No Regrets

by Ann Rule

  Jill explained that the dye pack she slipped into the robber’s sack was set to explode only if it was carried through the bank door, where it would be triggered. “After a delay of some seconds, it explodes and expels reddish-orange dye and tear gas.” She thought it would have gone off just after the man got into his vehicle, but the truck was out of her sight by then.

  Word came shortly after that the dye trap had done its work. A patrol officer found the turquoise pickup abandoned little more than a mile away from the bank. Detectives observed the nine-year-old Ford truck. When they glanced into the cab of the truck, they found its seat covered with bright orange powder. Certainly, the suspect would also be stained with the pervasive orange powder. If they could locate him quickly, he would still have the dye stigma marking him as a killer and a thief. It was made up of compounds that would not be easy to wash off.

  They asked the radio operator to check the license number through computers and learned that the vehicle had been reported stolen over the weekend. It figured. If they had hoped to get a lead on the killer via his vehicle, they were out of luck. He’d made sure there was no connection to him. Clearly, he had dumped the truck and left this quiet residential street in some other manner.

  Back at the bank, Al Gerdes and George Marberg were faced with the most frustrating kind of crime scene. Because the sea of blood left behind was so upsetting to bystanders, fire crews had hosed down the sidewalk where William Heggie died. Not only had they washed away the blood, but any possible clues that might have lain there also disappeared into the gutter drains. All the other debris had been picked up and put into trash cans. Gerdes and Marberg pawed through the trash, but found only paraphernalia left behind by the paramedics. Mr. Heggie’s glasses, International Kiwanis pin, and post office key had been found on the sidewalk, carried into the bank by someone, and placed on a counter. In the aftermath of such a shocking incident, bystanders often try to “tidy up,” trying to get some semblance of normalcy after disaster.

  The detectives knew only that they were looking for a tall man, a man possibly bearing orange dye stains on his clothing and his person. Jill Mobley said she had given him upward of fourteen hundred dollars in ones, fives, tens, and twenties. The twenty-dollar bills bore serial numbers prerecorded by the bank. This was standard practice in a robbery—to keep marked bills handy and slip them to the thieves.

  Hours went by, and the investigators felt the pressure of time passing; they wanted to get to the suspect before he could change clothes or get rid of the money. In the meantime the bulletin going out to Washington State law enforcement agencies specified that officers should be on the alert for individuals whose skin or garments bore bright-colored red or orange stains.

  A Washington State Patrol officer heard the alert for the “orange man” and reported that he had just stopped someone with peculiar skin color for a traffic violation on the freeway south of Seattle. “But it wasn’t a man,” he said. “It was a woman—her skin was bright orange. She looked like a tangerine!”

  “Was she really tall?” Marberg asked.

  “I can’t say that she was,” the trooper said. “But she was sitting down in the car. She could have had very long legs.”

  He passed on the address that had come back for the woman when he did a Wants-and-Warrants search on her driver’s license and registration. “She lives in Tacoma.”

  Tacoma was thirty miles south of the bank. Jill Mobley had been almost sure that the Prudential bank robber was male—but there was always the possibility that he had a woman waiting in his truck. If so, she, too, would have been enveloped in the cloud of orange dust. Tacoma detectives went to the “orange woman’s” home to question her. She wasn’t there; her roommate said she was at a doctor’s office appointment.

  “She has hepatitis,” the friend said. “That’s why her skin’s that funny color. The doctor told her that’s a symptom of liver trouble; your skin turns all orangey-yellow.”

  That eliminated the woman as a suspect; she might be a lousy driver, but she wasn’t a bank robber.

  A canvass of offices around the bank had produced no witnesses. No one but Jill Mobley had seen the pickup truck before the robbery, and only the two tellers had seen it speeding away.

