by Otto Penzler
With Nick in the van, Fiesta was pretty much out of the question, but Jesse James Hollywood and his crew drove up to Santa Barbara anyway, not knowing what else to do. On the way, Nick’s pager began to beep. His parents had given it to him the previous week, on the condition that he respond immediately when called. Now his mother was punching in their number, over and over. Jesse took it away. “If you run, I’ll break your teeth,” he said to Nick. Jesse rummaged through Nick’s pockets and pulled out several plastic bags of weed and Valium. He let Nick fire up and drop a pill. He also snatched a small address book from him. He ripped out the page with Ben’s number and tossed the rest out the window. For all his bluster, Jesse would not call Ben that day, or ever again.
When they got to Santa Barbara, they needed a place to stash Nick. That task fell to Jesse Rugge, the crew’s northern connection. He steered them to the home of a friend in the Hidden Valley neighborhood, a guy he often partied with named Ricky Hoe-flinger. They herded Nick into Ricky’s bedroom, bound his wrists with duct tape, and blindfolded him with a sock. Ricky had a friend over, and he asked what was going on. “Hollywood is tripping out,” Rugge explained. It was loud enough for Jesse James Hollywood to overhear. “Keep your fucking mouth shut,” he snapped at Rugge. Then he whispered to Ricky’s friend, “You don’t say shit.” Ricky and his friend took off, leaving the kidnappers and their captive alone in his house. “I didn’t want to know what was going on,” Ricky says. “I didn’t want any involvement.”
Two guys in the crew also wanted out. One was Will Skidmore; the other was Brian Affronti, whom they had picked up after grabbing Nick. Not wanting to rouse Jesse’s suspicions, Brian made up a story about having a date that night back in the Valley. “That way it wouldn’t seem like I was just trying to get out of something,” he says. Jesse agreed to let them take the van, a concession that ended their role in the crime but not their liability. As one of the abductors, Will was legally responsible for Nick’s fate, even if he had no idea what would later happen to him; a plea bargain is being negotiated. Brian, only tacitly involved, was given a grant of immunity, one of ten that prosecutors would hand out in order to piece together events.
Jesse eventually took off, too, though his phone card was used later that night to call Ricky’s house, presumably to check on Nick. Freed of his duct tape, Nick was relaxed, maybe even a little tickled to be hanging with his brother’s older crowd. He and Rugge took bong hits, sipped Tanqueray gin, and played a James Bond 007 video game, Nick’s favorite. His computer screen name was remag—gamer spelled backward. “He was the best,” says Jeff Markowitz, trying to envision his son at ease. “I’m sure he was beating the pants off every one of those guys.”
At the end of the night, Rugge took Nick to his father’s place, about a mile away. Barron Rugge manages a biological science greenhouse at UC Santa Barbara. His wife is active in her church, playing guitar and singing hymns on a Christian radio program. They both saw Nick but never questioned why he was spending the night in their home.
The next day, Monday, August 7, brought a new parade of witnesses. Two of them were girls, Natasha Adams-Young, 17, and Kelly Carpenter, 16. They had been hanging out that summer with a 17-year-old boy named Graham Pressley, who was dealing dope for the crew in Santa Barbara. Now they were all at Rugge’s house, along with Nick, watching TV, smoking pot, grabbing food from the fridge. “Like everyone was really friendly and the atmosphere wasn’t tense at all,” Natasha says. “It was mostly light and like fun.” She took an interest in Nick. He lied, telling her he was 17, too. After a while they all jumped in Natasha’s car and drove to her house. She had learned by then that Nick was not in Santa Barbara by choice. “He told me that it was okay because he was doing it for his brother, and that as long as his brother was okay, he was okay,” Natasha says. “He was going along with it.” He had a scrape on his arm from the beating, and she brought him rubbing alcohol and ointment. Rugge took off a little bit later, leaving Nick alone with Natasha, Kelly, and Graham—the only time that none of the original kidnappers was present.
It could be argued that the kidnapping had in fact ended. By every indication, Nick was free to leave. “Frankly, in hindsight, all of us wish and hope he had done something different and just walked away,” says Santa Barbara County senior deputy district attorney Ron Zonen, who is prosecuting each of the defendants. He contends, however, that in Nick’s mind he was still a hostage. “Being passive,” Zonen says, “does not amount to consent.”
