Chapter 16
A Hankering for Chess
James W. King, a 54-year-old retired Denver cop, was piddling in his backyard in Golden, Colorado—at the edge of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in neighboring Jefferson County—a sweaty T-shirt and shorts clinging to his five-foot-eleven, 180-pound frame. With the back of his hand, he wiped the perspiration beading up on his forehead just below his neatly trimmed, 1950s-style light-brown flat-top.
It was June 23, one week since the bloody massacre. King was mildly surprised nobody on the joint task force had reached out to him to brainstorm. After all, he’d spent thirteen months in the bowels of United Bank—until August 1990—and knew its security system better than just about anyone. Two days earlier, he’d written a letter to his good friend Mike McKown—the guard who’d trained him—lamenting how law enforcement was “of course” blaming past and present guards for the tragedy. “The Police and FBI have not yet questioned me,” he wrote, “but I guess they’ll get around to it soon.”
Though his prediction turned out to be eerily prophetic, the gentleman who interrupted his gardening that Sunday afternoon was on the payroll of a newspaper, not the DPD or FBI. John Ensslin, the police-beat reporter for the Rocky, was working his way down a lengthy list of former United Bank guards as he pieced together a story for Monday’s paper. After the two exchanged pleasantries, King invited him inside, offering the journalist a cold beverage. The two men chatted in the living room as a gray poodle, yapping furiously, tried to dominate their conversation.
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King told Ensslin he was stunned upon hearing news of the robbery and felt “sorrow” for the slain guards and their families. “They should have been armed,” he insisted. He shared that he was one of the few guards on the weekend crew who carried a weapon, boasting he’d done so without first receiving the bank’s authorization. “No one challenged me,” he said. King voiced his intense displeasure over United Bank and its new parent company, Norwest, creating an environment in which security guards weren’t able to protect themselves.
“Security at the bank was shitty,” he added, noting how bank officers wandered through secure areas whenever they pleased. They would regularly call downstairs to the monitor room to receive an escort via the freight elevator, he said, claiming to have misplaced their keycards. He told Ensslin it was obvious the killer possessed detailed knowledge of the security system.
“Do you have any idea who it might have been?”
“I can’t imagine who would have done such a horrible thing,” King said with a shake of his head.
Thirty minutes after entering the retired cop’s cramped bungalow, Ensslin headed back to his car—parked on the dirt road beside the house—another former guard now crossed off his list. The interview hadn’t unearthed anything close to a bombshell—nothing even worthy of mention in the article that would appear under his byline the next day. Not even King’s name.
John Gedney and Kevin Knierim were working through their own list of former United Bank guards that Monday morning. Unlike John Ensslin, however, they weren’t sitting in James King’s living room because they were writing a newspaper article. Rather, the two twenty-somethings were special agents with the FBI. King’s premonition to Mike McKown had been dead on the money. The agents carefully studied King’s bushy salt-and-pepper mustache, which they found similar to the description provided by the bank tellers. They also noted that his hair was beginning to gray around the temples and down his ultra-thin sideburns.
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As he did with Ensslin, King expressed his disapproval of Norwest’s decision to disarm the guards. He informed the agents he was writing a book about police procedures and bank security. He became particularly animated as he described United Bank’s woeful security procedures, noting that was one of the reasons he’d decided to quit.
The ex-cop was particularly upset, he said, because bank employees would be permitted to enter the facility on weekends without having to show any identification. Even maintenance employees could freely enter the guard monitor room. King told Gedney and Knierim he was convinced that the crime had been committed by an insider, someone who possessed thorough knowledge of the bank’s security systems.
As for his own whereabouts on Father’s Day morning, King recounted that he’d risen from bed at 8:00 a.m. and driven out to the Capitol Hill Community Center at approximately 9:30 a.m. to seek out a game of chess. He returned a short time later, he said, because the facility was closed. Upon returning home, he ate breakfast with his wife and then accompanied her to visit her father’s grave at the cemetery. They stopped for frozen yogurt on the way back. When they returned home at about 1:00 p.m., he washed his car.
Asked whether he owned any guns, King identified three: a twelve-gauge shotgun, a .22-caliber bolt-action rifle, and a .22-caliber handgun. As for his .38-caliber police revolver, he told the young agents he got rid of it because it had a cracked cylinder. When the lawmen asked if he’d be willing to take a polygraph, King nodded affirmatively, without displaying the slightest hesitation.
A few days later, Gedney and Knierim’s report made its way to police headquarters. As Detective Priest perused the document, several items virtually leapt off the page. First, though King lived eleven miles from United Bank’s downtown facility, he placed himself just over a mile away—at the community center on 1290 Williams Street—at the same time a homicidal maniac was brutally murdering four security guards. Second, the community center hadn’t hosted the Denver Chess Club in over three years, a fact confirmed by Priest’s subordinates. Why wouldn’t he have known that?
Even more significant, Priest couldn’t comprehend how a cop could casually discard the revolver he’d carried for 25 years. He considered his own service weapon part of his identity, no different from his badge. Most retired officers he knew had placed their guns and badges in display cases to memorialize their service. He’d also never heard of a crack forming in the cylinder of a .38-caliber revolver. James King’s story didn’t add up. In the blink of an eye, he’d leapfrogged Paul Yocum to the top of the detective’s list of suspects.
Detective Calvin Hemphill drew the assignment of conducting a follow-up interview of King. He’d spent the last sixteen years with the DPD, nearly ten as a detective. Though he’d overlapped with King for more than a decade, he didn’t have the foggiest clue who he was.
On July 2, Hemphill stood on the former cop’s front porch alongside another FBI agent, Alfonso Villegas. When the front door cracked open, the middle-aged man across from them appeared clean shaven, his bushy salt-and-pepper mustache suddenly gone.
