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  Susan fervently believes that if marijuana had been legalized, “my son would be alive today.” She adds, “You don’t read in the paper or see on the news how someone was stoned and out shooting.” Though she doesn’t smoke, she believes it’s safer than alcohol. Marijuana is “possibly the number one cancer cure. I’m not very political, but something seems a little backward sixteen years after the death of my son, and I wonder what’s going on.” One example: according to the FBI, in 2014 nearly 620,000 people were arrested for simple marijuana possession across the United States.

  Susan might have had to sit through more court hearings than she could ever have imagined. That doesn’t stop her from welcoming one more trial. “The finale,” as she calls it. “His father’s,” referring to Jack Hollywood standing trial for his role in Nick’s murder. For Susan, “that’s the only justice that is incomplete. He could have saved so many lives.” In regard to Jesse Hollywood’s life sentence and his father, she believes, “He killed his son. What kind of person is that?” She believes Jack’s influence could have determined the decision to murder Nick. “Do it. That’s how I think it happened.”

  However, regarding Jesse Hollywood’s life sentence, she feels, “That did not bring me pleasure, knowing that someone else’s son is going to be murdered.”

  There were multiple attempts to correspond with Jesse James Hollywood to obtain his input on the specific themes found in this book:

  Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future

  Choices and consequences

  Accountability

  It’s never too late to write your own ending

  How can we avoid the next innocent teen from being murdered?

  Jesse Hollywood was not interested in discussing these themes. Instead he expressed his thoughts in a letter written in December 2015.

  I will reiterate myself. I am already working on a project and have been for the last 5 years. . . This is the only real story. If you or [your agent] is interested in helping me accomplish that I may be willing to help you. Of course, we’d have to come to a mutual agreement that would benefit us both.

  Those terms were not agreed to and all correspondence eventually ceased. He is currently serving his time at Calipatria State Prison.

  Attempts were also made to reach out to Ryan Hoyt on death row in San Quentin. The intent was to ascertain his input regarding the same themes. This was his written response in a letter dated November 5, 2015.

  Thank you for your letter and interest in, not just my case, but in me. I’m actually sorry that I’m writing you to tell you that I’m not interested. Whether it was the idiots who made the movie or any of the other ones, they always just assumed I’d want to be involved without really caring about what I’ve [had] to deal with here.

  As a rule I don’t write people trying to make money off of other people’s misery. I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing. Clearly, it’s not. But I cannot make exceptions. Authors, media, Police. In my experience they’ve become the same thing.

  However, I really appreciated your approach. And the way you got at me. I wish you the best of luck on your project, but I have to decline any involvement.

  Thank you for your interest.

  —Ryan

  Chapter 33

  Finding Strength

  UP UNTIL A FEW YEARS ago, Susan would call his voice mail just to hear her son’s voice. And up until a few years ago, she would regularly visit his grave. Lately, she’s given herself some distance.

  “I find that for the past year and a half . . . when I go to Nick’s grave I become angry, and I don’t want to become angry. I just don’t want to lower myself to the level of the people that took him and become angry and maybe act out of a spontaneous moment within anger because that’s how things usually happen. Or [through] fear. So I just avoid tapping into that possible anger.”

  She might not have recently visited Nick’s grave, but she does hold him close in other ways. To this day, she carries a keepsake from Nick.

  “I wear the ring that he bought me for Mother’s Day. It’s getting very, very thin. It used to be inscribed, ‘Love, Nick.’ ” Nick was ten when he bought it for her. “It was this itty-bitty little sapphire with a gold band. It’s his birthstone. Within the past couple of years I put it on a chain, because I’m afraid that it’s going to break and I will lose it. So that is probably the most heartfelt gift piece of jewelry that I have. I certainly hope nobody decides it’s worth killing me over,” she says, demonstrating the depths of her wounds. “They can have the chain. They can have the other stuff. But don’t take my itty-bitty sapphire ring.”

  Susan hasn’t always had the ability to deal with her pain and heartache in a positive way. In fact, it’s easier for her to recall which prescriptions she wasn’t on. “2010 is when I took myself off all medications.” She explains how mixing two different antidepressants caused her to feel even more suicidal. Not to mention that she was “taking extra pills that I didn’t necessarily need and drinking.” She recalls a specific moment when she felt like taking her own life. She had broken the mirror of her compact and tried to slit her wrists with a shard of glass. “This is so not me, but that is what depression will do to you. And that’s why when you are traumatized, it’s important that everyone has access to the proper health care and psychiatrists and therapists.”

  Ironically, something that’s been therapeutic for Susan isn’t the running away from the pain. It’s running to it. There was a time she wanted to make it all disappear. But now? “I don’t know if I ever want it to go away, because that would mean Nick would go away, and I never want that.” She questioned herself at one point, Have I made it to the other side of grief? “Never,” she says. “Never ever will I make it to the other side. This is going to be with me until I close my eyes and take my last breath.”

