My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  We were thankful when the judge said that he would not allow that line of argument because it was irrelevant; never in the three days that Nick was kidnapped had he said anything about not wanting to return home because he hated his home life or his parents. In fact, he’d talked positively about wanting to go home. So the defense team wasn’t allowed to attack us directly, but that didn’t mean they were going to be polite. They made it clear that they wanted to prove what a dysfunctional, bad family we were.

  It was a terrible new experience. In all the other trials, no one had been so cruel or so conniving as to try to go after our family as a means to subvert the jury’s sympathy. It appeared that the defense team wanted to make it seem like Nick’s murder hadn’t been such a tragedy after all, because Nick didn’t love us. And when they referred to his age, rather than saying he was fifteen, they kept making the point that he was almost sixteen, as if that made it less tragic. Sixteen—why, he was practically ready to retire!

  Jeff was first on the witness stand, giving the jury a little background about Nick and Ben and our family dynamic. He explained that he tried to keep the two boys separate because of Ben’s troubled history, and he talked about the night before Nick disappeared, when we’d caught him with drugs in his pocket.

  Pauline Mahoney, one of the women who’d called 911, was next, and they played her call to the jury. I’d heard it before; it was still difficult to listen to it again. In that moment, everything could have changed. If only . . .

  Don’t waste your thoughts, I told myself. Can’t change anything about the past now, no matter how hard you wish it.

  Brian Affronti, William Skidmore’s friend, was next on the stand. He said that when they’d gotten to the apartment in Santa Barbara, Nick’s hands had been duct taped together, so he’d helped Nick smoke pot out of a bong. After Nick was murdered, Affronti said that he received a phone call from Skidmore, warning him to avoid Hollywood. Hollywood had labeled him a “weak link” and told Skidmore to kill him. Affronti also testified that he had seen the TEC-9 gun at Hollywood’s house.

  Chas Saulsbury was the next person on the witness stand, and he showed up in shorts and flip-flops. He was the childhood friend whose doorstep Hollywood had shown up on after he’d fled from California. Saulsbury was granted immunity right away when he went to the police, although he had originally lied when he told them that he didn’t know why Hollywood was in trouble. He claimed that he’d driven Hollywood to Las Vegas thinking Hollywood was just running from some kind of drug charges—but on cross-examination in this trial, he admitted that he knew about Nick’s murder before they ever left his mother’s house in Colorado.

  The defense team tried to rattle Saulsbury by telling him that if he was caught lying in a capital murder case, he could get life in prison or even the death penalty. The following day, the defense apologized for the threatening remarks and asked Saulsbury if he had been crying. He said no, but defense attorney James Blatt insisted that he had seen Chas Saulsbury cry after court.

  Saulsbury testified that Hollywood told him he got the TEC-9 from a worker at an auto body shop and that he asked Ryan Hoyt to use it to kill Nick Markowitz. Hollywood told Saulsbury that, initially, he was “not sure” what to do with Nick but that he’d ordered the shooting after speaking with attorney Stephen Hogg and finding out that kidnapping could carry a life sentence.

  The defense hammered Saulsbury about why he hadn’t gone to police immediately when he found out what Hollywood had done, and he said, “I was scared. I didn’t know what to do. A little boy got killed here.”

  That’s what I was thankful to Chas Saulsbury for—no matter what they asked him or how many ways they hammered at him, he kept bringing it back around to the point—don’t forget that a boy was killed, he kept reminding them.

  The first lighthearted moment in the trial came when the judge could no longer stand watching Saulsbury squirm around in his chair. He asked the bailiff to please bring the witness a chair that didn’t swivel.

  Chas Saulsbury was openly angry with the defense team. He got into trouble for speaking when there was no direct question posed of him. “Your client came running to me and then ended up in Brazil!” he said at one point. Toward the end of cross-examination, he was flustered and agitated.

