No Regrets (34 page)

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.

On the rental agreement, Jesse had listed his employer as Metro Transit, Seattle’s bus system, and noted that he worked nights. He did not, of course, work for the transit company; he didn’t have a job at all.

The investigators gathered up their bags of evidence, and double-locked the apartment. Back at the Homicide Unit, detectives got word that Sam Jesse had been taken into custody in Hawaii as he left the plane. He had told FBI agents that he knew nothing of a bank robbery or shooting in Seattle.

Sergeant Don Cameron drove to the home of Jesse’s mother and explained as gently as he could about her son’s arrest for bank robbery. The shocked woman said she had seen Sam last on Sunday afternoon, the day before the Prudential Bank robbery. He had told her then that he might be going away with friends for a week, but gave no details beyond that.

His mother had come to understand Sam’s need to get away occasionally. It was his pattern, she said, to go into the hills a few times a year, and he told her he had been cutting wood for spending money. He’d told her that he worked for Metro Transit until six months before. She didn’t mention the janitorial job. Sam was quite intelligent, she said, and he had completed several semesters of
college at Bellevue Community College where he’d been principally focused on mathematics. When Cameron asked her about Sam’s personality and if he was ever violent, she shook her head in surprise. On the contrary, she said, he was always easygoing and mild around his family.

When detectives counted the money they’d recovered from Sam’s apartment, it totaled $1,416. The serial numbers matched the list of marked bills the teller at the Prudential Bank had handed over on February 25. These were probably the bills in the dye pack. Some of them were wet—as if he had attempted to wash the orange stain from them. If Sam had used stolen money to buy his plane ticket to Hawaii, it had not been from the dye pack. For some reason, he’d left most of the stolen money behind—even the unstained bills.

Maybe he’d been haunted by the memory of the old man he shot.

Sam Jesse never got to see Hawaii, nothing beyond the FBI offices in Honolulu. He continued to deny any culpability in the Prudential Bank robbery for a long time, even after he was informed that Seattle detectives had found the gun and the stolen money in his apartment. He insisted the agents had “the wrong man.”

Back on the mainland, however, the evidence continued to pile up. The bullet retrieved at William Heggie’s autopsy proved to have been fired from the barrel of the .357 Magnum recovered in Sam Jesse’s apartment. The orange stains on the VW bug matched the bank’s orange dye microscopically.

At length, Jesse agreed to give a verbal statement to FBI agents in Hawaii, although he refused to sign any
written statement. He said he had driven his VW bug around the area near his apartment on Queen Anne Hill until he located the truck he wanted to steal for the bank robbery. He parked his VW at his apartment, and walked the four blocks to the turquoise pickup. He quickly changed the ignition and stole it. He’d then driven it to the Laurelhurst area and parked it within blocks of the Prudential Bank. That accomplished, he’d taken a cab back to his apartment.

The next morning, which was the Monday of the robbery, Sam said, he’d driven his VW bug to the block where witnesses had spotted it. He’d used the stolen pickup to get to the bank. At that point, everything was going just as he had planned.

But not for long. All of his careful choreography had evaporated as he turned to exit the bank with his bounty. Even so, his voice was relatively calm as he described his struggle with the old man and having to shoot him— something he had never envisioned. Then there was the “WHOOSH!” as the dye trap exploded in the cab of the truck.

He’d dumped the pickup, retrieved his VW bug, and returned to his apartment. Working feverishly, he’d pulled off his stained clothing and fished out some of the bills with the darkest dye color and placed them in a plastic garbage bag. He threw the bag off the Aurora Bridge at the deepest part of the Lake Washington ship canal.

At two o’clock on Tuesday morning, he’d bought some blue spray at a 7-Eleven store and attempted to paint over the rear fender of the bug, but it was raining so hard that the paint kept running, and the results weren’t what he hoped for. Jesse also said that his suitcase, the one federal agents had seized as he landed in Honolulu, contained a
thousand dollars, some of the few unstained proceeds from the Prudential Bank robbery, as well as some cash from “a previous one.”

Asked what ammunition he used in the .357, he said he’d used Remington hollow-point, semijacketed, 158-grain ammunition. It was quickly apparent that Sam Jesse had felt far more comfortable talking about his plans for the bank robbery, and the way it had gone down, than he did talking about the death of William Heggie.

He told the FBI agents that he had never intended to kill anyone. He hadn’t noticed the old man in the bank until he was robbing the teller. Out of the corner of his eye, he’d seen the man trying to put a key into the bank’s door. The agitated bank manager made three attempts to lock the door without success, and Sam said he’d decided he had to get out of the bank quickly. He grabbed the money bag and headed for the door, bumping into the elderly man.

“When I got to my truck, I saw that the guy had followed me,” Jesse said. “I only meant to scare him when I pointed the gun right at him. But instead of backing off, he just reached out and grabbed the gun with both his hands, and he started trying to wrestle it away from me.

“I was wearing gloves, trying to pull the gun back. I heard the gun hammer cock, and there was an explosion. The old man said something like, ‘Oh, my God,’ and he fell down. I just panicked and drove off. I guess I was about one hundred yards from the bank when the dye pack detonated.”