bankguys.us

Welcome to Bankguys!

This web site has been designed to provide a location on the internet where police officers, bank security officers, and members of the general public can view bulletins and photographs from bank robberies in the Pittsburgh Metro area, Western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

The goal of this site is to identify and bring about the arrest of unknown bank robbers, based upon bank surveillance photographs, description, and modus operandi (m.o.).  Occasionally, we also feature known bank robbery fugitives.

Although almost all the photographs and bulletins come from robberies in the Pittsburgh Metro area, Western Pennsylvania, and the entire state of West Virginia, there are sometimes “guest appearances” from other jurisdictions.

A word about bank surveillance photographs

Bank surveillance photographs range in quality from “almost worthless” to “photo studio”, with the majority falling somewhere between those extremes.  Often you will see photographs displayed on this site which are of poor image quality or in which the robber’s face is concealed.  However, there may be something distinctive about the robber’s appearance (profile, build, hairline, clothing, etc.) which might strike a familiar chord with someone who is acquainted with the suspect.  The video frames above are a real world example of this principle.  These frames were captured by a video camera as the robber entred the vestibule of the bank just before a Pittsburgh holdup in the fall of 2000.  The photos would be ranked toward the poor end of the quality scale.  However, within two days of the posting of these frames to the Bankguys web site, investigators were contacted by a bank security officer from a different bank.  He advised that employees at one of the bank’s small city branches believed that they recognized the robber as one of their customers.  They were right.  This tip led to the arrest of the suspect within two weeks for this and two other bank robberies.  This is why it is generally the policy of Bankguys to put bank robbery photographs on this site regardless of quality, unless there is an investigative reason for not doing so.

A word about “old” robberies

You may notice that some of the bank robberies occurred more than five years ago.  These are considered “old” bank robberies.  Under both federal and Pennsylvania law, the Statute of Limitations for robbery is five years.  If the suspect is not charged with the crime within five years of the date of the offense, prosecution is barred by the Statute of Limitations.  In other words, the robber “got away with it”.  (But not in West Virginia, where there is no Statute of Limitations for robbery.)

Then why bother to post “old” robberies on this web site?

We believe that it should be done for a couple of good reasons:

• History repeats itself.  Not many bank robbers hold up one bank just to experience something new and then quit.  They rob again.  So, even if they got away with one of the “old” ones, an old picture could help us identify them and take a closer look at them now.  We may find that they have committed more recent bank robberies which are NOT barred by the Statute of Limitations.  Without someone identifying that “old” photograph, we might never focus on the suspect in the more recent robberies.

• We like to solve bank robberies, even if it’s just a matter of tying up loose ends.

So if you know one of the robbers in an “old” photograph, don’t hesitate to contact us.

A word about comprehensiveness

The robberies posted on this site are not a comprehensive list of all bank robberies occurring in the Pittsburgh Metro area, Western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.  They are simply the ones that banks and law enforcement agencies have voluntarily submitted to Bankguys for posting.

Bankguys’ layout

To find out more about how to navigate this site and use it effectively, please click here.

Bankguys information sheet

A one-page information sheet about the Bankguys web site, suitable for printing out and posting on a bulletin board or giving to colleagues, is available in Adobe PDF format.  Click here.