No Regrets and Other True Cases

On December 14, Gleason and Gary Trent went to CID offices at Fort Lewis—only to learn that Bigelow had taken a four-day pass and would not be back until Tuesday, December 18. Two days later, however, Bigelow called the Bellevue Police Department. When he was told that the detectives who were looking for him were not on duty, he left his name and hung up.

  On December 18, Gleason and Trent went back to Fort Lewis and met with Jeff Bigelow in the CID offices. The interview began on a casual note. He was told that they were merely seeking more information about Teresa Sterling, and Bigelow was perfectly agreeable to having the interview recorded.

  Even at this point, the young soldier was not a prime suspect, but he was the one man who had evolved as being the closest to the dead girl. Trent asked him to describe their meeting, their relationship, and how often he had seen her.

  The detectives were surprised by his next words. He seemed to be holding back. He was very calm as he said he had known Teresa only casually—he guessed that he might have dated her once or twice. “The last time I saw her was some time in the middle of August. It was in downtown Bellevue. I said ‘Hi’ and told her I was going in the army.”

  Trent stopped the tape. He said they knew that Bigelow’s story was full of discrepancies, and that, at this point, he would be advised of his rights under Miranda. “We think you’re the guy who was with Teresa at the beauty shop on August 24. All your friends have told us over and over you and Teresa went to a lot of parties together.”

  Bigelow turned ashen and sagged a little in his chair. And he then admitted that he was the man with the motorcycle helmet who had been with Teresa that afternoon. “I guess I thought that was sometime earlier in August.”

  “We don’t believe that you were only casual acquaintances,” Trent said quietly. “We think you two had hooked up last summer.”

  “I didn’t consider her my girlfriend,” Bigelow argued. “I guess we did go out together, but it was only to parties and stuff.”

  Gleason and Trent could see that the previously calm soldier was becoming agitated. They pointed out that all their investigations indicated that Bigelow was probably the last person to see Teresa alive. Gradually, they suggested that he might have been involved in her death.

  Their conversation continued for another twenty minutes or so, and then Jeff Bigelow could stand it no longer. He had a lot on his conscience, and he wanted to tell someone.

  “I lost control of myself... and I accidentally killed her,” he sighed.

  Bigelow described a party the two had attended on August 24 or 25. They had both been drinking, and he guessed that they were probably pretty drunk.

  “Teresa made me jealous—she was paying attention to all the other guys there, and deliberately ignoring me. It got to me.”

  He said he had watched her flirting and had started to seethe with envy. Just after midnight, they had left the party, riding double on his motorcycle. At that point, he said they weren’t very far from where Teresa’s body had been found.

  “A ways down the street, I stopped,” Bigelow recalled. “She kept telling me how good-looking all those dudes at the party were, and how she wanted me to take her back there. We got into an argument about it.”

  Bigelow said he’d heard enough of that kind of talk. He was tired of it. But Teresa kept on taunting him about how much more attractive the other guys at the party were.

  He confessed that he slapped her when she argued back. Once. Twice. Teresa fought back, hitting at him with very little power. And then, Jeff Bigelow said, he grabbed her around the throat. “I lost control. I couldn’t help it. She went limp, and I didn’t really think she was dead—but I dragged her back into the woods.”

  He did not leave her there. Bigelow said he stayed beside Teresa’s body for about five hours, leaving only when it started to get daylight. He had some kind of frail hope that she would open her eyes. He knew she wouldn’t, but he kept hoping that what happened wasn’t real.

  Bigelow confided he had never had sex with Teresa, despite his attempts. “She wouldn’t.”

  Now, with his head down so he didn’t have to look at the detectives, he admitted to them that he had intercourse with her body as it lay in the woods. “I asked her if she would have sex with me while we were at the party that night, but she told me ‘No,’ like she always did. And kept flirting with all the other guys there.”

  There was one more thing that Detective Gary Trent had to get the young soldier to tell him. No one except the police, the medical examiner’s office, and Teresa’s killer knew about the symbolic rape with the tree limb.

  As Trent asked, “Is there anything more—anything you haven’t told us?” Bigelow looked away. And then, he finally admitted that he had inserted the branch into the dead girl’s vagina. He didn’t know why he had done that, but he had been very angry with her for teasing him the way she did.

