The Knife: Off Record – 128

This week, Patia tells the story of the Trenchcoat Robbers, Ray Bowman and William “Billy” Kirkpatrick, a notorious duo who evaded capture for two decades. It’s believed they robbed at least 28 banks in the United States. Patia uncovers new details about their crime spree and even speaks with someone personally connected to the story. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

(00:22):
Welcome to The Knife Off Record. I'm Patia Eton, I'm
Hannah Smith. If you've been enjoying the show, if you
would do us a favor and go over to Apple
Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen and give us
a rating and review, we would love you for it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Today, I am so excited because I'm telling you a
story that you know absolutely nothing about.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
I literally have no idea, and I know you've been
working really hard on it over the last few weeks
and there's been moments where you're like, oh my gosh,
I just had this wild phone call and I'm like,
what what is it?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, I'm looking forward to telling you this story because
is not only is it a heist story, but I
also at the end of the episode, we'll hear from
someone who has a really important relationship to one of
the people involved, and I think brings an important layer
to the story outside of the crime.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Cool. Yeah, So how did you first find this story?
Great question?

Speaker 2 (01:24):
I think I remember because, as you know, I like
have one billion.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Tabs open this right now.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, three notepads that I'm trying to stay organized and
at once, and you have to sort of stack them
on top of each other to see my actual list.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Great system, Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
But I found this because I think we had recently
interviewed Ellen, who was the victim of a kidnapping.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yes, great episode. If you haven't listened to that yet,
go listen to that episode.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
And so I was thinking, wow, okay, what would it
be like to be held hostage? Like really trying to
put myself in that space. And so I started thinking
about bank robberies and like, this is what we see
in the movies?

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Is everybody get down blah blah.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, And you know, you and I had previously interviewed
a bank robber before, which was an interesting story. We
interviewed a bank robber and the FBI agent who tracked
him down. We interviewed that agent again on this show,
which name is Mark Rosey.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah. That was such an interesting interview with the bankrobber.
I remember him because he was so honest about it.
He told us exactly what happened in his life and
his mindset and walked us through the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
And there were so many layers of his story that
you know it was wrong for him to do that
which he knows, but you begin to understand. And that
is for me, one of the more fascinating aspects of
like quote unquote crime and people who commit crimes is
does the ability to do good and bad lie and
everyone probably yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Oh yeah. Bank robbery is this interesting thing that has
sort of this romanticized version of like early America, and
you have like Bonnie and Clyde. But then there's also
this aspect of sort of like desperation, like someone who
you know, they're like, oh, I could just take this
money right now, and that would solve my problems. So
it's very interesting psychologically, Yeah, definitely. And you know, recently

(03:15):
I saw a headline where a guy went into a
bank with lemon juice all over his face and he
had convinced himself yes, and he had convinced himself that
the lemon juice made him invisible to the point where
he was like winking at security cameras like you'll never
catch me, You'll never catch me. And then they of
course do catch him, and he is shocked. And I'm

(03:38):
not remembering the exact like diagnosis he was given, but
it was something along the lines of like overconfidence, what
It wasn't like something you know, I don't know how
to put more serious than that. It was like, literally,
you have just managed to convince yourself of this. Oh
a man, if you could imagine. Okay, So this is

(04:01):
the story of the trench Coat robbers. They are a
notorious duo of bank robbers, and I'm just going to
get right into it, right, all right. So it's six
point thirty pm on February tenth, nineteen ninety seven. We're
in Lakewood, Washington, which is just outside of Tacoma, and

(04:22):
we're looking right at sea First Bank. Now the bank
is closed, it just closed, but inside three women are
still working. They are wrapping up for the evening, getting
cash from the day stored safely away. And two men
approach the bank. They're in trench coats. One of them

(04:44):
pulls a small L shaped tool out of his pocket
and picks the lock. The door clicks open and they're inside.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Immediately, guns pointed at the people who are still working
at the bank. One person zip ties everybody and the
other gets a hold of the cash. So they order
these people into the vault. They restrain them, and they
begin to fill duffel bag. After duffel bag with cash.

(05:14):
They're in and out in less than ten minutes with
nearly four point five million dollars.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Carrying four point You guys think that's heavy. It's heavy. Yeah,
okay wow.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
As soon as they're gone, one of the women breaks
free from a zip tie and she sounds the alarm,
so immediately the FBI is involved. They don't know who
these men are, but they're pretty sure that this is
the work of the trench Coat Robbers, a notorious duo
that has been on a cross country crime spree, evading
capture for decades.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
Okay, see, I was going to say, this feels like
a clean operation, like a well oiled machine. In and
out quickly, zip time. So it's making sense now that
this is a notorious duo.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yes, and this is their biggest ever heist and it
would be their last. So I'm actually going to take
you back to the beginning. Ooh okay, wow, I right
the way you're telling this, Okay, great. In this case,
the beginning is all the way back. In nineteen seventy four,
William Arthur Kirkpatrick, known as Billy and Ray Bowman, managed

(06:19):
to walk out of a kmart together with thirty eight
stolen records.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
The booster duo is arrested.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Their names are written by hand and one another's arrest records,
but they never end up doing any time for this theft. Now,
boosting is taking something and reselling it, right, Okay, okay, yeah,
so they're like a budding crime duo in the seventies.
They're teenagers, Billy and Billion Ray Billion Ray.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
So Billy's from Hoblan, Minnesota and raised from Kansas City.
But they meet at what you might call their first
real job, boosting records for none other than Kansas City
mob boss Anthony J. Carterrella, otherwise known as Tiger Carterrella,
the owner of Tiger Records.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
Oh wow, yeah, and also a mob boss. Also a
mob boss. That feels like that could be a whole
story right there, for sure.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
So Tiger Records is a place where you could go
and get the latest and greatest hits for a fraction
of the price, much cheaper than you could anywhere else
because the inventory was stolen by boosters like Billy and Ray.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
My gosh, yeah wow.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
Okay, so they really passed their sales onto the customer,
which you have to appreciate. So you're going to be
hearing a series of clips in the episode. The first
person we're going to hear from for really the majority
of the episode is a former ATF agent by the
name of Paul Marquart, and Paul is now retired, however,
he does.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
Sometimes still do contract work for the ATF.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
Okay, and then what they would do is they had
these trench coats that had hidden pockets inside, and they
would go out to small Kansas and go to like
any place that would sell records, and one of them

(08:09):
would distract the clerk and well the other one's sticking
albums in their coat. And they were doing a lot
of this in the winter time because then it wasn't
suspicious I'm wearing a trench coat. And then they would
just offload all those record albums to Tiger's record shop.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
Okay, we're talking albums. We're not talking CDs. We're talking big,
big albums, and they're putting them in their trench coats. Yeah, wow,
modern day Taylor Deluxe. Okay.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
So Billy and Ray are stealing these records in droves,
and as we now know, this is not a small
time operation. They're making some serious cash and they're dipping
their toes into the world of organized crimes.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
So wait, can I just clarify real quick? They're working
for Tiger Records, right, Like, they're going around to other
stores stealing albums and then selling them to Tiger Records.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Basically, yes, okay, yeah, and that is how they met.
So I wasn't able to go back further than that,
but that's how they met and became friends.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
They were immediately bested. Yeah, they were really connected. Yeah.
So I went on to Reddit.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
To see if anyone had anything to say about Tiger
Records because it has since closed, and I found a
thread on the Kansas City subreddit with few locals who
remembered it pretty well. There were rumors of very tight security,
people on ladders looking down at the shop making sure
no one was stealing from them, you know, much more

(09:42):
than you would have a normal record shop. So I
have no idea if anything else was going on there,
but I can speculate that Tiger Carterella was in more
than the record business.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
I see.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah, so for Billion Ray, this is a good gig.
There's easy money, no consequences. So far, they've been arrested
but didn't do any time. And then actually In nineteen
seventy seven, Carterrella was convicted for selling stolen records, and
he was sentenced to five years and was also fined.
I imagine if you're a Tiger Carterella in this moment,

(10:14):
you're like, Okay, arrest me for stolen records. I don't
know everything he was doing, but that seems like a
deal I would take if I were him.

