in and moved her kids in and Wow, so they were not thrilled with her. He thought she was, you know, the greatest thing. You know, he was having

a good time with her. Clearly, he was also a very bright man, a very educated man, and he was a wealthy man because he had invented a medical device that separated plasma from blood. He invented this with a partner and then subsequently got into this major legal battle with this partner, and so there were royalties that had been coming into the tune of a couple million a year, and then once this lawsuit kept going and going and going,

it was very expensive, very prustrating for him. They put some of those royalties into a fund that he did not have access to while they were in the middle of this lawsuit. So he was wealthy, but there was a bunch of money that he didn't have access to.

So meanwhile, he and the neette were working on a number of different projects, real estate projects, various other things he was trying to do with some related technology to the blood device, So he was he was busy working away, but he was struggling financially in the last year of his life, so things were things were kind of iffy with his finances, but she had some plans to change that.

did the relationship just look like? From outsiders? Friends of Bill will say, what did it look like?

she was of Indian descent. So she had dark eyes, she had dark really kinky, curly kind of frizzy hair, and she started coloring it, and it also looked like it was some bleached, so it's kind of hard to tell, you know, which was what was the sun and what was the hair color. But she was almost blonde, which you know, for somebody with Indian descent, you can imagine they're dark, dark haired, dark eyes, and a you know, different tint to the skin. So I saw her in court.

She didn't really look olive skinned, but she was. She definitely didn't look, you know, completely white. So anyway, she was attractive at the time. She was very athletic, very much in shape, went to the gym all the time, and apparently dressed to the nine. So she was very well dressed. And that's partly because Bill was buying her stuff. Bill was you know, bought her of some breast implants.

Bill took her on vacations. Bill said she didn't have to work as long as she was living in the house because he was going to take care of her. I mean, that was the deal, right, So she had plenty of time to work on her appearance. Bill, on the other hand, he was also athletic. He did manage to keep himself in good shape. He was a decent looking guy. You know, I wouldn't say he was a gorgeous man, but you know, he was not bad looking.

But he wasn't young. You know, he had money and but he was he was in good shape, and he did work at it, and apparently he would. I don't think he dressed up a lot.

that his ex wife had not been. And so, by all appearances, Bill's friends all thought they were this you know, I wouldn't say loving couple, but exclusive couple. They got along well. He was affectionate with her, He was very affectionate with his kids. Kind of all kinds of snapshots of him, you know, cuddling with her kids on the couch, taking them on his private plane, and taking them on his private boat. You know. So she's living the high

life and seems like everything's great. But he also is spending a couple of days a week in Las Vegas. He flies there in his private plane because he is establishing residency for tax purposes. He's saving half a million dollars a year doing this. Now, while he is away in Las Vegas, she's at the gym, you know, supposedly staying in shape. She is not taking her big diamond engagement ring with her to the gym. She is going to the gym posing as a young, hot, single athletic

woman on the prowl. And she is meeting and dating men left and right and sleeping with them, in fact, sleeping with them in Bill McLoughlin's house while he is in Las Vegas, which takes so much hutsbah, I can't even tell you.

she was so damn clever. She was gonna fool everybody, you know, and she was going to get what she wanted and what she needed and nobody was going to figure it out, because I mean, that seems to be a pattern with these narcissistic killers that you know, I'm smarter than everybody else, and I'm going to get away with this because I'm so good at this. I'm so good at lying. I fool everyone and everyone believes me, and they'll just do what I want and I just

manipulate them. And I want these men to give me sex, and I want these men to think that I'm a successful business woman and that this car that Bill gave me, and these clothes that Bill bought me, and these other things that Bill gave me, including his own accomplishments, which she took as her own, and told stories that she had invented this blood device, which is just ridiculous considering how old she was and what her education truly was.

These people believed her, and they wanted to meet Bill. They wanted to meet Bill because she told them that Bill was her you know, father figure, business mentor, and they were thinking, hey, some of them, you know, hey, I can get some of his money and invested in my business. So they were believing her stories. And so she was basically getting the admiration and the respect and

the sex and the nice things from every direction. So she was getting what she wanted, and she was pretending to be who she wanted to be, and she was getting away with it. So motivation. I think she had a big, deep black hole in her soul now that she was trying to fill with this cash and with this sex. And I don't know why she had it or where it came from, but it seems like she she definitely had a big black hole in her soul.

and getting some notice. And he was a great athlete, really great athlete, just kept getting injured, so he could never make it in the NFL. He did actually do well in the World Football League, so he was on a team in Barcelona called the Barcelona Dragons. He actually had his own fan club with five thousand fans. But he just could not make it here in the US.