  On redirect, the prosecutor asked if the defense’s rapid-fire questioning had confused him, and Saulsbury said yes. Toward the end of the morning session, had he been willing to say “yes” to anything? Yes, Saulsbury said.

  He looked beat up, and prosecutor Josh Lynn was worried that he had crumbled pretty badly. Lynn’s impression had been that Saulsbury was a sort of harmless, happy-go-lucky pot-smoking teenager who had turned into a happy-go-lucky pot-smoking adult. He thought Saulsbury had really been tricked into helping Hollywood in the name of friendship and that he had spent the years afterward trying to right his mistakes, but by the end, Lynn wasn’t so sure he understood Saulsbury or his true intentions anymore.

  There was some to-do about the name of the type of pot he said they smoked: Paranoia. Lynn asked Saulsbury if there were other types of pot he could name. Still looking sullen and totally serious, Saulsbury said, “I don’t think we have time for all those names.” Giggles around the courtroom ensued.

  The judge threatened to make him come back for another day of testimony. He had already been away from home for six days, and he was anxious to return; he had learned that his dog had been poisoned while he was gone.

  “She’s bleeding internally,” he said on the witness stand. “There’s been so much bleeding it’s coming out of her eyeballs.” He said he was going to have to go home and have her put to sleep.

  An investigator from defense attorney James Blatt’s office had called Chas Saulsbury’s wife to ask for their home address on the day Saulsbury arrived in Santa Barbara—and the following day, their dog began showing signs of having ingested rat poison.

  “Are you accusing me of poisoning your dog to threaten you?” Blatt asked on cross-examination.

  “Yes, I am,” Saulsbury replied.

  “How could you say that?” Blatt asked, throwing his arms open dramatically.

  The prosecution objected, and the judge put an end to that line of questioning . . . but of course it left the question in my mind. Was it really just coincidence that on the day Chas Saulsbury began testifying at Hollywood’s murder trial, his dog had been poisoned?

  Saulsbury wasn’t the only one who had strange stories to tell about the defense team. Michael Mehas, who was a researcher for the film Alpha Dog, said that his initial refusal to cooperate with the defense to make statements about what sorts of evidence District Attorney Ron Zonen shared with him “resulted in several threatening phone calls” to his home.

  Stephen Hogg was also granted immunity for his testimony. Of course, he denied having suggested that Hollywood “dig a deep hole” and have Nick killed, but he did admit that, in the midst of the kidnapping, Hollywood had showed up on his doorstep. Hogg told Hollywood that he and his friends could get life in prison if they hurt Nick or asked for ransom. He said that he had wanted to “impress upon [Hollywood] that his friends could be in some dire trouble.”

  And how did Hollywood react?

  “He didn’t react at all when I said that,” he testified.

  That’s not what got Hollywood upset, Hogg said. It was when Hogg suggested that he should go to police that Hollywood freaked out.

  Hogg claimed that he told him, “The first person that gets on the train gets the shortest ride,” meaning that if Hollywood went to the authorities first to tell them about the kidnapping, they would be lenient with him. But Hollywood vehemently insisted that he was not going to police. He smoked three cigarettes, paced around the table, then left.

  “I didn’t run after him. I regret that, but I didn’t.”

  Because of Hogg’s immunity deal, he wouldn’t face any consequences for his inactions; he got to just move on with his life. Oops, a boy got killed and
I could have prevented it. Oh well.

  Where Chas Saulsbury had acted hostile toward the defense, Hollywood’s former and possibly still current girlfriend, Michelle Lasher, was hostile toward the prosecution. She sauntered up to the witness stand as if she were modeling on a catwalk. During her testimony, she kept flipping her hair and bending over and bouncing her breasts, presumably for Hollywood’s enjoyment. She was irrational and dramatic and cartoonish, with Valley Girl inflections.

