Memoir of a notorious survivor
In this extract from his book Bank Robber: My Time With André Stander, former gangster Allan Heyl describes the aftermath of a gunshop robbery
We reached the Houghton house without further incident and waited for nightfall before unloading the car. Our haul wasn’t all we’d hoped for. Mac had only located a single Ruger Mini-14 and I’d taken birdshot shells, not buckshot. Fortunately, André managed to swap these shells for the ammunition we needed. He never said how or where he’d made the transaction and I never asked.
Some days later, André and I bought man-bags, which had become fashionable, and I went around armed with a Ruger .357 magnum revolver and the .45 Remington pistol that had belonged to the gunshop woman. The press revealed her name as Marlene Henn. (She was fatally shot in her Randburg home by robbers in 2008.) I also had her customer’s compact Astra Falcon, which he had carried in an ankle holster. The rounds in the Remington were all notched: homemade dum-dum bullets. These expand on impact, making a truly nasty wound. One night not long after the Potshot robbery, André and I were at the bar of the Houghton house eating pizza and drinking whisky. More accurately, I was eating the pizza and André was drinking a lot of whisky.
“You ever done this, Al?” he said, producing his Ruger .357, opening the cylinder and removing five bullets. These he very deliberately placed on the counter in a row. “Russian roulette. You ever played Russian roulette?”
“You’re mad,” I said. “That’s crazy. Insane.”
“So you’re saying I’m insane?”
“Yes. If you’ve played Russian roulette, then you’re insane.” “Well then, if that’s what you think, let me treat you to a live demonstration of insanity.” With that, he spun the cylinder, closed it, and cocked the hammer. All the time looking at me, dead serious.
Before I could say anything, he put the barrel to his head and pulled the trigger. I leapt off my stool in horror. He just sat there, staring at me, the gun still at his head. Slowly he lowered it.
“Man, oh man!” he breathed out. “That’s just the greatest thrill a man can have. It’s the ultimate form of letting it all hang out. It’s so personal and intimate that it brings a new and unique way of interacting with your own destiny and fate.” He said all this quietly, slowly, intensely.
He was terrifying me.
“You’ve just shown me the most extreme form of contempt imaginable,” I said. “Besides feeling nothing for yourself, you
were prepared to subject me to the horror of watching you blow your brains out. Right in front of me. Man, that’s just crazy.”
I stopped there, realising he was drunk and scarily unpredictable. I didn’t want to antagonise him.
“You can say that, but you don’t know what a thrill it is.” I wondered if he was challenging me. Again he went through the routine of opening the cylinder, spinning it and closing it.
“Your turn!” he shouted, aiming at me and pulling the trigger. There was a click. “Lucky bugger. How does it feel, hey?”
I was speechless.
Again he spun the cylinder and pointed the gun at me. This time I was away, running for my life into the garden with a drunk André in pursuit. We ended up running round and round the swimming pool. Again the dry click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber. He was close enough to inflict a deadly shot or, worse, a permanently disabling one. I raced towards the house to find my own revolver. Then I stopped. He was in the process of repeating the operation, but paused to look at me.
Suddenly I remembered an incident he’d told me about, where a colleague had suffered a gunshot wound by accident. As a result, André had resolved always to have only five rounds in his revolver so that the hammer rested on an empty cylinder. This way he could avoid an accidental discharge. So the revolver had been empty all along.
“You sick psycho!” I yelled at him. “What a sick thing to do. Always only five rounds in your revolver, hey? And what about a chance mistake? Did you ever consider that?” I was trembling with rage. And the louder I shouted, the more André laughed, until his laughter was hysterical.
I left him there beside the pool, went back to the bar and poured myself a large whisky. He came in still chuckling, reloaded the five rounds and, pointing the gun at the floor, carefully lowered the hammer onto the empty chamber.
“I’m going to sleep here,” I told him. I had drunk more than my limit and decided not to drive to the Linmeyer house. “You should go to bed.” He waved me away and refilled his glass.
I woke late the next morning with a gentle rap of knuckles on the door. “What is it?” I responded, annoyed.
André’s head appeared round the door and he stood there looking at me. He was barely coherent, mumbling something about Russian roulette and chasing me. “What happened?” I didn’t reply and he left, closing the door.
I followed him and found him sitting on the couch in the living room, bent over with his head in his hands. He looked up at me and shook his head slowly. I could see regret and remorse for his stupidity, but there was no apology. André Stander was incapable of apologising.
Some days later, André again left me almost speechless with one of his observations. “You’re beginning to concern me,” he said. “You’ve been out a while now and you still don’t have a car and you haven’t robbed a bank yet.”
After a few stunned moments, I said, “And achieve what? Where does that fit into our plans? You’re the one lazing around reading, cleaning the pool and playing gardener with the roses.” “I think you’ve lost your nerve.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yes, I do. One of these days I’ll get into that Cortina and start at one end of town and rob every bank along the way until
‘You ever done this, Al?’ he said, producing his Ruger .357. ‘You ever played Russian roulette?’ Andre Stander