My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  “Another day in court—that’s all this is,” I told myself, and I remembered some of the meditation techniques I learned from a therapist. Leave the darkness; go to the light.

  In my visualization, I saw the stairs that led down to a hallway with many doors. I had traveled this path in my meditations before; I knew what was behind each of those doors. I passed up the one that would lead to my beach cottage, as it wasn’t the warmth of the sun or the sound of the ocean I needed right then. Instead, I kept going to my favorite door: Nick’s nursery.

  It was 1984, and as I opened the door, I heard “The Muffin Man” playing from his tape recorder. The room smelled like baby oil. I grasped the handle of the top drawer of his dresser and looked at his little pastel undershirts, jammies, and blue booties. They cried out with sweetness.

  Little bears with red bows smiled down on me from the wallpaper border. The room was nice and tidy, with his books lined up by size. The Little Engine That Could, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Wheels on the Bus . . .

  Sitting proudly on the top shelf of his bookcase was a wooden alphabet train that spelled out “NICHOLAS.” Little Boy Blue was fast asleep in the hay in a framed picture on the wall. But as I got to the crib with the baby blue blanket, I felt emptiness. My baby was not there.

  In the corner of the room was a pair of shoes, size fourteen . . . what were they doing there?

  The sounds of the courtroom rose, and I told myself I had to leave this place. As I walked back through the hallway, I stepped on something. I looked down and picked it up—Nick’s teddy bear. I caressed its familiarity against my cheek and I thought I heard . . . “Mommy?”

  “All rise. The Honorable Judge William L. Gordon presiding.”

  We rose. I didn’t know where I was anymore.

  “The court is now in session. Please be seated.”

  First came the motions, the penal codes, the procedural babble that made my eyes glaze over. Three hours later, the judge said the first thing that mattered to me.

  “I have taken into consideration the defendant’s age and lack of prior convictions.”

  My heart sank.

  “I must also think of the vulnerability of the innocent victim . . . I also thought of how many opportunities [the defendant] had not to go through with this heinous crime. The planning and brutality of Nicholas’s murder warrants a death sentence. He killed a defenseless teenage boy who had done neither the defendant nor any of his cohorts any harm. Moreover, the evidence shows Mr. Hoyt murdered out of a desire to please Jesse Hollywood’s coterie of friends. There is no way I can justify the cruelty, and I sentence you, Ryan James Hoyt, to death by lethal injection in the San Quentin Prison. That will be the order.”

  Frozen in my seat, I attempted to make eye contact with the judge, but he would not allow it. He had never allowed it. He was the judge for Hoyt, Rugge, and both of Pressley’s trials. After sitting in his courtroom for more than a year, I knew he always made his decisions confidently without the need for acceptance. Still, I wanted to convey my gratitude to him—he had given the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime. Nick’s life meant no less than Ryan Hoyt’s did.

  I heard whimpers from the other side of the courtroom. I had no desire to look.

  People came over to us and hugged us, congratulated us on the verdict. So many people whose faces I knew only from the courtroom day after day.

  I wrote a letter to the Santa Barbara News-Press that they shared with readers:Santa Barbara is a place that I have very mixed emotions about due to the circumstances of my son’s death. However, I want to make it very clear I have full intentions of coming back when these proceedings are over to thank each of you for embracing me along with my son’s memory. My hopes are that I can look at your beautiful community and not link it to Nick’s death.

  We believe that all the jurors took pride in their duties, and with great distress came upon their decisions. I can only imagine what a challenge it had to have been, obeying the law, organizing evidence, and suppressing the emotions. We would like to thank each of them for being able to sit through some very tough moments.

  I thanked the prosecutors, the victim’s advocate, and all of the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department for devoting such a large part of their lives to helping get justice for Nick, I thanked the Hotel Santa Barbara staff for being kind to us while we stayed there during trials, and I thanked the media for being very decent and giving us space and compassion.

  Then I sat by Nick’s grave and told him the news. I wondered if it brought him any peace. As for me . . . I guess I was hoping for it to feel better than it did. Getting that verdict and that sentence was important, but it didn’t erase my suicidal thoughts. In fact, it brought me one step closer to feeling like my work on Earth was done.

  Every step like this made it feel more real and more final. Nick really wasn’t coming back.

  I had to remind myself of that daily. Where was the guy with the hidden camera who was supposed to pop up at the trial and tell us it was all a joke and we could go home now with Nick? But now a jury had decided that someone really had killed Nick . . . Did that mean it had to be true?

  On days when I felt particularly suicidal, I would call Jeff and tell him that I needed to go to the doctor to have my medications adjusted, or some equally smallish thing. Then I would go to the hospital and tell the truth—that I still wanted to die, and I needed help.

  But really, what could they do for me? They could take away my sharp objects and put me in a room with someone else who also wanted to die and tell me that things would get better, but did anything really get better? When, exactly, were things going to get better?

  You weren’t allowed to just stay in bed in the hospital. They made you get up and do things all day. But there were some days I just couldn’t, no matter what they told me. On those days, I would get what amounted to a bad report card. They’d make me feel like I wasn’t trying.

