4
FALLING-OUT
There are various versions of what went wrong between Jesse James Hollywood and Ben Markowitz, but the one as reliable as any comes from Ben. He said later, “Someone owed Jesse money, and I knew the person, and instead of Jesse going over there and doing something to harm him, I said, ‘I know him, let me take care of it.’ And I went over there (San Diego) and he didn’t have the two thousand that he owed Jesse, so he gave me two hundred E pills (Ecstasy), which is about what it’s worth when you buy a lot of it. It’s ten dollars a pill. And I sold some of it, and it ended up not being good. It was fake. So I still ended up owing Jesse the money, because I took it upon myself to take it. I was the one that wanted to take it into my own hands to try and make money off of it.”
Ben’s original plan had been to sell the Ecstasy at raves, where he could earn $20 for every pill that had cost him $10. Even though Ben often owed Jesse money, he said he was “clean” in all debts, until the fiasco of the fake E pills.
According to one document, Ben eventually paid Jesse $600, and when Jesse demanded the rest of the money, Ben tossed him the remaining Ecstasy, which wasn’t good, and an additional $200. Furious at the shortfall, Jesse told Ben, “Go fuck yourself and pay me the money!”
Ben recalled saying, “I told him, ‘All right, whatever!’ and just kind of walked away.”
Jesse James Hollywood wasn’t about to take this lying down. It was as much a matter of pride as about the money. If he let Ben Markowitz slide on this, he would lose face with the others. Jesse apparently used William Skidmore as a go-between, making Skidmore phone Ben in the middle of the night and harass him about the debt. At least that is what Skidmore said later. Ben, who had little respect for Skidmore, recalled, “I got a couple of phone calls from one of Jesse’s friends, William Skidmore. He’d call me late at night and say, ‘What’s going on? I thought we were friends. Why don’t we work this out?’ By then, I wasn’t friends with Jesse, or hanging out with him.” And Ben certainly wasn’t friends with Skidmore, whom he called a “punk.” Ben would say later that the phone calls were threatening in nature.
Things might have cooled off eventually, but Jesse just wouldn’t let the debt go, even though $1,200 was not a great deal of cash in the operations he ran. One night Jesse and his girlfriend, Michelle, went to a restaurant, BJ’s Microbrewery, where Ben’s girlfriend, Eliza Voita, worked as a waitress. They ran up a tab of $50, but instead of paying, Jesse skipped out without paying anything, telling Voita that Ben could pay the tab and take it off from what Ben owed him. In fact, in one version, according to Ben and others, Jesse Hollywood actually wrote this down on the bill for the meal and it stated that she could charge the meal to Ben.
This infuriated Ben, and he decided to up the ante. According to Ben, Jesse Hollywood had recently scammed an insurance company on his supposedly stolen Honda. The fact was, Jesse had sold his Honda Accord to a chop shop, and then reported it stolen to the AAA Insurance company for $36,000.
As Ben recalled, “Since Jesse did that to my girlfriend, I decided to go to his insurance company and tell them that he had his car stolen to get the insurance money. It was thirty-six thousand dollars. I was there when he had gone to get forms from the insurance company.” Because of his actions, Ben believed Jesse never saw a dime of the insurance money and that really made him furious.
Apparently, Ben told Jesse what he had done, but the feud did not stop there. Ben let Jesse know that he carried a gun around a lot. Ben related later that he knew that Jesse also had guns, including a semiautomatic rifle, a shotgun and a TEC-9 handgun. The TEC-9 was a semiautomatic, which Ben said that Jesse altered to make it fully automatic. “It was like in the movies,” Ben recalled. “Like you’d think an Uzi would look like.”
Through the spring and early summer months of 2000, the feud ratcheted up a notch when Ben phoned Jesse and left a message: “I know where you live, buddy!” From that point on, the messages—according to Jesse James Hollywood, his buddies and Michelle Lasher—became even more threatening.
Michelle said, “Ben left many threatening phone messages. On one of them he said that he was going to kill Jesse, his family and me.”
Jesse knew how “crazy” Ben could be when irritated. Jesse decided that it was becoming too dangerous to live in his house on Cohasset Street.
Jesse Hollywood borrowed a white van from a longtime family friend named John Roberts, and Jesse and his buddies started moving furniture out of the house to a storage locker across town. According to Michelle Lasher, she and Jesse were going to move into a house in Malibu and not tell anyone where they lived. “We just wanted to get away from the whole scene,” she said later.
The house on Cohasset Street was almost empty in the first week of August, when Ben decided to ante up once again. Ben went over to Jesse’s house and broke out several windows with a pipe or baseball bat. According to Skidmore, he and Jesse were sleeping on the floor near the windows when the attack occurred, shattering glass onto their sleeping bags.
