. . . I want Nick back.
His breakfast is getting cold.
Can you send him home now?
Nick’s Mom,
Susan
Jeff and I would attend Parents of Murdered Children meetings, a group no one wanted to belong to. There, we would share in being lost. We would see the hollowness in each other’s eyes and know that we were not alone in our grief. So many people in the group had even less than we did, though—their children’s bodies were never found, or the killers were never identified, or they were let off the hook because of insufficient evidence.
I found reasons to thank God for the small blessings we had—at least we had Nick’s body. At least we knew who had done this and why, and most of the criminals were in custody awaiting trials.
Before the trials, there were all sorts of motions and hearings that went on for months. It seemed there were court procedures of some sort relating to Nick’s case nearly every weekday, and I vowed to make it to every one of them. It was a difficult vow to keep because it meant that I would learn things I never wanted to learn about my son and his brutal death, and the callousness of others, and even about myself. I worried about my own anger. I worried I might get so angry that I’d want all of them dead. But for the most part, it wasn’t anger that I felt. Still, after all these months, it was disbelief and shock.
Frequently, I’d space out entirely, both in the courtroom and out. For a minute or two, I’d just be gone, floating in some otherworldly place where no one had been murdered and I was not Susan Markowitz, mother of the victim. I couldn’t even say what I was thinking in those moments. It wasn’t like normal daydreaming or losing myself in thought for a minute and then snapping back to reality. It was like I was really taking a total break from consciousness—my senses had just overloaded, tripped a switch, and my brain turned off.
Other times, it was a purposeful decision to put my mind elsewhere. During the more graphic moments of trials, I would give myself something else to think about: the way Nick had let me shave his face just a few weeks before his death; the way he was so proud of himself when he was about six years old and had stopped a neighbor, “Little Nick,” from running into the street. I would think of those memories and try not to hear the graphic evidence. I had anxiety attacks every day—attacks that left me feeling like I was falling down a bottomless hole.
There were so many people who would never be prosecuted for their involvement in Nick’s death, so many people who received immunity early on so that they’d testify against the most egregious offenders. But people who, nonetheless, had known that Nick had been kidnapped and was in danger. I wanted them all to be held responsible for what they’d done, and what they’d failed to do. Although the district attorney’s office might have been handing out legal immunity like cupcakes, we didn’t want anyone to feel morally absolved. Every one of them had failed Nick.
Jeff’s best friend, Richard Stanley, his longtime tennis buddy and doubles partner, was our attorney. He and another attorney, Richard Tarlow, took the daunting task of filing a civil lawsuit on our behalf with a mediator, naming thirty-two defendants—the Los Angeles Police Department for failing to investigate the 911 calls, John Roberts, Natasha Adams, Kelly Carpenter, the Lemon Tree Inn, Jack and Laurie Hollywood . . .
We reached a settlement on the suit, totaling $330,200. The money was split among the defendants based on their involvement and ability to pay: Casey Sheehan, for instance, was ordered to pay $1,000; Michelle Lasher and her parents, $35,000. Of course, we would never see anything even approaching that kind of money. What we actually received was about $193,000, plus the rights to Jesse James Hollywood’s house, which we sold for $90,000.
Talking about money in relation to Nick’s murder made me queasy. There was no price tag that would make this better, and I didn’t want anyone to ever think that we were profiting from his death. At least, however, perhaps it could help alleviate some of my guilt about my mounting medical and therapy bills—and indeed, in the end, the entire settlement would go straight toward paying these bills. Emergency rooms and mental hospitals were not cheap places to vacation.
I was even charged for their mistakes. One time, they gave me the wrong medication—a strong painkiller—which I turned out to be allergic to; within a few minutes of taking the pill, I was sweating profusely and the room was spinning. Next thing I knew, I was on a bed strapped to a heart monitor . . . and we got a bill for that electrocardiogram, too.