Speaker 1 (10:22):
Like he was maybe doing other right things, but he
got caught for the records.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
So this is probably, you know, not a time when
you want to continue working for an alleged mob boss.
The people are onto him, and you're kind of small
time by comparison. I can also speculate that if you're
a billion ray and you're working for Tiger Records and
Tiger Carterrella, you're starting to sort of see wealth from

(10:51):
you know, maybe that is obtained by a means that
is not good, but that you might be able to replicate.
So I'm there in Kansas, Yeah, so Tiger Records in
Kansas City. Billy didn't live there, but they would travel
all around and connect and do this right together, boosting records.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
I can totally see how they would think, like we
could have an exciting life as opposed to going and
getting a nine to five over here. Yeah, our lives
could be much more glamorous totally. And I mean I
wasn't a teenager in the seventies. I was still dead,
if you will. But but if.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
Your friends are like flip and Burgers for minimum wage
and you're making big bucks boosting records, that'd be pretty
hard to stop doing. And I'm especially picturing like if
I were a teenage boy, like this is a good
time appealing, like it's yeah, yeah, feels quite victimless too,
a record like who cares?

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Who cares? I will say for Tiger the mob boss,
if the record store is his front, then he really
screwed up by having your front not be clean. Right,
So there's anything I've learned from watching The Wire, Yeah,
your front business has to be like upstanding. Oh my god,
the Wire. I'm Michael Scott with the Wire. I don't know,
just understand a word of it.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Fair A side note, Tiger Carterilla went missing in nineteen
eighty four. He was missing for two weeks and then
found dead in the trunk of his own car, so
it didn't end well for him. But back to our
budding trench coat robbers. In September of nineteen eighty two,
two young men billion Ray, decide to rob a bank
in Annapolis, Missouri. They picked the lock while the bank

(12:30):
is closed, and once inside, point a gun at the
bank teller's and demand access to the cash. They're wearing wigs, sunglasses,
and a hat. I wasn't there while they were planning this,
but it seems like they may have watched some movies
about it, and you know, it's a pretty unimaginative disguise,
but it works, and they take off in a stolen
car with around sixty thousand dollars and begin planning their

(12:52):
next tist.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
That's pretty big, especially for the eighties. Yeah, it's a
lot of money. It's a lot of money. So you know,
boost records is out, bank robbery is in. Yeah, yeah,
lucrative sounds like totally.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
And in nineteen eighty three, Ray starts dating a woman
named Cheryl Clark, and he tells her that he's unemployed
sometimes works as a locksmith, you know, convenient to truth
than that, but he is a big spender and that's
not lost on Cheryl. They go to a lot of

(13:25):
fancy dinners, they ride in limousines, he buys expensive clothes,
he gives her cash more than you would make as
a sometimes unemployed locksmith, and he would leave for weeks
at a time. And we on the other side of
this know that Ray was meeting up with Billy and
they would go to another location, stake out a bank,

(13:46):
and then rob the bank and go their separate ways again.
So Ray was living in Kansas City and Billy was
living in Minnesota.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
And so Cheryl didn't know that he was even friends
with or maybe hadn't even met. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
So Cheryl was dating Ray and at some point she
becomes aware that he has a friendship with this guy Billie,
but she doesn't know that they're robbing banks together.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
So in nineteen eighty seven, they rob the Hawkeye Bank
in Des Moines, Iowa, making out with nearly fifty grand.
And this robbery starts differently than the others. At this time,
Billy and Ray have set their sights on one of
the bank employees and they essentially stalk him and figure
out where he lives, and then at three point thirty
in the morning on November sixth, nineteen eighty seven, they

(14:35):
break into his house. They hold the man, his wife
and child at gunpoint, zip tie them, and with all
three in two they go to the bank where the
man worked.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Wow. Yeah, so it's definitely an escalation, right, sure, because
now you're kidnapping three people.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah, and you know not that zip tying them at
their place of work was any sort of better. But
you can see this like brazenness, right, Yeah, Like you're
going to go to this guy's home, you're gonna follow him,
you're gonna take his wife and kid.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Yeah, that feels much more violent, but I can imagine
like they've been getting away with it, so they're feeling
a little more confident perhaps, Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
And so they go to this bank where the man
works and they steal fifty grand, right, and then they
go their separate ways. And what they're doing after these
robberies is they're going their separate ways and on their
way home because they're driving, they're stopping at different banks
and they're making deposits into safe deposit boxes.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
Okay, different bank safe deposit boxes like across the country. Yeah,
do they co own these or these they're their own
separate are.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
Their own separate boxes. They were relatively careful, which I'll
get into more or later, not to make their sort
of association super clear.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
Gotcha.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
And so in nineteen eighty eight, they have a failed robbery.
They attempt to rob Versus Wisconsin Bank, but the vault
had already been closed for the night, and they left
all the employees tied up in the basement and took
off with nothing. So I don't know exactly what went
wrong there, but things are moving really quickly.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
They're already onto their next robbery.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
And there are robberies in between these that I don't
even we don't even really quite know about because they
weren't fully traced back to them until later.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
But somehow they couldn't get maybe into the vault or
whatever it is. So this was a failed robbery. This
was a complete failure. And are they wearing trench coats
every time?

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, so I should mention they're wearing trench coats, wigs, mustaches,
fedora hats, I mean, sunglasses. They just stick to the
same get up and there's two of them and the
same emma. They get into the bank, they either linger
as it's closing, a stay behind, or they pick the
lock and get in right it's opening, and right as
it's closing. So their whole goal is usually that there's

(17:05):
no one else in the bank besides them and the employees.
And so in nineteen eighty nine they rob another branch
of the first Wisconsin bank, but this time they're successful
and they take over four hundred thousand dollars, saying yeah,
So once again they return to their separate lives. They
stop on the way home make these deposits and to

(17:27):
save deposit boxes all over the country, and some of
the cash they do take with them, but you know,
how much cash does a man really need? Yeah, And
from what I've learned about Ray, he never told anyone
close to him that he was robbing banks or doing
anything illegal. There were definitely times where he was sort
of openly not transparent, but he did not tell the

(17:49):
people close to him.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
Billy was not as tilant. Okay, I was going to say,
this agreement they have where they meet up and they'll
rob a bank and then they go and they do
their separate things. It really requires a lot of trusts
in each other. I don't know how long it is
between bank robberies, like a year or something. They're just
gonna trust the other person is like keeping their lipsipped,

(18:13):
and in some ways it's sort of like this sweet friendship,
like we have this secret. It works, but like I
have so much dirt on you. Yes, but don't you
dare that? Don't you dare?

