Monday, Dec. 16, 1991: Accused bank robber Jeffrey E. Erickson is sitting handcuffed in the back seat of an FBI car that is speeding him down the Kennedy Expressway toward the Dirksen Federal Building. The police radio is crackling, and Erickson, a 33-year-old former cop, is listening avidly to the shouts of alarm and coded messages being traded among FBI agents and a small army of suburban cops.
He has been handcuffed since he was arrested just a few minutes earlier as he was getting into a stolen Mazda that was parked in a Schaumburg parking lot. He and his captors are now monitoring the sounds of a high-speed chase taking place in a nearby suburb. He can`t hear the sirens, but he can tell the quarry is putting up one hell of a fight. ”Shots fired! Shots fired!” he hears as he sits immobilized next to a federal agent in the back seat.
He can`t see where he`s headed because his eyeglasses were crushed during the arrest, but he knows what is receding behind him. He knows the police are talking about his wife, Jill. He knows the arsenal he keeps at his home is no good to him now. And he knows that the hours he spent teaching Jill how to handle guns at suburban shooting ranges are now being tested in real life.
In nearby Hanover Park, a quiet community of subdivisions built around themes ranging from nautical to New England to old Hollywood, Hanover Park policeman Kennith Herman has also been monitoring the action.
Herman decides to block traffic on the eastbound lanes of Lake Street to keep citizens away from the high-speed chase approaching from the west. He parks at the corner of Lake Street and Bear Flag Drive, and in the distance, hears sirens coming closer.
Moments later, a gray van flies past him and squeals onto Bear Flag Drive. Herman decides to join the chase and enters the subdivision through an alley, planning to block the van`s path. As he pulls into the street and stops, the van is coming at him, and the driver is firing a gun. Before it passes, bullets puncture a back door of his car and shatter the back window, missing his head by inches.
Meanwhile, Bill Planz Jr. has come out of his family`s split-level home on Bear Flag Drive and is hiding behind a bush in his front yard. The gray van has just careened past his house, followed by a stream of screaming police cars, and two bullets have pocked his front door. Now he`s watching the van swerve back toward his house as a growing number of parked squad cars block the street.
He already knows what the driver of the van has just discovered: Bear Flag Drive is the only route into or out of this subdivision with the Wild West theme-Kit Carson and Apache Drive, Gold and Nugget Circles.
Planz can see a hand firing a gun out the driver`s-side window of the van as it crashes to a stop at the low cement wall that marks the entrance to the subdivision. He sees the police return fire. Gunshots echo in the air a few more times, then stop. Silence descends. Lights are flashing, police radios are squawking, but there isn`t any noise from the van. After a few minutes, a voice on a bullhorn demands that the driver drop weapons and come out.
Planz doesn`t remember when it dawned on him that the driver might have been hit. He was still scared when a lone officer approached the van behind a body shield. When the officer opened the door, Planz cringed, expecting more gunfire. But then, when he saw the blood dripping out the door of the van and onto the street, he knew it was over.
”I walked right up to the van,” Planz recalls. ”She had fallen down on the passenger-side door. They pulled her out on a stretcher, and blood was all over-on the van, on the ground, dripping off the sides of the stretcher.”
For Jeff and Jill Erickson, Dec. 16, 1991, had started out just as planned. The night before, according to the scenario painted by federal prosecutors, the couple had moved two stolen cars into place near a bank. At about 11 a.m., Jill Erickson, in the gray van, drove up to one of them, a Mazda. Her husband got out, and she drove the van to a spot in a parking lot just out of sight of the car.
Unfortunately for the Ericksons, the day was going pretty well for the FBI as well. Before Jeff Erickson could hot-wire the Mazda to life, federal SWAT team agents, who had been watching the car from unmarked cars nearby, arrested him.
The chase that ended on Bear Flag Drive began when agents attempted to see who was driving the gray van, FBI spokesman Robert Long says. At that point, agents were not planning to arrest the driver because they had no reason to suspect he or she knew anything about what Jeff Erickson was up to. But when they approached the van and asked the driver to get out, Jill Erickson threw the vehicle into reverse and roared off, leading the federal agents and dozens of police officers from at least seven suburban departments on an 11-mile chase that at times reached 110 miles an hour.
According to Long, agents in an unmarked car caught up with her several times, but she shot at them and continued to flee. Attempting to slow her down, agents shot out the tires of the van so that when Jill turned onto Bear Flag Drive, she was driving on the rims.
”As the police and FBI tried to stop the van, she would reach out the window and shoot,” Long says. ”She had several weapons with her. The FBI and police cars were full of holes. In self-defense, they returned fire.”
Still, the agents tried to avoid the final confrontation, Long says.
”Whenever a shootout occurs, it`s the last thing we want,” he says.
”It`s just a terrible tragedy.” Several months after the shootout, the Cook County Medical Examiner`s Office ruled Jill Erickson`s death a suicide.
When Jill Erickson was carried, bleeding and nearly dead, into Humana Hospital-Hoffman Estates on that afternoon, with two bullet wounds to the head, she was still wearing her disguise. Her long blond hair-the hair that had first attracted Jeff and that prompted him to nickname her ”Gorgeous”-
was tucked up under a short, dark wig.
When doctors announced her death six hours later, she was ”27-year-old bank robber Jill Erickson” to reporters and to FBI agents and the suburban policemen who would be buzzing for weeks about their brush with death.
The backdrop of Wild West street names and slightly dilapidated ranch-style homes where Jill Erickson lived her last conscious minutes provided a surreal end more suited to her favorite TV program, ”Star Trek,” than to her real life. A devoted ”Trekkie,” Jill preferred sitting on the couch with her yellow labrador, Kaos-named for the fictional spy network on the ”Get Smart” TV series-and her chemistry books, headphones and a collection of videotapes of every ”Star Trek” episode ever made.
