My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  Now it was all four of them in the car—Nick Markowitz, Graham Pressley, Jesse Rugge, and Ryan Hoyt—back on the way to Lizard’s Mouth. It was a thirty-minute trip, and his captors later said that Nick was barely able to sit up straight on the ride there because of all the drugs and drinking.

  Once they reached the site, they all got out of the car and headed toward the spot where Pressley had dug the grave. Of course, no one mentioned this to Nick. Did he have any idea what was in store? Probably not. He likely assumed that they were headed out there for some more partying.

  Pressley said that it wasn’t until they were walking to the grave that he knew for sure it was Nick whom they intended to kill—and that he froze in his tracks, unable to continue walking with them. Instead, the other three forged ahead, and Pressley went back to the car, where he sobbed and waited. Nick was walking in front of his captors wordlessly when Pressley last saw him—he wasn’t complaining or putting up a fight. He was just walking.

  Along the way, the three passed a few people who were coming down the mountain. They nodded to each other and didn’t say much, if anything.

  By the time that they reached a rock near the freshly dug grave, though, they were alone. Hoyt told Nick to sit down. Rugge pulled out the duct tape.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he allegedly said.

  “I know you won’t,” Nick replied.

  Rugge duct taped Nick’s hands behind his back, which Nick willingly allowed him to do, but as he taped over his mouth and nose, Nick cried; he couldn’t breathe.

  Hoyt dragged Nick over to the grave. That must have been the moment that Nick realized that Rugge had lied to him. This was when he knew he was going to die.

  Myson . . .

  It was the last second I could have gotten to him. The last sand in the hourglass was just about to fall, and I was still at home, drifting in and out of nightmares and no closer to finding him than I had been that first day.

  One of them knocked Nick down into the grave. They might or might not have hit him in the head with a shovel; later reports would be unclear. Then Ryan Hoyt pulled the trigger of the gun, landing nine bullets in Nick’s face and torso. He would have kept going except that the gun jammed. But nine bullets were enough. Every one of them landed a possible fatal wound, with the final one ripping through Nick’s jaw and through the back of his head.

  Nick was gone.

  Hoyt wiped off the gun and stuck it under Nick’s legs; then the two killers quickly shoveled dirt and leaves over his still-warm body, the ground wet with pools of blood.

  Jesse Rugge later said that he “almost” vomited and had to leave most of the shoveling duties to Hoyt. Hoyt, on the other hand, admired his own handiwork. When they got back to the car, he said, “That’s the first time I ever did anybody. I didn’t think he would go that fast.”

  He turned to Graham Pressley and said, “You ever tell anyone what you saw and I’ll kill you.”

  Considering the circumstances, Pressley believed him. They told Pressley to stay at the Lemon Tree Inn that night and check out in the morning, but he couldn’t sleep, so he called his mom and asked for a ride home at 6 a.m. He told her that he wasn’t feeling well.

  At 9:00 that morning, he called Natasha Adams and lied through his teeth.

  “I drove Nick home,” he told her. She was relieved. “I’ll call you later today—I have to go to work, but we’ll hang out later.”

  In the afternoon, he showed up at her house with a new story. He said that Hollywood had shown up at the hotel and laid a TEC-9 down on the bed, and Nick started crying. But it was just to scare him, so Nick wouldn’t say anything. Then he and Hollywood and Rugge got into a car and drove around Los Angeles and then he dropped them all off, and drove through the mountains, and . . .

  Adams admitted later that the story was pretty vague and not a clear explanation, but at that point, she was just so happy to hear that Nick was home that she didn’t stop to question the details. Jesse Rugge also called her that afternoon to say hello and to tell her that he was staying at his mom’s house for a week.

  “Jesse Rugge was the same Jesse that I’ve known,” Adams said. “Just really happy and joking around.”

  Graham Pressley, on the other hand, was acting a little strange, and she asked him if he was OK. He said he was fine. Adams let her mother know that the kidnapping situation had been resolved and that everything was OK now.

  Casey Sheehan was returning from work when he noticed that his car, which he had loaned to Hollywood, was back. It was parked in the alley, and Hollywood, Hoyt, and William Skidmore were all sitting around inside his apartment. After a while, Hoyt asked Sheehan to drive him to a clothing store—a surf shop. He had a few hundred dollars with him.

  Sheehan thought that was strange, because he knew that Hoyt owed Hollywood money. So he asked him how he could go shopping now.

  “I went up to Santa Barbara and took care of the problem,” he said.

  “What problem do you mean?”

  “The problem with Nicholas Markowitz.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s best that you don’t know.”

  Ryan Hoyt slept over at Casey Sheehan’s house that night and soon bragged to his friend about having killed Nick. Sheehan didn’t know whether or not to believe him. Hoyt seemed far too calm for a guy who claimed to have just murdered a kid. No remorse, no guilt. Maybe it was just one of Hoyt’s stories, Sheehan figured. He was notorious in the group for embellishing things to make himself sound cooler, tougher, or more handsome—including one time when he pretended he had landed a modeling job.

  Ryan Hoyt was many things, but he was no model.

