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JESSE JAMES HOLLYWOOD
No doubt about one thing, Jesse James Hollywood had a very memorable name. His name not only conjured up an image of the famous nineteenth-century outlaw but Tinseltown and the film industry as well. Yet, according to his grandmother Virginia Hollywood, Jesse was not named for the famous outlaw, but rather for an uncle named Jesse James, who had passed away. And Hollywood was Jesse’s real surname and not some movieland conceit.
Almost everyone who would talk about Jesse James Hollywood recalled what a great athlete he was as a boy, especially in baseball. Jesse’s father, Jack, was a coach in the Westhills Baseball League, where a lot of the neighborhood boys played, including, at various times, Ben Markowitz, Jesse Hollywood, William Skidmore and Jesse Rugge. Robin Leduc remembered Jesse Hollywood playing on a team with her son, Ray. She said, “He was a great little athlete. We lived for watching those boys play baseball.” Leduc and other parents spent time volunteering in the snack shack and rooting on their kids from the stands. Many of the boys were good at baseball, but Jesse Hollywood really stood out for his talent.
Even though Jesse was short in stature, he had lots of energy, charisma and drive. Peter Gunny, who played baseball with Jesse, recalled, “He was a real popular kid. Everyone knew him and wanted to be friends with him.” And as far as his talent went, Jesse’s old coach at El Camino Real High School, in Woodland Hills, remembered him as being “agile and focused, a good player who took his sport seriously.”
Even though Jesse was a great baseball player, he also had a temper and an attitude. He had a run-in with a teacher at El Camino Real High School in his sophomore year, cursed out the teacher and was expelled. Principal Ron Bauer later said, “It was a fairly serious incident.” A teacher added, “Let’s just say his behavior was very extreme and out of line.”
In 1992, Jesse and his family moved to the Colorado Springs area of Colorado, where his dad managed a sports bar. While in the area, Jesse continued playing baseball, and made friends easily, as usual. One of his friends was Chas Saulsbury, who regarded Jesse Hollywood as a very good baseball player. Chas also related one more thing, “Jesse, by the age of fourteen, was already smoking dope.”
Jesse Hollywood’s friend, William Jacques, who also lived in the area, would agree with this statement later. William said, “I first met Jesse when he was fourteen years old. He sold marijuana even then.”
Despite his yen for marijuana, Jesse remained an excellent ballplayer. In fact, Richard Dispenza, his baseball coach, became his godfather. Dispenza liked Jesse, despite the boy’s sometimes volatile temper, and he had a real respect for Jesse’s talent on the baseball diamond. Dispenza, in his own right, was well regarded, not only for helping kids around the baseball field, but in the community as well.
By 1996, the Hollywood family was back in southern California, and Jesse began attending Calabasas High School. He was so good a player that even though he was so young, he played on the varsity team—a team that won the championship that year. Coach Rick Nathanson remembered, “Jesse had an uncanny knack for getting on base.”
The following year it seemed that Jesse Hollywood would only get better in baseball, but in a preseason accident, he injured his back and leg and didn’t get on the team. Nathanson recalled, “I think he got a little depressed because he’d been looking forward to a very competitive season.”
With his baseball dreams shattered, Jesse Hollywood turned in a very different direction—one of fast cars, cute girls and fast times. Eventually one girl from high school would become Jesse James Hollywood’s girlfriend. Her name was Michelle Lasher, and her life would become inextricably tied to later events in his life stemming from the rash kidnapping of Nick Markowitz on August 6, 2000.
Michelle was a short girl, barely five feet tall, with luxuriant dark hair and exotic dark eyes. Her family was Jewish, which was unexpected, since Jesse Hollywood was starting to hang around white guys with racist attitudes. These attitudes did not seem to be a part of Jesse’s makeup, and he often went over to the Lasher home on Jewish holidays and celebrated with them, as Michelle did with his family at Christmas and Easter.
Michelle later said, “He was respectful of me. He didn’t say anything bad about Jewish people.” Michelle also related later that she and Jesse started dating in high school, and when she graduated, she took the summer off and went to Europe. When she came back to the United States, she moved in with Jesse Hollywood. By this point, even though he was only eighteen years old, he had started living in his own home in Reseda, on Elkwood Avenue.