Jeff never made me feel bad about any of it, and he didn’t show me the debts I was accumulating on our behalf, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of them. By the second time I got my stomach pumped, I knew the bills would be astronomical. I became so familiar with the hospital routine that I knew just what to do. I’d drive myself the thirty or forty miles to Pasadena from West Hills, and my therapist would call ahead so that the hospital would be expecting me.
Then I’d sit in the parking lot for a minute figuring out what I could and couldn’t bring inside. My picture of Nick would have to stay in the car because it was in a glass frame, so I’d leave it on the console, where others might be able to see it. Then I’d sneak a few pills into my rolled-up sleeve, just in case I needed them later.
Once I was inside, all of my belongings would be put onto a table and sorted through. Contraband was taken away, questionable things were held at the desk. My hair-brush had a pointed end, so it was held. They’d put tape with my name on it, and I’d have to ask for it when I needed to use it, under supervision. Then they’d take my vital signs and ask me what pills I’d taken and how many of each. Who could keep track?
If I couldn’t stay alert, they’d send me by wheelchair to the emergency room to pump my stomach, then send me back to the mental health ward. I’d stay there until someone pronounced me stable enough to go home again. In the meantime, Jeff would call my family and say, “Susan’s in the hospital again,” and they would all worry and wait and visit when they could.
My younger brother Ed couldn’t handle seeing me in that environment. He came to visit me at UCLA’s hospital the first time and understood at that moment that I was never going to be the same. I just wasn’t there anymore. All he could do was to hope that I wouldn’t succeed on my next suicide attempt.
Each time I didn’t succeed, though, I was glad a few days later. What if there is no afterlife? I thought. I would have killed myself for nothing—I won’t get to see Nick no matter what. At least now I get to see him in my dreams sometimes. It’s better than not seeing him at all.
Plus, I had to remember that I still had a job to do. I had to make sure Nick’s killers didn’t get away with their crime.
It’s illegal to drink on the beach at Paradise Cove, but that didn’t stop me. Were cops going to arrest me? Make my day, I thought. It would just put me closer to the people who took my son’s life. Why was I so drawn to the beach? Was it to reminisce about happier days with Nick and Jeff? Or to fantasize about drowning myself? I never even knew; I would just end up there some days, always with drinks in hand.
One day in August 2001, I sat outside the Paradise Café thinking about how senseless everything seemed. What was the purpose of my having lost Nick? I felt like life was forgetting us both.
“I hate life,” I repeated to myself, when I noticed the most beautiful little blond girl approaching me. She was maybe three or four years old. As she swung on the thick chain border that separated the café from the beach, she asked me, “Are there ghosts in here?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Do you have any kids?”
Sadly, I shook my head. “No.”
She looked at me and replied slowly. “Oh . . . I thought for sure you had a kid.” And off she ran to play with her friends, leaving me dumbfounded.
I decided to take it as a sign that Nick was with me. Hey, when in my position, you took anything you could get. Even if it meant nothing, it made me feel good for a moment.
It was
getting more rare for me to feel much of anything aside from my default depression. On September 11, 2001, I sat by my television set like everyone else, frozen in time and in disbelief about the acts of terror that had just claimed the lives of thousands of Americans. Yet I did not cry. I felt a disturbing lack of emotion. I watched the events unfold with the detachment of a clinician; of course, I knew it was a profoundly sad thing, but I could not find a personal connection.
This bothered me. Here I was, a person who used to cry over touching commercials, yet on this day of national tragedy, I still felt only my own tragedy. This is so unlike me, I thought. It made me realize I was still in a state of shock, still preserving myself. For what?
For the day we find Jesse James Hollywood, I told myself. For the day I could look him in the eye and say to him, “You are not getting away with murdering my son.”
CHAPTER 14
THE WORST OF ALL CASES
Ryan Hoyt was the next person to go to trial. His mother, Vicky Hoyt, walked past me on the way to the courtroom and said, “Stay away from me!” As if I were going to do anything else. She was acting like she was on some kind of drugs—prescription or not, I don’t know—and her testimony was rambling and very strange.
