59 Hours

by Johnny Kovatch

  Hollywood would try and claim that because Nick wasn’t in any restraints, that that meant he wasn’t being held captive. Lynn finally got Hollywood to agree that Nick was being held against his will.

  Regarding Nick’s pager going off, Lynn would ask Hollywood if he remembered saying, “Is that your fucking brother Ben calling?” Hollywood said he never said that. Lynn would fire back, “Is there something about this van ride that isn’t memorable to you? Is there something . . . that’s happened that caused you to forget what happened in the van?”

  Lynn would bring up the point again and again that if Nick was of no use to Hollywood contacting Ben, then why have Nick around at all? Why not let him go? Hollywood fell back on stating that there was never a plan. It was impulsive. Just as it was up to Nick to decide when he was free to go.

  Hollywood wouldn’t recall ever putting Nick’s wallet or pager on the dash right in front of him. Hollywood wouldn’t recall the ring he took from Nick and that Rugge had him return.

  Once at Richard Hoeflinger’s, Hollywood stated that he wasn’t “horrified” that Nick’s hands and feet were taped. Lynn would counter, “You weren’t horrified at a fifteen-year-old in a stranger’s home who was bound in the bedroom?”

  Hollywood said Skidmore was being aggressive, that he ordered Skidmore to remove the tape. He said he was trying to de-escalate the situation because of Skidmore’s aggression, never once mentioning that Affronti had asked to leave because he had a date. He made it seem like he was the one who sent Affronti and Skidmore home.

  Again, Lynn pressed Hollywood regarding Nick’s choices in the matter. “You didn’t give him a phone and say, ‘Call home’?” Or give him “fifty bucks. ‘Get yourself home’?”

  Lynn would ask if Nick’s murder was the most significant event in the entire episode of events. Hollywood answered, “I’d say it’s a terrible, horrible event. Not a significant—I mean, it’s a horrible event.” Lynn would counter, “Tell me what was worse? Was there a worse event during this whole episode?” Finally Hollywood would answer that there wasn’t, putting his broken windows, his need to sell his home, his need to find a condo, and his desire to attend Fiesta as secondary.

  Again, when Lynn asked why he didn’t let Nick go back to Los Angeles with Skidmore and Affronti, Hollywood mentioned how he was sidetracked, and those million things took precedence. According to Hollywood’s testimony, “And, you know, we had ordered food.”

  Hollywood said that he had been making phone calls to get a ride home, yet when he secured a ride, Nick was never offered one home. And with that, day one finally came to a close.

  * * *

  Though it went against the judge’s orders, Susan Markowitz would be consoled by a few witnesses. “They weren’t legally allowed to approach us,” but that didn’t stop Chas Saulsbury. “Chas met us off to the side.” He “showed the largest amount of remorse.” During his testimony, Chas had stated that his dog had been mysteriously poisoned, maybe as a threat against taking the stand. After Chas met with Susan off to the side, she expressed her condolences and believed it could only have been Hollywood who ordered the poisoning. “I don’t know who could possibly be involved in that other than the original scum who took my son’s life.”

  * * *

  Before questioning resumed on day two of Hollywood’s cross-examination, Judge Brian Hill met with the attorneys off the record and away from the jury.

  Lynn wanted to make a request of the court regarding one of Hollywood’s defense lawyers. “The next time that Mr. Kessel loudly in an open court calls me a dickhead or several other names that I could think of, I would appreciate if the court would address it. And if Mr. Kessel wants to object to that, I’ll put somebody on the stand right now to talk about the three instances.”

  Blatt would stipulate to having Hollywood’s leg shackles removed while testifying.

  This set the tone for the day.

  Back on the record, Lynn resumed. He opened up with Hollywood worrying more about getting himself home to Los Angeles than Nick. “Is it fair to conclude . . . that at least at the time that you decided to go home it was more important to you to do that than to bring Nick back with you?” Hollywood answered that he didn’t see any order of importance of plans. As far as Hollywood was concerned, Nick was “free to go” after he left Hoeflinger’s.

  Lynn had to remind the defendant that he never vocalized, “Nick, you’re free to go.”