Even though Jesse was listed as graduating from Calabasas High in 1998, the fact was he had been suspended from school the week before graduation. Administrators at the school would later not say why. Jesse did some work laying hardwood floors, but that was definitely not his main occupation as the months progressed.
Jesse was not only smoking marijuana, but he had begun dealing it as well, using his buddies as distributors. Among these friends were his old baseball buddies Ryan Hoyt, William Skidmore and Jesse Rugge. By the time Jesse Hollywood was nineteen years old, he bought a three-bedroom house on Cohasset Street in the San Fernando Valley. According to court records, he took out a $164,000 first mortgage for a $205,000 house, which, in essence, meant he paid $41,000 up front toward the purchase. This was a large amount for someone who had no full-time job and was only nineteen years old. Jesse did work part-time for Lee Esh as a carpenter, helping finish floors, but that did not garner him a huge amount of money. Even Jesse’s neighbors suspected that Jesse and his buddies were dealing drugs. One person who later claimed never to have seen Jesse actually dealing drugs was his girlfriend, Michelle Lasher. When asked this by police, a grand jury and at several trials, she was consistent in her statements—if Jesse did deal drugs, he never did it in her presence.
One neighbor, however, later told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “Everybody knew it was drugs. I mean, all the nice cars. He didn’t really go to work or nothing. It was kind of—run in for a second, and drive off.” Other neighbors spoke of luxury cars always stopping by Jesse’s house, and Jesse’s own black Mercedes and a blue tricked-out Honda in the driveway. It was fairly obvious to most of the neighbors that something fishy was going on—but they didn’t pry into what the young man was up to, other than to take note that a lot of young people were always hanging around Jesse Hollywood’s house, and people were coming to his door at all hours of the day and night.
Lee Esh later told a reporter that he knew that Jesse and his buddies were smoking dope, but he didn’t know that they were also selling it. Esh recalled, “As far as I was concerned with these kids, they all smoked pot. I basically didn’t see a problem. I would’ve trusted Jesse to give my kids a ride to the park. I thought he was a responsible kid.”
Responsible or not, Jesse and his buddies were always hanging out around his house and in the yard. One neighbor recalled Jesse and his pals in the front yard, wearing tank tops, smoking cigarettes, while Jesse’s two pit bulls scampered around in the backyard. And the neighbors were also aware of the parties that took place at Jesse James Hollywood’s house—most of these were loud and boisterous, and full of young people.
Jesse had a big-screen TV in the living room and a wave-shaped bubble lamp. The kitchen had a built-in microwave and there was a gas barbecue grill on the patio. And Jesse’s 1995 Honda Accord DX Coupe was something to behold. He eventually got an article about it, along with photos, in a European car magazine. The car had fluorescent lights, hydraulic switches, Niche Gefell rims and an impressive sound system. Jesse’s car alone could make heads turn.
Just what one of the parties at Jesse’s house was like was captured on videotape by Ryan Hoyt. Hoyt pointed the camera at Jesse, who held a Heineken beer in one hand and smoked dope from a long yellow bong. Jesse wore baggy jeans, a blue Dodgers cap turned backward, and a T-shirt from Serial Killer Inc. On the front of the T-shirt was a scene from the movie Heat, Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer making a getaway in a shoot-out from a bank heist. One word was etched on the T-shirt: money.
Rap music was thumping in the background as Jesse began speaking to the camera: “One time I was walking down the street, cuz. Some nigga hit me up, cuz. I’m like, ‘What up, cuz?’ Nigga straight ran my ass over! That’s why I’m a little fucked-up right now, cuz.” Then he spoke straight to Ryan and said, “Get the camera away from me, cuz! Before I have to bust yo’ lip, cuz.”
A short time later, Ryan Hoyt’s voice can be heard asking Jesse, “You been drinking tonight?” as if Hoyt were a policeman.
Jesse yelled back, “Fuck the police!”
Ryan continued to follow Jesse around with the camera, and began singing lines from the television reality show, Cops.
Things soon took a turn for the worse, as far as Hoyt was concerned. Jesse took the video camera away from Hoyt and started mocking him. Jesse asked him, “Now, how much money you got in your bank?” He was asking because Ryan Hoyt owed him $1,200 for dope that Hoyt hadn’t sold, but rather had smoked himself.
