The credit union robbery of 1976 · the case the court reports carry

October 15, 1976

The robbery: late in the afternoon of October 15, 1976, two men walked into a federal credit union in South Bend — the court reports that preserve the case do not name the institution — and robbed it of about $2,400. Robert Lee Holleman went in armed; Henry Taylor went in unarmed; the two took money from the cash drawers. A third man, Charles Edward Jamerson, completed the party the indictment charged.

The disposition: Holleman was arrested two days later, on October 17, 1976, at a South Bend motel, by a St. Joseph County detective accompanied by two Michigan state policemen who held a Michigan warrant for his arrest for another armed robbery. The three were indicted on November 16, 1976, tried before a jury in the Northern District of Indiana, and convicted on February 4, 1977, of robbing a federally insured credit union under 18 U.S.C. § 2113(a). Judge Allen Sharp sentenced Holleman to twenty years, Taylor to fifteen, and Jamerson to ten; Holleman's federal term ran consecutively with a state sentence he was already serving. The Seventh Circuit affirmed all three convictions on April 20, 1978, in United States v. Holleman, 575 F.2d 139, and Holleman's later attack on his confession and his sentence — he argued the conviction rested on perjured testimony — was denied and the denial affirmed in Holleman v. United States, 721 F.2d 1136 (7th Cir. 1983). The case is the only adjudicated South Bend bank or credit union robbery found in the reachable federal record — the reported appellate opinions, the Bureau's releases and the Department of Justice's case reports — between the Merchants National in 1934 and the 1990s, and that statement is printed as a search result, not as a claim that no other robbery happened in those decades: it is a claim about what the surviving, reachable record holds.

Sources:

1. United States v. Holleman, 575 F.2d 139 (7th Cir., decided April 20, 1978) — the indictment (a federal credit union in South Bend, October 15, 1976, about $2,400), the afternoon entry, Holleman armed and Taylor unarmed, the October 17 arrest at a South Bend motel, the jury convictions and the sentences of 20, 15 and 10 years.
2. Holleman v. United States, 721 F.2d 1136 (7th Cir., decided November 28, 1983) — the February 4, 1977 conviction date, Judge Sharp's twenty-year sentence consecutive to a state sentence, and the § 2255 litigation.