Murder They Wrote: The End of the Dream

[music] He was like the Pied Piper. Scott Skurlock, a free-spirited minister's son, athletic, good-looking. He's a incredible guy, you built a tree house. I was talking about two weeks to build this whole thing. When I first read about the main characters in newspaper, I was immediately curious. [music] I pulled you into this magical world where it was fun and happy. When he first came to you and said, "Look, we want you to help us rob a bank." I thought he was crazy. [music] This case is different from me that I have written about before. We love the story of Robin Hood, a bank robber who looked like Mel Gibson. The bank robber Hollywood would be born. Pancake makeup, false wig, false chin. We were currently receiving a silent hold-up alarm. He was taking more amounts of money than any robber that I had ever seen. We had planned to take five banks in one evening. It was a mind game with us. I discovered that it was at the same time tragic and funny, terrifying and romantic. Scott got out with his assault rifle and the gun shot went off. And I thought I was dead. I'm Ann Rule. The story you're about to watch is from my book, The End of the Dream. [music] Seattle, Washington, 1996. Just Thanksgiving Eve, of course. And everybody's anxious to get home and be other families and such. I left the office about 5.30. Almost precisely at that moment, the biggest bank robbery in American history. Got underway. The robber's fled with more than a million dollars. We're currently receiving a silent hold-up alarm from our sea first in Lake City. I knew it was Hollywood. Hollywood, as they called him, was no stranger to the Seattle Police or the FBI. One of the best you've ever seen? The best. No question. No questions. He had eluded and taunted them for four years. Effortlessly robbing 18 banks. But this would be his last. Within 24 hours, he was hunkered down in a cold, dark camper in a Seattle backyard. Surrounded by SWAT teams and the FBI. And Hollywood made his exit. I thought fantastic. He's out. Man, he made it. He did it. Wow. His nickname, his style, his success, all caught the attention of one of Seattle's most famous writers. Without question, the most astonishing front entrance I've ever seen. How are you? I'm Susan. Nice to meet you. And rule. A former Seattle cop, now a student of True Crime. How do you get any work done? Her home and office on Puget Sound are evidence that crime, or at least writing about it, can pay. You have been called the Queen of True Crime. You could pretty much pick whatever story you want to do. What was it specifically about this story that drew you to it? The idea of a Robin Hood-like character, of a highway man, a bank robber who looked like Mel Gibson, who basically was the kind of man that every woman in her secret heart would like to date at least once. Hollywood, actually, was Scott Skurlock, a preacher's son from Reston, Virginia. And the leading man in Ann Rule 17th book, The End of the Dream. The story of the man who would become one of this country's most remarkable bank robbers, begins unremarkably enough here in Hawaii, where he lived in the 70s on and off with his old friend Kevin Myers. And what a life it was. I was cashing my check, and I was counting my tins as I was walking out of the bank door. Here comes the island bus pulling up. The first person out, there's Scott coming down. Scott Skurlock and Kevin Myers were childhood friends. It was 1974, and Kevin was a student at the University of Hawaii. When out of the blue, Scott Skurlock simply showed up. He goes, "Why just came here from the airport?" And I go, "You're kidding." Virginia goes, "Yeah, I just golf a plane from Virginia." Ready to pick up where they'd left off in high school. Here we are, hallelujah. Absolute heaven. Yeah, it was heaven on earth. For Kevin, school didn't work out, but Hawaii did. He had this whole little private five acres, like Eden. He and Scott ended up on a five-acre tomato farm, on a Wahoo's breathtaking North Shore. Front door in the heaven, man. For being in your 20s, it was like a puppy getting let out of the pound, you know. It was fun. Kevin Myers and a spiring artist supported himself painting. Scott Skurlock hired on with a local landscaper. It definitely is one of the old trees. They fixed up the property. We called the shire because of the hobbit. You know, it was like the place we wanted to have our little kingdom at. And then you get invited to the kingdom. Marge Mullins came for a visit and ended up moving in. They wanted to be one with nature. Oh, God. Living the trees and playing the jungle and swimming in the ocean. Jump from the cliffs. And they were invincible. 