The End of the Dream (17 page)

Surprisingly, most elusive felons hunger, albeit subconsciously, for such a meeting. The bank robber who would come to be known only as “Hollywood” had not one but two spectacularly adept investigators on his trail. Of all the Northwest lawmen who would mobilize to track and trap him, Shawn Johnson and Mike Magan wanted him the most. Although they were as different in temperament and technique as any two men could be, they would unite in what became a surpassingly baffling investigation.
 
Mike Magan is tall and muscular, Shawn Johnson is tall and lanky. Mike was a football star, Shawn a basketball star. Mike Magan’s lineage is pure police, while Shawn Johnson is the first law-enforcement officer in his family. And Mike was a Seattle police officer while Shawn was an FBI agent. To the layman, that probably doesn’t mean much. To a working cop or agent, the old antagonisms between city cops and “the Feds” haven’t quite dissipated. During the long reign of FBDIRECTOR J. Edgar Hoover, “the Bureau” was viewed as elitist by most police departments. City and county police detectives grumbled about sending their information to the FBI because they claimed it disappeared into a great black hole, and there was no reciprocation. They were sometimes justified. With the abdication of Hoover, the Bureau and local cops began to work together with far more give and take.
 
Hollywood was a trophy kind of criminal, clever enough and elusive enough to become the kind of big fish that any cop would love to land first. Most of the working cops in the Northwest would come to know about Hollywood and his gang, and they all pondered how they might catch him if he showed up in their jurisdiction. But perhaps most of all, Mike Magan and Shawn Johnson wanted him. Each of them wanted to be the one to put the handcuffs on Hollywood, the first to read him his rights. Still, neither of them had a fix on what he looked like, who he was, where he lived, or where he would strike next.

1987 was a crucial year for both of them, Mike Magan was graduating from the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Center and about to become a rookie office on the Seattle Police Department.

Shawn Johnson was attending the FBACADEMY in Quantico, Virginia, and never had reason to give Seattle, Washington, a thought.

That same year, less than an hour’s drive from Quantico, Scott Scurlock was marrying “The Queen of Spades, “ in Reston, Virginia, while three thousand miles away from Quantico, Mark and Annie Biggins’ marriage was breaking up. Steve and Kevin Meyers were both living in Virginia, too and Steve was enjoying a new marriage. But as far back as 1987, a certain synchronicity of circumstances was beginning to line up and intersect. It was happening as quietly as a gentle breeze sliding through bare winter branches. It would be almost a decade before the tragic quintet of players would actually meet. All of them were so intent upon the lives they were living then, they had no time to look ahead, none of them could have foreseen what was to come. We know now where Scott Scurlock, Mark Biggins, and the Meyers brothers were from the fifties to the late eighties. Where were Mike Magan and Shawn Johnson? Actually, Mike and Shawn were nowhere at all in the fifties, they weren’t even born until the next decade. Shawn Johnson was born in Red Wing, Minnesota, in February 1961 and grew up a few miles east of there in a hamlet called Cannon Falls.

In Quantico, he would be geographically close to Scott Scurlock.

As a child, he grew up a short distance from Mark Biggins. Shawn was seven years younger than Mark, but both were sons of working-class Minnesota families and both were good students and athletes. While Mark Biggins had six siblings, Shawn had only one, his sister was seventeen years older than he and about to graduate from high school when he was born. Shawn grew up as virtually an only child. He was a tall skinny kid, a little bit shy. Like Mark Biggins, he would always be soft-spoken. Shawn Johnson graduated from Cannon Falls High School in 1979, and started college at Winona State University that fall.

Winona State is located near the shores of the great Mississippi River a few miles south of the falls that drop the St. Croix River into the Mississippi. He graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Science degree in criminal justice. His sister was an attorney, and he planned to be one, too.
 
But in the summer of 1983, Shawn did an internship with the St.
 
Paul Police Department. He found he loved police work.

Still, he went on to law school at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. Halfway through law school, Shawn married his college sweetheart, Marie. During his years in St. Paul, Shawn Johnson had done a variety of internships with a corporate law firm, a prosecuting attorney’s office, and two years with an insurance defense firm. As his graduation approached in 1987, he had every intention of going into the practice of law in one specialty or another. But he always remembered his internship with the St. Paul Police Department, and he realized that he was more intrigued by the challenges of police work than with practicing law. The FBI came to the law school campus every year, recruiting agents. The Bureau sounded interesting to Shawn, if he were to become a special agent, he would have an opportunity to combine his longtime interest in investigative work with his training in the law.
 
