http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/featured-news/the-story-of-connecticuts-brotherly-killers-035602
In one of the most spectacular crime sprees in Connecticut history,
the Pardue brothers robbed banks and murdered family members and accomplices
By Dan D'Ambrosio
December 01, 2010
On Nov. 13, 1969, the Union Bank in Union, Mo., was robbed after a
bomb intended to create a distraction exploded in the offices of
Sheriff H. William Miller in the county courthouse. Several days
after the robbery, Miller sent a deputy to the 120-acre Daisy Pardue
farm about seven miles west of town to serve divorce papers on the
79-year-old woman's son, Russell Pardue. The 53-year-old Russell had
left Connecticut and moved back to the farm to live with his mother
in a new $40,000 house he built.
When the deputy arrived, nobody was home, and neighbors said they had
seen neither Pardue nor his mother, a life-long resident of the area,
for a week. The roadside mailbox for the isolated farm was
overflowing with newspapers and letters, and Pardue's car, still with
its Connecticut plates, was gone from the garage in back of the house.
As Russell Pardue's son John confessed on his death bed to an FBI
agent two years later, John and his brother Jimmy robbed the bank in
Union then fled to the family farm to hide out. The brothers had
formulated a plan to begin robbing banks across the country. Although
John lived in Connecticut and Jimmy lived in Maryland, the plan was
to fly the loot to the property they owned in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho,
and bury it. Both boys were pilots, and the Idaho property was big
enough to accommodate an airfield.
When the brothers showed up at their father's house, the reception
was less than warm. Russell Pardue may have suspected his boys were
up to no good.
"When they got there apparently their father was really upset with
them and didn't want the boys there, so John left and came back to
Danbury," says Bridgeport attorney Michael Koskoff, who would later
represent John.
Jimmy stayed behind, and some time later, called his brother. John
relayed the conversation he had with his brother to Koskoff in one of
their jail cell interviews.
"Jimmy said 'John, you're going to be really angry with me,'" John
told Koskoff. "I said to him, 'Yeah? Why's that Jimmy?' He said, 'I
had to kill dad and grandma.' And I said to him, 'Jimmy you hothead!'"
John told Jimmy to stay put. He was coming out to the farm. After
John arrived, the brothers wrapped the bodies of their father and
grandmother, both shot dead, in heavy plastic, put them in a travel
trailer, and drove them cross-country to Jimmy's property in
Maryland, where they excavated a hole big enough to swallow the
trailer, bodies and all. Then they poured a concrete foundation and
built a garage on top of the buried trailer. The FBI later dug the
trailer up after John's confession.
Koskoff says Pardue told him his brother killed their father and
grandmother because he had told them about the bank robbery and "they
were being very nasty." Jimmy was afraid they would turn him in. John
seemed to think the pair had it coming anyway.
"He said, 'Don't get me wrong, they were terrible people, my father
and grandmother,'" remembers Koskoff. "'They were nasty people, so
unappreciative. They didn't take care of us. You'd think they'd be
there for us.'"
Koskoff, only 27 at the time he represented Pardue in 1971, had just
finished helping his father, renowned defense attorney Ted Koskoff,
defend Black Panther Lonnie McLucas in a New Haven murder trial that
garnered national attention beginning late in 1969. McLucas and two
others were accused of torturing fellow Panther Alex Rackley, whom
they believed was an FBI informant, at their headquarters on Orchard
Street in New Haven, before taking him to a swamp in Middlefield and
shooting him in the head.
Now Koskoff was helping to defend John Pardue in one of the most
spectacular crime sprees ever to hit Connecticut the Pardue
brothers' rampage of bank robbery and murder here and in Missouri
that left five dead and netted the brothers more than $200,000 in
stolen loot, about $1 million in today's dollars.
In March 1971, Koskoff hurried into Federal Court in Bridgeport to
find his father waiting for him at the defense table. The younger
Koskoff had good news concerning John Pardue, their latest client.
The Koskoffs were defending John against charges he robbed a bank in
Danbury in a spectacular caper that also involved bombings like the
robbery in Union, Mo. a key connection that led FBI Agent Thurl
Stalnaker to arrest the brothers.
Mike Koskoff was anxious to talk to his father because he had
interviewed one of the witnesses in the Danbury robbery who said the
robbers were definitely not the Pardue brothers. And the witness was
a minister.
"He says, 'I'll tell you one thing, these were not the bank robbers.
These guys look nothing like them,'" remembers Koskoff. "I said,
'Wow, this is dynamite, this is going to be a good witness.'"
