Original subtitles

- Two robbers go in.

One robber goes to the counter, jumps the counter.

- The robbers, they're wearing "Scream" masks.

One gets a manager, drags her by the hair,

orders all the employees into the vault at gunpoint.

- Employees are scared for their lives

and paralyzed with fear.

This is a pattern robbery.

And it has increasing violence.

This is a horror flick playing out in real life here.

- They then flee in a stolen Jeep.

- And right about this time, we get another call from dispatch.

- This is sort of the culmination of our fears.

We've had these bank robberies that continue to escalate.

And now we have a shot individual

related to this bank robbery.

- I'm angry that they're doing this to somebody.

I'm angry that I can't catch him.

- This doesn't get better.

They do this until they kill somebody.

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

This is "FBI True."

- Oh my god, Russ. How's it going?

Good to see you. How are you doing?

- Russell Humphrey spent 23 years in the FBI

where he helped lead the elite hostage rescue team

and became an expert in pursuing fugitives.

- Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you.

It's good to see you.

- Detective Chris Langley is a 25-year

veteran of the Lakewood, Colorado, Police Department.

He has investigated bank robberies,

kidnappings, and murders.

- Want to go inside?

- That'd be great. Let's go.

- Let's do it.

How is it that you two find yourself

working together on a case?

- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs, crimes against children

as well as human and drug trafficking.

- I ended up being assigned out with the FBI

violent crime task force.

For like five years straight, Denver

was either the number one or number two

per capita in bank robberies.

So we'd have over 100 bank robberies a year.

- We have live 91s going almost daily.

And in some cases, we're looking to see

is this something that's related or is it

an individual that's just going to keep

robbing until he's caught?

- Around 2012, they started having

some more violent takeover robberies that we

hadn't seen in the past.

- Alarm company's now calling in, giving us a panic alarm.

Robbery in progress.

- These were robberies where two hooded males with guns

tried to get into the vault.

- They were completely covered so

that there was no skin showing in most of the robberies.

And they look for any kind of anti-theft device

before they leave.

There's a tracker.

They would get rid of that tracker.

- While they were in the bank?

- Correct.

- The customer saw three males come in the bank,

three males leave the bank,

and three males leave in that Jeep.

- A lot of bank robberies, we call them note jobs.

A person comes in and pushes the note across and actually

apologizes and says, sorry, but can I

get some money for my family or something else?

These people were actually violent robbers committing

crimes that were traumatizing to customers and bank employees

and essentially attacking them.

- Jumping the counter with a mask with guns,

pointing guns at people's face.

I'm worried that they're going to escalate the violence

even more and kill somebody.

- We're starting to see an uptick in the violence.

How do you investigate when you have no clue

what the robbers look like?

Is there some pattern?

- There is a pattern.

They always had bags that they bring to put all the money.

- So at this point, to identify bank robbers

and then get that out to the public, and in this case,

we named them the Trick or Treat Bandits.

- From face masks to hats to hoodies,

these serial bank robbers are well-covered,

their heads included.

Investigators are now calling these men

the Trick or Treat Bandits.

- So in 2013, we get a robbery.

And it's a takeover robbery.

One of the things that we find was a GPS bracelet from

somebody on federal probation.

- But you could identify who the bracelet was on.

- Correct.

- What name do you get?

- Came back to Miguel Sanders, who was on federal probation

for bank robbery.

- I think there was a 30-second time period where it looked

like Miguel was in the bank but the GPS

company couldn't testify that it was in the bank.

It could have been outside of it.

But it certainly gave us a suspect

and made us think maybe there is some linkage

to the other robberies.

- When's the next bank robbery?

- There's one in September 2015 that really upped the ante.

A male walks in with a mask into a 7-Eleven,

looks at the clerk, shoots.

He narrowly missed her.

And he's visibly on the phone at the time.

He walks out.

Didn't demand money, didn't demand anything.

About two minutes after the 7-Eleven,

Lakewood gets a call of a bank robbery about five miles north.

- So the 7-Eleven shooting is a diversion?

- Correct.

Two people go into the bank.

One jumps the counter immediately,

pushes the female tellers around,

pushing them with guns in their face,

pushing them down onto the ground.

- And now we have a plastic "Scream" mask

from the movie "Scream," horror flick

playing out in real life here.

So now they're no longer the Trick or Treat Bandits.

And now they're the Scream Bandits.

- The employees are completely compliant.

Again, needlessly pushing guns in their face.

They're being overly violent.

- It's clear the employees are paralyzed with fear.

- Do we know how much money they got?

- Somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000.

- Wow.

That's a lot of money.

- What's enough?

