No Regrets

said. “It’s Jeff Bigelow.”
    Gleason and Trent thanked him, but they could not tell him yet that they had just arrested Bigelow for the murder of his daughter.
    It was almost Christmas. It had been only eleven days since Teresa’s body was found, and by working double shifts, the Bellevue detectives had accomplished something of a miracle. Roy Gleason, Gary Trent, and Marv Skeen barely slept from the moment of the body discovery on December 7. They are to be commended for an excellent demonstration of precise detective work. They had gone from a skeletonized body, discovered months after a murder, a body they believed they might never identify, to the arrest of a suspect.
    And that suspect had just admitted to murder.
    Jeff Bigelow’s parents had tried to get help for him in the past when he’d been arrested on relatively minor charges. Alarmed, they sent him to in-patient psychiatric clinics, but he had always convinced therapists that he was quite normal, and he had been released with little or no treatment. Teresa Sterling had been, in essence, still a child who didn’t recognize that she was teasing and taunting the wrong person. She was heedless of the fact that she was pushing the wrong buttons and bringing up old rages in her boyfriend.
    In the end, Teresa Sterling’s violent murder was the culmination of two families’ tragedies. Neither was a throwaway kid, and both families had tried desperately tokeep their children in a solid family situation and both families had been rebuffed. It was as if each teenager had been hellbent for destruction.
    On December 28, Jeffrey Bigelow pleaded guilty to a charge of murder in the second degree.

The Tragic Ending of a Bank Robber’s Fantasy
    There are few crimes that inspire admiration—not in the public, or among inmates in prison. Certainly not murder...or rape. Most convicts are not violent or bloodthirsty; those among them who are locked up for committing homicides or sexual crimes against helpless women are at the very bottom of the prison hierarchy. Prisoners in the upper echelon are popular because of their skill, dexterity, intelligence, and cunning. Clever con men evoke respect and so do the safecrackers who can hear the tumblers click into place in even the most complicated locks.
    And then there are the bank robbers.
    Harking back to John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, there is something Robin Hoodish about bank robbers, possessed of seeming brilliance and derring-do, which is often translated to television and movie screens. If nothing goes awry, bank robbers usually don’t kill the tellers and bank officers that they rob. (Although I have talked with many bank employees after an armed robbery and most of them suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome resultingfrom the terror they experienced when a bank robber held a loaded gun against their flesh. They have flashbacks that come with certain sounds and movements. Seemingly innocuous things trigger the memory of their absolute dread that they were going to die.)
    The idea of thousands and thousands of dollars just sitting there in bank vaults can be as tantalizing to the working man as the possibility of winning the lottery. The idea of robbing a bank is an adventure fantasy for some young people, and it is a way out for some middle-aged and elderly people of both sexes who have been pushed to the wall by debts and unemployment. Most, of course, don’t act on their imaginary plans. And the majority of those who take that avenue to instant wealth end up in jail. What works in the movies rarely works for long in the real world.
    Even so, there was one young man in the Northwest who fancied himself a natural at bank robbing. It seemed to him that he had worked out every exigency in his plans to rob a bank and live a life of luxury in an island paradise. He was quite intelligent, but he was not at all realistic. He had grown tall enough to be a basketball star, but he had not matured enough to let go of the fantasy of a storybook world. His bizarre and almost childlike plotting came to tragic fruition.

 
    It was the third week of February in Seattle. Although mornings were still cool, pussywillows, crocuses, and daffodils had popped out, and there was just a promise of spring in the way the air smelled. The business week had barely begun that Monday morning when bank teller Jill Mobley glanced out into the parking lot of the Laurelhurst branch of the Prudential Mutual Savings Bank in