She almost fainted.
It was no mistake, my being out there just as she was out there. We talked about signs—about how I felt that praying mantises were a sign of Nick, and how she felt that broken glass was a sign of her son. I asked her if she acknowledged these signs and thanked her son out loud for trying to communicate with her. I told her I imagined that it must be frustrating being on the other side, wondering if the person is “getting” the way you’re trying to communicate.
She told me that she didn’t want to talk to anyone who hadn’t lost a child anymore; she found it impossible to relate. I understood that. Even more specifically, I had trouble relating to people who hadn’t lost a child to murder—and even more specifically than that, I was continually searching for parents who had lost their only child to murder. Sometimes we all need to feel like we’ve found others like us.
In that place, at that moment, she was soaking in my words and looking for healing. We both were.
As we talked, I realized something: I really was getting through this. Taking it “one day at a time” was too much. I was taking it about ten minutes at a time. Sometimes one minute at a time. My goal was to just get through that minute and not look ahead.
I went back to the hotel and slept early each night. Most of the time, I was in bed by about 7:00 p.m., just completely emotionally exhausted. It took a lot of effort to be that detached! At one point, Leah had looked right into my eyes and said, “I just wanted to make sure you’re still in there.”
There was only so much I could handle, I knew, so I tried to withdraw from reality as best I could whenever it got tough. Because of the gag order, I was not allowed to talk about the trial with anyone, and that was tough, too, because sometimes I just wanted to decompress with a friend who would understand. After we left the courtroom each day, I wanted to talk about the defense’s shady tactics, and the difficulty of listening to the details, over and over, about how my son had been bound and gagged and eventually executed with a machine gun while standing in his grave.
“What can it hurt? She won’t tell,” I would think, spotting a homeless woman who looked friendly.
But the best I could do to keep friends and family updated was to point them to whatever was in the news. Each day, my webmaster for Nick’s website would put up the latest article that had appeared about the previous day’s court session, and anyone who cared could read through the articles, sorted by date, to keep up on what was happening.
Casey Sheehan, Kelly Carpenter, and Natasha Adams had all told their versions of what they had seen, and then it was Ben’s turn. I didn’t know if I was ready to hear Ben’s testimony. It seemed that every time Ben spoke, I found out another little something I hadn’t known before and never really wanted to find out.
The defense had tried to block Ben from appearing as a witness because they said he wasn’t credible, but the judge denied their request. As it turned out, he was one of the most credible people to appear in front of the court.
Ben didn’t try to whitewash anything; he admitted to the court that he had been a drug dealer and a fighter, that he’d threatened Hollywood, that he’d done things out of self-interest when he saw possible dollar signs. And he described that after he’d accrued the $1,200 debt to Hollywood, he was trying to straighten his life out, and he was engaged to be married and working a real job.
Every couple of questions, the defense would object to something, seemingly just to interrupt the process with things that appeared to have absolutely no bearing on what a jury would decide. For example, the prosecutor asked if Ben seemed to have “mutual interests or have things in common” with Hollywood, and Blatt objected and wanted him to break it up into two separate questions. So the prosecutor had to ask, “Did you have mutual interests?” (Yes.) “Did you have things in common?” (Yes.)
Because of this, all of the testimonies went extremely slowly. Every minute or so, the proceedings were interrupted so the defense could object, and the judge would have to rule on whether the objection would be sustained or overruled, and there was frequently a little discussion about it. People in the courtroom were rolling their eyes and groaning every time the defense called out, “Objection.”
And sometimes they just called things out for no good reason at all. While the prosecutor was explaining that Ben had changed after Nick’s murder and became the kind of person who was looking for a confrontation, Blatt called out, “Vague. Let it in. We want it in.”
The prosecutor said, “You know, I don’t need these comments during—”
“Yeah. No comments. Do you have an objection?” asked the judge.
“No.”
All pretense of politeness between the prosecution and the defense had gone out the window long ago. Kessel has a loud voice, and he chattered throughout the trial in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, frequently speaking negatively about Josh Lynn, and the judge had to remind him to keep his voice down.
The nitpicking over words soon led to this exchange:
The prosecutor asked Ben, “Would you have characterized yourself in those days as a tough guy? As a—”
“Objection. Vague. As a tough guy,” Blatt said. “What is a tough guy?”
“I’m asking him,” said the prosecutor.
“Well, overruled. I’ll permit it,” said the judge.
“Tough guy, Your Honor?”
“Yes, Mr. Blatt. Overruled.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“You can cross-examine him. Go ahead. You can answer the question.”
“At the time, yes,” Ben said.
“What do you mean by that?” the prosecutor asked.
“I was definitely, to be frank, I was a fucking dickhead. I mean, I was—I walked around with a chip on my shoulder, and if you looked at me sideways I’d kick your ass. I was just . . .”
“Do you understand the term now?” the judge asked the defense.
“I think so. Thank you. This witness said it better,” said Blatt.
The prosecutor also asked if Ben had ever seen Jack Hollywood supply his son with marijuana to sell, and Ben said yes—but the defense objected to that as well, saying it was irrelevant.
