Empty Promises

God!” Smith cried. “I’m shot.”
    As Kershner sped to Smith’s location, he held his mike in one hand, broadcasting the description of the Triumph, instructing all law agencies in the vicinity to set up roadblocks. If the shooter had slipped through the dragnet, he could be on the I-5 freeway, which was a straight shot south to the Mexican border, or a straight shot north to Canada.
    Kershner was the first officer to get to Smith. A passerby was already bent over the deputy, who lay sprawled on his back beside his patrol car. “I think he was alive when I drove up,” the white-faced man said, “but I’m afraid he’s dead now.”
    Two men from a nearby home said they heard shots and ran out to see the stopped patrol car and a red sports car racing away.
    Carlton Smith hadn’t had a chance. An autopsy revealed that he had taken the full blast of a shotgun at close range in his left side. Just to make sure he died, his killer had pumped seven bullets from a handgun into his body as he lay helpless.
    There appeared to be no motive except pure evil, unless the gunman needed to make sure that he would never be identified. Whoever drove that red Triumph must have had more than a traffic stop on his mind.
    Two Eugene police officers spotted the Triumph in south Eugene and gave chase, but they lost it. They later recalled that they had never wanted so badly to stop a car, and they’d felt searing frustration as they watched the powerful car pull away from them. But the investigators did have the Triumph’s license number. Carlton Smith had given it to the sheriff’s dispatcher when he radioed in. The Oregon Motor Vehicle Department in Salem, the state capital, always had someone on duty, and the night clerk checked the records and told the Eugene investigators that the car had recently been taken in on a trade by a car dealer in Salem.
    The sleepy dealer answered his phone at 3:30 A.M. “Yes,” he said groggily. “I know that car. In fact, I just sold it tonight—last night now, I guess. I was just getting ready to close at nine P.M. These two fellows walked in, looked the car over, and bought it for $895 in cash money. They gave me mostly twenty-dollar bills and this one guy said he’d been saving up his money to buy a good sports car.”
    The buyer’s name? Norbert Waitts. The salesman identified mug shots of Waitts and Carl Cletus Bowles as the men who had bought the red Triumph. Buying the car was a clever move because if they were stopped, Waitts would have proper legal registration for the vehicle. But they were stopped, and something had gone terribly wrong.
    What had made them shoot Carlton Smith? Had they simply panicked at the sight of a uniform? Or were they such confirmed cop-haters that their reflexes took over? No. It was most likely they knew they would be in trouble from the moment Smith picked up his radio to check on wants and warrants. If there was a “want” out on them for the bank robbery that afternoon, Waitts’s name would have brought an immediate hit. Their names had not been broadcast on civilian radio stations yet, so they couldn’t be sure that they were wanted—but they hadn’t taken that chance.
    Their new car was useless to them now. Waitts and Bowles realized that, and officers found it abandoned in a field adjoining a residential area only an hour after Deputy Smith died. That probably meant they were on foot. Police, sheriff’s deputies, and FBI agents covered the area like an army of ants on a sand hill, and yet the two killers evaded them again. Searchers realized that they must have stolen a car or hidden in some house in the neighborhood next to the field.
    Lane County Sheriff Harry Marlowe was of the opinion that the fugitives had somehow gotten ahold of a car. At eight the next morning, a young girl called the police to say that her mother and brother weren’t in the house. Elizabeth Banfield and her twelve-year-old son had simply disappeared during the night, leaving four other children alone in the house. The Banfield home was only three blocks from the site of the abandoned Triumph.
    The child who had alerted the police said her mother would not leave her children at home alone without at least telling them where she was going. The child had a vague memory of voices in the night, but she had rolled over and gone back to sleep, believing that she was only dreaming. “Then when I got up this morning,” she said, “I found the lights on in the kitchen