The manager held overnight · the robbery of November 20, 1961

NOVEMBER 20, 1961 – JULY 31, 1968

The crime: on the night of Sunday, November 19, 1961, three men — Julian Perez, Jesse Paramo and Manuel Zurita — got into the home of a Fort Wayne bank manager on the pretense of being deputy sheriffs, and held the manager and his wife captive through the night. In the morning Perez and Zurita took the manager to his bank and forced him to open the vault, while the third man dealt with the second employee: one of the two men assaulted was left bound to a pipe in the bank's night depository. The take, in the words of the federal indictment, was "a sum in excess of $69,000" belonging to a bank the Seventh Circuit's opinion, unusually, never names — the largest Fort Wayne bank loss documented to that date, taken not at gunpoint in a lobby but by holding a family hostage in its own house.

The solving: the case took three and a half years to break, and it broke in a tuberculosis hospital. Federal agents and Fort Wayne police worked the investigation continuously from the day of the crime, the court records, but lacked sufficient identity and evidence to indict. Paramo, hospitalized for about a year, confessed in June 1964 and implicated the other two; he was arrested on his release from the hospital in April 1965. The indictment followed on June 23, 1965. Paramo pleaded guilty that December; Zurita was tried and convicted shortly after. Perez was serving a sentence in the Arkansas State Penitentiary, where the federal warrant had been lodged against him in June 1965; Arkansas would not surrender him mid-sentence, and he was taken into custody only on his release, March 10, 1967, and returned to the Northern District of Indiana.

The appeal: a jury convicted Perez, and he was sentenced to twenty years. His appeal raised a question the case is still cited for: whether the six years between crime and trial denied him a speedy trial. The Seventh Circuit, on July 31, 1968, held they did not — the delay ran to the investigation's honest pace and to Arkansas's custody, not to the government, and Perez could show no substantial prejudice from it. The conviction stood.

Sources:

1. United States v. Perez, 398 F.2d 658 (7th Cir. July 31, 1968) — the indictment's charge (Nov. 20, 1961; in excess of $69,000; 18 U.S.C. § 2113(d)); the entry into the manager's home on the deputy-sheriff pretense; the night-long captivity of the manager and his wife; the vault opened under compulsion; the victim bound in the night depository; Paramo's June 1964 confession and April 1965 arrest; the June 23, 1965 indictment; the dispositions of Paramo (guilty plea) and Zurita (convicted); Perez's Arkansas custody, March 10, 1967 surrender, jury conviction and twenty-year sentence; affirmance on the speedy-trial claim. FBI Special Agent Rene J. Dumaine's testimony is part of the record.