No Regrets (33 page)

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 old 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.

“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 cheap 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.”