271: The Great Mars Hill Robbery | USA

On Friday evening, the 12th of November 1971, the fire alarm sounded in Mars Hill, Maine. In a town of fewer than two thousand people, a fire was everybody’s business. Police and volunteer firefighters headed away from Main Street to investigate. There was no fire. While emergency crews were being drawn out of town, a man walked into the Northern National Bank. He wore dark glasses, an almost ankle-length coat and a wig that has variously been remembered as blue or reddish-brown. A blue bandanna covered part of his face. He produced a gun and announced a robbery. The disguise might have worked somewhere else. Mars Hill was not somewhere else. Behind the counter was teller Ola Orser. She had known the Patterson family for years. When Bernard Patterson was a boy, he had sometimes accompanied his mother into this very bank to cash the family’s potato-picking cheques. Now he was twenty-four years old, standing on the other side of the counter with a gun in his hand. Ola recognised him. Patterson took two bags of cash and staggered out of the bank. Waiting below Main Street, beside the Prestile Stream, was the getaway vehicle he had prepared in advance: a rubber raft. He pushed off into the November water. Almost immediately, the raft overturned. Patterson and the money went into water barely above freezing. By then, the bank knew exactly who had robbed them. Police knew whom they were looking for. The robber was soaked, on foot, and somewhere near the town where he had grown up. It should have been a very short manhunt. Instead, Bernard Patterson disappeared. This is the story of the Great Mars Hill Bank Robbery. You are listening to: The Evidence Locker. Thanks for listening to our podcast. This episode is made possible by our sponsors—be sure to check them out for exclusive deals. For an ad-free experience, join us on Patreon, starting at just $2 a month, with 25% of proceeds supporting The Doe Network, helping to bring closure to international cold cases. Links are in the show notes. Our episodes cover true crimes involving real people, and some content may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised. We produce each episode with the utmost respect for the victims, their families, and loved ones. Mars Hill lies in Aroostook County, at the far northern end of Maine, close to the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Mainers call this vast region simply “The County”. It is larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, a landscape of potato fields, timber, low mountains and long winters. Mars Hill takes its name from the mountain rising beside it. The town grew around farming and logging, and for generations the potato harvest shaped the rhythm of local life. Children could be released from school to help bring in the crop. Families worked the fields together. Money was hard-earned and communities were close. Bernard Kenneth Patterson was born in nearby Presque Isle on the 14th of January 1947. His childhood was not comfortable. The Patterson family was poor even by the standards of an area where many families struggled. Bernard’s mother worked during the potato harvest and brought her cheques to the Northern National Bank. The bank he would one day rob was part of his childhood landscape. People who knew Bernard remembered a small, wiry boy who was unusually quick, both physically and mentally. Childhood friend Doug Pierce recalled wrestling with him in second grade. When Pierce pinned Bernard’s arm behind his back, Bernard escaped by throwing himself into a complete somersault. It was an early glimpse of a trait that followed him through life: when the obvious route was blocked, Bernard improvised. He was also exceptionally bright. Although he eventually left school after the eighth grade, former teachers remembered him as a natural mathematician. One recalled that Bernard could absorb in two days what other students needed a week to learn. But intelligence did not give him stability. In the late 1950s, the Patterson family home on York Street burned down. With nowhere for everyone to go, the family was split apart. The children stayed wherever relatives or other households could take them. Bernard spent periods with his uncle in nearby Blaine, while his older brother George tried to look after the younger children as best he could. A close friend later described Bernard as having lacked solid footing. At seventeen, Patterson found structure in the United States Army, during the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He was only five-foot-three, but his size was an advantage in one of the most dangerous jobs available to an American soldier. He became a tunnel rat. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces used elaborate underground tunnel systems for movement, storage, command posts, hospitals and shelter. When American troops discovered an entrance, somebody had to go inside. Tunnel rats crawled into spaces barely large enough for a man to pass through. They encountered darkness, traps, snakes, insects and enemy soldiers. A flashlight and a handgun might be all they carried. There was very little room to retreat and nowhere to take cover. Patterson volunteered for the work. He completed three tours in Vietnam and rose to the rank of sergeant. Accounts of his military record credit him with four Bronze Stars, four Army Commendation Medals and the Air Medal; he was also recommended for a Silver Star for valour. He appears to have been extraordinarily good at surviving situations in which panic could be fatal. But Bernard Patterson’s Vietnam story was never a simple war-hero narrative. Off duty, he moved comfortably through the war’s black market. According to Ron Chase’s later biography, Patterson traded currency, sold American military equipment and smuggled marijuana home to Maine while on leave. He volunteered to return to Vietnam for a fourth tour, but the Army refused. And suddenly, the place where Patterson had found purpose, danger and status was closed to him. He had