48 hours brought Scott's old friends, Marge and Kevin back to relive those adventures. We never found any places beautiful, this much fun. Hoping to shed light on how Scott Skurlock, a free spirit administered son, ended up wanted by the FBI. That's one of the early pictures I took of Scott and Kevin. What was Scott like? Scott was probably an adrenaline junkie. Push it, push it, push it. See how far you can go? Absolutely. The highest cliff peak could find you wanted to jump. Challenging other people too. He's like the pied piper, you know. He jumped off the cliff. If anyone was with him, he'd tell them to jump too. He was a leader. If he led you into something that by the time you came out of, you were very grateful you went and you never would have chosen. The fun always involved challenge. You could kill yourself on this stuff. In fact, you could have killed yourselves in any number of ways here. And an element of risk. This is hard in Robin Banks. But for Skurlock, danger was the appeal. Athletic, good looking, he seemed to lead a charmed life. And of course there were women when they worked in the tomato fields of their landlord. Most of the girls picked tapeless. So even work was kind of fun for them. It was probably every young man's dream. Life here on the North Shore of a Wahoo seemed almost too good to last. And indeed, it was. It ended in a dispute that would foreshadow things to come. A dispute over drugs. In 1976, while hiking, Kevin and Scott stumbled on a neighbor's patch of marijuana. They had gone in at night and cut down Christmas tree size pot plants, pulling off all the leaves and packaging them to sell them. It was to be a one-time thing. But Skurlock liked the easy money. And when Kevin was briefly away, he planted his own pot. He says, "Don't worry, man, no one will ever see it. And you can just hide them everywhere." He says, "I've got plants where I want to put it all through the forest and back in here." And I go, "No, man, they're going to catch you. You're going to find out. We're going to get kicked out of here." In fact, the landlord did find out. And the days of cheap rent and high living in Hawaii were over. Not that Scott had any regrets. He knew the difference between right and wrong, but he didn't care. One way or the other. No conscience. That's the part I couldn't see coming. That's the part nobody saw coming. The course had been set. Drugs, easy money, and the good life. I always think that that was a turning point in his life. He could have chosen to stay in the light and not go into the darkness. Scott Skurlock's next stop, Olympia Washington, and an exotic tree house. Progressive Evergreen College in Olympia Washington. In 1978, after Hawaii, Scott Skurlock enrolled here at one point dreaming of becoming a doctor. He soon was hitting the books as hard as a later would hit the banks. This is his evaluation from June of 1983. Scott has every reason to be delighted with his work this quarter in immunology. Professor Betty Cutters saw a bright future for a star pupil. I would have thought he would have gone off to be something very successful. Maybe start a business that was doing some innovative things in chemistry. Something where he'd make a fair bit of money probably. And soon enough, Scott was making money in chemistry, illegally. According to friend Kevin Myers, he was producing meth amphetamines. Crystal Math. He knew what to get. He knew it was in his school. How'd he get it? He had to have locked or to get it. Well, this is what he told me later. All up through the ceiling. and go through across the other areas of the college and drop down through the sings where everybody's gone at night. What was your impression about how big a business this was? Scott never told you everything, and he always kept his biggest secrets away from everybody. But the money was good enough to buy 20 secluded acres in Olympia, with a non-descript house perfect for camouflaging meth production and a forest perfect for perhaps the finest tree house ever built. I watched it go up over a period of time. A longtime friend and neighbor Wendy Scofield says it was Skurlock's pride and joy. How did it also fit with the personality that you knew? Just like he was, I mean he wanted to go higher and higher. This is hard. He was swinging from ropes, he thought he was Tarzan, you know, he was whooping through the trees, but he always wanted to get that bit higher. Treehouse. High, and then adrenaline high. Crystal meth high, bank robbery high. Three stories high, built around seven cedars, and Anne Rool says, built very quickly. The neighbor came over and he said, "Gee, I'd like to hire those guys that are working for you because they're working 18, 24 hours a day." Well, of course they were because they were on speed. Took me about two weeks to build this whole thing. Two weeks to build this whole thing. When I saw it, I go, "Wow, it's way up there. It's sitting. It's cool. It's 40 feet first floor." Kevin Myers took this video in 1985. You come from the main room up ladders, which is, he always liked the old ladders, and that was fun. You go up inside the ladders to the second floor. When you go from the main room, which where the fireplace was, because you want to keep the firewood low. Wait a minute, you had a fireplace in the treehouse? Yeah, huge six foot. You could put logs in there. We had hot and cold run, water, big outdoor bath. It was incredible. You sit back and just hear