On Wednesday, the 23rd of January, the
small town of Jay, Florida was in the grip of a severe cold spell. The temperature
had dipped down to 5 degrees. Around noon, two young, well-dressed men wearing
grey plastic raincoats, dark trousers, and shined shoes walked into the Bank of
Jay, and walked up to the desk of Jesse L. Golden, the Executive Vice President,
and head cashier. One man was later described as about 30 years of age, 190
pounds, with a slender build and light brown hair. The other about 27, 5 feet 8
inches tall, medium build with dark wavy hair and a broad forehead.
There
were ten people in the bank at that time including three customers. Calvin
Scott, his wife and eight-year-old daughter were in the office of Price W. Malone,
bank President. Along with Malone, and
Golden were two bank examiners, John W. Ellis, and Robert McCartney. Also were
Mrs. Evelyn Westmoreland, Mrs. Sara Youngblood, and Mrs. Linda Windham. (Presumably,
tellers.)
Mr. Golden
looked at the two men as they drew pistols, and ordered everyone to lie on the
floor in a back room. One of the gunmen entered Malone’s office and told him
and the Scott family to get down on the floor. Mr. Scott told his daughter, “Honey,
don’t open your mouth.” The robber said, “Fella, you open your mouth again, I’ll
blow your head off.” The people in the
other room were told, “We will shoot if you raise your head.” The taller of the two men paced back and
forth between the two rooms while his partner emptied the teller drawers.
After
he had the money from the teller drawers, the same man entered the room where
the bank employees and examiners were on the floor, and place his pistol to the
back of John W. Ellis’ head and ordered him to open the safe. Ellis was a chief
bank examiner with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Ellis refused
saying he did not know the combination. When the man threatened to shoot Ellis,
Jesse Golden volunteered to open the safe. While this was going on, four other
bank examiners who had been out to lunch walked into the bank, and were
immediately ordered to the floor.
Back
in the lobby, the gunmen ordered Golden to unplug the phones, but Golden told
them the phones did not have plugs. After filling pillow cases with money from
the vault, and apparently deciding two bags containing $700 in nickels, and
half dollars were too heavy to manage, the robbers left. They told everyone to
remain on the floor for five minutes, but about a minute later, Mr. Malone
called the Sheriff’s office, and the FBI reporting the robbery. The robbers had overlooked about $20,000 in
Silver bills, and securities in the vault, and left the heavy bags of coins
about half way from the vault to the bank door.
This
was the first time the bank had been robbed since it was organized in July
1951. There was no bank guard there. Malone later estimated that the whole
robbery took between 10 and 15 minutes.
It
was determined that the robbers had gotten away with $54,611. They drove west
on Hwy 4 at a high rate of speed to Century, and beat the road blocks that were
quickly installed. The next day it was discovered that they had switched cars
in the parking lot of a Century elementary school. They left a 1961 blue-green
Falcon Futura, and according to witnesses, drove away in a 1959 white or
cream-colored Chevrolet. The Futura had been stolen from the Auto Center on
West Garden St. in Pensacola on January 13, and probably stashed somewhere
until the robbery.
On
February 10th, a “ragpicker”, who has remained anonymous, was
scavenging in a wooded area between Olive and Creighton roads east of Ninth
Avenue for any metal he could sell and saw an area that looked as if it had
been freshly dug up, and filled back in. Curious he dug down about a foot and
found an aluminum Coleman cooler. Inside the cooler were two insulated picnic
bags with $40,220 of the loot stolen from the Jay robbery. After consulting
with his brother, he contacted the authorities, who staked out the site for two
weeks, hoping the robbers would return. Then the FBI went public asking the
public for information. Many tips came in, but ultimately the authorities did
not discover who committed the robbery, or buried the money. They did discover
that the cooler was purchased at Hess Marine on New Warrington Rd., on January
24. Sales people remembered the customer quibbling about the price and
receiving a discount. The insulated picnic bags were traced to Harvell’s
Pharmacy on North Palafox, and Brent lane.
The
man who found the buried money did not receive any reward for turning it in.
The bank’s holding company, the Hoover Insurance Company of New York, refused,
saying they had no policy of giving rewards.
There
was a robbery in Marianna, Florida with a lot of the same characteristics, but
it was determined to not be linked to the Jay robbery. The same month also had
a robbery nearby at Ellyson Field, also found not to be linked, even though
there was some suspicion that the Jay robbers might have been sailors from Ellyson
because of the shined cordovan shoes, and the confident manner of the two men,
and the proximity of the Naval installation to the burial site. It was also
thought that a Pensacola police officer could have been involved, but
ultimately, the case was never solved.
The pictures are all from the Pensacola News Journal,
January, and February 1963.
