The Best American Crime Writing (31 page)

They drove back to the Lemon Tree and picked up Rugge and Nick. It was sometime after midnight, the early hours of August 9. They retraced the route to Lizard’s Mouth. Graham stayed in the car while Ryan and Rugge marched Nick up to the boulder. When Nick saw the gun, did he at last understand what was happening—or did he think they were merely trying to scare him? When they duct-taped his mouth, and his hands behind him, did he tell them that it was unnecessary, that he was still going along with their game? Detectives would later ask Ryan about that moment, if it haunted him, if he woke up at night thinking about someone saying “please”? Ryan sighed. “You don’t even want to know that one,” he said.

Ryan whacked Nick’s head with a shovel, then pushed him into the grave. He aimed the gun and, with a single squeeze of the trigger, sprayed nine bullets—a fusillade that stopped only because the weapon jammed. The shots hit Nick in the stomach, chest, neck, and chin. Most of them ripped through his insides and out his back. Ryan slipped the gun under Nick’s legs. They tried covering him with dirt, but the hole was too shallow. They piled branches on top. Rugge vomited. Ryan, for the moment at least, seemed pleased with his handiwork. “That’s the first time I ever did anybody,” he said, back in the car. “I didn’t know he would go that quick.”

In the days that followed, everyone in Jesse James Hollywood’s crew lied—to their parents, to their friends, to each other, to themselves.

They dropped off Graham at the Lemon Tree and told him to check out in the morning. His curfew was normally 11:00
P.M.
, but his mother had fallen asleep, not realizing that he had been out all night until he called, at 6:00
P.M.
, asking for a ride home. “I asked him why he looked so pale—was he all right?” Christina Pressley says. “He said he didn’t feel very well and that he didn’t sleep much. He was clearly sick or shaken or something was very wrong.” When he got home, Graham called Natasha and told her that he had
given Nick a ride back to the San Fernando Valley. Natasha was relieved and told her mom that everything had turned out okay.

Ryan drove down to West Hills. Jesse gave him $400. Ryan went shopping for new clothes at the 118 Board Shop, a skate- and snowboard store in Granada Hills. Most days for him were a blur of brew and weed, but the next, August 10, was even foggier. “Mass consumption,” says Ryan, who was drinking, smoking, snorting lines, and popping muscle relaxants. “It was my birthday, my twenty-first birthday.” Most of the crew partied that night at the home of Casey Sheehan, another West Hills baseball alumnus who had once sold dope for Jesse. In his stupor Ryan confessed. “He didn’t show me that much emotion as far as, you know, like he had a lot of guilt on his conscience or anything like that, so I was still in disbelief about what had happened, what he had said to me,” Casey says. It was Casey’s car that Ryan had driven to Santa Barbara, and Casey was concerned enough to confront Jesse, who was also celebrating that night. “Just don’t worry about it,” Jesse told him.

The party might have gone on indefinitely had the killers only been more prudent in their disposal of the victim. Lizard’s Mouth may have seemed remote at two in the morning after a night of bong hits, but the grave was right in the middle of a trail—surrounded by graffiti, broken beer bottles, and the remnants of bonfires. That Saturday, August 12, three days after Nick’s murder, a group of hikers discovered the spot, alerted by the smell and the swarm of flies. They thought a dead animal was under the branches. When they saw a bloodied pant leg, they called the police. The summer heat had done terrible things to Nick’s body. His eyes and nose and wounds were filled with larvae. It took Santa Barbara County homicide detectives two days to identify him; a badly decomposed fingerprint matched the arrest record from the time Nick was busted with pot.

On Monday, August 14, detectives drove down to West Hills. They pulled up to the Markowitz home at 6:30
A.M.
Susan was in
bed. Jeff peeked out the window and told her that men in black suits were at the door. She knew Nick was dead.

The next day, August 15, the story was in the papers. It was accompanied by a photo of Nick at his bar mitzvah, in a white tuxedo and black bow tie. Natasha looked at the
Santa Barbara News-Press
that morning and saw him, the sweet, funny, gangly boy she had worried about the week before. She collapsed in tears. She called Jesse Rugge. “It’s not what you think,” Rugge told her. She headed to his house. He was not wearing a shirt. “I could see his heart beating through his chest,” Natasha says. She went to her mom’s law office and talked to an attorney, who arranged for a grant of immunity. By 4:00
P.M.
she was sitting with detectives, spilling the entire story, this time with names and addresses.

