Jeff Erickson met Jill Sandra Cohen at a bar in Niles in 1981, just after he was discharged from the Marines. A high school senior, Jill was celebrating her 17th birthday with her older sister. Jeff liked her long blond hair and long legs and discovered that she hated dancing as much as he did.
At that first meeting, they talked about their mutual love of animals, he says. Within six months, she had dropped out of Buffalo Grove High School and moved in with him. In 1983 they wed in a civil ceremony attended only by their parents.
Jill Cohen was the second adopted daughter of pharmacist Carl Cohen and Fran Cohen. Jill was a teenage loner and no social standout in high school. And although she told Jeff her childhood was happy, she moved in with him to escape the pain of her parents` impending divorce, Jeff says.
For most of their married life, the Ericksons lived in a series of apartments all over the northwest suburbs, including Mt. Prospect, Niles and Arlington Heights. Their frequent moves were caused by landlords who didn`t like their proliferation of pets, Jeff Erickson says. The couple always had a dog, and sometimes birds, gerbils and ferrets. ”We`d move in, and then new landlords would come in and change the lease, telling us to get rid of the dog,” he says. ”I could never see getting rid of the dog, so we moved.”
According to Jim Erickson, Jeff was so devoted to animals that he once ordered an autopsy done on a parakeet to see if it had died of something its surviving mate could be cured of.
In the spring of 1991, about a year after the first of the bank robberies the couple is charged with, the Ericksons put down $22,000 in cash and bought their townhouse in Hanover Park. A few months later, Jeff opened Erickson`s Best Used Books in Roselle. He built the shelves himself and advertised by leaving piles of books inside commuter train stations along the North Western line.
Suddenly, Erickson was leading a lifestyle drastically different from the one he and Jill had been used to. Since leaving the Marines, Erickson`s work life had been unfocused at best, involving a series of unrelated jobs that included driving a truck and a limousine, operating a cleaning business and clerking at a 7-Eleven.
The only other time Erickson had achieved a similar degree of respectability and security was his short-lived stint as a Hoffman Estates police officer in 1986. But he resigned under pressure after less than a year. In a perfect world, Erickson might have made a good cop. He likes people- he says his favorite job before the bookstore was working at 7-Eleven because of the customer contact-and he`s a police-procedure buff. But he didn`t like being the heavy. He didn`t have the ”common sense” the job required, according to his former chief. When he pulled people over, he`d apologize to them, Erickson says.
He has given different versions to different people of his failure as a cop. He told a co-worker in the bookstore that he was fired for failing to come to the aid of a threatened officer. In an interview for this story, he said he was asked to resign after a superior saw him apologizing profusely to a motorist he was ticketing. His mother thinks he was just ”too nice” for the job.
Erickson lost the police job in 1987, and sometime in the next two years, authorities say, he turned to crime. The bank robberies Erickson is charged with, authorities say, had many earmarks of someone familiar with police procedure and accomplished at acquiring and using weapons and professional burglary tools. Each of the robberies except the last involved a single person. Most of the robberies were in the northwest suburbs-Elk Grove Village, Niles, Rolling Meadows, Libertyville-and there was one in Wilmette.
The robber never shot anyone inside the banks, although he threatened tellers he`d ”blow their brains out,” according to the FBI. But authorities believe it was Erickson who shot and wounded Palatine police officer Kevin Maher last November when Maher pulled over a small Japanese-made car on a routine traffic stop. The driver of the car shot at Maher, hitting him in the shoulder, and then fled on foot. The car turned out to be stolen, and police have traced the bullet in that shooting to a gun in Erickson`s house. Authorities believe Maher inadvertently intercepted Erickson on the way to a heist.
The Maher shooting prompted the creation of a coordinated effort between federal agents and seven suburban police departments. The task force began staking out stolen Japanese cars sometime last fall. They hit pay dirt on Dec. 16.
Erickson will go on trial in federal court in July, charged with eight bank robberies. After 22 months of crime by the ”Bearded Bandit,”
authorities believe they have the culprit. The particular method of car theft, involving sophisticated burglary tools, and his habit of using two stolen Japanese vehicles as getaway cars were the two clues that finally led to Erickson`s capture.
Authorities believe his modus operandi was something like this: Sometime before a robbery, one car would be driven to a position near the bank and left there. Erickson would then drive the other car to the bank and use it as the immediate getaway vehicle. The getaway car was always abandoned a few blocks away, replaced by the second car. Both Jeff and Jill are believed to have been involved in the elaborate details of moving stolen cars into position.
When he was apprehended, Jeff Erickson still displayed a fastidious awareness of police procedure. He was happy to tell the FBI men who arrested him what they were doing wrong. He said he noticed a variety of errors when he was being booked into the Metropolitan Correctional Center, and he reported these lapses to the officers later.
