No Regrets

by Ann Rule

  “When did you have these conversations with Sam— about the bank robbery plans?” Marberg asked.

  “Almost every day. I’d just get bits and pieces from him. I’d tell him about my job and he’d tell me about what he was doing. Like he was going to set off the bomb and then get in and out of the bank in ninety seconds while the police were sucked away taking care of the bomb. That was the only way they could do it and get away.”

  Halley said that despite all the detailed planning, he hadn’t really believed that Sam was serious. Over the many years that he had known him, Sam had always been full of fantasy. That was his place in the group of guys who had grown up together in Laurelhurst and Windermere (an even more posh neighborhood). Sam was the chance-taker, the jokester, the one full of tall tales. He didn’t seem much different at twenty-two than he had been at fourteen or fifteen. The rest of his peers matured and moved into adulthood; Sam still clung to make-believe.

  Or so it seemed.

  As Mark Halley spun out his reasons for suspecting that Sam Jesse was the bank killer they sought, Al Gerdes and George Marberg took page after page of notes. Too much was clicking neatly into place for Sam not to be a prime suspect. They looked at Mark and saw that he had only recently come to terms with his suspicions about the Prudential robbery. He had clearly tried to ignore what he didn’t really want to believe and somehow managed to treat Sam’s escalating “stories” as only that. Sam’s imagination had amused his friends for years and it was easier to believe his activities were still fictional than to face the darkness creeping in. It must have been hard for Halley to go to his father with his suspicions.

  The detectives noted that Mark glanced up at the clock in the Homicide Unit from time to time. When it was almost two, he looked nervous. Suddenly, Gerdes had a thought. “Where is Sam now?” he asked.

  “He might be gone—”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think he might be on his way to Hawaii.”

  Halley hadn’t wanted to rat on Sam—not until he had reason to believe that the detectives agreed with his concern about his old friend. And the time had slipped by. It was ten minutes to two, and Sam Jesse had told him that he was going to board a plane for Hawaii at two. It could be another one of Sam’s big stories, but if it wasn’t it was too late to stop him now.

  Marberg and Gerdes were a little chagrinned, but if Sam Jesse was sitting in an airplane high over the Pacific Ocean, he wasn’t going anywhere until he landed in Hawaii. If Halley’s information was good, Sam could be stopped at the gate in Honolulu and held by police there. The Seattle detectives didn’t feel that they had a solid enough basis yet to evaluate Halley’s story and call for an emergency stop of a plane already taxiing out on the runway at SeaTac Airport.

  They could, however, call Honolulu police and ask them to stand by for the next six hours. “We may need you to detain a suspect for us,” George Marberg said. “We’ll be in touch as soon as we have more information.”

  “OK,” Al Gerdes said to Mark Halley. “Let’s focus in on why you feel so strongly about Jesse’s connection to bank robberies. Tell us specifically what changed your mind from thinking he was making things up to believing he was serious.”

  “OK,” Halley said, drawing a deep breath. “Sam told me about a bank robbery that was going to take place on a Friday. I looked in the paper the next day and I saw an article about a bank that got robbed on that Friday. I asked Sam if it was him and he said, ‘Yeah, but we hardly got anything.’ I became convinced that Sam had robbed that first bank. Even though we were such close friends, it seemed like maybe Sam had crossed the line. I didn’t see him very much after I went over there the day after the first robbery. He had a big, huge wad of bills and he took me to dinner one night at a real fancy place—but he said they didn’t get hardly anything and they were getting ready for this big job where they would get like $250,000 and could get out of the country. He wanted to take a trip right after [the big job] ...to Hawaii...maybe to Australia.”

  Mark said he had been upset at his own bank at the time they went out to dinner because they had bounced a check he had written and he was embarrassed. “Sam told me, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get back at the bank for you.’ I still didn’t think much of it at the time.”

  But Mark Halley said he had begun to avoid Sam Jesse after that because of the possibility that Sam was actually planning a big bank robbery.