And so in his last year of law school, Shawn Johnson applied to the FBI.
 
He had just graduated from law school and was preparing for the Minnesota bar exam when he learned he had been accepted into the FBI’s twelve week training program in Quantico. He asked for and was granted an extension so that he could take the bar exam. He passed on his first try. A new lawyer, Shawn Johnson was soon a rookie FBI agent, reporting to FBI headquarters in Quantico in August of 1987. It was the hottest, muggiest time of the year to run the obstacle courses in Virginia, but Shawn wasn’t sorry he was there, what he was learning was riveting.
 
Eight weeks into the training, Shawn got his assignment, Seattle, Washington. “I had to look on the map, “ he admitted. “I knew it was someplace out west, and I thought it was on the Pacific Ocean. I found out it wasn’t.” So the Johnsons headed west. They arrived in November, the beginning of Seattle’s six-month rainy season. Shawn Johnson’s first assignment in Seattle was with the Green River Killer Task Force, an intense serial murder investigation that ended in bitter disappointment after bitter disappointment. Shawn arrived when detectives and FBI agents were winding the failed investigation down. More than four dozen young women had disappeared in the Seattle area between July 1982 and April 1984, most of their skeletonized remains had been found in lonely grave sites located in ever-widening circles around the Seattle-Tacoma airport. The victims (all but four) had been identified, but never avenged.

The Green River Task Force had once had several dozen investigators working in a high-pressure boiler room of leads, tips, and follow-ups.

After four years, when no viable suspect had been found, the task force began closing down. Shawn Johnson worked for three months with another FBI special agent and Seattle Police and King County detectives who were still assigned to the task force. “We were basically pulling out, “ he recalled, “but it was still interesting for me coming right out of Quanticoto work on a case like that.” The search for the Green River Killer was a gripping learning experience for the scores of detectives who took part in it, even though at this writing, all the murder cases are still open, and the manpower assigned to follow leads consists of only one and a half detectives. Every one who worked on the task force came away with a deep understanding of serial murder and the devious mind of a brilliant sociopath. They just never found the brilliant sociopath who committed the Green River killings. Shawn Johnson was assigned next to the FBI’s violent crime unit. There was no lack of such crimes in Seattle, Shawn worked bank robberies, extortions, kidnapping, and parole violations for a year. “We were always busy, “ he recalled.

Marie Johnson seldom knew exactly what her husband’s daily work life was like not unless she overheard “war stories” at social events where he and other agents got together. It was just as well she didn’t know.

He made a point of not bringing his work home, some of the cases he investigated were very dangerous. From 1989 to 1994, Shawn worked counterintelligence and counterterrorism.

This was during the Goodwill Games and the Gulf War. “There was always something going on, “ he saysa deliberately vague understatement. He will not sayhe cannot say what was going on.

Those five years taught him a lot about the more sinister and dangerous attributes of terrorists.
 
By this time, the Johnsons had two toddlers at home. Shawn spent his off-duty time with his family and pursued his avocation as a scholar of the Civil War.

Immersing himself in the lore of a war that ended more than a century ago was a way to step out of the war against crime he lived everyday.

At work, his life was far different than it might have been had he opted to become an attorney in Minnesota. At first, both he and Marie had been homesick for Wisconsin and Minnesota, but gradually they grew accustomed to Seattle’s sometimes endless rainy season, bought a home in West Seattle, and settled in. In January of 1994, Shawn Johnson was reassigned to the violent crimes unit. Among the many cases that were thorns in the sides of agents and local detectives who worked robberies, there was a bank robber who had come to be known as Hollywood. He was so good at disguise and escape that he sometimes seemed to be more a ghost than a man. By the beginning of 1994, he and his accomplices had hit seven banks and stolen more than $400,000.

When Shawn Johnson looked over the charts that represented Hollywood’s crimes, it was obvious that he was perfecting his “craft.” In 1994, the bank robber in the mask wasn’t yet in the most-wanted class, he was only one among too many bank robbers in Seattle. But he seemed to be coming up through the pack, making himself more infamous with each bank he hit.