Speaker 4 (18:24):
So?

Speaker 3 (18:24):
Then?

Speaker 1 (18:24):
But what happens with Billy?

Speaker 3 (18:26):
Right?

Speaker 2 (18:26):
So Billy is dating a woman named Mayra Penny and
he discloses a little more to her than Ray ever
does to anyone close to him.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
But more on that later.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Okay, So Cheryl and Ray broke up in nineteen eighty nine,
and Cheryl would later say that when they were living together,
there was a locked room in their home she was
not allowed to go into, but one day she peered
in and saw wigs, bake, mustaches, Dora, Cheryl, and a
police scanner.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Oh uh huh yeah, suspect. Yeah, So what Cheryl thinking?

Speaker 2 (19:05):
At this point, She's thinking, you're probably not a locksmith,
but I'm on my way out, so you know. So
Ray begins dating a woman named Virginia Delamo, and she
goes by Jenny, and by nineteen ninety they're living together.
Now Jenny had a child from a previous relationship, as
did Ray, and then Jenny and Ray go on to
have two daughters together. So Ray tells Jenny and others

(19:30):
at this time in his life that he sells lawnmowers
and works as a private investigator. And just like during
his relationship with Cheryl, he leaves for weeks at a time.
And I read somewhere that he would tell her to
take the kids to the grocery store and that's when
he would leave.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
What do you mean, Like he wouldn't tell her like
I'm going on a work trip.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
It would be sort of their code, like I'm going
on a trip. I'm going to be gone for a while,
so that the kids didn't start getting upset. Yeah, because
you know, whether you're a bank robber or a traveling salesman,
you probably have to pack for a trip like that, right,
Like especially if you've got a bunch of fedoras, like
I imagine the boxes you're traveling with not disquis.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
So get the kids out of the house so that
I can pack my trench coat. I think that's what
it was, you see.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, she never knew where he was going for how long,
or had any way to contact him. Now, in nineteen
ninety one, billion, Ray rob a bank and Green Valley
outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, and they take off with
one hundred and thirty eight thousand dollars, but police nearly
capture them in the process. Billion Ray take a hostage,

(20:37):
lead police on a high speed chase, and even exchange gunfire.
What Yeah, And so somehow they managed to get away.
The hostage was left somewhere unharmed. I could not find
hardly anything about this. It's mind blowing to me.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
So this hostage, I guess that was seeing them in disguise, yes, okay, yeah,
and is this before CCTV. Yeah, so this is it's
like we're in the early nineties. You know, even any
security footage that would be had was probably pretty fuzzy.
And a lot of the time they were driving stolen cars. Okay,

(21:12):
they were renting a car, driving a stolen car, so
it wasn't like we got the licensed slate bingo, right, Okay, Yeah,
So they're pretty careful about that, driving different cars and
apparently have really good disguises. I mean, I'm just imagining
those glasses that have the nose and then like the
hair on the top of the glasses. I mean, it's
almost like that.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
Well, you know, I'm thinking if I'm a bank teller
and two men walking in trench coats. I'm done for
the day. I'm going home, goodbye. I'm going to take
the afternoon off exactly. But somehow they managed to get
out of this high speed chase unharmed, and this hostage
somehow unharmed. Like always, the Trencoat Robbers then split ways

(21:54):
returned to their lives, and now Ray has a young
daughter along with his older children to go home to.
Billy returns to his girlfriend Mayra Penny in Minnesota.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
So, just like in.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
The home he shared with Cheryl, he has the same
locker room with Jenny, right, She's not allowed to go
in there. It's a very modest house, a small ranch
shell home in the middle class neighborhood. And they're successfully
flying under the radar. Now fast forwarding a little bit,
the trench Coat Robbers have been linked to twenty seven
sometimes I read twenty different bank robberies. So as this

(22:27):
is all happening through the early nineties, because it started
back in the eighties, the FBI is assembling a task
force because they know that these trench Coat robbers exist,
but they don't know who they are at this time.
They've been featured on America's most wanted unsolved mysteries. But
they always seem to be ten steps ahead.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah, until one day in May of nineteen ninety seven
when the first domino falls.

Speaker 1 (22:54):
What is it?

Speaker 2 (22:54):
Yeah, so we heard from Paul Mark Quart earlier retired
to ATF agent Semer retired.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
You know, I would say he still works sometimes hard
to give up the job. Yeah, he really loves it.
He was just the best to talk to you about this.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Well.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, So back in nineteen ninety seven, Paul is working
as an agent for the ATF in Kansas City, Missouri.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
I'm walking down the hall It's mid afternoon. I'm already
thinking about going home a little bit earlier, and the
assistant Special Agent in charge walks out of his out
of their division office. Hey, Paul, come here, and I
got a note this company called Federal Van and Storage.

(23:41):
They say they got a machine gun and a silencer
in one of their storage lockers. Here, go ahead and
check this out. So I grab another agent. We both
went to Federal Vandaged Storage to check it out.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
So Paul's walking down the hallway gets us.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
No.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
You know, this is a typical day work for him.
He actually mentioned on our call that he was like
getting ready to leave for the day. So it's a
little bit of like a Okay, I'll go check it out.
Now this storage unit that he's being called to come
take a look at. What has happened is the storage unit,
this unit hasn't paid its bill. So the storage facility

(24:22):
they prepare to get rid of the contents via something
like storage wars, right, but they have to know what's
in there for sure, so they go and check it out,
and they find these guns and some other stuff that
we'll get into.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
And that's why they called the ATF very suspicious, very suspicious.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
So the name on the storage unit is Ray Bowman,
not even a fake name, not even a fake name,
and he hasn't paid his bill, which is why they
went in there in the frist place. Amateur mistake, Yeah,
unbelievable because I mean, clearly, this guy's a pro at
this point.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
And you have the money unless you spent it on
something else. Had the money. Yeah, isn't that wild? That's
really wild? Like what a mistake. Truly huge. It was
like one hundred and fifty five dollars bill. That's like
pretty unbelievable. I think so too. I mean, the only
thing I'll give to my guess is like, you don't
have auto pay right at that, So to send a

(25:16):
check or something, right, I'm guessing just get to himself
to the post office.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yeah, just too busy, too busy. So the storage unit
sends this letter to raise address. It doesn't get there
because the address doesn't exist. So with no payment and
no response, they open up the unit check it out.
Paul gets this call and goes to the unit. Okay,
so they get out there and sure enough, there's multiple guns,
but there's also a Crown broil back like those purple

(25:43):
you know, Crown Royal, like the liquor Oh yeah, yeah yeah,
And funny enough, Paul said that they actually see these
a lot when they're investigating people storing things in those
bags because.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
They're like nice, sort of like velvet bags, and people
just like to keep them, I guess, and store things
in them. I guess, So I guess.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
So, and so Paul recognizes that there's these little metal
pieces in the back and they are components that you
would use to make a silencer, and silencers are legal,
so these components are legal at least at this time,
and Paul has a specific skill set that allowed him
to immediately recognize what these were. And you know, he

