I'll Take Care of You by Caitlin Rother Read Free Book Online

behind the bullet casings, which the police saw as a clue because the killer must have known that he (or she) had left no fingerprints on the shells. Early on, however, the police kept these details secret, which left the neighbors frustrated by the lack of cold, hard facts.
    â€œNo information is available, so everybody is guessing,” Stan Love, a leader of the homeowners’ association, told the Los Angeles Times. “It sounds like somebody was mad at [Bill].”
    The impact of the incident wasn’t contained by the chain-link fence surrounding Balboa Coves—the entire city of Newport Beach was buzzing about it.
    â€œIt was big news in Newport,” Byington said. “He’s a millionaire. Initially they were truly shocked because this just doesn’t happen in Newport. . . . It was fodder for the local papers’ front page forever.”
    Bill’s neighbors were, in fact, living under a false sense of security. The police figured that the killer used the shiny pedestrian-access key to get in. Then, after dropping it, he must have escaped via the abutting Newport Channel, in a car driven by an accomplice, by jumping the fence and running away, or through the pedestrian gate, left purposely ajar. In those days, all you had to do to get through the main entrance gate was punch in a simple code and drive in.
    It didn’t take detectives long to determine this was no random killing. Because so few people had copies of the keys the killer had left behind, detectives were pretty confident within a day or so of the murder that this was an inside job. So they promptly started surveilling both of Bill McLaughlin’s homes in Newport Beach, where they watched Nanette come and go—and they kept an eye out for any suspicious characters to show up.

CHAPTER 6
    Sandy Baumgardner met Kevin McLaughlin at a Memorial Day party in 1989. She met Nanette about five weeks after Kevin’s accident in 1991. And after Thanksgiving dinner with the McLaughlins in 1993, Sandy dropped a note to Kevin, saying, If you want to get fish tacos, let me know. They began dating on and off after that, and she’d since become very close with the family.
    Sandy recalled recently that Kevin was good-looking, with a cute personality, noting that his brain injury had affected his time perception and speech, but not his overall ability to think.
    By the Saturday night after the murder, the police had cleared the Balboa Coves house for the family to return, so the McLaughlin clan gathered in the den with Nanette and a couple of Bill’s best friends from college to process what had happened. Nanette sat at the bottom of the staircase. Sandy and Denis Townsend stood next to Nanette, while Don Kalal and Kevin sat on a couch.
    â€œWe were so shocked,” Sandy said. “Our wheels were all turning.”
    Thinking Nanette needed consoling, the group tried to comfort her with small talk, but she didn’t seem to want or need it. Nanette said she was going to continue to sleep at the beach house.
    â€œShe didn’t seem very emotional,” Sandy said, and “for whatever reason, she seemed to be clingy with me.” Sandy couldn’t put her finger on what Nanette was feeling that night, but she kept catching Nanette staring at her in “kind of a needy way. She always struck me as very insecure.... If I were to speculate, she was trying to lure in a supporter, someone on her side.”
    Sandy called her father back to give him an update. As she was describing Nanette’s odd behavior, he said, “Let me give you some sage advice. You stay away from that woman.”
    Her father’s comment put her off a bit, because now that she was approaching thirty, she didn’t feel she needed his advice, even though he was a former special agent criminal investigator in the U.S. Air Force. But Ken Baumgardner didn’t need to see Nanette’s odd demeanor for himself. He’d had