  Lasher wanted everyone to know that the prosecution was “traumatizing” her. She frequently burst into tears on the stand while describing how she was still in love with Hollywood and how a detective had upset her by saying that the murder was Hollywood’s fault and that “they were just going to shoot him when they saw him.”

  She also wanted the jury to know that she’d overheard a conversation between Hollywood and Ryan Hoyt after the murder, and that Hollywood had asked Hoyt if he was crazy and then got very upset.

  “That was around the time that the blood vessel in his eye burst,” she said.

  But, Lasher claimed, Hollywood had never told her about any kidnapping or murder. “He was panicked when he came to see me in Palm Springs,” she said, but she hadn’t pushed him to find out why.

  Out came a hotel registration card. It was the registration that Lasher had filled out when she and Hollywood stayed in Colorado. Interestingly, it had a false name, false address, and a false vehicle make and color. But she said that had nothing to do with being on the run from authorities.

  “I never give my information,” she said. “That’s something I’ve been taught since I was very little.”

  Prosecutor Hans Almgren questioned her, and Lasher kept saying that she didn’t know or didn’t remember things—“It was nine years ago,” she said. But she refused to read her transcripts to refresh her memory. That’s not what she wanted to talk about. All she wanted to talk about was how the prosecution and the detectives and the police officers had all made her very upset.

  “I’m very afraid right now!” she said at one point. The judge asked her to stay silent while no question was pending, but she ignored him.

  “You are attacking me!” she said.

  The judge ended court early that day.

  When the defense team cross-examined her, they knew just where to start.

  “Are you aware that your boyfriend or ex-boyfriend, the man that you love, is facing the death penalty?”

  With that, she dropped her head and sobbed into her hands. When Michelle Lasher cried, she didn’t just let a few tears fall; she puffed her cheeks out and clawed at her eyes, pulling out tissue after tissue. The judge asked if she wanted a minute to compose herself, but she held up a tissue with her hand and said bravely, “No, no, no. I’m fine.” Then she whipped out her powder puff and powdered her nose. On the witness stand.

  I wondered if she had gotten the memo that there were to be no cameras in the courtroom, because it sure appeared to me like she was auditioning for a movie—or at least a soap opera. Was she hoping for a role in Alpha Dog II?

  It was such a double standard, really—the way the defense was purposely playing into Lasher’s hysterics, while at the same time they had made sure to have the judge tell our family that we were not allowed to show any emotion or we’d be thrown out of the courtroom. At one point, the bailiff even told Leah that she was using too many facial expressions.

  To make Hollywood appear more likable, the defense asked Michelle Lasher questions designed to make him sound like an upstanding family guy. She said that he celebrated Christian holidays with his own family and Jewish holidays with hers, and that “He was just more mature than the other boys in high school.”

  The judge cut off the defense before they could go on with these very touching questions; they were irrelevant to the matter at hand, he said.

  Lasher went into more detail about Ryan Hoyt: “He was a liar, he would sleep on everyone’s couches, he was always messing everything up. If Jesse gave him a car, he would leave it on the side of the road.”

  Then she said that Ron Zonen and Senior Deputy District Attorney Hans Almgren were “threatening to charge me with murder for someone I’ve never met.” She claimed that they’d said, “Either perjure yourself or we’re going to charge you with murder.”

  But it turned out that Lasher had never even met Ron Zonen, who was no longer prosecuting the case. She back-tracked on that one, saying that he hadn’t threatened her directly, but he had threatened her through lawyers.

  At one point while Almgren was questioning her, Blatt objected. “There’s no reason to point at the witness,” he said.

  “That’s not a legal objection,” the judge answered, causing giggles in the courtroom, an amusing diversion. I wasn’t sure how much more I could stand of seeing Michelle Lasher talk about how her life had been affected by these lousy people who were trying to apprehend a murderer. She didn’t know Nick and didn’t care about Nick, neither in life nor in death. It didn’t seem to occur to her that his life had been in any way significant, only that it was affecting her negatively, so she could no longer freely run around with her outlaw boyfriend.

