From Truly Adventurous:
He was a powerful executive at some of the best-known companies in the world. Then he started robbing banks. The meteoric rise and dramatic fall of Steve Carroll, the high-flying corporate executive who wanted it all.
A tall man with white hair walked into the U.S. Bank branch in Rolling Meadows, a middle-class suburb 25 miles northwest of Chicago. He wore black shorts and a sky-blue polo shirt and looked for all the world like a guy running an errand on his day off. He asked a teller for a withdrawal slip while making small talk, and then, as if the segue were the most natural thing in the world, asked if she knew bank policies. She did, she told him, at which point he pulled out a small black gun.
“Since you know bank procedures, this is a robbery,” he said. “Put all of the cash on the counter.” The robber turned to the teller next to her. “No funny business. Give me your money.”
The tellers complied, and the man ran out the door with $2,159. It had taken all of five minutes.
Photos of the robber from surveillance cameras soon appeared in the local papers, online, and on TV news. A friend emailed a photo to Ricky Rasmussen in Las Vegas. He and his wife thought it was a gag, and they couldn’t stop laughing. The man in the photo was unmistakably Steve Carroll, whom they had known for years and with whom they’d started a business. Steve was the successful friend in any group he was a part of, a dynamo who had been number two at J.D. Power and Associates and had a long resume as an executive at major American corporations. He was the guy who always picked up the check, the one who had the inside track financially, who inspired pride from those who hung out with him and admiration-tinged-with-jealousy from those who crossed his path on the golf course, at wild parties, or in high-powered meetings. When the Rasmussens realized it wasn’t a joke, they contacted the police and FBI, emailing about 30 photos of Carroll.
They weren’t alone. Steve hadn’t worn a mask or even a baseball cap and may as well have held up his driver’s license to the camera. A woman who worked at another bank called the FBI to tell agents that she recognized the robber as a customer. She sent photos from her bank’s security camera for verification.
The day after the August 2018 robbery, Scott Hamilton, a commercial airline pilot and Air Force Academy graduate living in Texas, answered a phone call from his brother John. “Dude you’re not going to freaking believe this,” John told him as he emailed him a link to one of the photos pinging around the internet. Scott opened the link and agreed it sure looked like Steve, but he offered that maybe it was just someone who resembled him. Another brother, Bob, came on the line and directed them to photos taken from different angles. There was no question: The man robbing the bank was their brother-in-law, their sister’s husband of 36 years. Scott even recognized the Bersa Thunder 380 pistol, which he’d given his sister as a gift. The Foster Grant sunglasses were familiar, too, a present from Scott to Steve the previous Christmas. The revelation left them shocked.
More than shocked: How was this happening? There was Steve, an upper-middle-class guy turned pistol-clutching outlaw. The voice that tells us some things are ours but most are not, that there are rules to follow no matter our whims and moods: This man in the photos seemed to have chucked all that out the window to say, for this bizarre moment, the rules mean nothing anymore. It was confounding, beguiling, a new dimension to a life that had always been lived out loud. And, of course, it was terrifying.
“I can’t believe something like this touched our family’s life. You don’t think the guy who robbed a bank would be your sister’s husband,” Scott says.
When Janet Carroll, Steve’s wife, found out about the robbery, the world seemed to stop spinning for her. Here was the last piece, the unthinkable conclusion to her increasingly urgent attempts to figure out what was going on in the head of the man she thought she knew, a man who existed as a quasi-hero in the eyes of those who knew him best.
Only it wasn’t the conclusion, but the latest in a series of unbelievable turns that started in the executive offices of some of America’s best-known corporations and would end in a manhunt and a burning question: What on earth happened to Steve Carroll?
*****He was a big guy who oozed charm, confidence, and charisma, and so Steve Carroll was understandably the center of attention strolling through the lobby of the Pebble Beach resort holding court with a cadre of friends. It was 1992, and Kraft, where Steve was an executive, was a sponsor of the U.S. Open golf tournament at Pebble Beach, located on the rocky coast of California’s Monterey Peninsula, one of the most storied courses in the country....
.....MUCH MORE
