Unfortunate Choices: 3 lives and a robbery gone awry, Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Three 20-something men in Seward in August 1971 pulled off the largest bank robbery in Alaska history. They also poorly planned their escape and were quickly captured. When this part of the story begins, they have been behind bars for one year.

It was August 1972, almost a full year since Paul Thomas Stavenjord, Robert Garner Jett and Randall Morris Simmons had pulled off a history-making bank robbery in Seward. It had also been almost a full year since the three young Alaskans had been arrested and charged; now their cases were about to go to trial.

With hard time in a federal penitentiary staring each of them in the face, lawyers for both sides began negotiating. Soon, it was expected, a deal would be forthcoming to allow the defendants to avoid a long and risky trial and to give them an opportunity to shorten their sentences.

In their Anchorage cells, the troubled trio could only wait and hope — and ponder, again, how far their plans had gone awry.

At the time of the robbery, both Jett and Simmons had reportedly been on parole from the Federal Youth Center in Englewood, Colorado. Stavenjord, according to sources, had also previously been incarcerated in Colorado on a felony charge. There are mixed reports concerning which of the men actually concocted the scheme to rob the Seward branch of the First National Bank of Anchorage, but it may have been that the theft was the brainchild of Stavenjord and Simmons.

Witness Steve Leis had tried to take the onus off his friend Jett. He told authorities that Jett had not come to Seward with Stavenjord and Simmons. Leis knew this because he personally driven Jett to town. On the morning of Aug. 4, just hours before the robbery, Leis, driving from Anchorage, had detoured to Seward to drop off Jett before continuing on to Kenai for a fishing trip.

Before he left Seward, however, Leis did see the three men together, fixing a flat tire on a 1964 tan-and-white Chevy Nova. That vehicle, which would turn out to be the getaway car, had been stolen the previous night from a Holiday Motors lot in Anchorage.

Jett’s attorney later unsuccessfully argued that Jett had been in Seward just by chance and had gotten caught up in “the adventure of thing.” But Jett’s own criminal past and some of his prior actions argued otherwise.

The trio’s own statements to authorities, for instance, made it clear that Jett had more than a passing familiarity with Simmons. The shotgun wielded by Jett during the robbery had been won by Simmons in a pool game a week earlier. Simmons had then given the weapon to Jett.

When the three men entered the bank at about 2:30 in the afternoon, each of them was carrying a weapon, thereby establishing their crime as armed robbery. Jett, shotgun in hand, guarded the front door of the bank. Simmons and Stavenjord, each with a pistol, commanded eight bank employees and 16 customers to lie face-down on the floor while they cleared out the cash from the tellers’ cages.

They then forced bank manager Dick Enberg to enter the vault, where they stuffed more cash into a large, rubberized bag.

While the robbery was in progress, local high school students Barbara Peterson and Rosemary Blatchford walked into the bank. Peterson, according to the Seward Phoenix Log the next day, said that a man —almost certainly Jett — grabbed her arm and told her to lie on the floor. “I was too scared to look up to see they really had guns,” she told the newspaper. “I could only think — just like on TV.”

At this point, many things were occurring simultaneously: Outside, Lt. Donald F. Riley, the only Seward police officer on duty, was sitting in his police cruiser across the street, waiting and watching. He had responded to a woman caller who had informed him, “There’s something strange going on. There are people lying on the floor of the bank.” Riley stayed where he was, concerned about endangering lives if he confronted potentially armed perpetrators on a busy downtown street.

Inside, Jett had noticed the police presence. Bank-teller trainee Suzanne Tanner heard Jett yell to his partners, “Hurry up! There’s a pig outside!”

The robbers confessed later that they had been prepared to take hostages, if necessary, but since they were not approached inside the bank, they bolted onto the street and dashed for their getaway car.

As they got rolling, Lt. Riley pursued in his police vehicle, but other traffic prevented him from catching up as the suspects fled at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. Meanwhile, two other men were also in pursuit — Galen W. Albertson, a Seward public works employee who had seen Peterson pulled into the bank, and the city dog catcher.

Albertson navigated traffic in his yellow, half-ton city pickup. When the Nova, followed shortly thereafter by Riley’s police car, shot up the dusty gravel of the Lowell Canyon Road, Albertson pulled his truck across the road to create a roadblock should the suspects decide to turn around.

As the robbers ditched their car and hauled their heavy bag of money into the woods at the base of Mount Marathon, Lt. Riley was already radioing for assistance. Near the car later, one of the volunteers aiding law-enforcement officials would discover a stash of “several sticks” of dynamite, said the Anchorage Daily News.

“It apparently was their intention to mine the car so that if anyone touched the car or got into it, it would blow up,” said assistant U.S. attorney A. Lee Petersen later. “One of them apparently bothered to talk the other two out of it.”

Under questioning days later, the men admitted that they had eschewed any thought of attempting to drive the highway out of Seward. They believed that roadblocks would be quickly erected and prevent their safe exit. Instead, they decided that they could escape and avoid capture by taking to the mountains.

The police did, indeed, establish the roadblocks the robbers had anticipated. But they also did far more than that.

Capt. Dan Church arrived in Seward to lead the efforts of the Alaska State Troopers. The FBI dispatched agents to the scene, focused mainly on the robbery itself. From Aero Helicopters in Anchorage, the Troopers leased a chopper to aid their search efforts and haul into town more men and equipment. They also borrowed a tracking dog — an eight-year-old German shepherd named “Hite” — from Ted Fields, who operated a canine protection agency in Anchorage.

In addition, the Troopers brought in their Mobile Crime Laboratory to help the FBI.

The Civil Air Patrol flew search missions in the Lowell Canyon and Mount Marathon area until the weather began to sour.

All told, some 25 law-enforcement officials and numerous volunteers worked the case and searched for the suspects, who at this point remained unidentified.

About 36 hours after the robbery, the three men on the mountain were making their way downhill and hoping for better luck in town. But town is where their remaining luck ran out.

Now they had been locked up for an entire year. Now there was an official deal on the table.

TO BE CONTINUED….