wind, and look back at the trees and the movement. And then you hear a little creaking. You're like on this awesome sailboat tucked into serenity. It was a thrill-seekers' paradise. Walkways into the trees, no safety rails, at first only ropes to the ground below. We're sitting at 60 feet up in the air at six doors. You want an escape route all the way down to the forest floor? Aren't you a little suspicious of that? No, I think it's like fun. Let's build it. You ready? With Scott running the camera, it was left to Kevin to test it out. I thought you still go for a nice little pre-swinging out of the forest floor, start running and get off. Well, that's not the way it worked. You drop, and then the rope got taunting and you go shooting through the forest. Wow, do you see that? But he let you test it. I would rather say I tested it just for him. Scott's friend Elizabeth Stanton says everyone always wanted to please Scott, something he was well aware of. He called it his tribe. He actually told me that once when I started how it was sitting for him. He said you're part of my tribe now. For those around him, it met an exciting life. From climbing trees at night to bicycling in the pouring rain. You can pull you into this magical world where it was fun and happy. And that can get addictive. People also kind of put him on a pedestal. So all of a sudden he's this incredible guy. He built the tree house and he's dashing looking and he's fun. And then he helps people out. One of the people Scott reached out to was Kevin Myers' brother Steve. Once a highly successful sculptor in Europe, he had fallen on hard times. I had gone through a year of custody case for my daughter. Expensive. Expensive and waste of time. I got tired of the whole thing and I wanted a whole new environment. He knew that I'd gone through this year of nonsense. And he hired me to come out and build this house. With his considerable talents, Steve helped transform the tree house. There was nothing in the tree house that was consciously designed. And that's very much what Scott was like, very much in the moment. With his self notion of being a part of nature and a refusal to be a direct part of this American society. But that materialistic American society, Scott supposedly disdained at certain aspects, he liked quite a lot. He spent his money traveling. He liked good food and good wine and champagne. This was a guy who liked to have a good time. Yeah, he did. He had dropped out of school. The drug business was paying the bills from the tree house to the trips. But then in 1989, Skurlock's main distributor was murdered. Suddenly, it brought home to him that this was a dangerous business, not just fun danger, but danger danger. Too much danger, Skurlock decided he quit the drug business almost immediately. That left just one problem, money and how to get it. I think the biggest priority was having money. No, no, no, all that does is let you live life. No, it doesn't. When we return, Skurlock's solution. [Music] In 1991, 36-year-old Scott Skurlock seemed to have it all. He lived in a spectacular three-story tree house, had no shortage of girlfriends and traveled extensively. Scottie was someone who, my sister and I used to laughingly say that he was the master of disinformation. But to his sister, Suzanne, and the rest of his family, what Scott actually did for a living was a mystery. He never behaved in a way that would have betrayed the amount of money he had. He dressed in clothes that look like hanging out clothes for somebody that lived in a tree house and supposedly did some kind of construction. Was that what you thought he did? Well, that's what he basically led us to believe. In fact, at the time, Scott was looking for a new line of work and he didn't look far for ideas. I'm Robin of Locksley. Robin Hood! He had always been a movie buff, and 1991 produced a blockbuster starring one of Skurlock's favorite characters. He loved Robin Hood. He loved the story of Robin Hood. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, retold the legend of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. The shudderful head of this! For an outlaw living in the forest, the idea certainly had appeal. Among local waitresses, he was already known for redistributing his wealth. Pam Oates loved to see him come in to the Bud Bay Cafe. He always ordered really expensive champagne, and he always left you $100 tip. He was always so generous and kind of the Robin Hood type of guy. We thought maybe he was a drug dealer or. You did? Well, yeah. Scott's drug dealing days actually were over, and he was fast running out of money. Steve Myers says the romantic Robin Hood idea began to take hold. He told me he'd always, even as a child, love the notion of robbing banks. This was something almost in a sense, almost like reappropriation. To help him fulfill this fantasy of the romantic bank robber, Skurlock approached someone he could trust. An old friend from college named Mark Beggins. I would have imagined him being a kindergarten teacher long before being a bank robber. Craig Eidsmo