The Burglary by Betty Medsger

often cased very late, gathering information that would be useful if the burglars needed to enter the building late, something they hoped they would not have to do. She had a casing problem no one else had—a car so beautiful it was likely to be remembered later. Because it was important not to be noticed, she had to leave her beautiful car at home. She borrowed a colleague’s sedate Volvo that blended in nicely late at night on the quiet Media streets. The streets of Media, especially near the courthouse and the building where the FBI office was located, came alive during the day, with peoplecontinuously entering and leaving those buildings. After school, neighborhood children rode bikes in the streets. At night, by contrast, the streets were nearly dead. Any unusual-looking person or vehicle, such as Smith’s flashy car, might have been conspicuous in that quiet environment.
    Williamson, like Smith, was proud of his casing skills. He also likes to think that his ability to tell very long shaggy-dog stories was helpful as tension relief during casing and while raiding draft board offices, but some of his fellow burglars disagree with him on that point. Casing was his real area of expertise, they say, rolling their eyes at the memory of his jokes. During one draft board raid, fellow burglars involuntarily risked arrest while hiding with Williamson in a closet, so loud were their groans when he finally finished one of his yarns. They affectionately advised him to stick with casing and drop the jokes. The night of this burglary he expected to be totally preoccupied.
    The burglars assumed that sitting for hours in parked cars in that quiet residential neighborhood might arouse suspicion. They decided that casing as male-female couples made them less suspicious. Couple cover stories were prepared in case someone asked them why they were lingering in a car on cold winter evenings. If a police car approached, the couple embraced and gave the impression they had been necking. In fact, those weeks before the burglary may be the only time when Media’s Veterans Square, the street in front of the building where the FBI was located, might have appeared to the casual observer to be a lovers’ lane. Another ruse called for a couple to start arguing if a police officer approached. They would tell him they were having a spat. In still another ruse, a couple would puzzle with the officer over the failure of their car to start. They would then say they were about to search for a pay phone so they could call for a tow truck.
    Williamson remembers his adrenaline pumping one evening when someone parked a car next to his van and sat beside him and his companion for a few minutes. “We became very quiet and still, and afraid.” On another occasion, “a police car drove down the street and shined a spotlight against the buildings on our side of the street.” Calmness returned as the officer drove away. The evening continued, as usual, with what burglars hope for: “nothing remarkable happening.”
    Ultimately, the burglary schedule was shaped around the predictable uneventful hours the team had mapped after two months of observation. As planned, they became very familiar with the neighborhood. They learned the habits of people and the changing patterns of building lights and traffic so well that they even knew when dog owners in the neighborhood walkedtheir dogs, and when one resident of the FBI building often left and returned from having a drink at a bar a block away on West State Street. One of the most important things they learned from casing was the schedule of police patrols. That information was essential to the timing of each phase of the burglary. They hoped the police would be preoccupied with watching the Ali-Frazier fight that night, but they were not going to take any chances. They watched the police very carefully, and they hoped the police were not watching them.
    DURING AN EARLY PLANNING