My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  “I’m [a] ghost,” Hollywood said. And what better place to disappear to than the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas? Fountains, gambling, shows, security cameras every ten feet . . . which might have been more of a concern except that Michelle Lasher says they stayed for just one night and never left the hotel room. They argued, and Hollywood decided that they should move on.

  He next headed to his old stomping grounds in Woodland Park, Colorado, where he had lived for a few years while his dad ran a restaurant. His path followed common patterns among fugitives; they tend to run to places they’re familiar with first. Detectives discovered that Michelle Lasher had checked them into a motel called the Loft House—but the detectives apparently just missed them.

  They had a good idea of who Hollywood would run to in Colorado: his godfather, Richard Dispenza, a forty-seven-year-old teacher and coach of football and girl’s soccer at Woodland Park High School. The Hollywoods had become close with Dispenza while they lived in Colorado, and he’d even been Jesse’s coach for some time. Jesse Hollywood still called him “Coach.” Jack Hollywood had called Dispenza to let him know that Jesse was in trouble and would probably be heading his way.

  But when investigators questioned him, Richard Dispenza claimed that he didn’t know where Hollywood and Lasher had gone. He admitted that the couple had stayed with him for one night, on August 16. But after that, well, gosh darn it, wouldn’t you know? They just disappeared. Strangest thing how that happens, isn’t it?

  Investigators sensed that Dispenza was lying, but they had no way to prove it yet. What had actually happened was that Dispenza had checked his godson into a Ramada Inn in Colorado Springs for August 17 through August 20. He did it under his own name but told the clerk the room was for someone else.

  Hollywood was calling Michelle Lasher “Sue” on that trip and introducing her to people under that name. But once he was settled in Colorado, Hollywood told her that it was time for her to go home. He didn’t even drive her to the airport; she took a taxi.

  She returned home by plane, and she found detectives sitting on her couch. They had been there to talk to her parents and had no idea she was about to walk in with a suitcase. Once they took her to the police station, in front of her mother and investigators in the middle of questioning, Michelle began rubbing her breasts.

  “I have to do this,” she explained. “I just got my boobs done.” Apparently the implants would cause her breasts to harden if she didn’t massage them.

  At first, she lied and lied, telling detectives that she had been visiting friends and had no idea where Hollywood was. After some grilling, though, she admitted she had been with him. She said he had been acting “like a shithead,” and she didn’t know where he was anymore.

  Hollywood left his rental car near Richard Dispenza’s home, and left his two guns with another old friend, William Jacques. Hollywood had visited Jacques to drink beer and watch movies and had said that he wouldn’t need his guns anymore. By the end of their visit, Hollywood had admitted he was actually on the run from police, but Jacques didn’t want to get involved.

  On August 20, Hollywood called Dispenza from a pay phone and found out that police had already been there and were hot on his trail. After that, Hollywood didn’t return to the hotel; he just started looking for old friends who might help or harbor him.

  Three days later, Richard Dispenza confessed to police that he had previously lied about not knowing Jesse James Hollywood’s whereabouts. It’s just that he’d wanted to give his godson a chance to go back to California and turn himself in, he explained. Plus, he hadn’t known what kind of trouble Hollywood was in at the time—despite the phone records showing calls from Jack Hollywood, Dispenza claimed that Jesse had just showed up and said he needed some help, he said. Had Jack told him nothing?

  Richard Dispenza was arrested on August 23 for the felony of harboring a fugitive, then posted five thousand dollars bail and was released. He was put on paid administrative leave from his school job while he awaited a trial.

  Hollywood next hitchhiked a ride to the family home of Chas Saulsbury, a friend who hadn’t seen or heard from him since the Hollywoods moved away in 1995. Saulsbury said that he came to his mother’s house one day and was shocked to see Hollywood standing on the doorstep waiting for him. Hollywood initially gave him only a very bare-bones explanation of what was going on—that some friends of his had killed someone, but he wasn’t involved. The police were after him anyway, though, and he needed help getting out of town. They went on the Internet and looked up the Santa Barbara News-Press website, where they read an article about how Nick’s body had been found, and they learned that the others had all been arrested.

