Empty Promises

use the phone to call for help because they had an emergency. Then they pushed their way into her home and held her and her son hostage at gunpoint. They told her they had just killed a police officer and had to get out of town in a hurry. “You’ll drive us in your car,” they ordered.
    She protested that she had four children asleep in the house and couldn’t leave. But the men insisted that she and her son leave with them. “One kid’s enough,” the tall, homely man said. “It will keep the cops from shooting at us if they should spot us. A flock of kids would be a mess.”
    When the men said they wanted to go to Idaho, Elizabeth Banfield directed them to take a route that ran past the dam where her husband was working. She held the faint hope that her husband might recognize the car and rescue her and her son. It was one chance in a million, and her heart sank when they passed close to the dam and she realized no one even saw their car.
    Her kidnappers knew that the Banfields’ car would soon be identified on both police and civilian radio broadcasts as a stolen vehicle, so they were anxious to dump it. Near Marion Forks, they came across a truck with an attached camper parked along the road. Inside, they found Mr. and Mrs. Rudolph Sternberg of Renton, Washington, their fourteen-year-old son, and his friend.
    Sternberg, a civil engineer for the Boeing Airplane Company, was no stranger to conflict. He was a veteran of the Latvian Army, and he had lost an arm in World War II when the Germans pressed him into military service against the Russians. It took him only a moment to realize he dared not resist the armed men who commandeered his camper; he had his family to consider.
    It was decided that Bowles would drive, with Sternberg sitting beside him. Waitts herded the five other hostages into the back of the camper and held a gun on them. Carl Bowles turned the camper south toward the California state line.
    The hundreds of miles between Salem, Oregon, and the California line passed slowly. Bowles monitored the radio news intently and kept Waitts informed through an intercom system Sternberg had installed in the camper. They learned that Deputy Carlton Smith had died and that the police believed the two ex-cons had abducted the Banfields.
    As they rolled up to the California state line, the hostages and their captors alike froze as a border inspector approached the truck. “You ready back there?” Bowles asked.
    “Ready,” Waitts muttered. “You keep the intercom on. I’ll know what to do.”
    “Carrying any fruit or vegetables?” the inspector asked, his trained eye scanning the rig.
    “No, sir,” Bowles said, and Sternberg shook his head too.
    “Any animals? Anyone in the back?”
    “No. Just me and my buddy here,” Bowles said, smiling.
    “Have a good day,” the border guard waved them on.
    Luckily for both the border agent and the hostages inside, he didn’t suspect that the camper held anything but a couple of fishing buddies.
    The odyssey of fear continued for another eighteen hours. During the trip, Bowles and Waitts pulled into truck stops twice and bought hamburgers, coffee, and milk for the hostages, but there was never any possibility that the hostages could cry out for help. If they did, someone would be shot.
    Late in the evening, Bowles announced that he had heard on the radio that the Banfields’ Thunderbird had been discovered. It was time to get rid of the camper; authorities were now so close on their tail that it was only a matter of time before the camper would be marked as a hot car, too. They allowed their captives to leave the camper to relieve themselves in a field.
    The hostages noted that their captors seemed disorganized; neither had slept since Monday night and it was now midnight on Thursday. The kidnappers couldn’t really sleep with six captives to watch. The best they could do was take turns with catnaps. The Sternbergs’ teenage son watched Bowles and Waitts as they tossed their two shotguns into a pond outside Marysville, California; the boy pretended to be looking up at a nearby hill, but he was actually memorizing everything he could about the area. He saw exactly where the guns splashed into the pond. If he survived this ordeal, he figured he could lead FBI agents right back to the spot.
    This was one of the most demoralizing moments of the endless trip down the interstate freeway. The hostages wondered if they would be dumped next. If their captors no