By SUSAN PARK

The account of how the infamous, local bank robber known as "Hollywood" managed to pull off one of the largest bank robberies in history has been preserved in a novel by celebrated Seattle author, Ann Rule.

Rule's novel, "The End of the Dream," contains five true crime accounts, including the tale of how a Virginia son of a preacher man grew up to become one of Seattle's most notorious criminals.

In an interview on KOMO TV4's locally produced program, "Northwest Afternoon," Rule said Hollywood's $1 million theft of the Lake City branch of Seafirst Bank weighed 56 pounds. Northwest Afternoon host Elissa Jaffe says she was shopping just down the street at Fred Meyer when the police cars arrived at Seafirst Bank. This was to be Hollywood's final heist.

Rule accounts how Scott Scurlock (aka "Hollywood") made his way from Virginia to Hawaii and then to Olympia to attend Evergreen College, where he lived in a luxury treehouse and took advantage of the school's chemistry lab to manufacture methamphetamine.

Scurlock later graduated to bank robbing and earned the name Hollywood for his theatrical disguises. A particularly dangerous bank robber, Scurlock was known among his friends for his extreme generosity. He used guilt to manipulate his friends to help him pull off heists, only to escape and leave them to take the fall.

After his death, a picture of Wyeth's Robin Hood was discovered hanging over Scurlock's bed in his four-story treehouse. Rule says, "I think that's how he saw himself - as taking from the rich. (But) he never gave much to the poor."

At a Lake City Chamber luncheon last year, local FBI investigator Mark Magan explained how he was able to succeed where others failed in tracking the elusive Hollywood. Magan says he owes his success to the irony that the very neighborhood where Hollywood was hiding was one he knew from his adolescence. Magan says he sneaked around himself trying to hide from the father of a girl he was dating. He says Hollywood eluded police by climbing and sleeping in trees.

In a final showdown on Thanksgiving Day in 1996, Hollywood took refuge in a trailer parked in a Lake City residents yard where he shot himself.