My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  What the yard really needed, I decided, was more posters. And now I had a reason to make more. I got back on the computer, for hours at a time, designing new ones:

  “Use, Buy, or Sell Drugs and You’re Putting Another Nail in Nick’s Coffin” was one of many.

  Maybe, if I did all the right things, I could have him back. If I showed that I had learned my lesson, if I promised to get it right this time. This couldn’t really be happening. This stuff happened on the news. It didn’t happen to my child; it happened to other people.

  Detectives interviewed Ben at our house that day and asked him about people he’d been associated with. Ben was candid from the start about his drug dealing and his past problems with gangs and illegal activities. He didn’t understand what the officers were probing for, though, until they asked him what kinds of guns Jesse James Hollywood owned. When he told them about the TEC-9, the officers’ eyes lit up. Ben noticed the looks they exchanged, and he realized at that moment who was responsible for his brother’s murder.

  Guilt or rage—I’m not sure which feeling came first, but they both came. And they hit hard, for all of us.

  It had all come down to Ben. All those years of trying, of worrying, of taking him back and trying again and loving and disciplining, and none of it had worked. Instead, it had all led to this moment—the moment when Ben’s latest drama got my son killed.

  It was too much. How do you process something like that? I don’t remember how I did. At first, it was just disbelief—I didn’t want to think that Ben could have had anything to do with this, or that he could have prevented it. We were learning only bits and pieces at a time. I knew there was something about a drug debt that Ben owed, and something about a kidnapping. We overheard some of the interview and caught on to that much right away.

  My dad and brothers were there, burning with enough anger that they could have killed Ben on the spot.

  “Keep it together,” I told them. “Don’t do anything.”

  It was enough to deal with what was happening as it was. I couldn’t imagine what I would do if a fight broke out on my front lawn. As I accepted what the police were telling us, I remember feeling betrayed in a way that was more visceral than I’d ever experienced. I didn’t want to ever look at Ben again.

  Ben told police about the .25 caliber handgun he had bought, and he told them that he wanted to turn it in to them so he wouldn’t be tempted to retaliate—or get blamed if anyone else did retaliate. Police went through Ben’s wardrobe with him because he couldn’t remember which shirt or jacket pocket he had left the gun in. They found and confiscated it.

  By Wednesday, August 16, officers had arrested William Skidmore, Jesse Rugge, and Graham Pressley. A SWAT team had surrounded Skidmore’s house with guns drawn, then pulled him out of the house and shackled him as he lay facedown on the driveway in his T-shirt and boxer shorts. Deputies tackled Rugge on his father’s front lawn. Pressley surrendered at the police station, with his parents. At 2 a.m. the next morning, police found Ryan Hoyt at Casey Sheehan’s house and arrested both of them—later releasing Sheehan once they determined that he wasn’t a participant in the crime.

  Once the suspects were in custody, police searched their houses, pulling out every drawer, rifling through every cabinet, searching for weapons, drugs, notes, clues. Their parents were stunned, watching their houses get torn apart and their belongings dumped on the floor. By now, news about this local murder was all over the San Fernando Valley, but the fact that their sons were involved was a shock to all of them.

  All except the Hollywoods, of course, who were well aware that their son had kidnapped the boy who had now been found dead. Police raided their home and brought out bags and bags of items—but they didn’t find Jesse James Hollywood.

  I knew little of the goings-on at the police station at the time. Maybe Jeff knew more; frankly, I don’t remember much about anyone else during those early days. I mostly remember the dizziness and the unreality of it all, and I remember just trying to hold it together. I didn’t have any room left in me to take care of anyone else.

  At some point, sitting around the glass dining room table, we picked out a box for our son’s body. I don’t remember what it looked like, but I’m sure it was nice. Someone brought up that we should have a limousine take us to the funeral. At first, that was discussed in a negative light, then I insisted we do it because I didn’t want any one of us driving that day.

  No one was going to ruin Nick’s funeral, I thought, not even myself. I had to pull myself together. I needed a sedative, so I got a prescription.

  Bob, the community’s friendliest pharmacist, made a house call. For all of the children’s doctor’s visits that required medicine through the years, we went to Bob. Now there he was in the living room, with his blue teary eyes, warm heart, and trembling hand, offering me a little white bag along with the tightest embrace.

  I slept in Nick’s bed.

  The day of the funeral, I was there, but not there. Nick wouldn’t want me to wear black, I thought. What do you wear to your son’s funeral? He liked color. Every color, except my pinkish-salmon sweatpants. I remember the day I tried to drive him to school while wearing those, and he—afraid I might have a reason to get out of the car—turned to me and said, “Mom, you’re not going to wear those, are you?” Well, there was at least one outfit I could cross off the list of possible things to wear.

  At the last minute, with the limousine waiting outside, someone told me that we could bring things to place in the casket with Nick. Feeling rushed and defensive, I thought, “Why didn’t someone tell me this sooner?” I walked into Nick’s room and gathered up things I knew others would consider silly. There was a family photo, plus a picture of Nick’s dog, Zak.