When Natasha drove everyone back to Rugge’s house later that day, essentially returning Nick to his captors, Jesse James Hollywood was waiting. He had introduced yet another person into the mix—a petite party girl named Michele Lasher, who was baring midriff and sitting in his lap. She lived with her parents in a gated community in Calabasas and taught children’s gymnastics in Woodland Hills. She also had JESSE JAMES tattooed just above her butt. During the investigation police would have doubts about whether Jesse and Michele were actually there that day; they were never spotted in Santa Barbara again. But Natasha and Kelly were adamant. How could they be so sure? Neither could stop talking about Michele’s boob job, reportedly paid for by Jesse. “Very lovely,” says Kelly, “but a little unreal.”
On Tuesday, August 8—his third day in Santa Barbara—Nick was still at the Rugges’. Of all the people who had seen him, only Natasha seemed to sense that something was wrong or that someone should speak up. She went to her mother, a criminal defense attorney. Natasha left out the names and addresses but explained that she knew of a boy who might be in trouble. Her mother urged her to call the police. Before sounding the alarm, Natasha wanted to be sure that Nick was really in danger. She went to see Graham and asked him to go for a walk in the park. Graham told her not to worry, that Nick would be fine. But he also told her to keep quiet or else they might all end up dead—“because Jesse Hollywood was quote-unquote crazy.” Natasha then went to see Rugge. “He looked me in the eye and he swore to me that he was going to take Nick home,” she says. Rugge told Nick the same thing, suggesting that he might give him some cash for a bus or a train that evening, but he wanted some assurance: “All I can say is there better not be a policeman coming at my door the next day.”
To celebrate Nick’s imminent release his keepers decided to rent a motel room and have a pool party. Needing a ride, Graham called his mother, a real estate appraiser. She was on her way to a 5:30 P.M. yoga class but agreed to swing by and pick everyone up. When they got in the car, Graham introduced Nick: “He is staying with Jesse for a few days.” Christina Pressley turned to the backseat to get a good look. She was worried about her son’s choice of friends, enough so that she had taken Rugge out to lunch a few months earlier, “because he had tattoos on him and my husband and I were concerned about the influence, because our son was coming out of his own rough time.” She knew that Graham smoked pot—though she had yet to learn that he was selling it—and she was in the habit of checking for warning signs. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “Nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Pressley,” Nick said. “Thanks for the ride.”
She dropped them off near the Lemon Tree Inn, a mid-range motel on State Street, a good ways up from the tourist strip. For several hours they smoked dope and drank rum and Cokes. Nick even went swimming. The question of escape came up again. “I’m going home,” Nick insisted. “Why would I complicate it?”
For three days the Markowitzes had been in a panic, driving the streets of West Hills, tacking up homemade posters, tracking down every friend they could think of. On the third day they formally reported Nick missing to the LAPD. They remembered how, just six months earlier, he had gotten lost riding his bike and had called them in desperation. “He was so relieved to have made it home,” his mother says. “He didn’t even know where he was around our own neighborhood.” She used to sleep on the side of the bed closest to the door so that she could get to Nick’s room faster in the event of an earthquake. Now she switched to the side of the bed closest to the wind
ow.
Jesse James Hollywood was also worried, afraid to hold on to Nick and afraid to let Nick go. On that same Tuesday, about the time the others were planning their trip to the Lemon Tree, Jesse went to visit his lawyer. Stephen Hogg had been a friend of the Hollywood family for nearly twenty years. He had already represented Jesse on two previous criminal charges, resisting arrest and being a minor in possession of alcohol. While smoking a cigarette on the back patio of Hogg’s Simi Valley home, Jesse revealed that some friends were holding a boy hostage. When prosecutors tried to question Hogg about their conversation, he initially refused, citing attorney-client privilege. A judge later ordered him to testify.
“What do I do?” Jesse asked.
“You got to go to the police,” Hogg told him.
“I can’t.”
“Jesse, you have got to.”
Jesse asked what kind of trouble his friends might be in.
“If they ask for ransom,” Hogg said, “they can get life.”
Jesse bolted from the backyard.
Hogg grew worried and began paging him. Jesse never called back. Within an hour, though, Jack Hollywood called Hogg. He was in Big Sur with his estranged wife, Laurie, spending a few days at the Ventana Inn & Spa. Hogg explained the problem. “Get ahold of Jesse,” his father said, “and sit on him for me.”
