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the bank and lie facedown on the floor. "You guys lay down on the floor,
" he said. "And don't look up for twenty seconds or I'll come back and
shoot someone." The bank robber was gone within those twenty seconds. He
had sounded deadly serious about shooting and everyone obeyed his time
limit. They didn't know if he had someone outside the bank, watching. He
had seemed supremely confident, and well informed, a professional.
He knew about the dye packs, and about the reserve money. If he knew
about bait bills, marked so that he could be linked to them if he tried
to spend them, he didn't mention it. But his take was dropping, this
time, he only got $5,739. On October 5, he hit in West Seattle again.
It wasn't the end of the week, it was a Monday at 10:15 A. M. when he
strode into the Great Western Bank.
He wore the blond wig and mustache, the "DARE" baseball cap, the
sunglasses, but he had substituted a white shirt and wild tie for the
T-shirt, and he wore a windbreaker jacket. The see-through mask was
gone, replaced by skillfully applied theatrical makeup that included a
large hooked nose. Instead of surgical gloves, he wore black gloves.
He had never yet left fingerprints and he apparently didn't intend to.
He was clearly operating on the premise, "If it ain't broke, don't fix
it, " as he used the same general language to demand money and to warn
witnesses not to follow him. This time, he asked for the "vault teller,
" something he had never done before. When a female teller stepped
nervously forward, he demanded that she take him into the vault, where
he evidently knew the large amounts of cash were kept.
Once there, he instructed her to give him hundreds, fifties, and
twenties only. As he ran from the bank, he carried a blue nylon duffel
bag. It contained $27,423. The bank's surveillance cameras caught it
all, and FBI special agents continued to form a profile of this unknown
man. They did it by carefully questioning every bank employee, every
customer in the five robberies. No detail was too small since they
couldn't know which minuscule part of his pattern might help them catch
him. In October of 1992, Scott Scurlock had become a star of sorts in
the Seattle area though, of course, no one knew his name. The "Rat on a
Rat" program featured him on one of their bulletins and offered a
thousand-dollar reward for any information on a, "Male, white, 30s,
5'11", 165 lbs. , sandy brown hair, makeup on face, black semiautomatic
pistol." The picture used was the blurred frame of a bank's 19 camera,
and despite his makeup and false hair, he looked for all the world as if
he'd come straight from central casting. He would have liked that.
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Scott's sixth bank robbery in 1992 was so remarkably successful that it
must have even stunned him. It was Thursday, a week before Thanksgiving,
when the man who had become all too familiar to the Seattle Police
Robbery Unit and the FBI walked into the Sea first Bank in Hawthorne
Hills at 11,40 A. M. He announced, "This is a robbery. This is no joke,
folks." Then he asked the tellers to step away from their drawers and
the customers to move to the center of the bank. He instructed the
drive-in teller to move back from her window, and made sure that her
microphone was turned off. "Who is the vault teller? " No one answered.
He racked back the slide on his pistol, chambering a round. "Now, " he
said, menacingly, "who is the vault teller? " A young female teller,
whose name was Patti, stepped forward, "I am, " she said quietly. She
was frightened.
Her manager handed her the keys to the vault, and, despite her fear,
Patti showed some spirit when she turned toward the man in the grotesque
makeup and said, "I would like someone to go back there with me."
"Fine, " he said, and the woman manager of the bank moved to the
teller's side. The trio walked toward the vault, the women trembling.
Once back in the lonely stillness of the vault, the teller had trouble
with the combination to the safe.
Her hands were shaking so much that her fingers kept slipping past the
code stops. "Calm down, " the robber said with a trace of humor in his
deep voice. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"I'm sorry, " Patti whispered. "I'm just scared to death." Again, the
robber told her she was safe, that he wouldn't hurt her. But his voice
was a little impatient now, the clock was ticking, and he had no way of
knowing what they were doing out in the rest of the bank. He needed to
be gone.
Patti finally got the safe open and stepped back. There was so much
money inside that the bag the bank robber carried wasn't big enough to
hold it all. He ordered Patti and her manager to find him another bag.
There wasn't one large enough in the vault area, so Patti went out into
the bank and brought back a canvas bank bag. "Do you have dye packs in
here? " the robber asked abruptly. "We don't use them here, " the
manager lied. But she could see there were no dye packs in what he was
grabbing. His hand hovered for a moment over a stack of bait money as if
he knew what it wa sand then he left it where it was.
Laden down with the two full bags of money, the man in the DARE cap and
checked black and white pants seemed about to leave. Then he turned
back. Every one froze. But he only said, "Don't trip any alarms for
thirty secondsor I'll come back in. Now everybody get down on the
floor." And then he was gone. But the vault teller realized that this
masked stranger was now a rich man.
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