Empty Promises

minor first-aid treatment. He was taken to the Mineral County sheriff’s headquarters to await news of his wife and baby.
    The hostage situation was becoming more volatile with every passing minute. Half crazy with lack of sleep, the two gunmen had gotten spooked just because they had to wait for sandwiches. There was no telling what they might do as the pressure on them increased. The Wilsons’ baby had to be screaming from hunger and exhaustion by now, and Joan Wilson was probably worried to death about her husband.
    Dispatcher Branovich continued to urge the fugitives to release Mrs. Wilson and her baby. “You make the terms,” he said convincingly. “We’ll do it any way you say.”
    But Bowles and Waitts were having none of it. “I wouldn’t trust a cop any further than the end of my gun,” Waitts snarled at Branovich.
    The stolen squad car had a conga line of police vehicles following it now, but no officer dared try to force it off the road or take a shot. For more than an hour, the strange procession rolled down the road. When they reached Coaldale, the army of officers trailing Carl Bowles watched incredulously as he parked and walked into a bar. They could have shot him easily enough, but they knew that Norbert Waitts was in the car holding a gun on Joan Wilson and her baby. If they brought Bowles down, they had no doubt that Waitts would shoot to kill.
    The parade of official cars, their light bars flashing red, blue, and yellow, stopped and waited. Their frustrating convoy would one day be the inspiration for a critically acclaimed Goldie Hawn movie called Sugarland Express . But this real drama was terrifying, galling, and fraught with danger.
    Finally, Bowles emerged from the bar, got back into the stolen squad car, and the procession of police vehicles continued down the road.
    As they crept along Highway 6, perhaps fortified by alcohol from the bar, Carl Bowles came up with a deal: “We’ll leave the woman and kid in the car if you’ll give us a half hour on foot.”
    Dispatcher Branovich quickly agreed. If Bowles kept his promise, it would be the best possible scenario for getting the woman and baby to safety, but he wouldn’t believe it until it happened.
    Actually, the sleep-deprived killers had another scheme in mind. They had spotted an empty pickup truck along the road and they planned to steal it. With a half-hour head start, they could slide into Vegas where they would be swallowed up by the crowds and bright lights. Odd that men without honor expected the police to honor them, to keep a promise to two ex-cons who had killed one of their brothers in cold blood.
    Bowles and Waitt walked away from the squad car and headed back toward the pickup. They planned to hot-wire the truck, but Special Deputy Jerry Minor had a gun on them before they ever got the engine to turn over. They took off running through the brush on foot. Minutes later, California Highway Patrolmen Bill Rich and Howard Hoffman from Bishop, just across the state line, spotted the pair.
    The outlaws surrendered meekly.
    The officers on the scene approached the stolen police car, afraid of what they might find inside. As they drew closer, they heard a sound and saw someone sit up. Joan Wilson and her baby were alive.
    Reunited with her worried husband, Joan Wilson told him that Carl Bowles had made a bizarre final gesture. “He tossed $900 in my lap when he left the car,” she said. “And he told me, ‘You don’t need to tell your old man where you got the dough. I don’t think I’m going to have a chance to spend it, so go out and have a ball on a spending spree.’ ”

    Carl Cletus Bowles went to a federal prison first, serving nine years at the McNeill Island facility on Puget Sound. Surrounded by water as cold and rough as it is beautiful, the prison is an island unto itself both figuratively and literally. No one escapes from McNeill, although a few hapless convicts have tried. But the churning current pulled them under, trapping them in a watery prison forever.
    Seven years later, when he was thirty-one years old, Bowles was transferred to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem to begin serving concurrent state and federal sentences. According to Judge Edwin Allen’s sentencing warning, Bowles was never to be considered a candidate for parole. His file at McNeill Island showed he had received seven disciplinary transfers in seven years of incarceration before he came to the Oregon State pen. A parole