My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  “Why don’t you just go?” one of the girls asked Nick.

  “It’s OK,” Nick said. “I don’t want to make any trouble for my brother.”

  So they stayed. Adams liked to fiddle with her electric guitar, so she brought it out and tried to show Nick some chords. Pressley and Nick put their feet up on the deck railing and listened to “Natasha’s bad renditions of some really good songs,” Graham Pressley later said.

  Rugge called and asked them to bring Nick back to his house. There, they saw Hollywood and his girlfriend. The girls noted her new boob job, courtesy of Hollywood’s lucrative drug-dealing business. Nick went upstairs to avoid Hollywood, who stayed downstairs talking to Rugge about what to do with him.

  “Tie him up and put him in a trunk so we can go out to Fiesta,” Hollywood suggested.

  No one put Nick in a trunk, but Hollywood and Michelle left, and Rugge was once again the babysitter. That night, Nick slept over again in Rugge’s bedroom.

  Sometime during that night, Natasha Adams’s conscience kicked into gear. What she knew was that Hollywood was not a good person, and that if he wanted to kill someone, he could have that person killed. She liked Nick and didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, even though she was afraid of interfering with Hollywood’s plans.

  Adams spoke to her mother, an attorney, and asked for some advice. Without giving many specifics, she explained that she’d met a boy who had been kidnapped by some people she knew, and she asked what she should do about it. Her mother advised her to go to the police, but Adams hesitated. It could mean big trouble for her if Hollywood discovered that she’d “ratted” him out, plus she wasn’t sure whether or not the situation would just blow over on its own. That would make things a lot easier, so she wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not she needed to call police.

  The group reconvened the next day at Rugge’s house, and this time, Natasha Adams wanted some answers. She, Kelly Carpenter, and Graham Pressley took a walk to a park to talk about “the situation.”

  “Nick isn’t supposed to be here,” she said to the others. “What’s going to happen to him? Graham, tell me . . . are they going to kill him?”

  “Oh, no, of course not.” He paused a second. “But Jesse was offered money.”

  He told her that Hollywood had offered Rugge two thousand dollars to kill Nick, but that Rugge had turned it down, telling Hollywood he was crazy. Pressley said that the guys didn’t know what they were going to do with Nick, but they weren’t going to hurt him. Everyone just had to keep their mouths shut because Hollywood could go to jail if word reached the police that he had kidnapped Nick, Pressley explained.

  Graham Pressley had his own reasons for not wanting to call the police. He liked smoking pot every day, and calling the cops could mean an end to his carefree lifestyle. Who knew what the police would do if they opened the door into his stoner’s haven?

  Natasha Adams was in tears. She had no idea what she was supposed to do—this situation seemed much more serious than any other she’d ever been in. Something just didn’t feel right about Pressley’s answer. Hollywood had offered to pay Rugge to kill Nick, for crying out loud. Her instincts were right. This was insane.

  Pressley and Carpenter went back to Rugge’s house, but Adams said she needed a few minutes to compose herself. When Nick asked why she was still outside, they told him she was upset. “Is it because of me?” he wanted to know.

  They said that it was.

  “Tell her not to worry. I’m OK. It’ll be a story I’ll tell my grandkids someday.”

  Adams calmed herself down at the park, and when she got back to the house, Rugge said, “You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “Yeah, I have been,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because Nick isn’t supposed to be here, and I don’t know what you’re going to do with him. You have to promise me you’re going to take him home.”

  Rugge looked her in the eye and swore he was going to take Nick home—a promise he reiterated several times that afternoon, both to his friends and to Nick himself.

  “I’m going to take you home. I’ll put you on a Grey-hound. I’ll get you home,” he would say.

  That was good enough for Adams. She decided not to call the police after all, thus making her yet another in the growing list of people who could have saved Nick’s life . . . but didn’t.

  I had switched sides of the bed with Jeff the previous night because I wanted to be closer to the window so that I could be the first to see Nick when he came home. But when I woke up, he still wasn’t there. Every minute felt like torture. I had to stay busy to keep my mind from dreaming up horrible scenarios, but of course, the images came anyway. I began losing touch with reality and floating around in a haze where time didn’t seem to function the way time is supposed to function. It was slowed down . . . or sped up . . . I just knew that Nick was in trouble somewhere and that every minute that passed was another minute we had not saved him from whatever trouble he was in.

