Saulsbury was reluctant, but ended up agreeing to drive Hollywood back to California for three thousand dollars. Saulsbury quickly threw together a bag, fed his “pet scorpions” some crickets, and began the twelve-hour drive from Colorado Springs to Las Vegas in his 1990 Audi. Hollywood didn’t have any luggage besides a large Ziploc of hundred-dollar bills. They would stay in Las Vegas for a night.
Saulsbury began having second thoughts and tried to formulate a way to separate himself from the fugitive. But Hollywood was a good friend—“I didn’t want to ditch him on the side of the road.”
Saulsbury learned very early that Hollywood wouldn’t be turning himself in for murder anytime soon. According to Saulsbury, Hollywood “didn’t want to face it.” He also learned that while driving with Nick, Hollywood not only had an AR-15 in the van, but also that TEC-9, “a big shotgun,” and “some handguns.”
Back in Los Angeles, Hollywood tried to massage the narrative. He didn’t refer to Nick’s abduction as a kidnapping. No, instead they’d “grabbed” Nick and taken him to Santa Barbara.
Hollywood relayed to Saulsbury his conversation with his lawyer. According to Saulsbury, Hollywood said Hogg advised him “he was in enough trouble already” and to “get rid of the kid.”
Did Hollywood ever inform Saulsbury of his alleged conversation with Eddy Bachman, the other neighborhood drug dealer who knew Hollywood was going to kill Nick to make a point? It seems the closest Hollywood would confess to orchestrating Nick’s murder would be to call it a “group decision.” Hollywood disclosed to Saulsbury that Hoyt was the shooter. Hollywood said Hoyt confirmed the murder and told him, “I took care of it.” By this time Hollywood had made good on his promise to become a “ghost” and had left town.
Hollywood and Saulsbury stayed at the Country Inn in Calabasas, located in Los Angeles County. In their rented room, news of the murder was all over the television. At that point, Saulsbury turned off the television as Hollywood detailed the entire story in a half hour. As more specifics were being disclosed, the magnitude of his association with Hollywood struck a nerve. Saulsbury realized he had a made a “terrible decision.”
Saulsbury now had a change of heart about being with Hollywood. He agreed to drop him off at John Roberts’s house. Hollywood had expected Saulsbury to drive around the neighborhood and return in a few minutes. Saulsbury had other ideas. Hollywood went in and Saulsbury “pretty much took off.” And for good reason. Saulsbury saw this “as the easiest opportunity to get away without too much drama.” That was the last he heard from Hollywood.
Saulsbury drove back to Las Vegas, where he stayed in a prepaid room that they had booked for a couple of nights. Once back in Colorado Springs, he learned that the FBI had visited his workplace. He contacted his lawyer and turned himself in. After being granted immunity—in other words, he could not be prosecuted for his involvement with Hollywood in exchange for witness testimony—he was debriefed by a Colorado Springs detective and two LA County sheriffs.
Back in West Hills, Hollywood tried to obtain a fake ID from John Roberts. Roberts told him he couldn’t do that. But he did send Hollywood off with ten grand. And like that, Hollywood went off the grid.
While Susan disappeared into her grief, Jesse Hollywood would also disappear and become the youngest person ever to appear on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. However, behind the scenes, behind the news articles and relentless press on the Markowitzes’ front lawn, there was one man relegated to the shadows of the case. He was thirty-six-year-old Santa Barbara Detective Mark Valencia. What Hollywood didn’t know was that he wouldn’t be the only person in this case to go off the grid. Valencia would disappear with him.
Chapter 23
The Hunt Is On
HOLLYWOOD HAD BEEN ELUDING INVESTIGATORS for close to four years when Valencia entered stage right.
His involvement with the case was so confidential, only a small pool of individuals within the department knew what he was tasked with doing. Initially, this small chain of command held meetings regarding how to approach going after the fugitive, what resources should be used and who should do it. Finally, Valencia was asked to be the guy. For two years, this was to be his sole assignment. “They turned me loose. It was actually unique as they allowed me to make decisions on the fly. They trusted me.” He only turned to the chain of command when he needed funding. He updated them when necessary. “The less people that knew the better.”
