The End of the Dream (37 page)

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“I was going to drive to Portland, take a plane to Reno, and then get a rental car to drive to Louisiana.” That was the end of their interview with Steve Meyers, a nurse came in and said he had to be transported to surgery. They went up to the seventh floor and found the man that they now knew was named Mark Biggins in a single room there, guarded by uniformed Seattle patrol officers. They attempted to talk to him, but he was still too sedated after surgery to respond. If Mark Biggins and Steve Meyers were in Harbor view Medical Center, that validated the investigators’ belief that the man who had escaped was William Scott Scurlock, forty-two, allegedly a scientist, a conservationist, a philanthropist, and perhaps one of the most cunning bank robbers they had ever encountered. It was midnight. Greg Mixsell and Walt Manning went back to the Homicide Unit on the third floor of the Public Safety Building to start their paperwork. Shawn Johnson went to the PSVCTF office on the twenty-eighth Floor of the FBANNEX.

He hadn’t eaten, and he would not sleep this night. He had to prepare arrest warrants and a search warrant for the property on Overhulse Road in Olympia, Washington, where according to Steve Meyersfbi agents would be searching “the biggest treehouse in the world.” Lieutenant Linda Pierce, who had lobbied to help Mike Magan get a spot on the task force, was Scene Commander out where the van had crashed, and she was busy coordinating scores of officers who still combed the area. Just before midnight, Sergeant Ron Smith came and took Mike Magan away from the scene to get a hamburger. It was only then that Mike realized he had not called his partner. Sheila had been as anxious as he to catch Hollywood, and hours had gone by where he was too occupied to think about calling her. “Sheila? “ Mike was tentative, Sheila Bond could be one tough partner. “What’s up, baby?

“ she asked.

“It happened, Sheila, “ he said, “and it’s over.”

“What happened? “

“Hollywood.. ..” Mike went through the evening once more for Sheila. She wasn’t madshe was disappointed that she hadn’t been there, but she told him she had spent the whole evening in the kitchen, and that she hadn’t even turned the radio on. At Seattle Police Homicide offices, Mike attended a debriefing. There were more than fifty people there, and for the first time, everyone learned what everyone else had been doing.

Also for the first time, they learned just how much money the Hollywood gang had stolen, $1,080,000! Somebody asked, “How much does a million and eighty thousand dollars weigh? “

“Fifty-six pounds.

“ Mike Magan finally headed for home at 3,00 A. M. On Thanksgiving morning. He stopped off at the North precinct to see how things were going. Then he drove past Lake Washington toward the house where Lisa and his two cats were sound asleep.

“The storm had knocked the power out, “ he remembered. “The wind was still blowing across the lake, raising whitecaps, and I could see those, but the streetlights were out and there were signs that had been knocked down rattling in the street. It was eerie, like a ghost town.

When I got home, there were no lights and I could hear our smoke alarm chirping. I checked on Lisa, and then I came downstairs. I was too tired to sleep. I still needed to talk to somebody so I called the FBI radio room at the Federal Building.

“They said it was quiet. They were getting ready for a search warrant in the morning. I asked them if Hollywood would make their Top Ten, and they said if we didn’t catch him tomorrow today reallyhe probably would.” Finally, with the smoke alarm still chirping, Mike went to bed.
 
He lay there, staring into the dark until morning. He didn’t sleep, nor did he try to. At 7,30, the phone started to ring, officers, old partners, friends, and then Shawn Johnson, updating Mike on the interrogation of Steve Meyers. Hollywood was still free.

Quietly, throughout the night of November 27-28, FBSWAT team members and other agents staked out the address on Overhulse Road in Olympia, Washington.

They saw no one arrive and no one leave the property. Sabrina Adams was sleeping high up in the treehouse deep in the woods. She had arrived before the FBI team got there. They didn’t know she was back there, and they were far too quiet for her to hear, even though she awoke often to listen for the sound of Scott’s van approaching. By Thanksgiving morning, Shawn Johnson had obtained a search warrant from U. S.
 
Magistrate Judge Philip K. Sweigert of the United States District Court, Western District. Two FBI Evidence Response Teams were assigned to sweep the property at Overhulse Road, to look for evidence that would further connect Scurlock and his wounded accomplices to the crime. Don Glasser headed for Olympia at 8,00 A. M. to join them.