When he went to interview his new client in the maximum security wing
of the federal prison in Danbury, Koskoff found "the most
wholesome-looking person you'd ever imagine." Pardue, with closely
cut blond hair and blue eyes, bore a striking resemblance to Steve
McQueen, says Koskoff.
"He was about my age, slightly older, we were contemporaries," he
says. "He was very friendly, very natural in his speech. He would say
things to me like, 'Mike, this prison, these people here are
terrible. You would just hate being in a place like this.'"
Pardue was moved to the federal prison after three attempted escapes
from state jails. Once by "the oldest method in the world," carving a
gun out of soap and threatening a guard, and twice by trying to
string bed clothes out of an upper story window, according to Koskoff.
In the Danbury robbery two explosions rocked the police station,
minutes before a third explosion ripped through the lobby of the
Union Savings Bank blocks away, where two men escaped with $55,365.
A powerful fourth explosion destroyed the getaway car, a white
Chrysler station wagon with New York plates, where it had been left
at the nearby Danbury Mall (not today's mall, but an earlier
version), blowing the hood of the car onto the roof of the shopping
center, 30 feet high and 80 to 100 feet away, according to Danbury
Police Lieutenant Jimmy King, a young officer at the time.
"I would say the whole thing happened within a matter of 15 minutes.
It was spectacular," says King. "It certainly was like an assault on Danbury."
Remarkably, no one was killed in any of the explosions, although 26
were injured at the police station, including eight officers.
As he filled his father in on the details of his interview with the
minister, Koskoff heard what sounded like banging coming from
downstairs in the courthouse.
A few minutes later, says Koskoff, a marshal came into the courtroom
to tell him and his father their client had been shot.
"So we went down to the cell," says Koskoff. "There was John. His
shirt was off, his chest was bare. You could see bullet holes in his
chest. It was not bloody, though there were little bits of blood
around the holes."
Koskoff says Pardue sat hunched over on the floor of the cell, still
alive but very pale.
"He didn't talk, but he looked at us," remembers Koskoff. "My father
looked at him and said, 'You didn't have a lot of confidence in us,
did you John?'"
Pardue had arranged for his wife Nancy, who had their infant son, to
smuggle a sawed-off shotgun into his cell. She had already been
caught trying to smuggle in a .45-caliber pistol, but for some
reason, she wasn't searched when she brought in the shotgun.
Nancy wore a mini-skirt that day, according to Jack Zeldes, another
prominent Connecticut attorney who was representing James Pardue.
"Strapped between her breasts was a sawed off, semi-automatic shot
gun," wrote Zeldes of that day. "Locked with her husband in the
holding cell and with her back toward the three U.S. marshals, John
carefully unbuttoned her blouse, removed the weapon allegedly with
the comment 'I knew your legs would get them' and stashed the
weapon under a towel on the top of the toilet tank in his cell."
After Nancy left, Federal Marshal Tony DiRienzo opened the cell door
to take Pardue to Judge Robert C. Zampano's courtroom. Pardue pulled
out the shotgun and trained it on DiRienzo, ordering him to "Freeze!"
One of the three federal marshals there that day was DiRienzo's
19-year-old son, also named Tony. It was the younger DiRienzo who
squeezed off several shots from his .38-caliber revolver, hitting
Pardue once in the throat and multiple times in the torso.
Mortally wounded, John was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in
Bridgeport, where a guard was placed on the door to his room. Back at
the cell, FBI Agent Stalnaker, who had been assigned to the Danbury
robbery and had quickly zeroed in on the Pardue brothers, asked the
Koskoffs whether they had any objection to his taking a dying
declaration from their client. The FBI is called in for all bank
robberies since deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation.
"We said, 'We don't know that he's dying so we do have an
objection,'" remembers Mike Koskoff.
Danbury Detective Joe Joseph was off-duty, sleeping at home in bed
when "all hell broke loose" in Danbury that February day in 1970.
Normally he would have been manning the front desk at the station
when the explosion set off by the Pardue brothers demolished the
building, and might have been killed.
"They scared the hell out of everybody in Danbury," says Joseph, now
87, who retired to Florida in September 1970 after injuring his back
not long after the Pardue robbery. "I guess that was the intention.
Those guys were bad. They'd kill you as quick as you'd snap your
fingers. It's lucky none of our guys got killed with the record they
had. They left a trail across the country from what I understand."