But to go off the map, Valencia could no longer identify as a “detective.” To catch this fugitive, Valencia had to become a “regular civilian.”
Valencia was an avid weight lifter and wore a sixteen-inch braided ponytail. He would cut his hair every three years and donate it to kids suffering from cancer. He had intense eyes and could make a point clearly without ever raising his voice.
Valencia was of local Native American descent—the Chumash—and had grown up on a reservation that instilled in him the ethos “Every elder’s your uncle.” His family could be traced back to this land before it was Mexico. Some of his ancestors fought in the Civil War. He would visit their gravestones, which read, FIRST NATIVE SCOUT PLATOON US CAVALRY.
Detective Valencia never knew his real last name. The Spanish converted his family name into a traditional Spanish one.
Even though he didn’t know his real name, Valencia never had an identity crisis. He was used to different roles with different objectives. He enlisted in the Marines at seventeen, right out of high school, as part of the Rights of the Warrior and Rites of Passage, which provided young Native Americans this opportunity. He had to wait a year to officially join.
He served from 1987 to 1992, with stints in Tarawa and Okinawa, and two tours in the Gulf for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He then went back with the UN for the nuclear arms inspections. He was a helicopter air crewman, flying on CH-53 Echoes, a nephew to the Huey helicopter.
After the Marines, he knew he was a good fit for undercover work with the sheriff’s department and the Department of Justice (DOJ). He thought he would fit right in working for a “paramilitary organization.”
Valencia grew up rough, so he had an advantage over most people when it came to dealing with the street. He adapted to undercover work effortlessly. That included five years as a sniper for a SWAT team.
Under the DOJ he was a part of the task force SBRNET—Santa Barbara Regional Narcotics Enforcement Team. The task force was composed of a single officer from every law enforcement agency in Santa Barbara County. SBRNET took over when a dope case crossed from street level to major narcotics.
Valencia was first assigned to street gangs, then to major dope trafficking (DTOs, or drug trafficking organizations). He got selected to go to major crimes narcotics, which wasn’t just garden-variety street crime—it was cartel-level investigations. That involved serious biker gangs who “didn’t hide behind toy drives.” After serving over five hundred warrants, he was called up for this.
This was the Jesse James Hollywood case, and he was officially tasked with finding the fugitive. Hollywood had been on the run for close to four years. This assignment, though, would require more than another identity change. This time, in order to do the job, Detective Valencia wasn’t that former corporal in the Marine Corps or an undercover cop. He was no longer even Native American. He had to go above and beyond just changing his identity. He simply had to cease to exist.
* * *
The FBI, who is involved in any kidnapping case, learned about Hollywood’s travels after the murder. Hollywood was seemingly everywhere and nowhere—Palm Springs with his girlfriend, Las Vegas at the Bellagio, Colorado Springs hiding out with Chas Saulsbury. But when Saulsbury left Hollywood at John Roberts’s house and headed home to Colorado, Hollywood’s trail went cold.
No one knew, but Hollywood had been spending a couple of weeks at a friend’s trailer in the Mojave Desert. He drank a cold Coors Light and laughed when he watched the SWAT team tear gas John Roberts’s home, thinking the fu
gitive was there.
Meanwhile, Susan teamed with her dear friend Randi. They’d met well before Nick was conceived. They’d both worked at a shop in Northridge, California, called the Hidden Cottage. Randi was the type of person you could call at two in the morning for any reason and she’d be available.
Randi had planned to take Susan on a getaway trip. It was the first year after Nick “had passed, or—he didn’t pass, I hate using that word—the first year he was taken, she got me to go on a cruise. Half the trip I was in a fog.” Susan appreciated the help she was getting, even though it wasn’t through a doctor’s office.
Susan had become addicted to anything and everything that could narcotize her pain. The cruise with Randi was even more therapeutic, because she was out in the world, away from the laborious hours spent passing out FBI’s Most Wanted flyers and driving around in her car, which served as a moving billboard, advertising the case and contact information.