They didn’t know at the time who had done it, and their first thoughts were that it was some local gang members who had broken the windows. But it soon became evident who the assailant was. Ben left a message on Jesse Hollywood’s answering machine saying, “This is Li’l Shooter.” (That was Ben’s nickname.) He let it be known that he was the one who had broken the windows, and he was still after Jesse Hollywood.
The broken windows really set Jesse Hollywood off. According to some sources, he went to Santa Barbara on August 5, 2000, to recruit Jesse Rugge, who was now living with his father and stepmother there, to help in exacting revenge upon Ben. Rugge would have a different take on why Jesse Hollywood came there that day, saying that it was only to make plans about Fiesta—but by the time Rugge was relating what had happened, he was in plenty of trouble and might not have been telling the whole truth about things.
Jesse Rugge noted, “Jesse Hollywood came up to Santa Barbara on the fifth, and Will Skidmore was with him. They had come up for Fiesta. Hollywood was ranting and raving about Ben Markowitz. Said that [Ben had] broken out his front windows and left a verbal voice mail on his pager. Jesse played that message for me.”
Rugge also gave a description of Jesse Hollywood at that moment. “If you could picture a five-foot-four man with an attitude! He was in the hallway, just pacing and saying, ‘Listen to it. Can you believe that fucking shit! Can you believe it!’ He was getting all ranted and raved. As I remember the message from Ben, it was ‘This is the beginning, bitch! This is just the beginning. This is Li’l Shooter. You’re fucking dead, you little midget! You’re fucking dead! I know where your family lives. And I know where you live!’”
One more person in Santa Barbara at the time, according to Rugge, was sixteen-year-old Kelly Carpenter. Rugge couldn’t remember for sure, but he thought that Kelly heard Hollywood ranting and raving about the message from Ben as well. Kelly would also relate later that she had seen Jesse Hollywood prior to August 6, and she had a very negative reaction about him. She thought he was sleazy and not someone that a person would want to be around.
Jesse Rugge would eventually deny that Hollywood recruited him to go back down to West Hills so that they could smash the windows at Ben Markowitz’s parents’ house. (However, Kelly Carpenter recalled that Rugge went there for that very reason.) Rugge related that they left Santa Barbara around 7:00 P.M. on August 5, just to go to Hollywood’s house to smoke dope and drink. Rugge said that the plans had changed about Fiesta, because their friend Brian Affronti was going to go with them on August 6. Rugge noted that when he got to Jesse Hollywood’s house, there was no furniture left inside, and he recalled, “He showed me the front windows, where they were axed out.”
On the morning of August 6, 2000, Jesse Rugge said that he, Hollywood and Skidmore got up fairly late, after a night of drinking and smoking dope; then they rolled up their sleeping bags and put them away. Rugge related that he heard Jesse Hollywood, who was on the phone to Brian Affronti, say, “Are you ready? All right. I’m coming to pick you up, late.” Hollywood was in the midst of still moving items out of his house to a storage unit, and he had John Roberts’s white utility van. There were some boxes and crates inside the van, and since Hollywood didn’t want to drive, he handed the van’s keys to Rugge.
Rugge later remembered very well the route they took that morning from Jesse Hollywood’s house. He said, “We came out of Cohasset Street, made a right on Woodlake, and came to a stop sign. We made a left on Saticoy and came up to a stop sign right there, at the corner of Platt where it meets Ingomar. Across the street was Taxco Trails Park.”
Rugge started the van forward again and Jesse Hollywood spotted a boy walking up the street. Rugge recalled, “Hollywood shouted, ‘That’s Ben Markowtiz’s brother! That’s Ben Markowitz’s brother! Pull over!’”
Rugge pulled over as instructed, about one car length in front of Nick, and as he did so, Jesse Hollywood jumped out of the passenger door and opened the side door so that Will Skidmore could get out. According to Rugge, Hollywood was shouting, “Let’s beat him up!”
Even though Pauline Mahoney thought she saw four young men beating up Nick on the sidewalk, it may have been only three or even just two. Rugge claimed emphatically later on that he never left the driver’s seat, but only watched Hollywood and Skidmore confront Nick. And Rugge would also claim that neither Hollywood nor Skidmore threw Nick into the van, but rather that Nick got in under his own power. Of course, if Nick had just been beaten up and ordered to get in by Hollywood, it wasn’t a matter of getting into the van because he wanted. It was because he was under severe duress.
