The Best American Crime Writing (29 page)

As Thompson drove past Tracy’s house, Tracy’s telephone rang furiously inside. By now, friends and family had heard word that Thompson had done something terrible, and they were desperate to warn Tracy. The phone kept ringing. Tracy and his wife had eaten dinner at the Barn House in Kewanee that night, and had stopped to talk to Joe’s stepdaughter. Their house was empty.

By about 8:15
P.M.
, squad cars from Wyoming and Bradford, along with Bob Taylor in the Toulon city police car, had converged, sirens blaring. Thompson turned east on Thomas Street, then south on Miller Street, lights still flashing. He was within a block of his own house, where the slain deputy still lay.

The Bradford policeman, driving north on Miller, came head-to-head with the stolen squad car. Thompson stopped. The Wyoming and Toulon cars, which had gone first to Thompson’s house, now came racing around the corner onto Miller and stopped behind the stolen vehicle. Thompson was surrounded.

The police aimed their weapons at Thompson. Still seated in the deputy’s car, the indictment alleges, Thompson reached for a shotgun and fired through the windshield at the officers. The officers returned fire. Then nothing moved. The only sounds in Toulon that moment were the officers’ heaving breaths and the whine of distant sirens racing to save the town.

Then more shots rang out, so many and for so long that some, describing it afterward, would liken it to the grand finale of a fireworks display. Then, another, longer silence, this one crushing in its implication—it was time for the officers to approach the stolen vehicle.

The police moved in, their lives thrust up against the crescendo of a thirty-year rage. Nothing moved inside the squad car. They stepped closer. Toulon’s lone traffic light, blinking a block away on Main Street, lit the scene in uncertain yellow. Thompson had been shot in the face. He appeared unconscious. Police dragged him from the car, handcuffed him, and continued to point their service revolvers at him. A medevac helicopter landed on the nearby high school football field and airlifted Thompson to a Peoria hospital.

Janet Giesenhagen was rushed to the same football field, where a helicopter awaited. She was pronounced dead on the field. That night, 10-year-old Ashley took her suitcase and slept at her grandmother’s house.

Thompson was placed on life support at OSF St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria. His condition improved over the course of the next week. On April 1, ten days after the murders in Toulon, he was transferred to the Peoria County Jail, and placed in a cell by himself. A few days later, he appeared in court in Toulon and demanded to represent himself, saying his court-appointed attorneys in previous cases had not been “worth throwing back.” He finally consented to a public defender—Matthew Maloney, an attorney certified to handle capital cases, from Princeton, Illinois, northeast of Toulon.

There are people in Toulon—and they do not make themselves loud or visible—who knew another side to Curt Thompson. They speak of a farm boy who lost his father at an early age, who had to work for room and board in grade school, who was bright and well-read and married a lovely woman to whom he stayed married and with whom he produced three children. They know that Thompson will be remembered in Toulon as a monster. They say they will remember more than that.

“Curt was probably born a hundred years too late,” says one of Thompson’s neighbors. “He butchered his own meat. He lived frugally and was a very intelligent person. He knew the biology of livestock and was well-read in politics and life events. He was very capable. I would have hired the man in an instant if not for his temper.”

“If you needed anything, Curt and his wife would come,” recalls Mary Jane Swank. “When I came home from the hospital, they fixed us a complete meal, and I mean complete: chicken, pork chops, corn, potatoes, everything. Just a few days before [the shootings], Curt brought us some meat he’d butchered.

“I knew he had problems with people. But if anyone treated him fair, he’d treat you fair back. Curt had so much to give—that’s the
part that hurts me a lot. If he was treated decent … you know how small towns are—they have to pick at somebody and never let up.”

“I felt bad for him sometimes,” says a friend of Thompson’s. “He never drove a fancy truck. A lot of his life was spent not having more than minimum finances. He always had two big black Lab dogs—salivated all over, but very nice, never growled or snapped. He’d bring the dogs along sometimes. About ten years ago, I noticed that he had only one of the dogs. He told me he had to put the other dog to sleep because it had heartworms. I asked if heartworms couldn’t be treated. He said, Yeah, you can treat it, but I did not have enough money.’ You should have seen his face. I thought he was going to cry. To me, it showed that he had a heart like anyone else.”