At El Camino Real High School, Susan would pass out key chains and flyers with additional contact information. But it was a testament to Susan’s character that someone who was grieving for the loss of her son would also extend appreciation to and acknowledge those who stood by her side and Nick’s. One person she specifically went to visit was Kirk Miyashiro.
It was only three weeks later that the fall term began. One of the first individuals through the school doors was Susan. She “came onto campus and brought Nick’s yearbook.” She went to Kirk’s office and asked, “Kirk, do you mind signing Nick’s yearbook?” Of course he’d sign it.
Kirk told Susan how horrified he felt. He repeated how Nick had been starting to find his way and had turned himself around. He couldn’t comprehend the senselessness of it all. “And I just, I lost it.”
Susan was very gracious. “She was thankful to me as far as taking Nick under my wing, giving him a chance.” Kirk was “honored to sign his yearbook, that she would be thinking of me.”
One statistic Kirk wasn’t proud of was that during his eighteen years in the LA Unified School District—fifteen as a teacher, three as an administrator—he had lost eleven students. Most of them were killed at the hands of others. Nick was one of those eleven.
* * *
Being with Randi on their cruise had stoked the restlessness inside of Susan. Even each calming breath of ocean air couldn’t quell the fiery resolve that fueled her quest to find Hollywood. She’d used the opportunity to hand out more flyers, pass out posters, and lead her own search party of two. She and Randi even flew to Canada. This didn’t make Valencia happy. Someone in law enforcement had tipped her off that Hollywood was up north. But Valencia couldn’t confront her yet because she had no idea he existed.
Susan admitted she was “messing up the FBI’s investigation. “They had to come to me and say, ‘Back off.’ ”
Valencia, who was working in tandem with the FBI, had to do the one thing that goes against every tenet in undercover work: he had to make himself made. In other words, out himself. “She didn’t know I had been assigned to the case. I was doing extensive undercover work and had been for years. A lot of the work I did was underground, so when I was assigned to do this, we didn’t tell anybody.”
Valencia had already been up in Canada, following leads on Hollywood’s whereabouts. Susan flew up there and found out that he might or might not be in that particular area. She started handing out more flyers. Valencia knew that was counterproductive. “Well, what does that do? It sends him back underground. Now I’m back to where I started.”
Valencia wasn’t indignant about this. There was nothing more he wanted than to catch Hollywood, so much so that he printed a picture of Nick off the Internet and carried it with him at all times.
Valencia “did not want to meet the family. It’s not that I had anything against them, but there’s a focus when it comes to chasing someone down—it’s called a rundown. You never want to let your emotions affect any decisions you make. Meeting the family or knowing the victim would stimulate those emotions. You’re now putting a person to a name. And then you meet the family, and you don’t want to carry the burden of their grief and guilt on your shoulders while you’re conducting investigations.”
Valencia and his colleagues finally made the drive to Susan’s. His intense eyes never tried to disguise the compassion and humanity behind them. He just knew that he never had any intention of Susan and Jeff knowing who he was at that time. But maybe his colleagues could reason with her? Maybe he wouldn’t have to approach after all.
While his colleagues spoke to her and Jeff outside their home, Valencia decided to wait back in the car. “I don’t know if they were buying it. They were impatient.” This left Valencia no choice. “I got out of the car and introduced myself.” When Susan saw that sixteen-inch braid and impressive musculature, it was the last person she was expecting. Susan felt they weren’t doing their job. “She felt the lead was cold and no one was doing anything, which is why she stimulated press.” Valencia didn’t fault her. He understood that any parent who had lost a child might do the exact same thing.
Wanting your son’s killer caught was one thing. Inserting yourself into the investigation? Valencia had to set the record straight, so he sat them down. He asked them point-blank, “Do you believe me when I tell you I’m working on this case?” He then proceeded to explain the way things were going to be. If they wanted him to do his job, they would have to “leave me alone and let me do it.” He was direct and harsh about it, but being standoffish was what kept the emotion out of it. Susan and Jeff were such good people that even he had to ask himself, how do you not get attached?