  Marberg and Gerdes found Halley’s recall of Sam’s progression as a bank robber more and more fascinating. Mark said Sam told him that he and his elusive partners were staking out a bank, watching it from a motorhome they’d stolen. Sam had told him they had to keep putting off this really big robbery until the time was ripe. This was the robbery where they were going to use some guy disguised as an old man to divert attention.

  “I’m not quite sure of how that was supposed to work,” Halley said. “I told him I didn’t want to hear any more about it because it was getting too weird for me.”

  But Mark had continued to have a kind of fascination with Sam Jesse’s activities, albeit from a safer distance. Two weeks later, a branch of Seattle First National Bank was robbed. Mark saw it in the paper, and then learned that Sam Jesse had rented a new apartment, bought a Volkswagen bug, and new furniture. The apartment was very nice and located on Queen Anne Hill.

  Marberg asked Halley to describe Sam Jesse’s newly acquired car.

  “Sort of two-toned. It’s got navy blue back fenders and a navy blue hood and it’s sort of a grayish color. There’s a small dent on the top of the hood and a spot on the side on one door.”

  Marberg nodded without saying anything. Halley described his feelings after reading about the robbery-murder at the Prudential Bank in Laurelhurst. “I recognized that Volkswagen description that was in the papers, and I just knew it had to be Sam.”

  Long before the details of the bank robbery-murder had hit the media, but only hours after it occurred, Mark had eaten lunch with Sam, unaware that he had accidentally chosen that day. Jesse had complained of feeling ill and said he’d slept very late that morning because he had a cold coming on.

  “Did he call you, or did you call him?” Marberg asked.

  “I called him around noon. He sounded really ‘zombiedout,’ like he wasn’t really there. I asked him if he wanted to go get some good food at the Sunlight Café.”

  Sam Jesse had agreed, but urged Mark to come up to his apartment first. Sam usually wanted to drive when they ate out, but on the twenty-fifth, he wanted Mark to drive his car. They left the VW bug parked in front of Jesse’s apartment and went out to lunch.

  It was eight that evening before Mark read the papers, and he thought at once of Sam. The bank job sounded like Sam’s “kamikaze” alternative plan that called for racing into and out of a bank. Further, the Laurelhurst branch of Prudential was an out-of-the-way bank, familiar mainly to those living in the area, and a bank that Sam had once said would be easy to “get.” It was very close to the neighborhood where they had both grown up.

  “Did you have any conversation with Sam that night?” Marberg asked.

  “I buzzed over there at nine-fifteen. He let me in, and I went over to the paper and said, ‘Did you see this?’”

  Where Jesse had been eager before to discuss any and all bank robberies, he hadn’t wanted to talk about the Laurelhurst incident at all.

  “I said, ‘Sam, you didn’t do that, did you?’ and he said, ‘What do you think I am—crazy or something?’ He totally denied the whole thing. Sam’s an accomplished liar,” Halley continued. “I’ve watched him lie to his parents for years. He can put up a wall where he shows no feelings at all. And Sam simply did not want to discuss the Prudential bank job. Finally, he told me that he had something to tell me. I expected he was going to confess about doing that bank. But he just said, ‘I’m going to Hawaii, to Honolulu.’ He said he was going to meet friends and stay there.

  “He kept saying that they were going to travel che
ap because he was poor, and hadn’t gotten enough money in the last thing. He went out of his way to deny that he’d had anything to do with the Prudential Bank.”

  Al Gerdes held out an enlargement of the photos taken by the bank’s hidden camera, and Mark Halley nodded. Even though the photo showed very little of the bank robber, Mark said he recognized the stance. “Those frozen shoulders,” he said. “That’s Sam. That’s how he stands. I’ve seen him wear a down hood like that, and he’s got brown work gloves, too, but I guess a lot of people do.”

  “So when you called Sam at noon on the twenty-fifth, did he sound like he’d just woken up?” Marberg asked, going back to the hours right after the bank robbery.

  “No... just flat. It goes back to New Year’s Eve. He was acting spooky then, and I remember his saying, ‘Sometimes I feel like the devil is overtaking me.’ I said, ‘How can you do that? How can you endanger other people’s lives?’ and he said, ‘It’s just like I’m not even there; something else takes over.’ But he also told me it was all like a big ‘rush’ to him.”

