Transcript of The Confession | Episode 3

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Started to do research, looking at the FBI website specifically. And looking at how people got caught and basically learning what not to do in order to get away with robbing a bank.

Do you have any last-minute doubts before you walked in?

Sure, absolutely. There were thoughts of aborting it. Of course. Should I or shouldn't I do this?

Tellers are the ones that are the true victims because they're the ones face to face with somebody, not knowing how desperate this individual is and not knowing if this individual, for one reason or another, would suddenly become violent and hurt them.

Throughout 2008, Keith Giammanco had been on a crime spree, robbing banks. Once, he even did 2 in a single day. That September, he was back in his car looking for his next target, somewhere just off the highway, preferably. A place with a simple layout, clear lines of sight, so it could be easy in and easy out. He eventually spotted a branch of Commerce Bank. Next door was a bakery with its own parking lot tucked away, a place he could leave his car well out of sight. And just a stone's throw from there was an entrance ramp to the highway.

I parked the car in an out-of-the-way place where it couldn't be seen from the building, and I went in and I did the same thing that I always did, handed the teller a note.

Keith exited with nearly $13,000 in cash. No signs of trouble. Seemed like another success, his 12th robbery. So, he gets back into his car and exits the parking lot.

When I left the bank and got on the road and was sitting at the stoplight waiting to get back on to the interstate, I could see the police cars coming the other way. And then I looked out of my rearview mirror and one of them did a U-turn and turned around and got immediately behind me.

Keith tensed. Maybe this meant he was busted. Or maybe it meant that the police were just fanning out, looking for a suspect with no positive ID. Because in past robberies, Keith had seen cop cars racing in as he slipped away. Keith made his turn onto the ramp leading onto the highway, the highway which could still lead him back home to Florissant, to his daughters, to safety, to his house where the grass was still waiting to be mowed. But the police car was still right behind him. And now its lights were flashing. Keith eased his foot onto the accelerator, willing his blue Mercury Marquis up the on-ramp. The engine hum deepened as the car picked up speed. 45, 50, 60. The patrol car was still there, right on his tail. Then he heard it, faint at first, the thud of rotor blades overhead. A helicopter. Cars began to drift to the shoulder one by one. The road was clearing for him. In that widening space, the truth settled in. This wasn't a close call anymore. It was a chase. For a moment, he considered making a run for it, just going pedal to the metal. But up ahead, the police had blocked the road.

It was an all-out onslaught. Of police cars, helicopters, cars in front of me, cars behind me, blocked in, weapons drawn, and I knew that it was over.

Keith told me that during his crime spree, he didn't allow himself to think about a moment of calamity, about about what would happen if his plan went horribly wrong, as if this form of denial was essential to the whole enterprise. But suddenly, that moment had arrived, and at last, he found himself peering into the abyss. What happened next would define the lives of Keith and his daughters for years to come. I'm Jay Calvert, and this is "True Crime." And this is Deep Cover: The Family Man, episode 3, The Confession. Can I ask you a question? When you see the flashing lights all around you, are you surprised that this moment has finally happened? Are you surprised that they—

Sure, absolutely, because I didn't do anything different than I had in any of the other robberies. The only difference was that a bank employee broke bank policy and protocol and against all law enforcement advice, left the building and followed me out.

What Keith's talking about here, what he's still circling, is the detail that undid him. The bank manager followed him outside, watched him walk to the car, noted the make, the model, and crucially, the license plate. This wasn't supposed to happen. In all of his reading, all of his preparation, Keith had convinced himself that bank managers were trained not to pursue, that it was unsafe, that protocol required them to stay inside, lock down, and wait for the police. Keith assumed that's how it would go down. And so what he cannot quite fathom, even to this day, is that the system didn't behave the way it was supposed to.

You would never expect that to happen. I never thought about getting caught, but if I did, that would have probably been the last thing that I would have thought, that I would have been caught in that manner.

Keith says that when it became apparent that there was no escape, he pulled over to the side of the highway and slowly got out of his car. A police officer forced him onto the pavement while another tightened a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. Keith says one of the officers planted a knee in the middle of his back, keeping him down on the ground. Then he turned and saw another officer aiming a pistol at his head. I wondered if perhaps this was the moment that reality finally came crashing down on him. You told me that you had not really thought about the worst-case scenario happening of you getting caught because, in your words, you wanted to manifest success. So I guess, what's it like at this moment?

Well, at that point, I— at that point, Jake, I couldn't figure out how they had a make on my vehicle. So I was still thinking, you know, what happened here? Because my vehicle was not in sight of the bank itself.

But why would that matter at this point?

Well, I think when something goes wrong, you automatically try to figure out why it went wrong.

I see. The post-mortem.

Yeah.

Okay. Um, is there a moment where real fear grips you about what's going to happen with the kids, or does that come later?

