He was sitting there, hunched over on the edge of the bed in a motel room at the outskirts of nowhere watching as the girl who called herself April began her routine. Dark eyed and beyond brooding, the middle-aged man said nothing as the young woman tossed back her long straight brown hair, and slowly, almost mechanically began to unbutton the prim, white dress shirt she wore. He barely moved as she let it drop to the floor and kicked it aside with one white high heel.

He had said he was a businessman or something and that he was on his way to Vegas, she would later tell a reporter for the man's hometown newspaper. He had even told her his name, his real name, though April hadn't paid much attention. To her, the tragic pear-shaped pile of a man was just another of the thousands of desperately lonely men who drift through the gaudy gaming town of Laughlin, Nevada, every year, guys who are far from home and looking to get lucky one way or the other.

Sometimes they do get lucky. The night before, this same guy had tipped another stripper $100 bucks on top of the $120 she charged for the dance and said he had been winning big on the casino floor. At least that's what April's friend had told her.

But luck has a way of turning on you. The girls who work the cheap motels in Laughlin know that even if the guys who slip rolls of bills into their stockings don't. It didn't surprise April at all that now, on this grim Monday night, the big roller's money was almost gone. He had a hundred and eighty bucks left in his wallet. After he paid April, $120 for the dance and a $50 tip, she noticed there was a lonely ten spot left in his wallet.

It's hard for those who knew Nick Bissell in his younger days when he was a sharp lawyer and an aggressive, some say overly aggressive prosecutor to imagine him spending the last night of his life in a seedy motel room shelling out his last few bucks to buy a little company from a woman young enough to be his daughter.

It was just as hard for them to imagine that Bissell, a man who had prided himself, it seemed, on his intractability when he came to making accused wrongdoers pay for their crimes, could end up a criminal himself, or that the same guy who had, on more than one occasion appeared on the syndicated television show America's Most Wanted to warn fugitives that they had no chance of escape, would become a fugitive himself.

Nick Bissell going to court

But hardest of all for those who knew him was the thought that it would end the way it did. Of course he had warned them. When he sliced off the electronic monitoring bracelet he had been ordered to wear after his conviction on federal fraud and tax evasion charges and slipped out of the Central New Jersey home he had put up as part of the collateral for his $300,000 bail, Bissell had left a note behind, telling anyone who would listen what he planned to do. But no one believed him.

As federal marshals ringed his motel room on the morning of November 26, 1996, pleading with him to surrender, Nick Bissell did exactly what he said he would do. He lifted his handgun to his head and squeezed off a single round.

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