Quote by W. Leon Morrow

“The robbery was as simple, successful, and as stupid as most robberies are. My name is Sam von Hammerstein. I was born on June 5, 1949, and I grew up on an old family farm in NC that had been handed down through the generations. I had no idea that anything interesting would happen in my life until we robbed a store on July 15, 1968. I was 19. Roger and Jerome were both 18. We lived in rural Rutherford County NC, just across the state line from Spartanburg, SC. We were working class, southern teenagers complaining about not having enough money for a trip to the beach. We were not juvenile delinquents, but each of us had some instability in our family lives. We didn’t have real experience with crime, but we had watched robberies on TV, so we figured it would be easy to do. I have heard it said that you can’t “un-ring” a bell but learned that I needed to try to undo my robbery and spent the next several years dodging bullets that might as well have been shot at me that day.”

Quote by W. Leon Morrow