Oscar Winner's Son Convicted of Murdering Swimwear Designer at NYC Hotel

Sylvie Cachay was twenty-six years old when she checked into the Soho House hotel in Manhattan on the night of December 9, 2010. She arrived with her boyfriend, Nicholas Brooks, who was ten years her junior. By the next morning, she was dead in an overflowing bathtub, and the man she came with had vanished.

Two years earlier, Sylvie had been at the peak of her career. The swimwear designer had launched her own line, Syla, and the industry had taken notice. Sports Illustrated featured her bikinis. Vogue, InStyle, and Elle covered her work. Within a year, her designs were in Barneys. Her publicist called it a PR dream. But then the financial crisis of 2008 hit, backers pulled out, and Sylvie was forced to close her business temporarily. The engagement to her photographer fiancé ended around the same time. Friends said she was lost, barely eating, consumed by the loss of her dream.

It was during this low point, in the summer of 2010, that Nicholas Brooks entered her life. He was twenty-four, handsome, and came with a trust fund. On their first date, Sylvie's toy poodle, Pepper, ran into the street and was hit by a car. Brooks stayed with her all night at the animal hospital, held her as she grieved. He seemed like a knight in shining armor arriving at exactly the moment she needed rescue.

But the relationship deteriorated quickly. Brooks was unemployed and unmotivated. Sylvie paid for everything. She drafted a five-page to-do list for him: wake up by ten, clean the bathroom, get a job, stop smoking pot, stop drinking. Her friends heard constant complaints. He was childish, disconnected, demanding things in bed she wasn't comfortable with. She texted one friend that he wanted "porn sex." She told another he had threatened her life. By Thanksgiving, her friends believed it was over. But Sylvie couldn't seem to let go. On December 5, she texted him: "Nicholas, i am so in love with you."

Four days later, she was dead. The night began with a fire at her apartment—candles Brooks had placed on the headboard ignited the bed. Sylvie had taken sleeping pills and was groggy. Brooks carried her pillow as they made their way to Soho House after midnight. Hotel staff noticed tension between them. Sylvie told the receptionist, Kristen Stephens, that she blamed Nick for the fire, that he was a child, that she should break up with him. Stephens helped guide the exhausted woman to her room, where Sylvie collapsed into bed.

Shortly after, Stephens heard yelling and arguing coming from Sylvie's room. Then, abruptly, silence. She pressed her ear against the wall of the adjacent room and heard nothing—no movement, no sound at all. She would later wonder if she had heard the moment Sylvie was killed. She wished she had knocked on the door.

When police arrived, they found Sylvie's body in the bathtub, fully clothed in a black turtleneck and panties, her Rolex watch still on her wrist. An empty pill bottle sat on the dresser. But what struck detectives most were the marks on her neck—light-colored bruises consistent with choking, and a cut inside her lip that could have been caused by a hand forced over her mouth. This didn't look like an accident. It looked like murder.

Nicholas Brooks had disappeared. Nearly three hours after Sylvie's body was discovered, he walked back into the hotel lobby, appearing inebriated, his eyes bloodshot, his reaction to learning of his girlfriend's death described by staff as blank and flat. When detectives brought him in for questioning, he was so intoxicated he fell asleep during the interview. When he woke, he told a story: they had sex, he showered, the candles caught fire, he rescued her, they went to the hotel, she took a bath while he went to the restaurant. When he returned, she was asleep. He decided to go out for a while. When he came back, police were everywhere.

But the hotel's surveillance cameras and staff told a different story. Brooks had left and returned to Sylvie's room multiple times that night, sometimes pacing the halls, sometimes biting his nails. He barely touched his food at the restaurant. At exactly 2:18 a.m., he left the room for the last time and went out to party with a stranger he met at the front desk, a jazz musician named David Raleigh. They went to a bar called Employees Only and did cocaine together.

What Brooks didn't know was that at 2:11 a.m.—seven minutes before he left—guests in the room below Sylvie's had complained to hotel staff about a water leak. The water was coming from an overflowing bathtub in Sylvie's room. Prosecutors argued this placed Brooks in the room while Sylvie was being drowned.

The defense offered a different theory: Sylvie, heavily medicated and exhausted, had decided to take a bath and accidentally drowned. The bruises on her neck, they suggested, came from rough sex earlier that evening. But Sylvie's family and friends knew something else. In the days before her death, Sylvie had discovered that Brooks had been stealing from her—over thirty thousand dollars in unauthorized ATM withdrawals. She had also learned he was visiting escort websites and using prostitutes. Around 1 a.m. on December 8, she sent him what prosecutors called the "F-U" email: "For the past six months I have supported you financially and emotionally. The fact u cheated on me makes me sick and you will f***ing pay. I am speaking with the credit card company and the police and I am going to tell them that I never allowed you to use my card."

Yet that same night, she met him at her apartment and was intimate with him. Her friends saw in this the classic trap of domestic violence—the desire to leave warring with the inability to actually go.

After five weeks of testimony and fifty-six prosecution witnesses, the jury deliberated for three days. They returned with a guilty verdict: second-degree murder. Nicholas Brooks was sentenced to twenty-five years to life. Sylvie Cachay, the woman who had dreamed of walking the streets of New York with ribbons in her hair, who had built a fashion line from nothing, who had tried to save a lost young man, would never get to become the somebody huge her cousin believed she was going to be.