  Grandpa Pooh wanted to give Nick his Chapstick and nail clippers. Leah gave a letter and his favorite Nintendo game, James Bond 007. All of these items went into a Ziploc bag. I don’t know who took it or why that, but that’s what it was—our final memories in a plastic bag. And I included the words of a poem I wrote the night after we found out Nick had been killed. Then I argued with myself about whether or not to put in his Old Testament Bible. I thought he might want it, but I also became selfish, not wanting to part with anything of his.

  “It’s time to go,” someone said.

  We arrived at Eden Memorial Park’s chapel and found it packed and spilling outside. There were about seven hundred people present, most looking as confused as we were. How could this have happened here, in our neighborhood? How could these killers have been the same kids who played Little League together not so long ago?

  “There are deaths such as this when we can’t shake an angry finger at God and say, ‘Why?’ We can only look at ourselves,” the rabbi said, in a service that had to be broadcast over an intercom so the crowd could all hear.

  I never saw Nick’s body in the casket, so I just had to trust he was in there. I stood by the deep, deep hole and asked Jeff to hold me so I wouldn’t fall in.

  Piggybacking caskets. What a distasteful term for what it means; in this case, it gave me the option to be buried in the same plot as Nick. His coffin would be twelve feet down and mine would be six feet down. I wondered how soon I would join him. Quickly, I hoped. I just wanted to be with him again, no matter how that had to happen.

  “Ben is such a coward!” I told everyone. “He didn’t even show up at his brother’s funeral!”

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that Jeff had asked Ben not to come to the funeral because he thought it would upset me. I had said something about how every big event wound up being about Ben—the way he caused a big scene at Nick’s bar mitzvah, at Leah’s wedding—and I didn’t want Nick’s funeral to be about Ben, too. But I didn’t remember that conversation, and Jeff didn’t mention that he had asked Ben not to be there, so it just made me angrier that he hadn’t shown up.

  I was furious and miserable and out of my mind and every other bad emotion a person can have all at o
nce.

  After the funeral, I kept changing outfits because I couldn’t get comfortable. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I was a childless mother.

  Is a mother who has lost her only child still a mother?

  Being a mom had been my love and my job. Now I had no job. I went out into the yard and found that the praying mantis had died that day, too.

  My mind wandered back to Nick’s Bible . . . had I put it with the things to go in the casket, or not? I looked around and, with a pang of guilt mixed with relief, found it. My eyes, tired and weak from crying, spotted the gold book-marking ribbon. What passage would I find there? The delicate sound of aging pages reminded me to be gentle with the book as I opened to page 282 of the Old Testament: Ecclesiastes, chapter 3: “Times and Seasons.”

  To everything, there is a season,

  And a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time

  to be born, and a time to die;

  A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is

  planted;

  A time to kill and a time to heal;

  A time to break down and a time to build up;

  A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

  A time to mourn, and a time to dance . . .

  People interpret the things that come to them in different ways. For me, this passage was a sign. It told me to breathe, to embrace, to love, if even for just a moment. It warned me not to succumb to the darkness I wanted to slip into.

  “Please don’t let this day end,” I wrote in my journal. “I’ll have to face reality. I hear God is going to help . . . I am going to need it.”

  Jeff’s ex-wife called to offer her condolences; we were, at that point, on friendly terms, but what I said next changed that forever.

  She told me how bad she felt for me, and I said, “The only thing worse that I can imagine is being the mother of someone responsible for this . . . and that’s kind of you, in a way.”

  She hung up on me and never spoke to me again.

  It wasn’t a kind thing to say, but it’s what I felt.

  I expressed that same sentiment to a reporter—that I thought it would be worse to be the parent of one of the killers because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself—and Ryan Hoyt’s mother took umbrage.

  “Well, my situation is better than theirs. My son didn’t do this,” she said.

  Before dawn, I stole the neighbor’s newspaper just so that I could see Nick’s face again. Then I went back to his bed and hoped for sleep. Five a.m. Six a.m. With nothing left to plan, no more obligations left to meet, there was no longer a reason for me to get out of bed—so that was where I stayed. For how long, I’m not sure, but I do recall that eventually Dr. Chris Fulton, our family therapist, had to come talk to me in Nick’s bedroom because I would not leave it. I didn’t feel like I could.

  People never know what to say when someone has died. I think they know even less what to say when it’s a murdered child. Mothers are not supposed to outlive their children; it’s so against the accepted order of events. But some people truly want to make things better with their words. They want to make some sense out of something so senseless.

  “God has a reason for everything,” they would say.

  A reason for everything but this, I thought. And the more I thought about that idea—that God had some control over this—the angrier I got. I wrote him a letter.

  Dear God,

  How could this have happened? Why my only child? Why not an accident? If you’re so capable of miracles, now would be a good time. What was the purpose of my son’s execution? I’ve heard that everything happens for a reason.

  Bull.

  This could have been stopped. And until there is something, anything, to hang on to . . . I’ve let go.

