Family Rent by a Bomb and a Broken Promise

Years later, the judge would say that the worst aspect of the crime--the one they called “the love connection”--was not the guns or the bomb threats or the hostages or the terror.

The worst was the shattering of a simple suburban life as it had been lived and loved.

John and Trish Farry’s home was tiny, but it was their dream. Snug at the end of a dead-end street, the two-bedroom ranch was their refuge from their other worlds: his as vice president of an electronics company, hers as manager of the First American Bank.

Here they welcomed friends for barbecues and their daughter’s classmates over to play. John, serious, dark, passionate about fishing. Trish, outgoing, confident, proud of her career.

And then one night in 1995, two masked gunmen burst through the front door and nothing was ever the same.

“Don’t look! Don’t look! Don’t look!” the intruders yelled, shoving John to the living room floor.

“Oh my God,” Trish cried, torn between running to her husband or to her 7-year-old daughter asleep in the back bedroom.

“On the floor! Down! Down!”

Trish threw herself down, face first.

“We’re here for the bank money,” the leader said. “Patricia can give us what we want.”

Nose pressed to the floor, Trish’s mind raced. How did he know her name? Was he someone she knew?

Be calm, Trish thought, heart pounding as her ankles were chained and a pillowcase pulled over her head. Just do what they want.

“Get us the money and no one gets hurt.”

Trish trembled and her mouth turned bone dry. But she knew that she could do anything if only they didn’t harm her daughter.

Please, she begged the ringleader, let me close her bedroom door.

“This is going to be the longest night of your life,” he said. “We’re going to show you how to dismantle a bomb.”

But he walked to the back of the house and closed the child’s door.

The ringleader paced the living room, talking nonstop. No one would get hurt, he said, if everyone followed the plan.

Chained and blindfolded, the Farrys listened grimly from the sofa.

Trish, you have the most important job, the gunman continued. You will open the bank as usual at 8 a.m. You will tell the other workers not to call the police. You will empty the vault. You will put the money in your car and follow our directions over the radio.

He took a long drag on a cigarette. Your husband will be taken away in a van. He will be strapped to a bomb. If anything goes wrong, we will detonate it.

“Do you understand?”

Trish shivered as she felt a gun against her thigh.

“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”

After 10 years with the bank, the 38-year-old manager knew what to do in a crisis: the distress signals, the secret codes, the dye packs that can be slipped into bags of stolen money. But all her training hadn’t prepared her for this: her home invaded, her husband captive, everything she loved in danger. And this horrible man drilling her on how to rob her own bank.

Money is only paper, she reminded herself. And bank money is insured.

The gunman was yelling again, asking how much was in the vault. Maybe $350,000, Trish guessed.

“That’s all?” the gunman screamed. “You’d better not be lying.”

“No sir, I’m not lying,” Trish said.

She leaned over to her husband. “John,” she whispered. “I can do what they want.”

Chained, ordered not to speak, John marveled at Trish’s composure. She was so brave, he thought. And he was so helpless.

The Farrys didn’t know it, but the gunman had been stalking them for five months.

He knew when they ate, when they took their daughter to school, when John went on business trips. From the bushes behind their house, he watched them shower. From the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on Kingston Pike, he watched Trish open the bank. He knew when the armored vans came and went. He knew when neighbors walked the dog.

His name was Doug Daigle, and when he breezed into Knoxville in the mid-1990s, he came with a past and he came with a plan. His past included robbery convictions, a dishonorable discharge from the Army and a stretch in a New Hampshire prison. His plan was this: Invade the homes of married female bank managers and threaten to blow up their families unless they robbed their own banks.

Simple. Brutal. Effective. Daigle called his plan “the love connection.”

All he needed were accomplices to pull it off.

Daigle was short and reedy-looking with crooked eyes, a long nose and black, stringy hair. But he had a con man’s charm and a braggart’s tongue. In no time he wooed the waitress at Shoney’s, where he ate breakfast every morning. After three days he bought her a car: a white Honda Accord. In two months he married her. Soon they had a double-wide house trailer, a baby and an ornamental pond. They also had an endless stash of money buried in the backyard.

At first, Capri Daigle thought the cash came from drug dealing. “I never thought you could just meet somebody who robbed banks,” she would say later.

But Capri learned quickly and without too many qualms. Before long she was a bank robber’s accomplice, accompanying her husband to municipal offices to check on land records and get aerial photos of the bank and the house.

Capri’s mother, Dena Farmer, joined in too, introducing Daigle to her boyfriend, Ted Roberts, a local car thief. Roberts wasn’t a hostage man himself, he told Daigle, but he introduced him to one--to John “Shot” Crisp, a man willing take hostages for the right payoff. Roberts would gladly act as the bagman.

Together they planned their first heist, sitting around the kitchen table in Farmer’s house in rural South Knoxville, or over dinner at the Cracker Barrel. Sometimes they would pile into Daigle’s red pickup, drive across the Tennessee River and cruise past the little tan house on a dead-end street where the bank manager lived. There were open fields behind and Interstate 40 nearby.

Easy for a quick getaway. Perfect for the plan.