(26:22):
noted throughout their call how many strange coincidences there were
in this investigation that allowed them to put the pieces together.
So he recognizes these as components of silencers. But that's
not all he finds.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
But there were other weird things in there, as police
had a blue cap with police written on it.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Bick.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
That really strange because there was a legal briefcase that
was full of pamphlets. I think there were like eighty
five of them or something like that. I once said
that type them all out. They were on the weirdest
object how to kill people, how to do makeup, how

(27:07):
to go you know, just how to hide yourself from
the authorities.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
This is like a little of someone's search history. Now, yeah,
exactly exactly. I'm like pamphlets, pamphlets. Okay.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
So Paul and his fellow agent sees the contents of
the storage locker, and the storage company is glad they
hand it over it. They want nothing to do with it.
But now they're also scared because they have given the
ATF everything in this man's storage locker, and he doesn't
seem like the kind of guy that wants the ATF
to know about his storage locker, let alone have everything

(27:45):
in it. M So they're pretty afraid that he's going
to come back to pay his bill and then be
really unhappy. So Paul tells them, look, if this person
comes back to pay the bill, take the money, there's

(28:06):
a chance they won't even go back to the locker
and check it out. And in case they do, I'm
going to leave a letter in there. On ATF letterhead says, hey, we'd.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Like to talk to you.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
So the man behind the encounter of the storage office,
his name's Alan, and I want to call this out.
It's a small detail that probably is not that relevant,
but Paul mentioned it a few times that Alan was
extremely frightened by this, but he did as he was
asked by Paul, and it ended up playing a major

(28:37):
role in their investigation moving forward. So Paul leaves with
all the contents of the storagelocker, leaves a letter in
the storagelocker.

Speaker 3 (28:45):
They were actually a little relieved that I wanted to
take them, and so we just loaded those up, and
ironically I called the FBI on my way back to
the office and asked to speak to somebody in the
bank robbery unit, and a guy answers, and I said, hey,

(29:05):
are you guys? Told him who I was. That was
an atf Asian had just found a box full of
weird stuff. It looks like a bank robbery kit to
me because it had a bolt proof ves, it had
a police hat, it had a scanner with an earpiece.
So I'm thinking this is the kind of step you
using a robbery I said, is there anybody that you're

(29:28):
looking at? And guy says, no, not really, but if
you ever find out who he is, give us a
call back.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
So whoever he had called was probably in the local
Kansas City office was not aware of trend trob Task Force.
But eventually Paul would get a callback, but it would
take almost a year. So this is happening in May
of nineteen ninety seven, So a couple of months after
that cea first bank robbery, which happened in February of

(29:57):
nineteen eighty seven.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
Okay, so the storage unit visit. We're in May nineteen
ninety seven.

Speaker 2 (30:01):
Okay, so Paul has never heard of the trench Coat
robbers at this time. You know, it's like they were
on the news and making headlines because there was some
security footage, but the access to information was just not
what it is now. Yeah, you couldn't just google, like
are we looking for any bank robbers?

Speaker 3 (30:19):
Right?

Speaker 2 (30:20):
So he just does what he's supposed to do as
an atf agian, starts investigating the silencers and the guns
and these pamphlets.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
And he has a name, right, right, He has the
name Ray Bowman. But Ray did not put down a
real address, so they can't go there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
But then Paul gets a call from the storage company
and this is within a few weeks of them seizing
the items from the locker. So Alan, behind the front desk,
is on the other line and he says someone has
shown up to settle the account.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
But he had come in and they said, well, you know,
you're in arrears and he said, yeah, I'm here to
pay it. So he did, and they were so definitely
afraid of him. They just didn't mention the fact that,
you know, somebody came and took your boxes and they
were just hoping and praying that he wasn't going to
check him out, which he did not. All he wanted

(31:16):
to do is just pay what was Oh, So he
paid him in cash one hundred and fifty five dollars
and like sixty three cents and walks out. And here's
one of these strange twists of this. There's this guy
that was dealing with him, was scared to death. His
name was Alan Powell. He's deceased now, but he was

(31:39):
kind of strange guy. He worked there, and he had
a little dog that would sit under his desk and
everything was He was just kind of a different kind
of cat. And what happened is he ran to the
window as the guy's leaving and writes down the license
plate of the car that he's leaving him. Cool. If
he doesn't do that, we aren't any closer to figure

(32:03):
it out. Who he is. What he did?

Speaker 1 (32:07):
Allan, Allan the unsung hero. We love it. Mm hmm.
So they now have.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
The license plate and a name, so Ray Bowman and
a license plate, and so they run the plate and
it actually comes back to a guy named Wayne Wells,
and of course Paul figures out, well, who's Wayne Wells?
And he's a local retired police officer who had actually
stopped working due to disability. He has since passed away,
but Paul is at this point wondering does he have

(32:34):
a dirty cop on his hands? So this takes Paul
to the local PD. So he's now talking to the
police and their intelligence unit trying to see who is
Wayne Wells because we need to investigate him. He's tied
to this strange man who has the storage locker. Now
here's where one of those other coincidences that Paul told

(32:55):
me about comes into play. Is while he's at this
police department debriefing them on what's going on, and say
he needs to learn more about Wayne Wells, someone who's
working there here's the name Ray Bowman, and tells Paul
that he's related to someone named Cheryl who previously dated
Ray Bowman. So Paul is really happy to have this intel,
but he's also like, this is great for me, but

(33:17):
don't go talk to Cheryl or Wayne because I need
everything to lay low until I figure out what I'm
dealing with here.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
M okay. Yeah, he was very afraid that they would
tip him off because you never know, are Cheryl and
Wayne still working with him? He doesn't know.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Exactly, but this is now a different entity, right, This
is the police department, not the ATF, and they are
you know, they.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Collaborate, but they don't work for Paul. Interesting.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
Yeah, Okay, Well, a couple of days go by and
I find out that Wantlind and another another officer name
I think is Dan Reynolds, they went an interviewed her.
Even though I was I was insisting they now.