Every item of interest they uncovered would be photographed, marked, and meticulously logged so that the chain of evidence would remain unbroken.
 
They would also take photos of this remarkable compound.

Despite the fact that he had had no sleep since Tuesday night, Shawn Johnson joined the search. The teams who had guarded the property all night were still there. They had seen no one approach during the night, though, but it was possible that Scott Scurlock had made his way home under cover of dark. There had to be other ways to get in, especially for someone who had reportedly lived here for a dozen years or more. And none of them knew about Sabrina Adams. Since she had arrived at the treehouse property by taxi, there was no vehicle indicating she was there, there was only the old red pickup Steve Meyers had mentioned and a nondescript sedan with California plates.

The FBI agents approached the gray house first. It looked like a pleasant farmhouse from the exterior. When no one responded to their knocks of shouts of , FBI! “ they kicked in the glass-paneled door and it shattered, its shiny wooden frame breaking into pieces. Sometime during the night, Shawn Johnson realized that he had come to think of the man still missing as two people, one was Hollywood, the bank robber and the other was a man he hoped to meet, Scott Scurlock. Both of them had lived in this house. It was a perfect Thanksgiving day, the winds of the night before had blown the rain clouds away, and the sky was blue.
 
Everywhere he looked, Shawn saw hundred-foot cedar trees reaching upward. This was where Hollywood reportedly had lived, planned, and plotted. This was where he took refuge after each bank robbery. (Or, if Meyers hadn’t been lying about the biggest treehouse in the world, this was where Scott had created it. )
 
This house, Steve had told Shawn, was the guest house where Scott welcomed family and friends. The farmhouse had obviously been remodeled, the kitchen and bathroom, particularly, were works of art with tile work that Steve had described.
 
Some of Steve’s marble sculptures were in the yard among the sword ferns and fallow vegetation. The FBI searchers found a dozen pairs of Converse All-Stars black, blue, red, wine, even pink the canvas shoes that Hollywood had worn into banks so many times, and tan boat shoes exactly like those in a number of surveillance photos.

There were extra portable radios, a number of books, magazines, and technical articles about shortwave radios and a frequency directory that included police channels. Steve’s bag was there, as he had said stuffed with stacks of crisp $20 bills. Many, many stacks of $20 bills. They found a passport in the inside pocket of a Versace sports jacket, more passports, baseball caps, maps of far-off places, mineral spirits, a catalogue for knives and optics, aviator sunglasses, rubber gloves, duct tape. There was a rifle in a pink Veloro case, and packets of ammunition. The house looked for all the world as if the occupants had only stepped away for a few minutes.

The bed covers were thrown back and dirty clothes were piled on the floor just like in any bachelor’s pad. There was a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter, a tea kettle full of water on the stove, and a bouquet of fresh flowers. There were any number of banking records for William Scott Scurlock, 1506 Overhulse Road. He banked, ironically enough, at a Sea first branch. His credit cards were there, and, in a desk in the dining room, they found a vial with a white powdery substance that they field-tested and found to be codeine. Nothing sensational, it could have been prescribed for a toothache. While they searched, the phone rang and they listened while a man named Doug* asked the answering machine, “Where is everybody? “ and then left his phone number.

They jotted down the number. Was Scott on his way home? It was hard for them not to jump when cars approached. A search warrant is an intensely personal invasion, granted only when there is probable cause to believe that evidence connected to a crime will be found. Such a search plunges law-enforcement officers into the middle of someone else’s daily life, the sounds, smells, tastes, and habits of a stranger are there to be touched and experienced.

Something that they didn’t find that Shawn expected were newspaper clippings about the bank robberies. Since Hollywood was such a showman, it seemed a given that he would have saved the headline accounts of his handiwork. “There was no scrapbook of his achievements’ at all, “ Shawn said. Of course, they had only searched the gray house, there was still the treehouse, the barn, and all of the outbuildings. They found books on a number of unusual subjects. One was called How to Bury Your Goods.
 
Riffling through the pages, they could see demonstrations of how to establish landmarks and triangulate measurements so that someone could go back and pinpoint where he had hidden valuables in the ground.
 
