The Stranger: Revisiting Race in an L.A. Murder

https://crimereads.com/the-stranger-revisiting-race-in-an-l-a-murder/

In 1997, Ennis Cosby was shot and killed by Mike Markhasev. The killer claimed it was a botched robbery. Others suspected racism.

Just after midnight, on a chilly Thursday in January, a young man pulled off California’s Interstate 405 and parked at the edge of the quiet mountains. He didn’t have a choice. His dark green Mercedes Benz convertible had a flat, and in his twenty-seven years on Earth, he had probably never needed to change a tire himself. He was a rich kid, a wad of cash in his wallet and a Rolex on his wrist. This was far from unusual in these parts, the Santa Monica Mountains, where Los Angeles’s elite sit on their balconies and watch the city lights float like bioluminescence in the darkness. He had taken the exit for the Skirball Cultural Center, a museum cut into the side of the mountain range and dedicated to “welcoming the stranger” and the “American democratic ideals of freedom and equality.” It was hard to see from where he was sitting.

The exit had taken him to a small connecting road saddled up against the greenery of a mountain. He had been on his way to visit his friend, Stephanie Crane, and took out his cellphone to call her for help. In 1997, guys as rich as him and from a family as prominent as his didn’t have to worry that someone might see his expensive cell phone and think that he was a drug dealer. He wasn’t some punk high school kid with a Motorola and a bag of cocaine swishing in his backpack. In fact, he was on holiday break from his graduate studies at the Teachers College of Columbia University. He struggled with dyslexia, and although he could have easily taken a role in his family’s business, he wanted to help children overcome their learning disorders like he had. He wanted them to understand that there’s a sequence to things, even when nothing seems to make sense.

He waited in his Mercedes. He was in the Sepulveda Pass, the dark corridor between two sides of the Santa Monica Mountains, the freeway running through it like a river of sequins.

Stephanie eventually pulled up behind him and turned on her high beams to give him some light. He got out of his car and inspected the tire. Stephanie was a real friend, maybe even a girlfriend. Even though he had only known her for a few days, and they didn’t go way back, she still came to his rescue, because he was the kind of guy who deserved a thing like that.

As Stephanie sat in her car behind him, another young man emerged out of the darkness, a gun in his hand, and knocked on her window.

“Open the door or I’ll kill you!” yelled eighteen-year-old Mike, a gang member who had been hanging out with his associates at the museum’s Park & Ride across the street.

Stephanie, terrified, sped away for a few meters and then circled back.

In the few seconds that she was gone, Mike ran up to her friend, pointed his .38 caliber pistol at his head, and demanded money.

One of the worst parts of losing a loved one is trying to understand what they were thinking in their last moments of life. I never knew the victim personally, but I remember being a kid and seeing him on the cover of Time magazine while in line at Gelson’s Market with my mother. He sat in a tuxedo with bright eyes and a close-lipped smile, his father draping his arms proudly over his son’s shoulders. The caption to the right of them read, “A Death in the Family.”

As I reviewed the case nearly twenty years later, I was kept awake by the infinite possibilities of his final moments, the eternity in the second in which he realized what was about to happen.

He was confused. He had once said, “The happiest day of my life occurred when I found out I was dyslexic. I believe that life is finding solutions, and the worst feeling to me is confusion.”

Mike, the gangster, later told his friend, “You know what [he] told me? He told me never had a gun to his face before and to kick back and hold on.”

The two young men shook. One was just too slow, so Mike “just blasted him” point-blank in the head, their faces lit up in the night like phosphorous.

By the time Stephanie returned, the victim was lying on his back, his left arm wrapped around his head, his right hand by his knee, still clutching a pack of cigarettes.

Law enforcement said that it was a botched robbery and that Mike and his fellow gangsters, who drove the getaway car, were waiting for a drug connection and found something else. Maybe they had seen the cellphone. It was deemed a “wrong place, wrong time” situation, nothing more or less.

Like an alien abduction.

It was peculiar that the victim’s Rolex had remained on his wrist, the wad of cash still in his pocket. Nothing was stolen from the scene. This irked me, as it had conspiracy theorists all over L.A. Bunk theories, ranging from mob hits to illicit homosexual relationships, flourished everywhere.

But there was no conspiracy behind it––or, at least, not a new or unique one.

It reminded me of a scene from In Cold Blood, what Perry Smith told Truman Capote after murdering the father of the Clutter Family in a botched robbery:

“I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.”

There was something Perry Smith hated in Herb Clutter. There was something that Mike hated in his victim, something that was overlooked by law enforcement, the judicial system, the media, and the court of public opinion. It seemed strange to me that no one seemed to acknowledge the obvious:

That Mike was white, and that his victim, Ennis Cosby, son of Bill Cosby, was Black.