Hoyt answered, “Enough to pay you some money.”
Jesse asked, “What’s gonna be there tomorrow, Hoyt? I’m serious, man! I can see it’s gonna be like nothing!”
“It’s not gonna be nothing!”Hoyt responded.
“What’s it gonna be then? Just tell me!”
In fact, it was going to be nothing. By now, Ryan Hoyt was virtually Jesse James Hollywood’s indentured servant. To help pay off his dope debt, Jesse made Ryan come over to the house every day to clean the house, do garden work, paint and clean up after the pit bulls, Dublin and Brooklyn. It was laborious and demeaning work, and Jesse and his friends often mocked Hoyt as he went about his chores. They called him “Hoytie, asshole, faggot,” and a lot worse. Sometimes they referred to Hoyt as Hollywood’s “bitch.”
A man who got to know Jesse James Hollywood very well later was screenwriter Michael Mehas, and he told the Ventura County Reporter, “He (Jesse) was generous in a controlling kind of way. He would give you what he wanted you to have and kind of bring you in, and it was a kind of controlling mechanism. These guys had nothing better in their lives to do. They didn’t have ambition, they weren’t incredibly intelligent, so they just hung around Jesse.”
In fact, Ryan Hoyt was very much less than intelligent—and tests later would prove that he had a low IQ. In the years to come, Jesse James Hollywood’s fate would become intertwined with that of Ryan Hoyt more than he might have wished. If Hoyt was his “bitch,” as many of Jesse’s other friends declared, it was this unhealthy relationship of master and servant that would in many ways be Jesse James Hollywood’s downfall.
Victoria Hoyt, Ryan’s mother, left a vivid account of what young Ryan’s life was like. She recalled, “I met Jim Hoyt, Ryan’s father, when I was fifteen years old. Jim is approximately ten years older than me. We moved in together when I was seventeen years old, and a month later he began physically abusing me. One day we were supposed to go to Disneyland with his family, and I was not able to take the day off work. This upset Jim and he threw me against a wall and beat and pounded on me with his hands. Several neighbors saw what was happening and did not intervene. I had black eyes and bruises all over my body. The woman living in the front unit helped me inside and gave me a sedative. We did not call the police.
“Jim Hoyt was also verbally abusive. He would often say, ‘Fuck you, you worthless piece of shit!’ to me and the kids. Jim would get angry easily and would yell and fly off the handle for no apparent reason.
“We married on June 4, 1977, when I was nineteen years old. I was pregnant with Kristina at the wedding. Kristina’s biological father was not Jim Hoyt. My mother is the only one who knew that Jim was not Kristina’s father. When I was six months pregnant with Kristina, I was serving dinner and dropped a baked potato on the floor. As I bent over to get it, Jim kicked me in the stomach and slammed my head against the wall. The day before Kristina was born, Jim smacked me and threw me on the bed.
“There was an incident when I was eight months pregnant with Ryan. I was in the driveway and arguing with Jim. Suddenly he kicked me in the lower stomach/groin area, pulled my hair and threw me against the car. I then fell on my back. My father came running and attempted to get Jim off of me. Jim did not come home for a week after that. I had cramps and pains in my stomach. I was afraid to go to the hospital because I did not want to get Jim into trouble and upset him anymore, so I rested at home until the pains stopped. Ryan was born a few weeks later.
“When Ryan was approximately four months old, I was carrying him up the aisle of a home improvement store. I tripped over a piece of fishing line that was strung across the aisle and dropped Ryan on his head. We took him to Tarzana Medical Center, where a doctor told me that he was fine. Several months later I was with Ryan at the beach. He had a slight ear infection. Later that night he had a high fever and went into convulsions. We called 911 and he was taken to the hospital.
“At the age of two, Ryan had a viral infection. He was vomiting and had diarrhea and could not keep anything in his system for weeks. I took him to the doctor and he was admitted to the hospital for a week. He had to get a spinal tap. The doctor thought it was a viral infection, possibly meningitis or pertussis. Ryan lost fifteen pounds, but he was never tested for neurological damage.
“These beatings and abuse on me happened at least once a week. The kids would be there to see and hear it. Jim then began abusing the kids. He would yell at them horribly and tell them how worthless they were and would smack them. Jim is an alcoholic and would drink in front of the kids and would often smoke marijuana in the house. So I would often take Ryan and the kids to the park, to the beach, anywhere just to get them out of the house and away from Jim. We would be at my mother’s house a lot.
