CALIFORNIA
The Meek Fugitive
Part 1: Why did a mild-mannered banker abscond with $500,000 and his two kids?
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Joanne Williams after waking in the middle of the night and discovering that her husband and two of their children were missing. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
At 31, Joanne was four years older than her husband. Following the fashions of the times, she wore a beehive hairdo and sleeveless shift dresses. The prior evening, Thursday, July 14, 1966, she and her husband, Roger Lee Williams, treated the kids to McDonalds. At dinner, Roger told Joanne he would drop the others at home and run some errands. He and a friend were rehearsing a comic revue for their upcoming high school reunion. He needed to deliver some hats for their costumes, and he was going to get the car’s fan belt replaced.
“About 11:30, he came in, and I thought he was coming to bed,” Joanne explained. “He said, ‘I’m sorry I woke you up,’ and said, ‘It’s hot in here.’ He brought me a glass of water and brought in a fan. Then he told me he was going to turn off the fan in the girls’ room.
“Later on, I woke up and he wasn’t there. I thought he might have gone to sleep in the girls’ room, where it’s cooler. No one was there.” Two slightly older children from Joanne’s prior marriage were safely in bed in their rooms. No clothing was missing, so the two younger girls must have left in their nightgowns. Four-year-old Kelley’s security blanket was gone. The only other missing item was the Dramamine five-year-old Rochelle needed to prevent carsickness. Then Joanne realized their Chevrolet station wagon was not in the driveway.
“I called Pop right away,” Joanne said, referring to Roger’s father, who helped her search the house. They called the police to report a kidnapping. They couldn’t fathom anything else. Roger had been looking forward to the reunion. “I can’t imagine my husband just leaving with the children for no apparent reason,” Joanne said.
Rialto, where the Williams family lived, sat fifty miles east of Los Angeles, just south of the San Bernardino Mountains. Its citrus orchards were blossoming into middle-class residential developments. The area’s big employer was in neighboring Fontana. Kaiser Steel belched black smoke into the sky but paid its employees well, enabling them to provide their kids with Skippy peanut butter and Schwinn bikes.
Roger held a good job at Security First National Bank and had served as assistant manager at the Fontana branch until he was promoted a year earlier. The bank branch was an easy ten-minute drive away along the recently decommissioned Route 66, which flowed through both towns.
Later Friday morning, the vault door wouldn’t open at the bank in Fontana. The manager borrowed cash from a nearby branch. Then Roger failed to show up for work at the bank’s main office in Riverside. He was responsible for security for the area’s branches, which meant he had keys and safe combinations and could deactivate burglar alarms. He also knew that the Fontana branch stocked extra cash on Thursdays to cover the following day’s payroll checks from Kaiser Steel.
Bank technicians drilled into the vault to open the door. They determined that someone had set the time mechanism to open Thursday night and reopen the following Monday. Missing from the safe was $200,000 in cash and over $300,000 in travelers checks, blank money orders, and cashier’s checks. A check-writing machine was gone, too. Nothing indicated anyone had broken into the bank or the vault.
Williams, 27, was an unlikely suspect. He’d worked for the bank since graduating high school. He was soft-spoken and mild-mannered. With black eyeglasses and light-colored hair neatly trimmed and swept back, he looked older than his years. Always in a suit and tie, he had nothing in common with those of his peers who were protesting wars and injustice and camping at music festivals. “I would have trusted Williams implicitly,” said the manager of the Fontana branch. “He had a key to the front door.” A bank spokesman said, “He has always been a popular young man, friendly with his fellow workers but quiet and unobtrusive. You might say he was considered a normal, well-adjusted individual.”
When FBI agents showed up at her front door, Joanne couldn’t believe Roger had stolen any money. “This isn’t Roger,” she said. “It would be completely out of character for him to be involved in this. He has expressed such disdain over similar things involving bankers.” But she mentioned she’d discovered that Roger’s .38-caliber revolver was missing.
The mystery of Roger’s possible involvement in a bank theft was too unfathomable to process. Her entire brain was occupied by fear for the safety of her girls.
“My biggest concern now is for the babies,” Joanne said. “It frightens me to think that someone may have forced Roger into something.”
Joanne’s shock and disbelief turned to anger a few weeks later. Where were her two girls? Were they even alive? What could have possibly gotten into her husband’s mind? The FBI had no leads. “I’m trying to prepare myself for just about anything at this point,” she admitted.
Her family and neighbors helped out, but there was no roadmap for dealing with this kind of ordeal. She tried to hold her emotions together for her other two children, but the nights were tough. They were empty of sleep and full of tears.