On the stand, Hoyt disavowed his taped jailhouse confession, claiming he didn’t remember it. He said he didn’t remember ever having a conversation with those detectives at all. Literally, he was claiming amnesia. He was just covering for Hollywood then, he said, but in actuality, he hadn’t even been there when Nick was murdered. All he’d done was bring a duffel bag to the hotel, and then leave. Hoyt said that he thought the duffel bag had marijuana in it. Days later, he found out that the package had contained a gun, and that someone had used that gun to kill Nick. That was his new story.
What would have brought on this convenient bout of amnesia? Sleep deprivation, Hoyt said. He claimed not to have slept for about a week. “Prior to my arrest, I was partying so hard I don’t believe I slept at all . . . I was drinking, snorting coke, smoking weed,” he testified.
An expert psychiatric witness for the prosecution testified that something was fishy about Hoyt’s newfound amnesia defense; total memory loss is very rare, he said, and wasn’t consistent with the way Hoyt acted during the three-hour evaluation that the psychiatrist conducted.
“His memory was crisp. It was solid,” he said. “But then there’s that blank two-day period. That’s simply not consistent with how the brain works.”
However, the psychiatrist explained, fake amnesia was a “fairly common” tactic among defendants in murder cases.
This courtroom scene was different from the one with the throngs of supporters for Richard Dispenza in Colorado. Here, Hoyt had few family members, including an aunt who cried intermittently. His mother leaned her pink cheek on the shoulder of a man sitting next to her. I don’t know who he was, but the way she stiffly clutched his arm was unsettling. When she looked my way, she did so with a sarcastic smile through clenched lips and eyes that looked distended, showing no sympathy.
What have I done—and more important, what did my Nick do—to make you look at me this way? I wanted to ask.
Aside from his few family members, most of the people in the court were members of the media or there for Nick, not Hoyt.
The defense painted a pitiable picture of Ryan Hoyt. His mother testified that his father had beaten her while she was pregnant. By all accounts, Hoyt had grown up in a violent, unstable household. This, apparently, was meant to make the jury take pity on him. It wasn’t his fault; he’d had a bad childhood. Who could blame him for just one little murder?
My older brother Buster had set up a little website dedicated to Nick by then, and it had a free guestbook people could sign. Almost all of the early entries were from people who’d known Nick well—our family and his friends. It was a place where we could gather, at least in cyberspace, to symbolically hold hands and talk about our loss. The beautiful words that people left about Nick did fortify me. My cousin Rose wrote to Jeff and me, “I wish I could take some of the pain away from you, but I know nothing in this lifetime will do that. Just remember when you are weak and down and don’t feel like going on, Nick is watching over you. He would want you to stay alive and healthy to see that justice is served with these people who took his life. His life now lives on through you. Let him shine!”
That’s what I tried to do. Every day, I brought Nick’s leather bomber jacket to court with me, and I held it to feel his presence.
The prosecutors warned us that they were going to show some pictures that would be upsetting to us. We didn’t have to be in the courtroom to see them, they said, but they wanted to give us the option to look first.
My son in his grave. His skull, torn open by bullets. His body, far away and fuzzy, half covered in dirt.
How much do you have to drink to unsee what you have already seen?
Ben was still in prison during Hoyt’s trial, but since he would have to be in Santa Barbara to testify, he was moved to the Santa Barbara County Jail for six weeks. It was the same jail where Hoyt was being held. Ben had to walk by him every day.
The trial lasted until November 21, 2001, when Ryan Hoyt was convicted of first-degree murder after just one day of jury deliberations. His parents were not there for the verdict. He sat stone-faced, and his grandfather later said that he knew what was coming.