And so in between, you know, healing and you know, getting injured and healing and training and running off and trying to audition again and getting signed and then injured, you know, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He was a bouncer and a physical trainer. And so while he was you know, in in the Newport Beach area, he met Nanette at the gym. They started hanging out and I guess they were friends. So she would tell him that she was dating all these different guys and

he didn't really know much about Bill McLoughlin. But she never told anybody at the gym that she was engaged to Bill McLoughlin. She made everybody think that he was just a business partner. So Eric Naposki, he had been married and divorced, had two kids, and he never sent them any money. He was always behind in his child support. As it turns out, by the time he was ultimately arrested in two thousand and nine, he was about one hundred thousand dollars behind because he had been married again

with two more kids. Of four kids, never paying his child support. He was one hundred thousand dollars in debt. But at this time, this is only after two kids. So he's he's a dad. You know, he's telling Nnette he's a dad, and he gets I think sucked in a little bit too, because he apparently likes kids, and he's hanging out with Nanette kids. And you know, by the year of nineteen ninety four, they were dating. So

they decided to start trying to try to date. So they've been friends already for a year or two and started dating. And initially, you know, it wasn't an exclusive thing, but they were getting more serious and at least Eric Sasso, and he took her home to meet his parents in Thanksgiving of nineteen ninety four, and Nannette took him to her sister's wedding that same trip back He's down in the Maryland area and introduced him as her boyfriend. Meanwhile,

Bill McLoughlin is thinking they're engaged right now. Bill was telling some people that he wasn't sure he wanted to marry her. He was just trying to keep her happy with this ring, and things were starting to go a little funny, and it's unclear whether he was figuring anything out or not. But he did tell his brother right before he was killed that he thought someone was after him, and he didn't say who. Well, I don't remember what your ust There you go.

liberty to start moving money around between other accounts. So one thing he did do is he talked to his accountant, who you know, basically he said, you know, Ninette wants to get married. You know, what should I do? And the accountant basically said, well, you know you should whyt't you just wait? You know, it's not going anywhere. If she really wants to marry you, she'll still want to

marry you. And because you know, he was having some difficulties and at one point, actually in nineteen ninety four, as things were getting very tight and he was having some liquid liquidity problems, he even said to his daughters, you know, do you think she's with me for my money? And they said yes. And so, you know, it's hard to say exactly, but I think she must have just told him what he wanted to hear, and he trust I think he trusted her, so all she had access

to was one account. And what she ended up doing, though, was was, like I said, soaking up all this knowledge. And what you know he did. He did make her a trustee to his estate. You know, that's if he were dead. Of course, when he did that, she was, she was. They were engaged, and she kept saying she wanted to have his child, and you know, he thought they were, you know, going to build a life together.

At least that's what she wanted. I don't know that he wanted that necessarily, but I think he was just trying to get back on a float, because this this legal this this lawsuit had been dragging on and dragging on, and then finally in October of nineteen ninety four and he was murdered in December, he finally got word that he had won or at least, you know, had won that round and was thinking and so he and the Neett were thinking that about nine million dollars was about

to come floating in. The thing suddenly changed in October of nineteen ninety four.

was still in a father son situation with him. I don't think Kevin was saying anything to his dad like watch out for Ninette, and in fact, I don't think they were they had any idea of what she was capable of. That's the thing. So when she's running around with Eric Knapowski and all these other men, they didn't

know that. They thought they were in an exclusive relationship because Nannette was Nannette was savvy enough to figure out that, you know, Bill did not want to come to these sporting events with her because he told her that he goes, you know what, I already raised my kids, I'm any interested in coming to these, you know, baseball games with you. So she would bring her lovers and Eric Knapowski in particular, to these games so the other people on the team

could see them. In fact, she's sitting on Eric Nappowski's lap right up until the day of the murder in front of her first ex husband. But again she's telling everybody else that, hey, Bill McLoughlin is my you know, business mentor father figure, including her first sex husband. The only person that testified during the trial that said anything that he knew was some guy who was a father of one of the kids on Nannette's son's baseball team,

who actually knew that she was living with Bill. He was the only person and he didn't say anything because he didn't like Bill personally. In fact, he liked Eric Napowski better because Eric. So there was nobody to warn Bill because they didn't. She kept everybody separate and compartmentalized that she was very good at that.

soccer game. We're going to talk about the soccer game, which is an hour before or earlier in the evening, and Eric and Nanette and the boy is going to receive an award. So this is an amazing part of this book. Where this is incredible scene. So tell us first about this check and how much and when is it written out for? And tell us about that first.

