49“No more jake????” a friend replied.
“Apparently Reno,” Steph wrote. “Long story tell you soon.”As the weeks ticked by, Jake’s friends grew more and
more frustrated. No one seemed to be treating Jake’s absence as
the emergency they felt it was. Steph and Dave moved back to
the 7-11 Ranch and were acting like nothing was wrong. If the
sheriff’s own son had vanished, Ajarian couldn’t help thinking, the
deputies would certainly be doing more than they were. Finally,
the friends decided they couldn’t rely on official channels for help.
Ajarian was in the hardware-store parking lot when he spotted
the first significant clue: Jake’s beloved 1976 Harley Sportster,
albeit with a new, slapdash paint job and a modified gas tank.
Dave was riding it. “If Jake ever saw Dave Jackson breathing on
his motorcycle, it would’ve been the end of the world,” Ajarian
told me. “And this guy is riding around on it. And why is it spray-
painted all these shitty different colors?”
Two other friends were shopping for used bikes when they
discovered a couple more of Jake’s motorcycles for sale in a
local shop. They obtained a copy of the title to one, a Honda,
which had both Jake’s and Deb’s signatures on it. To Ajarian’s
eye, Jake’s looked like a blatant forgery. “You could see Deb’s
signature and you could see Jake’s signature underneath it, and
it’s the same fricking hand writing,” he said. To Jake’s friends,
these motorcycle clues were a blatant sign that Deb’s story didn’t
make sense. If Jake’s family expected him to return, why were
they selling his stuff?
One day, Ajarian ran into Deb at the grocery store. He bar-
raged her with questions: Where was Jake? And if she didn’t
know, why hadn’t she filed a missing-person report? She muttered
something about not wanting to get in trouble for filing a false
report if Jake turned up.
Finally, three months after Jake was last seen, Deb Rudibaugh
officially reported her son missing, claiming that his interest in
martial arts had brought him into contact with a bad crowd. “I
figure he got in over his head with something and is either in wit-
ness protection or in hiding or dead,” she later told investigators.
Ajarian created a Facebook page called “Where is Jake Mil-
lison.” He posted photos from their motorcycle trip out West—
Jake posing next to a giant redwood; Jake wearing a helmet,
making goofy faces—and asked people to share any information
that might be useful. Someone reported seeing Deb, Steph, and
Dave burning Jake’s mattress days after he vanished. Someone
else pointed out that shortly after Jake disappeared, Dave had
changed his Facebook profile picture; in the new photo, he was
posed on one of Jake’s motorcycles—another thing Jake never
would have tolerated. The tips that came in to the Facebook group
were shared with law enforcement. The accumulation of facts,
plus Jake’s friends’ persistence, began to convince the department
“that this was a serious matter here,” Mykol said.
Winter brought “bad times” out at the 7-11 Ranch, Dave texted
a friend. With Jake gone, much of the work fell to him. “I’m sick
of being a slave for [Steph] and her mother on this ranch while she
is in the lodge warm cozy f****** around on her phone,” he wrote.
When he threatened to leave, Steph brandished a gun and fired a
bullet at the floor. Around the same time, Deb’s health began to
deteriorate. Within a year, she was admitted to the hospital for a
collapsed lung; a biopsy revealed that she had Stage 4 breast cancer.
Despite Jake’s friends’ attempts to keep the investigation ener-
gized, months passed without much development. A year went
by, and then another. Ajarian was alarmed to realize that he’d got-
ten used to Jake being gone. He and his friends sometimes joked
about a gray-haired Jake popping up in 50 years, cackling about
the epic prank he’d played on them, but the unspoken truth was
that they all assumed he was dead. Not knowing why or how, or
where his body was, was maddening. There had been no funeral
where they could make speeches about how much he’d mattered
to them and cry together for his loss. His family continued to live
as if he’d never existed. With no official action, it was hard not to
feel as though Jake’s disappearance—and his life—didn’t matter.