Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption

by Hopwood, Shon

  Sometimes we didn’t talk about it for a week, but neither of us liked to think that we were the kind of guys who were all talk and no action. So a kind of moronic shame set in, like, if we didn’t rob a bank, it would be another reason to think we were losers.

  I was still working for the fat farmer. Just as my dad had taught me, I would go through the cattle checking for sick ones, which you can tell because they have strings of saliva suspended from their mouths, glassy eyes, and general sluggishness. I washed cow dung from the feeding troughs and kept thinking that the barn stank like my life. I figured I needed some sort of flood to wash away the stink, and this part of my life.

  My trial date on the bad checks had come and gone and I hadn’t shown up. I didn’t have the money for a lawyer, and I was too depressed to ask Dad for a loan or to show up in court by myself. My arrest was imminent.

  Tom and I did have the plan, however. Next time I saw him at the bar I said it was time.

  On a Sunday morning in August of 1997 I was waiting for Tom to pick me up at my parents’ house. I had a small duffel bag of clothes and hygiene items. I had Dad’s old toolbox stuffed with canvas totes for the cash.

  Before Tom arrived I asked my brother Brook to come down to the basement. I told him that I was going to do something that could possibly get me killed if things went badly. I might have to drop out of sight, maybe permanently. When he asked what it was, I told him.

  I also told him that I wanted everyone in the family to know that I loved them. I trusted that he wouldn’t go run to Dad and try to stop me, because once right after I had come back from the Navy and was still recovering from pancreatitis, I had opened a beer and Brook, thinking it might land me back in the emergency room, had run to tell Dad. We had had it out over that.

  There was a honk at the curb. Brook gave me a hug.

  “Don’t get hurt,” he said.

  “I don’t intend to.”

  Tom and I drove north. We had run through the plan so often that actually doing it seemed like being in a movie that we had seen too many times—if never quite to the end.

  Listening to the story, Robby nodded.

  “Man, that’s a good feeling,” he said. “I used to feel the same way when I was finally on the road to go cook a big batch. On the road about to make something happen, yes sir.”

  I told him happiness was not exactly the feeling. I had been happy shooting hoops with my father. I had been happy out hunting on the farm when I was in high school. I had been happy chasing girls around David City. That was a lively kind of happiness. This was something else—an anxious feeling twisted up right underneath my navel, but, yes, it was a relief to be in motion.

  When we were a few towns away from the bank in Petersburg, we started to look for a car to steal. Neither of us knew how to hot-wire a car, so we needed to find one with the keys in it, which isn’t too hard in a small town on a Sunday evening. We needed a car that was nondescript, so no one would recognize it. “Oh, here comes Dr. Smith’s car with two punks in it.”

  We thought the parking lot of a church might be a good place, since everyone would be inside for a long time. That’s what happened. Wearing a ball cap and work gloves, I walked along a sidewalk with Tom following a little ways behind in the car. I saw keys dangling in an ignition. It was a Chrysler New Yorker, a car that would not have any mechanical problems. I nodded to Tom. I looked around and just did it.

  I really felt like a jerk for doing it.

  I was driving out of town, fast, but not too fast. Suddenly I couldn’t figure which street would take me to the highway. I pulled onto a wide street and nearly collided with Tom. I followed him out to the highway. I was a nervous wreck. I had never committed a felony.

  There was a pocket radio scanner plugged into Tom’s ear to monitor the cops. He was very professional about all this. He was exactly the kind of partner in crime you would want to have, except for his conscience, which was a bit too developed for this work. He stayed ahead of me, driving and listening. I had my eye constantly on the rearview mirror, sure we would see a cop blinking after us any second. You can see it in your mind: a guy rushes into the church, says, “Hey Bill, some kid just drove away in your car.” They get on the phone to the sheriff, and it’s off to the races. You see that in your mind and you feel stupid, like, how did I think we could get away with this?

