The Last Ride of the Polo Shirt Bandit
William Guess was his name—and it was prophetic. When he shot himself while surrounded by the police, he left unanswered the question that had stumped his pursuers: Why did an ordinary middle-class Texan turn into the most prolific bank robber in the state’s history?
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While people who live in Temple like to think of their city as the last place that would spawn a bank robber, it is a place where a person can easily develop a serious gambling problem, if he has the inclination. The city has always catered to Fort Hood soldiers looking for action, and several used-car businesses in the area (though not Guess’s) have been investigated by the police for serving as fronts for local bookmaking operations. Temple is also home to two weekly high-stakes poker games; the first is strictly private and includes a number of prominent businessmen, while the second is run by local bookies and hard-core gamblers and is more open. Guess played in both. On a routine night, he might win or lose anywhere from $500 to $5,000. If he had been looking for a warning of how far afield the cards might lead him, he had only to look across the poker table: Another regular at one of the games was a man from Temple who had once served time in federal prison. As a young man, he had forced his way into the home of a wealthy widow and held her hostage until she wrote a check for $11,500, which he supposedly needed because of gambling debts.
But if Temple provided the temptation, Guess was willing to be tempted. Besides betting on golf and poker, he started wagering as much as $15,000 on professional football games with two bookies in the Temple area known to their clients (and later to police investigators as well) as Shorty and Champ. Guess started making regular trips to the horse track at Manor Downs, east of Austin, where he would drop as much as $1,500 on a horse, and then he started going to the Isle of Capri casino in Bossier City, Louisiana. He even played the lottery heavily. Nobody seems to have been aware of the extent of his gambling habit. “When I cleaned out his office, I found all these tickets,” said Geneva. “I said, ‘What are these?’” They were from the race track. But people who saw Guess bet could see that he liked to take risks. “William lived on the edge,” said one person who used to bet with him. “He would play blackjack for any amount you wanted. He kept wanting to play for more and more.” So much did Guess come to define himself in terms of his risk taking that when his children were asked what he did for a living, they sometimes replied that he was a professional gambler.
NOBODY KNOWS PRECISELY WHAT WENT THROUGH GUESS’S mind as he decided to slide into criminal behavior, but the broad outlines of the situation are plain: He was gambling too much, he probably needed money to pay off a debt, perhaps he felt intrigued by images of himself usurping control of something as solid and as reputable as a bank. Did the idea of robbing banks hold some gritty, Western romance for him? Was it his way of getting even with all the people who had grown up to lead ordinary, dull, successful lives? Or maybe he studied the idea with a cold pragmatism, concluding that sticking up banks was a sure way to make easy money.
Several years before he started robbing banks on a regular basis, he apparently committed one isolated robbery in Harris County. That stickup wasn’t linked to others committed by the Polo Shirt Bandit until recently (when a woman who had worked at the bank called the Houston Police Department after seeing Guess on TV and said, “That’s the asshole that robbed me back in 1985”). Four years later, however, Guess started robbing on a systematic basis. On September 29, 1989, he was in Houston—probably to attend an automobile auction—and had checked into a Holiday Inn on 290 where he often stayed. It’s likely that he went somewhere else to change clothes. The branch of San Jacinto Savings that he had decided to raid was in a strip mall on Texas Highway 6, next to a Montessori Children’s Cottage, a Kids Kuts barbershop, and Copperfield Family Dental Care. It was a small bank, only women worked there, and Guess knew he could keep an eye on all of the employees at once. When he walked into the place at around noon, Guess looked like any nine-to-five businessman: He was wearing a dress shirt, a light blue vest, a tie, dress slacks, a driving cap, and dark sunglasses. He had painstakingly applied a realistic-looking false beard and mustache (a crepe beard, as the disguise is known, involves brushing spirit gum on the face, then attaching fake facial hair clump by clump), and he was carrying a large zippered daily-planner case, but the only thing inside was a small blue revolver, probably a .38. Guess took out the gun and told the tellers to dump the cash from their tills into the daily planner. From behind his pitch-dark sunglass lenses, he might not have been able to make out the tellers’ features, but he must have sensed the fear and vulnerability that he aroused. One minute the employees had been in charge of the bank, and the next minute he was. After warning the tellers that he had an accomplice outside who was also armed, which wasn’t true, Guess drove away in a brown Mercedes that he had probably bought at the auction.