  The following day, Thursday, was Ryan Hoyt’s twenty-first birthday. Casey Sheehan threw him a big party, with about thirty people in attendance. One of the people there was Jesse James Hollywood, and Sheehan finally confronted him about Hoyt’s claims. Was it true? Had Hoyt really killed Nick?

  “Just don’t worry about it,” Hollywood said.

  Sheehan later overheard Hoyt saying “We fucked up” to Hollywood, but the context wasn’t clear. What had he done wrong? Had he screwed up by leaving the gun at the murder scene? By burying Nick in a shallow grave on a popular hiking trail? Or by killing Nick at all?

  Hoyt slept over at Sheehan’s house again that night. He was more agitated by then than he had been the previous day. It was starting to settle in that he had actually done something serious—and that it might have consequences.

  For me, that day and the ones following it were more of the same—working on a spreadsheet detailing what everyone had told me and what places we had tried. I reached one boy who gave me a troubling answer when I asked if he knew where Nick was.

  “I think he’s on vacation,” the boy said. When I asked him to explain what he meant, he wouldn’t. That stuck with me. On vacation? Did he know something?

  It was getting harder and harder to stay grounded in reality. I felt my mental health slipping. People’s voices were becoming mere echoes. I didn’t know whether it was day or night anymore, or whether I had eaten that day.

  Jeff and Ben spent their days out on their motorcycles going up and down hills and hiking trails, while I tried to organize the volunteer squad. They just kept showing up, God bless them. But none of them were turning up anything useful, and neither were the police.

  I really feel you are coming home, I told Nick in my mind. Please hurry.

  On Saturday, August 12, 2000, three and a half days after Nick had been murdered, twenty-seven-year-old Darla Gacek and two of her friends set out to hike up toward Lizard’s Mouth. On the path, they heard a loud buzzing sound, which they thought was from a swarm of bees. They followed the sound and instead discovered hundreds of flies . . . and the stench of death. A dead animal, maybe a raccoon? But the smell was so strong. Too strong.

  The hikers kicked the sand a little and their unspoken fears materialized in the form of a pair of blue jeans and th
e corner of a T-shirt. Liquid pooled up around the body. The hikers didn’t want to disturb the scene any further. They managed to attract the attention of some local student filmmakers who were filming nearby, and they borrowed their cell phone to call police. It nevertheless took police two hours to show up.

  Meanwhile, Gacek guarded the body.

  “It was totally surreal,” she told detectives. “I’m thinking the world is so beautiful, but yet there’s this body that someone put there.”

  She prayed that it wasn’t a kid.

  But, of course, it was.

  The California heat had done terrible things to Nick’s body, speeding up the decomposition rate. Larvae had burrowed into his mouth and nose. His hands were bloated and discolored . . . with his father’s ring still on his finger.

  He was found face up, head leaning to his right, duct tape wrapped several times around his head over his mouth, ears, and part of his nose, with his arms awkwardly behind him.

  Detectives photographed the hikers and filmmakers, as well as the soles of their shoes, in case they had to differentiate their footprints from those of the murderers. At 6:30 p.m., the witnesses left the scene, forever changed by what they saw.

  It took detectives two days to officially identify the body, which they eventually managed to do through his badly decomposed fingerprints, which were on file from the time Nick was arrested for marijuana possession. How sad it was to realize that I was actually grateful now for that arrest, because it was the only way they were able to identify him.

  Before they even rang the doorbell, we knew that there were men at our door. We were so hypersensitive to every sound, waiting for Nick to come walking through that door, that the slightest rustle of trees or chirp of a bird could wake us from sleep and send us running to the window. This time, it was Jeff who made it to the window first.

  “Who’s there?” I asked.

  “Some men in black suits.”

  I couldn’t breathe.

  It had been a week of looking for Nick, and now my heart felt like it might stop. I put on my robe slowly, because this might have been the last minute I could have any hope. Men in black suits do not come before seven in the morning to say, “Your son is just fine.”

  I glanced into Nick’s room, at his empty bed, as I reached the stairs—the same stairs Nick would race down three at a time. Clutching the railing, I tried not to fall. One step, two steps. I had to make it down the stairs.

  I thought for a minute that this might be a good surprise, and maybe Nick would be on the other side of that door with the men. I whispered prayers, as nausea overtook me.

  I made it to the door and opened it. I was unsure of how many men there were—three? Four? All I saw were sad, serious eyes.

  Make this be a dream.

  They walked in and told us that they were sorry. “Some hikers found your son’s body. We’ve positively identified it. It was bullet riddled . . .”

  Tears fell and my body trembled as I found the couch behind me. I felt gutted. This could not be real.

  Duct taped, gagged, and with his arms behind him. Nine bullets to his face and torso. Execution style. Found in a shallow grave.

  The detectives smelled of death. They wanted a photo of Nick. Privately, they took Jeff aside to ask why we had duct tape on our stairs, just in case it was related. They needed to go through Nick’s room and our home to investigate for murder evidence. Murder evidence. They did this with finesse; I could not even remember them taking Nick’s computer, though the receipt said that they did so at 10:50 a.m. From that, I could only assume it meant they were in my house for four hours that day. I don’t remember at all.