So she's moving money basically from account to account, so she only has access authorized access to one account, but she's moving stuff around, and she keeps the ledger, and so she entering in, she'll take a certain amount of money and she'll enter in a different amount of money. So she's taking money and since she's doing the accounting, she's not doing the proper accounting either, so she can take it. No one will notice, at least she thinks so,

and that's true for all of nineteen ninety four. Then

she starts getting a little more brazen. So as nineteen ninety four progresses and her relationship with Eric progresses, she starts taking bigger amounts of money and again entering in a different amount in the ledger and moving money around different accounts, so that you can't find it if it's missing, right, So all the way up to it starts getting to thirty thousand and seventy five thousand, and then on December fourteenth, which is the day before he's murdered, she writes a

check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She signs it Bill McLoughlin, so she's forging his signature, and it is made out to a trust that she has just

established in the last couple of weeks. As soon as she found out this nine million dollars was going to be coming in, she immediately establishes this new business and a new account, incorporates this new thing, and she's basically setting up a mechanism to take the rest of his money and obviously to kill him, because all of this is done in such a way that the timing is such that he would have found out that she was doing this, and so the detectives and the prosecution think

that she either he was about to find out, or the clock was ticking, or something was about to happen. Maybe he really was having suspicions. We don't really know. His brother said that there was a very strange phone call right before he was killed where he said that he was stockpiling guns and someone was after him, and he was you know, he was sounding really paranoid and strange. So but he didn't mention it. Now, it's just it's

something he knew something was going on. Meanwhile, Nanetta is has just gotten back from this you know, whirlwind trip back to meet Eric's parents and from her sister's wedding where he caught the garter belt and she caught the bouquet. And you know, they're sitting each other's lap. The pictures of them, you know, clearly this happy couple. This is

a couple couple of weeks before Bill is killed. Right. So, and I don't know what she's thinking that nobody's ever gonna notice, nobody's ever gonna find these pictures, nobody's ever gonna find out. I don't know what she was thinking. But anyway, so she and Eric go off to this championship soccer game for her son Christopher. And you know, as I said, she has gone to every single game. She is the super soccer mom. She drives all the kids. She's always there, except on this night, her first ex

husband is there. He's the father of these of her two kids. He's there, Eric is there. He thinks that Eric and and Nette are a couple, but he knows Nanette's ways because she cheated on him too, and he's thinking, you know what, she's involved with Bill and Eric. So he's but he doesn't say anything. So he sees them at about eight twenty eight twenty pm. They start like saying,

we gotta go. Eric's got an eight o'clock appointment. He's like, well, but it's eight twenty and they're in overtime, you know, and it's a tide game. Where are you going?

thinks that's pretty weird. Anyway, they disappear, and Eric, about two weeks earlier, coincidentally, has gotten this new job as a security guy at this new nightclub which is only about a two and a half minute walk from Bill's house. So it's called the Lado. I think it's the lead village area, and it's over bridge over some water from Bill's house, which is right on the water. And coincidentally,

two weeks earlier, he gets this job. So Nanette and Eric tell police later that when they're questioned that you know, hey, she dropped him off at his apartment and he took a shower, and then he went to work and she went shopping. She went to the mall because it was right before Christmas. She had some shopping to do, so she comes back to Bill's house with these shopping bags

and a receipt to show where she's been. And Eric, when they finally catch up to him, you know, he says, oh, he that was his story, So I'll.

