“I just didn’t do it.”
And when asked again if he knew where Jesse was now, he answered, “No, I don’t.”
I tried not to let my mind ruminate on all the “what ifs” and “should have beens,” but it was so difficult to listen to person after person describe what they knew and when they knew it, only to have done nothing about it. How could so many people have seen my son duct taped and not called the police?
It made me feel so hopeless that his life had mattered so little to so many people and that there was this much selfishness in the world—dozens of people who’d decided to look out for themselves and ignore the plight of a kidnapped boy who was right in front of their faces. People who knew it was wrong and ignored it anyway.
I wrote more poems to Nick:Shadows
As I wait for court sessions to be scheduled,
Your face comes to me.
Tears blur my vision;
I take a deep breath.
I must not give in;
This just can’t be reality.
Breathe . . . my vision begins to clear.
A shadow is on the ground.
My heart pounds.
I look up desperately . . . hoping.
Disappointed, I search again for another
Shadow on the ground.
From my soul to yours,
Love,
Mom
The grand jury indicted the four culprits: Jesse Rugge, Graham Pressley, Ryan Hoyt, and Jesse James Hollywood—even though Hollywood hadn’t been found yet. The Santa Barbara County district attorney’s office announced to the press that they were considering seeking the death penalty for Hollywood, Rugge, and Hoyt.
It didn’t fill me with joy or relief. It was what I’d expected to happen, and if anything had happened otherwise, I would have been totally lost. But this—this was just another day, another step. I was glad that this part was over but knew we had so much more to endure. I hated all the things I had learned already in this proceeding, and I was so afraid of what I was going to have to learn going forward. The district attorney’s office had already prepared us that the details would get gruesome.
Three o’clock was always an anxious time for me those days. It was when I used to pick Nick up from school, and now . . . there was nowhere for me to be. I’d find myself getting more and more uneasy as the time grew near, and I’d give in to the ache to get out of the house and drive.
By 3:00 on most weekdays, I would find myself in front of Nick’s school, just watching. Some days it bothered me to see how life was going on. There were kids carrying backpacks, smiling and laughing. Backpacks were bittersweet; they became an emblem of age fifteen to me—the age that my son would be forever frozen in time. I was never going to see Nick smile and laugh again. How could they smile when the world was so cruel? On other days, seeing them still living was what I needed. One way or another, life was going on.
The bar disciplined Hollywood’s lawyer, Stephen Hogg, for his “ethics violation,” the first time he’d been disciplined in his twenty-eight-year career—but not the last. He was soon disciplined twice more on unrelated cases. To me, again, it was nothing. A slap on the wrist, if that. As far as I was concerned, proper “discipline” would have been prison time for failing to tell the police about a kidnapping in progress.
On Thanksgiving, Jeff and I summoned our bravery and went to see Lizard’s Mouth. We needed to feel the pain that we knew was waiting for us there. We sat in the spot where Nick breathed his last breath, and then we heard gunshots—it turned out that there was a gun range next to the mountain.
Jeff chiseled Nick’s name into a boulder, along with his date of birth and date of death. The date of death was actually wrong; we didn’t yet know that he had been killed after midnight, making it August 9 rather than August 8. But there it was, chiseled into the rock forever anyway. We didn’t want anyone to forget what happened at this spot.
The view at Lizard’s Mouth was magnificent. Nick should be here with me, I thought. He should be helping me see things in the cloud formations.
Looking out into the beautiful world, yet still not wanting to be in it anymore, I felt so lost and alone. Preserving Nick’s memory seemed to be the most important thing to do. Prior to Nick’s sixteenth birthday, we made up silver key chains—thousands of them, with Nick’s name and birth date and death date, plus the address to the website that my brother had made in honor of Nick, and my e-mail address so that people could write to me if they had anything to share or wanted to talk about Nick. I handed them out to people everywhere I went.
Most days felt like a battle just to stay alive and keep my mind intact. I drank increasing amounts—champagne and orange juice in the morning, and after I’d gone through two bottles of champagne, I’d switch to wine. Red wine if the weather was cold, white if it was hot, all through the afternoon and night until I went to sleep. Sometimes beer in the summer. When my girlfriends came over, they would bring wine. I built up an amazing tolerance, which was not so surprising considering that my father had been an alcoholic all his life. He was a funny drunk who’d liked to sing country-western songs, but there was nothing funny about me anymore. I was just a sad drunk.
Jeff had gone right back to work within a week or two after Nick’s funeral, leaving me alone in the house much of the time—but I didn’t mind that. It gave me more time to drink and drug myself without anyone noticing. Mainly, I stayed settled at home, but I did go out for lunch some days, drink some more, then drive home.
I was so drunk that I tried to drown myself in the swimming pool one day, with the telephone still in my hand—I had called my therapist. It’s very hard to drown yourself. Your head keeps bobbing back up, so you have to really force it to stay down. I could still hear my therapist’s voice on the phone: “If you don’t answer me right now, I’m calling 911,” he said.