  Mark Halley admitted that he himself was no angel, and he and Sam had participated in some forbidden activities over the years. He was frank in admitting that the two of them had indulged in psychedelic mushrooms a few years earlier. At that time, Sam had claimed to see “spirits” floating around during the mushroom episodes.

  “But he’s let up on the mushrooms recently,” Mark Halley pointed out. “Sam thinks that the world is going to end next year—with a big atomic war, and a worldwide depression. He thinks it’s survival of the fittest and the world is just going to go crazy, so he’s just starting a little early.”

  Halley’s recitation was one of the most startling Mar-berg and Gerdes had heard in their long careers as detectives, but he was telling them things about Sam Jesse that seemed to make some kind of sense in the crazy pattern of the events at the Prudential Bank. Sam Jesse, a brilliant son of an Episcopal minister, had seemingly been obsessed with a fantasy world in which he could rob and even kill with impunity, utterly consumed with the plotting and planning that appeared—at least to Sam him-self—to be foolproof. If he really believed the world was coming to an end, he had apparently decided to arm himself with enough money and supplies to be a survivor.

  Mark Halley told the two detectives that he had become more and more disturbed as he realized that Sam was probably responsible for William Heggie’s death. It all added up. In the past, he and Sam had consulted a hypnotist, a kind of guru, after Sam asked Mark what he should do to find answers to his “spiritual questions.”

  “This guy is pretty spiritually aware,” Mark explained, “and he’s the one that Sam kept talking to and he was always asking him was it OK if you kill somebody? What happens to you spiritually? Is there a debt against you? This guy says, ‘Only if you let it be a debt—then it’s a debt.’

  “That was something I just couldn’t agree with.”

  Halley’s conscience ate at him as he had wavered between going to the police and sticking by his old friend. He had clearly had his own philosophical questions about good and evil and accountability. While he tried to decide what to do, he said he had picked up a hitch-hiker—a complete stranger—and run his worries about Sam by him.

  “He told me the decision had to be mine, and all of a sudden, I knew what I would do. So I called my father and told him to contact you guys—to call the police.”

  Gerdes and Marberg believed Halley. They did a preliminary background check, and found that Sam Jesse was, indeed, the son of a minister. Until recently, he had been employed as a janitor at the Federal Office Building, a job far beneath his abilities and education. It was too late to stop him from fleeing to Hawaii. But he wouldn’t get beyond the gate when he landed in Honolulu.

  They asked Mark Halley to give them the most detailed description of Sam that he could.

  “He’s six feet, three inches tall, 180 pounds, and he has very straight blond hair, blue eyes. Sometimes he looks like he’s crying because he’s got this problem with his tear ducts. He wears wire-rimmed glasses.”

  “Any accent or speech impediment?” Marberg asked.

  “No.”

  “Scars?”

  “No.”

  “Mustache?”

  “Not now.”

  Detective Sergeant Jerry Yates called the Port of Seattle Police Department and asked that a detective contact all airlines to verify that a Sam Jesse had boarded a flight to Hawaii. Port Detective Doug Sundby reported back that Samuel Henry Jesse had departed on Northwest Flight 55 from SeaTac at 2:45 P.M., and he was scheduled to land in Honolulu at 6:30 P.M. Hawaii time. That would be 8:30 P.M. Seattle time. The Seattle detectives had a lot of work ahead of them before that plane landed.

  Sundby said he would have officers from his department search the many-tiered parking garage at the airport for a gray VW bug with black hood and fenders. They quickly located a similar car on the second level of the garage. A parking ticket had been taped on the window at 8:35 A.M. Jessie must have spent the night at the airport. Detective John Nordlund, accompanied by Mark Halley, left for the airport to ID the bug left behind.

