Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  At 8th Avenue and J Street in Sacramento, the camper slowed to a stop. In the wee hours of Friday morning, the streets were virtually empty. The men they knew only as Carl and Norbert stepped out of the vehicle. And then, miraculously, Carl told Rudolph Sternberg: "Drive this camper away from here for the next two hours and don't call the cops."

  Norbert Waitts added, "And don't make no mistake about it. We may be following you in another car. You goof it up and somebody will get hurt." Still unable to believe they were free, Sternberg peeled out. He drove the camper fourteen miles to Woodland. He kept watching the rearview mirror for headlights and saw none. Finally convinced they were truly free, he stopped at the motel where Elizabeth Banfield called home.

  * * *

  Bowles and Waitts knew they were high on the Wanted list of every cop in Oregon and California. They needed another car, but this time, even though they still had money, they didn't dare buy one. They trudged on foot for four miles, looking for a vehicle that would be easy to steal.

  The ex-cons happened onto an unlikely— and unfortunate— target. Sacramento is the capital of California, and the men and women who run the state live there most of the time. Ted Wilson was the finance director for the state of California— the highest appointed office in the state. He and his wife, Joan, their ten-year-old son, and their nineteen-month-old baby girl lived in a very nice house. There was a brand-new Ford Galaxie parked in their driveway.

  Joan Wilson was scheduled to play golf the next morning with a good friend, the wife of the deputy director of motor vehicles in California. But Joan Wilson wasn't at home when her friend came to pick her up at 9:00 A.M., and her home was in a state of confusion. The Wilsons' ten-year-old son and a thirteen-year-old cousin had woken up to find no one else in the house. No one had gotten them up for school.

  A baby-sitter who was supposed to care for the Wilsons' baby while Joan played golf arrived, but the baby wasn't there, nor were the Wilsons. Ted Wilson had already missed an important business conference and a long-distance call from a congressman. The phone kept ringing for him, but no one knew where he was. The boys said they had bunked out on a porch during the night and hadn't heard anything all night until they answered the phone when the congressman tried calling Wilson.

  When the California State Patrol investigators learned that Carl Cletus Bowles and Norbert Waitts had dropped off their hostages only four miles from Ted Wilson's house, they had a pretty good idea what happened to the state official. They only hoped that the kidnappers didn't know they were holding a very important person.

  A bulletin was issued to city, state, and federal agencies listing the Wilsons' green Ford Galaxie, LDG 311, as the latest getaway car. As soon as he heard the news, Governor Edmund "Jerry" Brown returned to Sacramento and took personal charge of the case. "I'm the baby's godfather," he told his troopers. "I don't want any harm to come to her or her father and mother."

  Wherever they were, Carl Bowles and Norbert Waitts were getting themselves deeper and deeper into trouble. A federal grand jury in Portland was called into special session and returned an indictment charging both men with bank robbery and set bail at $150,000 each. In Lane County, Oregon, they were charged with the first-degree murder of Deputy Carlton Smith. Federal authorities were also preparing kidnapping charges against them. The only good thing any law enforcement official had to say about them was that they hadn't killed the Banfields and the Sternbergs. That gave them hope that the Wilsons might survive, too. In California, every state trooper, fish and game official, forestry officer, and even highway work crew member was sent out along back roads to look for the Wilsons' car. But the search was fruitless all that day and into the evening. By midnight on Friday, July 9, Bowles and Waitts had gone another twenty-four hours without sleep, and a crisis was brewing. They were headed toward the hamlet of Tonopah, Nevada, which is halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.

  Deputy Thomas Wilmath spotted a green Ford stopped beside the road about four miles out of town. The plates were familiar; they'd been etched on every lawman's brain over the last twelve hours. But the Wilsons' car was empty. Wilmath figured that the occupants were out in the brush relieving themselves or that the kidnappers had ditched the car when they found a less recognizable vehicle.

  Wilmath walked quietly over to the car and was bending over to look inside just as two men stepped out of the brush with drawn guns. "Don't try anything, cop," an icy cold voice said. "You'll get it, and so will the people with us."

  The people with them were the Wilsons and their baby girl. Wilmath had no choice; if he resisted, the Wilsons might be killed. So instead of risking their lives, the deputy sheriff became the duo's tenth hostage. In a move that must have made sense to them at the time, the desperadoes crowded everyone into the police car. They used the squad car's police radio to contact the Nevada State Highway Patrol headquarters.

  The man on duty was Dispatcher Dave Branovich. The sixteen-year patrol veteran swallowed his shock when he heard Waitts's voice on the police radio. He listened as Waitts told him they wouldn't kill the hostages if they got what they wanted. What they wanted first was relatively simple— or seemed so; they wanted food and ammunition. Their plan was for Deputy Wilmath to go into a club in Tonopah and get sandwiches while Bowles and Waitts waited outside with the hostages. There were seventy people in the nightclub when the deputy strolled in with elaborate casualness. He waited for the sandwiches, which were delayed because the kitchen was so busy, and he was prepared to leave without saying a word.