Ben then described what happened when he got out of prison for armed robbery. Despite that he was on parole and was not supposed to be drinking, he’d gone out to a bar about a week after his release and happened to run into Casey Sheehan, the boy whose car Hollywood had borrowed to send Ryan Hoyt off to kill Nick. Ben threw Sheehan up against a friend’s truck and tried to get him to tell the truth about what Hollywood had told him when he’d asked to borrow the car. Had Sheehan known that his car was going to be used in Nick’s murder?
“At some point did you explain those events to me, the confrontation with Mr. Sheehan?” the prosecutor asked Ben.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear the question,” said Blatt.
“Oh, it has to do with explaining the confrontation with Mr. Sheehan,” the judge said.
Ben started to answer, but Blatt interrupted again. “Excuse me, Your Honor. The question is vague and ambiguous.”
“Well, if he didn’t hear it, I don’t see how he could make that objection,” said the prosecutor.
It was exhausting, really. By that point the trial had already been going on for a month.
The newspaper articles were frustrating as well. Some of them seemed accurate, and others made me wonder if the reporters just enjoyed stirring up more drama. Ben certainly aggravated the defense because he gave them nothing to work with; they wanted to pry out of him what a jerk he was, but Ben was open about all that before they even got started—so there was nothing for them to “catch him” about. About all they could do was try to nitpick him to death over dates; he could no longer remember exactly what month he had become friends with Hollywood, for example, or when they’d picked up the useless Ecstasy pills, or what month he’d seen the TEC-9 at Hollywood’s house.
It seemed like the defense had completely run out
of questions and they were just stalling for time to think of some new ones when they had this crazy exchange:
“You called yourself Bugsy, right?” Blatt asked.
“Yes,” said Ben.
“And Bugsy is after the infamous Jewish gangster Bugsy Siegel, correct?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you—and by the way, have people told you you look like him?”
“No.”
“He was a very handsome man. It was meant as a compliment.”
“Thank you.”
“All right.”
The judge interrupted: “No more questions along those lines.”
“All right,” said Blatt. “Going back to the glorious ’40s. All right. But you put a—did you put a tattoo of a Bugs Bunny on your arm to represent Bugsy?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And you wanted to emulate Bugsy Siegel, didn’t you?”
“No. No.”
“Well, did you know anything about him?”
“Yes.”
“You knew he was a glamorous figure, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And he was Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“And came to Hollywood in the ’40s?”
“Relevance, Your Honor,” Josh Lynn interrupted.
“Sustained,” said the judge.
“All right. And he was tough, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“So, when he—had a girlfriend named Flamingo, right, a nickname?”
“I’m going to say ‘Relevancy,’ Your Honor,” Josh Lynn said.
“Sustained,” said the judge. And on and on it went.
The defense tried everything they could to gain the jury’s sympathy, like, “You knew that [Hollywood’s brother] had heart disease, right?”
“I had no idea he had heart disease,” said Ben. What difference did that make? Ben had never done anything to Hollywood’s brother. Was the defense getting brothers confused? Hollywood was the one who murdered Ben’s brother, remember?
Yet some of the articles made it sound like the defense really took Ben apart.
Leah was so upset about the way that the trial was being written about that she wrote a letter to one of the papers with her corrections, asking if the reporter had been sitting in the same courtroom as she had.
The papers were also split about who was “winning” the trial. Many said that the defense was earning their keep and complained about a lackluster job from the prosecution, while others said the opposite—that the defense was using tactics meant to confuse the jury and that reporters had such a hard time following what they were saying that they sometimes just stopped taking notes. Online, people had heated debates about whether they thought Hollywood would be convicted or acquitted.
None of that concern even entered my brain—I knew the jury was going to convict Jesse James Hollywood. I had confidence in that from the very beginning, from the moment he was caught. It was only a matter of time. Others around me were nervous, including Jeff; he was afraid that I would not be able to handle it if the jury came back with a “not guilty” verdict. Perhaps he was right, but I didn’t even consider the possibility. I had too much on my plate as it was; worrying about future catastrophes would have been an unnecessary burden.
Ben’s testimony was very emotional at times. He spoke about his regrets and how he knew that his little brother, Nick, had looked up to him. He cried when he saw a picture of the gun. At least this time they hadn’t brought in the actual gun, which they had done in previous trials. Ben opened up in ways I had never seen before, and for the first time, I felt like he was one hundred percent there for his brother.
After he was through testifying, Ben came over to me outside the courthouse and we just hugged and cried together for a long time. Although he had apologized by letter before, now he said the words to me in person, and I felt a wall coming down between us. It was a beautiful feeling that I hoped would last.
Next to testify were the four people who’d been at Richard Hoeflinger’s house the night Nick was bound and gagged there. They testified that they were all afraid of Hollywood, and that he had a gun, and had told at least one of them to keep his “fucking mouth shut.”