Guess lifted a total of $1,000 from San Jacinto—not that much money. None of his early robberies was particularly lucrative; he knew tellers usually trigger a silent alarm, and he had only minutes before the police would arrive. Typically he got away with between $4,000 and $15,000. Only much later did he get larger hauls. But he must have found that first job rewarding enough, because it wasn’t long before he struck again. One month after robbing San Jacinto Savings, he held up tellers at an NCNB (as NationsBank used to be known) on Highway 6, in Fort Bend County. Two weeks later, he returned to Harris County to rob First Federal Savings and Loan on FM 1960. Witnesses saw him flee in another Mercedes, this time dark blue, license plate number 437 HFT. In December he hit the same NCNB again, and in January 1990 he returned to rob the branch for the third time. Then there was a lull.
SOMEBODY HAD JUST PULLED OFF FIVE BANK ROBBERIES in less than four months, which was galling to the detectives assigned to solve the cases. Among the law enforcement agents who converged on San Jacinto Savings after the first robbery in 1989 were Lieutenant Grace Hefner, who was in charge of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department robbery division, and Detective Tom Keen, who reported to her. Hefner is a reserved, soft-spoken, tenacious woman who is known for her ability to crack tough cases by carefully cataloguing large amounts of data. Keen, by contrast, is a gung ho, right-off-the-streets detective. Keen and Hefner would spend the next seven years trying to solve the San Jacinto robbery, but at the time it looked like a run-of-the-mill crime, and there was no reason to suspect that the investigation would prove inordinately long. Later they came to realize that the robbery was unusual in one respect: “That was the first time we saw such an elaborate disguise,” said Hefner recently. “Usually they just wear a hat and sunglasses. We don’t usually see fake beards.” But back then, nobody knew that the bank robber’s beard was false. They did notice the luxury automobile that he had driven off in, which was how Guess acquired his first nickname—originally the police referred to him as the Mercedes Bandit.
Most bank robberies are solved within a matter of weeks, but the robberies attributed to the Mercedes Bandit continued to mount, while Keen and Hefner made no progress. At least in his secret life, Guess must have felt charmed. Once he was almost caught when a police officer arrived in the middle of a robbery, but the officer mistakenly accosted another bearded man as Guess drove away from the scene. Another time Guess robbed a bank while an armed security guard was in the back of the institution fixing a cup of coffee. “This man was just fortunate,” said Keen. “He had lots of breaks.”
Guess was also smart; when Keen checked his computer system, the license plate number that the tellers at First Federal had written down popped up as belonging on a Hyundai. The owner of that car had reported its plates stolen from the parking lot of a medical office building on FM 1960. Guess was taking off the stolen plates and removing his false beard as soon as possible after each robbery (he had abandoned the crepe beard in favor of a prefabricated one that he could rip off all at once) to confuse any law enforcement officers he encountered. He also coated his fingertips so that they left no prints. About the only clue Keen and Hefner had to the bank robber’s identity was his peculiar ability to get his hands on different cars, none of which were being reported stolen; this seemed to indicate that he was in the used-car business. The detectives also believed the bank robber had to be from Houston, because he knew his way around. In the spring of 1990 the theory that the Mercedes Bandit was a local car dealer led the sheriff’s office to charge an innocent man with some of the robberies that Guess is now suspected of having committed. Frustrated by the lack of progress, the sheriff’s office distributed a surveillance photograph of the Mercedes Bandit to television stations and newspapers in the Houston area. Somebody called in and said the person looked a lot like Aubry Lee Kelley, who was in the vehicle-repossession business. Several witnesses picked him out of a lineup. Although Kelley immediately protested that he was innocent, he spent the next two months in jail—until Guess returned to San Jacinto Savings, the first bank he had held up and one of the two that Kelley was charged with robbing. This time he fled in a black Mazda, but the tellers were certain he was the same man who had robbed them before. The charges against the unfortunate Kelley were dropped. “Nobody listens to you in that jail,” Kelley told the Houston Chronicle shortly after his release. “They don’t care if you’re guilty or innocent. They’re just pushing people through court.” If he sounded bitter, he had good cause; while Kelley was in jail, he lost his repo business, was kicked out of his apartment in the Woodlands, and his wife suffered a miscarriage.
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