That comes later. Um, at that point I'm thinking, okay, I tell the truth and explain my circumstances and anything that might be mitigating, might be helpful, then this may not turn out too bad.

That's what you're thinking? Mm-hmm. That is very optimistic.

Sure. Well, it may not turn out as bad as what somebody might think.

And there it was, even in this moment that I had to imagine was rock bottom. The lowest of the low, when it seemed like the direness of the situation could no longer be ignored or minimized, there was Keith still manifesting success. Was there any feeling of relief?

No, I didn't feel relieved as much as I felt anxiety of what was going to happen next.

On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon—

people like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard—

and we pull apart the story behind the image.

And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives.

Discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture.

We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes.

I'm Emmanuel Jochi.

I'm Kai Wright.

And this is Big Lives.

Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts.

While Keith was on the side of the highway in handcuffs, Detective John Bradley was actually nearby. Driving around.

My partner and I at the time, you know, we would go out during different times and just kind of ride the area, thinking that it may happen again because it was happening so frequently. Um, that day I think we were out already, just traveling around, just being available, uh, when the call came out.

Bradley soon arrived at the scene of the arrest. What does that moment feel like as a law enforcement officer when you know you've got him?

It's a good feeling because, you know, the officers didn't get hurt, the employees didn't get hurt, he didn't get hurt, nobody got hurt.

Detective Bradley inspected Keith's getaway car, the blue Mercury Marquis. The evidence of a hurried costume change lay in plain sight— discarded clothing, a razor, and a plastic cup clouded with shaving water. Then he turned his attention to Keith himself, who was already in the back seat of a squad car. Keith wore black dress slacks and a gray sleeveless t-shirt. The police report mentioned that he still had a dress shirt tucked into his waistband, the rest of the shirt hanging down around his hips like he hadn't had time to finish pulling it off. Here, at last, was the man that Bradley had been chasing for months. Bradley studied him, took him in.

He didn't seem like a real aggressive guy once you start talking to him. Um, you know, not a guy that would be out committing such serious crimes. Cordial, um, not combative is how I would describe him.

Detective John Bradley and Keith ended up at the St. Louis County Police Headquarters in Clayton, Missouri. And eventually, another officer joined them in an interrogation room. Blank walls, a table, a couple of chairs.

The date is September 18th, 2008. This is Detective John Bradley, DSN 3181, of the St. Louis County Police Department Bureau of Crimes Against Persons. Persons. This interview is being conducted at 7900 Foresight.

This is a recording from that interrogation room.

The person being interviewed is Donald Keith Giammanco. Donald, or you'd like to be referred to as Keith? Donald is fine. Okay. You understand that this interview is being recorded on audio tape? Yes. Okay. Before I ask you any questions, you were advised of your constitutional rights. Yes. Okay. The time that you were advised of your constitutional rights was 6:52 PM, is that right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Are you willing to continue with this interview? Yes.

One of the first things that Detective Bradley asked about was the first bank robbery that he'd investigated, the one that got him started on this whole wild goose chase back in March.

Can you just, in your own words, describe to me what occurred that day? Uh, I was in deep distress about bills and taking, taking care of my children, my twin 17-year-old daughters, and their back tuition from last year. And, you know, basically just putting food on the table and paying the bills. So I I made a note out and went in, handed the teller the note, and left on foot. Okay. And do you remember what the note said? Not exactly word for word. What, what do you mean? It called it, you know, give me all the money, um, in both drawers and we'll all go home safe.

Listening to this tape, there is so much that intrigued me. First is how completely calm both Bradley and Keith seem to be. Polite, understated. Bradley's vibe is slow and deliberate, kind of like a guy approaching a dog. He doesn't want to spook. And this approach, it seemed to work. Keith does not request a lawyer to be present. He just talks. Keith explains that after robbing this bank, He drives back home.

Once you got to your residence, what did you do? I got rid of the jacket that I was wearing and I threw it away. And I basically just had dinner with my kids and spent an evening at home. This is when we lived at a different residence. The one that I lost in foreclosure. Okay. What happened to that house? We lost it.

You might recall at one point Keith robbed two banks in one day. He did this to avoid foreclosure. But in the end, it turns out Keith lost that house anyway. And when this memory resurfaces, Something seems to shift within Keith, and his calm, casual air evaporates.

Do you know what you did with the money from the bank robbery? I used it for, uh, um, to try to catch up on house payments and other bills, paying off attorneys and the electric and counselors and paying the girls' school tuition and— Okay, okay, okay. I know what was wrong, and, you know, I'm very sorry for it, and I'm really sorry for anybody that I scared or thought I might do harm to. But, you know, as desperate as I was, I thought this is a way that I can, you know, do this right now without hurting anybody. In a physical sense. And, you know, I don't know whether I was really ever of the belief that I would never get caught. It was just like almost a day-to-day desperation thing.