Speaker 4 (34:00):
Know.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
I was furious with him, and I said, why did
you do that? But it broke the case wide open
because she was cooperative. She told them stuff about how
when she was living with them, he had a locked
room that he wouldn't allow her into, that he would

(34:24):
go on business trips for two or three weeks at
a time and come back and not even tell her
where he'd gone, and all this stuff. At one time
he asked her to sew him a bulletproof vest with kevlar.
Just a wealth of knowledge about even knew that he
was living with somebody called Jenny.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Wow, this is a huge break, huge break.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
So now Paul needs to move really quickly because even
though it seems like Cheryl's cooperative and has no interest
in protecting Ray, at this point, she does know him.
They do have me virtual contacts. So okay, he's like,
Ray's living with someone named Jenny. So he finds Jenny's
address and that's how he locates Ray's residence. So that

(35:11):
was given to them by Cheryl Clark, the ex girlfriend.
But they still need to figure out why Wayne Wells
is connected to this at all. And what they uncover
is that Wayne had some sort of lawnmower business. Now
earlier I was saying that Ray told people, including Jenny,
that he sold lawnmowers, right, yeah, yeah, and so I
wasn't able to fully understand that connection if Wayne had

(35:34):
any knowledge or not of Ray's crime spree. But that
is the connection there in some way. But most importantly,
they now know where Ray lives because Cheryl told them.
So the ATF puts something called a pen register on
the residence, and it's different than a wiretap. It just
tells you what calls her incoming to the residence and

(35:56):
outgoing from a residence. It gives you, like the number
of the caller, yeah, exactly, so you can just see, Okay,
this number calls a lot, This number calls a lot.
You know, see if there's patterns. And they also do
a trash run, so they start picking up any trash
left outside the residence.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
Glamorous part of the job. Right exactly.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
And for whatever reason, in one of these trash runs
they throw away there's a photo of Ray and his family,
So Ray, Jenny and their kids.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
It gets cataloged because they know what Ray looks like.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Now they're starting to surveil him, the local PD surveilling him,
and they have no idea still that he's one of
the trench Coat robbers. But as they're following Ray, they
notice he's making a lot of calls from payphones, and
they subpoena the records from those payphones and set up
something new called a mail cover. So Ray had a
po box that they are able to track down, and

(36:47):
a mail cover tells you, kind of like a pen register,
what mail is incoming, what mail is outgoing. But they're
not opening it. They're just keeping track and kind of
following the lead because they don't want to tip off
Ray that people are looking out his mail.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
Right.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
So Paul, in the midst of this investigation that's unfolding,
asks an intern at the ATA pull up every police report,
arrest record, anything you can find on Rae Bowman, and
he does. And we've talked a lot about Ray and
we're not done yet. But meanwhile, in Minnesota. Also in
the late spring of nineteen ninety seven, Billy and his
girlfriend Mara Penny are building a cabin that's quaint. Yeah,

(37:25):
it's quaint, right, And the cabin is being built in
northern Minnesota.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Really far north, like by the Canadian border. I think,
I bet that's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
So pretty great choice. What a relaxing escape. Billy has
a good taste. Yeah, So you know, when you have
that kind of cash, it's not like you can walk
into a bank and deposit it. It's not like you
can put it in a mutual fund. So they're trying
to figure out a way to spend it. So they're
building this cabin together and they're paying the builder and cash. Well,

(37:54):
Billy and Myra are making a lot of complaints to
the builder. They don't like this, like that thinks they're
moving fast enough, and they're really starting to frustrate him,
and he's like, you know, it's pretty unusual that someone
would pay me all in cash, because we're talking six
figure payments. And he gets very irritated and he decides
to call the irs. Wow, basically they piss off their

(38:18):
contractor Yeah, like so silly, and I feel like, meanwhile,
Ray was so careful in most ways. I mean the
storage unit not paying that certainly a slip up, but
seemed like he was treading pretty lightly. But Myra and
Billy piss off this guy building their house and he
calls the IRS and he's like, maybe you should look
into them. The IRS is like, let's do it. So

(38:40):
they begin investigating, and this process takes a couple more months.
So now we're in October of nineteen ninety seven. And
as a reminder, the c first bank robbery was in
February of nineteen ninety seven. Ray's storage unit was found
out in May of nineteen ninety seven, got it. So
now we're in October, and we know that Billy and
Ray have some sort of an action because of the

(39:01):
pen register and the mail cover, but we don't yet
know that they're the trench cut robbers or what their
relationship is at all.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
And so the IRS agent up there, a guy named
Billy Waters who ended up being a major player in
this case, actually went to the house and served them
with a grand jury subpoena and that freaked them out,
and so all he was looking at was like, what

(39:28):
are you doing with all this cash? He just wanted
to investigate it. But what they did is they panicked,
and they actually flew to Las Vegas because they had
a bunch of money in a storage place there and
he picked it up and she flew back.

Speaker 1 (39:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
So what he says to the end of that clip
is they panic when they get the subpoena. So they
try to take this cash that has been in their
home or in nearby locations, and they drive it to
Las Vegas. They put it in a storage unit or
in a deposit box, some sort of storage situation there.
Mayra flies home and Billy drives. So as Billy is

(40:08):
driving home, Myra's back home because she flew and she
calls Ray and she tells him uncle Tom has been
to the house. Now I'm not completely sure of the
translation on that, but it's something like, we're in deep
shit with the federal government.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah, that's the code word code cal Tom has been
to the house. Yeah, not the call Ray wanted to get.
So Billy's still making his way through Nebraska, going seven
miles over the speed limit, and he crossed paths with
the Nebraska state trooper who had just so happened to
recently attend a course on drug interdiction, which just means

(40:46):
that you are stopping drugs from getting to their destination.
And he's pulling Billy over for breaking the speed limit.
So this is November tenth, nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
Now.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
When he approaches the driver side of Billy's car, he
notices Billy seems pretty nervous, so he asks, can I
search the car? Billy says no, no, you can't search
the car. Well, the police officer calls for backup. He's like,
just hold on it, I'm really going to search your car.
He also calls in for a drug dog because he

(41:18):
has just taken this class on drug intradiction.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
And the dog didn't exactly hit on the trunk. The
dog seemed interested in the car, but he didn't according
to the hand or, it wasn't a good enough sign
that there was dope in the car. But the trooper
on his own decides, well, this guy's really nervous and
he's not being cooperative, so I'm going to search your car.

(41:46):
So he searches the inside of the car and he
finds a couple of guns. He finds a bunch of
lock picking material, keys, all kinds of stuff. So he
decides I'm going to open up the trunk. He opens
up the trump foot locker in the trunk, opens up
one point eight million dollars in cash.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
So that's a lot of money. But Paul calls this
a bad search, So that is an unwarranted search because
they pulled Billy over for speeding and then they searched
the car after he said, you can't search the car,
but he did anyway, and he lerted the FBI. And
so I'm not exactly clear on when the FBI then
gets involved, but Billy's taken into custody. I'm assuming because

(42:32):
of what was already going on with the irs, they
had some way to make sure this was above board.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
I can only assume. So he never makes it back.
He's arrested.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
He's arrested, Okay, yeah, I think he was arrested that
day that he was pulled over. So Billy's in custody
and now the FBI is raiding his house and they're
starting to put together here's a guy with a lot
of cash, Here's a guy that the ATF thinks is
a bank robber. But we don't know what their relationship is.

(43:01):
We know they've communicated, but as they read Billy's house.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
They find something.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
Yeah, we're on the phone with the FBI agents that
are in the house up in Minnesota at the log
Cabin serving a search warrant there, and they're acting kind
of weird. They're saying, well, we're not really find anything,
and you know, they were kind of frustrated. And I

(43:28):
can't remember exactly how it happened, but somebody who well,
there's a picture on the refrigerator and we said, well,
what's the picture. Well it's a guy and a a
woman and three kids. And we're like, bingo, that's Ray Bowman.
So we're trying to tell him that's Ray. That's the
guy we're working on here.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Yeah. Wow, like a Christmas card or something.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Yeah, like just some photo that they both had. Yeah,
probably a Christmas card. I had thought of that. Maybe
that's what it was. And that's why up in the
trash is like how long does a person keep a
Christmas car? Yeah, So, because of this Grand Jury subpoena,
this code word call Uncle Thomas been to the house.
Ray has known that things have been heating up for them,
so he takes while this is happening, two Duffel bags

(44:18):
filled with cash. Well, over one hundred thousand dollars in
each one of them, and drops them off with his
estranged brother that he's been a strange friend for I
think about two years at this point, and he tells
his brother, hold onto these stuffel bags, don't open them
if anything happens to me, for my kids. He also
tells his partner, Jenny that something bad has happened to

(44:38):
a friend of his and he's not sure if it
will affect him. She doesn't know what this means, but
from what I know about their relationship, and Jenny is
pretty sharp, she understood that the lack of transparency and
all of these comments were concerning, and she had young
children that she was looking after, and so I'm sure
she wondered about it.