Once Nick Markowitz and Skidmore were in the van, Jesse Rugge was so rattled that he stepped down on the gas pedal, and the van began moving forward. He later recalled, “I freaked out. I didn’t know what was going on, so I peeled away.” According to Rugge, it was Nick, not Skidmore, who said, “Hey, you left Hollywood back there!”
A very shaken Jesse Rugge put the van in reverse, backed up to where Hollywood was, and as Hollywood climbed in, he called Rugge a “fuckin’ idiot.” Once in the van, at least according to Rugge, Jesse Hollywood made him drive in a very peculiar direction. Rugge related, “Usually going to Affronti’s, we kept on going straight down Valley Circle and then onto March. But Hollywood made me drive by the Markowitz house. And right around there he laid into Nick. I mean, verbally. He started talking about the threats Ben had made to him. To his family. I guess he (Hollywood) knew about Jeff Markowitz having been an Olympic ringster (boxer) and he started talking shit. Hollywood said stuff like, ‘Your brother is a fucking piece of shit!’ And ‘Your dad’s a pussy!’ Skidmore and I were just looking at each other. Skidmore looked stunned, ‘like what the hell.’ I was scared.”
It was a fateful string of events that had led to Nick Markowitz being on that street at all on Sunday, August 6. On the day before he was beaten up and tossed into a van, Nick Markowitz had been having a rocky time with his parents. Jeff Markowitz recalled, “Saturday night, Nicholas went out with some friends to City Walk. City Walk is a place where they have restaurants, movie theaters and the like. Kids go there, it’s a hangout. Nick went up there with some friends and his curfew was midnight. He came home at eleven-thirty, and as he walked in the door, my wife and I, we were right there. I’m not sure why we were right there, but we were, and as soon as we saw him, we knew there was something wrong. You could see it in his face, his eyes were droopy, and I said, ‘What’s going on? Why are you home so early?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it didn’t go so well.’
“And as I turned, he had on a pair of baggy pants, with a large pocket in the back, and I noticed something bulging in the back of his pocket, and I said, ‘What’s in your pants pocket?’ And he kind of put his hand back there and said, ‘It’s nothing. Nothing, Dad.’
“My wife and I confronted him, because we wanted to know what was going on, and as we got closer, he pulled away and ran out of the house. And we figured here we go again. Another overnight trip. A runaway night again.
“Forty-five minutes later he came back, and he walked up the driveway, and Susan was there to meet him, and I met him inside the house. Susan was there to meet him with a hug and a kiss, and the first thing he said was ‘I hate it when you talk to me about smoking.’ Basically just to say to her it was just cigarettes in his back pocket, and that’s why he left.
“He came into the house and we sat down in the living room, and I could tell he was hungry. So we got him—well, he likes a bowl of cereal late in the evening, and he got a bowl of cereal. We started to talk and Susan said, ‘Why don’t we just wait until the morning?’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ I figured he’d be sleeping in.”
It was later determined that the bulge in Nick’s back pocket was not a pack of cigarettes, but rather a small pouch he carried, which often contained a pipe for his marijuana and Valium pills. Jeff surmised that Nick returned these items to his hillside hangout and then returned home, claiming that he’d only been carrying a cigarette pack in his back pocket.
Jeff continued, “I got up in the morning and did my usual Sunday-morning tennis match, came home, expecting Nick to be in bed asleep. Susan was downstairs making breakfast and I said, ‘Well, I guess we have a job ahead of us.’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ She was making breakfast, and I said, ‘Well, why don’t you go ahead and wake him up and bring him down.’ She answered, ‘I was up there about nine, because his grandmother called wanting to know a phone number, and he was pretty out of it.’ (In other words, very sleepy.) Then I said, ‘Well, why don’t you wake him up now.’
“She went back up there and she let out a profanity. He wasn’t in his room. The profanity was basically to say, ‘How could he leave again without telling me!’ Because we had a good conversation the night before, thinking we were going to get to the bottom of things. But he took off.
“I didn’t think anything of it at the time, because, like I said before, he’d taken off at times. And we also knew that he had taken something the night before and maybe he was going back out to recover it, or do something, but he figured he’d better get out while the getting was good.
“This was about eleven A.M. That’s when it started. That’s when hell started.”
Ironically, Nick passed his cousin and uncle that very morning as he walked home. His cousin Jennifer Markowitz was riding in her father’s vehicle that morning, just having been picked up by him after a workout at the gym. Jennifer spotted Nick walking near Taxco Trails Park, and had her dad pull over to where Nick was. Jennifer rolled down her window and asked if Nick wanted a ride home. Since he was only a few blocks away from his house, he said no. Jennifer and her dad drove off.
Jeff related later, “My brother Monty saw Nick walking across the street that morning. He figured Nick was just going home from a friend’s house. I wonder what would have happened if Nick had taken a ride home with them.”