Shortly after Jim and Janet Giesenhagen died, Toulon united to throw several fund-raisers for Ashley. In a candle sale, citizens collected $3,500 for her future education. It had been the kind of gesture instinctive to the town since before Lincoln’s speech on the courthouse lawn.

When asked about Thompson, many in Toulon do not want to talk. They are polite about it, all of them. And they are consistent in their reasoning.

“I don’t want to think about it,” one resident says. “I wish this would all just go away.”

A month after the murders, Curt Thompson was taken to the Stark County courthouse to enter pleas in the thirty-count indictment against him. Under heavy guard and wearing an old-fashioned gray-and-white-striped prisoner’s jumpsuit, he walked deliberately into the courtroom, making eye contact with no one. Ashley Giesenhagen, seated in the back of the room, began sobbing at the sight of Thompson.

As the prosecutor read the indictment, questions wafted out the open courtroom window, through Toulon’s two coffee shops, past Casey’s gas station, and into the fields that frame Stark County. Why hadn’t the sheriff’s dispatcher called an ambulance immediately? Why had a rookie deputy tried on his own to serve a five-month-old warrant on a Friday night to a man known to be violent? Why hadn’t law enforcement prosecuted Thompson if he had violated court protective orders? Had police been afraid of Thompson? Had the state’s attorney done enough to stop him?

And, most important: Had the beauty of small-town life—that shoulder-to-shoulder proximity to everything and everyone—become its ugly undoing?

Thompson, through his lawyer, pleaded not guilty to all charges. The proceedings lasted about thirty minutes. After he was unshackled from a table, Thompson walked toward the door as he had entered—slowly and without expression. Just before leaving, he turned briefly toward the public who had packed the courtroom, and stared.

When word reached Chicago in early 2002 of a triple murder in Toulon, a tiny farming community of 1,400 in rural Illinois, I presumed it to be the usual small-town crime of passion, the kind none of the residents could have imagined a day earlier. Instead, a sheriff’s deputy and a husband and wife lay shotgunned to death in an eruption of violence nearly everyone had expected for decades
.

It was the decades part of the story that grabbed me. Since Abraham Lincoln had spoken on its courthouse steps, Toulon had survived by caring for its own. Its citizens reacted to—even anticipated—news of sick or bankrupt or suffering neighbors like antibodies in the bloodstream, converging as a whole to attack the problem and heal its kind. The more I learned about the towns history, the deeper I came to understand the place as a self-contained biological entity
.

That biology got sick when Curt Thompson came to town. A man with a complex and painful past, Thompson began in the 1970s to feud with town residents, mayors, and police staff, weaving creative terror into vendettas and then nursing them for years. Many who looked into his glaring eyes believed him capable of great violence, even murder. Because Thompson lived among them, too few in Toulon were willing to confront him or to pursue serious legal remedies against him. Many instead chose to avoid him, and in this way the organism that had protected Toulon for so long short-circuited like cells in a cancer-stricken body. Thompson remained a free man for decades. In March 2002, he was charged with a triple murder people both couldn’t believe and fully expected
.

When I arrived to investigate the story, Thompson was in custody and finally separated from the town he had bullied. He faced the death penalty if convicted. Still, few were willing to speak of him. In a town that still holds candle sales for its needy and food drives for its hungry, many explained that they still feared Thompson, prison cell or not
.

T
he boy in the video is named Jesse James Hollywood. That is what his birth certificate says. He is close to 20 but could pass for 15. His hair is short and blond. His eyes are blue. He is nearly as small—five feet five, 140 pounds—as most of his friends were in junior high school.

Jesse James Hollywood is drinking a Heineken. He is smoking weed from a long yellow bong. He is wearing baggy jeans, a baby blue Dodgers cap turned backward, and a T-shirt manufactured by Serial Killer Inc. The shirt has a black-and-white movie frame on the chest, a scene from
Heat
, the 1995 LA crime saga. It shows Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer making their getaway from a downtown bank heist. The caption is a single word:
MONEY
.