“I was afraid what Jim would do if I divorced him. I was not working and had no money. He filed for divorce first and just told me one day, ‘You’re not taking the kids, so get out or I’ll run you over with my car!’ I believed him and walked out, leaving my kids at the door crying and begging me not to leave them. I walked outside and Jim pushed me to the ground and held a pipe wrench over my head, threatening to bash my head in. Ryan and the kids watched this. I left Ryan, Kristina and Jonathon with him.
“I moved in with my parents, and Jim had the kids. Shortly after, Jim began dating Robin Deschaine, and they were married. They had a son, Ryan’s half brother Austin. Kristina told me that Jim would come into her room in the middle of the night and would hit her legs for no reason while she was sleeping. She would pretend that she was still sleeping and did not wake up so he would stop and leave her alone.
“When Jonathon was around seven years old, he asked me to take him to school so that he could report Jim for hitting him. Ryan was very protective of Jonathon and Kristina and would often take the blame for things he did not do. Ryan often took the beating for them.
“Kristina was twelve or thirteen years old when she found out that Jim Hoyt was not her biological father. Up until this point, no one knew, including Ryan. This devastated Kristina and she began running away from home all of the time. She turned to drugs and prostitution to survive. She would often be seen in front of a McDonald’s in Hollywood, panhandling. Kristina attempted suicide several times. This devastated Ryan.
“When Ryan was fourteen years old, Jim separated from Robin and moved to Topanga Canyon, with Ryan and Jonathon. Things were going well for the three of them during this time, and Ryan seemed to be doing well. However, Jim eventually reconciled with Robin, and things were then worse than ever.
“Ryan began spending more and more time at the home of my mother, Carol Stendel. I would meet them there, and this was our second home. He was fed, clothed and supervised there. He went there almost every day. During this time I had substance abuse problems. I never spent time with Ryan while I was intoxicated. Unfortunately, this sometimes meant he would not see me at all. I recall one Christmas when Ryan, Kristina and Jonathon were at my mother’s house for the day. I was supposed to come over and spend the day with them. I didn’t show up or call because I was intoxicated.”
Of all the friends hanging around at Jesse James Hollywood’s house, Ryan Hoyt had endured the most chaotic childhood. The rest had led fairly normal suburban lives—up to a point. Despite all the drug activity going on at Jesse Hollywood’s house, he was never arrested for using or dealing. Jesse Hollywood was arrested for minor disturbances, such as being underage and possessing alcohol, and on another occasion for resisting arrest while being disorderly. His buddies also had a few scrapes with the law, but nothing major. William Skidmore was arrested twice for being under the influence of a controlled substance, and once for resisting arrest. Jesse Rugge had been arrested for carrying a concealed knife at school, and in the year 2000, for driving under the influence. Ryan Hoyt, unlike the others, had no arrests at all.
Ben Markowitz, the toughest of Jesse Hollywood’s friends, later had a take on all the other guys in Hollywood’s orbit. Ben said, “As far as I was concerned, they were just a bunch of punks that couldn’t fight worth a lick.” Ben especially had an opinion about William Skidmore, and it wasn’t very flattering. He said, “He was a crackhead. He was just the type of person, whoever he’s hanging out with right at the moment, he’s friends with. If all of his friends decide to jump somebody, he’s going to jump in. Then if he sees the guy the next day, when he’s not with his friends, he’s going to try and patch things up.”
Court documents would allege later that Jesse James Hollywood was getting the marijuana from his father, and that it came from British Columbia in Canada—a potent strain known as “BC Bud.” Jack Hollywood, however, would deny ever distributing marijuana to Jesse, and said that Jesse got it elsewhere. BC Bud was considered to be top-quality marijuana by users, and generally cost more than lower-grade pot. And British Columbia would become an important factor in the years to come in Jesse’s life.
Ben Markowitz eventually had problems with money owed to Jesse Hollywood, as Ryan Hoyt had. Ben, however, was not the type to be turned into an indentured servant or mocked, and this debt would turn into a deadly feud with an unexpected victim—Ben’s half brother, Nick.