From the moment Nick Markowitz was thrown into the van, his journey, and those of the others, would take a random, almost surrealistic course. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the odyssey, and if Jesse James Hollywood was the ringleader, he also seemed at a loss as to what to do with Nick once he had him. Since Hollywood and Skidmore and Rugge had been on their way to Fiesta Days in Santa Barbara, ostensibly after planning to smash out the windows at the Markowitz home, Jesse Hollywood had Rugge drive on in that direction.
As the van moved along the highway, Nick’s pager began to beep. It had been given to him the week before by his parents, with instructions from them that he was to respond to it immediately when it went off. If not, they would take it away. Jesse Hollywood ordered Nick not to answer it, but Nick’s mom kept punching in the number, and Hollywood eventually took the pager away from Nick.
Brian Affronti was scheduled to go with them to Fiesta Days, and he lived in Chatsworth on the northwestern side of the San Fernando Valley. When they arrived at Affronti’s residence, Hollywood walked up the driveway to his door and asked him if he was ready to go. Affronti said that he was and they walked down the hill to where Affronti could see the white van. He knew that Hollywood was using it to move some furniture from his house to a storage unit.
Rugge would later give an account of what was going on in the van while Hollywood was talking to Affronti. Rugge said, “Jesse Hollywood was up there about fifteen or twenty minutes. William and I kept looking at each other and shaking our heads. Nick talked to us a little, but didn’t really say too much. And when Affronti got down to the van, I saw he had a sack of pot. He had a giant bag of it. It was just rolled up. And he had duct tape.” Rugge did not like the advent of the duct tape being brought on the scene. It made everything seem more ominous. What was strange was that Rugge’s version about the duct tape coming from Affronti’s house was different than what several other people would recall about the next stage of the journey to Santa Barbara.
Jesse Hollywood got in and sat down in the passenger seat, while Affronti got in the back. He immediately recognized William Skidmore and Jesse Rugge, but he didn’t recognize the boy who was also in the van. At the time Affronti thought that the kid was just another friend of Hollywood’s, Rugge’s or Skidmore’s, who would be going to Fiesta in Santa Barbara.
They drove to William Skidmore’s residence in Simi Valley, because Skidmore was a diabetic and needed to take his daily injection of insulin. Rugge recalled on the way there that a pipe full of marijuana was lit up and passed around. Once at Skidmore’s residence, William ran into his house and it only took him about two minutes to do his task with the insulin.
Everything seemed to be just a normal day for Brian Affronti, but then on the ride to Santa Barbara, Hollywood turned around and suddenly lit into the boy. Hollywood said, “If your brother thinks he’s going to kill my family, he has another thing coming! Your brother is going to pay me my money right now. If you run, I’ll break your teeth!” Affronti was shocked by this confrontation. Up until that moment, he thought that the boy was just another one of Jesse’s friends.
Somewhere near Oxnard, on the 101 Freeway, traffic slowed down because of congestion, and Jesse Hollywood ranted at Nick once more. According to Rugge, Hollywood wanted Nick to give him all his personal possessions. Nick handed over a small address book, a wallet that contained $80, seven small Baggies of marijuana and some Valium pills. Hollywood also took Nick’s ring, which was an heirloom. According to Rugge, Hollywood said, “‘Give me the fucking ring, too!’ Nick didn’t want to take it off, and then Hollywood made him take it off.”
This upset Rugge, and it was the only time during the kidnapping or drive to Santa Barbara that he spoke up and objected to something that Hollywood did. Rugge said, “Jess, just give him back his ring, man.” Surprisingly, Hollywood did. And this ring would play an important factor in developments a week later.
Jesse Hollywood wanted Nick deposited at Jesse Rugge’s father’s house in Santa Barbara, but Rugge did not want to take him there. According to Rugge, he started trying to think of where else Nick could be taken, and he related later, “It just popped into my head to take him to a friend’s house, Ricky Hoeflinger, who lived on Modoc Road in Santa Barbara.”
Rugge used Jesse Hollywood’s cell phone, but Hoeflinger wasn’t there at the time. Another person, Emilio Jerez, was, however, and Rugge spoke to him. Rugge said, “I asked him if I could stop by, and he said, ‘sure.’” Rugge didn’t tell Jerez that other people would be coming over to the house later, along with a kidnapped boy.
At least that was his version. Emilio Jerez would later state that when he talked to Rugge on the cell phone, the topic of a closet being in the house was mentioned, and the possibility that someone might be stuffed inside of it came up during the conversation. Jerez, who had just moved into Hoeflinger’s house in the previous week as a housemate, wondered what all of this was about.
