KEY POINTS:
The events that precipitated a trial, a manhunt, and a Hollywood movie surfaced when a trio of hikers, walking in the mountains above Santa Barbara, California, heard what sounded like the intense buzzing of bees.
They discovered flies swarming around the fast decomposing body of Nicolas Markowitz, 15,
executed in a burst of automatic gunfire.
Within 24 hours local police had arrested Jesse Taylor Rugge, 20, Graham Pressley, 17, Ryan James Hoyt, 21, and William Skidmore, 20, charging them with murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy.
Authorities would later allege Markowitz had been abducted, then murdered, as payback for a US$1200 ($1537) drug debt incurred by his older brother. A 20-year-old called Jesse James Hollywood, they said, ordered the kidnap and the hit.
"All this was done for the purposes of money and prestige," said Santa Barbara Deputy District Attorney Ronald Zonen.
By then Hollywood - named after a relative, not the famous Wild West outlaw - had eluded police and was on the run.
His smirking face and shaven head appeared on America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries TV shows.
The high-profile saga in which white boys - whose tattoos, drugs and guns aped a gangsta culture that had morphed from mean streets to suburbs - kidnapped a teenager, hid him in plain sight in front of preoccupied adults, then casually killed him, allegedly at the bequest of a young fugitive with an iconic name, gripped the national imagination.
Five years later, in March 2005, Hollywood was extradited from Brazil, where he had been hiding, to the United States. He pleaded not guilty to murder and kidnapping.
The 28-year-old still remains in limbo, his case delayed after Zonen was accused of impropriety.
Zonen had provided case files as an unpaid consultant to the producers of 2007's Alpha Dog - in which a Hollywood-like drug dealer played by Emile Hirsch orchestrates the murder of a teenage hostage - claiming he hoped the film would help catch Hollywood. James Blatt, Hollywood's lawyer, fears the publicity - which includes four trials and a book - may taint the jury pool.
"We're concerned whether we can receive a fair trial in the Santa Barbara area," he says.
The legal dispute caused by Zonen's indiscretion [Jack Hollywood, Jesse's father, also advised Alpha Dog] was resolved on May 12 by the California Supreme Court which ruled Zonen could prosecute.
The events that led to Markowitz's shallow grave began in West Hills, a white, conservative enclave in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.
The defendants had gone to school together, playing in local Little League baseball teams. Hollywood was a pitcher. His dad was a coach.
This Americana idyll had a darker side. Prosecutors say Hollywood ran a drug ring, staffed by his baseball buddies who sold marijuana at US$300 an ounce. A video, shot in 2000, shows Hollywood and his pals affecting a gangsta swagger seen in rap videos, as they drank beer and smoked marijuana at Hollywood's home, supposedly bought with drug sales.
At one point Hollywood, a diminutive 1.65m and 63kg, questions Ryan Hoyt about a US$1200 drug debt. Hoyt's failing as a dealer was that he smoked marijuana meant for sale. This, contend prosecutors, put Hoyt in Hollywood's power.
Hollywood was also locked in a public feud with Benjamin Markowitz, an urban legend with local teens whose image threatened to eclipse Hollywood's braggadocio. Ben also allegedly owned Hollywood US$1200.
"Ben was a fly in the ointment," Detective Ken Reinstadler, who worked the case, told Los Angeles Magazine. "Jesse James Hollywood is a wannabe bad boy. Ben is one tough hombre."
The pair traded angry phone messages. After Hollywood left a US$50 restaurant bill with a note - "Take this off Ben's debt" - Markowitz threatened to expose a US$35,000 insurance scam involving Hollywood's tricked-up car.
On August 6, the bad blood boiled over. Driving through West Hills, Hollywood, Rugge and Skidmore saw Ben's young brother, Nick, on the street. Apparently on impulse, they stopped, jumped out, thumped Nick and abducted him. After collecting Brian Affronti, one of Hollywood's dealers, they sped off.
Two witnesses called police and reported the abduction. But in a bungled response the LAPD logged it as an assault, not a kidnapping, and failed to red flag the incident.