  Mexico or Canada—Hollywood wasn’t sure where he wanted to go, but it was probably going to be one of the two. They tried to get Hollywood some fake identification online but weren’t successful in printing it out.

  What they told Saulsbury’s mother was that Hollywood had been pickpocketed in Las Vegas, and he needed Saulsbury to drive him back there. But after they got to Las Vegas, Hollywood became very agitated and changed his mind—he wanted to go back to Los Angeles instead. He needed advice from a friend there. Would Chas drive him there?

  It was a fifteen-hour ride in total, and Saulsbury agreed to do it, probably for money. Hollywood would later say that he’d paid Saulsbury $3,000 to take him, although Saulsbury claimed that he’d done it out of a misguided desire to help an old friend. What he learned during the ride, though, made him increasingly uncomfortable.

  Little by little, Hollywood appeared to be coming unglued. Praying, crying, saying he wished he were dead. He told Saulsbury more details of the story—how he and his friends had taken Nick because of Ben’s drug debt. Then Hollywood explained that he was initially “not sure” what to do with Nick until he’d spoken with his attorney, Stephen Hogg.

  According to Chas Saulsbury, what sealed Nick’s fate was when Stephen Hogg suggested that Hollywood should get rid of Nick and hide his body to avoid being caught on kidnapping charges. So, at that point, Hollywood told Jesse Rugge and Ryan Hoyt what the lawyer said, and Hoyt “volunteered to do it.”

  Did no one stop to think that murder charges might be worse?

  Saulsbury got spooked about his own fate at this point and just wanted to get home and get out of the situation. He tried to connect with Jack Hollywood, maybe to hand Jesse off to him, but didn’t succeed.

  Instead, Saulsbury took Hollywood to the van owner John Roberts’s house. Roberts was in the middle of watching a football game on television when Hollywood showed up at his back door. The two hugged and became emotional. Hollywood wanted money—particularly because Saulsbury, who was supposed to come back to pick him in a little while, had instead left with the rest of Hollywood’s money, about eight thousand dollars. But more importantly, Hollywood wanted help in getting a fake passport and fake ID so that he could leave the country as soon as possible.

  “I told him that I couldn’t,” John Roberts would later testify. “I knew people in Chicago that do it, but I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t give him any money, and he could not stay at my house.”

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Roberts did give Hollywood a manila envelope with ten thousand dollars in it and then claimed that he urged Hollywood to turn himself in. Quite a mixed message—why would Hollywood have needed ten thousand dollars to get to the police station? In any case, Hollywood was off again—this time, without Saulsbury to drive him around.

  When Saulsbury got back home to Colorado, he spoke with a lawyer, who told him that Hollywood’s could be a death-penalty case, and he needed to talk to police. So Saulsbury did, but he didn’t tell much of the truth. He claimed to have no idea why Hollywood was in trouble and that he’d assumed his old friend was just on the run because of a drug debt. But he did tell police that he had dropped Hollywood back off in West Hills a few days earlier, on August 25.

  On August 29, the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT t
eam closed off the streets in the West Hills neighborhood, surrounded and barricaded John Roberts’s home, and used a bullhorn to tell Jesse Hollywood to surrender and anyone inside the house to get out.

  But the only person who came out of the home was a dazed and possibly drunk John Roberts.

  The SWAT team fired about 300 pounds of tear gas into the home, destroying virtually everything inside, according to Roberts. They waited, but no one else came out. After searching the home themselves for an hour and a half, they announced that Hollywood was not there.

