National Football League

Ex-NFL player gets life for murder

Published Aug. 10, 2012 1:00 a.m. ET

foxsports

A former NFL linebacker was sentenced Friday to life in prison without possibility of parole for murdering his lover's wealthy live-in boyfriend nearly two decades ago in California.

An Orange County Superior Court judge sentenced Eric Andrew Naposki more than a year after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the fatal 1994 shooting of 55-year-old William Francis McLaughlin.

Naposki's lover, Nanette Ann Packard, urged the former linebacker for the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts to kill McLaughlin because she stood to collect $1 million on a life insurance policy if he died, prosecutors said. She gave him the key to the home she shared with McLaughlin and told Naposki when he would be home.

Naposki shot McLaughlin six times in the kitchen and then fled — but later showed up for his job as a bouncer at a local night club, prosecutors said.

The day before the Dec. 15, 1994, killing, Packard wrote a $250,000 check from one of McLaughlin's accounts and deposited it into her personal account.

Packard pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year in jail in 1996 for writing checks from McLaughlin's account without his knowledge, but the murder case went cold.

Investigators long suspected Packard and Naposki, however, and new technology to identify the weapon along with a new witness allowed prosecutors to file murder charges in 2009.

Naposki, now 45, was extradited from Connecticut.

Packard, now 47, was convicted of murder in January and is serving a sentence of life in prison without parole.

McLaughlin made his fortune as the founder of a company that developed a device that separates plasma from blood.