  That was the one thing that the investigators had to hear from Bigelow, the secret thing that would mark him as her murderer beyond a shadow of doubt. And now he did admit that. He gave a very detailed description of the position of the body when he left it, the foliage he’d placed over it to hide it, and the fact that he had removed Teresa’s clothing and left it beside her body.

  They had ridden only about five blocks from the party, where Teresa had taunted him for the last time. Bigelow said he knew the area well. Before he joined the army, he had worked as a greenskeeper on a nearby golf course. And he was just a short distance from his own home. With the first rays of dawn, he rode away from the peach orchard, leaving Teresa behind. “I cried over her body when I waited with her all night,” he said. “But I never wanted to go back to the woods again.”

  For three months, Jeff Bigelow had gone about his army duties, comported himself well as a soldier. But throughout those months, he must have felt that someone was going to tap him on the shoulder at any moment and tell him that Teresa had been found at last.

  Roy Gleason and Gary Trent arrested Bigelow on suspicion of murder and transported him back to Bellevue. Ironically, while Bigelow was in jail—before his name had been released to the media—Teresa’s father called from Georgia to say, “I remember one more name of somebody that Teresa knew,” he 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 to keep 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 resulting from 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 Seattle’s North End. The small bank building was easy to access because it was located on a triangle of land bordered by three busy streets. It was some distance from freeway on-ramps, which made it less than desirable for would-be robbers who prefer to have a quick getaway.

  The only personnel present in the bank at 9:37 A.M. were Jill, another female teller, and the relief manager, seventy-seven-year-old William Heggie. At an age when most men would have been long retired, Heggie had grown bored with sitting around or puttering in his garden. When he’d retired at sixty-five after twenty-five years as secretary-treasurer for the Acacia Memorial Park cemetery, he found that, as much as he loved gardening, it didn’t fill his days. So he had gone to work a day or two a week as a relief bank manager for Prudential. It suited him just fine, and provided money for extras that enriched his later years. Just last year, Bill Heggie and his wife had taken a long vacation—a perfect trip to Hawaii to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary.

  Jill Mobley noticed a turquoise pickup with a white canopy as it traveled all the way through a drive-in window lane and stopped in the northeast corner of the bank’s parking lot. Everything seemed to be normal; she expected to see only an early customer. But then there was something about the man who emerged from the driver’s door that made a prickle of concern touch the back of her neck. She looked sharply at the person near the pickup. He was a very tall man, but she really couldn’t see him at all— he was completely covered by clothing. He wore a beige rain jacket with a hood, a ski mask, sunglasses, and gloves.

  The weather wasn’t stormy that morning, and even if it had been, this man’s attire spelled only one thing to her: bank robbery ...

  She reacted quickly—before the man even entered the bank—tripping the silent alarm, which also activated a hidden camera. But she didn’t have time to warn her fellow teller or Mr. Heggie. As she turned to call to them, the hooded man had already entered the bank and was walking swiftly to her window. Now she could see the black handgun with its long barrel. He held out a green cloth bag.

  “Fill it,” he ordered, “and don’t pull the trap.”

  She knew this marked him as something of a pro. He obviously knew that tellers almost always have one stack of bills that will set off an automatic alarm when it is pulled from the drawer. But Jill Mobley had one more trick he seemed unaware of. Without blinking an eye, she pulled out a stack of booby-trapped ten-dollar bills. Hidden within them was a dye pack, set to release bright orange dye a minute after the person carrying them left the bank. The powdery indelible dye would instantly stain the bills themselves, and then spray the robber, anyone near him, and the immediate surroundings. He didn’t notice when she slipped the dye-pack stack of bills in with the rest. She handed him the sack, hoping the booby trap would react as it was supposed to.

  Satisfied, the bank robber spun around and headed for the door.

  Although Jill hadn’t seen him, William Heggie had silently risen from his desk ten feet away. He had seen what was going on and walked rapidly toward the bank’s doors, carrying the keys in his hand. He had been trying to lock the door. The tall old man was in good shape for his age, but he was no match for the man in the hooded jacket. The women tellers watched in horror as the robber yelled, “Get out of my way!”