Jack Hollywood also asked Hogg to track down John Roberts, another longtime family friend. Roberts was a 68-year-old retired wise guy with a checkered past in Chicago. He also happened to be the owner of the cargo van that had been used in Nick’s abduction. “I’m going to go out and find where the child is, and I’m going to do my Chicago act in front of these twenty-year-old boys,” he concluded after speaking with Hogg. He would give the victim some money to keep his mouth shut. “That’s old-fashioned 1950s—you know what I’m trying to say?—it’s old-fashioned gangster talk.” Hogg continued to page Jesse. Before he checked out of the Ventana, Jack Hollywood made a flurry of calls: to Jesse’s pager, to Jesse’s cell phone, to Jesse’s girlfriend, to Roberts, to Hogg again. The one call that none of them made was to the police.
Jesse had heard enough. He went to see Ryan Hoyt and asked him if he wanted to erase his debt. “He said there was a mess that needed to be cleaned up,” Ryan says. “He said I needed to go take care of somebody.” Ryan is tall and lanky, with dark, slicked-back hair, a heavy brow, and droopy, slightly flushed cheeks. He was the gang’s whipping boy—“the quote-unquote lame guy,” his attorney says—a high school dropout who tried to join the navy but failed the drug test. His mother has battled mental illness and alcoholism most of her life. His father, a construction worker, allegedly beat her. His older sister is a heroin addict. She once dated Ben Markowitz. His younger brother is doing twelve years for armed robbery. As a teenager Ryan went searching for a family and found it among the Hollywoods. He baby-sat Jesse’s younger brother. He helped Jesse’s mom clean house. When Jesse bought his own place, Ryan was there every day, getting high, trying to please. He claims that his debt to Jesse was down to $200 by the time of the abduction. If a week were to go by without payment, though, Jesse would add another $100 in interest to the tab. “That’s pretty brutal, I know,” Ryan says. But falling from Jesse’s favor was an option Ryan could not afford. “Imagine how he would treat me if I had told him to just—excuse my language—fuck off.”
Ryan’s twenty-first birthday was two days away. To be given the opportunity to clear his debt before that milestone was a better present than he could have hoped for. Not only would he be free of Jesse’s taunting, but he would be moving up in the hierarchy, having been entrusted with an assignment far weightier than beer cans and dog poop. “This could be the change in his lifestyle he was looking for,” says Zonen, the prosecutor. “This had a certain feel to it that pleased him.”
Jesse gave Ryan a duffel bag. Inside was an assault pistol known as a TEC-DC9, a model whose role in rampages, including the Columbine shooting, has led to numerous lawsuits and legislation. This one had been modified into a fully automatic machine gun capable of spraying twelve rounds a second. About 8:30 P.M. Jesse’s phone card was used to make a call to the Lemon Tree. With Ryan on his way, “the thing with Nick is being taken care of,” Jesse explained to another friend. His final task involved Michele. She was turning 20 this day. Jesse took her to the Outback Steakhouse in Northridge. It would keep her happy and help with his alibi. Dinner came to $108.98. He put it on his American Express card.
A couple hours later, up at the Lemon Tree, the party was coming to an end. “I’m sorry, ladies, I don’t mean to be rude, but you have to leave,” Rugge announced shortly before 11:00 P.M. “Someone is going to come and pick up Nick.” On the way there, Ryan got lost and had to call for directions. When he arrived, Nick was alone with Rugge and Graham. Up to that point Graham’s role had been minimal; Ryan had never even met him before. Now he guided Ryan out Highway 154, up through the San Marcos Pass, to West Camino Cielo, a single-lane road that winds along the crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains. It is a fifteen-mile drive, spectacular by day, precarious at night. They pulled over and began hiking through the brush. After a hundred yards or so they came upon a boulder with a large gap in its center, known to Santa Barbara teenagers as Lizard’s Mouth. Graham began digging with a shovel. He would later tell police that Ryan was aiming the TEC-DC9 at him, saying, “You’ll dig if you know what’s good for you.” Ryan denies ever threatening Graham: “I didn’t have to.” The ground was dense and rocky. The grave was only a foot or two deep.
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.