The End of the Dream (39 page)

Suddenly, they heard several volleys of shots south of them. As they stood, listening, they heard more shots. It was starting all over again.
 
The two homicide detectives moved into the street to stop all civilian traffic going southbound on Twentieth NE, and advised radio that they were in the area in plainclothes. Maning and Tall man waited until enough patrol units arrived to surround the area and then they moved down the street toward the sound of the shots. By this Thanksgiving Day, everyone in the neighborhood was aware that one of the bank robbers was still loose, and they worried that he might be someplace close by. An elderly woman living on Twentieth NE watched the news and read the morning paper. She lived alone, although her grown sons visited her frequently. She’d lived in her own home for decades, and she didn’t want to move. She had her garden and her friends there.

Her “boys” were due for Thanksgiving dinner, but she felt too nervous to start cooking, not knowing
 
who might be down in the basement or hiding out in her yard. She surely wasn’t going down the basement to get any of the jars of canned goods she stored down there. After worrying about it for a while, she called her fifty-three-year-old son, Robert Walker. “If you boys want Thanksgiving dinner, “ she said, “you’d better come over here and check things out for me. I’m not going downstairs until you check it out and make sure everything’s safe. That bank robber could be right here in the house with me, for all I know.”

“I’ll be over early, Mom, “ Walker said. And, true to his word, he showed up a little before ten. He and his girlfriend and another friend checked his mother’s basement, garage, and the large backyard.

They looked under the deck and even walked around a camper belonging to Robert’s brother, Ron. It hadn’t been used for a while, and it was sitting up on saw horses in the back corner of the yard. Everything looked fine. “We even looked at the camper door and it still had the cables locked over the door, “ Walker said. Reassured, Mrs. Walker went about cooking a turkey and making pies. The basement didn’t look nearly so menacmg once her company was there. At 2,00 P. M. , Ron Walker showed up for dinner. He and Bob talked about the slight possibility that anyone might be hiding in his camper. “Did you actually look in the camper? “ Ron asked his brother. “No, the door was locked.” They discussed it a little more, and Ron pointed out that there were other ways to get into the camper than through the main door.

There were small access doors low on the sides that were never locked.

He didn’t bother locking them because no one could see them when the camper was loaded on a pickup truck and in his mother’s backyard the camper was pretty much hidden by trees. As Bob Walker told Detective Walt Maning later, “We went back out there and double-checked the door again. And I walked around to the back side of the camper or the furthest away from the house and took a look at the door there, and there was a little spring clip holding it closed.. .. So I used the palm of my hand and hit the top apart right where the spring clip is (supposed) to spring the door open so I could stick my head in there and look around. I hit it two or three times hard with the palm of my hand, and it didn’t budge at all.” Bob Walker said he’d picked up a two-by-four and hit the access door several times at the clasp area, but it still wouldn’t move. “I was just getting into position to hit it where the whole latch would come all the way off. Just about that time, my brother whispered down to me, Bob, Bob! He’s in there.” Bob Walker set down the two-by-four very carefully. Ron Walker had taken a ladder over to the other side of the camper where one window’s drapes were open. It was over the bed. He had climbed up two or three steps and looked in. He was shocked to see that there was someone inside.

He had not been able to see the man’s face, but he saw the back of his head, the curly dark hair, and a portion of his shoulders. While he watched, he could see the man’s shoulders tense. With exquisite delicacy, the two brothers moved away from the camper, speaking to each other only in sign language. In their mother’s house, Ron called 911, while Bob kept an eye on the camper. Nothing changed. No doors opened. If there hadn’t been two of them, it might have been easy to think Ron had only imagined someone huddled inside. In less than five minutes, the first patrol cars arrived. Some came up the alley near the trailer, some stopped in front. And soon, there were Seattle police officers everywhere. Mike and Lisa hadn’t left for Susan and Frank Magan’s house yet. They were just beginning to gather up things when the phone rang. It was Chris Gough, Mike’s old partner from his bike patrol days. “Mike, “ Chris said, “I think they got your guy.