  Nordlund shone his flashlight into the interior of the bug. He could make out two orange flecks on the steering wheel. The vehicle was gray-blue with a dark blue hood and right rear fender. There was damage in the front—just as the coed witness had described it. Someone had apparently tried unsuccessfully to spray-paint the dark fender with light blue paint. Nordlund photographed the bug and had it impounded.

  Detective Sergeant Don Cameron, heading the night crew in Homicide, dispatched Mike Tando and John Boatman to the apartment house on Queen Anne Hill where Sam Jesse had his new apartment. They found that all the apartment mailboxes had the complete names of tenants on the slot in front. All but the mailbox for number 303. That slot read only “S.J.”

  No one answered the door at 303, but that didn’t surprise the detectives. The tenant was reported to be thousands of miles away.

  Detectives Marberg and Gerdes called the FBI and learned that the Seattle First National Bank branch at North 185th had been robbed on February 13, 1980, at 2:23 P.M.

  It was now 6:00 P.M., two and a half hours before Sam was scheduled to land in Honolulu. Judge William Lewis issued an arrest warrant for Samuel Henry Jesse after taking the information telephonically, and Marberg and Gerdes picked it up. The warrant said that Jesse was to be arrested on suspicion of first-degree robbery of the Prudential Bank. A search warrant for his apartment was obtained at the same time.

  Sam Jesse’s plane had passed the point of no return over the ocean; he would deplane in Honolulu in a little more than two hours. FBI special agents in Hawaii were made aware of the arrest warrant and would meet his plane.

  Armed with their search warrant, George Marberg and Al Gerdes went to Jesse’s apartment house. From outside, they could see a light burning in number 303, and they gained access from the balcony outside an unlocked bedroom window. Just in case, Cameron, Tando, and Boatman waited in the hallway outside the front door to Sam’s apartment. But Sam wasn’t there. The apartment was empty.

  It was a small, one-bedroom apartment. If Jesse had ever planned to cover his tracks in case he decided to return to Seattle, he had apparently given that idea up. He probably had been panicked by Mark Halley’s questions. His apartment was rife with physical evidence that would connect him to both the bank robbery and the murder. The investigators located a blue nylon knapsack containing a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum handgun with a four-inch barrel in a black leather holster. The gun’s grips were stained orange. Further down in the bag, they found an algebra textbook. When the detectives opened the book, they found a profusion of twenty-dollar bills stuck between its pages. The edge of every bill was bright orange.

  They found three ignition sets—all Ford products—in the knapsack. They were standard replacement ignitions which could be used to bypass a vehicle’s ignition when it was unplugged. Sam had been fully
prepared to steal the vehicles he needed to help disguise his identity when he drove to his target banks.

  The bed in the neat apartment was just a box spring and mattress set atop four concrete blocks. When the mattress and springs were removed, Marberg and Gerdes saw that the spaces in one block were filled with twenty-five twenty-dollar bills.

  There was a length of nylon rope in the closet, stained with orange powder.

  In the kitchen cabinet, they found more bills—ones and fives—in a cereal bowl. They also found a bill of sale for the VW bug, purchased for $840 on February 15, just two days after the Seattle First National Bank robbery. The apartment rental agreement showed that Sam Jesse had rented it on February 17 for $225 a month. He had spent his first bank money as his friend Mark suspected, setting himself up in an apartment and buying a car.

  And now they found a picture of the missing Sam Jesse: The tall, big-boned youth smiled into the camera selfconsciously. He held a newspaper in one hand, but it was impossible to read the headline. He didn’t look like either a killer or a bank robber. He looked like a teenager whose muscles had yet to catch up with his height. The length of his limbs and his awkwardness suggested that he might be suffering from Marfan’s Disease, the illness that Abe Lincoln was diagnosed as having. Sam was broadshouldered, and he had huge hands. He appeared to be about sixteen or seventeen, much younger than he really was, a kid posing shyly for a friend’s camera.

  Detectives outside the apartment searched the Dumpster and found a handwritten bill of sale for a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. The buyer was listed as J. T. Jay, and the date was January 28. The “J” was written to look like a “G”—the same peculiarity in handwriting present in Sam Jesse’s signature on the rental agreement.