Detective Lieutenant Tom Michael, a young Danbury police officer in
1970, was returning from a college class in New Haven on Interstate
84 with another young officer Lieutenant King the morning of the
explosions and robbery. They had to talk their way past a State
Police barricade to get to their station.
"They had the entire city shut down," says Michael. "You could not
exit into Danbury."
Once he reached the bombed-out station, Michael found a building in
shambles, still smoldering from the explosions. The entire police
department had relocated to the War Memorial building, which housed
the civil defense office, in a nearby park. Michael was sent onto the
roof of the building with a rifle to defend against possible further attacks.
"We were assuming we were under attack by a militant group," says Michael.
At the time, he says, the Black Liberation Army, an underground
organization formed after the demise of the Black Panther Party to
take up armed struggle on behalf of oppressed blacks, was killing
police in New York. Paranoia was already on the rise before the bombs
exploded in Danbury.
Special Agent Stalnaker had already been investigating two other
nearby robberies of the Vista Branch of the Northern Westchester
National Bank and the Georgetown Branch of the Fairfield Country
Trust Co. when the Danbury robbery went down.
"Stalnaker started to gather every bit of information he could to try
to find who the suspects were," says Koskoff. "One of the things they
did is they looked at various complaints filed around the Danbury
area to see if they could come up with suspects, especially involving
the use of explosives."
One of the complaints Stalnaker found was against John Pardue. A
neighbor complained Pardue had been shooting off "fireworks" in his
yard, causing loud explosions.
Next, Stalnaker focused on a bank robbery in Union, Mo., with a
similar M.O. to the Danbury robbery: Explosives were used to create a
distraction. Also, at about the same time as the Missouri robbery,
two people named Pardue, a man and his mother, went missing from the
Union area. And finally, John Pardue was identified as having bought
dynamite in Spokane, Wash.
"So this Thurl Stalnaker, in a masterful job of investigating, put
together all these disparate facts and started to zero in on Pardue
as a possible suspect," says attorney Koskoff.
On March 7, 1970, John Pardue, 27, was arrested in Danbury and his
brother James, 23, was arrested at his home in Lusby, Md. When John
was arrested, says Lt. King, police found money from the robbery in a
diaper box in his car, guarded by a Doberman pinscher that refused to
leave the car. Animal Control had to be called in.
Stalnaker told the Danbury News-Times in a 1995 interview the FBI had
made the Danbury investigation a priority because they thought the
bombing was the work of domestic terrorists. With as many as 50
agents as his disposal, Stalnaker, who died in 2000, was able to
solve the case in just three weeks.
In a Bridgeport hospital suffering multiple gunshot wounds, John
Pardue was about to take his final trip.
Unable to hold Pardue in Bridgeport any longer, the FBI decided to
move him to a federal hospital in Springfield, Mo., by airplane.
Pardue died at night during the flight. But luckily, Stalnaker told
Koskoff, Pardue had decided to give him a dying declaration.
And what a dying declaration it was. Although unable to speak because
of the gunshot wound to his throat, John Pardue managed to confess to
five bank robberies in Connecticut and Missouri beginning in 1968,
and five murders, through "what must have been like a game of
charades with a voiceless person," writes attorney Zeldes.
In his dying declaration Pardue never named Jimmy as his accomplice,
referring only to an unidentified partner who "everyone knew to be
his brother James," writes Zeldes.
The brothers had grown up in Westport and attended prestigious
Staples High School, where they only got into trouble once for
shooting seagulls at Sherwood Island State Park. John was arrested in
that incident.
"They came from a purely middle-class, one might even say privileged,
background," says Koskoff.
The boys' father, Russell, was an executive with Shell Oil, and
worked at company headquarters in New York. He appeared to be a
typical Fairfield County commuter, according to U.S. District Court
Judge Alan H. Nevas, then a young attorney who represented Jimmy and
John's mother Dorothy in her divorce from Russell. But the elder
Pardue was an alcoholic with a secret room in his basement, according to Nevas.
"He would come home from New York usually having had quite a bit to
drink, then would drink some more," says Nevas. "He would go
downstairs into this room where he had what for those days would have
been dirty magazines."
And there he would lock himself away. Dorothy Pardue was a "very
introverted person" who didn't talk much, says Nevas.
"You can imagine dinner conversation in that house was not what you
or I are used to," says Nevas. "As they grew older [the Pardue
brothers] must have been aware of what [their father] was doing in
the basement. Weekends must have been horrible in that house."
