No Regrets

Yates called the Port of Seattle Police Department and asked that a detective contact all airlines to verify that a Sam Jesse had boarded a flight to Hawaii. Port Detective Doug Sundby reported back thatSamuel Henry Jesse had departed on Northwest Flight 55 from SeaTac at 2:45 P.M ., and he was scheduled to land in Honolulu at 6:30 P.M . Hawaii time. That would be 8:30 P.M . Seattle time. The Seattle detectives had a lot of work ahead of them before that plane landed.
    Sundby said he would have officers from his department search the many-tiered parking garage at the airport for a gray VW bug with black hood and fenders. They quickly located a similar car on the second level of the garage. A parking ticket had been taped on the window at 8:35 A.M . Jessie must have spent the night at the airport. Detective John Nordlund, accompanied by Mark Halley, left for the airport to ID the bug left behind.
    Nordlund shone his flashlight into the interior of the bug. He could make out two orange flecks on the steering wheel. The vehicle was gray-blue with a dark blue hood and right rear fender. There was damage in the front—just as the coed witness had described it. Someone had apparently tried unsuccessfully to spray-paint the dark fender with light blue paint. Nordlund photographed the bug and had it impounded.
    Detective Sergeant Don Cameron, heading the night crew in Homicide, dispatched Mike Tando and John Boatman to the apartment house on Queen Anne Hill where Sam Jesse had his new apartment. They found that all the apartment mailboxes had the complete names of tenants on the slot in front. All but the mailbox for number 303. That slot read only “S.J.”
    No one answered the door at 303, but that didn’t surprise the detectives. The tenant was reported to be thousands of miles away.
    Detectives Marberg and Gerdes called the FBI and learned that the Seattle First National Bank branch atNorth 185th had been robbed on February 13, 1980, at 2:23 P.M.
    It was now 6:00 P.M ., two and a half hours before Sam was scheduled to land in Honolulu. Judge William Lewis issued an arrest warrant for Samuel Henry Jesse after taking the information telephonically, and Marberg and Gerdes picked it up. The warrant said that Jesse was to be arrested on suspicion of first-degree robbery of the Prudential Bank. A search warrant for his apartment was obtained at the same time.
    Sam Jesse’s plane had passed the point of no return over the ocean; he would deplane in Honolulu in a little more than two hours. FBI special agents in Hawaii were made aware of the arrest warrant and would meet his plane.
    Armed with their search warrant, George Marberg and Al Gerdes went to Jesse’s apartment house. From outside, they could see a light burning in number 303, and they gained access from the balcony outside an unlocked bedroom window. Just in case, Cameron, Tando, and Boatman waited in the hallway outside the front door to Sam’s apartment. But Sam wasn’t there. The apartment was empty.
    It was a small, one-bedroom apartment. If Jesse had ever planned to cover his tracks in case he decided to return to Seattle, he had apparently given that idea up. He probably had been panicked by Mark Halley’s questions. His apartment was rife with physical evidence that would connect him to both the bank robbery and the murder. The investigators located a blue nylon knapsack containing a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum handgun with a four-inch barrel in a black leather holster. The gun’s grips were stained orange. Further down in the bag, they found an algebratextbook. When the detectives opened the book, they found a profusion of twenty-dollar bills stuck between its pages. The edge of every bill was bright orange.
    They found three ignition sets—all Ford products—in the knapsack. They were standard replacement ignitions which could be used to bypass a vehicle’s ignition when it was unplugged. Sam had been fully prepared to steal the vehicles he needed to help disguise his identity when he drove to his target banks.
    The bed in the neat apartment was just a box spring and mattress set atop four concrete blocks. When the mattress and springs were removed, Marberg and Gerdes saw that the spaces in one block were filled with twenty-five twenty-dollar bills.
    There was a length of nylon rope in the closet, stained with orange powder.
    In the kitchen cabinet, they found more bills—ones and fives—in a cereal bowl. They also found a bill of sale for the VW