  Tom’s turn signal was suddenly blinking. He turned onto a gravel road and I followed. I could see why. On the highway ahead were the flashing red and blue lights of a cop car. Was it a roadblock, or just somebody stopped for a ticket? We couldn’t chance it. We took back roads to the abandoned farm. I kept listening for sirens behind us but they never came.

  We stashed the stolen car in the barn and drove the Tempo farther down the highway to Norfolk, where we checked into a cheap hotel using Tom’s name. That doesn’t seem too bright, but we couldn’t obtain any fake identification.

  Monday morning arrived. It’s hard to pull yourself out of bed when you know your life is going to change that day or maybe end. I felt the cool of the pillow for a few seconds more. Then I sucked up the air and sat up to do it, to have a new life, short or long.

  We drove to Tom’s family farm property and stashed the Tempo. From there we drove the big grain truck to the abandoned farm above Petersburg, jumped in the stolen car, and drove down to the bank. In town we noticed a sheriff’s patrol car parked about half a block from the bank. We rolled past the bank a second and third time, killed some time out of town, came back, and the sheriff’s car was still parked there. We went back to the abandoned farm to wait and think.

  We cruised around and found another abandoned farm, this one with an old chicken coop, leaning and almost collapsed. There wasn’t anything else around. If the thing caught fire, it would probably be doing someone a favor. And it would likely make a plume of smoke so that the volunteer fire department, and any deputy in town, would go roaring out to see what was up.

  We sat on a hill and watched the town. We looked over at the hill where a few generations of chicken feathers produced a greasy streak of smoke across the sky. The town remained still; no siren sounded or light blinked. No person moved on the street. The whole town had the look of one of those fake towns they built in the 1950s to test atom bombs.

  “What do you think?” Tom asked.

  “I think the whole town fell asleep,” I said.

  “They’re probably looking out their windows and thinking, thank God somebody finally burned that ugly chicken coop,” Tom said. “Maybe we should just take all this as a sign. Maybe we should just go home. We don’t need to do this,” he said.

  “I need this, Tom. If I don’t rob a bank, I’m going to jail for sure. If I do rob a bank, I’ll have some money for a lawyer and maybe I won’t go to jail. It’s backward, I know, but it is what it is.”

  Tom stood glaring but didn’t answer me.

  “With or without you, I’m doing it,” I said. “You don’t have to. Give me the keys and you take the grain truck back to the Tempo and go home. I’ll make do with the stolen car. Just let me have the keys.”

  He spun the key ring on his finger for maybe half a minute. I would not see a look that serious on a man again until prison.

  “There’s no way I’m letting you go down there alone,” he said.

  We suited up, gunned up, and headed for the Petersburg State Bank. The deputy’s car was still there, but we figured we would ignore it and hope for the best.

  People who say they don’t get scared when committing crimes like robberies are either high on crack or liars or both. From the moment I walked into the bank, every part of my body wanted to walk back out. I was sweating profusely, my heart rate was elevated, and I had that eerie feeling of hypersensitivity, like I had some sort of super power of hearing, smell, and sight.

  I walked in first, dressed as a construction worker with big boots, coveralls, a hardhat, and a mask covering everything but my eyes. As I stepped inside the double doo
rs, I expected all eyes to be on me, but people were busy. A teller was handing a deposit slip to a customer, and a manager was talking with a farmer in an office to the side of me. I noticed a banner with the high school football schedule displayed. There was a brief moment of calm before I dropped the metal toolbox to the floor. I almost didn’t want to drop it, but I did.

  When it landed, everyone jumped. I calmly unzipped my coveralls and pulled the rifle from the right leg—I had walked in stiff legged—and announced the day’s revised agenda.

  “This .. is .. a .. robbery!” I shouted.

  From the corner of my right eye I saw movement in the office as the manager and a farmer moved toward the glass vestibule through which I had just entered. I wasn’t worried, because I knew Tom would soon enter, cutting them off from escape. He did.