Get on the radio.” Mike left the house with lights whirling and siren shrilling. “I wanted to see how it would end, “ he said. “I couldn’t stay away.” He was carrying a gun, before he had left Homicide the night before, one of the sergeants had given him one. It was a vote of confidence, a sign that they knew he had fired his own Glock only because he had no other choice. There would, of course, be a shooting review board as there always is when a Seattle Police officer fires his gun at someone. Mike hoped to God he would not have to shoot on this day. When Shawn Johnson arrived at Mrs. Walker’s house, he saw a seemingly endless stream of blue whirling lights. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many police in one spot in my life, “ he remembered. He parked on the south side of the surrounded property. “I’m thinking I’ve got to get my MP5 (a shoulder weapon) out of my trunk but I opened the trunk and it was still so stuffed with the evidence from the treehouse property that I couldn’t get to my gun.” He looked again at the waves of squad cars and the personnel standing by and realized they probably didn’t need an FBI agent who had been on duty and hadn’t eaten or slept for thirty-six hours. He also realized it would be a long time before he got home. Of course, he would not have gone home if someone had ordered him to. He had to be where he was just as much as Mike Magan did. They were finally coming to the end of something that had consumed them for a very long time. Sergeant Howard Mont had been off duty the evening of the bank robbery. He heard about the shootout and knew that his men who were under fire. He had offered to come in and help, but Radio Dispatch had told him they already had enough commanders on the scene. Mont was scheduled to work second watch on Thanksgiving Day. At his squad’s roll call at 11,339A. M. , the main topic of discussion was, of course, the bank robbery and shootout of the night before. Since he was a sergeant in the neighborhood where it had all happened, Mont expected that he and his officers might have a pretty busy day answering calls from nervous residents. It looked, however, as though the fugitive bank robber had managed to get away under cover of darkness. Mont’s wife and son promised him that they would wait to have Thanksgiving dinner with him after his shift ended just before 8,00 P. M. At 2,36 P. M. , Mont heard two units on his squad receive a call to check out a possible prowler in a backyard on Twentieth NE near Seventy-fifth. “I decided to respond, “ Mont said.

“Even though I believed that Hollywood was long gone. The intense search that had been conducted made it highly unlikely that he would still be in the area.” Mont was the first to arrive at the address given. Ron Walker came out to meet him and explained what he had seen.

Mont asked Walker what the best approach to the camper would be just in case someone was inside. “Are you positive you saw someone in there?

“

“I can’t be absolutely positive, “ Walker said, wondering now if he had only imagined a man inside. “But I thought I saw a curtain move and now the curtains seem to be in a little different position.

But then we’ve had trouble with kids getting in there in the past.” Mont suspected Ron Walker was reacting to the general panic in the neighborhood. He had been a cop for a very long time, was just about to retire, in fact. Howard Mont knew that the power of suggestion made people see things. The patrol units in his squad arrived, and Mont directed them to the backyard of the Walker home. While his officers moved to surround the camper just in case ron Walker led Mont, Officers Jon Dittoe and Mike Cruzan, J. Johnson, and Student Officer sjon Stevens to the camper.

Mont and Walker went to the camper door while the patrol officers took up positions near the huge fir trees at the back of the yard.

Mont could see that the cable lock on the camper door was securely fastened and the curtains along the side windows were drawn tightly shut. The window at the north end of the camper was covered by either a couch or a chair cushion. “I knocked on the east window and the door of the camper, “ Mont recalled, “and said Seattle Police. Even though I thought there was no one inside, I was still careful in positioning myself to the side of the door and window just in case.” One of the patrol officers yelled toward the camper, saying that the police were outside. There was no response at all. They hadn’t really expected one.
 
“You think Scurlock’s in there, Mike? “ Mont asked, half joking.

“Hey, Scurlock, “ Cruzan called from behind the tree where he aimed his weapon for cover fire, “if you’re in there, you’d better come out!