  While Jeff went out searching, I stayed home assigning tasks to everyone who walked through the door—and by now, there were lots of people coming through our doors, family and friends, plus friends of friends. We had officially reported Nick a “Missing Person” and enlisted all the help we could find to comb the area. We tried the hospitals again. We tried stopping strangers and showing them his picture.

  Today, we will find him, I told myself. We have to.

  Across town, Jack Hollywood and John Roberts were back at Jesse Hollywood’s girlfriend Michelle Lasher’s house meeting with Jesse again. Jesse handed his father a pager number.

  “This is Ryan Hoyt’s number. He’ll know where the guy is, and you guys can go get him.”

  Jack Hollywood walked to Gelson’s Market down the street at about noon and paged Ryan Hoyt from a pay phone. Hoyt called back immediately. Jack didn’t want to discuss anything over the phone, so he asked Hoyt to meet him at Serrania Park in Woodland Hills.

  According to Jack Hollywood, the conversation went something like this: he said, “What the hell is going on with this thing? And where is this kid? Show me where he is and John and I will go and get him.”

  “I don’t know how to get in touch with him,” Hoyt replied.

  “Let’s find out. Call whoever you need to call, and you can just leave, and John and I will get the kid and take him home.”

  Hoyt seemed very agitated and rattled, and just said, “I can’t. I don’t have any control.”

  He wouldn’t give up any names of the other people involved. Then Jack gave Hoyt his phone number and told him to find out where Nick was and call back. “Whatever the consequences are, that’s part of the deal, but that’s what needs to happen,” Jack allegedly said.

  “OK, I’ll do that,” Hoyt said.

  But no one ever called him back. Jack Hollywood knew who Ben was, and he knew that Nick was Ben’s brother . . . yet he never tried to contact the family or to call police. He just waited for his son to decide to tell him where he was keeping “the kid.”

  I hated the clock. At least August meant that daylight lasted longer than usual, but that’s little consolation when you know nighttime is coming and people will go home and stop searching.

  Jeff didn’t tell me about the phone call he had made to the morgue to ask if they had any John Does. They didn’t. Yet.

  CHAPTER 9

  GET RID OF THE EVIDENCE

  He paced in the living room.

  “I don’t want to be in a situation,” Jesse Rugge said. “I don’t think I should be a part of this, and I’m going to get you home. I’m going to give you fifty dollars, and you’re taking a train tonight, and then you’ll have some money left over to get a cab home. And all I can say is there better not be policemen coming to my door the next day.”

  He repeated this sentiment several times, sometimes adding in things like, “How do I know you’re not going to tell?”

  “Don’t worry,” Nick told hi
m. “I won’t.”

  Inexplicably, though, instead of handing Nick the money and sending him on his way, Rugge changed course and decided that they should all go to a hotel and have a party that night. He didn’t want to be at his father’s house anymore, so Graham Pressley’s mother, Christina Pressley, picked them up on her way to her 5:30 yoga class and took them to the Lemon Tree Inn. Nick rode in the back of the car, and Christina didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Her son introduced Nick as Jesse Rugge’s friend.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you, too. Thanks for the ride,” Nick replied.

  Rugge booked room 341 at the Lemon Tree Inn in Santa Barbara while his friends sat in the lobby. Once in the room, they drank and smoked some more. It was the same group—Jesse Rugge, Graham Pressley, Natasha Adams, and Kelly Carpenter—plus one other male friend, and sometimes-drug-dealer, of Graham’s.

  Again, one of the girls asked Nick why he hadn’t just taken off.

  “I’ve taken self-defense and stuff. It’s not like I couldn’t do anything right now. I just don’t want to,” he told her. “I don’t see a reason to. I’m going home. Why would I complicate it?”

