“He was quiet, confident, calm, self-assured, intelligent, and a natural athlete,” remembered one friend. He was known to be friendly but reserved-he rarely initiated conversations, although he was happy to stop and talk if you did. William Guess grew up in Temple, where his father worked as the director of the city’s utilities. “This is the least likely place in the world for something like this to happen.” ![]() ![]() “This is a farming community,” said a neighbor who lives two houses down from the Guess family. The revelation of the Polo Shirt Bandit’s identity was greeted by the residents of Oenaville with total disbelief. Oenaville is far removed from the urban sprawl of roads like FM 1960 the town consists of a main crossroads, one convenience store, half a dozen ranches, and some houses, surrounded by a vast expanse of rolling prairie. ![]() He shared it with his wife, Geneva, and the youngest of their three sons. 290 or I-45 and vanish.Īs detectives learned after they discovered his identity from his driver’s license, William Guess lived in Oenaville, an unincorporated town six miles northeast of Temple, in a redbrick ranch house. There were never many witnesses around, never that many bank employees to control, and afterward he would slip into the speeding stream of traffic on U.S. Guess committed one robbery in a town called Salado, two in Austin, and nine within the limits of Houston, but he always came back to FM 1960 or Texas Highway 6 (as the road is known south of 290): Of the 26 additional bank robberies that he is believed to have committed in parts of Harris or Fort Bend counties, 21 occurred somewhere along the road where he now sat. He robbed more banks than Jesse James, John Dillinger, Willie Sutton, or Bonnie and Clyde, although he never hurt anyone. Over the span of his career, he is suspected of pulling off at least 38 robberies-making him the most prolific bank robber in the history of the state-and stealing in the vicinity of $600,000. This was where he had started robbing banks. But to Guess, they must have once looked like a row of cherries, his personal jackpot. The branches are as homey and cheerful as a Hallmark greeting card, and you wouldn’t think a robbery would ever happen inside one of them. The banks that stand along the road’s length are quintessentially modern they are small outfits, staffed by three or four people, that sit next to day care centers and Hunan Palaces and Repp Big and Tall clothing stores. Guess had just wrecked the Nissan on FM 1960, a busy four-lane stretch bordered by strip malls, Chinese restaurants, and auto body shops that intersects Interstate 45 and U.S. Either way, all those crisp-as-if-starched bills were now spilled out over the carpet: all that easy money, obtained at such immense risk. He could have dumped it out shortly after getting into the car to see how much was there, or it could have tumbled out during the fast turns he had taken in his unsuccessful attempt to shake the deputies who had cornered him. The money had been in Guess’s briefcase when he had walked out of the bank. On the floor of the car on the passenger side was $12,460. Once he had driven away, he had hurriedly pulled off the disguise, and a heady surge of relief probably had flooded through him-he thought he was going to escape once more, back to the part of his life that was ordinary and respectable. About fifteen minutes earlier, however, Guess had been wearing a fake beard and mustache, sunglasses, a baseball hat, and the shirt that had come to be the signature of his alter ego, a serial bank robber known as the Polo Shirt Bandit. At that moment he was wearing a windbreaker, blue jeans, low-heeled boots, and glasses, bearing little resemblance to the person who had just robbed Guaranty Federal, a small bank north of Houston. He had graying blond hair and a square face. Guess was 46 years old, and he was a big man-more than six feet tall, around 240 pounds. ![]() On November 27, 1996, William Guess sat in a rented maroon Nissan Maxima surrounded by Harris County sheriff’s deputies, holding a blue steel semiautomatic to his head.
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