“ Nothing. Ron Walker showed Sergeant Mont the storage hatch on the right side of the ten-foot camper. “Some body could have crawled through there, “ he said. “It’s blocked from the inside, and it shouldn’t be.” Thinking that “somebody” would have to be pretty slim and agile to get in that way, Mont asked Ron Walker to remove the lock from the door, but Walker said it was also locked from inside. “And I’ve lost the door key.” Cruzan stretched up to a small window on the north side, opposite the door, and shined his flashlight in. He could see no person or movement inside. Just a cold camper with built-in upholstered benches, a stationary table, an over-cab bed. Mont cracked open one of the louvered windows and called, “Come outor it’s going to get uncomfortable.” Nothing. Almost positive that the camper was empty, but loath to leave without being sure, Mont pulled two canisters of Oleoresin Capsicum Spray (pepper spray) from his jacket. As it happened, he was the pepper spray instructor for the Seattle Police Department, and he knew its effects all too well. If anyone was inside, they could not possibly remain in such a confined space without crying out or coughing when the spray came in. He emptied a canister of pepper spray into the louvered window. There was no response at all.

Just to be absolutely sure that the camper was empty, Howard Mont emptied the second canister. Nothing. There wasn’t a cough, a shout, even a sigh, from inside. “With no sound at all from the camper, “ Mont said, “that convinced me that no one was in the camper that it was safe enough to break in.” Howard Mont almost decided not to check out the camper. But as long as they were there, he reached through the window to open the door, knocking aside the cushion. He lifted his flashlight, prepared to shine it into the corners of the shadowy camper, and heardincrediblythe boom of a gunshot. “I thought I was dead, “ he remembered. He ran for cover, hearing multiple gunshots behind him. He dove toward a large fir tree about ten feet west of the camper, but the student officer was already there. “I didn’t think it would be quite fair to pull rank on the kid and kick him out of there, so I broke and ran for the next tree. I had only taken a few steps when rapid semiautomatic gunfire rang out again.” Mont hit the ground and crawled.
 
He looked back and saw the curtains moving in the camper’s windows. He radioed that shots had been fired and asked for backup. When he reached another large tree, Jon Dittoe, who had been covering Mont, yelled to ask for cover fire so that he could move farther away from the camper.

Mont fired several rounds from his 357

Magnum revolver, and another officer fired his 9-mm semiautomatic.

Mike Cruzan and J. Johnson also fired to cover Dittoe. The backyard where Mrs. Walker had taken such pride in her flowers and bushes rang out with the sound of gunfire. Mont and his men were using cover fire to allow all of them to get as far away from the camper as possible.

“My biggest worry, “ Mont recalled, “was that Hollywood was going to get desperate and charge out with automatic weapon fire. We had used a lot of our ammunition, one officer had used both of his clips.

I called for more ammunition on the radio. I also called for assistance from a television news helicopter that was overhead, (asking them) to watch for an attempted escape into the yard east of us.” It didn’t seem possible that anyone could get out of that east window but then it hadn’t seemed possible that someone had been inside, waiting with a gun drawn, someone who had the self-control to breathe in two canisters of pepper spray without making a sound. Sjon Stevens, the student officer, was able to scramble out of the backyard and return with a shotgun. Mont had him train it on the door of the camper, with orders to shoot immediately if Hollywood or anyone else came out that way with a weapon in his hand. Ron Walker had gone back into the house to get a screwdriver to open the door or a window when he heard gunfire. He went into the bedroom where he could observe the backyard.

He saw three officers with their guns drawn as they tried to keep the trees between themselves and the camper. He watched one officer fire into the camper and thought he saw return fire. Walker stood, frozen, by the window for about fifteen minutes. There was one more spate of gunfire during that time, but he could not tell who had fired.
 
The Seattle Police Emergency Response Team arrived. Mike Magan directed newly arrived patrol units, suggesting several ways to surround the backyard where the camper sat. Most of the units responding had been his backup the night before. Officer Jennifer Mclean, who had found the discarded jacket at the shootout scene the night before, reached the Walker house at seven minutes to three on that Thanksgiving afternoon.
 
She was a trained negotiator. The camper was contained, the man inside could not possibly get past the dozens of law-enforcement officers who took up positions around the Walker property. To help the Emergency Response Team, Jennifer Mclean had Ron Walker draw a detailed sketch of the exterior of the house, the backyard, and the camper itself. How long could Scott Scurlockif it was, indeed, Scurlock in the camper survive in the camper? She asked Walker what was inside the camper that might be useful to him. There was virtually nothing. No electricity, no food, no television, no radio, no phone, no heat, no batteries, no cooking utensils or knives.