Arrest Is Big Jolt for All Concerned

It may have been the wrong day to rob the California Federal savings and loan office in Corona del Mar. The bandit left there Thursday at 2 p.m. and drove away cleanly, with no one in pursuit.

An hour later, two Garden Grove police officers were in Santa Ana looking for a suspect in a bank robbery in their city. They spotted a man identified as Terry Highhouse near the civic center, and followed his car to Stanton, where he stopped in front of a house.

The officers, Mark Byrne and Dale Walker, identified Highhouse and arrested him when he got out of the car. Inside the vehicle, they found $2,600 in cash and a gun. The officers were surprised to learn later that most of the money was not from the Garden Grove robbery but from a more recent one in Corona del Mar. The officers were unaware of the savings and loan holdup, police officials said.

Booked on 4 Holdups

Highhouse, 30, was turned over to the U.S. marshal’s office in Santa Ana, where he was booked as a suspect in the Corona del Mar robbery and three other holdups in Orange County: at the Wells Fargo Bank in Tustin on March 1, at Crocker National Bank in Garden Grove on March 4, and at Home Federal Savings and Loan in Laguna Hills on March 11.

Highhouse was arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Ronald W. Rose and held in Orange County Jail for transfer to Terminal Island.

Highhouse’s last known address was in Santa Ana. He has served a prison term for bank robbery and was released just last December, police officials said.

FBI spokesman John Hoos of the Los Angeles office said that in all four of the robberies this month, the bandit wore a yellow baseball hat, a beige windbreaker, jeans and sunglasses. In each crime, Hoos said, the robber demanded money from a teller but showed no gun.

Hoos said luck played a part in Highhouse’s arrest, but it was mostly “the result of some very fine work by the Garden Grove police officers.”

Byrne and Walker usually work in uniform, but on Thursday they were on special assignment, in plain clothes and an unmarked car.