was college roommates with Mark and best man at his wedding in your wildest imagination. Could you have ever seen him robbing a bank? No, no, he's not at all, not at all. Mark was somebody who was not into violence, was just a real sweet, kind fellow, and he wasn't real adventurous. He wasn't a risk taker. But after college Beggins was desperate, with no steady job, a failing marriage, a drug problem, and a daughter to support. I had a copy of his diary, 6/13/84, Olympia, Washington. I'm out of cigarettes. My car gets about 8 miles to the gallon. My daughter has huge fever blisteries on her legs from sweat and urine. He was so desperate about there wasn't enough money for food and there wasn't enough money for diapers when she was a baby. And he felt terrible that he couldn't provide. For years Skurlock had helped out, letting Beggins live and work on his property. So now when Scott needed help with his new bank robbing venture, well Beggins apparently felt obligated. Besides, it was all going to be so easy. Certainly, it was easy in the movies. Everybody freeze! Everybody move! Keep your hands up in your legs down! In 1991, Point Break, with Patrick Swazie and Keanu Reeves, told the story of surfers who rob banks, more or less for the thrill of it. It's a killer rush. Skurlock watched Point Break, over and over. Nice Point Break. This is sort of hard to believe that anybody would look at a movie and say, "Well, I can do that. I just think I'll go rob banks." But that essentially is what you believe in. That's essentially what I think happened. So on June 25th, 1992, Scott, Skurlock and Mark Beggins robbed their first bank. Rock 'n' roll! And as the robbers did in Point Break, they wore masks. But unlike in the movie, things went terribly wrong. That was really a disaster. They hadn't planned how they were going to get away. They were going to steal a car from somebody. Somebody in the bank? Yeah. They took car keys from one man and he had a Cadillac. Mark was so nervous, he flooded the Cadillac and it wouldn't start. The Lyram had gone off and they ran down the alley, vicious dogs and somebody's backyard that almost went over the fence after him. And they ran across the golf course with all the golfers looking like, "Who are these guys?" And bank robbers. For Mark Beggins, the experience was so terrifying. fine, he packed up and left. But Skirlok always thrived on risk. For him, it had been an adrenaline rush. Instead of quitting, he upped the ante and started robbing banks on his own. He had been studying FBI forensics and studying all the different bank robberies across the country. And he needed someone outside that was always safe. This time, he approached his artist friend, Steve Myers. When he first came to you and said, look, we want you to help us rob a bank. I thought he was crazy. I thought he was stone-called crazy. At first, Myers refused. But finally, feeling indebted, he agreed to at least help Laundermoney, which he did on gambling trips to Las Vegas. A lot of trips. In 1992, Scott hits six banks, perfecting his skills along the way. Yes, he was always trying to find new things that he didn't know about. It paid off, his sixth robbery netted over a quarter of a million dollars. It began to dawn on Sean Johnson of the FBI that the bank robber in the bizarre makeup and dark glasses was in a class all his own. They didn't leave you much to work with, right? As far as forensic evidence goes? Very few clues. Actually, we had the two vehicles recovered. Nothing in the bank, no fingerprints, no physical evidence per se. And that's why it was a very difficult case, because you didn't know who you were dealing with and really not a lot of clues. For the next three years, Sean Johnson would chase the mystery man behind the mask. The man the FBI called Holly Wood. I think he finished his one and starts planning his second. He's always planning. It was a chase he told reporters he will never forget. I don't think there's a day that goes by. They don't think about the case in some form or fashion for some reason. Really? Yes. Still. I can't say that about any other cases. And when we come back, we'll tell you why. Seattle in the '90s turned out to be an ideal spot for the launching of Scott Skurlock's Holly Wood career, professional bank robber. Bank of America. It seems like we pass a bank every few blocks. Bank on the south side, bank on the north side, a bank to the east to us. The branches multiplied a decade ago says Seattle Detective Mike McGann to service the high-tech gold rush and its new Microsoft millionaires. There is common as coffee carts or espresso stands or coffee shops. A fact not lost on Holly Wood. He was taking more amounts of money than any robber that I had ever seen or actually any case that I ever worked on. This is actually Skurlock's Fourth Robert University Savings Bank. FBI agent Sean Johnson showed us the bank surveillance tapes he had studied as he became fascinated with his quarry. From his looks. Pancake, makeup, false wig, false chin. To his leaps. Athletic ability, very agile in the