“I still can’t get over it,” Joanne acknowledged. “It seems impossible. But I’ve been trying to get back on my feet.” There were no savings to rely on, and she scrambled to pay bills. She found work as a secretary, but the salary wasn’t enough to run a home. “I’m still paying the gas bill and the tires and the lube job he had before he left,” she said, adding, “It’s kind of ironic.” Unable to make ends meet, Joanne filed for welfare benefits of $250 per month.
In October, somewhat reluctantly, she filed for divorce. “It was a necessary step so I can sell the house to get some of the bills paid. I’m head over heels in debt, and this is the only thing I could do.”
Just as frustrated as Joanne about the FBI’s lack of progress, Security First National Bank advertised a $5000 reward for information leading to Williams’ arrest.
On Halloween, Joanne opened the door for trick-or-treaters and encountered two children in masks, one dressed as a clown, the other a tiger. “Trick or treat?” they chorused.
With them was a gray-haired woman who asked, “Don’t you know these girls?”
“I don’t think so,” said Joanne.
“Are you sure?”
Confusion flashed through Joanne’s mind. “I wondered if someone was playing a horrible joke…I thought to myself, maybe it is Kelley and Chelle. Maybe they are my girls.”
She lifted the tiger head mask from one girl and exclaimed, “Kelley! It’s Kelley.” Next to her was Rochelle. “Chelle and Kelley are back!” said Joanne, hardly able to believe it. “I never expected to see my little girls alive again,” Joanne admitted later when the girls were out of earshot.
The girls were in good health and new clothes. One was wearing a souvenir bracelet from New Mexico. From it dangled Roger’s wedding band. Joanne broke down. “You don’t know how wonderful it is to have something you love back again. I just did not know how I was going to face the holidays without my two little girls. I’ve been feeling so blue.”
The gray-haired woman, who worked for a babysitting agency, said she’d been hired for three hours’ work by a bearded man who called himself Mr. Lee, which happened to be Roger’s middle name. He was staying at a motel three blocks away on Route 66. He asked her to take the girls trick-or-treating and then to a home he drew on a map.
Joanne called the FBI, and agents interviewed the girls while their mother sat nearby. They said their dad had bought a new car and taken them on a long vacation. He kept a suitcase full of money. They’d visited a fair and a zoo, the beach and the desert. They’d even flown in a plane and ridden a ferryboat. They moved from city to city, motel to motel. When the babysitter arrived that afternoon, their dad kissed them goodbye and said he was going to Alaska but would see them before he left in the morning.
Law enforcement agents found Roger’s room at the nearby El Rey Motel. He, of course, was long gone. The innkeeper said he’d had a goatee and black hair. He must have dyed it darker. Agents found $4,000 in the room, along with some clothing. Outside, Williams had abandoned a trailer filled with suitcases, pots and pans, toys, blankets, and radios.
After seeing newspaper photos about the Halloween reunion, the owner of the Capri Motel in nearby Ontario, California, contacted the police. She reported that Williams and the girls had stayed several days there. He’d said he was from Burlington, Vermont, and used the name Sampson Moody. Sampson and Moody were the surnames of two vice presidents at Security First, which itself was turning out to be a poorly chosen moniker for an institution that allowed the theft to happen.
At the Capri, Williams had sported red hair and a full beard. “He told my husband that he wanted to go to Las Vegas,” said the woman who ran the motel with her husband. “So my husband offered to make the reservations for him. He paid for the first night. Said he’d never been to Las Vegas.” But Williams never showed up for the reservation. Instead, he booked the motel in Rialto.
The FBI obtained Williams’ car’s license plate from the motel registrations. Agents slowly pieced together his journey. The day he took off with the girls, he’d dropped the family station wagon at a body shop in Elko, Nevada. The owner had wondered why he never picked it up. He and the girls then flew on a chartered flight to Seattle. Using his real name but a non-existent address in Phoenix, he purchased a new Oldsmobile Starfire and drove to Calgary, Alberta. He then motored across Canada with the girls, reentered the U.S. at Niagara Falls, traveled the Atlantic Seaboard to Florida, and returned to California. The question was, where was he now? And what had motivated his insane adventure?
The FBI announced that Williams was likely headed toward the Pacific Northwest, where his Canadian license plates would draw less attention. Joanne’s life was still upside-down. “I keep hoping he will return for the children’s sake — not for me. They need him and miss him.”
In Part 2, Roger Lee Williams’ secret Achilles heel brings his odyssey to a surprising end.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
