Couple Facing Bank Fraud Charges Kill Themselves : Indictment: Missouri executive and his wife were accused of 53 felony counts. Bodies are found in garage of Palm Desert rental home.

Just as the FBI was convening a news conference in Missouri to announce that a banker and his wife were being indicted for bank fraud Friday afternoon, Riverside County sheriff’s deputies opened the garage door of their vacation rental at the Palm Desert Country Club and found their bodies.

The couple had died of apparent bullet wounds in what authorities believe was a carefully arranged murder-suicide pact. The two were expecting the indictment, which charged them with 53 felony counts of bank fraud stemming from one of the biggest bank failures in Missouri history, officials in St. Louis said.

Instead of surrendering as planned, the couple, in businesslike fashion, sent a Federal Express letter to their attorney in St. Louis advising him that they would be dead by the time he received it, officials said. The attorney declined interviews.

The couple were identified as Don Chilton, 45, former chairman of the board of the First Exchange Corp., which owned five subsidiary banks in Missouri, and his wife, Patricia Eisenbeis Chilton, 37, a former vice president of investments.

Deputy Coroner Mike Werk of the Riverside County coroner’s office said authorities found the couple’s bodies inside a car in the garage of a stucco home they had rented days before, perhaps with the intention of using it as a place to carry out a suicide pact.

A .38-caliber revolver was found, he said, but the motor of the car had also been left running, perhaps as a backup in case the gunshot wounds failed to kill them both.

The two, dressed in casual clothes, had left a brief note for authorities identifying themselves and giving the name of the attorney who would dispose of their complicated business affairs, Werk said. The note bore both their signatures, he said.

Werk declined to give further details.

The couple was at the center of a 17-month federal investigation prompted by the failure of the banks, whose troubled assets were assumed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. last year at a cost of $250 million.

The lengthy indictment handed up in St. Louis on Friday charged the Chiltons with cheating the bank out of more than $15 million in a series of deals involving alleged insider trading, phony loans, self-dealing and record cover-ups.

Also indicted were Don Chilton’s brother, Bill Chilton of Sanibel, Fla., a former advisory director of First Exchange Corp., and Andrew J. Crawford, a former Arkansas bond salesman. Neither could be reached for comment.

A former Marine who rose from a low-ranking auditor, Don Chilton presided over the bank as it grew during the 1980s. In 1989, $58 million of the bank’s $394 million in loans--an unusually high amount--were to insiders and insider-related companies.

He was combative in interviews last year when the charges became public, suing his detractors for libel and blaming his problems on abuse by regulators. He also became involved in a blizzard of lawsuits and countersuits with bank managers.

According to the indictment, the Chiltons were principals in a conspiracy that started in 1986, when the Chilton brothers began trading in uncovered government securities. To cover the $1.5 million the brothers lost in the risky trades, Crawford allegedly created phony bond trades on behalf of the banks, according to the indictment.

In another alleged fraud, the brothers formed a company to buy two motels, took out mortgages from their banks, and paid off the mortgages with other loans from their banks.

The indictment also charged that Chilton asked bank employees to lie to bank examiners. Chilton also allegedly failed to reveal that he had a financial interest in several of his brother’s businesses that received bank loans, and that he made loans to his sister and brother-in-law without informing bank management of their relationship.

According to the indictment, Chilton also told bank employees to lie to regulators if irregularities came to light. Fourteen of the 53 counts in the indictment accuse Don and Bill Chilton of making false statements on loan documents.