  The district attorney would bring up other witnesses’ testimony—those who were told that Nick wasn’t allowed to use the phone, who were told not to disclose to Nick that he was in Santa Barbara. Even though Hollywood would deny saying it, Lynn asked him why he said Nick was to stay until Ben could be found.

  Returning to Nick’s pager, Hollywood would say he didn’t know who paged Nick, even though Nick said it was his mother. Again, Hollywood never let him call home.

  Lynn pressed him again about him kidnapping Nick “in an irrational effort to confront Ben.” But Hollywood didn’t need Nick to find Ben. He had been to Ben’s place with Ryan Hoyt, waiting in front of his apartment. So what was the real reason he abducted Nick?

  Lynn pointed out, “In your effort to de-escalate, you didn’t take Nick, you just gave the van to Skidmore and Affronti?” When another one of Hollywood’s friends finally showed up to get him, he again passed up the chance to bring Nick home. Lynn then pressed further, asking why he would need a ride at all. Why not just go back to LA with Skidmore and Affronti? Hollywood couldn’t remember. Lynn pressed, “Mr. Hollywood, if you say you don’t remember, do you believe that that will just absolve you from the need to answer the question?”

  Lynn would often back Hollywood into a corner with his questioning. Again, Hollywood would contradict himself. He would say he couldn’t remember certain witnesses’ testimony, but then, after Lynn refreshed his memory, he would vehemently dismiss the exact testimony he couldn’t recall. Or as Lynn put it, “How would you know if you don’t remember?”

  But Lynn continued to play the long game, pointing out that it was interesting that Hollywood couldn’t remember his exact words or was fuzzy the majority of the time. Yet when a witness said something damning against him, he had instant recall and denied he’d ever said it.

  Hollywood, who constantly wiped his brow, was adamant that Nick was always free to go “as far as I was concerned.” Lynn countered by asking him, “How was he made aware of his freedom?” Hollywood stammered through the answer, before Lynn followed up, “So it was up to Nick to figure out when and if he could leave?” Essentially, this fifteen-year-old was somehow now in charge of his own kidnapping and release. Lynn would then ask, “Mr. Hollywood, was this just an unplanned vacation that Nick should have been thanking you for?”

  Questioning Hollywood about the night of the abduction, Lynn would bring Hollywood’s utter disregard to the surface: “At the time that you were eating that burrito, were you thinking that perhaps Nick Markowitz needed a ride back to Los Angeles to be with his family?”

  Again, Hollywood’s memory failed him. “I can’t remember what I was thinking.”

  Lynn attempted to find out who supplied Hollywood with his weed. “Well,” Hollywood answered, “people who grow marijuana.” He couldn’t recall names. He was certain, though, that he never thought about calling the police after feeling threatened by Ben Markowitz.

  Lynn would ask why Hollywood—who had just been in Santa Barbara the day before the abduction—wanted to bring Jesse Rugge back to Los Angeles to collect on Ben’s drug debt. Whoever said that, Hollywood testified, they must have heard it wrong.

  Lynn pointed out that the specific reason tape was around the handle of the TEC-9 was to make it harder to pull fingerprints.

  He would throw in quick non sequiturs to keep Hollywood scrambling. He would ask about Hollywood going to the gun range to fire the TEC-9 and then in the next sentence ask him if he agreed that Nick would be alive today if he hadn’t “taken” him in th
e van.

  Hollywood repeatedly stated there was “nothing out of the ordinary” happening following Nick’s abduction. Lynn would fire back, “Other than an uninvited fifteen-year-old brought to a houseful of strangers a hundred miles from his home, right?”

  Lynn kept pressing, “Did you say to Nick he’ll be home in a couple of days?” Hollywood denied it. Lynn followed, “So you don’t know where Mr. Affronti may have gotten that information?” And that was how the day went, Hollywood’s memory going back and forth from never recalling to total recall when it only hurt his case.

  Hollywood couldn’t recall whether he’d ever asked Rugge if Nick had been let go, though he did remember the five hundred dollars he was owed by Rugge. He couldn’t recall Rugge pleading with him to get Nick because, “I can’t have Nick at my parents’.”

  Hollywood had tons of plans during those two and a half days. He wanted to sell his house, find a condo, and fix his windows. One plan he never made, as Lynn pointed out, was to return Nick back home.