But the wild car chase and the shootout were a final act of escapism in a saga that took the Ericksons from a humdrum, lower-middle-class existence in the Northwest suburbs to a life of guns and bank robberies that law enforcement spokesmen say were planned and executed with ”military precision.”
The Ericksons-neither of whom had a prior police record-are charged with eight bank robberies committed between January 1990 and December 1991. Jeff allegedly carried out most of the crimes carrying a police scanner and a gun and wearing a fake beard, prompting police to nickname him the ”Bearded Bandit.” His wife, named as an unindicted co-conspirator, is believed to have participated in the crimes by helping her husband move getaway cars into place. She may also have been inside one of the banks.
The pair were immediately dubbed a suburban Bonnie and Clyde by local media. Authorities privately speculated that the unassuming couple had a pact to go out in a blaze of glory. In fact, while he was being arrested, Erickson twice reached for a weapon from a bag on the seat next to him and twice pulled his hand back.
Later, he conversed with agents as if they were his equals, which once they might have been, back when he was winning trophies for marksmanship at the Chicago Police Academy. FBI agents reported that Erickson asked them if they would have shot him if he`d fired on them. Erickson indicated that he`d considered putting up a fight before he actually surrendered, agents said.
While Jeff Erickson thought about it and reconsidered, Jill Erickson did it. Jeff has denied that he and Jill had a secret plan to go out Bonnie and Clyde style, but he hasn`t explained his wife`s desperado race or her gunfight with four squad cars of federal agents and police officers from seven suburban departments. He doesn`t understand it, he says.
As the unfolding story of the suburban pair hit the news, neighbors expressed amazement and gave accounts of the outward ordinariness of the Ericksons` lives.
The couple are alleged to have stolen about $170,000 from suburban banks. But instead of taking the money to Switzerland or the Dutch Antilles, they settled in the Chicago area. After years of moving from one apartment to another in the Northwest suburbs and working dead-end jobs, they bought what real estate agents might call a ”starter home” in Hanover Park in 1991.
Their white townhouse on Waterford Drive, in the Olde Salem subdivision, had a small tree in front, a Honda Precis and two Honda motorcycles in the driveway and a Weber grill in the back yard.
The couple opened a small bookstore, and, for a brief, shining six months, Jeff Erickson was a local burgher, a respected bookseller with a growing list of customers. Erickson`s Best Used Books was deemed one of the better used bookstores in the area. Customers described the proprietor as well-read in the classics and something of an intellectual. He was such a creature of habit that he ate the same thing-a chili cheese dog and a large Mountain Dew-for lunch every day. The bookstore was open six days a week, closed Mondays. Authorities say the later robberies Erickson is charged with took place on Mondays.
In their moment of greatest success, the Ericksons achieved not the glamor and excitement of a Bonnie and Clyde but a middle-class version of the American dream: home ownership and self-employment. And higher education. Throughout the crime spree, Jill was attending classes part time at Loyola University, working toward a bachelor`s degree in chemistry she would have earned this spring.
But if the couple had turned to robbing banks to help them achieve their goals, they didn`t quit while they were ahead, authorities say.
Not much about Jeff Erickson`s early days set him apart from the other crew-cut boys growing up on his block in Morton Grove in the early 1960s, except perhaps his family`s Cleaverish normality. Jack and June Erickson were family people who lived for their two sons and raised them in a house filled with pets.
June Erickson had her boys baptized at the Irving Park Lutheran Church, but the family wasn`t Bible-thumping religious. They took frequent camping trips around the country, and before the boys were grown, they had camped out in almost every state. Their father, a World War II veteran who worked in middle management at Illinois Bell, accompanied them into the great outdoors whenever he could get time off.
”We were into camping,” June says. ”Kids love to run through woods. I took them hiking an awful lot. We led an easy-going type life.” In the weeks after Jill`s death and Jeff`s arrest, June Erickson, whose husband died of cancer in 1986, was having high blood-pressure problems and broke down often when she talked about what seemed like such an idyllic past. ”We just had an awful lot of fun together. I can see my husband and me and the boys running across fields, hiking, playing, camping.”
Jeff Erickson cut an uninspired but adequate path through Niles West High School, where he was on the swim team. He wasn`t the kind of guy to be elected to the homecoming court, but he wasn`t antisocial either. He graduated early and joined the Marine Corps, which shipped him around the South and Southwest, where he learned aircraft maintenance.
One thing that distinguished the Erickson boys from their peers was their love of guns. Like their other main hobby, motorcycling, the interest in guns was initiated by older brother Jim. The hobby began 20 years ago when Jim took up target shooting to exercise an injured index finger. Together the brothers started going to a suburban shooting range while still in their teens.
Until then, there had never been a weapon in the Erickson house. ”We weren`t allowed to own a peashooter or slingshot or anything,” Jim recalls.
”My mom`s what I call a Bambi-ist. She can`t see how people can shoot at anything with big brown eyes and a wet nose.” Jim Erickson made a vocation out of his hobby, went to gunsmithing school, then opened his own gun shop, Addison Shooter`s Supply.
Two months after Jeff`s arrest, Jim Erickson closed his gun business. He has been quizzed by the FBI several times but has not been accused of any wrongdoing. Nonetheless, he was uneasy during interviews for this story. When the FBI searched Jeff and Jill Ericksons` residence, they found 38 weapons around the house and in a massive safe installed in the garage. Among them were smoke grenades and semi-automatic rifles with their serial numbers filed off.
Jeff won trophies for marksmanship in the Marines and at the Chicago Police Academy. He says he first trained Jill in the proper use of firearms for safety reasons because he had so many guns around the house.