  How anyone else found out, I have no idea. People just started calling and showing up.

  Ben had been out late when he got a wake-up phone call from his aunt.

  “They found Nick,” she said.

  “That’s great. Let me go back to sleep—it’s early in the morning,” he said.

  “Well . . . no, Ben, they found him . . . but he’s not OK.”

  She explained how the hikers had found him, and Ben was in shock. Until that moment, he had really believed that Nick had just run away to a friend’s house. His screams woke his two roommates.

  In a similar fashion, Leah got a morning wake-up call from her mother’s mother.

  “I’m so sorry about your brother,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about him. He just ran away for a few days. I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Leah said.

  “Oh God . . . you don’t know.”

  I couldn’t talk, so I tried to write something. The first words that came out were:I am not screaming.

  I am numb.

  I feel nothing.

  I feel hollow.

  I died with Nick.

  CHAPTER 10

  PLEASE, GOD, THERE’S BEEN A MISTAKE

  “Missing boy found dead.”

  “Body identified as Woodland Hills boy.”

  “Body identified as missing teen.”

  Those were the headlines the following day. I didn’t want to miss any of the news, so I kept checking the television, not wanting to miss seeing my baby’s face. I was still waiting for someone to tell me that they had their wires crossed and it wasn’t Nick after all. The body was decomposed, so maybe the fingerprints weren’t accurate. There was still a God, right?

  Someone—maybe it was me—had had the good sense to put a note on our front door saying “No media, please.” I didn’t hate them for being there; in a way, I even appreciated that they cared to report about Nick, but we weren’t in any condition to face reporters or talk coherently.

  Outside my window, I could see people gathering. I walked out and went straight into denial mode, playing hostess to this yard memorial. I felt that if I stayed busy, then this would turn out to have just been a bad dream. We needed sodas for the kids, and music, and photos of Nick to put up outside. We needed candles, and people to keep them lit. I assigned tasks to everyone.

  Why isn’t someone telling me this is a mistake?

  Natasha Adams’s mother read the newspaper that morning and showed the article to her daughter.

  “How could this happen?” Adams cried. When her parents left for work, she drove to Jesse Rugge’s house to confront him, calling him a murderer.

  “It’s not what you think,” he told her. He was shirtless, and Adams said she could actually see his heart beating.

  Hours later, she went to her mother’s law firm and conferred with a lawyer, who told her that she had a grant of immunity, which meant that she could never be prosecuted for any involvement she had with the crime, as long as she told the truth about what happened. Only then did she go to the police and tell them what she knew.

  Just before she showed up at the police station, another young woman called on the condition of anonymity and told a detective that she knew the people responsible for Nick’s murder. So when Adams arrived, the story she told was no great surprise. It matched the basic facts given by the anonymous caller.

  Ultimately, seventeen-year-old Natasha Adams was the lone person, out of dozens, who chose to stand up to Jesse James Hollywood. She was immune from prosecution, but she was not immune from Hollywood’s wrath.

  I’m not sure where we would be today if those two girls hadn’t been brave enough to take this step. My biggest heartbreak was that they didn’t find that bravery a week earlier. Had they called police back then, it would have been the difference between life and death.

  Meanwhile, I had trouble breathing; anxiety attacks stole all the air around me, making my chest feel constricted. It felt like I was falling into nothing. With all these emotions overwhelming me, I had to do something, had to stay busy.

  I should make sure the table fountain has water in it.

  The music had to be nonstop, but only certain types of music. I’m surprised I didn’t hire a DJ. The yard memorial went on for days, with people stopping by, coming in and out and sharing hugs and bringing gift
s.

  We received so many beautiful gifts, most of which were untraceable. However, I knew the origin of one that was left on my doorstep: unbelievably beautiful porcelain angels from the parents of Bernardo A. Repreza, a very handsome boy who had been beaten and stabbed to death in 1998 at fifteen years old, just like Nick. I don’t think I met his parents, but if I did, I know they would understand my lack of memory.

  Thank you. I will keep your son’s picture forever.

  A live praying mantis appeared on our table water fountain that day, and I remember being comforted by the sight of it as it drank from the fountain. The praying mantis, in my mind, was a sign from Nick. I had seen a praying mantis only once before, on a rose bush when Nick was about seven years old. He had been very intrigued by it. He had a whole set of thousands of cards called the Illustrated Wildlife Treasury, with pictures and information about all sorts of animals, and he read them all. The bugs were what intrigued him the most. If I ever had a bug question, I would ask him.

  What do praying mantises eat? I should bring him something. Do they eat bugs?

  That mantis hung around the whole week, sometimes taking shelter in our garage and sitting on flower arrangements people had brought, sometimes sitting on a chair or table. I was able to hold it in my hands, talk to it.

  Is that you, Nick? Do you need me?

  I waited for Nick to come put his arm around me and tell me it was all a big joke and, “Hey, by the way, I sent this little praying mantis to keep you company for a while.” But he didn’t show up. He had to still be coming home, didn’t he?