During the penalty phase, we played a portion of video from Nick’s bar mitzvah speech. In each bar mitzvah ceremony, the young man reads a portion of the Torah. Nick’s reading was Shoeftim, from Deuteronomy, and it was a farewell speech from Moses just before he died, as the Jewish people were about to enter the Promised Land. The speech was all about justice.
In his speech, Nick said, “Moses told the people that there must be justice for all. He said, ‘Justice, justice must you follow.’ They were also told that no accused person should be condemned without being provided a fair trial, to include testimony by dependable witnesses.”
Later, he added, “Preparing for this bar mitzvah has been a real eye-opener for me. I have really grown in the past few months, and I don’t mean my height. I don’t know how to explain it, but my Judaism has really started to mean something to me.
“I never realized how much Jewish law applies in today’s world. For instance, my Torah portion mentions justice. Justice and a fair legal system are the basis of any democracy. The American justice system is far from perfect, but it definitely beats the alternative.
“I found it interesting that over three thousand years ago, God, through Moses, expressed the importance of a fair legal system. I know that many of you think I’m perfect”—this drew laughter from the bar mitzvah crowd—“but believe me, I am far from perfect. However, I do think I am developing a strong sense of what is right and wrong, and how to treat other people. The Golden Rule in Judaism is ‘Treat other people as you would like to be treated.’ That is a rule I will try to live by.”
Given the first-degree murder conviction, there were only two options for sentencing: Ryan Hoyt would either get life in prison or the death penalty. I wondered if Nick would think less of me for really needing the death penalty. An eye for an eye, I told myself. It’s time for our justice system to really mean “justice.” I didn’t want to react out of spite or hate or even anger, though. I wanted to feel the way I did because it was the only appropriate form of punishment for the crime. One of the most difficult things I’ve had to do was to get up and speak during the penalty phase of Ryan Hoyt’s trial.
“Ryan James Hoyt, you shot my child in the face and did not even know his name! His name was Nicholas Samuel Markowitz,” I said.
I told the court about what had happened to all of us since Nick’s murder—about how it was tearing Jeff and I apart, about how my mother had a heart attack during the grand jury trial, about Nick’s half-sister Leah’s emotional roller coaster knowing her children would never know their uncle Nick.
Then I described what h
ad happened to Nick’s best friend, Ryan, at Bryn Athens: “A school that has been dealing with boys for over one hundred and fifty years suggested his mom come to get him.” Ryan had been unable to pull himself together without professional help, and the two of us cried every time we saw each other.
“I can only imagine Nick’s last breaths that were spent trying to plead for his life through the duct tape that muffled his cries. Game that is hunted and killed receives more dignity in its death than Nicholas did. This vision has haunted me every minute for the past four hundred and seventy-three days.
“Holidays are something I try to pretend are not there, but Mother’s Day collapsed me. I lay face first in the grass over my son’s body begging someone to tell me I was having a nightmare.”
After court that day, I crawled back into the hotel bed, where I would try to sleep as early as I could to make the day shorter. I wrote another note to Nick.
I will be with you soon, my son. Love, Mom
P.S. Dad says for me not to hurry. You probably need the break.
In his closing remarks, the prosecutor argued that “the death penalty is saved for the worst of all cases. This is the worst of all cases.”
On the day of sentencing, I sat up front as usual. The victim’s advocate, Joan, held my hand. The court had appointed her, but to Jeff and me, she had become family. She checked on us frequently to see how we were doing, even beyond the scope of her job. We went to lunch with Joan and her wonderful husband, Pete; we transcended the relationship we were assigned to have.
Just a few feet in front of me sat Ryan Hoyt, handcuffed and sitting in a cushioned, swivel-rocking chair. He was dressed in slacks and a sweater, with gel-slicked hair, his patent-leather shoes tapping, even though his feet were chained. His eyes were black and hollow; they were the eyes of a killer. His shoe tapping bothered me.
Has he made us the same now? I wondered. Do we both feel nothing?
My Stolen Son Page 18