  Hollywood said he asked Nick at one point while they were at Jesse Rugge’s if he wanted to go home. He stated that Nick said, “No, I’m cool.” Lynn would press him, “Did it surprise you that Nick Markowitz, whom you had pinned against a tree and put in a van the day before and brought one hundred miles from his home, didn’t want to hop in a car with you, did that surprise you?”

  Hollywood denied ever offering Rugge two thousand dollars to kill Nick. He denied ever joking that he wanted to put Nick in the trunk of a car and then head to dinner. Again, whoever stated anything against him “simply has that wrong,” Lynn would sarcastically opine.

  Lynn would question Hollywood about how he’d gone to his attorney, Stephen Hogg, for advice about Nick’s abduction. Apparently, life in prison for kidnapping for ransom wasn’t a concern to Hollywood that he felt he needed to tell Rugge. Hollywood stated that Nick was in no danger. Lynn would ask, “And the non-danger with Rugge is based on the zero phone calls on August seventh?”

  Lynn would press and ask why Hollywood simply didn’t postpone his dinner at the Outback Steakhouse instead of tasking Hoyt, a guy he didn’t trust and deemed unreliable, to pick up Nick.

  Even though Hollywood—only fifteen minutes away from Casey Sheehan’s—would stop at a pay phone to call Rugge after he picked up Hoyt in Casey Sheehan’s car from his own house, he never once thought he needed to page anyone to see if Nick had actually been returned or if Hoyt had found the Lemon Tree Inn.

  Lynn couldn’t ask Hollywood about the events of August 9. Hollywood had complete and total memory loss of that day apart from a phone call with Hoyt.

  After having enough of Hollywood’s memory loss, Lynn finally asked, “And do you feel if you just say you don’t remember that I’ll stop asking?” He would jest at Hollywood’s “full blackout mode.”

  Lynn would then press him with a series of questions regarding Hoyt:

  “Right now, to this day, does Ryan Hoyt owe you money?”

  “I wouldn’t—I’m not concerned with—if Hoyt owes me money or not.”

  “I didn’t ask you that.”

  “I think that’s—”

  “Mr. Hollywood, does Ryan Hoyt owe you money right now or not?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

  “Yes or no.”

  “I don’t—I don’t know how to answer that question, sir.”

  “That’s because you paid him for a job well done, didn’t you?”

  Hollywood’s Freudian slip was just a few questions away: he would answer a question he was never asked. “I don’t think a hundred or two hundred dollars is a significant amount enough to kill somebody.” Lynn would reply, “Why did you just say that? Did I ask you a question about killing somebody?”

  Hollywood kept trying to distance himself from having any part in Nick’s death. Lynn wasn’t buying it and had had enough: “If the murder of an innocent fifteen-year-old boy didn’t cause you to go to the police, can you tell us what would?”

  Regarding Ryan Hoyt’s birthday party the night after Nick was killed: “Why during that period of time . . . were you offering money for Ben Markowitz to be harmed?”

  Lynn would question him about heading to Palm Springs, Vegas, Colorado, then back to Los Angeles, where he hid out in the Mojave Desert before heading to Canada, then Brazil. On his ventures from Colorado back to Los Angeles, Hollywood would state he was praying and asking God for help. Lynn wouldn’t let him off that easily. “You didn’t say you were asking for God to help Nick or his family, did you?” He quickly followed up with, “This was about you, wasn’t it, you were praying for yourself because you knew you were in a world of trouble.”

  Lynn would press Hollywood as to whether he remembered writing to somebody that he thought it was funny “that they were teargassing John Roberts’s house while you were a hundred miles away drinking a cold Coors Light?”

  Hollywood would answer one question with clarity, that he chose Brazil based on the movie Blame It on Rio, because Canada had been “freezing cold and I was miserable.”

  Lynn wanted to know if Hollywood could recall something he said to the detectives in the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office after being apprehended. “Do you remember telling them how disappointed your father would be at the way you were caught?” And, sticking to the theme of his entire cross-examination, he did not.

  Closing arguments would follow.

