I'll Take Care of You (20 page)

CHAPTER 28

Using a method that had worked for her before, Nanette Johnston returned to the personal ads, where she'd found her first rich, older man. This time, she landed a catch who would prove to be just as wealthy, if not more so, than Bill McLaughlin.

In April 1997, only four months out of jail, Nanette answered an ad placed by real estate developer John Packard, who, like the other men in her life, fell for Nanette's mystique and her tried-and-true Supermom con. Almost immediately after they began dating, he later testified, “we started interacting like a family.”

She told him a variation on the same story, that she made a living writing business plans for medical ventures developed by her former business partner, Bill McLaughlin.

Nanette had started calling herself “Annette” Johnston, and had mail sent to her under that name to her home. John not only knew about this practice, he made light of it. In a letter dated May 11, 1997, he began,
Dear Annette, Oh, My Gosh! Now you have me saying it. What's next?

It's unclear why she decided to use a different first name (her middle name is Anne), although it's not uncommon for someone with a criminal record to use an alias.

Nanette told John that her ex-husband, K. Ross Johnston, was a bad man, and John believed her because K. Ross kept pestering him after they met in September.

“He was constantly calling me up, saying Nanette was a murderer,” John said. “It was oppressive.”

John finally had to ask a friend to write K. Ross a “cease and desist” letter to force him to back off.

 

 

Nanette and John were engaged by October 1997. Nearly fifteen years her senior, he stood head to head with her at five feet six inches.

She immediately started trying to get custody of her kids away from her ex-husband. In court papers, Nanette claimed she'd had no input into the original divorce decree and was “coerced” into signing the paperwork.
Respondent is 6'2” and weighs approximately 220 pounds,
she wrote.
He was far more intimidating to me in 1989 than he is today, but I still am intimidated by him.

She said neither of them ever followed the original court order for custody and visitation, claiming that when he moved to California, he'd left the kids with her. She wrote that she came out in mid-1990,
with the thought in mind that we might reconcile. However, that was short-lived and we only lived together less than a month.

Since then, she wrote, they'd been sharing custody of the kids fifty-fifty, but the kids now wanted to live with her and attend regular school, not be homeschooled by K. Ross and his girlfriend, Julia. Nanette didn't like the homeschooling, she wrote, nor did she condone K. Ross's use of “corporal punishment” on the children. Besides, she said, K. Ross and Julia had a baby who was almost two years old, and they were expecting a second child in the spring.

K. Ross countered that Nanette had gotten violent with him during an argument at his house on January 17, 1998, triggered by her attempt to exchange custody days so she and John could take the children skiing.

“You never do anything with the kids,” K. Ross quoted her as saying. “All you do is make them clean the house and hang out at home.”

“That's not true,” K. Ross said.

“That's why the kids want to live with me. I go places with them. I do things with them. I buy them things. They have fun with me. I'm sure they would have more fun skiing with me than staying here with you.”

“Nanette,” he said, “how can I compete with someone who is unemployed and has half a million dollars of stolen money to spoil the kids?”

[That] is when she began punching me in the face, leaving my lip swollen, yelling bad language and then drove away,
K. Ross wrote.

 

 

Nanette and John were married on Valentine's Day in 1998 at the Westin Hotel, only ten months after they'd met. And it didn't take long before the thirty-three-year-old femme fatale got herself—and her husband—in trouble with the law again.

Still on five years' probation, Nanette was prohibited from writing “any portion of any checks.” She also was to “have no blank checks in possession . . . not have a checking account nor use or possess credit cards or open credit accounts unless approved by probation.”

On April 2, 1998, four Newport Beach police detectives conducted a surprise probation search of her house in Lake Forest, where they found a number of receipts for wedding-related purchases, including some freshwater pearls at Zales jewelry store and some flowers at Greenworks, Inc., all made by check.

Asked if she had written the checks, Nanette said no, it was her husband John; she'd only delivered them to the businesses. After finding John's letter to “Annette,” Detective Tom Fischbacher's antennae went up and he called John for more information.

John said he'd written and signed the checks. However, after further investigation, the detectives learned that he and Nanette had lied to detectives, trying to cover for her.

John also faxed over copies of canceled checks on which he'd “fraudulently altered the information” in an attempt to “conceal” his wife's connection to the check so she wouldn't be sent back to jail on a probation violation, the police report noted.

Packard related that suspect Johnston was very well aware of the terms and conditions of her probation,
the report said, noting that John also contradicted earlier statements to the police about the matter. Packard's offering of fraudulently altered checks to the NBPD during the course of this investigation constituted a violation of 132 PC (Section 132 of the Penal Code) for being an accessory after the fact; Packard also provided false statements to investigators, the report pointed out. (John, however, was never charged with a crime.)

As it turned out, these personal wedding items were charged to John's business account for Pacific Housing and Development Corp., on which only John and his partner were authorized signees.

By the time the detectives finished getting search warrants, obtaining copies of other checks, and going over the accounts again, they found she'd written more than two dozen checks. When confronted, she said she called John “most of the time” to tell him what the checks were for, but she admitted that she'd lied to detectives because she was “nervous,” and they had caught her “off guard.” She then claimed that she hadn't written any checks after the wedding, which the police also found to be false.

This investigation revealed that suspect Johnston, while on formal probation for two separate felony cases, wrote portions of at least twenty-five (25) checks, totaling $17,695.03, in direct violation [of her probation],
Detective Jeff Lu wrote in an October 1998 report. Lu submitted his conclusions and evidence to the Orange County Probation Department and to the DA's office for possible prosecution and punishment for the probation violation.