Nevas says the tight bond between the brothers was probably at least
partially formed "because of this terribly dysfunctional house with a
father who was a drunk and a mother who was very weak." Of course,
says Nevas, countless children who grow up in similar circumstances
don't turn to bank robbery and murder. And Russell and Daisy Pardue
were not the Pardue brothers' first murder victims. They had killed
three times before.
For their first robbery, of the Vista Branch of the Northern
Westchester National Bank in August 1968, the Pardues had an
accomplice, a young black man named Lee Polk. In that robbery, which
netted some $22,000, the brothers and Polk overpowered a state
trooper and used his car to commit the crime.
For their second robbery, of the Georgetown Branch of the Fairfield
County Trust Company, the Pardues again picked up Polk plus a second
accomplice, another black man named Dick Gregory.
Next, the foursome flagged down a late model car, according to
Jimmy's attorney Jack Zeldes. When the 19-year-old owner, "a new
father in a new car," resisted, the Pardues shot and killed him, then
stuffed him in the trunk. The two accomplices, Polk and Gregory,
actually committed the robbery of the Georgetown Branch, netting
nearly $40,000.
The robbers then drove to Kent where the Pardues tied their
accomplices to a tree, shot them and set their bodies on fire,
according to Danbury Detective Roger Brooks.
"It was a cute trick," says Det. Brooks. "[Police] would be looking
for the two bank robbers that were not the Pardues. They ain't going
to find them because they're up in Kent tied to a tree, burned. There
was nothing to connect [the Pardues] to the robbery."
After their eventual arrests in 1971 on federal charges, the Pardue
brothers were always held separately. John would soon be dead,
without ever going to trial. Jimmy's mental competency was in
question from the get-go.
"When the court appointed psychiatrists examined Pardue at various
places where the Government stored him, the defendant was nearly
catatonic, sometimes in a fetal position," writes Zeldes, his attorney.
Communicating with Jimmy was "extensively difficult," Zeldes told
Judge Robert C. Zampano, and even though he had an attorney Zeldes
Jimmy filed a motion, to represent himself, which the court
forwarded to Zeldes.
The presiding judge, Robert C. Zampano, found Pardue was unable to
understand the charges against him. There followed three years of
"yo-yo" mental examinations at federal facilities in Connecticut and
Missouri without any resolution either to proceed to trial or treat
Pardue for mental illness, until finally in March 1973 Judge Zampano
reluctantly granted Zeldes' motion to dismiss the indictment against Jimmy.
Commented Zampano: "It is indeed lamentable when a federal judge, in
his attempt to provide for the care of a pretrial detainee who is
mentally ill, is confronted with the following painful alternatives:
either to authorize the continued incarceration of a defendant in
violation of his constitutional rights, or to release him into the
community where he may be a danger to himself and to the public."
With the federal charges against him dropped, the State of
Connecticut brought its charges against Jimmy for the Danbury
robbery. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to
Fairfield Hills Hospital. Meanwhile the State of Missouri was seeking
Pardue's extradition to stand trial for the murders and robberies he
committed there.
His brother John's confession, however, was not admissible against
him, "and in view of the lack of witnesses, James was not tried for
the 1969 homicides of his father and grandmother and the Missouri
bank robberies," writes attorney Zeldes.
On May 28, 1976, Jimmy was released from the Missouri State Hospital
in Fulton, Mo. Shortly thereafter, he and a companion he had met in a
mental hospital were charged with rape, sodomy and kidnapping against
a woman they held captive in a box some remembered it being a
coffin for several days.
But before they were actually arrested on those charges, Jimmy and
his companion held up a bank in Lakewood, Colo., dressed in suit and
tie, "without any masks or disguise of any kind," according to
Zeldes. In July 1977, Pardue was convicted of the bank robbery and
sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
In the rape-sodomy case, he was acquitted on the sodomy charges, but
ultimately convicted of rape and kidnapping and sentenced to 10
years. Released on parole in 1991, Jimmy moved to Stanberry, Mo., a
tiny town in the northwest corner of the state.
Later that year, in June, Jimmy hanged himself. The saga of the
Pardue brothers was over.
Looking back, Attorney Mike Koskoff sees a telling comparison between
the two most fascinating clients he ever had: John Pardue and Lonnie McLucas.
"The Black Panthers stood for something, not something I agreed with
but at least there was a point. They were looking for racial equality
and felt [violence] was justified," he says. "All Pardue wanted was
other people's money. He didn't care who got killed or injured in the
process. A complete lack of morality. I don't think I've ever met
anybody like that before."
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