Bonnie And Clyde And Dad

“All I can tell you is that I thought it would help us as a family,” he said.

“Robbing banks would help you as a family?” I asked.

Scott took a breath and slowly blew it out. “I did it for the family,” he said. “I swear to you, I would only rob banks for my family.”

Scott Catts and his two children, Hayden and Abby, are serving time in prison for the two bank robberies they pulled off together, as a family. Skip Hollandsworth interviewed all three of them for Texas Monthly, and the story of how it all came to be is WILD and almost…understandable?

Scott, the patriarch, was a single father after his wife died of breast cancer. He had a good job as an engineer but would rob a bank once a year or so to help make ends meet, figuring that his pistol wasn’t loaded and the bank money was insured, he didn’t really feel like a criminal. But he didn’t stop there:

Scott knew that if he had a bigger operation — “a team of accomplices” was the way he put it to me — he could get cash from several tellers’ drawers and perhaps even get to the bank’s vault. The problem was that he had no criminal friends to turn to. There was no one he could trust to stay quiet about what he was doing — except for his own children. Maybe, he began to think, he should talk to Hayden and Abby about joining him.

He quickly rationalized the idea to himself. For one thing, he knew that as long as they did what he told them, they wouldn’t get caught. And he would use the money from the robbery to start a small business — maybe a coffee shop — that he’d let the kids run… All I can tell you is that I thought doing it would give us all a little boost in our lives — that it would help us as a family.”

His kids were 20 and 18 years old. His daughter Abby was the getaway driver, Hayden the guy who came in and yelled for everyone to shut up and cooperate. Dad was the bag man.

Spoiler alert: they never did open that coffee shop. Abby and Hayden got more lenient sentences — five and ten years respectively, but shorter with parole — but Dad will be in jail for 24 years, until he’s 62.

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