downstairs as fast as he can. As I mentioned before, he has some ambulatory problems from his brain damage, so it takes him a full minute to get downstairs and this dog is barking like crazy, and he finds his father lying on the kitchen floor and there's blood on the floor, there's some bullet case things lying around. The dog is barking like crazy. His father's glasses are askew. Yeah,

and he's in his bathrobe. And so he immediately starts calling nine one one and the tragic, tragic, horrible part of this case. And they played the nine woman on tape in the courtroom and it just made you wrench inside. It was so sad. He was trying so hard to communicate with the nine one one dispatcher and she could not understand what he was saying, and it was just it must have just been horrible for him, so trying to communicate, having such problems communicating. She's like, wait, what

your dog's been shot? You know, wait, did your father shoot himself? Your mom? Your dad? I mean, she just couldn't get it, but she did get that there was a gun involved. So they did end up sending an ambulance, did send the police over, but by the time they

got over there, it was way too late. And in fact, by the time he was calling nine one one, his father was probably already dead because there were six shots with the nine millimeter and there were several at least several of them that would have been fatal as soon as they were shot. So he probably felt like, you know, time was running out, but in fact his dad was already dead.

Newport Beach. This is there's a lot of water in Newport Beach and a lot of there's a pedestrian's kind of like a jogging path or you can walk on it, you can bike on it, you can roller blade on it, and that goes all the way around the peninsular area and the right where Bill lived, which was called Bay. Oh my god, I don't get this wrong. Bishar Coves

and Ninette was a rollerblader and very athletic. As I said, And so the people in the house who lived there had a key to a gate that went from inside the community out to that path. So there was a gate right across the street. They lived on a cul de sac, and then there was they also had front door keys, so the pedestrian access gate keys that for that lock were given out to by the homeowners association. There were only a limited number. You had to sign

out for them. You are not allowed to copy the key, it said, do not copy on you know, on keys. So they were distributed by the homeowners association on purpose to keep these to keep it secure. So anyway, when the police got there, they found two newly copied keys. One was actually literally in the door lock of the front door, just a single key with one of those little tiny metal circles that you get when you just come back from the hardware store because they give you

those little tiny keyring things. And then there was another one on the doormat, and they were different colors and they were clearly, you know, shiny, brand new copies keys. Now, as they started doing some investigation, what they found was that well, because they were right near the ocean, the front door lock could get corroded with salt, so that sometimes when they had a new key they'd have to go get it reground because it wouldn't fit in properly.

And then the one that was on the doormat was the one that went to the gate, the pedestrian access gate out to that path, and by the way, that path led right up to the bridge which led across the bridge over to the Thunderbird Lounge where Eric Napowski

had just gotten this job. So again there was a key to the pedestrian access gate on the mat, and the front door lock had a key that was literally stuck in it, as if somebody had stuck the key in the front door lock tried to turn and get it out and it got stuck, and in his haste dropped the other key. So that's basically what the police decided that, Okay, there's two keys. They're freshly made copies.

And what that means is there's a finite number of people who had access to these keys, because, like I said, they were not supposed to be copied.

And in Newport they rotate their detectives, so you don't have somebody who's, you know, a veteran homicide detective work in every case. They rotate them, so that the detective in this case was Tom both Or Boss and this was his first homicide case. And actually, as it turns out, it was his first and only homicide case. He had worked undercover narcotics, he had done all kinds of other things,

but this was his first homicide case. Now, by the same token, as he's explained to me, that doesn't mean he was making decisions on this case. It meant that he was the lead detective, but he said he mostly was in charge of keeping the paperwork together and that the people above him were the ones who were making the decisions on what to do next, which I think is also true of smaller departments where you have the supervisory people who are more experienced, who are calling the

shops and telling everybody what to do. So I think when they say lead detective in this particular case, you know, I don't want to blame him for overlooking on anything. But at the same time, he wasn't experienced, So by the same token, he was also an enterprising guy. He he was the one who said, Hey, why don't I go approach some of these hardware stores and see if I can find out if anybody's made keys there recently.

As it turned out, guess what, Eric Nepowski had recently copied keys at the hardware store, you know, near near his house. So, like I said, so there are pros and cons to this small kind of smaller community approach and the experience, but that's the way it is. What it is, and it was it was.