As he was being booked, officers informed Erickson that his wife was dead. A few days later, he viewed her body privately, after a federal court denied him bail but allowed him to be transported to a North Shore funeral home handcuffed, in leg shackles and accompanied by a cadre of U.S marshals.
In many ways, Jeff and Jill Erickson were an odd couple. They lived an isolated married life, with few friends. While he was known to neighbors and acquaintances as a jovial fellow who loved to talk, she was shy and barely responded to greetings. He was a creature of habit, she was unpredictable. He was of average intelligence, she had a brilliant streak.
Brian Kita, owner of Tucker`s Hot Dogs, next to what used to be Erickson`s bookstore on Irving Park Road in Roselle, recalls that Jeff Erickson used to stop by and chat during his lunch hour, while Jill was invariably silent. ”I would never imagine he`d have the brains to be a bank robber,” Kita says. Privately, authorities agree. ”He looks and acts like Baby Huey. You see him, and you can`t imagine the guy would be able to plan anything with such military precision,” one official says.
Federal prosecutors also see a more calculating mind behind the heists. As an unindicted co-conspirator, Jill is charged in the planning and execution of the bank robberies at all levels.
Jill had a reputation for intelligence but not social graces. Jeff and his family have described her as ”brilliant,” yet at family gatherings she often spent most of her time in a room away from other people. Philip Kotula, a customer at Erickson`s Best Used Books, recalls being impressed by her.
”She talked to me about Fourier analyses, which only one in a hundred people would know,” he says. Most of her jobs were solitary positions in labs at various suburban companies. The night she died, she was due on the night shift at Safety-Kleen Corp. in Elgin, where she analyzed chemicals.
Neighbors described Jill as a nocturnal oddball who went roller-blading in the middle of the night. But there was an explanation for her strange behavior: manic-depression combined with what doctors called the beginnings of schizophrenia, according to her husband. Jill was so diagnosed in the spring of 1991-about 16 months after the first robbery her husband is charged with-when she checked herself into a suburban hospital for a drinking problem, leaving her husband a note on the kitchen table as to her whereabouts.
While in rehabilitation for three weeks, Jill told doctors about her bizarre circadian rhythms. Unable to sleep for days at a time, she`d stay awake for three days straight, trying everything to tire herself out, including midnight weight lifting or motorcycling, roller-blading around the Olde Salem subdivision in the wee hours or studying her chemistry homework.
Her husband recalled that during these periods, his wife was capable of simultaneously watching ”Star Trek,” listening to classical or rock music on headphones and studying chemistry. When sleep finally came, it lasted for days at a time. Jill would get out of bed only to shower, then crawl back under the covers, Erickson remembers.
To relax during the last two years, the couple began to go on what they called ”night rides.” They`d jump on their Hondas and ride as fast as they could to Peoria or Rockford in the middle of the night, racing back before dawn.
Eventually, Jill Erickson took medication for her condition, Jeff says, but she was terrified of losing her mind after the schizophrenia diagnosis. Says her husband: ”She said if she noticed she was losing her mind, she would kill herself. She was smart, a chemist. She said she didn`t care if I took the guns away, she just wouldn`t play it (her mental illness) out.”
According to the Cook County Medical Examiner`s Office, that is exactly what happened. The autopsy and a police investigation determined that while Jill may have been superficially wounded by police gunfire in the shootout, the bullets that killed her was self-inflicted.
In early June Erickson still planned to plead innocent to the eight bank robbery charges. He says deeply misses his wife (whom he refers to as ”my Jill”) and his dog.
”I grew up in the northwest suburbs, and I like it there,” he says. ”I never wanted to live anywhere else, really. I wanted a house because of the dog. I was never into flashy stuff. Whenever someone shows me a Rolex watch, I look at it and think: `Why would you pay 10 grand for a watch? Is that one-millionth of a second a year worth it?` ”
But even modest dreams have six-figure price tags in the northwest suburbs, where homes cost the kind of money that might seem like Mt. Everest to a truck-driving 7-Eleven clerk without a college education. Billboards with 5-foot-high dollar signs promote the subdivisions near his old townhouse:
”$130,000 buys 3 bedrooms 3 bath 2-car garage in Hanover Park.”
These days, Jeff Erickson doesn`t complain about incarceration. Jail`s not bad, he says. The food`s OK, and they have exercise periods to keep the fat off, he adds. During one of those exercise periods, on the roof of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, his brother brought Kaos to the top floor of a parking garage just below the MCC. Erickson watched his dog chase a ball, but when he called out, the sun was behind him, and the dog, he said, never saw him.