Ex-NFL player owned Beretta handgun like one in killing

SANTA ANA – The ex-NFL player on trial in the killing of a Newport Beach millionaire in December 1994 told police a week after the slaying that he once owned a 9 mm handgun – similar to the one used in the slaying – but had loaned it to a friend who promptly lost it, a detective testified Thursday.

In his first interview with police after the Dec. 15, 1994, shooting death of William McLaughlin, ex-football player Eric Naposki volunteered that he purchased a 9 mm Beretta handgun four or five months earlier, former Detective Thomas Voth testified.

Eric Naposki, far right, watches as a picture of a Beretta 9mm model 92F, similar to the one used in the murder of William McLaughlin, was shown to the jury during opening statements at his murder trial in Superior Court in Santa Ana, June 20.

But Naposki claimed he loaned the $700 gun to a friend without ever firing it, and the friend lost the gun within three weeks, Voth told the jury in Superior Court Judge William R. Froeberg's courtroom.

Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy told the jury in his opening statements that new ballistics tests revealed that the gun used to kill McLaughlin inside the kitchen of his expensive Balboa Coves home on Newport Bay was a 9 mm Beretta model 92.

Naposki, 44, was arrested in 2009 and charged along with former girlfriend Nanette Johnston Packard with murdering McLaughlin, 55, for financial gain. Johnston Packard was living with McLaughlin, a multi-millionaire who was 25 years older, at the same time she was carrying on an affair with Naposki.

Murphy contends that Johnston Packard was a beneficiary of McLaughlin's life insurance policy and will, and believed she was entitled to live in his beach house and assume ownership of a luxury car.

Johnston Packard and Naposki were often seen together in the weeks before McLaughlin was murdered, and, after the murder, considered buying a $375,000 Lake Forest house together, according to other testimony Thursday. In testimony on Wednesday, a real estate agent testified that the couple had talked with her before the murder about buying a $915,000 home in the Turtle Rock neighborhood of Irvine. The couple split up about a year after McLaughlin was gunned down.

Naposki, who played parts of three seasons in the NFL and also played pro football in Spain and Canada, is being tried first in the McLaughlin case. Johnston Packard, now 45, remains in custody without bail and is scheduled to be tried later. Both are charged with murdering McLaughlin for financial gain, a special circumstance that could lead to a life term in state prison upon convictions.

Defense attorneys Gary Pohlson and Angelo MacDonald, Naposki's lawyers, contend that Naposki was with Johnston Packard at her son's youth soccer league game in Walnut on the night McLaughlin was murdered, and could not have returned to Newport Beach in time to gain entrance to the McLaughlin's gated home and shoot him.

Eric Naposki, far right, watches as a picture of a Beretta 9mm model 92F, similar to the one used in the murder of William McLaughlin, was shown to the jury during opening statements at his murder trial in Superior Court in Santa Ana, June 20.