There were a lot of things one might be able to mask, things he had been trained to mask. Whether it was an unconscious decision or on purpose, his rigid posture decompressed, his voice softened. The father in him surfaced. “I’m not a robot, but it was one of the buffers I had to put up.” He had a fugitive to catch.
* * *
The FBI received a tip from Chicago. An agent phoned Valencia, told him they were doing surveillance on an apartment after grabbing a lead that Hollywood might be inside. A pizza deliveryman exited. They waited until he returned to the shop. That was when they grabbed him. They showed him a picture and asked, “Did this guy order?” And he ID’d who he thought was Hollywood. The agent asked Valencia one question. “We’re sitting on the house right now. What do you want us to do?’ ”
If it really was Hollywood, Valencia told him that the UFAP arrest warrant—Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution—was good. The problem was Valencia couldn’t order them to search the apartment to find out if Hollywood was inside. “There’s what’s called a Steagald warrant here in California. If you’re running from the law and you’re hiding in your cousin’s house, I don’t have the right to invade your cousin’s [property], waive his Fourth Amendment [which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures], to search for you. I have to write a paper to say why I know you’re in this house, ’cause I’m going into someone else’s house to search for you, so it was pretty much the same lines that we had to write another warrant. They had it locked down, but we couldn’t search.” Valencia caught the first plane to Chicago.
Finally, with the proper warrant, they entered the apartment. “There were maps of Brazil and Mexico and routes and there was just no one in there, nothing, maybe a floor mat. It was clearly a crash pad.” Two things stood out. “There was a lot of money” and “a large amount of marijuana.”
Another lead sent Valencia to a possible informant at the Cook County Jail in Chicago. He didn’t know how this man was affiliated with the apartment, but when he interviewed him, Valencia found out he was from Southern California. He was tied into Hollywood’s group. Valencia just didn’t know his level of involvement. And he never would. The possible informant told Valencia, “Look, you’re a nice guy, but I am more afraid of them”—meaning Hollywood and his father’s connections—“than I am of you.” According to Valencia, “He didn’t say a
word. He was in Cook County Jail and that thing’s a dungeon. He’d rather do that than me getting him out to help with this case. He knew about the cops coming to the apartment.” Valencia didn’t “have a twist on him, so we moved on. He was just a kid, too, a peanut-head kid.”
Chapter 24
A Break in the Case
VALENCIA HAD BEEN ON THE case a little over eight months. Finally, while tracking Jack Hollywood’s phone he learned that one of Hollywood’s family members was headed to Brazil to visit Jesse. Through other intel, American investigators had suspected that Hollywood could have been in Brazil since 2002. “So it was Jack that we got up on. He was my primary target [for any leads] because following him? He actually gave it up”—intel on his son’s whereabouts—“and didn’t know it.” Valencia knew one hard fact about Jack. “He set up his kid for failure from the word go.”
In the beginning, Jack wasn’t Valencia’s primary focus. “He had come up in several major investigations. We have computer databases all over the United States.” Jack’s name was included. “If anybody sees him [in the database],” which included the FBI and that small chain of command within the department, they were advised to “contact me.”
Just how was Valencia made aware of Jack’s illicit behaviors? “The weirdest thing happened. An [undercover] crew from San Bernardino or Riverside, they’re working a Colombian kilo-level case—coke, not weed.” Valencia was working for the Department of Justice, so he didn’t even know this crew. “The crooks show up in a car [to meet the undercover agents]—somebody wants twenty, thirty kilos, somebody has the money,” but it turned out the suspect couldn’t or wouldn’t do the deal.
“The undercover agents and informants—it has nothing to do with my case—they put a tracker on his car. They’re all Spanish speakers.” By law the tracker could be placed on a car for only a month. Three weeks later, when law enforcement had no intention of following the vehicle except to stop it and covertly remove the tracker, Valencia received correspondence that “Jack was driving it.” Valencia couldn’t believe it. He had zero clue as to why Jack was there. Valencia only received the call because Jack had been “flagged” in the database.
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