  Once again, they had narrowly missed him. At that moment, Hollywood was actually staying in a friend’s borrowed trailer in a remote Mojave Desert location. He was watching television and saw the eight-hour standoff take place between John Roberts and police, which Hollywood would later say made him feel guilty. His conscience didn’t seem to nag him when it came to Nick’s murder, but it did bother him that his dad’s friend was getting “hassled” by the police.

  For two weeks, Hollywood said, he stayed in that trailer and lived off frozen food, beer, and cigarettes. According to him, the location was so dangerous that the post office wouldn’t even deliver mail there.

  America’s Most Wanted picked up on this case early, and Hollywood saw its first episode featuring him while he was in the trailer, too. It made him even more determined to get out of the country. But first, he needed to secure a fake ID; then he hopped on a plane from LAX to Seattle to visit more friends. He stayed there for around two more weeks, then paid about two thousand to get someone to smuggle him into Canada by boat.

  Canada was one of the places I’d heard might be a possibility for where Jesse James Hollywood was hiding. I guess a lot of American fugitives go there.

  I was spending my days making more and more “Wanted” posters. I got pictures of Hollywood in various states—with a baseball cap, with surfer hair, with almost no hair, looking angry, with a goofy smile. I added a fake moustache and beard to some posters, in case that’s what he looked like by then. I even put fake makeup and long hair on him on other posters, in case he was disguised as a woman. On those, I named him “Jesseca.”

  When I wasn’t making posters, I was going onto Internet chat rooms and message boards making a nuisance of myself. On a good day, I could hit more than three hundred of them—just signing up and popping in with my message, which I would cut and paste over and over again.

  $20,000.00 REWARD for Jesse James Hollywood

  AMERICA’S MOST WANTED—WANTED BY THE FBI

  Please pass this on to others to help me find this

  5’ 4” coward. He is responsible for the execution of my

  only child, Nicholas Samuel Markowitz, 15 years young.

  You can remain anonymous,

  and will not have to appear in court.

  http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/fugitives/fugitives.htm

  If you have information, please call 911

  or 1-800-CRIME TV.

  I’m sure some people saw me as a spammer, but at the same time, if it were your child . . . what would you do?

  Even though I was doing all the things that one might do if one believed that her son had been murdered and his killer was on the run, I wasn’t always very clear on that belief in my own head or heart. Plus, I started taking a lot of pills and drinking more than ever before, just trying to make the days go away. Trying to dull the pain, or keep myself as far removed from reality as possible.

  My mom’s birthday was August 27, but we were unable to even think about celebrating. We had just taped a segment for America’s Most Wanted, and that in itself was draining, even though it made us feel good that someone cared to find Nick’s killer. The trouble was finding the energy to put on makeup and pretty clothes and face the lights and cameras when all I wanted to do was crawl back into bed and never wake up again.

  “Please shorten my day. I am feeling as wilted as my houseplants,” I wrote in my journal.

  In the middle of the night, Jeff’s sobs woke me, piercing my heart. He would cry in his sleep many nights, unaware that he was doing it. My own tears had disappeared after the funeral and hadn’t returned. I just couldn’t cry anymore; crying made it real.

  On September 1, I wrote in my journal, “I really feel that you are coming back, but the problem is your funeral was two weeks ago.”

  Every time I heard helicopters, I assumed it was someone tracking Jesse James Hollywood and that they were about to find him any minute. After all the press, I was sure he couldn’t hide out for long—someone was bound to see him and alert the police. Yet day after day, there was no news.

  Our therapist came to the house to see us every couple of days. My mental state wasn’t improving; it was deteriorating. I wrote letters to Nick asking him to help guide me. I missed everything about him—the way he would sneak around the house and pop up to scare me, his celebrity impressions, his dirty cereal bowls in the sink. I smelled his laundry and sprayed his cologne on myself.

  I could not stop laughing on September 10, 2000, the first time I was admitted to Pine Grove Hospital’s mental health clinic. It wasn’t because I thought anything was funny. In fact, nothing was funny. All I wanted to do was die, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

  Dearest Nick,

  Guess where I am? Visiting Pine Grove—and no, I’m not camping. I don’t think I will ever go camping again without you. It just would not be the same.