The music thumping on the stereo is Mac Dre, an Oakland rapper. He once got five years for conspiring to rob a bank. “Life’s a Bitch” is the title of the song. When Jesse James Hollywood speaks, he mimics the cadences of the hood, an act that is alternately reverential and derisive. He is pretending to be a Crip—a meticulous study—yet the fakery is spiked with contempt. “One time I was walking down the street, cuz,” he says, mugging for the camera. “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.” When he decides the shtick has grown old, Jesse James Hollywood says, “Get the camera away from me, cuz. Before I have to bust yo’lip, cuz.”

The party is in Jesse James Hollywood’s home, a three-bed, two-bath staple of 1950s suburbia that he bought on his own. There is a big-screen TV in the living room, along with a wave-shaped bubble lamp and a vase of artificial flowers; the kitchen has a built-in microwave and a double-door refrigerator; a gas barbecue grill sits on the patio. The house is in West Hills, at the far edge of the San Fernando Valley. It is among the whitest corners of Los Angeles—an affluent, educated, conservative bedroom community, once part of Canoga Park until home owners decided that a name change would enhance their neighborhood’s image. The pride of West Hills is its youth baseball complex, a collection of mini-stadiums with padded outfield fences and electronic scoreboards, Marathon Sod and crushed-brick base paths. As a child Jesse James Hollywood played on those diamonds. He was an All-Star pitcher and third baseman. His dad was a coach. His mom brought snacks. At least three of his guests here—all drinking beer, smoking dope, taking turns with the camera—played in the same league, some years on the same team. One of them is Ryan Hoyt, a lefty first baseman. He aims the lens into the face of another ex-Little League friend.

“You been drinking tonight?” Ryan asks, in a mock interrogation.

“Fuck the police!” his subject howls.

Ryan follows him with the camera, then breaks into the theme from the TV show
COPS:
“Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?” he sings. “Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?”

The tape is more than an uncensored testament to cocky, middle-class, Valley Boy indulgence. It is evidence in a murder. By this time in his life, Jesse James Hollywood was the boss of a thuggish little drug ring. He trafficked in vacuum-sealed bricks of British Columbian marijuana, a potent strain known as B.C. Bud. His clownish friends were his marketing staff, breaking the pounds into ounces that went for $300 on the street. The arrangement served them all, funding their nightly binges and paying for Jesse James Hollywood’s mortgage, except for one problem: His cartel had a
habit of smoking more than it sold. Ryan was the worst. His consumption had reduced him from dope dealer to indentured servant. He arrived at Jesse James Hollywood’s house every day to clean, garden, paint, and pick up after an ill-mannered pit bull named Chump, yet even after months of menial chores he was unable to erase his pot-smoking debt. At the time of the video he was in for $1,200, and Jesse James Hollywood was not about to let him forget.

“Now how much money you got in your bank?” Jesse James Hollywood asks, cornering Ryan in the kitchen.

“Stop recording,” Ryan says.

“How much? How much can you get from the bank?” “Enough to pay you some money.”

“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.” “What’s it gonna be then? Just tell me.”

The video was shot in early 2000. Six months later the party would be over, the tape seized by homicide detectives. A drug dispute had gone haywire, and Jesse James Hollywood and his crew were now implicated in the kidnapping and execution of a 15-year-old boy, the younger brother of one of their own henchmen. As a bunch, they might best be described as slackers with an edge, children of relative privilege yet barely functional as adults. They came from nice homes but broken families. They attended the finest schools without opening their eyes. When they lost their way, it had more to do with abundance—too much freedom, too much money, too much time—than with deprivation. Their violence was committed while numb, not in a rage. Part of that was surely the drugs, which turned their world into a full-scale PlayStation, no more real than the lives taken and restored on-screen. But there seemed to be something else going on in West Hills, a malaise born of entitlement, of parents who found it easier to grant independence than to set limits. How does a community without gangs breed an entire
team of gangsta disciples? To what extent does living in a “good” area allow a false sense of security, even laziness, to creep into the work of raising kids?