  But what neither Nick nor any of the other people in the group at the hotel knew was that after Rugge had turned down Hollywood’s bribe to kill Nick, Hollywood had turned to his favorite little brownnoser: Ryan Hoyt. Hoyt was still doing menial jobs for Hollywood, trying to work off his debts from the parking tickets and the marijuana, and he would do anything to impress his idol.

  “I have a way for you to erase your debt,” Hollywood told him.

  Hoyt was all ears.

  “There’s a mess that needs to be cleaned up. I need you to take care of somebody.”

  Hoyt agreed without question, even though his debt by that point was just a few hundred dollars—plus the one hundred dollars per week interest whenever he was short on his payments. Hollywood handed him a big blue hockey duffel bag, which was the bag that he stored his guns in. This time, the duffel bag contained a black TEC-9 semiautomatic assault pistol—the same kind of gun used in the 1999 Columbine school shooting. But semiautomatic wasn’t good enough for Hollywood; he’d had the trigger shaved down so that it could be converted to a fully automatic weapon. It was capable of spraying up to a thousand bullets in a minute. And now it was in Ryan Hoyt’s hands.

  That day, Hollywood also took twenty-five thousand dollars out of his bank account in the form of cashier’s checks and dropped off his Mercedes at a repair shop. Then he called Rugge at the Lemon Tree Inn at about 8:30 p.m., using a phone card.

  Graham Pressley went to his own house for a little while to pick up swimming trunks for himself and Nick. The two of them then went to the hotel swimming pool, which Nick dipped a foot in and declared too cold.

  “I think we’d better check out the hot tub instead,” he said.

  There was an outdoor hot tub next to the pool, with a few young women already in it. Adams and Carpenter had given Nick and Pressley some tips on picking up women earlier that night, so they found this a perfect moment to practice their new techniques—which caused a lighthearted moment of laughter a few minutes later when the women up and left.

  But Nick and Pressley stayed in the hot tub, talking about girls and music and life. They spent a good deal of time together just talking, surrounded by palm trees. Nick mentioned that he now felt embarrassed about having told Adams and Carpenter about the girl he liked, but he said that one of the first things he wanted to do when he got back home was to call the girl up and tell her how he felt.

  With arms outstretched on either side of him, Nick commented on how relaxing the water felt after the last crazy couple of days. He submerged himself a few times, closing his eyes and holding himself underwater. Then the two teenagers sat in silence for a few moments, watching people come and go and the last bits of sunlight fade away.

  “What do you think about God?” Nick asked Pressley. It was an unexpected question, but he was serious.

  “I don’t know . . . I think God and the world are the same thing,” Pressley replied.

  “I doubt if God is there sometimes . . . but times like these dissolve my doubts.” Nick looked up at the sky. “God probably laughs at us most of the time.”

  He talked about being worried about his family, and said he knew that his mother would be relieved to see him home again.

  “My mom is the same way,” Pressley said.

  “But you don’t know my mom,” Nick told him.

  It was dark when they toweled off and went back to the hotel room, where everyone was out on the balcony. The girls asked what Nick’s plans were for when he got back home. Nick said that he wanted to see the girl he talked about and then he wanted to go sit and watch a sunset somewhere and think.

  At around 11:00 p.m., Jesse Rugge made an announcement: “I don’t mean to be rude, but . . .” it was time for everyone to leave. Someone was coming to pick up Nick and take him home. Nick and the girls exchanged phone numbers and long hugs and said their good-byes and “I’ll miss you’s,” and then they left. Graham Pressley shook Nick’s hand good-bye, but then Rugge stopped him and asked him to stay.

  Back in the room, Nick fell asleep. Shortly afterward, the door opened—and in barged tall, gawky Ryan Hoyt, with the blue duffel bag that Rugge recognized as containing Hollywood’s guns. Hoyt went straight to the bathroom. Rugge didn’t look surprised to see him.

  Who’s this guy? wondered Graham Pressley. He peeked into the bathroom and saw Hoyt cleaning a gun clip. But Pressley didn’t say anything about it to anyone. He was afraid for his own life. Even when Nick woke up, he didn’t mention anything to him about what this “new guy” was up to.