And they didn't really know what was going on or who to look at, in particular, until Bill's memorial service, at which Nanette's son said, my boyfriend plays football. My mom's boyfriend plays football. Now, people at the funeral were like, wait a minute, Nannette was Bill's girlfriend. Who's she talking about? So right away casts out of the bag. They focus in on somebody who plays football who is hanging out

with Ninnette. N Nannette has gone to stay at another house that Bill owns, which is about four minutes away

on Seashore Drive. She says, Oh, I can't stay in this house where he was killed, So she's staying in this other house, which they call the Beach House, and the police starts surveilling her and that house, and within short order they see Eric Naposki come in into the house, so they start following him and they find probable cause to pull him over and bring him in for questioning in the middle of the night, after he's gotten off

work at the Underbird Lounge, some kind of outstanding traffic warrants, so they bring him in for questioning about this murder. And he's like, well, you know, I've been Yeah, I've been kind of dating the net but it's like, no big deal. So he's minimizing their relationship and she's minimizing their relationship, and so the police are kind of focusing in on the two of them as suspects, but they still don't have what they need to break this case open.

So what they end up doing and I ended up interviewing the prosecutor at that time, which was not the prosecutor who ultimately prosecuted this case to conviction. She was a tough cookie and the way she described it, this was an all man's kind of world. She was the only woman, and she just had a disagreement with these guys at the Newport Beach Police Department. There was a breakdown in communication. They didn't want her involved in the case. They wanted to do it their way. She wanted to

do something different. They split the case into two, into the fraud with the checks, the embezzlement, and the murder, and she's like, you know, she didn't think that was a good idea, but that's what they did. So they finally arrested in a net for these fraudulent checks that they basically counted up like fifteen checks that they could figure out that she forged the bill's name on. And they thought that they were going to force her to talk about the murder, but in fact, she she just

clammed up. And so she the way she tells it now, looking back, that was a big mistake and that that is what, you know, really screwed up this whole, this whole case and why it ended up turning into a cold case all these years later. She wouldn't talk, and they, I guess thought she was just going to roll over, and she didn't, so they they thought that Eric was the shooter, I think, way back then, but they just couldn't prove it.

department's probably embarrassed after all these years. Ultimately, you know, there was a conviction and it all turned out fine. But I mean, I can't say for sure what happened back then, But I think what happened is that they thought that they had a sure thing with the fraud. That's what they could prove, and that's what they could prove in court, and so that's what they went after, and they were hoping that the murder would follow. That's

that's all I can suggest at this point. It may make but I think that's what happened.

financial gain were there. They did not prosecute this one as a death penalty case, but it was a very similar case in that it was a you know, largely circumstantial evidence case because they did not have the murder weapon and they did not have direct evidence, but they had all kinds of other financial evidence and all kinds of other evidence. And so they were very similar in the way that the suspects and defendants used children, use their children as pawns and manipulated and it was all

about money and greed. So he came into this one. The police detective and the prosecutor really got to be close over this during the scholar Giulion investigation, and they wanted to continue to work on something else, and they basically just said, hey, do you have any other cases that you think, you know, we could take another look at, And they said, yeah, the McLoughlin case. So so they set this investigator, Lara Montgomery, onto the case and he

went through every piece of evidence again. He listened to all these tapes that they had in the case, files of phone calls that they'd made, you know, phone interviews, and a bunch of taped calls that had come into the police department. And what he found were a couple

of witnesses who had basically been overlooked. And what also had changed is that, you know, with new technology, the ballistics were much better, so that they were able to narrow down the murder weapon from twenty seven or twenty eight guns down to just one, and that was the Bretta ninety two F which coincidentally, Eric Neapowski had owned and said had been stolen. He didn't know where it was,

couldn't find it. Couldn't produce it, so they basically were able to arrest both of them, and they reinterviewed both of them, and Eric Naposki kept saying, I have an alibi. I have an alibi, and he said this earlier too, but he never produced any phone records to back this up.

He said he got a page from the Thunderbird lounge where he worked, saying he needed to come in and warned him about some boat parade traffic and he should be aware, and that he returned a page all those years ago when we used to have pagers, he apparently returned a page from a payphone using his credit card, his phone credit cards, but he never produced those records, and so by the time he was arrested, those records had long been destroyed, and he and his attorneys and

Nanessa attorneys kept trying to use that as well, it's been so long, you can't properly a judic case or prosecute this case because you know our evidence and you know Eric's albi have been destroyed. Well, according to the prosecution, they did these time trials driving from point A to point B, and they're like, you know what, regardless of whether he ever made this call, he still had enough time to commit the murder, so it doesn't even matter.