In the Farry house that hot September night, the love connection worked like a charm. The other gunman barely spoke, but Daigle never stopped. He smoked and drank milk and complained about his ulcers. He boasted of other bank jobs and how he would make it up to victims afterward--sending airline tickets or a Christmas card. He admired John’s fishing photographs and bragged about his own prowess at something called snook fishing.

“Snook,” he said, “a very elusive fish.”

Trish tried to remember everything: his boots, his smell, his raspy cough. But she never looked directly at him.

Daigle warned her not to as he removed the blindfold so she could practice disconnecting the red and black wires from a plastic package labeled “explosives.”

A small clock attached to the device was set for 9 a.m.

Trish was shown diagrams of the route she would take. They talked about the layout of the bank and the security codes. They tested walkie-talkie radios. Trish would go to the bank alone, but Daigle would be in contact with her at all times.

He drilled her over and over until Trish thought her head would burst.

Are you sure you can do this? Daigle asked.

Yes, Trish replied, feeling stronger, feeling sure.

Hours had passed, and her daughter hadn’t stirred. She could do anything as long as the child was safe.

Dawn was breaking when Daigle announced that it was time for John to go. Crisp, who had sat silently at the kitchen table all night, yanked him from the sofa. Tearfully the couple hugged.

“I love you,” John said, choking with helplessness and rage.

Then he was gone, hustled out in chains.

Alone with Daigle, Trish had one thing on her mind. A friend was supposed to come by to bring her daughter to school. Somehow she had to be diverted.

“Think of a plan,” Daigle snapped.

“No, you think of a plan,” Trish snapped back.

Daigle proposed taking the friend hostage too.

“No!” Trish was surprised by the anger in her voice.

Grudgingly, Daigle agreed to let the child call and tell the friend not to come.

In the kitchen, the little girl ate oatmeal and stole glances at the stranger with the orange wool cap pulled over his head and a blanket hugged tight to his face. Her mom explained that he was a friend of Daddy’s. We must be very quiet, Trish said. We don’t want to wake him.

In the car, the child asked about the walkie-talkies. Daddy’s friend makes radios and we’re going to test them, Trish explained, trying to sound normal.

But nothing was normal on this sunny day, although the rest of the world acted as though it were. The neighbors nodded cheerily, the crossing guard waved, the police officer outside the school smiled.

My husband could be blown up any moment, Trish wanted to scream. Someone help me.

Instead she smiled brightly as she dropped her daughter off and watched her skip into school.

The first part of the nightmare was over. Her child was safe.

“She’s at the bank,” a voice crackled over the radio as Trish pulled into her parking space at First National, a small brick-and-glass building on the corner of Kingston Pike and Northshore Drive.

Where were they watching from? How many of them were there?

Trembling, Trish climbed out of the car, walked a few yards to the door and punched in her code. For a moment everything seemed eerily familiar, as though she could just walk to her desk and start her day.

Trish hesitated. Her fingers hovered over the distress button. All her training told her to press it.

What was she thinking? John was strapped to a bomb.

She jerked her hand away.

Trish fidgeted as other employees filtered in, waiting for the teller who had the joint combination to the vault. Struggling to stay composed, Trish called an emergency meeting in the lobby. Her words gushed out along with her tears.

They’ve got John, she sobbed. You have to help me. We have to empty the vault.

Trish could hear the gasps, see the shocked glances. She knew what they must be thinking.

No, she cried. You cannot call the police. If you do, John will die.

Others started crying too. But no one reached for the alarm.

The vault had more money than Trish had guessed. In a flash she decided that Daigle wasn’t getting it all, only about what he expected. The bags of $20s and $50s were so heavy they felt like they were full of rocks. Later Trish wondered where she got the strength to haul them to her car. But she did, alone.

From the lobby, her co-workers watched, clinging to each other. Please God, Trish prayed as she pulled onto Kingston Pike, don’t let anyone call the police.

Daigle’s voice broke over the radio with directions--right at the industrial park, left around the subdivision, right down Papermill Road.

Where on earth was he taking her?

After five minutes of twists and turns, Daigle ordered her to the Super 8 Motel about a half-mile from the bank. Park by the dumpster, he said. Leave the car unlocked. Walk to the phone outside the Waffle House and wait for my call.

“Don’t look back,” he warned, and the radio went dead.

The restaurant was a block away, on a slight rise above Kingston Pike. The phone hung in a bright blue booth by a window. Inside, Trish saw waitresses clattering around with trays, bantering with diners. Outside, traffic rumbled by.

Trish heard only the silence of the phone.

Ring, she begged. Please ring.

8:30 a.m.

Daigle had told her she had until 9:00 to dismantle the bomb.

8:45.

What was happening? Why this awful silence?

8:50.

I gave you the money! Trish wanted to scream. My husband better be alive.

9:00.

Trish stared at the phone, and then at her watch, and at the phone again. There was nothing more she could do.

She collapsed on the curb and sobbed.

*

To be continued next Sunday.

This story is based on interviews with John and Trish Farry and agents in the FBI’s Knoxville Field Office, as well as a review of police reports and trial transcripts.