  Al Lima and Jim Lundin processed the stolen pickup with ID Technician Jeanne Ward. It was extraordinarily clean: It held few traces of the killer—nothing beyond the orange dye that stained it and a pair of sunglasses with the frame now dyed orange. Both the truck’s ignition and the wires under the dashboard had been tampered with, undoubtedly when it was stolen. The ashtray was pulled out, and there was a plastic garbage bag under the dash which contained paper towels. They retained the contents of the ashtray and the garbage sack, as well as samples of the dye-stained upholstery and the driver’s seat belt.

  Although there had been no witnesses around the bank, Detectives Gary Fowler and Nat Crawford made a door-to-door canvass of the block where the pickup was abandoned. They had more luck; they located a man who remembered something. “Just before ten this morning,” he recalled, “I heard a car with a loud engine. As it passed, I looked out the window and I saw an older Volkswagen bug. It was light blue or gray, and it was headed north on Forty-fifth N.E. It looked to me like there might have been two people inside.”

  The investigators figured that the person who’d abandoned the pickup had had another vehicle waiting for his getaway, and it was probably the VW bug with the noisy engine. The timing was right. He’d left the bank at about 9:40 A.M., driven the mile in the truck filled with tear gas and floating orange powder, and then changed cars. He would have been in a tearing hurry as the VW pulled away.

  An even better witness on the street turned up. The young woman said she’d been on her way to classes at the University of Washington at 9:15 A.M. “I noticed an older bug parked facing northbound on the east side of Forty-fifth. I thought the people who live there had bought a different car; I noticed it especially because I also drive an old Volkswagen.”

  “What did it look like?” Lima asked.

  “It was gray—older—maybe as old as a 1963 to 1968 model. The hood was black, as if it had been replaced, and so were two of the fenders. It was kind of beat-up, with a dent in the center of the hood. When I got home from class at a quarter to one, it was gone.”

  “Did you see anyone in it—or around it?”

  “No. It was empty at nine-fifteen.”

  The information on the Volkswagen bug was passed on at once to all law enforcement agencies in the thirteen western states. With every hour that passed, the killer could be another sixty or seventy miles away from Seattle.

  The investigators studied films from the bank’s hidden camera. They could see the bank robber at Jill Mobley’s window, his left hand on the green cloth bag, and his right clutching a handgun. The only bit of skin visible was the tip of his nose. If the films were shown on TV news, they wondered if anyone might recognize something about him. Was there anything in his stance, his clothing, or his mannerisms that would trigger a memory in someone watching? The pictures were published in every paper in Seattle and the tape shown on all Northwest television news programs.

  On February 26, a huge announcement appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It was a message from the “Rat on a Rat” program endorsed by financial institutions in an effort to stop a rash of bank robberies:

  $5,000 REWARD

  For information leading to the indictment of the person who robbed the Prudential Mutual Savings Bank, 4500 Sandpoint Way N.E. at 9:40 A.M.on February 25. Description: the robber is 6' to 6'3'' and wearing a tan parka, hood and ski mask. He may have red-tinted cash. He is believed to be driving a 1963 to 1968 VW Bug; blue-gray, with black hood and back fenders. During this robbery, William G. Heggie, banker, was murdered. Sometimes bank robbers take more than money.

  A toll-free phone number was listed for a “no-questions-asked” tip line where an informant could call with possible leads on the bank kille
r’s identity.

  Calls began to come in from citizens who wanted to help. One woman reported seeing a blue-gray VW speeding southbound shortly after the robbery, and watched it make an illegal left turn. She hadn’t been able to get the license number.

  The coed witness agreed to be hypnotized to help her remember details about the VW bug she’d seen. She was an excellent subject for hypnosis by Detective Joe Nicholas, and her recall in the trance state confirmed her original description of the car. Now she was able to retrieve more details. She remembered the tires, the hubcaps, all the dents and their placement, the chrome trim—even the shape of the headlights. But she still could not visualize anyone inside the VW.

  ID Tech Jeanne Ward reported that she had been unable to find any latent fingerprints in the stolen truck, and she knew why: The dashboard and console of the truck had been wiped clean. She had found glove prints which she would retain for comparison. Glove prints can be distinctive, but cloth fiber patterns are not nearly as useful as fingerprints themselves.