So there was a whole lot of you know, back and forth over these over this phone call that Eric Naposki supposedly made. His defense said it was physically impossible for him to have committed the murder because he returned his call at eight point fifty two and there's no way he could have driven from there at Newport, And the prosecution proved that he was able to do that to everybody's satisfaction, including the jury, including the judge.

It does happen, but it actually works better because you know, theoretically, the prosecution can then use completely different theories from trial to trial because you have different juries. With using the same facts, you can have different interpretations.

But when Ninette came around for trial, Eric had already been convicted, and and so what her defense was trying to say is well, Eric's the one who shot him, and Nanette didn't have anything to do with it. In the first one, you know, he was a jealous and in the first one they were trying to his defense was trying to say, well, it could have just as easily have been the Neette who shot him, you know,

I mean, it was just kind of crazy. Yeah, But the defense for both of them were that it's been fifteen years, this just isn't fair to prosecute them because we don't have all the evidence. It's been destroyed, which wasn't true, but that was what both of them said, and that the police investigation was so shoddy and so poor that you know, you can't trust anything they say.

just she's just more interesting as a person. But they never really painted her during the trial either trials, as a three dimensional person. It was she was just like this horrible, terrible, sleazy, cheating, you know, seductress. And even her own attorney it was bizarre. He just kept bringing up all this horrible behavior. But he said, but no matter how much you hate her, you can't can you can't convict her just because you don't like who she is.

It doesn't make her murderer. And I'm not sure that was the best tactic because by the time you were done, I mean, hitter lickworst than the prosecutor did. I mean, it was kind of bizarre.

I know we have like two seconds left. But the interesting thing at the very end was that Eric Kapowski, after he was convicted, then comes out with this story about oh, it wasn't me, it was a hit man that Ninnette hired, which delayed everything and sentence things, and had the prosecutor and Larry Montgomery the investigator, go back again and try to research this whole new theory but it never held any water, and they.

So I let him do that, and I said, look, I'm going to let you talk, but I need to talk to I need to ask some questions. And so he did let me. But he's a character. You know. What's the thing that I always say is people who were convicted killers is they don't seem like killers. They're charming, they are friendly. Oftentimes they are you know, you would have no idea, and he was. He fit right into that mold.

and people, I mean, I don't. I don't write a book unless somebody's been convicted. So I wait till everything's over.

waiting forever for that. Well you're already waiting forever, as you know, So the maybe a year and a half is not And you know, I mean, especially if you've looked at the trial and your experience that looking at trials, and no one can ever say for sure that something won't be overturned an appeal, but unless something was dramatically wrong with the trial, and so well, you know, my.

out of Prescott, Arizona. So somebody who had read that Dead Reckoning was sending me story ideas and book ideas. In the first one, I'm like, no, no, And then she tried again, and she was sending me these clippings from the newspaper from the trial of Stephen Democher, who was ultimately convicted and sentenced for killing his just recently

divorced wife Carol Kennedy. And the interesting thing about this case is that they have two daughters, and the two daughters to this day believe that their father did not do it and that their father was wrongly convicted, and so does his entire family. So this is a really interesting case to me because there were a lot of

twists and turns things that went wrong. There was a trial on the first trial, and he was ultimately convicted in a second trial, but there was he was The murder occurred about a month after their divorce was finalized, and there had been a long battle over money, So it's another one of these cases about money and financial gain, and the prosecution basically says that his motive was so

that he didn't have to pay her alimony. So the day that he was supposed to pay his first alimony payment of six thousand dollars, he didn't make the payment and the next day she was murdered. And then there were two life insurance payments of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars total that he was supposedly the beneficiary. But because they were divorced, they were then going to go to the daughters, and what ended up happening is that money. He convinced them that money needs to go to me

and my defense. And so there were all these transfers. And so even after he was charged with the murder, he was later charged with a whole bunch of other things that happened while he was in jail, with the transfer of all that money, which ended up getting spent on his first trial, which was a mistrial. To so private attorney's got all that money, the daughter's got none

of it, and that's gone. And there was a whole there's a whole bunch of other stuff that was just really crazy, and these attorneys were accusing each other of impropriety and the judge and it was just like, it's a crazy case. It's crazy fiction, right, it's crazy. It's like crazier than fiction. I always pick cases that are crazier than fiction.