“Oh, fine,” I said, and I gave up and got out of the pool. There had to be an easier way to kill myself. I wondered about the “never-wake-up berries” from the movie The Blue Lagoon. You just ate a branchful of crimson arita berries and went to sleep forever—how neat and simple.
I kept thinking that there had to be someone else out there like me, someone who would understand what I was going through. But each time I spoke to a parent of a murdered child, I would eventually hear the words “my other child” or “my children.” Could I have been the only person in this unbearable situation, having my only child murdered?
I felt that Jeff had more to live for than I did—he still had his two other children, plus his grandchild and another one on the way. Leah was pregnant again. It hurt too much for me to be very near them . . . my realities hit me more each day. I was never going to have a grandchild of my own.
After Nick was born, I had two more pregnancies. One ended in miscarriage, and the other . . . well, the other was Sarah. In my nineteenth week, well after I could feel her kick, we found out she had a neural tube defect and had no chance of survival. I thought nothing was ever going to compare to the agony I felt when I sat in a room full of habitual aborters who made jokes about their unwanted pregnancies and knew that in a few minutes, this very wanted life inside me was going to be taken away from us. I couldn’t stop crying; I would never get to meet my daughter.
That made Nick even more important. Having another baby just wasn’t going to happen for us, so all of my hopes and dreams lived with him. With him gone, all the meaning in my life was gone, too.
I spoke to God a lot in those days. Wrote him letters, too. Most of them were similar.
Dear God,
This is Susan Markowitz. There has been a mistake. You see, Nick was a good boy. I was trying to raise him right. I am so sorry if I did something wrong. Could you please send him back? I promise to do better. I’m begging you: Please send him back and take me. There is a word called miracles; only you can do them. I have never asked for one before. Actually, I haven’t asked you for anything except to have a child. Could you plea
se undo what those boys did to my son? I looked at the calendar, and it has been four months. I really need him back. I try to get by with just his memory; it is not enough. I will trade everything including my soul just to say good-bye.
P.S. Waiting in West Hills, California
The hearings and jury selections and trials overlapped each other; we were at all of them, though. The first to make it to an actual trial was Richard Dispenza, the teacher from Colorado who’d lied to detectives about his godson Jesse Hollywood’s whereabouts. It turned out that Dispenza was very popular in his hometown; students and faculty packed the courtroom and overflowed into the hallways during the weeklong trial. The judge even reminded them, “This is a trial, not an athletic event.”
The defense attorney told the jury that Dispenza hadn’t known that Hollywood was a fugitive when he’d showed up at Dispenza’s house and that he’d kicked Hollywood out the next day because he reeked of marijuana smoke. But he had driven him to a hotel, because he didn’t think Hollywood should drive in his stoned condition.
Dispenza knew that Hollywood was in trouble, but not that he was wanted for murder, said the defense attorney. It was just an honest mistake! And when detectives had asked where Hollywood was and Dispenza lied, that was just because he wanted to give his godson a chance to do the right thing and turn himself in. Detectives, however, said that Richard Dispenza’s story about what he knew and when he knew it kept changing.
“To this day, Jesse James Hollywood is a fugitive from justice,” the prosecutor said. “The help from this defendant was not a mistake—it was a crime.”
The jury agreed; they convicted Richard Dispenza of harboring a fugitive, a felony that carried up to a six-year prison term. In addition, he was convicted of false reporting to authorities, a misdemeanor. But it would be up to the judge to decide what kind of sentence to impose.
When he left the courtroom that day, reporters asked Dispenza if he was going to lose his teaching license. He said he didn’t think so, because he viewed the crime he committed to be relatively minor. And he planned to appeal the verdict.
After a verdict was announced, the victim—or, as in our case, the family of the deceased victim—was allowed to take the stand to give what is called a “Victim’s Impact Statement.” It’s a rite of passage I don’t wish on anyone. It’s a time meant to remind the court of the human side of crime—after the evidence is weighed impartially, then it’s OK to remember that the “body” is a real person, and the crime has left a family in ruins. You have to figure out a way to put into words how, exactly, this crime has hurt you and why a judge should carry out the kind of sentence you believe is appropriate. A sales pitch for justice, based on just how shattered you are.
After my morning mimosas, I took the stand and begged the judge to make sure that Richard Dispenza saw some jail time. I knew there was a risk that he wouldn’t spend any time in jail at all, and I wanted to convey an important point: were it not for Dispenza’s lies, one of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” would be off that list and in prison right now.
But others painted a glowing picture of Dispenza. His supporters wrote two hundred and forty-nine letters to the court, and his neighbor took the stand to say what a great and selfless man he was and how students were always coming to him for advice.
The judge said, “We’ve got an exceptionally fine citizen and an exceptionally generous man who has committed an incredible lapse of judgment.” Jailing him would waste taxpayer money and serve no purpose, the judge declared, so the sentence would be three years of probation, four hundred and eighty hours of community service, and victim empathy classes.
Throughout the courtroom and outside in the halls, the students and other supporters cheered and high-fived each other for the slap-on-the-wrist sentence. I felt like they were all cheering for letting Hollywood get away with murdering my son. “Hooray for harboring a fugitive! Gimme a high-five!”