  Every law agency within a hundred miles had been notified that two of the most-wanted criminals were now in a county squad car, along with a deputy, the finance director of the state of California, and his wife and baby. The roads surrounding Tonopah were beginning to bristle with patrol cars. The net was tightening. But the word was "Do nothing that might jeopardize the hostages."

  Carl Bowles and Norbert Waitts were getting jumpy, and they didn't trust Deputy Wilmath. They grew restless waiting for him to come back with food. They stood in the doorway of the club for a while, with one eye on Wilmath and one on the hostages. Then, without warning, they began firing into the club at random. Patrons hit the floor and scrambled under tables when Carl and Norbert shouted that they were coming in for food and that nothing could stop them.

  Predictably, those inside who were still standing raced for the exits in a panic. A card dealer pulled a revolver and started firing back. Wilmath yelled at him to hold his fire because there were hostages just out side in the car. But it was too late. Bowles and Waitt made a dash for the squad car, and three of the shots fired at them pierced the police car, one of them smashing the rear window as the car careened out of town.

  "Come in… come in," Dispatcher Branovich pleaded over the radio. "Has anybody been hurt?"

  Bowles answered, "This guy Wilson has been shot."

  Although Branovich tried to cajole Bowles into taking Wilson to a hospital, the fugitive refused. "Don't tell me what to do," Bowles spat. "I'm telling you. We're a couple miles out of town. There's a service station on the left side and it's closed. We'll leave him there, and you can pick him up. He ain't bad hurt. We're taking the woman and the kid with us. If you try to stop us, you know what's going to happen to them."

  Wilson begged to stay in the car with his family, but Bowles pushed the bleeding man out of the car at the gas station. Deputies who picked him up a few minutes later were relieved to see that his thigh wound wasn't as serious as it looked; he waved away medics and agreed only to minor first-aid treatment. He was taken to the Mineral County sheriff's headquarters to await news of his wife and baby.

  The hostage situation was becoming more volatile with every passing minute. Half crazy with lack of sleep, the two gunmen had gotten spooked just because they had to wait for sandwiches. There was no telling what they might do as the pressure on them increased. The Wilsons' baby had to be screaming from hunger and exhaustion by now, and Joan Wilson was probably worried to deat
h about her husband.

  Dispatcher Branovich continued to urge the fugitives to release Mrs. Wilson and her baby. "You make the terms," he said convincingly. "We'll do it any way you say."

  But Bowles and Waitts were having none of it. "I wouldn't trust a cop any further than the end of my gun," Waitts snarled at Branovich.

  The stolen squad car had a conga line of police vehicles following it now, but no officer dared try to force it off the road or take a shot. For more than an hour, the strange procession rolled down the road. When they reached Coaldale, the army of officers trailing Carl Bowles watched incredulously as he parked and walked into a bar. They could have shot him easily enough, but they knew that Norbert Waitts was in the car holding a gun on Joan Wilson and her baby. If they brought Bowles down, they had no doubt that Waitts would shoot to kill.

  The parade of official cars, their light bars flashing red, blue, and yellow, stopped and waited. Their frustrating convoy would one day be the inspiration for a critically acclaimed Goldie Hawn movie called Sugar-land Express. But this real drama was terrifying, galling, and fraught with danger.

  Finally, Bowles emerged from the bar, got back into the stolen squad car, and the procession of police vehicles continued down the road.

  As they crept along Highway 6, perhaps fortified by alcohol from the bar, Carl Bowles came up with a deal: "We'll leave the woman and kid in the car if you'll give us a half hour on foot."

  Dispatcher Branovich quickly agreed. If Bowles kept his promise, it would be the best possible scenario for getting the woman and baby to safety, but he wouldn't believe it until it happened.

  Actually, the sleep-deprived killers had another scheme in mind. They had spotted an empty pickup truck along the road and they planned to steal it. With a half-hour head start, they could slide into Vegas where they would be swallowed up by the crowds and bright lights. Odd that men without honor expected the police to honor them, to keep a promise to two ex-cons who had killed one of their brothers in cold blood.

  Bowles and Waitt walked away from the squad car and headed back toward the pickup. They planned to hot-wire the truck, but Special Deputy Jerry Minor had a gun on them before they ever got the engine to turn over. They took off running through the brush on foot. Minutes later, California Highway Patrolmen Bill Rich and Howard Hoffman from Bishop, just across the state line, spotted the pair.

  The outlaws surrendered meekly.

  The officers on the scene approached the stolen police car, afraid of what they might find inside. As they drew closer, they heard a sound and saw someone sit up. Joan Wilson and her baby were alive.

  Reunited with her worried husband, Joan Wilson told him that Carl Bowles had made a bizarre final gesture. "He tossed $900 in my lap when he left the car," she said. "And he told me, 'You don't need to tell your old man where you got the dough. I don't think I'm going to have a chance to spend it, so go out and have a ball on a spending spree.' "

  * * *

  Carl Cletus Bowles went to a federal prison first, serving nine years at the McNeill Island facility on Puget Sound. Surrounded by water as cold and rough as it is beautiful, the prison is an island unto itself both figuratively and literally. No one escapes from McNeill, although a few hapless convicts have tried. But the churning current pulled them under, trapping them in a watery prison forever.

