CALIFORNIA
The Meek Fugitive
Part 2: How did the mild-mannered banker get caught?
Read Part 1 of this two-part series here.
By March 1967, Roger Lee Williams had been on the lam for eight months. His girls were safe, back home in Rialto. His wife, Joanne, was trying to reassemble her life and provide for her children. The Fontana bank where Roger had worked was still looking for the half-million dollars he had stolen.
On the 30th of that month, Doris and Ed Burton went to Las Vegas on a whim. They drove from Fontana, where they were raising four children. Doris waited tables and Ed installed aluminum awnings.
Since its inception as a gambling mecca, Las Vegas maintained two centers of gravity, the Strip and downtown. In the mid-1960s, the Las Vegas Strip attracted tourists with showstopping performances and extravagant casinos. Desert-themed hotels — like the Sands, the Dunes, the Sahara, the Aladdin, and Desert Inn — enchanted gamblers. Yet, downtown Las Vegas remained as lively as ever. Known as “Glitter Gulch” for its extensive, pulsating neon, downtown delivered excitement and walkability.
During their first night, the Burtons won. But tides turned quickly in Vegas, and they were running out of cash by their second evening. They strolled around downtown. Doris wanted to go back to their motel on the Strip, but Ed said, “Come on, five dollars more isn’t going to hurt us.” They stepped into the Fremont Casino.
“We went in, and Ed sat down at the blackjack table,” Doris recalled. “I was standing next to him, and I turned around and glanced at this man sitting one stool away. His eyes met mine, just a flicker, and I said to myself, “Oh! I know him.”
“He turned his head away and made one more bet. It had been years since I saw him, and he looked a bit different. He had a mustache, and he used to wear glasses. But I knew. I see a lot of people, and I never forget a face. That’s when I told Ed who it was.” Ed was busy losing his last five dollars and wasn’t really listening.
Doris had worked for several years at Denny’s in Fontana, a mile from the Security First National Bank branch. She’d waited on the man frequently. “I was afraid Williams might have recognized me because, after that last bet, he walked away. But then he went to a dice table and then came back to a blackjack table. By this time, I was telling the head of the casino’s security detail all about him.”
Two plainclothes officers grabbed Williams from the blackjack table a few minutes later. Afterward, some people, even some friends, criticized Doris Burton. “Many people think I’m a rat fink for turning him in,” she said. But she was sure she did the right thing, concluding, “I knew what I was going to do would ruin things for him, but they would have caught him someday. And if there is a reward, I would just as soon my family got it as someone else.” A few days after the arrest, Security First National Bank paid Doris the $5000 reward. Ed’s five-dollar blackjack bet finally paid off.
After initially denying his identity, Williams surrendered without any trouble. Authorities found $65,000 in his car, a new white Cadillac. He acknowledged staying at two motels on the Las Vegas Strip, the Flamingo Capri and then the Rodeway Inn. At the latter property, agents recovered another $15,000.
When Joanne Williams heard that Roger had been arrested in Las Vegas, she said, “I always figured it could be there. He liked to gamble.” Asked if she still loved her husband, she said, “I don’t think I could ever trust him again. I feel sorry for him.”
When asked if she wanted to see Roger, she replied, “Yes, I want to very much, just to see why he did this and whether I did anything that might have caused him to do it.” Like many women of her generation, she’d been raised to believe that any failing in a marriage was the woman’s fault.
Williams told police that since dropping the girls off in Rialto on Halloween, he’d lived in a kitchenette unit at a motel near Fresno for $35 a week as Robert Moore. That happened to be the name of a Security Bank branch manager. Whatever his creativity as a fugitive, he had little talent for inventing names.
“I have never been around anyone with a nicer or sweeter disposition,” said the woman who owned the motel with her husband. “He studied astrology and science of the mind, things like that. He was a positive thinker. I’m interested in those things, too.” He went to church on Sundays, cooked for himself, and assisted with painting and gardening at the motel. The husband said, “I don’t care what Bob did, I thought a lot of him. He was a mighty fine fellow, very pleasant. He was a perfect gentleman.”