  I’m sure that part of her “trauma” came from the fact that Hollywood had moved on and had a baby with his next girlfriend, whom he actually called his wife. I waited and wondered if that would ever come up.

  Graham Pressley was the next person to testify, and we all knew that his testimony could be the most important in the trial. After all, he had actually been there right up until Nick was taken to Lizard Mouth to his death. Because no one was going to call Ryan Hoyt to the stand—he was an unreliable witness, and his own case was on appeal—and it was still questionable whether Jesse Rugge would be called, Pressley was likely the only one able to offer first-person testimony about how the murder really happened.

  Like just about all of the others, Pressley had initially lied to the authorities about his own involvement in the crime. It wasn’t until he took a polygraph that he came clean about what had happened.

  On the stand, he re-created the timeline of events for the jury, explaining what Nick had been going through and how people were reacting. He came off as completely calm and levelheaded. Mature, even.

  When he explained that Ryan Hoyt had arrived at the Lemon Tree Inn carrying a duffel bag with the TEC-9 gun in it, the prosecutor asked why Pressley hadn’t warned Nick.

  “Because I was more concerned with myself at that point,” he admitted. Several times, he referred to his decisions that day as “selfish.” His concern for his own safety came first, and it had clouded his judgment. All he’d wanted to do was to follow whatever orders Hoyt gave him and stay out of the way so he wouldn’t become their victim, too.

  Why did he stay in the car when he heard the gunshots?

  “I wasn’t at a place where I could think rationally,” he said.

  The defense must have expected to eat Graham Pressley alive. They tried . . . but they failed. Pressley remained remarkably calm, even when the defense lawyers yelled at him and tried to get him to crack, and that seemed to get under their skin.

  I understood that defense attorneys were a different breed of people, but these two clowns—Kessel and Blatt—were the worst kind I’d ever encountered. I couldn’t find any shred of decency in either of them.

  Kessel kept trying to get Pressley to answer questions in the way he wanted—with simple one-word responses, but Pressley often elaborated a bit. When Kessel asked if he had gotten into the car voluntarily or involuntarily, Pressley didn’t choose either word—he said he acted out of fear. When Kessel asked if he’d intended to hurt Nick, Pressley said no, but that “being afraid to do something is not a defense for murder.”

  “Can you just answer the question?” Kessel yelled.

  “You are badgering the witness,” the judge said.

  One of the new tactics the defense used was to call our relationship into question. Pressley had said that my confidence in him motiva
ted him to come clean about some prior testimony. But Kessel wanted to make that ugly.

  Wasn’t the real motivator that I had struck a deal with him that I’d ask for his early release from prison if he would falsely testify against Hollywood?

  No, Pressley said.

  Then Kessel asked if he had made a deal with prosecutors to cooperate, but the judge stopped the defense attorney and admonished him for asking “an improper question.”

  Still, Kessel tried again. He wanted to know if my presence in the courtroom made Pressley feel compelled to lie. He said no.

  After his testimony ended, I learned from his mother that Pressley had received death threats.

  On Pressley’s fourth day on the stand, the defense planned to play a one-hour tape of his polygraph test. Since I had heard it already maybe six times before in other trials, I decided that this would be a good time for me to take a break. I really didn’t need to hear it a seventh time.

  So I let my friends know that I was going to just separate for a little while, and I sat outside. A woman in a green sweater walked past me. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the sun on my face. Then I heard her shuffling back toward me, so I opened my eyes.

  “I’m waiting to get into the courtroom,” she said. “They said it was full and I have to wait until someone comes out in order to go inside. Are you waiting also?”

  “No, I have a seat,” I said.

  I don’t remember how the discussion started, but she told me that she was depressed because her own son, a pilot, had died in Hawaii. We got to talking, and I said, “I lost a son also. The trial that you’re trying to get into? I’m Nick’s mom.”