When I spoke to Keith about his confession and why he talked, he told me that he was tired of lying and that In the moment, he felt an overpowering desire to come clean. At the very end of the recording, Bradley throws out what I like to call the Hail Mary question, like a last shot at getting to the bottom of things.

All right, well, do you have anything else you want to tell us? Yeah. I'd like to say I'm very sorry. And I would like to have the chance to make restitution and be there for my kids, because they're the main thing. And I've always been there for my kids. And that's the only reason I would ever even think of anything like this. Okay.

He's talking here, of course, about Elise and Marissa, his 17-year-old twin daughters. They would soon have so much to deal with. The revelation that their father was the Boonie Hat Bandit, the chaos that this would create, the fact that for the foreseeable future, they were effectively orphaned. And on top of all of that, their father's claim that he had robbed these banks for them.

On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon—

people like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard—

and we pull apart the story behind the image.

And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives.

Discovering forgotten interviews that changed exactly how we see these giants of our culture.

We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes.

I'm Emmanuel Jochi.

I'm Kai Wright.

And this is Big Lives.

Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts.

On the day after Keith Giammanco's arrest, his twin daughters, Elise and Marissa, hunkered down in their small house in Florissant, Missouri. A whole bunch of reporters and news crews were outside on the sidewalk yelling questions and slipping notes under their front door. The girls weren't sure what to say. They themselves had so many questions, starting with, did Dad really do this? Initially, Marissa, the more rebellious sister, was convinced that the police had made a mistake, arrested the wrong guy. But then she saw her father's mugshot on TV.

He's frowning in the picture. Like, it's kind of an intense mugshot, actually, because you can just see the self-disgust and the, "Oh my God, I got caught." And I even looked it up online just so I could, like, get a real, like, stare at it for a minute. And, like, you can just see it in the mugshot. So I was like, That is not the look of an innocent man.

It became clear that the man that they knew as their father was also a master of disguise who'd hit 12 banks. He'd exit, loot in hand, and vanish until he magically reappeared at Elise's orchestra concerts, or in the kitchen making dinner, or in his Rams gear mowing the lawn. Like nothing had happened. Talk about a poker face. For his daughters, it left their heads spinning. Here's Elise, the striver who dressed in bright colors, loved to make checklists, and worked at Banana Republic.

I didn't trust anyone after that. I'm— I felt like I was living in some sort of simulation almost. Like, what is actually reality?

I was like, "Um, is everyone lying to me about who they are?" Elise's one saving grace was that deep down, she always knew who she was and who she wasn't.

I was like, "I am not my parents' mistakes. That is not me. That is them." You know, I was like, "I have to recalibrate the way that I'm thinking about this because I am never gonna get the support that I need from my parents right now. There's not a knight in shining armor." Nobody's coming to save you.

Elise was a young woman who always had a plan. And so right away, instinctively, she started writing a list.

I remember sitting at the desk listening to Iron and Wine. I was, you know, writing this list out. It included call a social worker, figure out food stamps. My car always needed maintenance too, so that was always on the list. "New fuel injector. Can you do this yourself?" And then also a big one was, "Find Dad a lawyer." I remember from the first day, I was like, "We need to figure out how he's gonna be defended." Elise eventually began looking at the dates when the robberies occurred and matched them up with moments that stuck out in her memory.

Moments when Dad suddenly seemed to have money to pay their tuition at their private school, or when he peeled off a $100 bill and left a huge tip at the Outback Steakhouse. And suddenly, it all started to click.

It made me angry. I just was angry at the— just the lying and the— the living of a double life, because that's what he was doing. He was robbing banks and pretending that he was, like, coming home and living a regular life. And those are two separate realities, you know? There's the Boonie Hat Bandit, and there's Keith Chiavonco.

One of the hardest parts for Elise to wrap her head around was just how long this had been going on for. Because her dad didn't just rob a bank once. He did it over and over for roughly a year. That kind of thing takes planning and nerve and the willingness to wake up and decide to do it all over again. And for Elise and Marissa, there were no obvious answers, only more questions, like, why didn't he ask for help? Why didn't he find a job? How had he managed such an elaborate deception? And how did he possibly think that he was gonna get away with this?

And I ran this stuff over and over in my head. It wasn't just once or twice. It's been millions of times. I'm stuck in this kind of ludic loop of, "Why? Here's how. Here's what occurred.

Why?

Here's how. Here's what occurred. But why? Here's how.

Here's what occurred." You can feel her brain almost glitching here. The questions never resolve. They just recycle.