Though the murder of Ennis Cosby was shocking, it wasn’t considered as newsworthy as others of its time. The trials of the Menendez Brothers and O.J. Simpson, as well as the ever-present echoes of the Manson Family and the Black Dahlia, dominated the world of L.A. true crime, which had already become its own subgenre. The trial was unremarkable and the case closed relatively quickly (Mike didn’t officially confess until after the trial was over, but he wasn’t fooling anyone before then). What did stand out, to me, was the Cosby’s family’s unusual plea to the judge: to spare the life of their son’s murderer. They didn’t want another young man to die.

The trial ended without incident and was, from then on, regarded as just another celebrity tragedy.

That doesn’t mean that Ennis wasn’t mourned. The public knew him as Theo Huxtable, the handsome and endearing son of America’s then-father, Dr. Cliff Huxtable. Theo was modeled closely after Ennis, especially in his narrative of overcoming dyslexia, a defining feature of both adolescents’ journeys into adulthood. Most viewers of The Cosby Show, which was then in syndication, may have never met Ennis—or even knew that he existed––but they understood him so personally through his television incarnation that the news of his murder would have seemed intimately cruel.  Those who knew the connection between Theo and Ennis may have felt like they had lost a friend.

In 2014, when I was in graduate school, I was introduced to Mikhail “Mike” Markhasev over a bottle of iced tea from the snack cart in the visitation room at the state prison in Corcoran, California. I was interviewing men in the Protective Housing Unit, or P.H.U., a place for inmates who couldn’t survive in the general prison population because of the infamy of their crimes. The P.H.U. ended up being a retirement home for aging criminals, like Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, and Mike was one of its few young inmates. He had just turned eighteen when he murdered Ennis. Back then, he had a thick mat of black hair and a clean-shaven face, but over the course of nearly twenty years his features had inverted: a shaved head, a neat, short-boxed beard, and a pair of reading glasses made him appear more like a fellow graduate student than a lifer. Tall, pale, and lean, the prisoner seemed to have avoided the sun and wear of the perilous San Joaquin Valley.

As we introduced ourselves, an elderly Charles Manson gummed down a candy bar behind us.

Over the next few years, Mike and I wrote to each other and visited when we could. In his late thirties, he seemed to show great remorse. He even refused to submit a request for parole, believing that he didn’t deserve to leave prison. He became meticulously devout, spending countless days studying next to a local Orthodox priest in the visitation room in order to slowly piece his soul back together.

Mike wasn’t the only member of a street gang who sought remorse and reform in prison. His previous gang involvement was still, however, perplexing. Although they weren’t rich, his grandparents took good care of him, and he always knew he was loved; nearly two decades later, they still visited him in prison nearly every week, picking at a bowl of nuts. He wasn’t starving for anything. He was a Ukrainian immigrant but spoke English so well that he would have never had trouble making friends. He didn’t fit the pattern of what one might imagine as a fledgling L.A. gangster, born into a continuous cycle of insurmountable poverty and neighborhood violence. His choice to join a Hispanic gang as a white kid from North Hollywood suggested that he was actively looking for trouble, even if there were no indication that he was about to turn.

After the murder, the Los Angeles Times interviewed his former classmate, Robert. “This is really weird. I would talk to him and stuff, and he never seemed like a troublemaker. He was a nice, everyday kind of dude.”

In the same article, an ex-girlfriend remembered him being, “Nice, I don’t want to say too nice, but really, really nice.”

His North Hollywood landlady, Olga, also told the Times, “He dressed like a normal teenager, wore the baggy clothes like everyone, seemed normal. “Nobody ever complained about him.”

After the murder, Mike told another confident, “I killed a n—–. It’s all over the news.”

After a few years, I asked Mike, “Looking back, as a mature man, do you think eighteen-year-old Mike would have pulled the trigger if Ennis weren’t Black?… Do you think he would have spared Ennis if he were white?”

Now, regardless of how remorseful he was, Mike wasn’t stupid. There’s no question that the crime started off as a robbery, and it was clear that Mike, who was loaded on heroin and cocaine the night of the crime, acted erratically in his decision to murder Ennis. A simple answer of “yes” would have potentially turned this case into a verifiable hate crime, something that could deeply affect his future in prison, especially if he chose to re-think parole. Regardless, a simple answer was impossible.

He answered:

“I did view Mr. Cosby as less than human. What changed everything was when [Stephanie Crane] left, my friends and partners in crime drove up alongside Ennis’s car, because they thought that ‘something happened,’ and they came to pick me up––they were waiting for me to return with the loot. So, if initially I had no intention of shooting Ennis––only to rob him and flee behind the thick curtain of night’s anonymity, now I was faced with a serious ‘security breach,’ so to speak: the clock was ticking it was a matter of seconds before Ms. Crane would contact someone; plus Ennis now saw my friend’s car, my friends’ faces (the car illuminated them), and me. My foremost concern was not getting caught and covering my tracks quickly: fueled by a drug-scorched mind, I simply set a three-second deadline for Ennis (who was still trying to process what was going on), gave him a warning, and then caved into my impatience by firing the gun. That was it.

