“It can’t be true,” Kateri Fogleman
remembers thinking on the day that her husband
showed her the surveillance footage of the
bank robber who had been terrorizing the area
for months.
Both Kateri and her husband recognized the
robber.
Kateri had been raised in a law enforcement
family and she believed in law and order - she
knew she had to do the right thing and turn
in the culprit, but it wasn’t that simple
… her own father was the Snowbird Bandit
- the cop that robbed banks.
After screaming into a towel so her kids wouldn’t
hear her and falling to her knees in shock,
Kateri pulled herself together and she, her
husband and her mother headed to the local
sheriff's station to turn in her father, Randy
Adair, a retired LAPD detective, for bank
robbery.
Although she knew it was the right thing to
do, Kateri couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed
- so much so that she fainted outside the
station before going in to make her statement!
The robber, who had hit five banks between
March and July of twenty-fifteen and made
away with nearly ten-thousand dollars, had
been dubbed the “Snowbird Bandit” by law
enforcement because of his age and white hair...but
no one had suspected that the Snowbird Bandit
was a former cop.
Hours after Kateri made her statement, agents
from the Orange County Bank Robbery Apprehension
Team tracked down Adair’s Jeep in a parking
lot near the Rancho Santa Margarita city hall
and arrested him on suspicion of robbery.
When officers showed Adair, aged seventy,
a photo of the surveillance footage that had
outed him, his response was: “I’m cooked.
I think I should have a lawyer.”
His family, the community, and the police
were all stunned - how could a former cop,
a family man, and a community leader be the
Snowbird Bandit, the cop that robbed banks?
Randolph Bruce Adair was born in nineteen-forty-four
and grew up as the son of a rodeo-riding dairy
farmer in Artesia.
While growing up on a dairy farm taught Adair
the value of hard work, his family also claims
that growing up with a violent alcoholic father
was hard on young Randy.
Adair was drafted into the U.S. Army in nineteen-sixty-five
during the Vietnam war, and he was assigned
to the Criminal Investigation Command in Panama.
After returning from the war, Adair graduated
top in his class from the LAPD Police Academy
and began his career as an LAPD cop.
Less than a year after graduating from the
Police Academy, on June fourth, nineteen-sixty-eight
the twenty-three year old rookie found himself
responding to a call claiming shots fired
at the nearby Ambassador Hotel.
Adair vividly remembers being one of the first
on the scene of the assassination of Senator
Robert F. Kennedy.
As he told a reporter during an interview
he gave from prison in twenty-seventeen: “We
got to the pantry, and you could see that
Kennedy was down on the floor...He’s lying
face up, and I saw fluid, you know, from the
head injury—brain matter looks kinda like
snot, you know?”
Adair was involved in the arrest of the suspect,
Shiran Shiran, and even escorted Kennedy’s
wife Ethel to the hospital.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a memorable year
for Adair for another reason - it was the
year that he met his future wife, Susan Hackworth.
She lived in the apartment next door to Adair,
and after finally convincing her to go out
with him, the pair became an item and wed
in September of that year.
The couple would go on to have two children
- a son named Andrew was born in nineteen-seventy-one,
and their daughter Kateri was born in nineteen-seventy-five.
After a strong start, Adair’s law enforcement
career took off.
He was quickly promoted to detective and assigned
to an elite unit focused on organized crime.
One of the main jobs of this unit was catching
bank robbers, which was a huge problem in
the sixties.
Adair’s first bank robbery call came in
on March twenty-fourth, nineteen-sixty-nine.
A silent alarm had been triggered at the United
California Bank in Mid-City, and Adair and
his team arrived just as the robber was attempting
to make off with his stash.
Upon seeing the cops, the robber ran back
into the building, and officers found him
hiding in a second floor bathroom.
After arresting Robert Lee White, officers
learned that they had captured the Whileshire
Bandit, who had not only hit nine banks in
the area but was also wanted as the Blue Blazer
Bandit in Fort Worth, Texas.
In nineteen-seventy-one Adair was the first
on the scene of a fire at a low-income housing
development.
With no sign of the fire department and smoke
quickly filling the building, Adair didn’t
think twice before he ran inside and began
getting the residents to safety, carrying
those who were too sick - or too intoxicated
- to get out themselves.
Adair went back into the building at least
seven times to rescue twenty-five to thirty
people that night, and was awarded a Class
A commendation for bravery for his heroic
efforts.
As his reputation grew and the arrests piled
up, Adair was promoted to homicide detective,
where he spent the rest of his career working
on well-known cases like the capture of William
George Bonin, also known as the Freeway Strangler,
who had raped, tortured and killed more than
twenty young boys.
He was also involved in the takedown of Richard
Ramirez, the notorious Night Stalker serial
killer who raped and killed at least thirteen
people in nineteen eighty-four and eight-five.
Adair retired from the police force in nineteen-eighty-eight
at the age of fifty-three and focused his
attention on his family and community.
The devoted family man loved playing with
his grandchildren, deep-sea fishing and volunteering
with local youth.
He had been a founding member of the LAPD
Centurions Football team back in nineteen-seventy-nine,
and had helped the team raise more than half
a million dollars for the Children’s Center
of Los Angeles.
He also volunteered as a highschool football
coach and linesman at Dana Hills High School,
and when some of the boys on the team got
themselves into some trouble with the law,
Adair even went to court on their behalf.
But for all of his bravery and devotion, Randy
Adair had a dark side.
Adair had always had a complicated relationship
with alcohol.