It was a tough day.
Richard Dispenza resigned from his teaching job before they could fire him, but he was soon teaching and coaching again. Just a small hiccup in his life.
Back we went to California, where America’s Most Wanted did a long segment on Jesse James Hollywood that generated a flurry of new tips. People claimed sightings of him across the United States, Mexico, and Canada . . . plus the inevitable callers who would say, “He’s on television every week! Are you guys nuts? He hosts that show Monster Garage! How could you not find him?” Of course, they were talking about the Jesse James who eventually married Sandra Bullock, not Jesse James Hollywood. Every time America’s Most Wanted aired, hundreds of calls would pour in, and some were solid tips. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI were not allowed to tell me anything about their investigation at this point except that they were going to do their best to find him.
That wasn’t very reassuring to me. It was hard for Jeff and me to sit still and wait for people we didn’t know to track down the man who’d ordered my son’s execution, so we followed some of those tips ourselves, putting up signs and posters in areas where people claimed to have spotted him. One person e-mailed me a photo she had taken of a guy we were both sure was Hollywood. She told me that she had tried sending this information to the police, but hadn’t yet received a response. I excitedly passed it along too, only to learn that it was a lookalike. The resemblance was amazing, but the person in the photo bore no relation to the Hollywoods.
In June 2001, Nick’s purebred Australian shepherd, Zak, died. He hadn’t been the same since Nick had been gone. I wondered if they would be together now.
After Nick’s death, Ben had gone into a freefall. Where before he’d sold more drugs than he’d actually used, soon it became the opposite. He went off the deep end. Many times he told the press, “It’s my fault that my fifteen-year-old brother is dead.” I could not understand how he wouldn’t straighten up after Nick’s murder. What other wake-up call could a human being possibly need?
I seethed with anger at how Ben was disrespecting his brother’s memory. I seethed when Jeff wanted to visit him. If I could have made Ben disappear from the planet, I would have—to me, he was worse than worthless; he was trampling the flowers on Nick’s grave by continuing to do drugs and to hang out with the same kinds of evil people who killed Nick.
Ben committed a string of crimes during this time. He later said that he was on his own suicide mission, not unlike mine. I drank and took prescription pills; he broke into drug-dealers’ houses and tried to get himself shot.
In December, Ben got arrested.
He was picked up for two separate instances of home invasion and armed robbery, but that didn’t begin to cover what had actually happened. First, Ben and a male friend had gone to visit his friend Heather, who had a three-year-old daughter. Another guy and Heather’s sister were already there, and they began passing along a glass pipe. Heather’s little daughter was walking around in clouds of crystal meth smoke.
Even though Ben was high, too, he was appalled. “Get the baby out of here,” he screamed to Heather’s sister.
She did, and then he pulled out a gun and proceeded to teach the other two meth addicts “a lesson.” He forced Heather and her male friend to strip naked; then he tied them to chairs, just to humiliate them. He took away Heather’s cell phone and left them there, wriggling in their chairs.
The following night, Ben went to collect some money a marijuana dealer owed him, with his partner-in-crime in tow. They broke into the man’s house with guns in hand. Despite his threats, Ben left with only five dollars and the guy’s driver’s license.
“You’ll get your license back when you pay me,” Ben said.
The drug dealer and Heather each went to the police and filed reports. The police came looking for Ben and found him. His mom hired a good attorney, while Ben sat in the Los Angeles County Jail for six months awaiting trial. The deputy district attorney told him that if he were convicted of all charges, he would face sixty-f
our years in prison.
At the trial, Heather testified about what Ben had done, but when Ben’s attorney cross-examined her, things got interesting.
“Have you ever had sex with Ben?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And was that before or after the incident took place?”
“Both.”
“So you had sex with Ben after this. About how long after?”
“The following night.”
That was the end of Ben’s first hurdle—the prosecution’s case had obviously suffered a big blow. At lunch, Ben’s attorney worked out a deal with the district attorney’s office: two years for a simple robbery charge, less time served, which was six months by this time. Ben was looking at eighteen months of hard time, but it sounded a lot better than sixty-four years, so he jumped at the deal.
Then came time for the drug dealer to testify about the second case. During an earlier hearing, he had changed his mind about testifying, saying he didn’t want Ben to go to prison, but the police arrested him and forced him to show up as a witness at the trial anyway. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment.
Ben was headed off to Corcoran prison.
Ben had been arrested before but only as a juvenile. This was the first time that he was going to be sent to “Big Boy” prison, and the thought of it scared him to pieces. Oddly enough, it probably saved his life.
In prison, Ben made a promise that if God would get him through his ordeal, he would never hurt anyone or break the law again. It was the truth. Finally, finally, it was the truth. At the time, though, I would never have believed it.
I was too busy worrying about my own survival to think much about Ben’s plight, though. I continued writing poetry and letters to Nick and to God, though sometimes the words jammed up worse than others.
What happened?
My Stolen Son Page 17