  But I was trying. I’m not sure if they understood that sometimes I had to try just to open my eyes. Just to sit up. Just to speak three words. Just to not break into the nurse’s station and steal whatever little white pills they might have stacked neatly behind the desk and swallow all of them at once.

  I told the other patients that if they didn’t want to take their pills to please save them for me. If they found any on the floor, I’d take those, too. I was not picky: whatever they had, I’d take. But it didn’t work that way—it really was a lot like the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest where someone called out “Medication time!” and everyone lined up at a desk to get a little cup with a pill in it. You had to stand there and open your mouth and put the pill in and swallow it before you left the station—no throwing it away or saving it for later. They didn’t have to worry about me throwing away any pills, that’s for sure, but they did have to worry about me stockpiling pills to take all at once.

  There was some kind of comfort in being in a hospital; you do get taken care of in different ways than you might at home, and there’s nothing for you to concentrate on other than your own mental health. But then I’d have to go back home and wonder what was going to make me not do it again.

  Perhaps, given my stints in the mental hospitals, it comes as no great shock that I also tried using a Ouija board to contact Nick.

  It wasn’t my idea. My neighbors, who I barely knew before Nick’s death, made the offer. They believed they could communicate with spirits using a Ouija board, and I thought, Why not? I soon found that after Nick’s death, I believed in everything. I no longer cared to figure out which religion or lack thereof had it right; I was open to believing in anything that might give me a connection to my son.

  So I would walk over to my neighbor’s house and take notes while they used the Ouija board. I tried to write down everything they said—which was a challenge, because some sessions lasted for hours.

  I would ask the questions:

  “How do I communicate with you, Nick?” yielded the r
esponse, “You have to think of Susan; otherwise, there are two of me and none of you . . . You are so busy thinking your thoughts that you can’t hear mine.”

  “Can you tell me where Hollywood is?” I asked, and the response came back: “He is in a cage that he made for himself. He’s not getting away with it.”

  I left these sessions feeling good. I don’t know whether I was really communicating with Nick, but it felt real to me—and I’d rather have that than let my cynicism rob me of experiencing it. My new motto became, “Embrace and acknowledge whatever comes your way.” One time, Nick’s best friend, Ryan, came along with me. I thanked Nick for each of these sessions and kept them in my heart, needing to believe that there was still a way for us to talk.

  Right after Ryan Hoyt’s guilty verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Police Department declared that two of their officers, Donovan Lyons and Brent Rygh, would receive written reprimands. The LAPD Board of Rights had found them guilty of failing to properly investigate the 911 calls about the kidnapping . . . narrowly. The board called it a “minor technical breach of policy” because the officers had interviewed the first 911 caller only by cell phone and never followed up with an in-person interview. But the board concluded that the officers’ lack of investigating had no effect on Nick’s death.

  In fact, one of the board members wanted to reassure those two officers that they hadn’t really done anything wrong; they just hadn’t done their best. “This decision should in no way [imply] that your actions or inactions were connected to what later occurred,” he told them.

  Come again?

  The officers had had the license plate number for the van, and although they had run the plates, they had decided not to even visit the van’s owner, John Roberts. They said that they had simply looked around town for a victim wandering the streets, and when they didn’t find one—oh, well. If they had visited John Roberts and asked who had his van, and then gone and tracked it down, I felt strongly that Nick would be alive today. John Roberts lived only a few blocks from where Nick was abducted. One of the reasons that the officers said they didn’t go to the address was that they thought it was “miles” away. Perhaps they didn’t feel like driving that day.

  The 911 operators who’d bungled the calls and coded them as an assault and an information-only broadcast, respectively, were each disciplined, too . . . three days’ suspension. Somehow it didn’t seem right that their errors had led to my son’s murder, and yet they were basically given mini vacations from work.

  I tried not to focus on that, though. Nick’s high school wanted to do something to memorialize him, and Jeff had spent many hours making a marker for future generations to admire. There would be a tree-planting ceremony in his honor on December 28, 2001, which gave me a way to get through Christmas, a little. I asked for his friends to bring letters, poems, or prayers to share.

  That day, his grandma wrote, “Well, Nick, we planted your tree today, as you know, because as soon as we finished, you watered it.” It had rained. “Nice touch. Only you would think of something like that to let us know you were watching. I love you and miss you.”

  Then something happened that really threw me: it seemed the whole world knew that Ben had gotten out of prison, except me.

  In a therapy session months earlier, I had told Jeff that I needed to know when Ben got out or when Jeff spoke to him. I never wanted Ben to be anywhere near us again; my mother was now living with us, and I felt that anyone who was associated with Ben was in serious danger. But Jeff had kept it a secret from me for three weeks. I found out through other family members who were also trying to keep it from me.

  I felt so betrayed.

  I really just want to be alone, I thought. Jeff’s life was always going to include Ben, even if only in his thoughts, and that would crush me. I began separating myself from Jeff in my mind, preparing myself for what could come. Almost no marriages survive the murder of a child; I knew the stats. I knew the stories from the Parents of Murdered Children group. The trauma put such a strain on the marriage that it almost always broke, and in our case, there was the added element that surely created much more stress—the “Ben factor.”

