Excerpt: 'The End of a Dream'

A Thanksgiving Heist

(CBS)  Read Chapter 1 of Ann Rule's book on the Scott Scurlock case.

In Seattle, Washington, Thanksgiving is only rarely celebrated under a brilliant blue sky and against a landscape rife with autumn colors. More often than not, the holiday seems to draw memorably violent storms to the Northwest. Many a turkey has been coaxed to semidoneness on an outdoor barbeque because power lines are down. Wednesday, November 27, 1996, was the day before Thanksgiving; the weather was wildly rainy and stormy, with gusts of wind stripping the trees of their last few leaves. Whatever smothered sun there had been that day had long since set, the streets were coils of shiny black, reflecting yellow streetlights and the red, green, and silver of Christmas lights.

Late customers hurried into the Lake City Branch of Seafirst Bank only eighteen minutes before closing. More than a dozen people stood patiently in the long lines, most of them so intent on the errands they still needed to run that they were unaware of what was going on around them.

CBS

Buy "The End Of The Dream," or other Ann Rule books

The bank's automatic cameras kept clicking away as they always did, silent, mindless and mechanical. One camera snapped everyone coming in the door, another caught the bored or impatient faces of people waiting in line for a teller, while another scanned the entire bank. A fourth was aimed away from the tellers' cages toward a central island where customers stood writing out deposit and withdrawal slips. Each frame of the film noted the camera's number, the bank's ID number and name, the date, and the time to the second.

Camera 1-06 recorded the time at 5:42:13 P.M. at the instant a figure appeared at the far right of the frame. From a distance, he seemed only slightly bizarre; he wore both a hooded rain jacket and a baseball cap. A casual observer saw a man past middle age with gray hair; a full, drooping gray moustache; and a prominent chin. His dark glasses seemed odd, considering that the sun had set more than an hour before, and his wide, garish necktie was in dubious taste. He wore cheap tennis shoes, the low black canvas type that predated Nikes and Adidas. A closer look revealed that the body beneath the bulky jacket was too toned to belong to a man in his fifties, and he moved with an almost pantherlike grace. He had to be either an atlete or a dancer.

The camera clicked off seconds and the man approached a line of people. They looked at him with startled eyes and then averted their glances as considerate people do when they realize they are looking at someone with a handicap. Although the man's stride was confident, his face wasn't normal. He appeared to have suffered serious facial burns, and he was wearing either heavy makeup to cover scars or a rubbery mask to prevent additional scarring.

Here, in this neighborhood bank, no one expected trouble. The robot lenses caught their expressions as the odd-looking man cut between customers waiting in line. One man had an embarrassed half-smile on his face, a woman's eyes shifted momentarily, and a girl covered her mouth with her hand. What they were feeling was just a tingle of alarm. Nothing overtly frightening had been said or done. It was a little rude of the scarred man to slide between people in line, but it wasn't as if he were crowding in. He moved through, toward the back of the bank.

They didn't see the gun. They didn't see the holster strapped under his shoulder nor the knife or the extra gun strapped to his ankle. They certainly didn't see the other strange-looking man. The second man was quite tall, over six feet, and close to two hundred pounds. He wore a khaki parka with a light brown hood. His skin also had a masklike appearance, and he had a bushy moustache, too. The teller closest to him saw that he wore beige gloves and lace-up allweather boots.

What happens next? Find out in Part II, The End of a Dream.