The Saint Joe Road robbery · $174,441 and a detective down

JANUARY 27, 1994 – FEBRUARY 1995

The robbery: at about 10:30 in the morning on January 27, 1994, two men entered the NBD Bank at 5767 Saint Joe Road and robbed it of $174,441.68 — the largest bank take documented in Fort Wayne's record. The FBI's memorandum of February 14, 1994, released years later under the Freedom of Information Act, is the surviving account. One man worked the lobby, ordering the tellers to put all their money, including the reserve money, on the counter, and gathering it into a clear plastic bag while monitoring a police scanner, a stopwatch around his neck. The second took the branch manager to the basement vault; the manager could not open it, and a vault teller was brought to unlock it and help fill two white cloth bags. When the alarm's activation was announced between them, the two went out the front doors into the parking lot — where two Fort Wayne detectives were arriving in answer to the alarm. The first man raised a long-barrelled rifle — an M-1, the Bureau's later documents say — and fired. One detective took a minor bullet wound to the ankle. Seventeen .30-caliber cartridge cases were recovered from the lot, along with cash the robbers had dropped in the exchange.

The escape: the getaway car was a light blue 1982 Oldsmobile Cutlass on a Washington license plate, abandoned minutes later at the Indiana State Developmental Center, 4900 Saint Joe Road, for a second Cutlass staged there, dark brown, on an Indiana plate. The blue car, the Bureau found, had been bought the day before the robbery, January 26, from a private seller for $700 in cash — seven one-hundred-dollar bills. It is the pattern, as much as any face, that the file remembers: cars bought for cash with hundred-dollar bills, a switch a short distance from the bank, a scanner and a stopwatch against the police clock.

The file: by July 1994 the Indianapolis Division had tied the robbery, on method of operation, to two others by the same pair: the Old National Bank at Evansville, robbed on October 29, 1993, by two men in full-face Halloween masks, and the Society National Bank at Springdale, Ohio, robbed June 8, 1994, where the method matched except for a hand grenade one of the men may have carried. A year on, in February 1995, the file thickens and then closes over. Two men arrested by Evansville police on February 9, 1995 — held in the Vanderburgh County jail with four hand grenades, rifles and ammunition recovered from them — were believed by the Bureau to have committed three more Evansville bank robberies and one Fort Wayne bank robbery identified in a referenced teletype, and possibly three more besides: bank robberies at Fort Wayne on August 25 and September 16, 1994, a bank robbery at South Bend, and the robbery of an armored car at Fort Wayne on February 1, 1995. The cartridge cases from the Saint Joe Road shootout were ordered forwarded to the FBI Laboratory for comparison against the arrested men's weapons. There the released record reached for this section ends: the names in the file are withheld, and it records Bureau belief, not a Fort Wayne conviction. What is adjudicated is nothing; what is documented is the robbery itself, the detective's wound, and the shape of the hunt.

Sources:

1. FBI, Indianapolis Division, memorandum (LHM), Feb. 14, 1994, file 91A-IP-77949 — the January 27, 1994 robbery of NBD Bank, 5767 Saint Joe Road: $174,441.68; the two subjects' division of work; the vault; the confrontation with two Fort Wayne detectives; the ankle wound; the seventeen cartridge cases; the dropped cash; the two Oldsmobile Cutlasses and the $700 cash purchase of January 26, 1994 — in the FBI's FOIA release "Midwest Bank Robberies" (BOMBROB), via archive.org.
2. FBI, Indianapolis Division, airtel to Cincinnati Division, July 25, 1994 — the Evansville (Oct. 29, 1993) and Fort Wayne robberies "committed by the same individuals," the identical elements listed; the Springdale, Ohio robbery of June 8, 1994 similar in method "except for the hand grenade" — same release.
3. FBI, Indianapolis Division, teletype (Feb. 1995) — the February 9, 1995 Evansville arrests; grenades and weapons recovered; the subjects believed responsible for further Evansville and Fort Wayne robberies, and possibly the Fort Wayne robberies of Aug. 25, 1994 (91A-IP-79010) and Sept. 16, 1994 (91A-IP-79105), a South Bend robbery (91A-IP-79372) and the Fort Wayne armored car robbery of Feb. 1, 1995 (192C-IP-79600); the order forwarding the January 27 cartridge cases to the FBI Laboratory — same release. Subject names are redacted in the released file.