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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SOON AFTER GUESS RESURFACED, inadvertently springing Kelley from jail, he decided to move into new territory and alter his disguise, as if he felt he had to vary his routine to keep ahead of the police. On May 21 he ventured into Houston and hit Mason Road Bank (now called Comerica), a small adobe-style building much like the institutions he had been robbing up and down FM 1960. On July 3 he robbed the same bank again. Despite its name, the bank lies on Blalock Road, which runs directly into I-10, and after both robberies Guess simply disappeared into traffic. By now he had abandoned his Mercedes for cars that were less noticeable. In the second robbery of Mason Road Bank he also abandoned the Mercedes Bandit’s business attire for a more casual look: He was still using a fake beard and mustache and sunglasses, but now he wore a white polo shirt with blue stripes, blue jeans, low-heeled boots, and a baseball hat. From that point on, he wore a polo shirt in every robbery he committed.
Why Guess reconfigured himself as the Polo Shirt Bandit remains an unanswered question; maybe he adopted the look to make the police think they were dealing with a different bank robber. Whatever the reason, the new disguise was an improvement: While the Mercedes Bandit had posed as a typical businessman, the Polo Shirt Bandit was even more ordinary, and therefore more invisible. The new apparel seemed to transform Guess into a generic Bubba, a Texan Everyman, just another big guy in a gimme cap.
The two Houston robberies brought Guess’s heists to eight and the number of law enforcement agencies hunting for him to five, as the Houston Police Department joined the Harris County Sheriff’s Department, the Fort Bend Sheriff’s Department, the Sugar Land Police Department, and the FBI. Guess must have spent some time conjecturing about his pursuers, but he must have felt secure enough once he made it back to Oenaville; the town was surely too tiny, too rustic, and too remote to be the scene of his unmasking. And if his occasional trips to Houston began to acquire an element of serious risk, well, Guess had long had an appetite for risk. Before he had chanced his livelihood; now he was gambling with his freedom.
During his next jobs, Guess displayed an unusual ability to think fast under pressure. On September 18, 1990, he visited a branch of Guaranty Federal Savings that sits in a shopping center on Jones Road, near FM 1960. He was wearing his disguise, and he issued the same set of instructions, but before he left the bank, a dye pack that he had scooped into his briefcase along with the money exploded, shooting a fine red powder that looked like smoke into the air, staining his skin and clothing, and spraying a chemical agent that made his eyes burn and water. If he had taken the time to look for clean money, Guess might have been caught, but he immediately threw the briefcase down and ran off, leaving the cash behind. Apparently he had a pressing debt to pay, however, because only three weeks after the dye pack went off, Guess returned to rob a bank called Commerce Savings. The following year, he robbed Guaranty Federal for the second time. “Okay, girls,” he said to the tellers with characteristic aplomb. “Let’s do it right this time: No dye packs.”
Several months later, the same audacity helped Guess brazen his way through the most harrowing moment of his criminal career. In the summer of 1991, perhaps because he was concerned about hitting too many banks near Houston or the target was too tempting, Guess decided to rob a branch of Taylor Banc in Austin. The one-story, redbrick building stands on the crest of a hill at the intersection of Braker Lane and I-35. It is clearly visible from the highway, and Guess probably spotted it on a trip to Manor Downs. As soon as he saw the building, he must have imagined how easily he could rob it: The bank was just the right size, and a getaway looked simple—although as it turned out, it wasn’t.
At eleven-fifteen in the morning on July 18 Guess drove up to Taylor Banc in a two-tone Chevy pickup. He walked into the lobby wearing a fake beard and a polo shirt and carrying a Titan chrome .32-caliber semiautomatic in his briefcase. The robbery went off without a hitch, but the Austin police responded within minutes, and when Guess tried to disappear into the northbound traffic on I-35, he kept running into patrol cars. A police helicopter soon appeared overhead. Spooked, Guess finally drove down a dead-end street and got rid of every piece of evidence that could tie him to the crime. He shucked off his shirt, jeans, belt, boots, hat, and beard—everything he had worn into the bank—shoved them into a plastic trash bag and heaved it out the window of the truck. He also dumped the money, the stolen plates on the truck, and the Titan semiautomatic. “He got naked,” said one detective. Then he pulled on different clothing and drove away. The police didn’t have a vehicle description, and they were looking for a bearded man in a baseball cap and a polo shirt; if any officers encountered Guess, they didn’t recognize him as their suspect. Shortly after Guess left, a patrol car turned onto the street. A woman who had seen Guess change his clothes pointed out the pile of belongings in the trash bag, but by then Guess was gone.
On that occasion the debts that Guess had amassed must have been particularly onerous. One day after leaving Austin empty-handed he showed up in Harris County and robbed a Bank of America, and the day after that, as if he still hadn’t gotten the amount he required, he robbed a branch of San Jacinto Savings. Before the end of 1991, he robbed four more banks, all in Harris County, boosting the number he had hit to nineteen.
KEEN, HEFNER, AND THE OTHER DETECTIVES looking for the Polo Shirt Bandit obtained the first and only items of physical evidence they ever got during their investigation from the pile of stuff Guess left in Austin. From the fake beard, they learned that their suspect had been using a disguise. The investigators had already decided that the bank robber probably had a steady source of income, since his robberies took place in an irregular sequence; considering his actions after the botched Austin robbery, Keen and Hefner felt certain that their suspect had a gambling problem. “Who else would be going through that kind of money other than somebody with a drug problem?” asked Keen. “And he didn’t look like somebody who was into drugs. He stayed the same weight.”
But the evidence and the suppositions led nowhere. Keen and Hefner contacted casino officials around the country, but their quest turned up no useful tips; partial fingerprints recovered from the license plate Guess left behind in Austin didn’t match any on file. The Harris County Sheriff’s Department turned to the media for new leads. On December 17, 1991, the Houston Chronicle published a surveillance photograph obtained the week before, and after the picture ran, the sheriff’s office got a tip that the bandit resembled another man who owned a car-repossession business. The suspect’s partner also looked like the Polo Shirt Bandit, however, and detectives decided the two had been taking turns at wearing the same disguise. Early in 1992 the sheriff’s office arrested both men and charged them with some of the Polo Shirt Bandit’s robberies. “In each case they would wear sunglasses, a baseball hat, and a beard,” someone from the sheriff’s department told reporters at the time. “If you look at the surveillance photos, it’s hard to tell the difference.”
Both men were released, but they soon would have been cleared anyway: On February 19, 1992, the Polo Shirt Bandit returned to Harris County to rob a branch of Cypress National Bank on Jones Road that he had robbed once before. “This is the last time I’m going to rob a bank,” Guess told the tellers at Cypress National. “I need this money for my son.” And then the robberies stopped, as abruptly as they had begun.
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