bank. He was jumping over counters. It was just very unusual for a bank to do that. And that's very intimidating, I assume. And not only does this person have a gun, but they're moving around like Superman. It's a takeover situation with the FBI calls it. How wonderful would he typically stay in a bank? About two minutes when he was doing the teller lines. As his career progressed, he was in the bank somewhere from three to four minutes. On average, bank robber would probably be in there less than a minute. Holly Wood may have felt comfortable taking his time because he was no longer in this alone. I sat in the car scanning. In 1993, Steve Myers became his eyes and ears outside the banks. Someone called 911 on the phone that saw Scott inside the bank or whatever the case may have been. It would come over the scanner, and then I would rate it all him out. And he would leave. And there was always more than one getaway car, right? They had been purchased anonymously. There's no way of tracing them back to him. They had nothing on us forensically. Zero. He worked hard at that. He paid a lot of money to make sure that didn't happen. Paid off a lot of people. Paid a lot of people so that nothing would ever be traced back to him. Either cars that we intentionally left for the FBI or paid people at work in banks to give us inside information. The FBI called them pro-net tags. And these are the electronic traces they put in the money. We knew some of the banks in Seattle carried them. The banks that didn't carry traces were the ones we robbed. But occasionally, they went for bigger fish. In this situation, the bank is much larger than some of his previous targets. You have customers. You have employees behind the counterline. This lady looks like she doesn't even know he's there. She's just reading her paper there. Probably doesn't know what's happening. To help control these situations, Hollywood convinced old friend Mark Beganz to put their disastrous first bank robbery behind him and give it another try. Mark was the lookout crowd control, making sure that nobody left. And if somebody came in, that they would be put in a position where he could keep an eye on him. I see she's now looking at that him and realizes that something's going on. As he goes down the row here, she apparently decides that maybe she can get out of this mess. You just saw her get out from the chair and he pointed over. I think he had the weapon in his hand. And now she's coming back. I could say, being able to control the situation in the bank. Nobody ever was hurt. Nobody was ever intended to be hurt. To this day, from prison, Steve Myers praises Hollywood's professional approach. His whole point was, if you go in crazy with violence and waving your gun, if something does happen, what do you do then? So his whole idea was to go in as calmly. It's cleanly as possible. Most people working in banks realize this guy's not afraid. That is more frightening and commanding without having to be crazy. There may not have been shooting, but bank employees certainly were terrified. He just takes everything over. He'd just assume, shoot, you lose, look at you. You had no doubt of that. Oh, no doubt. No doubt at all. Susan Bartlett had endured other bank robberies, but after Hollywood hit, she quit the business and sought therapy. You no longer work in a bank. No. Is that the reason why? Yes. He just couldn't imagine. I wasn't sleeping and I was afraid to go to work. I just didn't want to have to face it again. And she might have encountered Hollywood again. We did two banks three times. Is that sort of just in your face? A mind game, too, for the FBI and the police, who had noticed Hollywood's uncanny knowledge of police work. He often hit during shift changes, or when patrol cars were dispersed. Because of the equipment he used, his discipline, his timing worried hit, the neighborhoods where he hit, how he was hitting the command and control of employees and other victims inside the bank, witnesses. My biggest fear was that it was a police officer. By the end of 1995, Hollywood had stolen almost $1 million. But FBI agents Sean Johnson had discovered a pattern. Or sometimes when he was gone as much as a year, other times he was only gone as short as eight days. And it was pretty much determined by the fact that how much money he got. Johnson calculated that for his lifestyle, Hollywood needed $20,000 a month, meaning he would run out around January 25th, 1996. Johnson picked the right day, but the wrong bank. I heard an alert tones go out. Bank robbery, first interstate bank, Wedgewood, which was about two miles from my location. And I raced up there and I heard the description. And I said, Hollywood, we just missed him. But how frustrating to have been two miles away on a day that you had picked a year before? A year before? Yes. And miss him. And just sitting there thinking, you know, who is this guy? And where is he? And would they ever catch him? When we come back, Hollywood's big finale. My name's Jack Wagner, host of Other World, a podcast featuring real people who experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained. I have no idea how I got there. I don't think I've ever seen anything that looks like this. It felt like electric stars on fire. I started Other World to take a grounded approach to the paranormal, help people tell their own stories, and encourage more to come forward. I certainly don't have the answers, but maybe one day we will. Join me as we explore our world's greatest mysteries. Listen to Other World Now for free wherever you get your podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING] By mid-1996, Hollywood had added two more bank robberies to his total and a quarter of a million dollars to his take. In four years, he had robbed 17 banks. And practice was making perfect. This is the bank that I took my ladder and climbed up on the roof of. Seattle Detective Mike McGahn became almost obsessed, climbing on bank rooftops late at night, in search of some clue he had missed. A satirier Sunday night that I'd get out and drive around at night with a list of all the banks he hit out here in the north end. At Witzend, the FBI's lead agent, Sean Johnson, went on TV. This is Hollywood. He's robbed 14 banks in Seattle since June the 1992. To put a $50,000 price tag on Hollywood's head. This was the point in time in which it became personal. For Skurlock and his pals, the attention only upped the ante. We had planned to take five banks in one evening, in an hour and a half to our job. And we'd had the mobile base station set up to white out the police frequencies in Seattle. but they scale. He sold back this grand plan, Meyer says, after learning that the cops had persuaded every bank in Seattle to put electronic tracers in with the money. The robbers focused then on just one bank. The final bank we knew that there was going to be three to four million dollars. We sat down and we made a decision between ourselves. Are we going to show we do it with what we're having to face with these tracers or are we going to be able to do it? For cops and crooks, the dynamic of this high stakes game had changed. The adrenaline rush, the excitement, the control elements I think maybe were more important than the money. So either we're going to live through it or we'd die. Behind the bravado, Scott Skurlock was feeling the stress. He was drinking heavily and friends not involved in the robberies, pals like Kevin Myers were told to stay away. His sister recalls an odd exchange he had with his young niece. She looks like she's just Uncle Scott's only going to live till he's 42. And I said, what? She said, you know, he just told me that. So I marched her back in the living room. He was still in the living room doing some reading of magazine or something. And I said, Uncle Scott, what are you telling her? And he hemmed and hawed and left the room. On that rainy Thanksgiving Eve in 1996, Scott Skurlock again, a journey to the makeup room and transformed himself into Hollywood. And with Mark Biggins and Steve Myers, he set off for Seattle and the grand finale. They go in and they rob the bank. He's in there for 10, 15 minutes. I'm outside. The call comes over to the scanner that there's a silent alarm in the bank. We're currently receiving a silent hold-up alarm from us. So I called him out. It came in about 5.40 pm. 2800. Northeast. Detective Mike McGann jumped into his patrol car. It was somewhat crippling to us to get out to that location, but it was crippling for him to get away from the bank. By then, Skurlock and Biggins had exchanged the getaway car for a white van driven by Steve Myers. And McGann says they made a critical mistake. How you turn left here, you're driven right out of the city. Instead, they hit holiday gridlock and began frantically trying to get rid of those electronic tracers. Scott comes up and hands me, says there's a tracer. At that point, Scott said he wanted to drive. So why did he want to drive all of a sudden? I don't know. He wanted me to go through the money and I said, man, I said, okay, so I got out. I stopped. I got out and then he started taking his mask off and I said, go, man. Just go. Forget the mask. It's raining and it's dark. It doesn't matter. And he sat there for two minutes, I think. Steve Myers is sure it was the tracers that led Detective McGann to the van. And since he went to a likely area and simply spotted it. But you could see flashlights going back and forth in and out of the van. I pulled straight up on the van to get a closer look and asked that we perform a stop on it. I had four or five patrol cars pulling behind me and their van turns down this street and it pulls to the right curb. Okay, so you get out. Get out, draw down. I mean, just immediately like this in between the cars, see Myers step out from the vehicle. You sure it's Myers? Well, I'm positive, it's Myers. I'm positive. My lights are shining on the vehicle and Myers had the rifle like this and he was out waiting for me. And as soon as I stepped out of the car to take aim, he came down with that rifle and was lunging like this. I never got out of the van. And I