FBI agents hightailed it to Fresno, in central California. At the Yosemite Rancho Motel, they found $67,000 in cash and over $35,000 in travelers checks in three suitcases. Near the check-writing machine were dozens of unused cashier’s checks made out for $200 or $300. Agents learned that Williams had opened a bank account nearby and funded it with $1,100. Apparently choosing the one institution he trusted, he selected a branch of Security First National Bank, his former employer.
Authorities estimated they’d recovered everything stolen except for about $40,000, which Williams must have spent during his eight months on the lam.
Why had Williams chosen Fresno? I pondered that question for some time. Fresno was a medium-sized agricultural city, large enough to remain anonymous and far enough from Rialto to avoid encountering anyone he knew. But if Williams enjoyed Vegas, Fresno was an odd choice. Between Fresno and Las Vegas sat the Sierra Nevada mountains and the 14,000-foot Mount Whitney. As the crow flew, Las Vegas was 260 miles from Fresno. But no roads could traverse that part of the Sierras. Getting to Sin City required a 400-mile, six-hour drive through the Mojave Desert.
At first, Williams’ selection of Fresno made no sense to me given how much he liked gambling. Then I realized that was probably the reason. He wanted to be close enough to Vegas to get there in a day’s drive. But he didn’t want to be so close that he could visit impulsively. After all, Vegas itself would have been an excellent place to hide, filled with transients of all varieties, people who tended to mind their own business, and every kind of short- and long-term housing option. Williams, a methodical, disciplined man, knew he’d be better off not gambling all the time.
Initially, Williams pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, paid for with his parents’ life savings, argued that Williams had lived an exemplary life until the alleged theft. He’d also disclosed where the remaining money was hidden. That got his bail reduced to $25,000. During his arrest, Williams revealed he’d been so anxious about his inevitable capture he’d considered suicide. His lawyer used that admission to convince the judge to allow him to live at his parents’ home while awaiting trial. During that time, he and Joanne remained on good terms, and the kids visited frequently.
In June 1967, Williams agreed to plead guilty to one charge of larceny from a national bank. The crime carried a possible ten-year prison term. Talking to reporters, Williams admitted, “I took the money. That’s basically it. I would not call it a spree. It was more deeply rooted than that, but I cannot explain.” His attorney suggested he’d been suffering from deep psychological issues and told the judge he’d been besieged with financial and marital problems that he could not cope with. I presume this means that before the theft he’d been gambling away much of his salary, and Joanne resented it, but it’s impossible to know for sure.
A court sentencing report revealed that Williams had wagered most of the money that was still missing. While in Fresno, Williams had once flown to Houston. He bought ringside seats at the Cassius Clay-Ernie Terrell boxing match and returned to Fresno immediately afterward. Presumably, he’d bet on the match. He also liked horse races.
The exact nature of Williams’ psychological issues was never disclosed. The judge sentenced Williams to eight years, saying, “The psychiatrists and I are convinced that the offense committed by this man was out of character, and I doubt that he would repeat that or any other offense.” As it would turn out, the doctors and the judge were fatally mistaken.
Williams served 2½ years before being paroled. Upon his release, he was required to participate in ongoing psychiatric treatment. Perhaps he didn’t stick with it for the long term.
In 1988, eighteen years after his parole, Williams killed both his parents. A stroke had forced his father into a care facility. His mother, struggling with her own health issues, was selling their home and moving into Roger’s house, which he shared with his 17-year-old son from a second marriage. Roger, now 50, shot her in the backyard. Her grandson discovered the body late that night.
After killing his mother, Roger drove to the Rialto Retirement Home. He pushed his father’s wheelchair outside to a field and shot him in the head. Pointing the gun at himself, Roger then fired a bullet into his own brain.
What happened afterward is fuzzy. Roger underwent surgery at a nearby hospital. For at least a few days, he survived. After that, there is no documentation of a recovery, a death, or any arrest. I would have thought he’d died in the hospital, but Social Security records suggest he lived until 2001. Many hours of research have not clarified what happened in those intervening years, and I don’t feel comfortable bringing pain back to his surviving family.
When the murder of Williams’ parents hit the news, neighbors said — as they did in 1966 and again in 1967 — they couldn’t imagine this mild-mannered man doing such a thing. “He was a hell of a nice guy,” said a neighbor. “Any time I talked to him, he always seemed in a really good mood…of course the pressures that go on inside your head aren’t always open to other people.”
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