Former Denver Police detective Lt. Jon Priest displays three binders he kept in his office that comprised a synopsis of 75,000 documents stored in police archives that were collected during investigations from the 1991 United Bank robbery. (Denver Post file)
5:04 a.m., Father’s Day, 1991.
An alarm sounds in the hallway of the subbasement at the United Bank building — now Wells Fargo — at 17th Avenue and Lincoln Street in Denver.
Something or someone in a storage room on the subbasement level triggered the alarm.
A light appears on a board in a monitor room on the Concourse level, one floor below street level.
William Rogers McCullom Jr., 33, or Phillip Lee Mankoff, 41, presumably turns the alarm off, almost immediately. The alarm was never turned back on.
At 7:30 a.m., guards from Wells Fargo and Loomis Armored Inc. arrive at United Bank to make weekend deposits from stores, bars and restaurants. Because of holiday gift buying the bags of money are heavier than most weeks.
Then at 9:14 a.m., a man standing at a door where freight is delivered into the building buzzes the guards.
He says he’s Bob Bardwell, the bank vice president, and needs to get in.
McCullom Jr., 33, who normally goes home at 7 a.m., is staying later along with Mankoff so that they can train Scott Raymond McCarthy, 21.
McCullom takes an elevator to street level to let the vice president into the building. According to bank policy, guards do not carry guns because of the belief they spark greater amounts of violence.
The man, appearing to be in his late 50s or 60s, enters the building. He is wearing a gray sports coat, a white shirt, a multi-colored necktie, blue or gray slacks, a brown fedora hat and mirrored sunglasses, and has a bandage on his left cheek.
The man pulls out a .38-caliber handgun and points it at McCullom.
He orders McCullom to take him to a storage area in the subbasement. They climb into a freight elevator and descend.
The gunman walks McCullum through a tunnel.
In a remote storage room of the subbasement the man posing as a vice president shoots McCullom three times in the head, once in the torso and once in the arm.