  I told my therapist I was considering spending time apart from Jeff—which was kind of a funny notion, considering that Jeff was rarely around those days anyway. Time apart would not be that different from what we were doing now. I thought about it and thought about it, but I didn’t act on it. It remained another sadness hanging over me, the looming threat that my marriage might be over, too.

  I realized that I was starting to think of my life in terms of deaths and trials. This was the month that so-and-so died. This was the month this trial came to an end. This was the month of so-and-so’s sentencing. In February 2002, my father died. He was a great man—which is exactly what it says on his headstone: “A great man.” He was never able to talk about Nick, and I tried to respect that; I didn’t come around or call as much as I usually would, and I tried not to talk about Nick when I did. But when it was clear that he was dying and no longer conscious, I had told him, “Don’t be afraid. We’re all with you, and Nick is waiting.”

  Somehow, I was supposed to get myself together and make it to Santa Barbara again for Jesse Rugge’s trial in April 2002. But before it even began, we were hit with a punch in the stomach: the judge ruled that the jury could not hear Jesse’s confession.

  It had been coerced, the judge said.

  The ruling was all based on one statement that a detective had made in the middle of Rugge’s confession, when Rugge was still hemming and hawing about how he was afraid of prison: “You could be sentenced to death. It looks like you put him in his own grave and shot him, so it doesn’t matter who you’re going to be afraid of. I’d be afraid of that needle. Does that spin it a little different?”

  “I’d be afraid of that needle” was considered coercion. It didn’t make any sense to me, but that’s what the judge ruled. It meant that a jury would never hear a word of what Rugge said, before or after that moment. Those detectives had worked so hard for that confession, and I didn’t see a thing wrong with it . . . and what made me angrier was that jurors would never even know that it existed. They’d never get to weigh it with the other evidence. Why not let the jury decide if it was a real confession? I thought. How were they supposed to come to a fair decision if they couldn’t even see all the evidence?

  Regardless of the anguish I felt, the trial was about to start, and I had to put on a confident face for the cameras.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Markowitz, can I have a moment of your time?” “Mrs. Markowitz, how are you coping?” “How do you feel about seeing Jesse Rugge here today?”

  Flash, flash. The cameras went off. Did they expect me to smile? Cry?

  The Santa Barbara courthouse was one of the most beautiful Spanish buildings I had ever seen, and also one of the coldest. Polished terra-cotta floors, stone walls, high ceilings with heavy beams, and open-air veranda staircases make it impossible to keep warm. On the other hand, this also made it a great retreat from the summer heat.

  Every morning, I would have to leave hours early to save a seat in the courtroom. You could not put your belongings on a seat or ask someone else to save one for you. My family would travel for hours only to be turned away when they got to the courtroom because not one person would give up a seat for them. It was a media frenzy.

  I had met Barney the bailiff when we’d first arrived in the Santa Barbara courthouse, in 2000, and I had been trying to forget him ever since, but there he was again. That wasn’t his real name, but it’s what I nicknamed him in my mind because he looked so much like Barney Rubble from The Flintstones. You could not miss him, with his wad of freshly polished keys dangling at his side. The shine reflecting off his shoes was just a bit less bright than staring directly at the sun.

  Every trial day we had to get up by 4:00 a.m. in order to leave home by 5:00 and make it to court by 7:00 to stand in line. The doors would open at 8:00.
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br />   But just before the first day of Rugge’s trial began, at 10:00, Barney stood in front of our seats and proudly announced it was time to take a break and we would not be allowed to leave our belongings in the courtroom—so the seats I just saved for Jeff and I were back on the free market. I walked out the door and turned around, making myself the first person in the “new” line.

  Then, when break time was over, Barney opened the other set of doors . . . making me the last in line. I asked him if he could let me know which door he was going to open for the lunch break, so I wouldn’t lose my seat again. With one hand on his keys and the other on his hip, he looked away and said, “You know, it still remains a mystery even to myself as to which door I’m going to open.”

  His moves were meticulous. He would pick a piece of lint off his chair, untwist the telephone cord. When he stood, he stood at attention as if he were holding up the wall behind him.

  When I asked to speak with the judge about allowing us to save regular seats—considering that we were the victim’s parents and were traveling two hours to get there every morning, he said no. “Those are the judge’s rules.”

  After many more such encounters, I thought to myself that I had to find the humanity in this man. I don’t know why it became a challenge to me, but it did; he seemed so utterly without compassion. One day, I heard him whistling and told him that it brought back comforting memories of my father, who recently passed away.

  “I’ll see if I can’t whistle for you more often,” he said. He never whistled again.

  With the confession thrown out, Jesse Rugge was able to completely change his story without the jury knowing any different. So he claimed that he wasn’t even present when Nick was killed: “I took off running once I heard the gunshots,” he said.

  Studying the jury’s faces concerned me. They looked like they were buying it.