By the time the van pulled into the Santa Barbara home of one of Rugge's friends the situation had taken on a surreal edge, half abduction, half floating party. Over 2 1/2 days Nick was ferried from house to house, seen by dozens of teenagers and several adults who were oblivious to any menace.
"I thought Nick was up here visiting," said Rugge's father, Barron. "There was no threat. If the kid felt he was in danger he would have said so."
Bound by tape or let free to smoke marijuana, watch TV, swim and chat with his captors, Markowitz seemed unfazed.
"He told me it was OK," Natasha Adams-Young, then 17, told a grand jury. "Because he was doing it for his brother. And that as long as his brother was OK, he was OK."
She drove Nick, Rugge, her friend Kelly Carpenter and Graham Pressley, one of Hollywood's dealers, to her mother's. Later, Rugge left.
Nick, left alone with three teenagers who hadn't kidnapped him, could have run, but stayed. "Don't worry," he said. "It's just another story to tell my grandkids."
His captors called him the Stolen Boy.
Prosecutors called it "the party with an edge". Visiting teens were wary of Hollywood. When Adams-Young - who had broached the issue obliquely to her mother, a lawyer, without result - voiced her concerns to Pressley, he advised her to keep quiet.
"If spoke up and Hollywood didn't go to jail," she said later, "we could all end up dead because Jesse Hollywood was quote, unquote, crazy."
At some point, contend prosecutors, Hollywood said Hoyt could clear his debt by killing Nick.
In the early hours of August 9, Hoyt, who had already dug a grave with Pressley and Rugge, took Markowitz up into the mountains.
Hoyt shot Markowitz nine times, throwing the murder weapon, a sub-machine, into the grave.
"That's the first time I ever did anybody," he said. "I didn't know he would go that quick."
By August 16 Hoyt, Rugge, Pressley and Skidmore were in police custody. Adams-Young had seen the papers, spoken to her mother, gotten immunity and spoken to Santa Barbara police. The defendants quickly implicated one another.
All four defendants were convicted. Hoyt is on death row. The others are doing jail time. In a civil suit, brought by Markowitz's parents, Hollywood and two co-defendants were ordered to pay US$11.2 million.
Meanwhile, Hollywood had cleaned out US$24,000 from his bank account and fled with his girlfriend, Michelle Lasher - a gym teacher with JESSE JAMES tattooed across her back - to Las Vegas. The next day they drove to Colorado. Lasher flew home.
Hollywood dumped his car, with a shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle, and walked to the home of an old friend, Chas Saulsbury. They drove to LA.
En route, said Saulsbury, Hollywood confessed.
Saulsbury drove Hollywood to the home of John Roberts, a family friend. When Roberts refused to help Hollywood slipped into the night, clutching a bag stuffed with US$100 bills. It was August 23. When police team raided Roberts' home on the 29th, Hollywood was long gone.
Thereafter, the trail went cold. Police suspected Jack Hollywood knew of his son's whereabouts. Then, on March 10, 2005, the FBI traced Jesse - apparently after listening to phone calls with his father - to Saquarema, a beach resort near Rio de Janeiro.
Calling himself Michael Costa Giroux, a Canadian, Hollywood lived with his 40-year-old girlfriend, Marcia, surviving on a US$1200 monthly cheque from his father and odd jobs teaching English and walking dogs. His Portuguese was poor and he kept a low profile.
As Hollywood was hauled away after being arrested in a Saquarema shopping mall, Marcia screamed, "I have a son with him."
This gambit worked for Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, who fathered a Brazilian child and legally snookered extradition to Britain. But not for Hollywood.
Nor did Blatt's contention that Zonen's co-operation with Alpha Dog, which starred Justin Timberlake, Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone, jeopardised any chance of a fair trial.
Jack Hollywood thinks Alpha Dog - which depicts Jesse as a paranoiac and the murder as a tragic end game to gangsta fantasies of respect - exaggerates the truth. Maybe.
But when Hollywood appeared, clad in orange prison garb, at a court hearing, he grinned confidently, showing some of his old cockiness.
It may not be the best demeanour for a jury.
