Father's Day Bank Massacre


The Father's Day Bank Massacre was a bank robbery and shooting that took place on Sunday, June 16, 1991 at the United Bank Tower in Denver, Colorado, United States. The perpetrator killed four unarmed bank guards and held up six tellers in the bank's cash vault. An estimated $200,000 was stolen from the bank. Nearly three weeks later, on July 4, 1991, authorities arrested retired police officer James W. King for the crime. The subsequent trial was broadcast nationally on Court TV. After days of deliberation, the jury acquitted King. The crime remains unsolved and is considered a cold case.

Timeline of bank heist

Bank entry and murder of guards

The United Bank Tower had previously allowed its guards to be armed, but had changed their policy less than a year before the robbery, requiring the guards to be unarmed.
At approximately 4 a.m on Sunday, June 16, 1991 Father's Day an alarm went off in a basement storage room at the United Bank Tower. Records showed a guard in the control center turned off the alarm and took no further action. It is unknown if this incident had anything to do with the upcoming robbery.
At 9:14 a.m., a man identifying himself as Robert Bardwell, a Vice President at the bank, asked for entry into the bank through a side freight elevator. He called the bank's guard room using a street-level security phone. Guard William McCullum Jr. responded by riding the elevator up from the guard room. When the elevator doors opened, the gunman forced McCullum to ride to the subbasement area of the bank. There, the gunman killed McCullum, hid his body in a storage room, and took his electric pass card. The killer made his way through the bank tunnels and up one floor to the bank's basement-level area, which housed the vault and guard station.
During the journey, the intruder set off an alarm at 9:20 a.m. when entering a stairwell. The intruder made his way into the vault area and first entered the guard room. There, the gunman forced two guards, Phillip Mankoff and Scott McCarthy, into a battery room, where both men were shot and killed. Investigators believed a third guard, Todd Wilson, returned to the area during or immediately after the shooting. Upon his return, Wilson was shot several feet away from the battery room where Mankoff and McCarthy lay. Upon investigation, police determined the shooter fired eighteen shots during the killing spree, hitting his victims with all except one of them. None of the four murdered bank guards were armed.
Before leaving the guard room and entering the vault area, the intruder removed and tampered with evidence so as to eliminate any trace of his identity. The perpetrator seized ten videotapes, bank keys, a two-way radio, and pages of the guard logbook.

Holdup of tellers and robbery

Electronic records indicated that the intruder opened the vault door at 9:48 a.m. At that time, six vault employees were on duty processing cash deliveries. The intruder demanded that the employees cover their eyes and lie on the floor. He ordered the senior vault manager, David Barranco, to fill a satchel with cash from the work stations. Before leaving the scene, the assailant forced the tellers to crawl into a small room near the vault—otherwise known as a mantrap. The robber made his escape at 9:56 a.m. according to electronic records, leaving the tellers locked in the mantrap. Using a broken spoon found on the mantrap's door sill, the tellers freed themselves approximately 20 minutes after the robbery.
Prior to leaving the scene, the robber collected all the spent shell casings that had been removed from his revolver after firing it. The only physical evidence he left behind was the eighteen bullets he fired. The surviving bank employees said the man appeared to be in his late 50s or 60s, wearing a gray sport coat, a white shirt, a multi-colored necktie, blue or gray slacks, a brown fedora hat and mirrored sunglasses, and had a bandage on his left cheek.

Arrest and trial of James King

The ensuing police investigation involved more than forty FBI agents and two dozen detectives. Investigators were baffled as to why the robber never filled the entire satchel with cash, and only stole approximately $200,000 a mere 10% of the more than $2 million available in the cash room and vault. They also did not understand why he murdered the four guards, but left the other bank employees unharmed, since the guards were unarmed and did not present any more of a threat than the other employees at the scene. Police quickly determined the man could not have been bank Vice President Robert Bardwell, the name the robber used to gain entry at the freight elevator, as the real Bardwell was vacationing in the mountains with his family at the time.
From the beginning of the robbery investigation, authorities suspected that the killer was associated in some way with the bank. There was also some suspicion that the robber may have been a police officer due to having fired eighteen rounds, a standard load carried by officers on duty. Investigators questioned current and former bank employees until narrowing their search to James King, a retired Denver police officer and a former guard at the bank. After retiring from the Denver Police Department in 1986, King worked as a part-time guard at the bank between 1989 and 1990, leaving the job ten months before the robbery. King and his wife had declared bankruptcy a year after he retired from the force, and still had substantial debt in 1991, including $25,000 in credit card bills. King was arrested on the evening of July 4, 1991. A search of his house found no physical evidence connecting him to the robbery. The only suspicious things found were a detailed map of the bank building interior in a folder marked "plans", and five phony ID cards, containing King's picture with different aliases. These phony ID cards would be suppressed by a judge and not included as evidence in his trial, on grounds that it was never established King had ever used them in any illegal activity, nor could they be connected in any way to the robbery and murders.
A jury of seven men, five women and two alternates was chosen on the morning of May 19, 1992. The trial began the same day in the afternoon.

The prosecution's case

Denver Deputy District Attorney Bill Buckley led the prosecution against King. The prosecution contended that several pieces of circumstantial and eyewitness evidence pointed to King's role in the crime. The arguments presented by the prosecution included:
Attorneys Walter Gerash and Scott Robinson defended King. The key elements of their case were:
After 53 hours of jury deliberation, King was acquitted of all charges. After the trial, the FBI kept King under observation for years, hoping to find something they could charge him with that was not prevented by double jeopardy procedure, but they found nothing. King lived what was described as "a hermit's existence" at his home at 665 Juniper Street, in Golden, Colorado. He died of dementia at a nearby hospice on May 21, 2013 at the age of 77. His wife, who had stayed with him, died before him in 2009.
Four months after the verdict, Paul Yoccum died of a heart attack at age 52.
In 1997, King's attorney Walter Gerash, along with Phil Goodstein, published a book about the case, entitled "Murders in the Bank Vault: The Father's Day Massacre and Trial of James King".

Victims