  Rugge was annoyed, because he’d thought that Hollywood was going to be there, not just send his lackey. Rugge later insisted that he didn’t know beforehand that Nick would be killed—he claimed that he didn’t know until the moment when Hoyt arrived that that Nick wasn’t actually going home. Rugge later told police, “That’s when I knew everything went sour. I was expecting at least Jesse [Hollywood], at least his ass to show his fucking face.”

  Then Hoyt and Rugge left together and got into a Honda sedan owned by Hollywood’s friend Casey Sheehan. This was Pressley’s chance to be a hero. He was alone with Nick and could have helped him, warned him, or called the police. But he didn’t.

  Earlier that day, Hollywood and his girlfriend had gone to Sheehan’s apartment and, after a few beers, had asked to borrow his car. Sheehan later said that he thought they needed it to move more things out of Hollywood’s house, so he handed over the keys to his mother’s red Honda Civic, asking only that they make sure he had a ride to work the next day. Hollywood said he’d take care of it.

  Casey Sheehan also knew all about Nick’s kidnapping by that point, but he had also decided not to get involved.

  If he had really thought that Hollywood needed the car to move, though, why hadn’t Sheehan emptied out the trunk?

  Hollywood then left, alone. He drove back to his house and gave the car to Hoyt, who was still there doing menial chores. This was the moment it all became real. Hoyt had the weapon and the car. Now his instructions were to go to Santa Barbara—and kill Nick.

  Then Hollywood got into a different car and drove back to Sheehan’s apartment to pick him up for dinner. He said that he’d been taking a shower and getting ready during that time; after all, it was his girlfriend Michelle’s twentieth birthday, and Hollywood was taking her and Sheehan out to the Outback Steakhouse in the Northridge to celebrate.

  Hollywood was calm at dinner, telling Sheehan cryptically that the situation with Nick had been “unwound,” or “taken care of,” depending on whose recollection one believed. Either way, apparently, neither Sheehan nor Michelle Lasher bothered to ask what that meant or whether Nick was on his way home. At least, neither of them ever admitted to asking the question, or hearing its answer. Hollywood paid the $108.98 bill on his Americ
an Express card, established his alibi, and left. He went back to Casey Sheehan’s house and slept over that night.

  While Hollywood was out, Ryan Hoyt and Jesse Rugge drove Sheehan’s mother’s car to Barron Rugge’s house, where they picked up at least two shovels from the side yard and duct tape from the garage. Then Hoyt asked Rugge to show him a spot to dig a grave.

  But Rugge said he didn’t know the area very well, and Graham Pressley would be a better tour guide. So Hoyt went back to the Lemon Tree and picked up Pressley, leaving Rugge behind in the hotel to stay with Nick, who slept on and off over the next hour and a half. He just kept plying Nick with alcohol, marijuana, and Valium, and later claimed that it seemed like Nick was having a good time.

  Hoyt and Pressley hadn’t know each other before this day, but what Pressley did know by this point was that Hoyt had a gun and had come there on Hollywood’s orders to use it in some fashion. He later said that when Hoyt ordered him to go with him to a hiking trail in the mountains of Santa Barbara and start digging, he thought he was digging his own grave. Maybe because he knew too much about the kidnapping.

  The trail was called Lizard’s Mouth, because that’s what one of the giant rock formations looked like—a lizard with a wide-open mouth. It sat on the crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains, with a sweeping view of the ocean and the city of Goleta. Popular with hikers and lovers and beer-drinking teenagers, the trail was like a grown-up jungle gym, filled with caves and trees and interesting boulders to climb over and around. Some of the caves were pockmarked on the inside like bee-hives. The rock formations had names like Breathless and Sudden Fear. Sunset there was said to be beautiful.

  But now, past midnight, it was a difficult hike to navigate—it took almost twenty minutes to get to the spot. Graham Pressley had been there many times before with friends to smoke pot. He now dug a hole near an overarching manzanita bush, ordered to be seven feet wide by two feet deep, until Ryan Hoyt decided it was enough. Hoyt would later testify that he didn’t threaten Pressley with the gun because he “didn’t have to.” Then they went back for Nick. They taped up Nick’s hands and legs and then realized they couldn’t very well get downstairs and across the parking lot like that, so they untaped him.