No Regrets

bug, purchased for $840 on February 15, just two days after the Seattle First National Bank robbery. The apartment rental agreement showed that Sam Jesse had rented it on February 17 for $225 a month. He had spent his first bank money as his friend Mark suspected, setting himself up in an apartment and buying a car.
    And now they found a picture of the missing Sam Jesse: The tall, big-boned youth smiled into the camera selfconsciously. He held a newspaper in one hand, but it was impossible to read the headline. He didn’t look like either a killer or a bank robber. He looked like a teenager whose muscles had yet to catch up with his height. The length of his limbs and his awkwardness suggested that he might be suffering from Marfan’s Disease, the illness that Abe Lincoln was diagnosed as having. Sam was broadshouldered,and he had huge hands. He appeared to be about sixteen or seventeen, much younger than he really was, a kid posing shyly for a friend’s camera.
    Detectives outside the apartment searched the Dumpster and found a handwritten bill of sale for a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. The buyer was listed as J. T. Jay, and the date was January 28. The “J” was written to look like a “G”—the same peculiarity in handwriting present in Sam Jesse’s signature on the rental agreement.
    On the rental agreement, Jesse had listed his employer as Metro Transit, Seattle’s bus system, and noted that he worked nights. He did not, of course, work for the transit company; he didn’t have a job at all.
    The investigators gathered up their bags of evidence, and double-locked the apartment. Back at the Homicide Unit, detectives got word that Sam Jesse had been taken into custody in Hawaii as he left the plane. He had told FBI agents that he knew nothing of a bank robbery or shooting in Seattle.
    Sergeant Don Cameron drove to the home of Jesse’s mother and explained as gently as he could about her son’s arrest for bank robbery. The shocked woman said she had seen Sam last on Sunday afternoon, the day before the Prudential Bank robbery. He had told her then that he might be going away with friends for a week, but gave no details beyond that.
    His mother had come to understand Sam’s need to get away occasionally. It was his pattern, she said, to go into the hills a few times a year, and he told her he had been cutting wood for spending money. He’d told her that he worked for Metro Transit until six months before. She didn’t mention the janitorial job. Sam was quite intelligent, she said, and he had completed several semesters ofcollege at Bellevue Community College where he’d been principally focused on mathematics. When Cameron asked her about Sam’s personality and if he was ever violent, she shook her head in surprise. On the contrary, she said, he was always easygoing and mild around his family.
    When detectives counted the money they’d recovered from Sam’s apartment, it totaled $1,416. The serial numbers matched the list of marked bills the teller at the Prudential Bank had handed over on February 25. These were probably the bills in the dye pack. Some of them were wet—as if he had attempted to wash the orange stain from them. If Sam had used stolen money to buy his plane ticket to Hawaii, it had not been from the dye pack. For some reason, he’d left most of the stolen money behind—even the unstained bills.
    Maybe he’d been haunted by the memory of the old man he shot.
    Sam Jesse never got to see Hawaii, nothing beyond the FBI offices in Honolulu. He continued to deny any culpability in the Prudential Bank robbery for a long time, even after he was informed that Seattle detectives had found the gun and the stolen money in his apartment. He insisted the agents had “the wrong man.”
    Back on the mainland, however, the evidence continued to pile up. The bullet retrieved at William Heggie’s autopsy proved to have been fired from the barrel of the .357 Magnum recovered in Sam Jesse’s apartment. The orange stains on the VW bug matched the bank’s orange dye microscopically.
    At length, Jesse agreed to give a verbal statement to FBI agents in Hawaii, although he refused to sign anywritten statement. He said he had driven his VW bug around the area near his apartment on Queen Anne Hill until he located the truck he wanted to steal for the bank robbery. He parked his VW at his apartment, and walked the four blocks to the turquoise pickup. He quickly changed the ignition and stole it. He’d