  My mother made me promise that I would not commit suicide. I promised just so that she would leave me alone, but I didn’t mean it. Every night, I hoped to sleep in, so that the next day wouldn’t be as long. I took my sedatives and cried until I dry heaved, and eventually I just ran out of tears. I had come untethered from the world, and I prayed to die so I could be with Nick.

  In the meantime, I wrote lists.

  Every little personality trait of my son’s went into a list. Every funny little memory, every quirk—did you know he put syrup into his clam chowder? Or that he had to lie down to have blood drawn? He had a mole on his back, handed down through generations. He hated when I brought up that he had size fourteen shoes. These were things that needed to be documented, so no one would ever forget.

  Just in case God heard my prayer and took me to see Nick, someone was going to have to stay on Earth and remember my memories for me.

  CHAPTER 11

  ALL I DID WAS KILL HIM

  By the time they sat down with Jesse Rugge, police already had a pretty clear picture of what had happened and how Rugge was involved. Rugge, however, was determined to play dumb when detectives asked him if he had read an article about a recent homicide in the area.

  “Not really. I just looked at it and briefly was like, ‘Whoa. Tripped out.’ ”

  Tripped out?

  “I was surprised. It’s from the same area I just came back from on Sunday daytime from a wedding.”

  He didn’t know Nick Markowitz, Rugge assured them, but he recognized the last name because he had run into Ben Markowitz in the “Valley party scene.” They had talked maybe once or twice, years ago.

  When the detectives asked who Rugge normally hung out with, he said, “No one, really,” and then mentioned three guys, including Graham Pressley, whom he said he saw every now and then. But really, he said, he had “pretty much stopped” being part of the party scene when he was nineteen. Now he was twenty. He didn’t want to be the old guy who hung around high school parties anymore, he explained.

  “Do you know any other Jesses? Keep in mind we’re not sitting here because we’re stupid,” the detective said.

  “I know a bunch of kids.”

  “Tell us about Jesse. Jesse from West Hills.”

  “Used to play baseball as kids . . . I don’t know Jesse’s last name.”

  “What does Jesse do now?”

  “Think he’s working for a wood floor company, maybe, but I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “He has long hair, I think.”

  “White guy?”

  “No, brownish.”

  “Hispanic?”

  “No, tan. I probably haven’t seen him in a month, month and a half, so I really don’t know what he looks like now.”

  “So, you don’t remember his last name?”

  “No, not really. I don’t, actually.”

  “Do you know how that sounds?”

  “Well, yeah, it sounds awkward . . . Look, I know the kid from playing baseball when we were younger. I’ve run into him at a party. That’s really the only acquaintances I have with this man.” After a pause, “You guys freaked me out pulling up to my house.”

  “I’m going to ask you the freakiest question in the world. Did you have anything to do with this? Anything at all? I’m not necessarily asking if you killed the kid, just if you had anything to do with it.”

  “Where do you get this from? No, I do not. I don’t get why you’re even asking me this. This is ridiculous, sir.”

  It was as if Jesse Rugge thought that the detectives were simply going to have a good chuckle about what a silly mix-up this was, then let him go back home to sleep. He was obviously tired—throughout the whole interview, he yawned huge, sloppy yawns. And kept asking for cigarettes.

  The first little bump in his smooth-sailing road of denial came when the detectives mentioned that they had been speaking with his father and stepmother for—oh, an hour and a half or so. And they had made it clear that they’d both seen Jesse James Hollywood at their house that weekend. “You know, the guy you really don’t know?” detectives asked.

  “Mmm hmm,” Rugge mumbled.

  Still, he
wasn’t ready to give in, insisting that he was being accused of something he didn’t do. “I don’t have no idea of what you guys are talking about. Obviously, you know as much as I do.”

  The detectives were patient, and they worked hard for their confession. They slowly let Rugge in on more and more details of what they already knew and could prove. Among other things, they told him that they had pictures from the security cameras at the Lemon Tree Inn showing that he was there renting a room the night before the murder. Each new piece of evidence made Rugge act more miserable—he put his head down on the table, didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  What they explained to him was that they knew Rugge was involved, but they didn’t yet know why. Was he a cold-blooded killer, or had someone put him up to this? Had he pulled the trigger, or had someone else done it? No answer.

  “I think somebody else is responsible for this, and I’d hate to see you make a bad decision,” one of the detectives said.

  “If you think it’s Jesse [Hollywood] or them, I doubt it’s them,” Rugge said.

  “Jesse is involved up to here,” the detective said, gesturing to his head. “You’re there. Right there when it happened.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I don’t know what people have been telling you, bro.”

  “Tell me about the Lemon Tree.”

  Nothing.

  The detective continued, “I know who was there and you were there renting a room. Guess who one of the pictures is? The dead guy. Isn’t that a coincidence? Don’t you think that’s some coincidence, Jess?”

  “That’s some shit.”

  No matter how clear it was at this point that he couldn’t get away with playing dumb, Jesse Rugge still refused to talk. The detective asked if he was afraid of what Hollywood was going to do to him.

  “No, I’m afraid what jail is going to do to me. That’s one fucking thing I’m scared of. It’s my life. I’m going away for a very long time. I’m going to get hurt inside there. I’m a white man.”