Like, it's one thing to get that money

and do this as a enterprise.

It's a whole nother thing to be doing the terrorizing piece.

Now you're starting to rough up tellers.

You've got weapons pointing at them.

This doesn't get better.

It doesn't go down from here.

They don't take-- they don't go from this to no jobs.

They do this until they kill somebody.

- When you guys look at these videos as investigators,

what are you feeling?

- For me, it's a combination of anger and anxious.

You know, I'm angry that they're doing this to somebody.

I'm anxious about what's going to happen if I don't do my job

well enough to catch them.

- Right.

- As we're trying to figure out what to do next,

we get another robbery.

That's November 18.

- So when the radio call comes in, what does it say?

- It says that there's three armed men robbing

the bank at Jewell and Kipling in Lakewood

and that they're wearing "Scream" masks.

- Immediately thought these are the same guys.

One jumps the teller counter.

The other one gets a manager, drags her by the hair,

wants to get into the vault--

--orders all the employees into the vault at gunpoint.

- They've got all these employees at gunpoint

at close proximity jamming them all into a room

shoving guns in their faces.

When you watch the bank video, it's clear the employees

are scared for their lives.

- They then flee in a stolen Jeep that's right in front.

And this time, when they're grabbing money from the vault,

they ditched two trackers and they missed one.

So we're getting live updates about where

the tracker is headed.

- Right away, I think they're going to ditch that car.

They're going to be in something else.

Don't look for a black Jeep.

But it's so close in proximity,

it's hard to tell if they ditched the car or not

so we don't know if we're looking for a Jeep or not.

- And they're at the point where they're kind of driving

within rules and standards, not in a crazy

hair-on-fire getaway stance.

- So you don't know what you're looking for.

- Right.

We know that the GPS tracker is going east.

And we don't even know if it's the robbers necessarily.

- At this time, agents are getting in the area.

And they see a black Jeep heading in the same direction.

So they all go to start trying to stop this black Jeep.

- Well, it ends up being an old guy that they stopped that had

nothing to do with it.

About that same time, they actually

find the tracker ditched on the side of the road.

About a mile away to the east of that,

we get a call from a citizen seeing

something happen in a field that pulls

our attention away from there.

- Everybody's going at this point.

And right about this time, we get another call from dispatch.

They say a neighbor called in saying that their neighbor

has been shot.

- This is sort of the culmination of our

fears, right?

We've had these bank robberies that continue to escalate.

And now we have a shot individual

related to this bank robbery.

- Why was the gentleman shot?

- He's working in the house, sees three men with guns,

and they point them in his face,

push him to the ground with the guns,

ask him if he wants to die today.

Told him, you're going to drive us out of here.

He said OK.

But he knew at that point he was not going

to make it alive if he did it.

So he goes with them out to the garage.

His intention is to run.

So he hits that garage door.

And as it opens, he runs.

They shoot him right away.

He falls, gets back up and starts running,

looks back, blocks a round.

It was going to hit his face, hits his arm.

- Oh wow.

- He decides he's going to run towards one of the neighbors

across the street.

He looks at one, says, that's my pregnant neighbor.

I can't bring this gunfire to them.

So he decides he'll just run behind their houses

and, you know, jump down this ravine.

And then he thinks I'll bleed out and die if I go down there.

So he ends up walking around the house

and getting to the neighbor's house for help.

And luckily, they're home and they see him.

- That's a neighborhood that only has one entrance and exit.

Detective in an unmarked car is sitting

at that one intersection.

He sees a van going south through the intersection.

It's a four-way stop, but it accelerates instead of stopping

through the stop signs, and he decided to chase it.

- Is the van starting to recognize

that they're being chased?

- Immediately. And they drive insane.

They go through where the highway is

and just driving like maniacs.

- By this point, there's 60 or 70

on-duty officers going in uniform

plus all the investigators.

- This van ends up crashing in Sheridan,

about 50 yards away from a rec center for Sheridan

and also the high school for Sheridan.

So now we're extremely concerned.

- Multiple schools are now being locked down

because we certainly have no idea where

they're going to go next.

- They run up the--

it's a small hill to the parking lot.

A gal had just left the rec center with her mother.

She was there for probation for a DUI.

So she had to do her community service there.

Robbers pull open the door, pull out this female,

and immediately start punching her.

Well, she's not going to go down easy

because she's not like that.

So she punches back.

And we actually got DNA from one of our suspects,

from her ring and from her other hand.

So she was punching back.

- Wow, yeah, she was swinging.

- And they threw her to the ground

and over the top of her shot her.

- In that car was a sobriety start.

In order for you to get into said car,

you have to blow the sobriety test, show that you're a 0.0,

and then you drive away.