  Susan did want to make it to the other side of forgiveness when it came to Ben. She recalls the process. “We didn’t speak for five years. He had written me a letter asking me for forgiveness, but I didn’t comprehend what I read until five years later. In 2005 his grandmother, my husband’s mother, I think it was her seventy-fifth birthday—we were all invited and I didn’t want everybody to be looking at us, [knowing] we weren’t getting along, or him not being invited or me not wanting to go because he was invited, or vice versa. So I wrote him a letter asking him to meet me at the cemetery. And we did. Jeff and I and him. It was surprisingly the perfect time—yes, there were tears—but there wasn’t a lot of conversation that was needed. It was just me missing him, me knowing that I will always love him, and that Nick would want me to love him.”

  She hopes Ben will one day be able to forgive himself. “I hope so,” she says with a long exhale. “I would not be able to say anything other than that. But I hope so. I feel he will never ever be able to make this right and had he had the opportunity, he would have. I have to support him a hundred percent and I do, and I’m so proud of him.”

  Just like those cassettes she played for Nick when he was a baby, Susan still finds herself dedicating songs to him. One in particular, “I Hope You Dance,” by Lee Ann Womack, was released in March of 2000. Part of the opening verse goes, And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance . . . I hope you dance.

  “For it to come on these days—it’s 2016—to have it suddenly come on when you’re feeling sad or down, it is a sign, and you have to appreciate it and take it for what it is. I had heard it about a month before he was kidnapped, and I didn’t know the name of the song, or who sang it at the time, and I was still searching, waiting to hear it again, and it never came on while he was still alive, but it came on after he was kidnapped.”

  In moments when it’s impossible to breathe, Susan understands she has no choice but to persevere. Which is one of the reasons she’s open about speaking honestly about her son’s life. Her focus crystallizes to, How can we prevent this from happening to the next innocent fifteen-year-old?

  A
fter all these years, Susan has her own story to tell, her own parable. And no, it might not be The Giving Tree, but Nick is very much at its core.

  Epilogue

  Life After

  WILLIAM SKIDMORE REFLECTS ON NICK’S murder and his role. “I was still in shock. I’m thinking now that I look back at it, and as I’m older, I’m thinking maybe if I was just quiet and didn’t say anything, it would just go away.” He laughs once, not out of humor but because he’s ashamed. A nervous reaction. “I know, stupid thing to think.”

  As far as reaching out to Susan Markowitz, William is hesitant. He doesn’t want to open up old wounds for her. “The thing is, I still think about it all the time. That will never go away.” He says that if he did have the opportunity to address Susan, he would tell her, “I’m sorry, tell her . . . a lot of lives were ruined. I know that was her son. If I had lost my son . . . it would be very difficult for me to forgive someone who hurt somebody in my family. I look at all the different reasons—the drugs, age, the time. I pray every day. I know that he was innocent.”

  He conveys that this doesn’t relieve him from his liability. “I wish I wouldn’t have been such an immature young man.” He admits he was looking for validation in all the wrong places.

  If he could go back and talk to his twenty-year-old self, he says, “I would have followed what my parents tried to teach me when I was young and not been a late bloomer. My family’s a real close family and I know theirs [Markowitzes] are too. I wish I could go back. I ask God for forgiveness. I pray daily. And I can’t change the past. I wish I could. That’s one thing that’s been with me for a long time. ‘If I would have done this . . . if I would have done that . . . ,’ ” he sheepishly admits. “I was a follower, I was a scared child in a twenty-year-old body trying to be cool, trying to fit in.”

  If he could address Nick today, William says, “I know he wasn’t here as long as he should have been here. One day, we’ll all be able to go see him. I just wish it had been different. I wish a lot of the decisions I made in my life could have been different. We all got to face our Maker one day, and I ask for forgiveness every day. That’s why I try and better myself every day, better than I was yesterday.” He grows silent before adding, “My family—they didn’t raise me to be a bully. They raised me to be a productive member of society. That’s what I’m trying to do. It’s hard because stuff happens in life that just makes you want to quit, and I’ve learned that I can’t quit. With Narcotics Anonymous [NA] I’m learning to love myself, because a lot of the decisions I made in the past, a lot of stuff I do—it hurts me, I know it hurts other people too. . . . It’s opening my eyes to a lot of things—every action you do, there’s a consequence. There’s a reaction. You’re not just affecting yourself, you’re affecting other people—your family, your parents, people that care for you.” He wants to one day visit Lizard’s Mouth and privately make amends.

  When it comes to Ben Markowitz? “I wish him the best, I really do. We had good times together. We had bad times together. Just like me, he’s human. We all make mistakes, we do stuff, we don’t think about consequences. We get lost and think that we’re a god. I just hope . . . that he finds God and . . . that everything works out for him. I hope that doesn’t stay on his conscience either.”

  After William was paroled from Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego in 2009, he tried to run from his past at the same moment he tried to make up for lost time. “I was shooting speed every single day for about a year and a half and you could tell, but I couldn’t notice. Everybody was like, ‘Dude, you’re a hundred and fifty pounds. Your eyes have black rings around them, you look like shit,’ and I wouldn’t believe them.”

  He admitted he needed to go to rehab after seeing his father cry in front of him for the first time. His parents desperately wanted to see him seek help. He calls it his Moment of Clarity. They took him to rehab that day.