Another, along the same lines, was U.

S. Army Special Forces Caching Techniques. Other titles included New I.
 
D. in America, Credit Secrets, Serious Surveillance, and The Heavy Duty New Identity Book. Far more troubling was a book titled, Kill Without Joy, The Complete How to Kill Book. Clearly the games that Scott Scurlock was playing were becoming more and more intricate. After the gray house, the FBI search team swept the barn. The entry room was a jumble of equipment, tools, building materials the kind of storage that any builder or handyman might have. The room beyond the first room had a massive safe and more storage-type items. But, here, the team saw what looked like a plywood trap door in the floor. They pried it up, wondering nervously if the man they sought was down there with a gun aimed at them. But there was no one there, only a huge underground room beneath the barn. It was a concrete, bunkerlike space, with plenty of room for several men well over six feet to stand without bending. There was no cash in the safe, but there were weapons.

Indeed, every place they searched on this sylvan property was rife with guns. They moved around a corner, and past a curtain made of two army blankets. Now they seemed to have found Scott Scurlock’s makeup studio.
 
It was fully equipped with both makeup and ammunition. There was bright track lighting over a counter that held mirrors, several shades of theatrical makeup, fake hair, powder brushes, adhesive, gloves, knives, guns, and bags and boxes of rounds of high-powered ammunition. Kleenex apparently used to apply makeup the day before was still wadded up in a cardboard box beneath the counter. Later, during the many long conversations he would have with Steve Meyers, Shawn would realize that this barn room must have been where he and Scott had come to count their money after a bank job. ) If there was a “war room” in Scott Scurlock’s compound, this had to be it. There was even a huge stereo system in the barn, perhaps used to blast out the music that would get their juices going for what lay ahead.

Curious, Shawn reached over and turned on the system. A CD was in place, and the room was instantly filled with the sound track from the movie, Top Gun, the song “Danger Zone” that played whenever Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards soared in their jet fighters. The music boomed for a few moments, and then he switched it off. It was very quiet again as they searched the barn, finding more ammo, and more evidence that chilled them as much as the November cold in the unheated barn. Shawn Johnson kept thinking that whoever had set up this room had been totally committed to what he was doing.

It was a completely professional operation. All of it. Perfect makeup.
 
Careful planning. Untraceable cars, according to Steve at least, wiped clean three times. “We finished with the house, “ Shawn said. “We finished with the barn. The treehouse was way, way back in the woods.
 
You had to walk a long way down this wooded path. I remember walking back there. I was trying to find this thing expecting a small treehouse.
 
All of sudden, I looked up and there it was.” It rose up out of the mossy forest floor as though it had burst from the earth. It might not have been the biggest treehouse in the world but it was big, three stories built above its tall “legs” of living cedar trees. He saw that it might have known better days. The exterior looked weathered and somewhat jerry-built, as if one of its decks or ramps could drop off at any minute. There were walkways extending hundreds of feet into the trees, Shawn was amazed that anyone had managed to build them way up there. Some of the other FBI searchers had found the treehouse before Shawn got there. They had shouted up to what appeared to be the living quarters, not really expecting an answer, but far above, a slender blond woman had peered down at them, disappeared for a moment, and then come back wearing glasses. Her face was a study of shock, panic, and sadness as she followed their commands to come down. “I saw all these FBI guys, “ Sabrina remembered sometime later, tears filling her eyes and her voice choking. “I thought that everything Scott had ever warned me might happen was happening.” She didn’t say if he had told her why someone might invade their perfect world, but it was obvious he had made some attempt to prepare her for disaster. After she clambered down the steps, the team waiting for her shouted up for Scott to come down, too. “He’s not here, “ she said softly. “I don’t know where he is. Do you? “ And, of course, no one did. They began the search of the treehouse next, and were greeted by a smiling Buddha statue at the . bottom of what seemed to be endless series of stairs and ladders. It was a little hairy climbing up, since most of the stairs had no railings, and some of them appeared to be flimsy. It could even have been booby trapped, with the ladders designed to collapse under a man’s weight. Once inside, the FBI agents found the first two floors “very well done.” The living area had a new couch covered with a fleecy Alpaca throw, a rattan trunk, lamps, and floors covered by colorful Southwestern rugs.