Detectives pinpointed cell phone use, combed through receipts from Home Depot and hopped from cheap motel to cheap motel to build a case against a man suspected of robbing a Seymour bank in February.
Police had developed Ansonia native Thomas Steele, 53, as a suspect just 37 hours after the Webster Bank at 15 New Haven Road was robbed at about noon on Saturday, Feb. 16.
Steele, who suffers from prostate cancer, according to a note in his case file, hasn’t admitted to any wrongdoing. He denied involvement during interviews with police, according to court documents.
Police obtained a warrant for his arrest and took him into custody June 3, almost four months after the crime.
Steele has not entered a plea. He’s due back in Derby court June 19. His case will probably get transferred to Milford, where more serious criminal cases are heard. He was represented by a public defender during his initial appearance.
The info in this story comes from the arrest warrant affidavit police convinced a judge to sign in order to charge Steele.
The Robbery
At about noon on Feb. 16, a man wearing a black ski mask went into the Webster Bank at 15 New Haven Road holding a gun.
“Get the f*** down on the floor,” he yelled, moving across the lobby.
“Don’t be a hero, it’s not your money,” the man told an employee after jumping over the teller’s desk. He pointed the gun at customers in the bank as he made his way to a waiting getaway car. His accomplice, the driver of that car, hasn’t been named nor arrested.
The robber left with $4,749 cash — and, unbeknown to him, an explosive dye back hidden in the loot that sprays red paint and tear gas.
Twenty minutes after police learned of the robbery, a woman in Beacon Falls walked her dog near a cul-de-sac off North Main Street. That’s about 2.6 miles from Webster Bank. The woman made an odd discovery — $540 cash, but the bills were burned and stained, thanks to the dye pack.
At 1 p.m., an hour after the robbery, a motorist driving on Route 8 near exit 9 noticed something odd. A man in a dark-colored Cadillac threw something from the vehicle.
The motorist noted the vehicle’s license plate.
The Route 8 witness, by the way — a Webster Bank branch manager, driving to the bank that had been robbed.
Cops tracked down the litter tossed from the Caddy. It turned out to be an Airsoft handgun, a “facsimile” of a Beretta.
At 4 p.m. — four hours after the bank robbery — Seymour detectives were chatting with the Cadillac’s owner, a Bridgeport resident. He said he had been tending to an ill child in a hospital during the robbery — but that a buddy, Thomas Steele, uses his car.
Cops didn’t have an address for Steele, though, as his buddy told police Steele “lives hotel to hotel.”
Thirty Seven Hours Later
Sure enough, police found Steele at a hotel — the Super 8 in Milford.
A Milford police officer, after receiving a bulletin from Seymour police, spotted the Cadillac there.
Two Seymour detectives (Brian Anderson and Steve Ditria) and a few Milford officers knocked on the door of the Super 8 where Steele was staying.
Then they took him into custody, right?
Wrong.
Steele wouldn’t open the door. He talked to them through a window. If this was the part of the story where the suspect is supposed to fold, Steele wasn’t playing his part.
He denied the Cadillac was his.
“I have no idea who that car belongs to, I know nothing about that car,” he said.
The detectives checked surveillance video from the Super 8. They watched a man who looked like Steele drive into the parking lot, get out and rent a room.
Now police had to match Steele and the car to the Webster Bank robbery. They needed to build enough probable cause so that a judge would sign an arrest warrant.
They impounded the car and got permission from the owner to search it.
Meanwhile, Milford police were tracking Steele back at the Super 8. As he left with a 20-year-old female companion, Seymour detectives and a FBI agent arrived to chat up the woman.
She wasn’t terribly cooperative, according to the warrant, but apparently told cops that Steele had been very anxious about buying something to clean the Cadillac.
Investigators had another discussion with Steele at the Super 8.
“You don’t have enough on me, otherwise you would be arresting me,” he allegedly told police.
Steele left.
Cops Circle
On Feb. 25, Seymour detectives (Ditria and Detective Sgt. Joseph DeNigris) went to the Post Motor Inn on Boston Post Road in Milford.
A manager at the motel told police that Steele had checked in there at 2:51 p.m. Feb. 16 — the day of the robbery. How police knew that he had stayed there is not clear.
Cops talked to a motel worker, who remembered cleaning Steele’s room after he left. There was a “substantial” red stain on the sink, a small portion of which was still visible to detectives.
Oh …
Then the detectives went for a walk.
“We walked outside and checked the perimeter around the room, we noticed two separate areas in the snow, located in the back of the room that were red in color,” DeNigris stated in the arrest warrant.
Then, on the ground near some trees about 50 feet from the room where Steele had stayed — a plastic bag.
In it, two red-stained towels, dish soap, receipts, red-stained plastic gloves — and one empty bottle of wine.
As detectives made their discovery, the motel worker had one of his own. He walked over with a black ski mask, saying he had just found it in a pile of snow.
One of the receipts in the plastic bag was from the Wal-Mart on New Haven Avenue in Derby. It was dated Feb. 16, 9:37 a.m., two and one-half hours before the Seymour bank robbery.
Video surveillance from the Wal-Mart showed Steele at the Wal-Mart buying an Airsoft handgun — a $16 Beretta copy.
Another receipt recovered outside the motel is from the Derby Home Depot on Main Street. It was dated Feb. 16, 2:28 p.m., two and one-half hours after the Seymour bank robbery.
Store video shows Steele buying “Goof Off” and rubber gloves, presumably (according to police) to deal with the dye pack that had exploded in his bag of cash seconds after allegedly robbing the Webster Bank.
Cell Phone Data
As Seymour detectives continued their investigation, Steele called them several times using his cell phone. What he relayed to police isn’t known — but cops took note of his cell phone number in order to get 30 pages of calling data from Sprint, his cell phone carrier.
Police were able to used data from cell phone towers to build a timeline. Court documents do not indicate how long it took to obtain the information from the cellular carrier.
At 11:54 a.m., about the time of the robbery, Steele allegedly used his cell phone, which used a cell antenna on Rimmon Street in Seymour.
At 12:20 p.m., when the dye pack and cash was found by a dog walker in Beacon Falls, Steele’s cell phone was bouncing data off a cell site at 236 Pent Road in Beacon Falls.
Steele is charged with first-degree robbery and third-degree larceny. He’s being held on $200,000 bail.
