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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WILLIAM GUESS DID NOT HAVE A SICK SON. Detectives now believe he was just trying to justify his actions to the people he was holding up. However, it is possible that the strain of leading a double life had begun to affect him; Geneva recalls that William had constant stomach problems and was always eating Tums. (Three years later Guess would suffer a heart attack.) If he was ever to interrupt the cycle of compulsive gambling and criminal activity he had fallen into, this would have been the occasion. However, whatever qualms he may have felt were no match for the pull of his addictions: On February 23, 1993, a year after saying he was through with crime, Guess packed up his gun, his fake beard, one of his polo shirts, and resumed his bank-robbing spree. He stole the license plates off a car that belonged to an employee of a fast-food restaurant on U.S. 290 and put them onto the white Ford Thunderbird he was driving. Like many of the cars he used from then on, it looked new; apparently Guess started using rental cars instead of used ones. Guess then headed for the Bank of America on FM 1960 and held it up for the second time.
Three months later Guess committed a robbery that was the one most likely to have led to his capture—it was like a beacon announcing his approximate home base, although none of the detectives searching for him understood this at the time. On May 20, 1993, Guess held up Peoples National Bank in the scenic town of Salado. It was the only robbery that he ever committed in Bell County, where Oenaville is located—Salado is only about twenty miles from Guess’s home. While his success in evading capture thus far was largely because he had avoided robbing banks in places where he might be recognized, Guess must have found Peoples National irresistible: The old stone building sits so close to I-35 that the highway entrance ramp is visible from the bank’s parking lot, and Salado has no police department of its own. Law enforcement agents had to come from Belton, ten minutes away. Breaking from the routine he had used in the past, Guess stayed inside the bank long enough to force the employees to open its vault, and while the police have never disclosed how much money he got, it was far more than his usual plunder.
One week later the Temple Daily Telegram linked the Salado robbery to “a professional bandit” who was described as being from around Houston. The article outlined the Polo Shirt Bandit’s methods and appearance, and it included a photograph of Guess in disguise. “Authorities do not believe the robber remained in the Central Texas area,” reported the paper. “However, anyone able to confirm the true identity of the man pictured in the photograph is urged to call the sheriff’s department.” Half of Temple must have read the story—Guess probably saw it himself. In the meantime, FBI agents showed photographs of the Polo Shirt Bandit at work in other banks to Jerry Kopriva, who was in charge of security for Peoples National in the area at that time. Kopriva had known Guess in high school, and they had become reacquainted when their children started attending the same schools. Kopriva studied the photographs and never realized he was looking at William Guess. “I had no earthly idea,” he said recently.
In retrospect it seems weird that a beard, a gimme cap, and a pair of sunglasses were enough to render Guess unrecognizable, but apparently people who knew him were incapable of seeing through his disguise because the idea that he might be a bank robber was unthinkable. And Guess never revealed any sign of his illicit career to his friends or neighbors; he never changed his lifestyle in any obvious fashion, and he was never suddenly and inexplicably rich. “He never flashed a hundred dollar bill,” said a neighbor in Oenaville. “He’s lived here for ten years, and he’s always driven around in an old vehicle.” Geneva and William had separate bank accounts, and his family was never aware of any change in William’s finances. “He was a penny- pincher,” said Geneva. “It was a big joke with the kids: ‘Daddy’s cheap, cheap, cheap.’ When we went on vacations, he would want to stay in some dumpy old motel. He was happy buying clothes at Wal-Mart.” He never boasted of his illegal exploits, not even when he was drunk.
Perhaps he never slipped because nobody knew him that well anymore. After selling the car business, Guess had drifted into buying old cars at auctions, fixing them up, and selling them to other car dealers, and he was spending almost all his time at the garage owned by Cliff Lambert. The property sits on a bluff, and it is strewn with every model of vehicle imaginable, including two-doors, four-doors, old pickups, a few Winnebagos, and even an old powerboat. When friends asked if he was going to get back into the used-car business on a more formal basis, Guess replied no, not unless he had to. “Gradually he built a shell around himself,” said an old friend. “In the last five or six years, it was like he had a chip on his shoulder. He was more aloof.”
As if Guess was alarmed by the publicity the Salado bank robbery attracted, he committed no more robberies that year. He started up again in 1994, however, and from that point on he became more and more effective as a criminal. Guess had been learning on the job, and in the last phase of his career, he figured out how to avoid security measures like dye packs and how to coerce employees into letting him into the vaults. While the life went out of William Guess, who was sitting in a junkyard for hours at a time, the Polo Shirt Bandit grew more potent; it was as if one waxed and the other waned.
EARLY IN 1994 ROBERT DAVENPORT, a detective newly assigned to the Houston Police Department’s robbery division, was handed material on the serial bank robber. The police department’s interest in the Polo Shirt Bandit had been reignited on January 4, when the bank robber hit his third institution within the city limits. A subsequent Houston robbery—at Pinemont Bank, on Memorial, on May 19, 1994—provided Davenport with what he thought was a big break. “We got an excellent video,” he said. “It showed his every movement. It showed him pointing, holding his weapon, walking. There was a strong front-on facial shot, a good profile, even a shot of the back of his head. It was perfect.” The videotape of the Polo Shirt Bandit robbing Pinemont first ran on the TV show City Under Siege, then appeared on local news, and eventually aired again on America’s Most Wanted. Davenport researched every name that turned up and found many people who bore a striking resemblance to the Polo Shirt Bandit, but nobody who had committed his crimes. “One woman was so upset she went into convulsions because she thought it was her ex-husband,” he remembered. Investigators began to feel certain that the bank robber didn’t live in the Houston area, since the publicity would have unearthed him if he did. Davenport distributed wanted posters at police roll calls around the city and held seminars for bank employees to teach them about the bandit’s habits. He worked until he had the sense that he knew the Polo Shirt Bandit, even though he didn’t know his name, and still the bank robber wasn’t caught. He robbed eight more banks in the next year and a half. Then he started using a semiautomatic that carried more firepower than any he had used before.
On April 11, 1996, Guess showed up at a Compass Bank on Bissonnet in Houston. The wedge-shaped bank building looked small from the outside, but once Guess was inside, he discovered that it was much bigger; Guess was forced to spend far longer in the bank than he wanted to, as he had to round up employees from various offices before he could get his money, and he grew visibly jittery in the process. During his next robberies, his manner became increasingly ominous. Guess started getting more aggressive, more nervous, and more demanding; he began pointing the gun directly at bank employees, whereas before he had only displayed a weapon to show them that he was armed. How had the years of assuming the role of the Polo Shirt Bandit changed William Guess? What actions was he now capable of? On July 24 Guess got into the vault of a Savings of America on Post Oak and walked off with $31,823—a vast difference from the $1,000 he had taken from San Jacinto Savings almost seven years before.
As Guess’s behavior became more threatening, law enforcement officers began to put more and more effort into his capture. The Harris County Sheriff’s Department formed a task force to catch the man that everyone in the robbery division had come to think of as their nemesis and put Grace Hefner in charge. In the middle of 1995 a bank association had offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the Polo Shirt Bandit. By last summer, when Guess showed up with a bigger gun, the reward being offered was up to $26,000. Davenport said, “We didn’t know whether he was making a statement: ‘I’ve got more bullets. I’m ready for a shoot-out.’”
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