Rugge said later that when he pulled up near Hoeflinger’s house, he parked the van on a corner, left the others inside the van and walked to that residence. When he rang the doorbell, a friend of Hoeflinger’s, Gabriel Ibarra, answered the door. Rugge recalled, “I said, ‘Is Emilio in?’ And he says, ‘No, he’s taking a shower.’ So I wasn’t going to go in without anybody’s permission. When I walked away, I was walking back around, and I could hear Ricky Hoeflinger’s music from his car. He was coming down Modoc in his Altima. He’s got a good sound system in that car, and I knew it. So I turned around and started walking toward where he was coming from. He made a right into his driveway, parked, got out, and we shook hands and gave each other a little hug. I said to Ricky, ‘There’s a little problem going on.’ I didn’t give him too much details about it. He asked, ‘Who’s up with you?’ And I said, ‘Hollywood , William, couple of other people.’ He said, ‘All right, come on in.’”
Rugge didn’t mention it later, but two girls were also with Richard Hoeflinger that day. They were Hoeflinger’s cousin Shauna Vasquez and her friend Jaymi Dickensheet. All of these people would have many things to say about what occurred at Hoeflinger’s house over the next few hours. But that was all in the future.
Rugge continued, “So when I went back to the van, I said let’s go. And Hollywood said, ‘All right.’ They all came out. Hollywood walked in first, then it would have been Brian, Will, Markowitz and myself. Immediately inside the house, Hollywood started to act, like—well, he was running around, pacing, pacing up and down the hallways, checking closets, and, frankly, just talking shit. I knew he had a gun in his waistband at the time.”
According to Rugge, Hollywood seemed to be very upset that Hoeflinger’s closets were full and there was nowhere inside them to stash a kidnapped boy. Rugge also said that Hollywood was running around the house as if he owned the place. Rugge said, “The rest of us were all in the living room, just stalling there, confused. We didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what was going on. None of us did.” Rugge’s story of not going immediately to the back room with the others would be contradicted by almost everyone else later.
Nick was taken to a back bedroom, and Rugge did not join the others there for two to three minutes. At least that’s what he said later, although others in the house would put him in the bedroom with Nick, right from the beginning. Rugge said that when he did enter the room, he was surprised to see Nick taped up with duct tape. Rugge recalled, “Nick was taped up and smoking a bong.” (Apparently, it was held by someone else so that he could smoke it.) “There was a blindfold over his eyes and his feet and hands were taped up. There was like a white sock around his eyes. I believe the sock was from Nick’s foot.”
Brian Affronti also went into Hoeflinger’s bedroom and was surprised to see Nick Markowitz, hands and ankles bound with duct tape. As he said later, “The whole scene freaked me out!”
Rugge, at least, thought the whole duct tape incident was ridiculous. According to his later statements, “I looked at Hollywood and said, ‘I’m going to go get a knife and cut him out. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife and cut the binds. William and Brian Affronti were right there. Hollywood didn’t say anything, because I think he kind of realized that all these people were around.”
Yet, Rugge would change details of this story as well, and in another version Rugge said, “We all thought the duct tape was kind of absurd. Ricky, everybody. So Ricky went and got a knife from the kitchen, brought it back, put the knife in there and cut it out.”
Hoeflinger was on his way to a barbecue, and he said later, “I saw that stuff in the bedroom before I left for the barbecue, but I didn’t make it obvious to anyone at the barbecue. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what was going on.”
By this point Brian Affronti was becoming more and more freaked out by the whole situation and asked Jesse Hollywood for the van’s keys so he could go home. Hollywood answered, “Well, first I’m going over to Jesse Rugge’s house to take a shower and change my clothes.” At that point Hollywood and Rugge left, leaving Nick with Affronti and Skidmore.
Rugge related that he and Hollywood went to Rugge’s father’s house in Santa Barbara, probably around 4:00 or 4:30 P.M. Since there was only one shower upstairs, they took turns taking showers. Rugge recalled that Jesse Hollywood still had a gun, and he took it with him into the bathroom. They spent anywhere from a half hour to forty-five minutes at the Rugge residence; then they went back to Hoeflinger’s place.
Meanwhile, William Skidmore and Brian Affronti had been left with Nick Markowitz at Ricky Hoeflinger’s place, while Hoeflinger and the two girls went to one barbecue, and Ibarra went to another. In fact, Skidmore and Affronti weren’t guarding Nick as much as they were smoking dope, drinking and playing video games with him. When Hollywood and Rugge walked back in, they were greeted by an amazing sight. Nick Markowitz was playing a 007 video game with these older guys and beating them.