  People sort of smiled or looked confused, like Who put you up to this? A teller actually asked if it was a joke, with a stare that made me understand that such jokes were certainly not welcome. I had to yell again at everybody to get down. They finally understood it was serious. People dropped, their bellies touching the polished floor. Tom grabbed the canvas bags from the toolbox and went to the tellers’ tills. He emptied them.

  He wanted me to keep a vigilant eye on the windows facing the street, to see if the sheriff’s deputy was coming. We had a modified system of nicknames pulled from the movie Reservoir Dogs, like I was Mr. Red and he was Mr. Black, so we could use those names if we had to yell at each other. He suddenly wanted me to keep a better eye on the windows. He meant to yell, “Check the windows, Mr. Red.” What he said was, “Check the windows, Hopwood!”

  For a brief moment I thought about pointing the gun barrel toward my own head and pulling the trigger, but I figured I could always do that later. I might as well play out the scene.

  A lady entered the double glass doors, about to come inside the bank. Through the inner glass door she studied me—first the mask, then the rifle at my side. She smiled and entered anyway.

  I ordered her to the floor. She was nervously shaking on the ground. But I tried not to think about it. I focused on the small tasks. Check the window. Survey the room. Check my watch. Check the window again. Yell at Tom—not by name—to hurry because we were already into our third minute.

  Tom emptied the tills down to the change. He was living in an apartment with coin-operated laundry and had decided to take the quarters; his plan was that he would never need quarters for laundry again. He told me before the robbery that all the quarters would be his, and I almost thought that was half his reason for going ahead with the thing.

  We locked everyone in the vault. Nobody cried. We said they would be out and safe in just a few minutes. It was, in fact, our intention to call the cops ourselves if we didn’t hear on the scanner that the people were soon out.

  The plan was for Tom to exit the bank first and jump in the driver’s side, since he would be driving. I would come out behind him with the bags of money.

  But when we left the bank he walked to the passenger’s side, opened the door, and plopped himself down on the seat. He looked up at me, and he could read my expression even through the mask I was wearing.

  Tom was normally the calm one.

  We sped at ninety down the highway for five miles before turning onto the gravel road. Once we arrived at the farm, we drove the car as far into the woods as we could. We switched from coveralls to farm boy attire. With my rifle, with the moneybags, and with the portable scanner—listening to the dispatch commotion through the earpiece—I sat on the bed of the grain truck.

  As the truck rolled slowly away from Petersburg, the scanner lit up with cop chatter—it was pandemonium. The good news was that everyone was out of the vault. The bad news was they had provided excellent descriptions of us already.

  The Norfolk police dispatcher that day was a girl we both knew. Trish had graduated from David City a year before us, and her husband, Scott, was a friend and classmate of ours. He had been the football team quarterback and the basketball point guard—the guy who had thrown me a couple thousand bounce passes to start our motion offense.

  The cops started yelling over the scanner. They said they had the vehicle spotted and were about to take it down. I clutched my rifle and waited for the grain truck to either pick up speed or stop. I couldn’t communicate with Tom up front, but I figured he would soon see the blinking lights of the cop cars. There was nothing I could do. I guessed it was all over.

  Then maybe two minutes later there was a shout on the scanner.

  “We got ’em. They did not resist. We have them in custody. No sign of weapons or money.”

  Twin boys, eighteen years old, had been pulled over at gunpoint while we ambled into thin air. The twins were questioned and later released. We owe them an apology for sure.

  We had successfully robbed our first bank. We split $50,000.

  A week later we met at a bar in Lincoln. Tom felt terrible about what we had done. So did I. He thought we should give the money back. I didn’t.

  “We could just send it to them in a box, with a note of some kind.”

  “What kind of a note?”

  He tried a few ideas for notes, but they didn’t make much sense. Something about how they should tighten their security or stop robbing farmers blind, but I’m sure they weren’t doing any such thing.