And it just feels like a vicious cycle of still not being able to make sense of it, because it's nonsensical. There is no sense there. You know, it was a senseless act. So trying to find sense and reason in something that is unreasonable and senseless is an insane act. It's an insane mental process because you're doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

Elise thought back to the time about a year earlier when they faced eviction, when the bank was about to foreclose on their childhood home. Keith's solution had been to rob banks, 2 in 1 day. Elise recalled that at that time, she'd offered to help her dad, She kept replaying that moment in her mind.

I work a job where I'm making money every week. Why aren't you accepting my help from the job that I have with the bills? He should have accepted my help. It just feels like he underestimated my emotional maturity, my intelligence at that age.

Elise says that as maddening as all this was, She was now in crisis mode. What she needed to do now was take a lesson from what her dad didn't do. After missing a day or two, Elise and Marissa went back to their private Catholic school. The girls asked to meet with all of their friends at once, to clear the air in a single moment, to explain what had happened, to face it head on. So about a dozen girls dressed in their neatly pressed uniforms gathered at the gazebo on the school's front lawn.

And we, Marissa and I, told everybody what happened in our own words so that it came from us and so that our friends knew what was going on.

Do you remember anything that you told them?

Just that our dad was arrested for robbing banks and in prison. And that we're going to need a lot of help, you know, because that was part of my dad's issue, was that he did not ask for the right amount of help.

And so the girls began asking for help from their classmates, from the school's bursar office, from the people at their church, from their landlord who happened to be a friend of their dad's. From their orthodontist because Elise still had braces and no way of paying for them. And in the coming days and weeks, a list emerged, a list of helpers. And there was another list too, a budget. Elise says she lined up donors who gave them about $2,000 a month. And there was also her job at Banana Republic. Elise did the math, working full shifts at $7.25 an hour, She pulled in about $1,400 a month. If they stretched every dollar, it might keep them afloat. Marissa and Elise eventually visited their father at the county jail where he was being held. They were led into a white concrete room with a glass partition, the girls on one side, their dad on the other in his prison jumpsuit. And two telephones bolted to the wall for them to talk through. Here's Marissa.

I remember sitting down and seeing him and just, you know, crying and touching the glass, which is like a whole nother feeling in general, just being separated like that. I just remember him saying that he made a bad choice, you know? I had to accept that, that he made a bad choice, you know, and that I was gonna have to forgive him. And I made up my mind very, very shortly after he got arrested that no matter what happened, what he did, I love my dad.

I keep thinking about Marissa's word choice here. She says she knew at some point she would have to forgive him 'cause she loved him. The love was the starting point. It was foundational, non-negotiable. But loving someone, that's not the same as understanding their thinking or forgiving them for what they did. For her part, Elise says she didn't have the luxury of asking why her father had done this or what the implications were.

I guess I didn't really press the issue and ask him why that first visit, because there was so much emotion and so much dismay and grief. It just seems like that was going to cause more of a breakdown, more of a struggle than we needed at the time. We were already suffering so much. Like, the why didn't even really matter. It's like, we're here now. Now we have to deal with this.

I very much hear Elise as the list maker speaking here. She's in triage mode, trying to figure out what she needs to do. Because even more than she realized, so much of this ordeal was now on her shoulders. Finding a lawyer for their father, paying the bills, avoiding eviction, looking after her rebellious sister, who, by the way, would soon be in some pretty serious trouble of her own. Also on Elise's checklist, in the maybe category, was finding their mother, wherever she was, because seemed like they could really use a parent right about now. In so many ways, Their father's arrest was a seismic moment in their lives. And though they didn't know it at the time, they were only seeing the first cracks. There were more harder truths coming, truths involving both their parents and each other. Elisa's earliest memory from childhood was of her and her twin sister working together to escape their crib. It seemed almost like a prophecy. Like somehow she knew that someday they would need to escape. But how do you ever escape family when, in so many ways, it's the thing you are?

Next time on Deep Cover: As soon as Dad was out of the picture, like, I kind of went buck wild. I was one of those people that's like, bring the police, what else do I have to lose right now, type of thing.

And he showed me the surveillance tape and he's like, do you recognize this person? And I'm like, oh, that's my mother.

Deep Cover, the Family Man is produced by Isaac Carter and Amy Gaines McQuaid. Our show is edited by Karen Shakerdge. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Sound design by Jake Gorski. Original scoring and our theme were composed by Luis Guerra. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins. Our story consultant was James Foreman Jr. Special thanks to Daphne Chen, Sonya Gerwitt, Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jake Flanagan, Corinne Gilliard Fisher, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, and Greta Cohn. I'm Jake Halpern.

On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon—

people like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard—

and we pull apart the story behind the image.

And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives.

Discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture.

We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes.

I'm Emmanuel Jochi.

I'm Kai Wright.

And this is Big Lives.

Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an iHeartRadio podcast. Guaranteed human.