No Regrets

but I began to realize that he really had worked out all the details of robbing banks, and that he was having some dark thoughts. On New Year’s Eve, he asked me, ‘You know what it’s like to kill someone? It’s like you’ve just been over the edge and you keep it inside you all the time.’”
    Sam Jesse’s father was a minister, and Halley said he had behaved like a typical “PK” (Preacher’s Kid) all through school, trying to prove that he wasn’t a goody-goody guy because of his father’s profession. Although he was very intelligent, he had been a deliberate under-achiever.
    Shortly after New Year’s, Sam had quit his job as a janitor. He’d told Mark Halley that he was going to start robbing banks. He explained that he had to do a small “job” first to set himself up as a bank robber. “He told me that he’d planned to rob a grocery store first. But that didn’twork because he was alone in this store at night and the alarm went off. That scared him and he didn’t go through with it.”
    But that hadn’t stopped Jesse from continuing with his plan to be a master bank robber. He revealed to Halley that he intended to keep on working up to banks. “He sounded so serious that I began to watch the papers for reports of store robberies to see if Sam really meant it,” Halley said, “and I saw some that I thought Sam might have pulled off. He wouldn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when I asked him though.
    “He told me that when you do a bank, you have to do everything right. He said that the people who get caught are the ones that just run in there—super desperate—and they don’t have the whole thing thought out. He said he had a friend who’d been in jails and involved in crime before and knew a lot about it. They studied up on everything. He said it was real hard work. He’d go to the library and study up on crime statistics, how many policemen there are in certain areas, what times stores were busiest, or when people did their banking. Stuff like that. Then they’d stake out the store and watch for where the manager of the bank or store lives, and what they’d do with the money and when. Like they’d stake it out for hours at a time a week before they did it.”
    “Do you know who the friend was—his accomplice was?”
    Halley shook his head. “I don’t even know if such a guy existed. I thought maybe Sam was making that all up. It wasn’t anyone I knew—I’m sure of that.”
    All this research had been, according to Halley, on the little jobs. It was supposedly only to get the cash they needed for the big bank jobs that lay ahead.
They
had planned to get disguises, Mace, a gun. Sam and his unknownaccomplice were supposed to have planned diversionary techniques. “Sam talked about setting off a bomb near a bank they wanted to rob—or maybe have someone dressed as an old man stumble into the bank to divert attention.”
    “But you personally never saw anyone who was working with Sam Jesse? It was always just him who was telling you about the bank robbery plans?”
    “Never saw them. But he always spoke in the plural, as if he had a partner—or even a gang.”
    Mark Halley’s depiction of his friend, Sam Jesse, sounded pretty far-fetched; Jesse—if what Halley was saying was true—seemed to have been unduly influenced by James Bond movies, and his plans for a crime spree more like those expected from a brash young teenager than a twenty-two-year-old man. But the detectives would certainly hear this informant out. As bizarre as he sounded, Sam Jesse was the most likely suspect—the
only
real suspect they had had so far.
    Asked to describe Jesse’s physical appearance, Halley replied that he was very tall and skinny—well over six feet tall. “He looks younger than he is, and he’s got really, really blond hair. If you saw him, you wouldn’t forget him. He’s kind of ‘gangly.’”
    “Does Sam have a gun?” Gerdes asked.
    “Yeah, he went through the want ads in the Little Nickel newspaper and he found a .357 Magnum for sale up near Everett.”
    The bullet in William Heggie’s body had been .357 ammunition.
    Halley said that Sam had bought the handgun in late January or early February. “I advised him not to—I toldhim he didn’t need a gun. The guy who sold it to him made Sam promise to register it—but he never did.”
    Sam Jesse had paid about $150 for the gun, and he had immediately gone to several discount stores to buy high-velocity