To listen to Nicolas Holzer tell it, he should never have gotten married. But because he did, he had to kill both his parents, his two sons, ages 10 and 13, and the family’s Pembroke Welsh corgi, stabbing them to death with a kitchen knife in their Goleta tract home four years ago — this according to his explanation to Sheriff’s Office investigators. This case was never a whodunit. Holzer called 9-1-1 right after the stabbings. Nothing he said during his monotone confession made a lick of sense. The only question from the start was whether Holzer was sane enough to be found guilty of murder. That’s still the only question left for Judge Brian Hill to decide; the trial to find the answer starts May 30.
In the muddy audio of the Holzer interview, Sergeant Rob Minter of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office is trying to make sense of what Holzer has done. Little sense, however, can be made. Holzer explains it’s been his destiny to go to hell for an eternity and to live there by himself. He’s been told this various times since he was 5. When pressed by Minter for details, there aren’t any. It’s never clear who is telling Holzer these things. Holzer also says he killed a jogger in Isla Vista, running him over twice with his car, he said. He also drowned a 14-year-old girl in her bathtub, he said, and joined the Irish Republican Army, and had some role causing the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 that claimed the lives of 239 souls aboard. And he always comes back to the fact that he should have never married a Mexican woman he’d met in Santa Barbara in 2001. They’d had two children, Sebastian and Vincent, before divorcing bitterly in 2006, the same year Holzer lost his job at Raytheon. He moved in with his parents, Bill and Sheila, and won sole custody of the kids.
One thing’s for certain: The Nick Holzer who’s been showing up in Hill’s courtroom this week is a far cry from the Nick Holzer, 45 at the time of the killings, who showed up in court shortly after his arrest, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, fleshy, red-faced, and pop-eyed. Since then, Holzer has lost 50-100 pounds. His hair seems darker. He’s sporting a scraggly patch of facial hair. He wears a suit, thick horn-rimmed glasses, and leaves a stooped-over, medicated impression.