Well, in their haste, there's nobody blowing into that.

And the car, unbeknownst to them, just doesn't operate.

- So they take off running.

- So the guys are running.

And do they run into a dragnet, or?

- We lock it down.

And we're looking for them.

And then we have armed officers, SWAT agents

searching the grounds.

- And that's where they end up finding one suspect

hiding underneath the bus.

And there's Miguel Sanders.

- The guy with the ankle monitor?

- Correct.

- We've got two other subjects at this point.

Obviously, they've clearly split.

- We didn't know who they were.

They had fled.

We went back to the car where the vehicle had wrecked

and where they were changing clothes, collected the three

masks, rushed them with our regional crime lab

at Jefferson County, and within 48 hours--

it was really quick turnaround-- we had a match.

- To be clear, that's great work.

- I've never had a DNA result come back so quickly.

- Do you have a name? - We did.

We got three.

We got Miguel Sanders, who we knew.

We got Tyrone Richardson and then we got Myloh Mason.

- How does it feel to finally identify all three robbers?

- I was ecstatic.

- Then our concern was what's going to happen next.

Like, they've already shown a penchant to--

for increased violence that led to what we had that day.

This is the number one priority is to these two into custody.

In the case of Mr. Richardson,

we were able to identify some associates,

identify some addresses, and identify more

than one female acquaintance.

Six days later, the 24th of November,

he was identified at a residence but we were not able

to put him down at that residence

so it led to a moving surveillance

to another residence.

Ultimately, we went to a third residence

and he was taken into custody without incident in Aurora

with the Aurora SWAT team.

Now we have to find Myloh Mason.

We were starting to do phones.

We were starting to develop sources.

We did a search warrant at a girlfriend's residence.

We did some knock and talks, putting it out there on

wanted bulletins and posters.

- Right.

And how did that work out for you?

- Not great.

- No, not great.

It became clear that we wanted to get him on the top 10 list.

It provides a whole lot of money.

It provides a whole lot of Bureau resources.

- FBI top 10 is very difficult-- terrorists,

serial killers, mob bosses.

How do we get a guy on the top 10 that's not murdered anyone?

- From our perspective, it doesn't

get more dangerous than this because the penchant

for violence we saw that day was purely

lucky that that gentleman and those others

throughout the course of that day didn't lose their lives.

So from our perspective, it was an absolute necessity.

Why would we not use them as an FBI task force?

- He gets put on the top 10?

- He does, on December 17th.

- Did the top 10 listing bring any new leads?

- We had recently identified a female friend.

So one of the decisions was made

to work on phones, phone orders for that individual,

as well as a tracker on her vehicle.

On January 15th, a Friday morning,

we're sitting in the office, and there's the tracker.

It's in an area north of Denver in an empty parking lot

and not moving.

We immediately sent a few units up there,

find this female's car sitting in an empty church

parking lot, no church service going on.

There's nothing going on.

And interestingly enough, about a block to the east right off

I-25, there's a Motel 6 where let's just

say we've spent quite a few days

and quite a few fugitive arrests

have come out of that Motel 6.

We send in a small team to look over that guest list.

One of our very savvy investigators

looks down that list and sees a very peripheral name

to the investigation but one they

remembered to be on call detail records and is like,

that's the room.

It's a room on the north side, second floor of about 10 rooms.

So now we've got one of our better

surveillance individuals.

He gets in a restaurant across the street,

crawls in the back of the car, and prepares

for a long day of just looking at this hotel room.

Sees nothing for hours.

So about 5:00 or 6:00 that evening,

our female friend exits the hotel room, the exact

hotel room we're looking at.

And our surveillance gentleman catches a corner face shot

and says, jackpot, 100%, and let her drive away,

a car stop her.

At that point, she says I was in the room with Myloh Mason.

We evacuate the hotel, make the area safe,

and we threw a call into the room.

The jig's up. We know you're in there.

Please come out.

He walked to the door and complied

completely with commands.

He indicated that his name was Myloh Mason.

- All three in custody.

- All three in custody. - All three in custody finally.

- The task force was key to this.

All these robberies were not in Lakewood.

They were all over the place.

I wouldn't have been able to get the information,

especially in a timely manner, of the other robberies

to put together these pieces.

- What about you, Russ?

How does this case rank in your career?

And this case is one of your more satisfying ones?

- And this case is absolutely one of my more satisfying

in the violent crime realm.

- Right.

- For us as the Safe Streets Task Force,

this is exactly why we exist.

This is a pattern robbery that's across jurisdictions.

And it has increasing violence.

And if we don't stop that, where does it end?