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