Speaker 1 (44:57):
But what could she do?

Speaker 2 (44:59):
And the day then comes. Ray Moowment is arrested without
incident while being surveilled as his home is rated.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
Wow, I'm reading them his rights. You're done? And he
argued with me, and I said, I'm telling you, I'm
reading them his rights right now. I read rays rights.
I said, do you want to talk? And Ray just
nodds and said no, which I knew was going to happen.
I said that's it. Take him back to his cell

(45:28):
and that was it. But then I left to go
to where they were serving the search for That was
crazy because they got into that locker room and I
thought I'd get there too late to see anything. Well,
it took him forever to get into that locker room
because they had to get a locksmith to break in

(45:49):
because it was a really high dollar lock that he
had on the room. And then inside was safe and
that took the guy probably another two hours to break in.
They're safe. So we were there quite late, and I
think we took all together. We took like three hundred
and seventy nine thousand dollars in cash and eighty five
guns and it was quite a hall woosh.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
I love that he had to bring in a locksmith
to break into Rai's secret room and it took them hours. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
Yeah, So Ray is arrested, Billy's in custody, and they're
linking them together. So Ray and Billy are both in custody.
The atf IRS FBI, they're like, we've got the trench
co robbers. These are the trench coat robbers. Ray's brother
then turns in the Duffel bags, which are of course
full of cash traceable back to the Sea First bank robbery.

(46:48):
So they still needed a little bit more than the
photo and the cash. Like, they know who they are,
but they need to be able to prove it. And
so they go back through the mail cover and see
that Billy at one point mailed RAYA Keach was safe
deposit box in Washington State where the Sea First being
robbery happened. And they then remember that intern who pulled

(47:11):
all these arrest records, and they see mugshots going back
to nineteen sixty two for their record boosting. Wow, and
they're arrested together at certain times, and so you have
the names and different police reports. So certainly the photo
was really great evidence, but they had been linked many
other ways.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
Once everyone sort.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
Of collaborated, really largely thanks to the investigation done by
the ETF. That's really what broke the case wide open.

Speaker 3 (47:40):
And I remember when I'm sitting down with all these
FBI agents and they said, man, if we could only
put them together. I reached into my boxes stuff and
I pulled out that police report and I said, well,
will this do? They got arrested together stealing records in Springfield,
And they said, how why did you do all this?

(48:02):
They just couldn't get over it that we did a
pen register, and we did the mail cover and we
did all this stuff. I had a file about an
inch and a half thick of all his prior arrests.
None of them resulted in a conviction though, I mean,
he didn't do time.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
What an exciting moment when it all comes together. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
And you know, Paul said multiple times throughout the interview
like he thinks highly of the FBI. He was glad
that they were collaborating with this, but ultimately they kind
of take center stage at the end of the story
after he's done all this like work, and you could
tell it's a little bit like no. But the transcoll
robberies are finally brought to justice. They're arrested in nineteen

(48:47):
ninety seven and they're charged with some of the bank robberies.
But the issue is that even though these different organizations
like that BI and the ATF are able to put
together well over twenty around twenty seven bank robbery, the
statue of limitations was up on most of them. Really, Yeah,
a lot of them had like a five year statue
of limitation.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
So what could they do.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Yeah, So they have three robberies that they're able to
charge them with. That is the US Bank in Portland, Oregon,
which took place in February of nineteen ninety four, they
still two hundred and thirty three thousand dollars, a bank
in Ohio on October sixth, nineteen ninety four three hundred
and sixty two thousand dollars, and of course the Seafirst
Bank in Washington, where they still four point five million,

(49:31):
four point four million, but we can round up.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
So in nineteen ninety eight, Billy decides he's going to
take a plea deal. And here is where it kind
of turns for me with Billy, because he has told
Myra a lot over the years.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
I was going to ask that because when they get
the call, they're freaking out, seemingly together. She also knows
we're paying for this cabin in cash. So how much
does she know? She knows a lot? I called her,
did Yeah, she didn't answer. Oh that's a emailed her. Wow.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
Yeah, no answer from Myra, But yeah, I think she
knew a lot. I think he had told her more
and more, and so she pleads with him to take
a deal. Okay, and he does, and so he goes
into custody in nineteen ninety seven. He takes the plead
deal in early nineteen ninety eight, and he was released
in twenty eleven.

Speaker 1 (50:24):
Wow, okay, I called him too and no answer. Okay,
But Mara wasn't charged with anything.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
So Mayra okay, had tried to bail him out when
he first was arrested.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
What did she use? Stolen cash?

Speaker 2 (50:38):
So yeah, I think she did, like six months for
money laundering or something. I mean, she must have really
loved this guy. Ray, on the other hand, decides to
take his case to trial, and I think a lot
of that was based on that. He thought that the
searches were not up to above board and so could
they really use all the evidence that they said they
had on him? And he was found guilty and he

(51:02):
was sentenced to two hundred and ninety five months in prison.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
How many years is that? It's a lot. I think
it was twenty four years or something like that. Whereas
Billy served what would that have been tennish?

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Yeah, like less than fifteen years okay. Yeah, So let's
see here. Ray was sentenced over twenty four years, okay,
so quite a bit longer. Yeah, and Ray ended up
passing away in prison once. We'll talk more about in
a minute, but I want to say Ray and Billy
they didn't kill anyone, but they stole a lot of
money and traumatized a lot of people who stood between

(51:38):
them and that money, and most of those people were
just at work doing their jobs. They held the family
at gunpoint in the middle of the night, they exchanged
gunfire with officers who were obviously also just doing their job,
so it was not a victimless crime spree. And indirectly,
they also had two other major victims, which were two
other bank robbers. Really yeah, So Frank Bulldock and Francis Larkin.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
And there's an interesting side story. Two other guys from
Boston had gotten arrested by the FBI for two of
the jobs that they did in Wisconsin. And these guys
actually got convicted.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
Oh my gosh, So two other guys are wrongly convicted
for robberies committed by Ray and Billy.

Speaker 1 (52:28):
Yes, were they actual bankrobbers or not? And they just
got convicted of these crimes and either way it's yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
So basically what happened is Frank Bulldock and Francis Arkin
had been charged with having committed an armored car robbery
in Boston. They hadn't been convicted of that crime at
this point, but they had been charged stealing a large
amount of cash from an armored car. An FBI agent
who happened to be either familiar with or working on

(52:56):
the trench Coat robber case was visiting Boston when he
reads an article about this duo that robs an armored
car and he's like, boom, these must be the trench
Coat robbers.