  I was thinking you could somehow get a hall pass like the one you did in high school, and come see me. I really need to see you. I know, or so I think I know, that you’re not really coming back. I am having a very difficult time in coming to reality with your disappearance, let alone your execution.

  How is it that I am supposed to go on living? For what?

  Your memories are so sweet and funny, but I feel it is OK to be selfish and want more. Like just one more hug or even a good-bye. They would not let me see you. I miss you terribly.

  Please, please do not let this be real.

  Your birthday is coming up next week. What am I going to do? You would have turned 16 years young. I am torn apart at the thought of instead of a car for your birthday you ended up with a coffin. Please help guide me in what to do on your special day. It will always be my special day, giving birth to you 16 years ago. It was too short a time with you. You were robbed of the best years of your life. I am so sorry.

  XOXOXO

  Mommy

  One pill was not enough to help me sleep. It’s likely that I sneaked another. Sleep might give me strength, I thought.

  In the morning, we had a group therapy session. All the people there went around the circle telling us about their problems. Their stupid, stupid problems. This one was having a career quandary; that one thought she might still love her ex-boyfriend, whatever. Then it came my turn . . . and after I spoke, suddenly everyone wanted to leave. They all realized they didn’t have any real problems after all.

  So it was just the therapist and me left in the room, and I still couldn’t stop laughing. After just twenty-seven hours in the mental health clinic, I was discharged and back home again, where I took some more pills and tried not to think about how much that experience was going to cost us in medical bills. What a waste.

  A double dose of something or other helped me sleep for four hours in a row, a rarity. I always looked for Nick in my dreams, hoping he’d show up and talk to me, give me a sign, something. But the only time I caught a glimpse of him, it wasn’t a good glimpse. He was wearing black pants and a dragon shirt that Ben had helped him shop for, and he looked handsome except for the expression on his face—very angry. He was walking all alone toward me with his fists clenched, tight lips, and glaring eyes.

  Why was he so mad? Was he angry about what happened to him? Was he angry with me for how I felt about Ben?

  I just need some time. I know in my heart that if Ben could have saved you, he would have. Please come back to me in my next dream with a smile. I need to see you.

 
; I made it to the therapist’s office twice more that week. Afterward, I would always go to the bar across the street and have a drink . . . or two or three. And then I would drive home. It’s a miracle that I didn’t create another tragedy.

  Three days after coming out of the hospital, I sat at that bar and lost myself in the drinks. Then came the pills. My funeral arrangements had already been made along with Nick’s; I already had the plot, so why not use it? I prayed that there really was a heaven and that I’d get to see my son again, and then I took some more pills. I don’t know how many, but I knew it was enough. I felt myself slipping . . . and then I thought of my therapist, Dr. Fulton.

  The guilt set in. I had done this just after leaving his office. How was he going to feel? Not wanting him to have my death on his head, I walked back across the street and told him what I’d done. He called Jeff at work to come get me, while I passed out in the waiting room.

  The black tar that was crammed down my throat in the emergency room made me think I surely would never try that again.

  I was admitted to Northridge Hospital that day because UCLA’s Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital didn’t have a bed available. I guess there were a lot of us crazies out there. I think this was the place where I saw ants crawling across my bed. That didn’t freak me out; it actually comforted me. I talked to them, out loud, telling them that everything was OK and I would be their “Auntie.”

  When they discharged me less than a day later, they wrote on my chart, “Patient is less depressed, denies feeling suicidal at time of discharge.”

  Ha!

  And there went another month’s salary for Jeff. Maybe more. Probably more. It was difficult enough for Jeff to work those days; for several months, he couldn’t hold it together in front of his employees. In the middle of a job, he would just burst out crying. For the most part, people left him alone. There were no words that would fix this.