Jesse Rugge was arrested early on the morning of the sixteenth, followed by Graham Pressley, Will Skidmore, and by the end of the day, Ryan Hoyt. They talked, implicating themselves and each other. From jail Ryan called his mother, Victoria Hoyt, a conversation that authorities recorded and later played at his trial. With her voice wavering between a growl and a whimper she pressured Ryan into talking to detectives without an attorney, never pausing to think that he might be guilty.

“Ryan, Ryan, you are innocent, you are so innocent,” she said. “You are guilty by association.”

“I know,” he said.

“Who did this? You tell them right now!”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is Jesse? Where the fuck is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then find him! Spill your fucking guts and get out now! Do it for me, do it for your family, do it for yourself. Tell them what you know. Ryan, you tell them now! You fucking asshole. Don’t defend anybody. This is your life.”

Then she recited the Lord’s Prayer.

After hanging up, Ryan called a guard and said he wanted to speak to somebody about the crime. He was brought to an interview room equipped with a hidden camera and a microphone. He was wearing an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, slumped in a chair, rubbing his forehead. Two detectives arrived and asked him what he wanted to talk about. “If I talk, does it get said in court that I said it?” Ryan asked.

He would later claim to remember none of what he said, but jurors would get to see and hear him for themselves. He began to recount the story of the murder, hoping to minimize his involvement at every possible juncture. “What Ben owed Jesse didn’t, in my opinion—I’m going to say this off the record—in my opinion, didn’t justify this kid’s death,” Ryan said. He made it clear that he had nothing to do with the kidnapping. He was also offended by reports that he had dug Nick’s grave. “I feel like I’ve been shit on, excuse my language.” When he was told that the other defendants were ratting him out, saying he had put the duct tape on Nick, Ryan was indignant. “Really?” he said. “I love this one.”

There was one matter he wanted to set straight: “The only thing I did was kill him.”

While the rest were blurting out confessions, proving themselves to be as detached from their own interests as they were from Nick’s, Jesse James Hollywood was demonstrating a slyness that would confound just about everyone.

That is not to say that Jesse was discreet. He had always had a flamboyance about him, a compulsion to live out the mythology of the dope man—the pimp, the playa, the mac daddy—to a degree that exceeded the fantasies of most suburban kids. Jesse’s favorite alias, Sean Michaels, is the name of an African American porn star who sells replicas of his genitalia on the Internet for $69. When
Jesse’s ghetto-fabulous “Hollywood Honda” ended up in the fall 1999 edition of
Lowrider Euro
, under the headline
RIDING OFF INTO THE SUNSET WITH JESSE JAMES’ WILD RIDE
, it was only because he had mailed photos of it to the magazine’s editor. “I never thought that I would take it to this level,” Jesse says in the article, referring to his investment in the car. “I guess I got addicted to it.” But if Jesse was obsessed with projecting an image that few five-foot-five, 140-pound white boys can command, he at least understood the game he was playing better than any of the lost souls in his crew.

In the days after the murder he began collecting on old debts. Brian Affronti, one of the boys who had driven the van back from Santa Barbara, owed him $4,000. He was also storing a shotgun for Jesse, wrapped in a sleeping bag. Brian was not home when Jesse came for the money but had told him where it was hidden—and instructed him to pick up the sleeping bag while he was at it. “That way it wouldn’t look odd to my parents,” Brian says. Now driving a leased Lincoln LS, Jesse headed to Palm Springs, where Michele was attending a modeling convention. He drained $24,000 from his bank account, and they took off for Las Vegas. Jesse checked them into the Bellagio, a place that could not possibly have more security cameras. This time he paid cash.

The day Nick’s body was identified in the newspapers, Jack Hollywood was stunned. Ever since he learned of the abduction, he had been pressing Jesse for answers but getting no response. He paged his son. Jesse finally called back to say that he was on his way to Colorado, where the family had lived for a few years in the mid-1990s. His father called Richard Dispenza, a 48-year-old assistant football coach at Woodland Park High School in Colorado Springs. Dispenza was Jesse’s godfather. “I think my kid is in some kind of trouble, and I’m not sure, you know, how involved he is or what’s going on, but the last I heard he was headed that way,” Jack Hollywood told him. On the day of the arrests Jesse and Michele stayed with Dispenza. Then Michele caught a flight back to LA, and Dispenza
checked Jesse into a Ramada Inn. When Santa Barbara County detectives interviewed Dispenza the next day, Jesse was still at the motel. Dispenza had just been named his school’s Teacher of the Year. He was the founder of an antismoking group called Tobacco-Free Teens. If he had wanted to, he could have ended the manhunt right then. But he lied. A judge later sentenced him to three years’ probation and 480 hours of community service for harboring a fugitive.