Then came one of the hikers who found Nick’s body, and a forensic detective who described the condition of his body in its grave at Lizard’s Mouth. A forensic pathologist also talked about the autopsy. I tried not to hear any of it. Thinking about his body rotting in the summer heat was still very hard for me to block out. I didn’t even like very hot days because it made me think about Nick’s body out there, burning up in the sun.
Paul Kimes, an investigator with the district attorney’s office, then took the stand to clarify what had happened with Michelle Lasher and her claims that the district attorney’s office had been threatening her. He was there when the supposed “threat” had occurred, and he said that what was actually going on that day was that Hans Almgren had been signing her immunity papers—the opposite of a threat, really. He gave her the immunity papers to sign. She’d marched in the room angrily, refused to read the papers, didn’t listen to what he said to her, then signed and threw the papers and the pen at him and walked out.
When it was the defense’s turn to call their witnesses, they wanted to turn it into a red-carpet event. They wanted to call filmmaker Nick Cassavetes and Justin Timberlake, ostensibly because Cassavetes and Timberlake had had access to the district attorney’s notes, but the judge didn’t see how that was relevant to the trial so he disallowed it.
He did, however, allow them to call Jerry Hollywood, Jesse’s seventy-year-old second cousin, who had never been questioned about any of the events before. I don’t know why no one had ever interviewed Jerry—there’s a record that Jesse called him just before Nick was murdered. But he said he never came forward and told police about that phone call because no one ever asked him. We had never heard a word about him before that day either. There was really just one reason the defense wanted him there: Jerry Hollywood had told the defense’s investigator that Jesse said Nick was going home.
But the prosecutor didn’t believe it. The elderly man didn’t come across sharp enough to have recollection of the exact words that had been used nine years prior, and it was very fishy that he had never before come forward to mention something that was in his cousin’s favor. Wasn’t it true, Josh Lynn wanted to know, that it was the investigator who’d put those words into his mouth? That it wasn’t really Jerry’s memory, but the investigator’s story he was telling?
“Most of the statements he [the investigator] said were correct,” Jerry agreed. “It’s just that they weren’t quite my words.”
Then, on June 22, 2009, the judge called out, “Next witness,” and the defense said . . .
“Jesse James Hollywood.”
Oh my God.
The room was silent. No one had known that this was coming. It was very rare for an accused murderer to take the stand in his own defense, and apparently, even Hollywood’s own lawyers disagreed about it, one wanting him to and the other opposed to the idea. In the end, it had been left up to him, and Hollywood had decided to testify.
My heart raced. Finally, I would get to see this man face-to-face, hear the words out of his own mouth. It was both horrible and yet satisfying at once.
Hollywood buttoned his black suit jacket and walked up to the stand to swear on the Bible, looking ghostly pale, a stark contrast from the tanned complexion he’d had upon his arrest. For the first time, I heard his voice. The only other time I’d ever heard him speak was in a video where he was acting like a gangster a few months before Nick’s murder. This was his real voice, and it was small, almost feminine. This short guy with the wimpy voice had become the leader of the pack? It was unimaginable without the drug-dealing father and the guns.
Why is he taking the stand? I thought. And the only explanation I could come up with was that his lawyers must have told him he was toast, and he’d better get u
p there and save himself. That they had done all they could.
On the stand, Hollywood used few words, answering most of his lawyer’s questions with “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” When asked to describe himself, he said he had “fullblown OCD” (obsessive-compulsive disorder) and that he was a health nut who was always dieting and working out. They did a bit of bragging about his organizational skills and his excellent credit score (which surely should cancel out a kidnapping and murder, no?).
Hollywood spoke about baseball, saying that it had been “pretty much my life” until a shoulder and back injury had forced him to stop playing. And he spoke about his drug dealing, saying that he began selling drugs as a teenager in Colorado but claiming that his father hadn’t been the source. While growing up, he always suspected that his dad was into “illicit activities,” but they didn’t talk about it directly until he was older, when he learned that his dad was selling large quantities of low- to mid-grade marijuana—more than one hundred pounds at a time. While his dad made sales across the country, Jesse concentrated on selling high-grade pot in the San Fernando Valley region, which earned him about ten thousand dollars a month when business was going well.
OK, I thought. He’s telling the truth. I hadn’t expected him to, but it gave me just the smallest bit of hope that he’d continue telling the truth about the things that really mattered.
On his second day of testimony, Hollywood began talking about the kidnapping . . . except that he didn’t call it a kidnapping. He called it a “taking.” The “taking of Nick.”
“I pinned him up against a tree and I said, ‘Where’s your brother? Where’s your brother?’ ” he testified. Then, after William Skidmore got in a few punches, the two of them “ushered” Nick into the van.
He said it was an impulsive and irrational decision he’d made because he’d been so mad about his broken windows. But he said that he hadn’t intended to hurt Nick and didn’t think that anyone else would, either.
As Hollywood spoke, he was sweating so profusely that he had to keep wiping his brow, but he didn’t seem to want to touch his face. He kept wiping it with the back of his hand or his sleeve. I wondered if that was an OCD thing or if it was because someone had told him that touching your face was a sign of lying.
My Stolen Son Page 26
