things, discovering a new thanks. and especially if it helped people. benefited people. he could make money off of an idea. how had hal fischel worked with bill on an early phase of the machine. it was after fischel left the company that the money came rolling. in fischel thoughts his contribution to the invention deserve more than what he got, so he sued his former friend and partner, bill mclaughlin. and here s the thing. it was just two weeks before the murder that the courts decided for bill, any day he was to get a 9 million he and fischel had been fighting over four years. so, was a revenge killing? sounded at least plausible. except for something that killer left behind. something fischel didn t have access to. no, it was in dna, not fingerprints. something more mundane than that. when we got here, the door on the right was open, and there was a key stuck in the
that at the time but the cops and the killer. there are lots of 9 millimeter guns around, but why did eric naposki seem so dodgy about his? where is your 9 millimeter? i have no idea. you have no idea. that s my statement. reporter: if he thought he was helping himself, he wasn t. why didn t you ask for a lawyer? i didn t think i need 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. i did. reporter: 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? and, if so, did nanette quite literally hold the key? at the center of the case, the younger girlfriend with a shady past she was trying to
that nanette johnston was greedy and would stop at nothing for money. it was clear to him that she had been cheating on bill. it was also clear to him she had been cheating on bill with eric. he even knew that her key to the community pedestrian gate was missing. and, remember, there was one found, could have been it, on the mat at the murder scene. but did all of that make her a killer? she and her lover, eric? do you remember what you thought at the time? i thought the police would be able to have a closed case. wishful thinking, as it turned out. probably naive. reporter: in fact, it looked like someone or two someones might just get away with murder. coming up this story from a new witness. she said i don t even want to know if you had anything to do with this. she said, maybe you did, maybe you didn t. you didn t
arrived to find a millionaire entrepreneur dead on his own kitchen floor. his name was bill mclaughlin, 55 years old, deeply religions and a true believer in the american dream, who made his come true. kind of a self-made guy, right? absolutely, yes. reporter: bill, said his daughter jenny, was the first in his family to go to college, first to found a company, first to end up with millions. not someone you d think would wind up murdered. but here he was. you could tell there was not a physical struggle. there weren t things that were knocked off counters or things like that. reporter: you could tell, said voth, bill mclaughlin saw it coming, saw his killer. one of his movements was to put his hand up and try to block a shot. he got shot through the underside of a finger. so he saw his attacker. reporter: now voth needed to figure out, who was that last person bill mclaughlin saw? you re trying to take everything in, and you re trying
believing the killer knew the millionaire so well, he had his house keys. but a new person entered the picture and detectives found his memory suspiciously hazy on one particular topic. here again is keith morrison. reporter: two keys that demanded attention. one of them was stuck in the front door the night bill mclaughlin was murdered. the other was dropped on a mat outside. the person who killed bill had obtained those keys somehow, 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. what is your involvement or relationship? nanette is a pretty good friend of mine. reporter: that s how they found eric naposki, who was living in a studio apartment in one of those southern california melrose place sort of