Jesse left the motel on August 20. He had abandoned the Lincoln at Dispenza’s house, along with a twelve-gauge shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle. He walked to the home of Chas Saulsbury, a friend from his early teens whom he had not spoken to in years. Jesse told Chas’s mom that he had been pickpocketed in Vegas. Chas agreed to give Jesse a ride back there. Jesse paid for everything out of a plastic bag full of $100 bills. In Vegas he convinced Chas to take him all the way to LA, and during the drive he told Chas the whole story, saying they had snatched Nick to get back at Ben. “But, pretty much, like he said, they made a mistake grabbing him, and once they had him they kind of were just a little bit scared to let him go,” Chas says. Only after consulting with his attorney did Jesse decide to cut his losses. “He talked to his lawyer to find out the implications of the kidnapping and whatnot, and at that point, from what he told me, the lawyer says that he was in enough trouble already and they should get rid of the kid.”

By the time they reached West Hills, Chas was spooked. Jesse wanted to visit John Roberts. “Old John,” as he is known to the Hollywoods, was watching a baseball game—one that he had made a little wager on—when he noticed Jesse standing at the screen door. “I got up and went to the door and grabbed him, pulled him into the house and shut the door, and it was a very emotional meeting, both of us,” he says. Roberts had already taken it upon himself to have the van washed and wiped with solvent, hoping to erase any evidence of Jesse’s role in the abduction. But when Jesse asked for a
fake ID, Roberts says he balked. “I knew people that used to do it, I knew people in Chicago that do it, but I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t give him any money and he could not stay at my house.” A week later Santa Barbara County sheriff’s investigators showed up to serve a search warrant and thought they heard voices inside. When nobody came out, they called in a SWAT team. Roberts finally emerged, saying he had been asleep. Officers still bombarded the house with tear gas but found no sign of Jesse. That was a year and a half ago.

Today Jesse James Hollywood is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. The bureau’s website features eight color photos of him. Agents even took the unusual step of hosting an Internet chat, hoping to generate tips. He has been profiled three times on
Unsolved Mysteries
, and four times on
Americas Most Wanted
. The reward for his capture stands at $50,000, of which $30,000 is being offered by the Markowitzes; if he surrenders voluntarily, they have pledged to put their share in a college fund for his 12-year-old brother. Yet for all of Jesse James Hollywood’s splashiness, his posturing, his arrogance, and his youth, there has not been another verified sighting—no leads, no arrests.

Jesse, in fact, is just about the only person tied to the case who has shown any initiative or moxie. Nearly everyone else who played a role in the crime or watched it unfold was hobbled by a kind of nonchalance, impassively going along with things—from the killers to the witnesses to, sadly, the victim himself. Most of them were stoned, which is not that unusual; half of all U.S. high school seniors have at some time smoked pot. This group’s pot smoking, however, was not merely excessive. Whether cause or effect, a stultifying moral indifference infected their partying; they stumbled through the ordeal with the vacancy of their video games, bereft of judgment or consequence. Even Natasha—the story’s heroine, to the extent that one exists—deluded herself into thinking that things were not how they appeared. “It didn’t really seem real,” she says in
perfect teenspeak. The parents who wandered in and out of the picture also missed signals. So many of them saw only what they wanted to see, never asking the inconvenient questions that might expose the lie.

Jesse’s situation was different. He enjoyed not only a level of drive and talent that eluded the others but also a degree of support from his parents—especially his father—that set him apart. Far from being removed, much less disapproving, Jack Hollywood was Jesse’s role model. “It’s just that the father is much more sophisticated, savvy, low-profile, and seemingly has much better judgment than his son,” says Bruce Correll, chief deputy of the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department. For the past two decades, according to authorities, Jesse’s dad has been a large-scale San Fernando Valley marijuana trafficker—a pleasant, unassuming wholesaler who uses his love for baseball as cover. “Jack Hollywood is a mobster,” Zonen, the prosecutor, has said in court, contending that Jesse was successful “because he went into the family business.” Ben Markowitz has testified that Jesse got dope from his father. John Roberts also has testified that he and Jesse’s father “were involved together at one time, some time ago. But may I say, never in conjunction, never in conjunction with Jesse, ever.” During a search of Jack Hollywood’s residence, officers seized tax documents, check stubs, and mortgage statements, along with several small bags of marijuana and a cardboard box containing $7,600 in cash, but have yet to file charges. “They don’t charge me with anything,” Jack Hollywood says, “so how can I prove I’m innocent?”