To settle his debt Ryan agreed to be the triggerman. He was found guilty in November and sentenced to die. Three cohorts were accused of abducting the victim and digging his grave. They are being held without bail, awaiting trial. The final defendant is the ringleader himself, the one with the unforgettable name. He is nowhere to be found.

Of all the West Hills stoners selling Jesse James Hollywood’s pot, the one least in awe of him, the one most capable of doing him damage, was a neighbor named Benjamin Markowitz. He was in the same baseball league as a child but a couple years older—bigger and badder and just a bit nuttier.

By the time he was 15 Ben had slashed tires, stolen a car, cracked open a boy’s forehead with brass knuckles, and done eight months in a juvenile probation camp. His nickname was Bugsy. He had covered himself in tattoos including the insignia of the Pecker-woods, a San Fernando Valley gang with white supremacist leanings—never mind that he was Jewish. His father, who makes aerospace parts in a family-run machine shop, tried everything he could think of to turn Ben around, from psychotherapy to Ritalin to martial arts. He tussled with Ben. He dragged him to work. He paid a tae kwon do instructor to take him in as a ward. “I didn’t know what the hell to do,” says Jeff Markowitz, who divorced Ben’s mother when their son was 4 and assumed custody when he was 12. “Ben was an urban legend in our town.”

Remarriage had introduced a stepmother, Susan, and a half brother, Nicholas, seven years younger than Ben. If the Markowitzes had tried to blur those lines of separation in the beginning, they took to drawing them more sharply as Ben careened through
adolescence. Susan was especially doting with Nick, hoping to insulate him from his older brother. “My whole life, I was trying to keep Nick from seeing or knowing the truth about Ben’s trouble,” she says. “It was a lot of work keeping them apart.” In the end it was also futile. Nick came to idolize Ben, and Ben somehow managed to keep dragging the family into his craziness, like the time he showed up drunk, with a shaved head, at Nick’s bar mitzvah and demanded to drive his brother home in a low-rider Impala.

It would be trite to say that West Hills was too small for both Ben Markowitz and Jesse James Hollywood, but that might not be far from the truth. They lived only a dozen blocks from each other and attended the same prestigious high school, El Camino Real, winner of the state academic decathlon for five of the last ten years. Ben got expelled for hitting a girl who threw a milk carton his way. Jesse got expelled for spewing obscenities at an administrator who objected to the tank top he was wearing. Ben never finished school, but Jesse went on to graduate from Calabasas High in 1998. Compared with Ben—and every other member of his crew, for that matter—Jesse was the model of success, ambitious and status conscious. With five to ten dealers each netting him about $500 to $1,000 a month, Jesse was living on maybe $50,000 a year, tax free—enough for a thick bankroll in his pocket, a girl on his arm, and an endless supply of weed for his friends. He used to show up for school in a tricked-out silver ’95 Honda Accord DX coupe, the ’57 Chevy of the
Fast and the Furious
generation. Loaded with hydraulic switches, fluorescent lights, $2,000 Niche Gefell rims, and a sound system capable of rattling windows, the car drew envious stares in the student parking lot, even from kids who had no interest in the dope business. By 19 Jesse owned a $205,000 home on Cohasset Street, just a few blocks from his parents’. “He was slinging some spliff,” acknowledges his father, Jack Hollywood, employing a Rasta-flavored lexicon somewhat at odds with the image of a Little League coach. “But it wasn’t even that much of a
bad rhythm. There was no trouble until this Ben Markowitz guy came around.”

