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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And then Hefner noticed a pattern. Beginning in February 1996, as if he had been lulled into complacency or was getting sloppy, Guess had started robbing a bank every 50 to 56 days. He had robbed on February 15, April 11, May 31, and July 24. By September 11, the Harris County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI, the Houston Police Department (HPD), and the Texas Rangers convened to figure out how to respond. One week later Guess cleaned out the vault at a branch of Coastal Banc, scoring more than $60,000, and that caused law enforcement agencies to disagree about what he was going to do next: The FBI and the HPD argued that the robber had just gotten so much money that he wouldn’t rob again for some time, while Hefner thought his gambling had become so compulsive that he would strike again within the 56-day time frame. The sheriff’s department and the Texas Rangers decided to set up a surveillance operation over a three-week period in November, when they thought the Polo Shirt Bandit was going to hit, but the FBI and the HPD decided not to participate.
After juggling schedules and rearranging long-planned vacations, a team of eighty uniformed and non-uniformed officers was assembled. Hefner briefed them about the bandit’s habits. She also told them to anticipate that the bank robber would try to kill himself or shoot his way out of a corner if faced with the prospect of arrest—the Polo Shirt Bandit was relatively young and had committed dozens of serious crimes, meaning that he was facing an extremely long prison term. Beginning on November 5, the officers sat in parked cars outside of banks that looked like the kind of places that the Polo Shirt Bandit liked to stick up, and waited. He never showed.
By November 25 the three weeks were up, and the sheriff’s department was about to call off the surveillance. Then bank executives requested that the extra protection remain in place through the Thanksgiving holidays. The sheriff’s office decided that it couldn’t afford to keep all 80 officers on the lookout for a bank robber who might not show up, but it did keep about 25 officers on the alert.
ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, WILLIAM GUESS got a phone call from a friend in the car salvage business in Houston. The friend told Guess that there was going to be a big automobile auction on the following day. On Monday, Guess drove to Houston, checked into the Holiday Inn he often stayed in, and went to the car auction. On Wednesday morning, he put on his bank-robbing attire and drove a rented Nissan over to Guaranty Federal, at 3902 FM 1960. Apparently he sat in the car for some time (police officers later found a cooler and a lot of empty beer cans in the car). At ten-thirteen Guess went into the bank, where he displayed his gun and ordered the tellers to fill his briefcase with cash. But then, as if a fickle wind turned the weather vane of his fortune around, everything started to go wrong.
A woman who worked at another branch of Guaranty Federal had stopped by the location on FM 1960 that morning, and as she was leaving, she noticed Guess enter the bank. As it happened, the woman had attended one of Davenport’s briefings, and she recognized Guess as the Polo Shirt Bandit. Recalling what Davenport had said to do during such a situation—“If you ever see this man, call 911”—she dialed the emergency number on her cellular phone. The dispatcher kept her on the phone until Guess emerged, and the woman was able to report that he left the bank in a maroon Nissan Maxima, license plate STS 05X, heading west on FM 1960.
Ron Fleming and Mitch Hatcher, who were normally assigned to a narcotics unit, were among the only Harris County deputies still out looking for the Polo Shirt Bandit that morning. After patrolling up and down Jones Road for a while, Fleming, who was driving, had said, “There’s nothing going on here, let’s cruise over to 1960.” Right after they turned onto FM 1960, the dispatcher announced that the Polo Shirt Bandit had struck again and gave them a vehicle description and location. “He was heading right to us,” Fleming recalled afterward. As the dispatcher was repeating the bank robber’s vehicle and license plate number, Hatcher and Flem-ing spotted the maroon Nissan in oncoming traffic. Thirty seconds later, and they would have missed him. Fleming made a U-turn. “We got him! This is him!” he started yelling to his partner.
