No Regrets

robbery. He had a big, huge wad of bills and he took me to dinner one night at a real fancy place—but he said they didn’t get hardly anything and they were getting ready for this big job where they would get like $250,000 and could get out of the country. He wanted to take a trip right after [the big job] ...to Hawaii...maybe to Australia.”
    Mark said he had been upset at his own bank at the time they went out to dinner because they had bounced acheck he had written and he was embarrassed. “Sam told me, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get back at the bank for you.’ I still didn’t think much of it at the time.”
    But Mark Halley said he had begun to avoid Sam Jesse after that because of the possibility that Sam was actually planning a big bank robbery.
    Marberg and Gerdes found Halley’s recall of Sam’s progression as a bank robber more and more fascinating. Mark said Sam told him that he and his elusive partners were staking out a bank, watching it from a motorhome they’d stolen. Sam had told him they had to keep putting off this really big robbery until the time was ripe. This was the robbery where they were going to use some guy disguised as an old man to divert attention.
    “I’m not quite sure of how that was supposed to work,” Halley said. “I told him I didn’t want to hear any more about it because it was getting too weird for me.”
    But Mark had continued to have a kind of fascination with Sam Jesse’s activities, albeit from a safer distance. Two weeks later, a branch of Seattle First National Bank was robbed. Mark saw it in the paper, and then learned that Sam Jesse had rented a new apartment, bought a Volkswagen bug, and new furniture. The apartment was very nice and located on Queen Anne Hill.
    Marberg asked Halley to describe Sam Jesse’s newly acquired car.
    “Sort of two-toned. It’s got navy blue back fenders and a navy blue hood and it’s sort of a grayish color. There’s a small dent on the top of the hood and a spot on the side on one door.”
    Marberg nodded without saying anything. Halley described his feelings after reading about the robbery-murder at the Prudential Bank in Laurelhurst. “I recognizedthat Volkswagen description that was in the papers, and I just knew it had to be Sam.”
    Long before the details of the bank robbery-murder had hit the media, but only hours after it occurred, Mark had eaten lunch with Sam, unaware that he had accidentally chosen that day. Jesse had complained of feeling ill and said he’d slept very late that morning because he had a cold coming on.
    “Did he call you, or did you call him?” Marberg asked.
    “I called him around noon. He sounded really ‘zombiedout,’ like he wasn’t really there. I asked him if he wanted to go get some good food at the Sunlight Café.”
    Sam Jesse had agreed, but urged Mark to come up to his apartment first. Sam usually wanted to drive when they ate out, but on the twenty-fifth, he wanted Mark to drive his car. They left the VW bug parked in front of Jesse’s apartment and went out to lunch.
    It was eight that evening before Mark read the papers, and he thought at once of Sam. The bank job sounded like Sam’s “kamikaze” alternative plan that called for racing into and out of a bank. Further, the Laurelhurst branch of Prudential was an out-of-the-way bank, familiar mainly to those living in the area, and a bank that Sam had once said would be easy to “get.” It was very close to the neighborhood where they had both grown up.
    “Did you have any conversation with Sam that night?” Marberg asked.
    “I buzzed over there at nine-fifteen. He let me in, and I went over to the paper and said, ‘Did you see this?’”
    Where Jesse had been eager before to discuss any and all bank robberies, he hadn’t wanted to talk about the Laurelhurst incident at all.
    “I said, ‘Sam, you didn’t do that, did you?’ and he said,‘What do you think I am—crazy or something?’ He totally denied the whole thing. Sam’s an accomplished liar,” Halley continued. “I’ve watched him lie to his parents for years. He can put up a wall where he shows no feelings at all. And Sam simply did not want to discuss the Prudential bank job. Finally, he told me that he had something to tell me. I expected he was going to confess about doing that bank. But he just said, ‘I’m going to Hawaii, to Honolulu.’ He said he was going to meet friends and stay there.
    “He kept saying that they were going to travel