The Dream Unravels

Leads To A Shootout

(CBS)  On that rainy Thanksgiving eve in 1996, Scott Scurlock adjourned to the makeup room and transformed himself into "Hollywood."

With Biggins and Steve Meyers, he set off for Seattle. The robbery, which began a little after 5:30 p.m., took about 15 minutes. The bank's silent alarm had alerted police.

Magan jumped into his patrol car and got stuck in Thanksgiving traffic. But the robbers were also stuck. Scurlock and Biggins had exchanged the getaway car for a white van driven by Steve Meyers. Magan says they made a key mistake: had they made a left at one intersection, rather than a right, they would have gotten out of the city undetected. Instead, they hit holiday gridlock, and began frantically trying to get rid of the tracers.

Eventually, they stopped to switch drivers. The cops were right on their heels, though. Steve Meyers is sure it was the tracers that led Magan to the van. Magan insists he went to a likely area and simply spotted it.

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Says Magan: "You could see flashlights going backwards and forwards. I pulled up on the van to get a closer look, asked that we perform a stop on it. I had four or five patrol cars pull in behind me, turns down this street, and pulls to the right curb."

Steve Meyers says the cops shot first and he and Biggins were hit. He insists Scurlock actually stepped out of the van, intending to fire back in self-defense. "I never got out of the van, I never got out of the van, and I don’t know how I would either. I had no arms," he says. "Scott got out with his assault rifle. And it supposedly jammed. And he got back in and they started firing again."

Magan is just as adamant that Meyers attempted to fire first. He says he then shot back as the van took off. Wounded and bleeding, Biggins returned 37 rounds. What ensued was a surreal slow-motion chase and shootout on Seattle's side streets. Two hundred police officers rushed to the scene.

During a second shootout, Scurlock got out with a shotgun and fired three rounds. The van took off again. The van finally crashed into the side of a house on 77th Street. For Biggins and Steve Meyers, the game was over.

FBI agent Johnson rushed to the van. There, he saw money, weapons, ammunition, makeup, clothing and “blood, a lot of blood.” But Scurlock had disappeared. The SWAteam searched everywhere, but couldn’t find him.

The next day, Thanksgiving, a man went into the backyard of his mother’s nearby house to check the camper parked in the back. He wanted to make sure Scurlock wasn’t there. He came running back – he had seen a man with dark curly hair. He called police.

Sgt. Howard Monta and two other officers showed up. Monta knocked on the door and no one came out. Then Monta sprayed two full canisters of pepper spray into the camper. There was no sound or movement. But to satisfy the Walkers, he went over to take one last look. "I was going to look in with my flashlight. And the gunshot went off; I thought I was dead," Monta says.

The other officers opened up, pounding the camper with gunfire. Then – no sound. Hours passed in silence. Eventually, police fired more tear gas in, and then entered. They found Scurlock dead. He had shot himself in the head.

"Scott Scurlock may have been a bank robber, but he had an opportunity to take him with me, kill me and he did not do that," says Monta. "I wish he was still alive. He’s a brilliant man, basically."

Steve Meyers, now serving 21 years in prison, agrees. He is not angry at Scurlock for, at the end, running. He thinks that his sentence would have been lighter had Scurlock lived. "I regret in a sense that it ever happened," he says. "But I can't sit and look at this man and say I'm regretting that I ever knew the guy. Some of the best years of my life were with this guy."

Suzanne Scurlock says she was shocked to discover what her brother had been up to. She feels no sympathy at all for "Hollywood," but she misses her brother: "We loved him. To us, to us, he was an entirely different person than who he was in those banks. The only thing I can say is that he made some very, very poor decisions. Why did he make those decisions? One of the keys about him is that nobody really knew him."

Part I: The End Of The Dream || Murder They Wrote Section