48 APRIL 2020
plausible. Maybe he would’ve abandoned his family, Jake’s friends
thought, but he never would’ve abandoned them.
In June, Jake’s friend Max Matheny and his sister, Molly,
met with Mykol at the sheriff’s-department headquarters. Molly
had called Ray, Jake’s dad; he said he hadn’t heard from his son
in weeks, and suggested that she file a missing-person report.
Mykol didn’t think that was necessary. Everything Deb had
said had checked out so far: It seemed that Jake had just taken
off. But the sheriff’s office did reopen the case, and alerted law
enforcement in Reno to be on the lookout for Jake.
Ajarian, too, says he tried to file a missing-person report. The
sheriff’s department, Ajarian told me, “kept saying the family
doesn’t want it.” Several of Jake’s friends said they were told that
only family members could file such reports, although according
to Colorado law “any person with relevant, credible information
suggesting that a person is missing may make a missing person
report to a law enforcement agency.”
Nate Lopez spent “a lot of time” talking with local law enforce-
ment. “They just told me that the only people they can really
believe is the family. If they say that Jake went on a trip, and
they’re the last people to see him, that’s what you have to go
by until there’s evidence that shows otherwise,” Lopez told me.
Jake’s friends refused to let the matter go. Steph messaged
one of her brother’s friends—“do you have any idea who keeps
reporting jake missing? I would really like [if they] could just call
mom instead,” she wrote. But Jake’s friends called the ranch so
often that the sheriff told them to knock it off.
It was dismaying, if not surprising, that law enforcement
seemed slow to wonder whether Jake Millison had been the victim
of a crime. Most murder victims in the U.S. are male— typically
young men of color—but you wouldn’t know that from watch-
ing TV, where the victims who get the most airtime tend to be
young, attractive white women. As a culture, we’re not as attuned
to young men’s vulnerability to violence.
While law enforcement seemed to accept Jake’s family’s story,
his friends found themselves bumping up against an uncomfort-
able possibility: that one of his family members was complicit in
his disappearance.
Three years before Jake went missing, Steph, who had been
living in Denver, moved back to Gunnison with her husband and
son. She earned money taking tourists on horseback rides, and
dreamed of giving her son a country upbringing—crisp mountain
mornings; lying in the tall grass, aiming a rifle at soda cans. Though
Steph described herself as “not good with backhoe things,” she was
a skilled horsewoman who identified as a country girl.
Despite their shared upbringing, Steph and Jake never got
along. “Yes hes mellow with his friends but with family he is a
complete dick most of the time,” Steph texted a friend around
the time she moved back to Gunnison. Jake made it clear he was
unhappy that his sister was back in town. Steph had already used
her inheritance to put a down payment on her house in Denver;
now he worried she was trying to stake a claim on the ranch, too.
Steph and Jake had worked out a kind of sibling détente, which
is to say that they mostly avoided each other. But things were
different with Steph’s husband, Dave. Where Jake was reserved,
Dave was cocky. Everything about him seemed to grate on Jake,
including Dave’s car—a white Ford station wagon with flames
painted on it. Jake’s friends say his annoyance was undergirded
with fear; he saw Dave as unpredictable, potentially violent. He
made awkward half-jokes about keeping a gun nearby in case
Dave attacked him.
Jake began training at a jiu-jitsu gym in Gunnison. He took
to it right away; the tactics and technicalities and focus on self-
mastery suited his temperament. “Jiu-jitsu translates as ‘gentle
art,’ ” Page, who trained at the same gym, told me. “There’s no
striking—it’s all about distance management, leverage, control.
It’s like playing chess with the human body.” Jake had alwaysbeen chubby and withdrawn; jiu-jitsu helped him grow more
comfortable in his body, more used to asserting himself.
Jiu-jitsu emphasizes personal development in all areas of life,
and Jake became preoccupied with bettering himself. He adopted
a strict diet and chided his friends when they ate at Taco Bell. He
chugged a gallon of water a day for a few weeks, briefly convinced
that hydration was the secret to health. His mania for improve-
ment extended to the ranch, which he periodically tried to clean
up, whether his mother liked it or not. He told Ajarian he was
bringing junk into town on the sly and tossing it into Dumpsters.
With Dave and Steph back on the ranch, things could get
heated. One day, Jake plowed snow into huge banks that blocked
Dave’s car; in the argument that ensued, Dave took off his jacket,
revealing a gun. (Dave later claimed that he was planning to set
the gun aside so they could fight with their fists.) That afternoon,
Jake filed for an order of protection against his brother-in-law.
Had it gone into effect, it would have essentially banned Dave
from the ranch. Jake withdrew his complaint a few days later,
but the animosity between the two men remained so strong that
Deb declared they couldn’t be on the property at the same time.
Steph was furious when she and Dave had to move to an
apartment in town. “My younger brother is trying to ruin my
life,” she wrote on the website Moms.com in 2014. “How can
I make [my mom] see that it is unhealthy for him to be there
controlling her and her property like he owns it?”
By the following year, Deb seemed to have taken her daughter’s
advice. “My mom might be kicking my brother out soon,” Steph
messaged a friend on Wednesday, May 13. That Friday night was
the last time anyone saw Jake. A few days after that, Steph posted
on Facebook: “Have you ever been woken up with such awesome
news you wanted to run outside screaming?”JAKE’S FRIENDS FOUND THEMSELVES
BUMPING UP AGAINST AN UNCOMFORTABLE
POSSIBILITY: THAT HIS FAMILY WAS
COMPLICIT IN HIS DISAPPEARANCE.