  Heggie would give no ground. There was a scuffle at the door and then the two men tumbled out onto the sidewalk. Frozen in shock, the two women watched helplessly. Suddenly, they heard a muffled “boom!” and saw Heggie fall to the sidewalk. The gunman stepped over him, running toward his truck. He leaped into the turquoise pickup and sped away.

  From the moment Jill Mobley spotted him until the shooting, no more than three minutes had passed. It had happened so rapidly that it seemed more a bad dream than reality.

  Seattle Police Patrolman J. A. Nicholson, working a one-man car out of the north precinct, was only a few blocks away from the bank’s location at 4500 Sand Point Way N.E. when his radio crackled with the report of a silent alarm at the Prudential Mutual Bank. A minute or so after, his radio sounded again. “Shots heard...man down.” Nicholson raced to the bank, arriving at 9:40 A.M.

  He saw the elderly man who lay unmoving on the sidewalk in front of the bank and the spreading torrent of blood that seemed to be coming from his midchest area. A young woman bent over the elderly man, attempting to administer CPR. Nicholson and Officer R. Amundson, who arrived seconds behind him, bent to assist her. A doctor from the clinic across the street came running, too, carrying his bag.

  Debra Wiatrak, twenty-two, told the officers that she had been driving by and had stopped when a woman waved frantically to her. “I’m a trained EMT,” she said, “and I didn’t have a pulse even then.”

  If anyone could have saved William Heggie, he would have survived. Seattle Fire Department paramedics from Medic One—the premier emergency response program in America at the time—the doctor, his nurse, and Debra Wiatrak all tried their best.

  A man standing near the bank entrance watched sadly as medical personnel tried to get a heartbeat. “I don’t think they’re getting any life back,” he said quietly. “He was a wonderful man. I’ve known him for twenty-five years and he was one of the finest people I’ve ever known.”

  And indeed he was.

  If the bank robber had met Heggie forty years earlier, the denouement of their battle might well have been different. Heggie, a British Columbia native, was a robust young man who played tennis and rugby then. He had been a strong and vigorous man for all of his life. In later years, he belonged to the Shrine, the Order of Eastern Star, th
e Kiwanis, and a number of other service and fraternal organizations. He and his wife had raised three daughters. That he was now likely to die seemed unthinkable. After thirty minutes of fruitless effort, he was loaded onto the Medic One rig and rushed to Harborview Hospital. He was pronounced dead on arrival.

  But even as medics worked over Bill Heggie, the police investigation had begun. Nicholson talked to Jill Mobley first. “I think Mr. Heggie was trying to lock the bank doors—to lock the man in,” she said.

  “Did you see where the truck headed when the killer left?”

  She shook her head. “He went westbound—toward the University of Washington campus, but we couldn’t see beyond that.”

  An alert was put out at once for officers to be on the lookout for the turquoise truck with the white canopy.

  A phalanx of detectives and FBI agents left their downtown offices as soon as the communications scanners began broadcasting word of the bank robbery. Robbery Lieutenant Bob Holter and his detectives, Sergeant John Gray, Sergeant Chuck Schueffele, and Detectives James Lundin and Al “Beans” Lima, arrived first, followed shortly by Homicide Detectives George Marberg, Al Gerdes, Gary Fowler, and Nat Crawford. The scene at the bank was alive with fire department and police patrol personnel. Patrol Sergeants Harry Hanson and James Johnson briefed the detectives on what information they had been able to gather thus far. It wasn’t much. They knew only that they were looking for a very tall person—probably a male, because of his height. But the robber had been dressed so that the tellers could not see so much as a patch of skin.

  Jill Mobley told Al Lima that she could not even say for sure what race the robber was. “I’m inclined to think that he’s white—but that’s from his voice only,” she said. “And that is just an impression... I could very well be mistaken.”

  The Seattle police detectives and the six FBI special agents divided up chores at the scene: A special agent began processing the area around the teller’s window for latent prints, while pairs of detectives and agents interviewed the witnesses who had been present or nearby during the robbery. There were precious few of them; in all likelihood, the bank robber had deliberately chosen a time when the bank would probably be empty.