Bank Robbery in Jay

On Wednesday, the 23^rd 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 10^th, 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.