Federal Marshals took us out of our handcuffs and left the courtroom. I was still standing with my mouth open, not knowing what was going on. Apparently, federal courts at this time didn’t choose to prosecute bank robbers unless they had either used automatic weapons or taken hostages. Neither of those circumstances were involved in our case.
But the federal courts relied on the arresting counties to prosecute these cases. So within about 45 seconds of being released from one set of cuffs, I was put into cuffs belonging to the County’s Sheriff Department and transported to the jail in up north, where I remained for the next 16 months.
County jail would make prison easier, but not easy. In county jail there are no “contact” visits. I watched my oldest daughter learn to walk and talk through a 3/4 inch piece of security glass. I consider this the saddest part of my story. The relationship that could have been between my first-born child and I was irreversibly damaged.
The county-level trial was going to last a long time. There were so many witnesses. Not only every customer in every bank we had been into was an eligible witness, but people in banks that were robbed by other people also showed up on the stand. See, we weren’t the only bank robbers in the city. We were just the only ones on trial, and we would be tried for every robbery that was yet unsolved.
150 witnesses. Some were scared, some angry, and a lot of them didn’t realize what they were saying when they testified against me. One was a friend of mine named Rachel Fitz. Her misguided effort to help on the stand went something like “Lloyd said he was robbing banks, but I didn’t believe him, he would never do that.” Thanks, Rache.
One of the first robberies we had done had proved to be timely. The cameras hadn’t been working and there weren’t pull-alarms in the money drawers — we would have been fine if we stayed and made coffee. The bank’s manager was a memorable witness. She was asked if she could identify the robber in the courtroom. She stated that her post inside the bank was such that she was facing a wall. All she saw was that he had “long thin legs and a small butt.” I was asked to stand in front of the courtroom and walk away from her so that she may look at my ass and perhaps identify me. If you think this was humiliating, you’re probably right. My ass did not convince her. I was not convicted of that robbery. What I came to find out was that a conviction really comes down to one thing — if I could be positively identified by one bank employee or customer that was proven “reliable.”