no other choice but to returned to northern Maine. He found himself back in his hometown, in his twenties and broke. Years later, when a friend asked why he had robbed the bank, Patterson reportedly gave a characteristically neat answer: the Veterans Administration would not give him a loan, so he decided to take one out himself. Whatever his grievances, the robbery was not spontaneous. Patterson chose the bank he knew. He hid a rubber raft beside the Prestile Stream as part of his escape plan. And, according to Mars Hill’s acting police chief Fay Fitzherbert, he arranged for a friend to report a false fire shortly before the robbery. The diversion was clever. The disguise was not. Friday was the bank’s late-opening day. Patterson entered wearing the long coat, dark glasses, wig and bandanna, and displayed what appeared to be a firearm. The gun was later reported to have been a toy. Ola Orser and the other people inside the bank had no way of knowing that. Patterson demanded cash. Sources disagree on the precise amount. Ron Chase’s book and its publisher give the figure as approximately $110,000, while later Bangor Daily News reporting places it at $177,000. Either figure made it an enormous robbery for 1971, and contemporary accounts regarded it as the largest bank robbery in Maine history at the time. The money was loaded into two bags, and then Patterson made for the stream. The Prestile runs directly through Mars Hill and continues towards the Canadian border. On paper, it offered a route out of town that avoided the roads. In practice, November in northern Maine had other ideas. The raft flipped. Patterson plunged into water around forty degrees Fahrenheit – roughly four or five degrees Celsius – along with the proceeds of the robbery. He managed to get out, but the carefully prepared river escape was over almost as soon as it had begun. He did not head home. He did not approach friends openly. Instead, soaked and already identified, Patterson made for Mars Hill Mountain and disappeared into the country around the town. Police, sheriff’s deputies, the FBI and Canadian authorities became involved in the search. According to Chase, it grew into the largest law-enforcement operation northern Maine had seen. And still they could not find him. For roughly a week, Patterson hid in the area around Mars Hill Mountain. That week is perhaps more revealing than the rubber raft. The absurdity of the disguise and the capsized boat can make the robbery sound slapstick. But Patterson was a former tunnel rat who had spent years operating in dangerous terrain. He knew how to stay still, endure discomfort and wait. Eventually, he arranged a ride south to Connecticut. Then he kept going. From Connecticut, Patterson made his way across the United States to California. By then his face and name were known to law enforcement, so leaving the country required another solution. He obtained a false passport and flew to France, carrying the bank’s money with him. This was 1971. There were no biometric passports, no shared digital border databases and no instant electronic trail every time somebody spent money. Cash could travel in a suitcase. A convincing document and a confident manner could carry a person surprisingly far. For the first time in his life, Patterson had both confidence and cash. Europe transformed his escape. For a man who had grown up poor in northern Maine, suddenly there were expensive hotels, restaurants, wine, motorcycles and people who did not know anything about Mars Hill. He spent months in Switzerland, including time around Villars-sur-Ollon in the Alps, where he reportedly rented a large house and lived extravagantly. Ron Chase’s account describes a succession of parties and women, and Patterson moving through wealthy social circles with remarkable ease. He also gave money away. One story has him handing francs to an elderly woman who appeared to need them. Gestures like this helped create the Robin Hood mythology that followed Patterson for decades. Friends remembered him as generous and loyal. Even years later, people who had known him could be fiercely protective of his reputation. But generosity was easy when the money belonged to somebody else. More importantly for Patterson, conspicuous generosity and expensive living were terrible habits for a fugitive. Law enforcement was getting closer… At one point, according to Chase’s reconstruction, Patterson left Switzerland for England only about half an hour ahead of Interpol. So he moved again. He bought a motorcycle and travelled through Europe. He attempted to enter Greece and was turned away. From Italy he crossed the Mediterranean into North Africa. This is where the story becomes so strange that it sounds embellished. Patterson traded the motorcycle for a camel, and then headed into the desert. Accounts differ over whether this episode took place in Tunisia or Morocco, but agree on the essential fact: the former Maine bank robber attempted to travel into the Sahara by camel and nearly got himself killed after becoming lost. It was an extraordinary escalation from hiding on Mars Hill Mountain only months earlier. Eventually Patterson abandoned his North African adventure and returned to Britain. By then, most of the bank money was gone. In June 1972, he travelled by ferry to Jersey in the Channel Islands. This time, Scotland Yard was waiting. Patterson’s arrest ended roughly seven months on the run. Later summaries sometimes say he surrendered at Scotland Yard in London, but detailed Maine reporting based on Chase’s research places his capture on the Isle of Jersey by British authorities. Either way, the European holiday was over. He was returned to the United States and brought back to Maine to face federal prosecution. There is a photograph from December 1972 showing Patterson being escorted to federal court in Bangor by two US Marshals. The flamboyant disguise was gone. So were the Alpine parties, the motorcycle and the camel. He was twenty-five years old. The prosecution could have exposed him to as much as thirty