  “Listen, man, we have the money and we are not giving it back,” I said. “That’s how bank robbery is done. You keep it. It’s a risk and reward thing.”

  Tom decided to just go back to college and have a life and hope this thing never caught up with him. He would use the money for tuition.

  He almost made it work. A year and a half later, when he was finally arrested, and after I had held up four more banks without him, he was taken down and cuffed right as he was coming out from taking a test. He was a criminal justice major. There was a chance he would have applied to become an FBI agent. He would have been a good one. When you think about it, the world is full of people doing good work because they never got caught doing that very stupid something when they were younger and crazier. Of course, we were way over the top in that department.

  The money didn’t do me any good, by the way. I went to jail anyway a few weeks later for buying my underage brother beer. That’s when Pastor Marty Barnhart came to see me, wanting to save me. But I was already planning the next bank job.

  Mail call. The big plastic tub was dragged in, scraping along the concrete floor. We waited on our perches, hoping to be called down. I would often receive encouraging letters, as I said, and by this time I was also receiving legal mail relating to the work I was doing for the other guys.

  It was December of 2000, almost two years since my arrival at Pekin. Back home, except to my family, I was becoming a forgotten man.

  “Hopwood!”

  I walked down the steel stairs. It was a postcard. I looked at the return address. It was from Ann Marie Metzner.

  What the …? I tried not to look excited, but there was a small bounce in my step on the way back up to my cell.

  Mom had mentioned a few months earlier that Ann Marie had asked for my address, but I didn’t believe she would actually write. I simply couldn’t fathom the possibility. For a minute I couldn’t bring myself to read it. I stared at her neat printing, with tiny circles dotting her i’s.

  I read the card. I read it again as I paced the cell. Robby came in and I tossed the card down like it was a trivial piece of junk mail. After he left, I read it once, twice, maybe ten times. The card had a faint scent of perfume—surely the result of resting next to an envelope doused in perfume from some other woman sent to some other prisoner.

  Ann Marie wrote to say hello and to ask if I needed anything. She had been following my situation through her visits with Mom at the office. She mentioned, in a few words, her engagement and about problems with an eating disorder. I knew from things Mom had said that Ann Marie had been fighting anorexia and that her health had been damaged
by it. I knew she had turned her college studies to nutrition as a way of fighting back.

  Prison life is made bearable by fantasies. I thought I already had a quality one with the imagined paralegal career. Some guys imagine they will own a strip club and have gorgeous girls hanging on them. Or, like I said, they’ll be rap stars. Some just want to get back to a farm or family. I had always tried to keep my fantasies within the realm of reality.

  But with this card it was suddenly difficult not to imagine a friendship with Ann Marie. I could no doubt learn something from this woman. Maybe some of her kindness would rub off on me. And maybe I could give her strength through letters and an understanding of her situation.

  Yeah, right, like she needed anything from a guy in the joint.

  I kept picking up the card and wondering exactly how real it was. It seemed real.

  I wrote back immediately. I’m not one of those guys who needs days to process something. The reply ran too long at first, so I rewrote it. I wanted my handwriting to appear neat, but that was a task beyond me. I rewrote it again.

  The first thing I asked was whether she had written out of sympathy, for either me or my mom. I didn’t need that. Friends, I needed—sympathy, not so much. So I asked if that was why she was writing.

  Assuming she wasn’t writing out of sympathy, I was also concerned that one wrong word might make her swim away from her little nibble, never to write again. So I wrote the initial letter over and over again, hoping to choose just the right words. In closing the letter, I asked her to please write again, and I asked if she might send some pictures, as I was curious to see what she looked like.

  I figured it would take a day or two for her to receive the letter, a day for it to sit on her desk, a day for her reply, and then it would have to go through the mail, if she replied at all.

  I had sent her a sufficiently inappropriate, too long, too personal reply, surely asking for more than she was willing to give. But prison dreams prosper in the thinnest of soils, so I kept standing at the rail for her reply.