No Regrets

no witnesses around the bank, Detectives Gary Fowler and Nat Crawford made a door-to-door canvass of the block where the pickup was abandoned. They had more luck; they located a man who remembered something. “Just before ten this morning,” he recalled, “I heard a car with a loud engine. As it passed, I looked out the window and I saw an older Volkswagen bug. It was light blue or gray, and it was headed north on Forty-fifth N.E. It looked to me like there might have been two people inside.”
    The investigators figured that the person who’d abandoned the pickup had had another vehicle waiting for his getaway, and it was probably the VW bug with the noisy engine. The timing was right. He’d left the bank at about 9:40 A.M. , driven the mile in the truck filled with tear gas and floating orange powder, and then changed cars. He would have been in a tearing hurry as the VW pulled away.
    An even better witness on the street turned up. The young woman said she’d been on her way to classes at the University of Washington at 9:15 A.M . “I noticed an older bug parked facing northbound on the east side of Forty-fifth. I thought the people who live there had bought a different car; I noticed it especially because I also drive an old Volkswagen.”
    “What did it look like?” Lima asked.
    “It was gray—older—maybe as old as a 1963 to 1968model. The hood was black, as if it had been replaced, and so were two of the fenders. It was kind of beat-up, with a dent in the center of the hood. When I got home from class at a quarter to one, it was gone.”
    “Did you see anyone in it—or around it?”
    “No. It was empty at nine-fifteen.”
    The information on the Volkswagen bug was passed on at once to all law enforcement agencies in the thirteen western states. With every hour that passed, the killer could be another sixty or seventy miles away from Seattle.
    The investigators studied films from the bank’s hidden camera. They could see the bank robber at Jill Mobley’s window, his left hand on the green cloth bag, and his right clutching a handgun. The only bit of skin visible was the tip of his nose. If the films were shown on TV news, they wondered if anyone might recognize something about him. Was there anything in his stance, his clothing, or his mannerisms that would trigger a memory in someone watching? The pictures were published in every paper in Seattle and the tape shown on all Northwest television news programs.
    On February 26, a huge announcement appeared in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
It was a message from the “Rat on a Rat” program endorsed by financial institutions in an effort to stop a rash of bank robberies:
    $5,000 REWARD
    For information leading to the indictment of the person who robbed the Prudential Mutual Savings Bank, 4500 Sandpoint Way N.E. at 9:40 A.M. on February 25. Description: the robber is 6' to 6'3'' and wearing a tan parka, hood and ski mask. He may have red-tinted cash. He is believed to be driving a 1963 to 1968VW Bug; blue-gray, with black hood and back fenders. During this robbery, William G. Heggie, banker, was murdered. Sometimes bank robbers take more than money.
    A toll-free phone number was listed for a “no-questions-asked” tip line where an informant could call with possible leads on the bank killer’s identity.
    Calls began to come in from citizens who wanted to help. One woman reported seeing a blue-gray VW speeding southbound shortly after the robbery, and watched it make an illegal left turn. She hadn’t been able to get the license number.
    The coed witness agreed to be hypnotized to help her remember details about the VW bug she’d seen. She was an excellent subject for hypnosis by Detective Joe Nicholas, and her recall in the trance state confirmed her original description of the car. Now she was able to retrieve more details. She remembered the tires, the hubcaps, all the dents and their placement, the chrome trim—even the shape of the headlights. But she still could not visualize anyone inside the VW.
    ID Tech Jeanne Ward reported that she had been unable to find any latent fingerprints in the stolen truck, and she knew why: The dashboard and console of the truck had been wiped clean. She had found glove prints which she would retain for comparison. Glove prints can be distinctive, but cloth fiber patterns are not nearly as useful as fingerprints themselves.
    The owner of the Ford pickup said that his vehicle had been parked in front of his