Deputy District Attorney James Marion subsequently called Lu to tell him that the DA's office had decided not to prosecute the case after meeting with Paul Meyer, Nanette's new attorney. Marion told Lu that Nanette's probation conditions had been modified such that only future violations would count against her. The case was “exceptionally cleared.”

 

 

In 1999, Nanette got pregnant with their daughter, Jaycie, who was born in March 2000. Having a rich man's child was a pretty good way to assure his financial commitment in the long term—and plenty of cash in the short term to feed Nanette's frenzied materialistic taste for clothing, shoes, cars, and cosmetic surgery.

That said, John Packard was clearly no innocent. He and his partner in Pacific Property Assets (PPA) were accused in a consolidation of investors' lawsuits of defrauding and soliciting $90 million in investments from elderly folks in an alleged Ponzi scheme of condo developments.

Packard and his partner denied the allegations, which they chalked up to the poor economy, claiming to have operated successfully for more than a decade and acquiring more than one hundred properties, refinancing the buildings and selling 40 percent “for very significant gains.” However, the two cofounders testified that they misled investors by reporting investment funds received as revenue on their income statements, which allowed them to appear profitable. According to the WTF Finance news site, these activities weren't all that different from the practices of big banking corporations that overstated their assets during the recent Wall Street mess.

But Packard's legal troubles didn't stop there. In 2012, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint in federal court against him and his two partners, alleging they'd “engaged in a scheme to defraud potential investors” by boasting a false track record of a 60 percent return and $100 million in net equity on their previous venture, PPA, when they launched a new corporation, Apartments America, in 2009.

In fact, Apartments America was formed only three months after PPA had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and had defaulted on $91.6 million in promissory notes held by 647 investors whose investments had been pooled to buy apartment complexes, according to the SEC complaint.

The complaint was still pending when this book went to press. Attempts to reach John Packard for comment on these allegations and others by Nanette, detailed in this book, were unsuccessful.

 

 

Before John Packard lost big in the real estate market collapse, he was quite well off, and Nanette took full advantage of his healthy income. That continued even after their marriage went south.

We had a very lavish and extravagant lifestyle,
Nanette later wrote in divorce papers, noting that during happier times in the marriage, she'd never wanted for anything. It wasn't uncommon for her to spend $10,000 to $15,000 at a time on designer clothing.

He'd always bought her jewelry and had been “very generous” with her older children, she said, estimating that they'd spent $37,170 per month for basic expenses, not including vacations.
[But] to punish me for divorcing him,
she wrote,
petitioner has essentially cut off all available funds to me. He has canceled all my credit cards and refuses to put any significant money in my checking account.
And yet, she said, he'd just bought himself a $125,000 Mercedes.

Nanette spoiled their daughter, Jaycie, and volunteered at her school, all the while still fussing over Lishele and Kristofer. She never missed one of Lishele's dance recitals and still took birthday cupcakes to her class, even during college.

 

 

Still unsatisfied, however, Nanette remained out on the hunt. On July 13, 2002, she met a handsome young man named Billy McNeal, a senior financial analyst for PepsiCo who was in his last year of graduate business school at the University of Southern California (USC). Billy, who was six years younger than Nanette, was also married.

In court, Billy described his first interaction with Nanette as “a social meeting, chance encounter up in L.A.” He later elaborated to say that they were both out in Hollywood, with respective groups of friends, and noticed each other while passing through a hotel lobby. They stopped and struck up a conversation that resulted in the two groups leaving together for cocktails. After that, he and Nanette began dating—and cheating on their respective spouses.

“It was a little complicated, because there were marriages involved,” Billy testified in 2012. “We dated for quite some time,” but it “got serious rather quickly.”

Billy said he'd already “checked out” of his marriage about six months earlier and had been “looking elsewhere” ever since. He and his wife formally separated on August 14, 2002—only a month after he'd met Nanette—and his wife filed for divorce three months later, citing “irreconcilable differences.” With no children, the claim went uncontested. The divorce was final on December 20, 2003.

Billy said some of the problems in his marriage stemmed from the difference in their personalities and conflicting interests in how they spent their free time. Billy's first wife liked staying home; Nanette and Billy both enjoyed going out. Even so, he said, he was pretty busy with school and working full-time when he met Nanette, so he didn't have “a lot of time to gallivant.”

“We both were high-energy people, type A personalities, who like to be out with friends, having fun,” he said. “It was refreshing, and that's how it started.”

Nanette told Billy that she was a successful businesswoman who made her living by writing business plans for friends, companies, and colleagues. Embellishing her credentials, she told him she'd started out at a young age in sales of athletic club memberships and bought her own Mercedes. Then, adopting her usual tactic of claiming Bill McLaughlin's accomplishments as her own, she said she went into pharmaceutical sales as a rep for what is now Baxter International, Inc., in Orange and Los Angeles Counties. She soon became their number one rep, she said, and got promoted to regional manager. While traveling to various medical offices for work, she identified an opportunity for a new and improved heart valve. She presented it to the executive board, but her boss squashed the idea. She tried going over his head, but she got nowhere.

“She wasn't happy with that,” Billy testified. “She wasn't going to be told no.”

Determined, she told Billy, Nanette found a doctor in Orange County who believed in her product. She found some engineers to produce a prototype, then sold it to Baxter, which bought her out for millions in profits. And that is when she met John Packard.

“That's the story I understood, and that's the story I told people in front of her and she told people in front of me,” Billy said.