Michael Patrick Magan was born on September 21, 1962.

The Magans had come to America from County Langfar, the village of Killahsee. Mike came from so many generations of Irish cops that the strong blue line was almost genetically bred into him. His great grandfather the first Frank Magan was “Lieutenant of Roundsman” for the New York Police Department. His grandfather, Frank R. Magan, was a New York City Police officer and later a New York City fireman. His father, Frank III BORN in Brooklyn, raised in Queens joined the New York City Police Department in 1958. He was on the Tactical Patrol Squad, the first in America. All the patrolmen on the special squad had to be over six feet, at over six-feet-six, Frank qualified easily. Where Scott Scurlock’s great-great uncle Doc had ridden with Billy the Kid, all of Magan’s male ancestors rode with the law. Just as preachers’ kids often rebel, so do cops’ kids. It can be rough on a kid when his old man represents all that is moral and legal. But that didn’t happen to Mike Magan.

All he and his big brother Jake ever
 
wanted to be were police officers, and they couldn’t wait until they were old enough to join the force. Susan and Frank Magan III, Mike’s parents, were the least likely couple to meet. She was a naive, extremely devout Irish Catholic girl from Butte, Montana, who attended Catholic school in Butte and left home to attend strict St. Mary’s College in Leavenworth, Kansas. Big Frank Magan, of course, grew up in Queens.

The petite blond and the towering Frank met in Seattle in the mid-fifties at a party one of Susan’s friends gave.

All they had in common was a devout Catholic faith and a certain independence of spirit. Frank convinced Susan to marry him and move to New York City, and she loved it, but in 1996 when Jake was almost two and Mike was about to be born, they moved back to Seattle, “because it was a better place to raise kids.” It was, and they had three jake, Mike, and Molly. Like the Scurlocks, the Magans had no set rules for their youngsters. But their lifestyles were vastly different, while the Scurlocks were immersed in New Age religion and the laissez-faire attitudes that went with it, the Magans’ kids all went to parochial schools where the nuns and the Irish Christian Brothers could be tough.

Both families taught by example, letting their youngsters make their own decisions. Susan Magan recalled that she and Frank never had trouble with Jake, Mike, or Molly nothing beyond some “egg-throwing incidents” with the boys. Her older brothers were much stricter with Molly than their parents were. She felt lucky if she could ever have a date without her big brothers watching over her. Mike Magan barely survived childhood. Susan took him shopping at the A&P when he was four, and she was terrified when he suddenly started gagging and choking in agony. One of the store employees had been changing the price tags on merchandise, using acetone (nail polish remover) to remove the old labels. Foolishly, he had used a pop bottle to hold the acetone. When he set it down for a moment, he put it right next to bottles of real pop. Little Mike saw it there, open, and took a big gulp of “pop.” He was rushed to Children’s-Orthopedic Hospital by ambulance. Doctors told Franlt and Susan Magan that he might die, and if he didn’t, there was a strong possibility that his lungs had been irreparably damaged. “He inhaled some of it, “ the doctors warned.

“You have to understand that his lungs were burned.” Mike was released after five days in the hospital, hardly the worse for wear.

He didn’t realize how desperate his condition had been. And his lungs developed just fine. Susan always worked, but she was home before school and after school because she was a drama and speech teacher at a private preparatory school for girls. Later, she also opened her own catering business. In 1980, when Mike was a senior in high school, Frank R. Magan II moved in with his son’s family in their home in a suburb in the north end of Seattle. He was an irascible character who usually thought his grandsons the finest boys on earth. He believed Susan was an angel.
 
Stories of Grandpa Frank’s eccentricities still send his family into gales of laughter. He had a prized 1964 Mercury Marquis that he revered so much (despite its rapidly disintegrating condition) that they called it “Baby Jesus” behind his back. Mike drove it once and was afraid it would explode from sheer gas fumes alone. Once when Grandpa Frank’s sister, Agnes, a most devout and sheltered nun, was coming for a visit, he took Mike and Jake aside and cautioned them, “Now, boys my sister Agnes is coming and she doesn’t like cuss words” Mike winked at Jake and said, “Well, what’s the ##@@$$$big $$###&& deal about that? “