When the patrol car pulled up behind him, Guess waved as if to show that he would pull over momentarily. His mind must have raced to consider whether he had committed a traffic violation or whether this was the confrontation that some part of himself must always have been anticipating. The patrol car moved up behind him, close enough for him to study the faces of the two deputies in his rearview mirror. Apparently something told him that they knew exactly who he was. As soon as he saw a break in traffic, Guess took off, running a red light. The patrol car turned on its siren and followed. Guess led Hatcher and Fleming on a chase through a Builders Square parking lot, several other red lights, and up and down streets that intersected with FM 1960. Two other Harris County Sheriff’s Department patrol cars joined the caravan along the way. Guess kept leaving the main thoroughfare in a vain attempt to shake the cars on his tail, but he always came back to his primary getaway route.
About ten minutes after the chase began, Guess and the three patrol cars came tearing down FM 1960 toward the intersection at Perry Road. Sitting in a red pickup in the far left lane was Steve Sharum, a Deer Park plumber. Sharum had been just a few cars ahead of Guess when Hatcher and Fleming had first spotted the Nissan, and he had watched as the patrol car turned around, and the maroon car had zipped out to run the red light. Sharum’s younger brother had been killed in a car accident, and the reckless driving of the man in the Nissan had ticked him off. “That guy’s driving ignorant,” Sharum had thought. “He must have stolen that car.” Now when Sharum looked up and saw the same Nissan Maxima in his rearview mirror, bearing down fast, he thought, “Well, if I stop, he’ll either have to stop too or go around me.” Sharum closed his eyes, held on to his steering wheel, and punched the brakes. He felt two jolts—Guess smashing into his pickup, and the third patrol car slamming into Guess. Then Sharum heard someone yell, “He’s got a gun!” so he lay down on the front seat of his truck and didn’t move.
Once he rear-ended Sharum’s pickup, Guess knew his long charade was finished. He had planned what he would do in such a moment. Perhaps he knew the moment was inevitable, because he robbed banks like he gambled—he didn’t stop until he was completely out of luck. Guess put the blue steel semiautomatic to his temple. When the deputies jumped out of their cars and surrounded him, he fluttered his other hand at them, as if he could shoo them away. “It’s over,” he said. “I haven’t hurt anybody. I don’t want to hurt you. It’s over.” Guess let the gun slip down a little bit, then lifted it back up and fired. His head slumped forward on his chest.
Tom Keen was the first detective to arrive at the crime scene. He took one look and knew that he wasn’t going to learn much about the hidden life of the man in the car. All the essential facts were bleeding out of him. “Fellah, I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” Keen said to the slumped-over man. “Now I finally get to see you, and look how it’s ending.” Robert Davenport had learned that a chase was in progress from an HPD dispatcher; once it ended, he started to head over there, but he changed destinations once he learned that Guess was being flown to Hermann Hospital. Davenport was waiting at the emergency entrance when Guess arrived. “I was hoping that I could look at him and just know, but a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head is a pretty ugly thing,” said Davenport. While doctors hurried to stabilize Guess’s condition, Davenport snapped photographs of his immobile figure. The hospital staff also allowed the police to take fingerprints of the still-unconscious man. Davenport immediately contacted the police department’s lab and had them compare Guess’s prints with those left by the Polo Shirt Bandit in Austin. “Lo and behold,” said Davenport. “Bing. They were his.”
Geneva was at home preparing for Thanksgiving when she learned from a reporter that her husband was the Polo Shirt Bandit. She never went to Houston to visit him. “I didn’t want to,” she said. “I was just so angry that he could do such a thing. What really upset me was the statement he made to the police about how he had never hurt anyone. I thought, ‘Well, who are we?’”
William Guess died without regaining consciousness on January 4. Since his secret life was unmasked, Geneva has discovered bills for credit cards that she didn’t even know he had. William had been taking out large cash advances on the cards and Geneva has been left with the bills. “I just cannot figure out what happened to the money,” she said. “There is no money. His savings account, everything, it’s all wiped out. I think he left me with $184.”
To his surprise, Davenport felt none of the elation he had expected to feel, no sense of satisfaction, at the conclusion of his investigation. Even though Guess had been found, it was as though he had eluded capture after all. “I was just so disappointed,” the detective said. “I was mad, I guess, mad at him, more than anything. I was crushed to see him and know that he would never answer the biggest questions I had. I knew the what, where, when, and how. But why? What made this man turn to a life of crime?”
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