Rugge said later that Nick had been sitting around with Skidmore and Affronti, drinking Tanqueray and smoking dope. As far as the video game went, Rugge related, “Nick was on a roll for a good hour. He was being treated like everyone else in that house.”
Eventually Skidmore and Affronti left in the white van, heading back home to the Los Angeles area. Rugge noted that Hollywood made several phone calls before leaving, but whom he was calling, Rugge couldn’t say. Rugge also noted that things were better now between Hollywood and Nick. They even sat down on the same couch, playing video games and talking. Hollywood was not threatening Nick at that point. What was even more strange, to Rugge, was that Jesse Hollywood was not making a concerted effort to find out where Ben was at this juncture, nor trying to resolve the situation with Nick.
At around 9:00 P.M., Richard Hoeflinger and the two girls came back to his house, and they were surprised to see Rugge, Nick and Jesse Hollywood still there. At least all of them would agree that things had cooled off, as far as Nick and Hollywood went. Nick was not duct taped, and he was free to roam around the house and even into the backyard, where he smoked several cigarettes. In fact, Nick could have taken off from the backyard at that point, and nobody would have known for several minutes.
Before Jesse Hollywood left to return to Los Angeles (and there would be multiple versions later of how he did that), according to Rugge, Jesse told him to keep an eye on Nick until it was decided what to do with him. As Rugge would say later, the plan was just to keep him up in Santa Barbara until Hollywood decided what his next move would be. Rugge was under the impression that Jesse Hollywood would contact Ben Markowitz and come to some kind of agreement with him in exchange for the release of Nick. In essence, Ben was going to hand over money on his debt to have Nick released, according to how Rugge understood the situation.
Later asked why he didn’t just tell Nick to get up and leave at this point, Rugge answered that he didn’t know why he didn’t, although he was certain that Jesse Hollywood was carrying a weapon around with him at the time. In fact, neither he nor the others were exactly rocket scientists. They spent their days smoking pot, drinking and hanging out. Holding down a steady job and decision making were just not part of their world. Even though Rugge did not want Nick with him, he did not make any plans at that point to send him on his way. And for his part, Nick did not get up and leave, either. He had his own agenda, and it seemed to have been that he didn’t want to cause waves for his half brother, Ben.
Rugge and Nick stayed for at least another hour and a half at Hoeflinger’s place after Jesse Hollywood had left. At least that’s what Rugge said later. Since Hoeflinger and the others were going to bed soon, Rugge and Nick took off for Rugge’s residence, where he was living with his dad and stepmom in Santa Barbara. Since Rugge didn’t have a car, they walked nearly two and a half miles to Baron Rugge’s residence. It was late at night, and Rugge noted that Nick was stumbling along, having smoked a great deal of pot and having drunk quite a bit of Tanqueray. It took them a long time to walk the two and a half miles.
When they got to the Rugge residence, Jesse Rugge related, “My father, stepmom, a guy named Doug and a friend of Doug’s were there. We walked in, and they were in the kitchen smoking cigarettes, ’cause we don’t smoke cigarettes in the rest of the house. I came into the kitchen, and Nick stood right there by the door, and I said, ‘Dad, Melissa, this is a friend, Nick. Nick is going to be staying for a day for Fiesta.’ And I asked Nick if he wanted a beer, and he said no. So I got myself a beer, and from there we went right out into the living room.
“I drank my beer, we watched some TV, and that was it. As far as sleeping arrangements, I gave Nick some options—my bed, the floor or the couch downstairs. He took the floor, so I had a bunch of blankets in my closet, and pillows, and that’s how I made up the bed. We eventually fell asleep, watching television.”
The next morning, Monday, August 7, 2000, Jesse Rugge awoke first and went downstairs and called his friend Graham Pressley. Then he paged Jesse Hollywood and asked that he give him a call back. Rugge noted that Nick got up about 11:00 A.M., and was watching TV upstairs, when Rugge was through talking to Hollywood. Neither Rugge’s dad or stepmom were there, because they had gone to work, it being a Monday morning. Jesse Rugge took a shower, and Nick could have easily walked out the door, but he didn’t. Asked later if he was worried that Nick would bolt, Rugge answered, “I really didn’t care if he did or did not.”
On Monday, August 7, seventeen-year old Graham Pressley went over to Jesse Rugge’s house. Not unlike Skidmore and Rugge, Pressley would become intertwined in events surrounding Nick Markowitz. Pressley was born in 1983 in Santa Barbara to Charles and Christina Pressley. Charles worked as a maintenance man, and Christina was a real estate appraiser. Christina described Graham as a happy baby and youngster who got along well with his parents and others. He was in a Gifted and Talented Program in the second grade, and as a boy he participated in Scouting and was active in sports, especially soccer. In fact, he was so good at that sport that he was even invited to try out for the Olympic Development Program.