years in prison. The judge who sentenced him was himself a veteran of the Second World War and reportedly took Patterson’s military record into account. Patterson received an effective sentence of fifteen years. He was sent to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. For a man who had crawled through enemy tunnels in Vietnam and crossed continents while being hunted by police, prison frightened him in a way few other things had. Patterson later said that nothing he had experienced in Vietnam had made him as afraid as Lewisburg. He served about five years and was released in 1977. And as one can expect, prison did not turn him into a conventional citizen.. During his sentence, Patterson had used the prison library to study marijuana cultivation. When he returned to Aroostook County, he put the education to practical use. He settled in Westfield, not far from Mars Hill, and grew marijuana. This became another local chapter in the Patterson legend. Years later, writer Kathryn Olmstead remembered staying on a neighbouring farm and seeing helicopters overhead searching for the crop Patterson was known to cultivate. He had apparently developed dwarf plants that were more difficult to spot from the air. The boy who had escaped a wrestling hold with a somersault had not lost his instinct for improvisation. Patterson married and had a daughter, although the marriage did not last. He continued living in northern Maine and remained, to many people who knew him, far more than the man who had once robbed the bank. When Ron Chase began researching Patterson’s life decades later, he interviewed more than forty people. Again and again, Chase encountered the same contradiction. People knew what Bernard had done. They also liked him. Brian Blanchard, one of Patterson’s lifelong friends, helped Chase travel around Mars Hill during his research but made one condition clear: Bernard was his friend, and he would not participate in anything intended to denigrate him. That loyalty helps explain why the robbery survived so strongly in local memory. It was not simply that the crime was bizarre. Mars Hill knew the robber. Some remembered the poor child whose family had been scattered after a house fire. Some remembered the quick, clever boy from school. Some remembered the decorated soldier who came home from Vietnam. Some remembered the man who could be funny, generous, reckless and infuriating. And Ola Orser had known him long before the wig. It is tempting to turn Bernard Patterson into one thing. War hero. Bank robber. Folk hero. Drug grower. None works particularly well on its own. His military record was real. So was the bank robbery. The courage required to enter enemy tunnels does not make threatening bank employees harmless. And the fact that the gun was reportedly a toy does not mean the people facing it knew they were safe. But reducing Patterson to the robbery misses why this particular crime became part of Maine folklore. He was not an anonymous offender who appeared from nowhere. His entire life seemed to contain the same unlikely mixture of nerve, intelligence, poor judgement and improvisation. He grew up with very little and left school young, yet people who taught him remembered an exceptional mind. He found success in one of the most dangerous roles in Vietnam, then also participated in black-market dealing. He planned a diversion sophisticated enough to draw police away from the centre of town, then robbed a bank where the teller knew him. He prepared a raft to escape unnoticed and capsized it within minutes. He was identified almost immediately, yet managed to cross the United States, obtain false documents and spend months moving through Europe and North Africa. And when ordinary fugitive behaviour might have involved finding a quiet room and keeping his head down, Bernard Patterson rented expensive accommodation, surrounded himself with people, rode a motorcycle across Europe and somehow ended up with a camel in the Sahara. The story did not become larger than life after his death. Patterson appears to have lived it that way. He also paid for it. The stolen money was largely gone by the time he was caught. He spent years in a federal prison that he later described as more frightening than Vietnam. His later life included heavy drinking and continued marijuana use, and his health declined. On the 5th of July 2003, Bernard Patterson died of a heart attack at a hospital in Presque Isle. He was fifty-six. He had reportedly tried during his lifetime to sell the rights to his story. He believed there ought to be a book or a film about him, but would not accept what he considered too little money. The book finally came thirteen years after his death. Ron Chase had first read about Patterson in a series of newspaper articles in 1973. Four decades later, he began tracking down the people who had known him and piecing together the life behind the famous robbery. After the book was published in 2016, Chase held a talk at the library in Mars Hill. There he met someone he had not been able to interview during his research: Patterson’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Emma, who had been an infant when her father died. She had one question: If they ever made the book into a movie, could she be in it? For Mars Hill, perhaps the story had always felt a little like one. A false fire alarm. A hometown bank. A terrible disguise. Two bags of cash. A rubber raft overturned in icy water. Then Switzerland, Interpol, a motorcycle, North Africa and a camel. All of it beginning in a town small enough for the woman behind the bank counter to look through the wig and recognise the boy who used to come in with his mother. If you'd like to dive deeper into this case, check out the resources we used for this episode in the show notes. Don’t forget to follow us on social media for more updates on today's case – you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. We also have a channel on YouTube where you can watch more content. 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