Speaker 1 (53:07):
You know, it's not unreasonable.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
So they arrest Bulldock and Larkin and they are actually
convicted for having robbed a bank in Milwaukee in nineteen
ninety one, which was actually not them, it was billion Ray.
Bulldock was sentenced to forty eight years and four months
in prison. Larkin was sentenced to thirty two years and
six months in prison, and they ended up actually just

(53:31):
dropping the armored car robbery charges after that, because you know,
they're effectively spending the rest of their lives in prison. Now,
these guys were not innocent in their lives. They're innocent
of this specific robbery that they were charged with. But
Bulldock had been convicted of second degree murder in Massachusetts
and released on parole before this all happened. So yeah,

(53:52):
I don't want to also make it seem like they
were not problematic in their own ways, but they certainly
shouldn't have been convicted of this crime.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
They were convicted did of a crime they did not commit.
So then it was that overturned and were they released.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
Yeah, So during their imprisonment, the trench cut robbers are
found out and arrested. So I think it was Billy
who admits to this Milwaukee robbery, and when that is revealed,
they have to release these people. So they were both
released from prison in nineteen ninety nine. I'm not discussing
their other crimes because it just wasn't part of the story.
But they didn't do the crime that they were serving

(54:25):
all this time for, which is a huge miscarriage of justice.

Speaker 1 (54:27):
Totally, it doesn't you know, I mean, it doesn't really matter.
It reminds me of our Jennifer Thompson episode where you know,
she talked about putting the wrong person in prison, no
matter if you think they're a good person or not,
is an injustice And so I'm glad that they got released.
And that's really wild. Totally.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
And I will say that Buldock sued for nine million
dollars for the wrongful conviction.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
It's also why it's terrible idea, like obviously, you know
it wasn't intentional, but yeah, then they're of course they're
going to sue and yeah, we'll get money.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
The judge actually I think threw it out because they
were like, you're not innocent, okay, But I mean, yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Little side story there, But isn't that so crazy? So crazy?

Speaker 2 (55:10):
That is largely the story of the trench Coat Robbers.
But Ray Bowman was also a father, and you know,
I had listened to that great podcast My Fugitive Dad,
and I'm like, what is it like, Like, what is
that like to know your dad as this other person
portrayed in the media. And so I reached out to

(55:31):
a couple of family members and I was lucky enough
to speak with Sam Bowman, who.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
Is Ray's daughter.

Speaker 4 (55:38):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Yeah, and you know, she was really young when this
all happened, but of course it has tremendously impacted her
life and still does. And you know, I asked Sam
about her dad and the man that she knew, because
she didn't know this version of him, and I also
want to first say before I get into the Sam

(55:59):
Bowman and of it all. Sam was so great and acknowledged.
So we were getting into our conversation talking about the
fact that her dad went to prison and she didn't
get to spend most of her life with him because
of that, and then he passed away in prison. She
was like, yeah, and his time was cut short, but
by his own choices, and she fully acknowledged what he did.

(56:22):
And I think it is totally within her rights to
also acknowledge that he was her dad. And so I
asked her if she had any memories that she would
share with me about Ray as her dad.

Speaker 5 (56:35):
I think about him in his giant green armchair. He
used to stick his lower lip out in a very
specific way, and he would always be reading the newspaper,
and he's just under this warm yellow light and a
stark outside the house. And that's where he would always

(56:55):
be if he was home and not doing anything else
in the house, he would just be in that chair
and reading. And then every night I would climb in
his lab and I'd lay down and he'd run my
back and I'd watch the TV like sixty minutes whatever
was on or cops and then he'd run my back
until I went to sleep, and then he would carry
me to my room and tuck me in and say

(57:17):
buenos noches, and I would go to sleep.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
That's really sweet. It's really sweet.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
I mean, I'm so glad she has that memory of him,
and Sam was just so great, and she does have
in her own way, like a sense of humor about
all of this. And she said, you know, he also,
I remember, had a lot of trench coats, which of
course has been widely reported on. But here's what she
had to say about it.

Speaker 5 (57:42):
Actually, he used to obviously wore trench coats a lot.
He was very very fast, obviously. Yeah, so he was
very fashionable. I know, he used to wear like Italian
silk button down shirts or whatever.

Speaker 4 (57:54):
He was always well dressed. My mother was always well dressed.

Speaker 5 (57:57):
They believed in presenting themselves in that way to the world,
which I also like to do in my own personal style.
But specifically, what I loved was he wore like Italian
leather shoes, like specific leather shoes that were made for
his feet, which means that he had those Oh gosh,
they're like wooden feet.

Speaker 2 (58:19):
Yeah, and so I was picturing this like, Okay, you
have this dad who wears nice clothes and has these
like custom shoe shapeholders. It's like he tucks her into
bed at night, but he also watches cops.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
I know.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
I was going to say, I'm like, I love that
she watches cops with him. Yes, this is something that's
interesting to him, right.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
She said that he loved watching shows like that, And
I'm like, is this guy just an adrenaline junkie?

Speaker 1 (58:46):
Wow? Wow? I love hearing these details about him. You
know that he was like obviously really cared about his
clothes and spent a lot of time and money on
his appearance.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
Yeah, and I wasn't able to locate these people, but
I heard through my veryvarious phone calls and research that
actually Ray and Billy overall now after the zip tide
and pointing guns at people, acknowledging that were kind. Like
there were instances where someone said it's too tight, it's
hurting me, and they would loosen it a little bit
and reassure them they were going to be okay. And look,

(59:17):
I don't want to overstate a level of kindness when
you're robbing a bank and people are terrified, but they had,
you know, these different layers to them, and I loved
talking with Sam and hearing about this other part of
Ray that you don't hear about. I asked her, though,
looking back, could she remember any display of wealth or
money that might have seemed out of place given their

(59:40):
otherwise modest lifestyle because she was so young.

Speaker 5 (59:44):
I like to say that I'm very lucky. I had
no conscious concept of money until after it happened, when
we immediately had no money. To me, No, there was
nothing I would say that was extravagant. I know he
used to have like it wasn't great, but it was
gorgeous at the time. I was in nineteen eighty six Corvette.
At one point he had Harley that was from like

(01:00:06):
the seventy three something like that. He liked his clothes,
he liked to eat well. I remember, because we lived
outside Kansas City, we would go to the plaza and
he would.

Speaker 4 (01:00:17):
Spoil us with toys.