  Chapter 30

  A Mother Remembers

  SUSAN MARKOWITZ WOULD SPEND COUNTLESS hours rereading the journal entries she shared with Nick. She was thankful she’d told him to stop writing in pencil because she was worried his entries would fade.

  Susan would think back and smile at certain memories. One was Nick’s childhood nickname, originating from his habit of cleaning his nose with a finger. In a play on words, she would joke and call him, “No PickNick.” She thought back to the day they were running late for school and “Nick was wearing orange sweats and a green turtleneck, for God’s sake.” She was sure he was “making fun of me now.”

  She reread a particular entry, dated October 22, 1992:

  Thanks for the letter, Mom. By the way, my day was pretty good and bad, but it will get better. I am really glad you got me this book. I think this will be fun and I really, really like my new desk. Please write back.

  For Susan, it wasn’t just the content of the entries; it was the passion with which they were written. “It’s so sad to go back in time and see his pain as a little kid. You wouldn’t know that if you wouldn’t have written it down.”

  Dear Mom, today I was made fun of from [four people]. They called me a jerk and an idiot and a fool. They say my bike sucks. I don’t think it does but needs a new seat, new gears, new brakes, new everything. What did I do wrong? Well, I’m glad I have you to talk to cause I have no one else, not even my best friend. . . . I don’t know what to do. Please wake up early before dad, and talk to me please. Well, I’ve got to go now. I love you. Your son, Nick.

  Susan couldn’t wait. She had to wake him right then. They discussed his entry, but didn’t leave it at that. Susan would write her own reply:

  Dear Nicholas, I enjoyed our talk. I hope you understand what I was trying to tell you—the most important thing for you to remember is you didn’t do anything wrong. Sometimes people get embarrassed or try to change the subject by doing harmful things which is wrong, but unfortunately a part of growing up.

  * * *

  Though Nick’s pager had been discarded on the side of the road, Susan saw things that made her think that Nick had found a way to communicate with her. “I live up against the mountains, and I see hawks and falcons, and we used to have memories of those while taking him to school. I feel like he’s still here.” She wouldn’t go as far as to say he was speaking to her in her dreams. “You can’t live for those type of things. You have to take it as they come.”

  Chapter 31

  Closing Arguments

&n
bsp; JUNE 30, 2009. EIGHT DAYS after Hollywood’s questioning had commenced.

  A homicide during the commission of a kidnapping. This was the first point Lynn wanted to remind the jury about. The kidnapping didn’t end when Hollywood left Hoeflinger’s house on the sixth. No, it ended with Nick’s death. To the prosecution, this was one continuous transaction. On Hollywood’s orders. Which was why Lynn stated in his opening argument that it was as if Hollywood pulled the trigger himself. Just because he wasn’t present for the first-degree murder, that didn’t exonerate him from being convicted of it. “Mr. Hollywood should be a convicted kidnapper and child murderer and there’s no doubt about it.”

  The second point: “This case is about Nick Markowitz, it’s not about Jesse Hollywood. Jesse Hollywood is still alive, he’s sitting right there. This case is about Nick and Nick’s story and what happened to him.”

  Lynn reminded the jury, “Hollywood was always having somebody else go do deeds for him.” He called Hollywood out for not being a “gun guy,” yet cited no less than four different guns he had in his possession.

  Lynn pointed out that during direct examination with his own attorney, Hollywood answered questions beautifully. But on cross-examination? He remembered “all but that which gets him in trouble.” He made the point that every time someone was doing something on behalf of Hollywood, Hollywood himself was somewhere eating. Hollywood never said a negative thing about himself. He did, however, repeat “regretting this and regretting that,” regardless of whether the question asked for it.

  Lynn went on to state that if this whole dispute were singularly based on Ben Markowitz’s debt, Jeff Markowitz would have paid it. He pointed out again how Jeff had paid Ben’s rent while Ben was living with Hollywood. No, this murder was done to make a point: You don’t fuck with me.

  Lynn stressed that Chas Saulsbury had no motive to make up any of his witness testimony, including his testifying at trial (though not in an earlier proceeding) that Hollywood had claimed that Hogg told him that if he wasn’t going to call the police, he “needed to dig a deep hole.” (Hogg reportedly denied having said this; he also reportedly said he didn’t have enough information to call the police himself.)