Waterbury Man Faces 15 Months For Ansonia Bank Robbery

It’s no surprise that smoking is bad for your health.

But it can also be bad for your prospects of getting away with armed robbery, as a Waterbury man found out the hard way in the case of a stickup at a downtown Ansonia bank nearly six years ago.

The man, Dennis Wilson, pleaded guilty in the case last month, and will face 15 months in prison when he’s sentenced.

Wilson, 43, had been a suspect in the heist for years. But cops weren’t able to obtain an arrest warrant until they received word that DNA from a cigarette butt found at the scene of the crime matched his.

The Robbery

The bank robbery happened March 4, 2009 at the Naugatuck Savings Bank (now Ion Bank) at 75 Tremont St., next to the Big Y in Ansonia.

The information comes from an arrest warrant for Wilson written by Detective Stephen Adcox.

The warrant says witnesses told police that about 9:15 a.m. that day, a black man entered the bank displaying a handgun and robbed the branch of $8,359 before fleeing the area in a Ford Explorer with temporary plates.

Cops checked the area where the vehicle had been parked outside the bank and found a cigarette butt next to the driver’s side door that appeared to have been dropped recently because it was not yet deformed or wet from the elements.”

Detectives bagged the butt and sent it to a state lab to see if DNA could be extracted.

Suspect Named

The warrant doesn’t detail any more activity in the case until about six months after the heist, when two FBI agents visited Ansonia asking questions about the robbery.

That’s because the agents were investigating a similar armed robbery that had occurred in Brewster, N.Y. a month before. They had developed a suspect — Dennis Wilson.

Ansonia cops ran Wilson’s criminal history and found that his description was similar to that reported by witnesses in the Ansonia stickup.

They also found that he owned a gray Ford Explorer that had been issued temporary plates for the time period covered by the robbery. The warrant notes that Wilson got permanent plates for the vehicle when he registered it three days after the heist.

Butt Break

But police did not have much luck with matching the cigarette butt to a suspect initially.

The state crime lab sent a report in July 2011 saying that while technicians were able to grab DNA evidence from it, no matching profiles” were found when they ran the result through the state and national DNA databases.

But that changed in March 2012, when the lab alerted Ansonia police a new search had matched the DNA from the cigarette butt to a suspect — Dennis Wilson.

What changed that time? Wilson pleaded guilty to the Brewster stickup and was sentenced to 87 months in federal prison.

And as a convicted felon, Wilson had to provide a DNA sample to the feds, which then went into a national database.

Arrest, Conviction

After learning of the DNA hit, Ansonia cops matched the M.O. of the Ansonia crime to two prior robberies Wilson had been convicted of perpetrating.

Adcox and Detective Sgt. Patrick Lynch drove to Otisville, N.Y. to get a confirmatory” DNA sample from Wilson, who was locked up in a federal penitentiary there.

Wilson told the two cops he didn’t even know where Ansonia was and said he didn’t want to answer any questions about the robbery.

The state police lab matched the DNA sample from Wilson obtained by Adcox and Lynch to the cigarette butt in July 2013. The cops got a warrant charging Wilson with first-degree robbery and second-degree larceny in the case a month later.

Wilson pleaded guilty under the Alford doctrine to a reduced charge of second-degree robbery in the case last month, nearly six years after the stickup.

Under Alford, a defendant does not admit all of the allegations he or she is charged with, but concedes that a conviction is likely if the case went to trial.

According to court documents, a plea deal in the case calls for Wilson to receive a five-year prison sentence to be suspended after 15 months, followed by three years of probation.

Wilson’s sentence in the Ansonia case will run concurrently to his federal prison sentence.

Wilson is scheduled to return to court in Milford for sentencing April 8.

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