CHAPTER 10
FIND THE BLACK SWAN
At 11:30 a.m. on June 17, 1981, a beautiful 70-degree spring day with an insistent westerly breeze, thirty-seven-year-old William Griffin left the second-floor bedroom where he lived in his parent’s Rochester, New York, home and trod down the shoe-buffed stairs that led to their meticulous living room.
At the bottom he stopped, paused, and then, without a word of warning, shot off three shotgun blasts that killed his mother and a handyman who was hanging wallpaper and critically wounded his stepfather. The sound reverberated in the enclosed space.
Griffin then left the house and shot a workman and two bystanders as he jogged two blocks to the Security Trust Company, a neighborhood bank. Seconds after he entered, people began sprinting from the bank as Griffin took nine bank employees hostage and ordered the customers to leave.
For the next three and a half hours, Griffin led police and FBI agents in a violent standoff in which he shot and wounded the first two police officers who responded to the bank’s silent alarm, and shot six people who happened to be walking near the bank. Griffin shot off so many rounds—more than one hundred in all—that the police used a garbage truck to shield one officer as he was being rescued.
Waving the nine bank employees into a small office at 2:30 p.m., Griffin told the manager to call the police and deliver a message.
Outside, FBI agent Clint Van Zandt stood by while Rochester police officer Jim O’Brien picked up the phone.
“Either you come to the front entrance doors of the bank at three o’clock and have a shoot-out with him in the parking lot,” the