by Otto Penzler
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?”
Unlike Jesse, who flouted the taboos of the suburbs, his dad knew how to blend into West Hills. At one point he opened a baseball-card shop. At another he ran a car-wholesaling business, advertising in Jesse’s Little League yearbooks. His passion for the sport puts a new twist on the old Yogi Berra quip, a saying featured on the West Hills baseball website: “Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the street.” The case against Jack Hollywood has yet to be proved, but prosecutors and detectives believe it will eventually explain everything about Jesse—why he was able to manipulate his cohorts so effectively and, more important, how he has managed to survive so long on the lam. They believe that his father knows where Jesse is hiding and is using his own underworld connections to keep him there. In the beginning Jesse did what most novice fugitives do, visiting familiar people and places, flashing cash, discussing the crime. Once he returned to West Hills, though, he vanished.
“That’s Jack Hollywood’s personality taking control,” Chief Deputy Correll says. “If he had not taken control, Jesse would be in jail right now.”
In the time that Jesse James Hollywood has been missing, Jeff and Susan Markowitz have transformed their home into a shrine. The relics of Nick’s life are everywhere: baby handprints, stuffed animals, the decoration from his first birthday cake—and his second and third and fourth and fifth—a karate robe, the cast from a broken right foot, an ornamental egg filled with soil from his grave. Susan has tried to console herself by writing poems, their titles blunt and raw: “Denial,” “Fading,” “Drifting,” “What Day Is This?” The screensaver on her computer is a picture of Nick’s marble headstone. Her e-mail address is aching4nick.
Evidence of Ben’s life is scarcer. Four months after the murder he was arrested on a pair of armed robbery warrants. The cases were weak—one victim was a druggie; the other, a reputed prostitute, accompanied him to a strip joint and a cheap motel—but Ben still drew a sixteen-month prison term. Susan could not forgive his lack of repentance. “He’s rubbing his brother’s name in the dirt,” she says.
When Susan talks, she seems to be floating. She wants to die.
Inside, she says, she already has. Twice she has been hospitalized, after overdosing on a combination of sleeping pills and champagne. Instead of finding peace she managed only to rack up $20,000 in medical bills. She made it through the first trial by taking Nick’s leather jacket to court, clutching it as his final hours were relived. She has vowed to stay alive long enough to see that all of his accused killers are brought to justice—and that includes Jesse James Hollywood, if and when he is captured. She does not know how long that will be. But she knows it will fulfill her last obligation as a mother.
That name. It was almost too good to be true. I would hesitate to call it a predictor of destiny. On the other hand, when you christen your son Jesse James Hollywood, the chances of him growing up to be a certified public accountant seem rather slim. In reporting this story, one of my first missions was to visit the Los Angeles county registrar-recorders office. I wanted to view his birth certificate. I had to know whether that whole trifurcated business—a name so much greater than the sum of its parts—was genuine, not a nickname, a gang name, a stage name, or some other self-mythologizing moniker. To be fair, the Hollywood part was unavoidable; it is the family appellation. The Jesse part (and here I must admit to some bias) is a perfectly fine Old Testament echo. But to deliberately sandwich them around James—to brand a newborn with such a theatrically infamous identity—now that made me wonder: What the hell were his parents thinking?
Although this article was ostensibly about a group of bored middle-class young people in the San Fernando Valley and their murderous exploits, it was at its heart about parents. Parents who offered too little guidance or the wrong kind of guidance, floating in and out of their children’s lives like ghosts. It would be foolish to say that Jesse James Hollywood would have followed the straight and narrow if his folks had just called him Mortimer. But there is no question that bearing all three of those names made him an especially attractive subject for a Los Angeles Magazine crime story. We put him on the cover of our February 2002 issue. “WANTED,” the headline read, “JESSE JAMES HOLLYWOOD.” True to his name, he remains on the run.
MY UNDERTAKER, MY PIMP
JAY KIRK
For a year I worked in an office where I spoke to dying people on the telephone every day. The office was that of a funeral-consumer watchdog, which meant that we kept an eye on the funeral industry and helped the imminently bereaved and imminently deceased to make affordable funeral plans. Above my desk I kept an index card with a Faulkner quotation, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” On a particularly bad day I scratched out the last word and changed it to “nothing.”
Because I am a person who has obsessively meditated on his own death since the age of 5, my friends and family thought it uncanny, if not alarming, that I had taken the job. When I was 6 my parents were worried enough that my father, a minister, took me to funerals, thinking (reasonably) that my trouble was all in my mind and that a swift dose of reality might cure me. What my father did not understand was that no matter how assuringly he winked at me over the bowed heads, death is ultimately a problem of the imagination. The funerals only gave mine dark fodder.
As did, inevitably, the job that put me on the phone with death every day. When I found myself flirting with a terminally ill 22-year-old girl, I knew it was time to “move on.” On my last day, my coworkers gave me a cardboard coffin, which they had all signed, like a giant crematable birthday card. I absconded with two numbers: the girl’s (I wanted to meet her in person—to sleep with a dying girl, I think—and from our conversations it seemed mutual, but it never happened, I never called, and then she died) and that of an Oregon undertaker who, after some controversy with his mortuary board, had fled the state and open
ed a brothel. The man’s name is Mack Moore, and the brothel, in Beatty, Nevada, is called Angel’s Ladies. Because this man had made what I saw as the happy leap from Thanatos to Eros, I knew that I had to seek him out. He was older than I expected—71—but when he shook my hand, in the driveway of his Las Vegas mansion, what struck me were the lustrous strawberry-blond curls that fell like a halo around his ears.
The eponymous Angel, Mack’s wife, helped Mack and me pack my trunk with whorehouse provisions—laundry detergent, toilet paper, tubs of mayonnaise, hot cocoa—before we set out on the 120-mile drive to Beatty. Angel stayed behind to tidy up, since the police had returned their confiscated belongings just a week earlier and the house was still a disaster. I was soon to hear much about the night that Angel had been held hostage in her living room while the cops looked for evidence of illegal “outcalls.”
The elderly pimp shuttles back and forth between his Vegas mansion and the desert brothel a few times a week. The lonesome-ness of the drive is total and exhilarating: a haunting landscape of gray-green sagebrush broken here and there by a streak of martian red, a rumpled mountain range, a demonic cactus. In almost two hours the only blips of civilization are the town of Amargosa Valley (Mack points out and curses the Cherry Patch 2 bordello, a rival), a New Age temple, and the south entrance to the Nevada Test Site.
Beatty, in Nye County, is the last town to survive from among the many that popped up during the 1904 Rhyolite gold rush. Now Rhyolite, once the fourth largest city in Nevada, is a ghost town, and Beatty is the place where you had better stop to buy gas. The Bullfrog Mine, the major employer until central banks across Europe released large parts of their gold reserves into the market, shut down in 1998 and is now down to a skeleton crew doing mop-up; Beatty’s population has dwindled severely as a result. The economy is sporadic, and stability is as fleeting as it was for the nomadic Shoshone, who summered on the oasis. Other jobs are scarce to nonexistent. Even the Nevada Test Site, despite being literally just over the hill, provides only a handful of jobs to the few willing to commute—the nearest gates are 103 miles north and 54 miles south. The Yucca Mountain Project, a planned federal graveyard for 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive decay, offers possible hope for the future, but it’s less than certain, and even if it flies, it won’t guarantee jobs for Beatty. For now, the town survives on tourism: Death Valley hikers, truckers, gamblers, and men visiting Angel’s Ladies.