He began drinking heavily after he was drafted
to the army, and even in the hard-drinking
cop culture of the sixties and seventies,
he was known as an especially heavy drinker.
He joined AA in nineteen-seventy-three and
got sober for the first time before his daughter
Kateri was born.
But between the strain of the horrific homicides
he had witnessed over his career, and the
medical bills piling up from his wife Susan’s
cancer treatment and his own health issues,
sobriety proved elusive for Adair.
He had started drinking again in nineteen-eight-three
and things quickly got out of control.
At his lowest point he was living in an abandoned
car near the harbour and didn’t care if
he lived or died.
His wife Susan recalls one time when he phoned
her and told her this was goodbye - he was
holding a loaded gun and saying “I’m ending
it because I can’t handle it anymore, things
are too horrible.”
Thankfully, Susan was able to talk him down,
and Adair got sober again in nineteen-ninety-six,
which saved their marriage.
But by then his drinking and declining health
had made it impossible for him to work as
a Private Investigator, and he and Susan had
lost their home to medical bills.
They declared bankruptcy in two-thousand and
were living on the fixed income from his twenty-eight
hundred dollar monthly LAPD pension.
They were having trouble making ends meet,
even with help and loans from their daughter
Kateri.
This is when his gambling addiction flared
up.
Although drinking had always been his biggest
problem, gambling had haunted Adair for years.
He had been a regular at local Indian casinos
and the horse track, but soon he started playing
online games on his iPad at home.
As the losses mounted in the months leading
up to the robberies, Adair had been forced
to take out loans and withdraw funds from
his pension after gambling away their rent
money.
It was then that Adair, a distinguished ex-cop,
decided to turn to a life of crime.
On March twentieth, twenty-fifteen, Adair
walked into the California Bank and Trust
in Dana Point at one-forty-five on a Friday
afternoon.
Wearing a baseball cap with his revolver tucked
into his waistband, Adair handed a note to
the teller demanding money.
Moments later, Adair walked away with a little
more than seventeen-hundred dollars.
Adair laid low for two months before more
gambling losses prompted him to attempt another
robbery on May twenty-second.
This time he targeted a First Citizens Bank
branch near his home in Rancho Santa Margarita,
making off with nearly twelve-hundred dollars.
On June eleventh, the day after his daughter
Kateri’s fortieth birthday, the Snowbird
Bandit struck again, this time making off
with nine-hundred and forty-four dollars from
a Wells Fargo bank in Mission Viejo.
On July sixth he made his biggest score yet,
taking thirty-six hundred dollars from a U.S.
Bank branch in Ladera Ranch.
Adair promised himself that this would be
his last robbery, but by mid July he was short
on cash again and worried about making rent.
On July twenty-first, Adair returned to the
same First Citizens branch in Rancho Santa
Margarita that he had robbed in May, this
time making off with sixteen-hundred dollars.
Adair, who lived just a few blocks away and
didn’t wear a disguise, was clearly caught
on camera this time, and the photo of the
Snowbird Bandit that was released to the public
the next day was what led to his downfall.
Over a period of five months from March to
July twenty-fifteen, Adair perpetrated five
robberies and stole just over nine thousand
dollars in total before he was turned in by
his family.
The morning after his final robbery, as his
wife and daughter were giving their statement
to the police, Adair was at the racetrack,
hoping to increase his latest take on the
horse races.
Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on his side that
day - Adair had lost more than a thousand
dollars before he headed to the City Hall
parking lot where his wife, at the urging
of the police, had asked him to pick her up.
Seventy year old Adair was arrested without
incident, and police found a loaded .38 revolver
in his briefcase next to more than a thousand
dollars worth of betting slips.
He was charged with robbery, for which he
could face up to twenty years in federal prison,
and held on two-hundred thousand dollars bail
until his trial.
Although Kateri knows she did the right thing
by turning her father in, she insists that
she doesn’t believe he was in his right
mind at the time of the crimes.
Adair’s health had suffered ever since that
fire back in nineteen-seventy-one.
Smoke inhalation had led to recurring bouts
of pneumonia and bronchitis, and in twenty-ten
Adair had suffered an aneurysm that required
a nine hour heart surgery to repair.
He later developed sepsis from an infection
stemming from that surgery and spent three
months in Intensive Care.
He was given last rites at least once during
this time.
In twenty-thirteen Adair had six heart attacks
and was suffering from kidney failure that
required dialysis four times a week.
Kateri says his doctor’s called him a “walking
dead man”, and that they suspected that
he had suffered severe brain damage.
Kateri herself had noticed over the last few
years that her father’s mind seemed to be
going, and she feels strongly that this contributed
to his out of character decision to commit
the robberies.
In court Adair pled guilty to one count of
bank robbery and one count of brandishing
a weapon for the May twenty-second robbery
in Rancho Santa Margarita.
As part of his plea deal, another six charges
stemming from the other four robberies were
dropped.
In the end, the judge took his age, health
and past public service into account when
he sentenced Randy Adair to seven years in
prison for the robberies.
Adair was taken to the Federal Correctional
Institution at Terminal Island, a low-security
federal prison in California, to begin serving
his sentence.
Because he had used a gun in some of his robberies
Adair is considered a violent offender, but
inside prison his status as a retired cop
makes him an outcast.
At his sentencing Adair told the judge: “I
seem to have ruined my life.
I’m ashamed I hurt people, innocent people.
… I’m prepared to take the consequences
for it.”
So, what do you think about the story of the
Snowbird Bandit, that cop that robbed banks?
What surprised you the most about this tale?
Be sure and let us know in the comments!
