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…