don't know how I would have either. I had no arms. Because Steve Myers says the cops had shot first and he and Biggins were hit. Myers insists it was Scott, who stepped out of the van intending to fire back in self-defense. Scott got out with this assault rifle and it's supposedly jammed and he got back in and they started firing again. You're saying the cops fired before he got out with the assault rifle? Oh, yeah. That's always been the case. They are firing. Mike McGahn is just as adamant that it was Myers who attempted to fire first. And as he then shot back as the van took off, wounded and bleeding, Mark Biggins returned 37 rounds. It's kind of like running gun, running gun. It was strange by any standards, a surreal slow motion chase and shootout on the Seattle side streets. 200 officers rushed to the scene. We had a second shootout around the corner here. Skirlike exited the van at that time with a shotgun. He fired three rounds of the shotgun, the van took off again. The van finally crashed into the side of a house on 77th street. For Mark Biggins and Steve Myers, the game was over. FBI agent Johnson rushed to the van. You haven't seen this since that night, have you? No. No, I haven't. The bullet holes and everything else brings back some memories. I picture seeing Mark and Steve here and over a million dollars. What does over a million dollars look like? Looks like a lot of money. Was it just all over the van? It was just spread out all over the back of the van here. There were flashlights. We saw weapons. There was ammunition, bits of makeup and clothing, blood, a lot of blood, approached Steve and asked if he was Hollywood and he said, no, I'm not Hollywood. And I didn't know what to believe at that point. They had the van, they had the money, they had Steve and Mark. But Hollywood was nowhere to be found. The officers and the SWAT teams were searched high, they searched lowly, search North, South East and West. And they couldn't find her. They always seemed to be a possibility to have the ending. I didn't want to write the final scene. Was Thanksgiving day and elderly, a mom and grandma was cooking for her sons who were coming home. After the previous night's excitement, Wilma Walker was looking forward to a quiet Thanksgiving. Just for peace of mind, her son decided he would check out the camper parked in the back. He came running in the house and his eyes are big and he said, I saw him, I saw him, he has a dark curly hair. This is Mr. Walker. They call the police. I think that bank robber might be hiding in my camper in the backyard. When you went through this gate, Sergeant Howard Manta and two other officers showed up. In the back door would have been right about here, it had a chain lock on it. And I went to the corner of the camper and knocked on the door and announced myself a Seattle police come out, there was anyone inside come out now. Manta sprayed two full canisters of pepper spray into the camper. We never heard of cough or movement at all. But to satisfy the walkers, he went over to take one last look. I was going to look in with my flashlight and the gun shot went off. The other officers opened up, pounding the camper with gunfire. Then nothing, hours passed in silence. I think a total of four hours before they actually fired more tear gas into the camper and made an entry. They found Scott Skurlock dead. The gunshot Howard Manta heard was Skurlock taking his own life. Scott Skurlock may have been a bank robber, but he had an opportunity to take me with him. He had an opportunity to kill me and he did not do that. I wish he was still alive. What do you mean? Well, he's a brilliant man, basically. Steve Myers, now serving 21 years in prison, agrees. Nor is he angry at Skurlock for, at the end, running. Do you think your sentence would have been lighter had Scott lived? Of course it would have been. Of course. You blame him for that? No, it's not his fault. This is the way the system is. I regret in a sense that it had ever happened, but I can't sit and look at this man and saying, I'm regretting that I ever knew the guy. Some of the best years of my life were with this guy. Years Skurlock's family knew nothing at all about. I was completely shocked at what he was doing. Today his sister Suzanne feels no sympathy at all for Hollywood, but she misses her brother, Scott. We loved him. To us, he was an entirely different person than who he was in those banks. The only thing I could say is that he clearly made some very, very poor decisions. Now, why did he make those decisions? One of the keys about him was that nobody really knew him. Steve Myers was released from prison in 2013. Mark Biggins was released from prison in 2015. Paramount plus is your streaming home for another unbelievable season of the NFL on CBS. And here he goes. Every Sunday. Touchdown. The most anticipated games. Am I going deep? Oh, what a catch. Football's biggest stars. That's old fashioned Josh Allen football. And all the unforgettable moments. There it is. This is history. 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