  The owner of the Ford pickup said that his vehicle had been parked in front of his home—without the keys— Sunday night. He had discovered it was missing the next morning. He had no idea who might have taken it; he was the only one who had the key, and no one else ever drove it.

  King County Medical Examiner Dr. John Eisele completed William Heggie’s autopsy the morning after the deadly bank robbery. Heggie had succumbed to a single gunshot wound through the sternum near the midline of the chest. Eisele could not pinpoint the distance Heggie had stood from his killer. Surgeons in ER had cut into his chest to massage his heart in a futile attempt to save him, and any gun barrel stippling or powder burn marks were destroyed in the process. But it was clear any attempts at resuscitation would have been in vain. The elderly man’s liver, right lung, and the right ventricle of his heart had been torn away by the bullet. Dr. Eisele retrieved it, and noted that it was the kind of high-impact ammunition used by Seattle police officers. It was in good condition and would be useful for ballistic comparison if detectives should ever find the shooter and his stash of bullets.

  Calls from tipsters continued to come in. A Renton, Washington, bank reported that they had taken in some bills with reddish stains. But when the bills’ serial numbers were checked, they did not match those missing in the Prudential robbery.

  And then, George Marberg and Al Gerdes received a phone call from a police dispatcher in communications center. “A man just called in on 911 and he says his son might have some valuable information about the bank suspect. I’ve got a contact number for you.”

  This was the kind of information that every detective hopes for, especially in a case like this in which they had absolutely no idea who they were looking for—not even the race, sex, or age of a suspect.

  The detective team arranged to meet the young male informant, Mark Halley,* twenty-two, in his father’s downtown office. The clean-cut witness began to tell them of his suspicions about who the Prudential robber might be. What Halley had to say was riveting.

  “I think it was a guy named Sam Jesse. I went to school with him; I’ve known him for years....We graduated from high school together five years ago, and we’ve been close friends.”

  Halley said that he and Sam Jesse both lived with their mothers in Laurelhurst, which is a venerable upper-middle-class neighborhood northeast of the University of Washington. Laurelhurst was only blocks from the Prudential Bank where William Heggie was killed. They had graduated from high school in the late seventies, and had remained close friends.

  “What makes you feel that this Sam would be involved in a bank robbery?” Marberg asked.

  “Sam’s a different kind of guy,” Halley explained. “Always has been. At first you’re gonna think that he’s putting you on because he’s always talking about stuff that doesn’t seem real. But he’s a ‘go for it’ person. He rides his motorcycle at the highest speeds, smokes a little more marijuana than anyone else, and drinks way more and gets way more blown away. It’s an all-or-nothing type deal. There was always something weird about him. That’s sort of what I thought was pretty cool about Sam. You just wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  “You wouldn’t put bank robbery and shooting someone past him?”

  Halley shook his head. “No. Sam’s always been on this bit about karma. And he’s always told me that it’s OK to kill people because he believes in ‘survival of the fittest.’”

  That still didn’t explain why Halley had connected Sam Jesse to the Prudential Bank. But he hastened to explain further. “We got drunk together on New Year’s Eve, and Sam was going on about how he was working eight hours a day for minimum wage. He said he had found a way around that. He was really going to go out and rob a bank. He said he was going to get enough money to live in his own apartment and buy a guitar. He wanted to start a rock band. He began to talk about things so bizarre that I found them hard to believe—even for him. But now, I’m afraid he was serious.”

  “Why? You didn’t just think he was drunk and rambling?” Gerdes asked.

  “No—because of the way he talked, and then how he acted after. Sam actually bragged to me that he’d strangled a girl once, but I didn’t believe him because he once told one of our other friends that he’d knocked an old woman down to take her purse. He likes to shock people, but I began to realize that he really had worked out all the details of robbing banks, and that he was having some dark thoughts. On New Year’s Eve, he asked me, ‘You know what it’s like to kill someone? It’s like you’ve just been over the edge and you keep it inside you all the time.’”