  William says his drug use might have been just a symptom. Looking back, he knows the drugs might have been his attempt to cope with his role and accountability in Nick’s death. “The drugs suppressed the feelings.”

  But now that he’s finally sober, one might wonder, who was going to win out? Capone, Scrappy, the Blanket, or Will? “Today, I would say Will. It’s not a name I was given [on the streets]. It was not a name that was earned. My birth name—it means something to me now. The other names? All they did was bring me problems in life. William, that’s the name I’m going to die with.”

  William understands the skeptics, and he doesn’t fault them. He says that he doesn’t need anyone to believe a word he says. For William, his viewpoint is not about talking, it’s about doing. “I don’t need to say anything to my detractors who think I’m just trying to make myself look good. I live through my actions now. In NA, I’m mentoring guys getting out of prison. Learning to run my own business.” He’s not indignant when he answers. He’s an open book and wants to expose the bad and the good.

  “I’ve done my time. I have nothing to hide. I’m not hiding from anybody. I don’t have an ego like I used to. Anything I say, I’m hoping it helps somebody. Because when I was younger, I really didn’t listen to people. A lot of people tried to help me, and I didn’t listen to them. I wish I could have gone back and listened to them. Because it would have saved a lot of hard times. They tell us [in NA], ‘Give back to the person that’s going through what you went through.’ God will repay you in the end. I truly believe that.”

  He has one last point. “Condemn that twenty-year-old. That’s not me anymore. I got what I deserved.”

  * * *

  Jesse Rugge served a total of thirteen years, eleven in state prison. Today there are no detectives sitting across from him. No law enforcement trying to talk perspective to some shit-scared twenty-year-old trying to distance himself. No, today he’s in an industrial studio in the arts district in downtown Los Angeles to give an on-camera interview. His interrogators are the amplifying lights of two LED panels that enhance every nuanced shift of Adam’s apple and eyes tracking beneath closed lids that open only when he’s ready to speak. “When you’re younger, all you want to do is point. You want to not take responsibility in certain actions, you want to find fault in the relationship, or ‘It’s my parents.’ . . . You don’t know how to take responsibility. . . . And it was like really strange to sit there and go wait a second, I fucked up. I made the choice.”

  Jesse did two and half years in isolation. “There is a lot of deep soul-searching at that time and stuff like that, but still my maturity level was still not there enough. Still a little knucklehead . . . hardheaded. Very immature. I think where the transition started is . . . getting a life sentence.”

  Jesse rocks back in his chair. “I’ll never forget T69730. I’ll never fucking forget that number. . . . That’s a number that will never leave me.”

  And yet, as much disdain as he feels for his years behind bars, he carries the same amount of gratefulness for them. “As much as I hated prison, I mean, I needed it, man. I fucking hate saying that and I’m sorry to use the F word, but it’s just true.

  “I was guilty of the murder.” Because, to Jesse, he didn’t do anything to stop it.

  He recalls a story while he was incarcerated. “I remember telling this man . . . I just got denied [parole] again . . . I said, ‘Man, I was a coward.’ He goes, ‘You weren’t a coward.’ He says, ‘Do you know the definition of a coward?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘A coward is a person that has all the tools to handle the situation at that time in your life and then chooses to do nothing about it. That’s a coward.’ He said, ‘Dude, you’re just ignorant. You weren’t bred to do that. You weren’t taught to go ahead and do something like that.’ He said, ‘In a situation like that of course someone is going to try and save their own life.’ I was like sitting there, but something dawned on me—I was guilty. I was guilty of the situation.”

  When asked about the publicity his role in the case has garnered, Jesse neither
celebrates nor revels in it. “There are no winners. Any time we do a crime there are no winners. It’s the fact that, like, I never realized the lack of participation [in stopping it] killed that young man’s life.”

  Today Jesse knows what piece of the puzzle he had been from the beginning, knows his inaction was just as terminal as if he had pulled the trigger himself.

  He doesn’t need the view from the driver’s seat of that white van, nor does he seek the warm fuzz within a haze of bong smoke. Today he lifts clasped hands and raises his eyes: “For Nicholas. I own up for Nicholas.”

  He also talks about his last parole hearing. He was the only person “off his yard at Chino [California Institute for Men] going to board” that day at one o’clock in the afternoon.

  “I remember sitting there, and they said, ‘Are you going to speak today, Mr. Rugge?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to speak.’ They said, ‘Do you have anything to say now?’ I said, ‘Yeah . . . I’m guilty. I’m guilty of the murder.’ That was the first time I ever said that, and it was super emotional.”

  Jesse looks down at his arms. He may not care if anyone believes a single word. “It gives me chills right now, because I never thought that I would say something like that. And I remember the victim’s family. You know, Susan. I just remember her and everything of them saying this is the first time he’s ever admitted it. And it was the first time, like, that they needed to hear it too. Regardless if I walk out of here, I said it and they needed to hear that.” He acknowledges he was “a follower . . . a peon.”

  He cups his hands together, adamant. “I’m not going to live Nicholas’s life in vain. I’m just done with that behavior.”