  Seven years later, when he was thirty-one years old, Bowles was transferred to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem to begin serving concurrent state and federal sentences. According to Judge Edwin Allen's sentencing warning, Bowles was never to be considered a candidate for parole. His file at McNeill Island showed he had received seven disciplinary transfers in seven years of incarceration before he came to the Oregon State pen. A parole coordinator had written: "Bowles is extremely dangerous. He has committed crimes of extreme violence on more than one occasion, culminating in the brutal slaying of a police officer."

  But when he came to the state penitentiary in Salem, Carl Cletus Bowles seemed to have turned over a new leaf. Psychologists there noted that Bowles now said he felt his crimes, including the murder of Carlton Smith, had not been justified and that he felt remorse. However, the interviewer suspected Bowles was only trying to earn an early release by saying what he thought parole board members wanted to hear.

  As the first year passed, however, Oregon prison officials were surprised to find that Bowles was handling imprisonment "exceptionally well." Like most sociopaths, he was an ideal prisoner, charming and apparently eager to get an education and change his behavior. He was a very handsome man, something that all too often blinds observers to what is really going on behind a wonderful facade and clear, friendly eyes. All of us tend, unconsciously perhaps, to view beautiful people as positive and good, and homely people as negative and suspicious. And because Bowles was small in stature, he seemed somehow less threatening than a six-footer would have.

  Hoyt Cupp, the superintendent of the Oregon prison, took a personal interest in Carl Bowles and became a leading advocate for his rehabilitation. In Cupp's defense, this was in an era when inhumane prison conditions were being blasted by critics, and Cupp had done much to renovate the sections of the Oregon prison that were run-down and shut off from the light. Most states had outlawed the death penalty, and rehabilitation was the philosophy of the day. Cupp saw something in Carl Bowles that he thought merited an attempt to save him, and the warden believed the crimes of his wild youth didn't necessarily mark Bowles forever a criminal. No one knew for sure which of the two parolees had shot Deputy Carlton Smith, and all of the hostages they had taken as they sped toward California had been released unharmed. Ted Wilson was shot, yes, but his wound could have come from friendly fire when the police shot at the stolen police unit. Hoyt Cupp was certainly no novice when it came to dealing with prisoners. He had an unblemished three-decade record in prison administration. And on May 17, 1974, Cupp was in Arkansas presiding over the Western Wardens Association meeting. His innovative techniques and his concern for the rights of both victims and prisoners made him the natural choice to oversee the organization.

  One new concept being implemented in the Oregon prison system was that of conjugal visits, the theory behind it being that if men were cut off from the women they loved for endless months and years, they would never be able to fit into their families or society again. Conjugal visits between prisoners and their wives had been tried first in a prison in Parchman, Mississippi, in the late sixties, and the results had been good. Half a dozen years later, a number of prisons were providing trailers and cabins on the penitentiary grounds where prisoners with good records could be alone with their spouses. The Oregon State Penitentiary did not yet have this kind of facility, so the prisoners who qualified for the program were allowed, in rare instances, to visit their loved ones at the women's homes, but always under the watchful surveillance of corrections or probation officers.

  Carl Bowles didn't have a wife, but he did have a fiancée. Jill Fina* was in her early twenties, a slim woman with huge dark eyes and full lips. She had begun to write to Bowles, although no one knew for sure where she had heard of him; she would have been only thirteen or fourteen when he and Norbert Waitts made their marathon run through Oregon, California, and Nevada.

  Nevertheless, Jill Fina visited Bowles at least a dozen times between August 1973, and May 17, 1974. At the prison, she was known as his fiancée. Superintendent Cupp and Ted Winters, the assistant ombudsman for the governor's office, visited with Jill several times and found her to be a "responsible, concerned type of individual," someone who would be a good influence on Bowles. And he certainly needed it. He wasn't in prison for life— not yet— and having someone like Jill to bond with might make all the difference in the world for him.

  Jill Fina really was concerned about Bowles, and she had shown responsibility in her life, but she also had a wild side, and unbeknownst to Cupp and Winters, she was not who she said she was.

  She was born Jill Onofrio in Lubbock, Texas,
and had run away from home at thirteen. From that time on, she lived with foster parents in Oklahoma. Although she was alienated from her parents, Jill had an uncle who became a kind of hero to her, and she felt more related to him than she did to her immediate family.

  Jill was smart. She graduated from high school in Felt, Oklahoma, in 1969, and for the next three years she worked as an accountant at banks in Oklahoma City. She married a man named Fina and they moved to Monrovia, California, where they bought a house. Her husband was a skilled carpet layer for a Los Angeles firm, and Jill worked as an assistant bookkeeper for an acoustics company in Pasadena. Her boss would remember her as a very good employee who was capable of doing the work of three people. "She was a little wild in her attitudes," her employer said, "but then, she was only twenty-three."

  Somewhere along the line, Jill became estranged from her husband and began to focus all of her attention on Carl Bowles. Her letters and monthly visits seemed to give him new optimism, and the pair made plans for a future together when he was paroled. Bowles confided to Warden Cupp that he and Jill were engaged, and he put in a request for a conjugal visit.