No Regrets

sidewalk in front of the bank and the spreading torrent of blood that seemed to be coming from his midchest area. A young woman bent over the elderly man, attempting to administer CPR. Nicholson and Officer R. Amundson, who arrived seconds behind him, bent to assist her. A doctor from the clinic across the street came running, too, carrying his bag.
    Debra Wiatrak, twenty-two, told the officers that she had been driving by and had stopped when a woman waved frantically to her. “I’m a trained EMT,” she said, “and I didn’t have a pulse even then.”
    If anyone could have saved William Heggie, he would have survived. Seattle Fire Department paramedics from Medic One—the premier emergency response program in America at the time—the doctor, his nurse, and Debra Wiatrak all tried their best.
    A man standing near the bank entrance watched sadly as medical personnel tried to get a heartbeat. “I don’t think they’re getting any life back,” he said quietly. “He was a wonderful man. I’ve known him for twenty-five years and he was one of the finest people I’ve ever known.”
    And indeed he was.
    If the bank robber had met Heggie forty years earlier, the denouement of their battle might well have been different. Heggie, a British Columbia native, was a robust young man who played tennis and rugby then. He had been a strong and vigorous man for all of his life. In later years, he belonged to the Shrine, the Order of Eastern Star, the Kiwanis, and a number of other service and fraternal organizations. He and his wife had raised three daughters.That he was now likely to die seemed unthinkable. After thirty minutes of fruitless effort, he was loaded onto the Medic One rig and rushed to Harborview Hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival.
    But even as medics worked over Bill Heggie, the police investigation had begun. Nicholson talked to Jill Mobley first. “I think Mr. Heggie was trying to lock the bank doors—to lock the man in,” she said.
    “Did you see where the truck headed when the killer left?”
    She shook her head. “He went westbound—toward the University of Washington campus, but we couldn’t see beyond that.”
    An alert was put out at once for officers to be on the lookout for the turquoise truck with the white canopy.
    A phalanx of detectives and FBI agents left their downtown offices as soon as the communications scanners began broadcasting word of the bank robbery. Robbery Lieutenant Bob Holter and his detectives, Sergeant John Gray, Sergeant Chuck Schueffele, and Detectives James Lundin and Al “Beans” Lima, arrived first, followed shortly by Homicide Detectives George Marberg, Al Gerdes, Gary Fowler, and Nat Crawford. The scene at the bank was alive with fire department and police patrol personnel. Patrol Sergeants Harry Hanson and James Johnson briefed the detectives on what information they had been able to gather thus far. It wasn’t much. They knew only that they were looking for a very tall person—probably a male, because of his height. But the robber had been dressed so that the tellers could not see so much as a patch of skin.
    Jill Mobley told Al Lima that she could not even say for sure what race the robber was. “I’m inclined to think thathe’s white—but that’s from his voice only,” she said. “And that is just an impression... I could very well be mistaken.”
    The Seattle police detectives and the six FBI special agents divided up chores at the scene: A special agent began processing the area around the teller’s window for latent prints, while pairs of detectives and agents interviewed the witnesses who had been present or nearby during the robbery. There were precious few of them; in all likelihood, the bank robber had deliberately chosen a time when the bank would probably be empty.
    Jill explained that the dye pack she slipped into the robber’s sack was set to explode only if it was carried through the bank door, where it would be triggered. “After a delay of some seconds, it explodes and expels reddish-orange dye and tear gas.” She thought it would have gone off just after the man got into his vehicle, but the truck was out of her sight by then.
    Word came shortly after that the dye trap had done its work. A patrol officer found the turquoise pickup abandoned little more than a mile away from the bank. Detectives observed the nine-year-old Ford truck. When they glanced into the cab of the truck, they found its seat covered with bright