Speaker 5 (01:00:19):
Toys like when we were born when because my older sister,
he would spoil her with me with my little sister,
but like we just toys galore.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
Yeah, he sounds like a great guy on it. Yeah,
he's a great guy. I mean obviously they committed a crime.
They also did their time for it. But there's something
really romantic about bank robbers because it's sort of like
this idea that they were like, you know, this whole
thing with the American dream, this whole like thing I'm

(01:00:49):
born into, or I'm gonna maybe have to work this
nine to five. And I don't know their backgrounds, but
it seems like neither of them came from wealth and
they were like, actually, we'll just cheat the system and
we're going to do a different And then it's sort
of hard to be super sympathetic when they're stealing from banks,
you know, right, So there's something that feels very like
adventurous about it. And I am not discounting the fact

(01:01:12):
that they also terrified people. But yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
We talked about this so much, but especially talking to Sam,
just being reminded that people are, you know, dynamic, and
it doesn't mean something that he did wasn't wrong. But
he was also a dad who clearly loved his children
and he really I think did what he could to
sort of protect them from what was going on. You know,
Paul Marquart, the ATF agent, we've been hearing clips from

(01:01:38):
said that at Ray's trial, when Jenny learned the amount
of money that he had stolen in the Seafirst bank robbery,
she audibly gasped in the courtroom. I mean, she truly
had no idea, and you know, she was completely innocent
of the crimes that he committed. We talked about Mayra
Penny Billy's girlfriend, on the other hand, who had been
arrested for money laundering. She also then wanted to shield

(01:01:59):
her children Drin from it as much as she could,
So for the most part, Sam actually grew up knowing
nothing specific about what happened.

Speaker 5 (01:02:08):
So obviously all of this happens when I'm like first grade,
and that's like the fallout of is first in the
second grade.

Speaker 4 (01:02:16):
So being that young, my mom.

Speaker 5 (01:02:17):
Said, daddy broke a rule and he has to go
to time out for a while, because that's how you
explain that to like.

Speaker 4 (01:02:24):
A five year old four five year old, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:02:28):
And that it was it made sense, and I kind
of held on to that for so long. But that's
what I held on too from that was, Oh, he's
going to come home, Like he'll come back.

Speaker 4 (01:02:37):
He's just in time out.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
Yeah, I mean, it's sad, and she would go and
visit her father sometimes while he was in prison, but
was so young that the visit was, you know, it's
in a very controlled environment and it's not like she's
using that time to ask a lot of questions. But
they would exchange letters and birthday cards. And another sweet
thing that Sam told me is that her uncle, her

(01:03:01):
father's brothers would send birthday cards blink to Ray for
him to fill out to his kids in prison, and
he always would And I just thought that was so
sweet the way they really rallied, you know, because when
all of this happened, Jenny then had no money nowhere
to go. She had been relying on Ray financially, which
I think is the case in a lot of households,
and they moved in with one of her sisters in Georgia.

(01:03:24):
She had to go back to work to support the family.
And so when I asked Sam Moore about like, what
did you know and when did you find out? She
was like, you know, life just sort of keeps moving
and it's not like you don't have questions, but it
doesn't consume your thoughts because it's your normal. But one
day it is revealed to her. Actually Sam was home

(01:03:45):
with her older sister, and her older sister was watching
a crime show on television.

Speaker 4 (01:03:51):
We were in Georgia.

Speaker 5 (01:03:53):
We lived in an apartment out there, and my older
sister had told me, SAVING need to go to your
room and middle of the day and she's watching TV,
and I'm like, why are you telling me to go
to my room?

Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
That's rude. I don't need to be in there.

Speaker 5 (01:04:07):
So I pretend to go to my room and then
I sneak back out and I'm hiding behind the couch
in our living room and she's watching the TV, and
from behind the couch, me peeking around the corner. I
found out what my dad did and what his life
was before he.

Speaker 4 (01:04:25):
Had me and when he had me and after he
had me.

Speaker 5 (01:04:29):
And I found out about the trial, and I found
out about everything. And I was ten years old, nine
years old, ten years old. Yeah, no one had to
tell me. I found out. It was just so.

Speaker 4 (01:04:42):
Such a surreal way to realize that, just to.

Speaker 5 (01:04:46):
Actually come to terms with, oh, he's not coming back,
because you don't come back from that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Yeah, I mean, we didn't get into the specifics of this.
She was so young when it all happened, but I
am ad you know he was sentenced to twenty four years.
That's an amount of time that's hard to comprehend as
an adult and as a child it's impossible. And so
I think Jenny, just in an effort to protect them,
was sort of also protecting the details of that. And
he's in time out and we'll see him when we

(01:05:15):
see him, and they did go and visit, but it
was difficult. And Sam, because of this experience, really sees
what we've seen, which is that people are capable of
good and bad. And that's the case for almost everyone.

Speaker 4 (01:05:32):
I think every because it's it's so.

Speaker 5 (01:05:37):
These shades of gray that people have, where no one
is black or white, it's everyone as a shade of gray.
Everyone thought and experienced my dad as this wonderful person.
And obviously his brother knew good and bad. I'm sure
his mom knew good and bad. But he was kind

(01:05:57):
in so many ways, and he was my dad, and
he was, in my opinion for a short time, a
very good dad, so reconciling. I think that's why it
made such a sad impact on so many people. The
people who knew him for so long understood that he
had been doing this for so long and were like,

(01:06:18):
you did this to yourself? Well, so mourning the fact
that he had started a family, he had kids, he
was trying to do better in some ways, and was
trying to be there for us.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
Ray passed away in prison in twenty eleven. So Sam
actually has a tattoo on her arm that reminds her
of her dad, and it's a trench coat hanging on
this she or hanging on a coat rack with the
Italian leather. She's at the bottom of it. And she
said that she'll find herself holding her arm where the
tattoo is at times and it just reminds her of him.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
And I just really loved that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:55):
I mean, Sam is such a thoughtful, kind, introspective person
and it's just one of the ways that she has
processed her grief. So thank you so much to Sam
for sharing her story with us as well.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
So glad that you were able to speak with her. Yeah,
I'm curious, you know, So when they were finally caught,
how much money was found that they actually took?

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Do you know I tried to figure this out and
I couldn't. They re covered some of it, but not
all of it, is the short answer.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Well, that's my other question. First of all, yeah, if
I were the brother, good for him for following, yeah,
the law and doing the right thing. But he probably
could have held onto those defel bags full of money
and I would have been okay. But you think about
all of those safety deposit boxes and bank boxes like
spread out across the country, and I'm like, did they
find all of it? Did they?

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Not impossible to say? And I you know, Billy didn't
answer the phone, but I certainly would have asked. I
know that Ray also told his mother, Hey, here's a
Kido safe deposit box if anything happens to me. You know,
when things started heating up, he was trying to sort
of help his family before he went to prison, I think.
But yeah, sounds like his family turned in any money

(01:08:05):
that they became aware of. And yeah, I don't know,
it's a lot of money to recover, and it sounds
like they were pretty good at hiding it. I asked Sam,
you know, do you get that question? And she's like, sometimes,
and I understand people's curiosity, but that usually people's response
is pretty empathetic when she tells them.

Speaker 1 (01:08:21):
Yeah, I mean, what a wild thing. It's like such
a banana story. Yeah, and then if it's like your
life though, yeah, and your father, then it's you know,
very real and a whole different thing. Totally. Yeah. So
that is the story of the trench Coat Rock Circesia.
What a story. I loved it. Thanks for listening. We'll

(01:08:44):
be back next week.

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):
If you have a story for us, we would love
to hear it. Our email is The Knife at exactly
rightmedia dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram
at the Knife Podcast.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Or a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast. This has
been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced by me
Hannah Smith and me Paytia Eten.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Samarosi.

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):
This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer
is Christina Chamberlain. Our theme music is by Birds in
the Airport, artwork by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff,
Georgia Hardstark and Daniell Kramer.