Like most of the dealers in Jesse’s circle, Ben was often careless about money, losing product—or using it—and falling into debt. Unlike them he was a genuine hoodlum, refusing to take orders and damning the consequences. “Ben was a fly in the ointment,” says Ken Reinstadler, a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s lieutenant, who would later oversee the murder investigation. “Jesse James Hollywood is a wanna-be bad boy. Ben is one tough hombre.” During the first half of 2000, the two were locked in a tit-for-tat feud, at once childish and menacing. Ben would get messages on his voice mail: “I thought we were homies. Why don’t you come kick it? Let’s straighten this thing out.” Jesse would also get messages on his voice mail: “I know where you live, too, buddy, so you make the first move.” One night in February Jesse and his girlfriend went to a restaurant in Woodland Hills where Ben’s girlfriend worked. They ate and drank up a tab of $50, then left a note: “Take this off Ben’s debt.” Ben upped the ante, threatening to expose a $35,000 insurance scam that involved the customized Honda. Jesse had chopped up the car, sold the parts, then reported it stolen. “This is what Ben’s been doing forever—latching onto people, terrorizing them,” says Jack Hollywood. “My son was scared to death. He was going to move out and try to get away from the whole situation.”

The pissing match came to a head on August 6, 2000, a Sunday. Jesse had packed up his house and put everything in storage. Sometime during the previous day or two, Ben had come over and busted a couple of windows with a metal pipe. Jesse piled his crew into a cargo van, lent to him by a friend of his father’s to help with the move. In the driver’s seat was Jesse Rugge, a speedy center fielder from their baseball years. After his parents divorced, he split his time between his father’s house in Santa Barbara and his mother’s in West Hills. A high school dropout, he had a shaved head and a body covered with tattoos—scorpions on both arms, a skull on his
right leg, and a simulation of ripped skin, with exposed muscle, on his left—all courtesy of a brother-in-law who works at a parlor called Iron Cross. In the back was William Skidmore, probably the best hitter and fielder of them all. He was living in Simi Valley but grew up in West Hills, halfway between the Rugges and the Hollywoods. The others sometimes called him
vato loco
, a crazy dude—his mother is Latina—and he once told police, after being arrested on a minor drug charge, that his gang name was Capone. But his affiliations, oddly, were Asian; he had the logo of a Filipino gang, Satanas, tattooed across his stomach and chest. Ryan Hoyt stayed behind, ordered to sweep up the broken glass.

They had been planning to go up to Santa Barbara for Old Spanish Days, a Mardi Gras-style festival. But everyone inside the van agreed that Ben’s latest incursion could not go ignored. They talked of hunting him down, or maybe just swinging by the Markowitz home and shattering a few panes as payback. As they cruised the quiet, pine-shrouded streets of West Hills, the last thing they expected was to stumble upon Nick Markowitz, wandering past Taxco Trails Park at about 1:00
P.M.
Nick was hardly the ruffian that Ben was—he had appeared in Shakespeare plays at school, volunteered as a peer counselor, and once signed a journal entry “Rabbi Nick”—but he was still having his troubles. He was regularly popping Valium and smoking dope. He had already been caught at school with a bit of weed and arrested. On Saturday night he had gone with friends to City Walk and come home looking zonked. This morning, rather than face a confrontation with his parents, Nick had sneaked out while his mom was making breakfast. “He was just picking everything apart,” his father says, “the life that he was deciding to choose or not to choose.”

The van pulled up to the curb and Jesse’s crew jumped out. They pummeled Nick, kicking and hitting, then dragged him inside. As they did, Pauline Ann Mahoney came driving by on her way home from church. Before the van peeled out she got close
enough to read the license plate. “All right, boys,” she said to the three children in her Cadillac, “this is the number.” They chanted it together until Mahoney could get home and dial 911. “These guys were beating the crap out of this kid,” she told the emergency operator. “Four versus one. All white.” Two Los Angeles police officers were advised, but a series of missteps ended any chance of catching up. The 911 staff, it turned out, had coded the incident as an assault rather than a kidnapping in progress—even after a second witness made a similar call. Thinking the matter was less serious, an officer talked to Mahoney via cell phone but never took a direct statement. They also failed to reach the registered owner of the van, partly because they had misread his address. “This was not the LAPD at its best,” says Xavier Hermosillo, a member of the department’s Board of Rights, which investigated the lapse. The officers received written reprimands; two emergency dispatchers ended up with three-day suspensions.