reporter: so voth questioned nanette and bill s own grown kids, couldn t eliminate anybody yet. we looked at the girlfriend and also looked at the daughters because anyone who stands to gain money in this situation is a potential suspect. reporter: bill s ex-wife was way off in hawaii. they d been divorced for years. still the detectives talked to her. then there was kevin, bill s disabled son, and the only other person in the house at the time of the murder. newport beach emergency. reporter: it was shortly after 9:00 p.m. when kevin heard the gunfire. he was upstairs, still debilitated by those car accident injuries. he labored to make his way to the kitchen where he found his father. [ inaudible ] i can t understand what you re saying. reporter: too disabled to explain he needed help. somebody s dying? reporter: someone was dead.
to remember as much as you can, write down what you feel is important, what s going to come up in the investigation. reporter: what was important? what wasn t? it was hard to know in those first few hours. as you can see, in this video the police shot the night of the murder, the house was as neat as a pin, except for a cup on a table, papers regarding a lawsuit, and six bullet casings on the kitchen floor. and one more thing, a post-it note from his girlfriend nannette, stuck to the side of a lamp. she d be home late. her son had a soccer game. nanette johnston as she was known back then, before reality shows and a couple of more marriages, had been his girlfriend for years. they seemed happy, despite the almost 30-year age difference, said his daughter kim. they seemed to be good companions. she was like your age, wasn t she?
end, and they were both bawling at the top of their lungs. and then i remember my brother speaking, too, at the funeral and telling everybody what an amazing man he was and what a great dad he was for him. reporter: bill s girlfriend nanette moved out of the house where bill was killed in to another house he owned on the beach. kim and her husband move back into the family home with her brother. they clung to each other for dear life. we cried on each other s shoulders and did a lot of counseling and therapy and grieving. reporter: what made it worse was they didn t know who did it. or why. any more than did the newport beach police. when a thing like this happens, i mean, it s really an execution-style killing. this was obviously someone who intended to kill your dad. you must immediately wonder who. right. well, you wonder if it s a completely random act, some
bill mclaughlin? investigators were talking to his girlfriend nannette who was cheating on him with another man. and when they interviewed him, he was deceptive about whether he owned a gun. meanwhile bill s daughters were trying to get their father s affairs in order. but they were about to find that things weren t adding up. the question was who else had access to bill s accounts. here again is keith morrison. reporter: in the afternoon on the day he was murdered, bill mclaughlin drove from a house he kept in las vegas to mccarran airport. he climbed into the little airplane he owned and flew it up above all his trouble. this is where he was free and happy, pure joy up here. just around sunset he landed at john wayne airport in orange county, called nanette to tell her he was back, and drove home to newport to the place he was about to die. but, for all their efforts, investigators could find not one bit of evidence in those final movements of his. nothing that would link him to
stranger and it was a mistake or an accident, or you develop a list of people that might have a reason to have shot him. reporter: to police, it didn t look random. nothing was taken. the killer struck with precision accuracy and got clean away. but there was something that intrigued detective voth that night. it was a clue they found in bill mclaughlin s closet. we do a search of the house with the permission of kevin. we re told there are weapons in the closet upstairs. when you come across that many weapons, it becomes surprising. reporter: bill was an avid gun collector. he kept dozens in his newport beach house. not just antiques, revolvers, semi-automatic weapons, including seven modified m-16 assault rifles. dangerous stuff in the wrong hands. we didn t know if somebody maybe was upset with the sale of a gun or something. reporter: nanette was worried about that, too. nanette told us that bill was