Friends who knew Pressley at that time said that he was a tremendous soccer player, but very modest about his abilities. One friend said that Graham always took time to praise other players’ abilities.
In the long run the talent on the soccer field was more of a curse to Graham than a blessing. Dr. Rahn Minegawa, a psychiatrist, who later spoke with Graham, said, “Graham’s interest in soccer waned as a result of the pressure and anxiety he experienced at a higher level of play, and his growing resentment toward his father for putting pressure on him to play. He quit playing altogether at the age of thirteen, much to the disappointment of his father. It was also the time that Graham first began to use marijuana.”
Because of his marijuana use, Graham became bored and restless in high school, even though he was very bright. In his freshman year he was expelled from San Marcos High School when drug paraphernalia was found on him there. Graham enrolled at La Cuesta High School, in the Independent Study Program, where he easily passed the California High School Proficiency Examination. Soon after, he took seven credits’ worth of courses at Santa Barbara City College, even though he was only seventeen years old, and technically would have still been a junior in high school that year.
Since Graham Pressley was a frequent guest at the Rugge residence, he walked right into the house while Jesse Rugge was taking a shower. Rugge recalled later, “When I got out of the shower, Graham and Nick were talking in my living room. We smoked some pot, hung out, watched TV and listened to music. Later me and Graham watered the backyard.”
Another person arrived at Rugge’s house that afternoon—seventeen-year-old Natasha Adams. She related later, “I lived in Santa Barbara my entire life. I’d known Graham Pressley for about eight years by 2000, but I really only started hanging out with him about 1998. I first met Jesse Rugge in 1999, but only really started to hang out with him in June 2000. Me and him and Kelly (Carpenter) and Graham hung out just about on a daily basis.
“I went over to Jesse Rugge’s house on Monday in the late morning, probably around eleven A.M. (It may have been a little later.) I’d seen Jesse (Rugge) on the previous Saturday night, and he didn’t tell me specifically, but I overheard him talking to his friends and he said that he was going to go down to L.A. He originally had lived down there, but he moved up to Santa Barbara.”
There was one more person at Rugge’s house that morning besides Graham Pressley and Jesse Rugge—it was Nick Markowitz, whom Natasha had never seen before. At some point, according to Natasha, Pressley told her about Nick, “They (meaning the others) had kidnapped this kid and brought him back up here to Jesse Rugge’s house.”
Whatever the time this information had been given to Natasha, she and Rugge, Pressley and Nick, all went over to her house to hang out. Natasha recalled that this was sometime in the afternoon of August 7. Another person joined them there, Natasha’s friend, sixteen-year old Kelly Carpenter. Kelly had known Natasha and Graham since elementary school, and Jesse Rugge since October 1999.
Kelly recalled, “I went over to Natasha’s house about two P.M. I didn’t know one boy who was there. Jesse Rugge didn’t stay very long, and there wasn’t anything unusual about the other guy, except I didn’t know him. As far as I knew, he was just another friend.”
When Kelly talked to Nick, she recalled later, “He was very sweet, pretty quiet, but really a nice guy.”
Sometime late in the afternoon of Monday, August 7, Jesse Rugge did have contact with Jesse Hollywood by phone. According to Rugge, he told Jesse to come up to Santa Barbara and get Nick out of there. According to Rugge, Hollywood agreed to come to Santa Barbara, and showed up there late that afternoon. Rugge didn’t say what vehicle he had, but related later, “I left from Natasha’s house and picked Hollywood up down the street, and we ate at the shoreline, East Beach. He liked that place on the beach, so he decided to take me there. Michelle, his girlfriend, was with him. She’s got fake breasts, and she’s tiny. Really short. Kind of past my elbows, maybe. Anyway, she and Jesse ate, but I didn’t. We were there maybe thirty-five minutes.”
Later Rugge would say that he spoke right in front of Michelle Lasher to Jesse Hollywood about getting Nick Markowitz out of Santa Barbara. Rugge’s exact words, according to him later, were “‘Aren’t you taking him home?’ And Jesse didn’t give a response. He gave me, like, a shrug and started talking about something different.”
Michelle Lasher would later deny ever having gone to lunch with Jesse Hollywood and Jesse Rugge that day in Santa Barbara. It was hard to tell by that point who was lying and who was telling the truth, because they were all in a great deal of trouble.