  Sam Jesse’s father was a minister, and Halley said he had behaved like a typical “PK” (Preacher’s Kid) all through school, trying to prove that he wasn’t a goody-goody guy because of his father’s profession. Although he was very intelligent, he had been a deliberate under-achiever.

  Shortly after New Year’s, Sam had quit his job as a janitor. He’d told Mark Halley that he was going to start robbing banks. He explained that he had to do a small “job” first to set himself up as a bank robber. “He told me that he’d planned to rob a grocery store first. But that didn’t work because he was alone in this store at night and the alarm went off. That scared him and he didn’t go through with it.”

  But that hadn’t stopped Jesse from continuing with his plan to be a master bank robber. He revealed to Halley that he intended to keep on working up to banks. “He sounded so serious that I began to watch the papers for reports of store robberies to see if Sam really meant it,” Halley said, “and I saw some that I thought Sam might have pulled off. He wouldn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when I asked him though.

  “He told me that when you do a bank, you have to do everything right. He said that the people who get caught are the ones that just run in there—super desperate—and they don’t have the whole thing thought out. He said he had a friend who’d been in jails and involved in crime before and knew a lot about it. They studied up on everything. He said it was real hard work. He’d go to the library and study up on crime statistics, how many policemen there are in certain areas, what times stores were busiest, or when people did their banking. Stuff like that. Then they’d stake out the store and watch for where the manager of the bank or store lives, and what they’d do with the money and when. Like they’d stake it out for hours at a time a week before they did it.”

  “Do you know who the friend was—his accomplice was?”

  Halley shook his head. “I don’t even know if such a guy existed. I thought maybe Sam was making that all up. It wasn’t anyone I knew—I’m sure of that.”

  All this research had been, according to Halley, on the little jobs. It was supposedly only to get the cash they needed for the big bank jobs that lay ahead. They had planned to get disguises, Mace, a gun. Sam and his unknown accomplice were supposed to have planned diversionary techniques. “Sam talked about setting off a bomb near a bank they wanted to rob—or maybe have someone dressed as an o
ld man stumble into the bank to divert attention.”

  “But you personally never saw anyone who was working with Sam Jesse? It was always just him who was telling you about the bank robbery plans?”

  “Never saw them. But he always spoke in the plural, as if he had a partner—or even a gang.”

  Mark Halley’s depiction of his friend, Sam Jesse, sounded pretty far-fetched; Jesse—if what Halley was saying was true—seemed to have been unduly influenced by James Bond movies, and his plans for a crime spree more like those expected from a brash young teenager than a twenty-two-year-old man. But the detectives would certainly hear this informant out. As bizarre as he sounded, Sam Jesse was the most likely suspect—the only real suspect they had had so far.

  Asked to describe Jesse’s physical appearance, Halley replied that he was very tall and skinny—well over six feet tall. “He looks younger than he is, and he’s got really, really blond hair. If you saw him, you wouldn’t forget him. He’s kind of ‘gangly.’”

  “Does Sam have a gun?” Gerdes asked.

  “Yeah, he went through the want ads in the Little Nickel newspaper and he found a .357 Magnum for sale up near Everett.”

  The bullet in William Heggie’s body had been .357 ammunition.

  Halley said that Sam had bought the handgun in late January or early February. “I advised him not to—I told him he didn’t need a gun. The guy who sold it to him made Sam promise to register it—but he never did.”

  Sam Jesse had paid about $150 for the gun, and he had immediately gone to several discount stores to buy high-velocity ammunition—both regular and hollow-point. With Halley riding along, Sam had then driven to the forests along Snoqualmie Pass to try out the gun by shooting at trees.

  Sam’s plan for robbing banks had been very intricate, according to Mark. He would use several vehicles, some stolen. Sam said he planned to steal the vehicles by knocking their locks out, and then getting new locks. He intended to use a stolen van or truck as he drove to the banks, and after the robberies, to use yet another stolen vehicle to leave the immediate area. He would eventually end up in his own car.