Hemphill and Villegas flashed their credentials. “May we have a word with you?” the DPD detective asked.
King’s eyes darted from Hemphill to Villegas, and then back again. “No,” he finally said. “My lawyer told me not to speak with the FBI or DPD.”
“Listen,” Hemphill said, attempting to charm his way inside by appealing to King’s ego. “We’re here because you worked as a guard at United Bank and also with us on the force. You’re not a suspect. We want to tap into your experience to see if you can help us solve the crime.”
The detective’s ploy worked. King opened the door wide, directing the lawmen to a couch in the living room as he took a seat in an easy chair.
Their conversation began with a review of his employment with United Bank. The former cop explained that he’d worked twelve-hour shifts on Saturdays and Sundays, carrying his .38-caliber Colt Trooper revolver on a Sam Browne belt. The belt contained a pouch for two speed loaders. King acknowledged wearing the gun even after learning it had a cracked cylinder. After he quit, he said, he dismantled it—because it was dangerous—and threw it in the trash. His wife really didn’t like having guns around the house anyway.
Without much prompting, King launched into a stinging critique of the bank’s security procedures. For starters, the surveillance cameras were never cleaned, the footage they captured always out of focus. Though the freight elevator supposedly had a dedicated key, he said, virtually any key on the guard’s key ring would work. He explained how he’d once mistakenly used the wrong key to operate the elevator and it worked just fine. It was such a serious breach of security, he noted the problem in the guard logbook. “But they didn’t care,” he told the lawmen, with evident disgust.
Furthermore, anyone who wanted to gain access to the bank during the weekend could just call down to the monitor room and be allowed in without any identification. The weekend guards felt compelled to let employees enter the bank even if their names weren’t found on the computerized list. “If we told them we couldn’t let them in without proper identification,” he said, “they would complain and we would get into trouble.”
When King finally took a breath, Hemphill asked, “How would you know if the person seeking access to the bank was really who they claimed to be?”
“You wouldn’t,” the ex-cop said with snicker. “You wouldn’t know if they were a vice president or a secretary.”
“Are you familiar with the name Bob Bardwell?”
King shook his head. “No, I’m not.” As he resumed his rant, Villegas jotted in his notes that he displayed “animosity” toward the bank, the FBI, and the DPD.
The former security guard acknowledged being aware of a camera that filmed the guards as they worked in the monitor room and that it fed footage into the VCR in the supervisor’s office. “They spied on us to see if we were eating or drinking,” he said, his tone dripping with disdain. “Of course I ate and drank during my shifts, and I couldn’t have cared less if they caught me.”
King shared with the lawmen additional details about his activities on Father’s Day—a few of which didn’t mesh with his June 24 interview. He now claimed that he’d eaten breakfast with his wife before leaving for the community center at 9:30 a.m. He told Hemphill and Villegas no one was there when he arrived and that he therefore came back home without playing chess, returning at about 10:20 a.m. His wife and youngest son were there, he said, and they all went to the cemetery together.
Hemphill asked what prompted him to play chess that morning. King explained that he used to play all the time, but hadn’t been to the community center for a game since 1986. He said he decided that very morning to start playing again, noting he’d met his attorney, Walter Gerash, years earlier when they’d competed against each other at the center. “He’s a close friend of mine,” he said. “I don’t think he’s going to bill me for this.”
King really perked up when the discussion shifted to his book on police procedures. He told the detective and special agent he’d been writing one chapter per year and had completed eight of the 23 he planned to write. He’d taken the job at United Bank, he said, in part to obtain background information for a chapter about bank security. But since quitting his job there, he’d changed his mind. The book wasn’t going to include a chapter on bank security after all.
Before leaving, Hemphill asked King to confirm—a second time—that he’d be willing to take a polygraph.
“Actually, I’m not,” the retired cop said, pursing his lips. “The polygraph scares me and I’m nervous as it is. I just don’t trust it.”
Hemphill and Villegas raced back to police headquarters to share with Jon Priest what King had told them. After hearing their summary, the lead detective was even more convinced they were closing in on the killer. He asked Sergeant Doug Hildebrant, a fellow detective, to conduct a third interview. Hildebrant called King the next morning, July 3.
King repeated to Hildebrant what he’d said the prior day, though with slight adjustments: that he’d left for the community center at 9:30 a.m. and that the facility was closed when he arrived. He told Hildebrant he got back home between 10:20 and 10:30 a.m. Between 11:00 and 11:30 a.m., he and his wife visited Mount Olivet Cemetery, where her parents were buried. On their way back, they stopped for some ice cream. At 1:00 p.m., he drove to a car wash and then came back home. He learned about the bank heist, he said, watching the six o’clock news on TV.
Later that afternoon, Hildebrant and Lieutenant Tom Haney paid King yet another visit. The detective asked if any of King’s neighbors could verify his whereabouts on Father’s Day morning. The ex-cop replied that he didn’t know any of his neighbors and hadn’t seen any of them when he left for the community center or when he returned home.
Hildebrant inquired whether anyone had seen him at the community center who could corroborate his alibi. King recounted that he’d parked in the back, walked around to the front, but hadn’t seen anyone to let him in. The place was closed and locked. A well-dressed gentleman was standing on the front porch, he said. He asked the man if he knew where the chess club was meeting, but he didn’t know. Yet the stranger couldn’t serve as his alibi, as King had no idea who he was.
Steven B. Epstein, a native of Long Island, graduated with B.A. and law degrees from the University of North Carolina. “Deadly Heist” is his fourth true crime book. By day, he tries cases and practices family law at Poyner Spruill LLP in Raleigh, North Carolina. He and his books have been featured on TV documentaries, including “Dateline NBC,” TV newscasts, and true crime podcasts and livestreams.