“Did I have to shoot him? Certainly not. Could I have simply gotten in the car and left? Yes, but my paranoid mind was swimming with sirens, helicopters, and handcuffs.

“As you see the fact that Ennis was Black wasn’t the primary motive in this murder. Was I racist at the time? Absolutely. Did my racism allow me to murder a Black man without a pang of conscience and afterwards and afterwards rationalize what I did as ‘no big deal,’—almost some sick ‘community service’ when filtered through my belief system at the time—as seen through the warped worldview and demonic logic I lived by? But, it’s still a fact that main impulse of my evil act stemmed from self-preservation: I didn’t want to get popped.”

If he were worried about getting caught, why couldn’t he have just run away? He knew that Stephanie had already seen him, so much so that she helped a forensic artist sketch a stunningly accurate facial composite of Mike which was used to incriminate him. Murdering Ennis wouldn’t have done away with a lone witness. Stephanie, who was only a few yards away from the shooting, had more than enough information to testify against Mike for murder. Why didn’t Mike try to do away with Stephanie, a white woman who, in a matter of seconds, returned to the exact place of the shooting? It’s difficult to piece together how exactly why he thought his actions were “self-preserving.” Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe another current ran silently through him as well.

A young woman, Sara, who was with Mike after the murder, remembered him lamenting, “Why did it have to happen? Why did I have to do it?”

Was this admission more than simply rhetorical?

Had the hard drugs and fear of getting caught completely stripped away Mike’s ability to think rationally? Was he left purely to impulse, and was this impulse rooted in self-preservation, or something else as well? I thought of French Algerian character of Meursalt in Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, who, in a moment of heat-induced disorientation, shoots and kills an Arab man out of an unidentified impulse. The question at the center of the crimes of Mike Markhasev and the fictional Meursalt isn’t a matter of pre-meditation. Instead, it’s: “Why was this your impulse?” Again, there is no evidence to suggest that Mike’s crime started out as anything but a robbery, or that he planned on hurting Ennis at all. It ended, however, as something much more complicated.

Mike truly believed that the impulse that lead to the murder of Ennis Cosby was self-preservation. To deny the obvious presence of a second, more sinister impulse, was something too uncomfortable for nearly everyone involved in the case––and for the people of L.A.–– to believe. After denying his own parole petition, Mike, now sober, spent years in the P.H.U. as a model prisoner, renouncing his racism and dedicating himself to keeping at-risk kids off the street. Determining whether or not his years of hard attrition have changed his deepest impulses would be the work of a psychologist, or a philosopher.

Regardless, the trial didn’t just incriminate Mike Markhasev. It indicted the City of L.A., which was still reeling from the 1992 Riots and the trial of O.J. Simpson. Perhaps no one wanted to talk about race anymore. There was no mention of Ennis’s race during the two-week-long trial, and there was no allegation that Mike murdered Ennis because he was Black. The only person who said anything about the matter publicly was Camille Cosby, the bereaved mother, in a USA Today article published the day after the trial ended, writing:

“I believe America taught our son’s killer to hate African Americans…All African-Americans, regardless of their educational and economic accomplishments, have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin colors. Sadly, my family and I experienced that to be one of America’s racial truths.”

The Washington Post commented, “Emotional words––gone too far––of an embittered mother who has tragically lost her only son? Or has she expressed an inescapable racial truth about America?”

Camille exposed the deeply racist concept of “Black exceptionalism,” the idea that a Black person is somehow elevated, or more redeemable, if they accomplish great things in white society. It’s the idea that someone can earn their way out of their Blackness through commitment to “white” ideals and become one of “the good ones.” Ennis Cosby, a deeply exceptional human, was a victim of this line of thinking. Perhaps the subject of his race was never broached because those involved in the trial refused to see Ennis as Black, and thus denied him the vital considerations that should have been taken into account in a case like this.

In 2020, Americans are recognizing that hate crimes don’t have a singular look. A drugged out, confused teenaged gangster shot Ennis Cosby, and his deeply held racist beliefs were likely to have influenced his decision, but the Los Angeles judicial system committed a farther-reaching crime by avoiding an uncomfortable question. It should have asked, “What role did race play in this suffering?”  It’s the same question that we must ask when a policeman shoots a Black person, or a riot squad tear-gasses a crowd of protestors, and it’s very likely that the perpetrators will honestly believe, like Mike, that they were protecting themselves. Even though it occurred twenty-three years ago, the story of the murder of Ennis Cosby is a primer for 2020, for understanding the dangers in avoiding hard questions and in ignoring the layers behind our own impulses, no matter how honorable or necessary acting on these impulses may seem.

It wasn’t salacious as the Black Dahlia, or mythological like the Manson Family murders, but the death of Ennis Cosby will always be the quintessential Los Angeles murder, rooted in a place that insists on its own enlightenment but is terrified to look in the mirror.