After Jesse Rugge had left Natasha Adams’s house, she spoke to Nick about his predicament, and she asked him why he just didn’t leave, now that Rugge was gone. According to Natasha, “Nick said he was going to stick around because he was going to help out his brother and that he was fine.”
It may also have been here that Nick told her, “When this is all over, it will be a story to tell my grandkids,” although there was also a version that he spoke these words later on August 8.
Natasha recalled, “He had a scrape on his elbow, and he asked for some rubbing alcohol, so I gave it to him.” Kelly Carpenter also remembered this incident by saying that they gave him some alcohol and Neosporin. She didn’t remember the cuts and bruises as being very bad.
At this point Kelly Carpenter had no idea that Nick had been brought to Santa Barbara against his will, at least not at first. Later, however, she recalled, “We were at Natasha’s house and she leaned over to me and whispered that he’d been kidnapped.” Soon they began referring to Nick as the “Stolen Boy.”
Later that same day Kelly, Natasha, Graham and Nick returned to Jesse Rugge’s house in Santa Barbara. Kelly recalled, “It was probably around four P.M. I walked out to the back patio, and Jesse Hollywood and his girlfriend, Michelle, were there. Nick immediately went upstairs in the house. I had met Jesse Hollywood maybe a week before.”
Kelly related later that she knew that Jesse James Hollywood dealt drugs and that Jesse Rugge was working for him. She said she also knew that Graham Pressley bought marijuana from Rugge and sold it, though she never spoke of a direct link between Pressley and Hollywood. Asked to describe how much marijuana they were dealing, she said, “A fair amount.”
As to her impression of Jesse James Hollywood, Kelly responded, “He liked to talk. He gave me a bad impression. He didn’t make me feel very comfortable.” As for Michelle Lasher, Kelly said, “His girlfriend, she was a very petite girl. She had fake breasts and dark hair. And a high-pitched voice. I asked her where she was from and she told us about the Valley. But I really didn’t talk to her much.”
Natasha Adams also had a fairly similar reaction to all of this as Kelly had had. Natasha remembered, “I had seen Jesse James Hollywood before. I didn’t like him. He seemed like an unkind person, just kind of sleazy. The wrong kind of person to hang out with.”
As for Michelle Lasher, Natasha recalled, “She sat on Hollywood’s lap and called him, ‘Jess.’ They were acting like they were in a relationship.” Natasha would also note later that Michelle spoke about her breast augmentation procedure, something that Natasha referred to as a “boob job.”
Natasha recalled Nick going upstairs as soon as he realized that Jesse James Hollywood was there. Since Natasha knew about the kidnapping, she surmised it was the reason why Nick did not want to be around Jesse Hollywood. And according to Kelly, she heard Jesse James Hollywood say one very ominous thing as he and Michelle were leaving Rugge’s residence. According to Kelly, Jesse Hollywood said to Rugge, “‘Well, we’ll just tie him up and throw him in the back of the car and go to the Biltmore and get something to eat.’ Something like that. He said it in a joking manner, but it made me really uncomfortable.”
Rugge also commented on this time frame later. He said, “We were not even there for, like, fifteen minutes back from the restaurant, when Natasha, Graham, Kelly and Nick showed up. Nick went upstairs. He didn’t like being around Jesse and Michelle, so he jumped up and split. Hollywood didn’t say anything to Nick. The rest of us hung out a little bit. Before Hollywood and Michelle left, we talked a little about Nick. He told me he was going to come up later, pick him up and take him away.” Apparently, Rugge didn’t object to this “later” period of time when Nick would be taken away, although the exact time was never specified. And Rugge still believed “taken away” meant “taken home.” Rugge also learned that Jesse Hollywood still had not been in touch with Ben Markowitz. There was one more thing that Rugge was not divulging at the moment, that would come back to haunt him later. In his version of his meeting with Jesse James Hollywood, he would talk later of being offered $2,500 to kill Nick.
Natasha recalled leaving Rugge’s house around 5:00 or 6:00 P.M., and Kelly Carpenter left with her, but not Graham Pressley. Pressley stayed at Rugge’s house with Jesse Rugge and Nick. Even though at that point, Natasha Adams and Kelly Carpenter were pretty sure that Graham Pressley had told them the truth, that Nick Markowitz had been kidnapped and was being held in Santa Barbara on the orders of Jesse James Hollywood, neither one of them told law enforcement or even their parents about what was going on. At this point they knew nothing about the $2,500 that Rugge said that Jesse Hollywood had offered him to kill Nick.
Eventually Jesse Rugge did tell Graham Pressley about this supposed offer. Just when he did that would be a bone of contention amongst many later on, although it seemed to have been after Natasha and Kelly left. Rugge assured Pressley that he was not going to follow through on the offer.