And then she didn't come out.
"She's in forever," he recalls. "Everybody knows you can't stay in forever."
By then, LAPD knew the Starlet Bandit was likely to strike again. The group had robbed two banks on the same day on three previous occasions. Officers had deployed to banks throughout the Valley. When Canty went into the Chase bank, a plainclothes officer was parked right outside.
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Other employees came out to look — and told the officer they had just been robbed. He hopped back in his car and joined the chase.
When the officer got to the alley, he saw the bank employee looking toward the rear parking lot, out of breath. Canty was running away, with her cellphone up to her ear. "Where are you?" she screamed. "Come and get me! They're chasing me!"
The officer drove closer to her and yelled to stop, but she kept going. He said he was a police officer, but she kept running. Then he yelled that he was pointing a gun at her. She stopped, and that's when he slapped on the handcuffs.
St. John had been waiting in the parking lot across the street, talking to Canty on the cellphone. He was circling the block, attempting to pick her up, when she went the wrong way. When he saw that she was trapped, he took off.
St. John later got a call from Canty's mother, saying that Canty would not rat him out, but they needed $5,000 for bail.
Before they could get the money together, Canty started talking. And what she told detectives unraveled the whole case. She was, May says, "the home run."
She confessed that a man she knew only as "Bob" had put her up to it. Bob had given her the sunglasses and the purse, and had scrawled out the note on the roof of his rented Chevy Malibu.
Though she did not know Bob's full name, the detectives got her to call her mother, who provided the license plate of St. John's car. With that, the detectives traced the car to Alamo, which provided the address of the customer who had rented the car.
It was St. John's house — Ana's house — in Palmdale.
Ana was at work when she learned that the police wanted to talk to her. Her first thought was that her husband had been murdered. The agents told her they had a search warrant for her house and that St. John was wanted for bank robbery.
He was still on parole, one of the conditions of which was that he had to wear an ankle bracelet. The agents informed Ana that the bracelet put him at the scene of 13 robberies.
The bracelet even showed how fast he was going. During the robberies, they could tell he was waiting in the parking lot. Immediately afterward, they could see him accelerating away.
It was a lot to process, but her primary reaction was how stupid it was.
"How do you spend all those years away from your children, and then decide to do something where you know you're going to get caught," she says. "I just don't get it."
The agents followed St. John around for a couple days before they arrested him. When they pulled him over, on May 27, 2010, Derosier was in the car. The detectives immediately recognized her from the first two robberies.
For St. John, the gravity of the situation began to sink in after he was arrested.
"When they put it on paper, that's when it's, like, 'What the fuck,' " he says. "It dawned on me, the seriousness, when I looked at it as a charge. I didn't realize it was that many."
He doesn't have particularly good answers for his wife. He had stopped thinking about the ankle bracelet.
"So many wild things happened, I didn't really trip," he says.
The FBI arrested five of the women involved. Most received relatively mild sentences and have been released. Prosecutors sought to put Kilgo away for 3½ years. Although she was linked to nine robberies, she was given just 14 months. Paroled, she later returned to prison on a drug charge; she's now in solitary confinement after fighting with other inmates.
St. John ended up pleading guilty, and was sentenced in January 2011 to eight years. He was also ordered to pay back $21,000 to the banks. He is due to be released in 2017.
"I understand I gotta take more responsibility," he says by phone from federal prison in Herlong, Calif. "I'm the EBP — the evil black pimp. I understand that. I hurt everybody that was helping me."
Ana says she hasn't talked to her husband in two years. The cars have all been repossessed and the house is in foreclosure. She's thinking about moving out of Palmdale to be closer to her family. And, after nearly 20 years of marriage, she's also considering a divorce.
"It makes me sad because I lost so many years," she says. "He destroyed a lot of lives and a lot of hope I had for us."
In a letter from prison, St. John suggests that he still has fame on his mind.
"People expected more out of me," he writes, "Hell, I did, too. But I'm not dead, so I'm gonna keep going. Besides, this isn't the last thing I wanna be remembered for."
The funny thing is . . . This does not even hit close to the truth when it comes to the crimes . . . Gene if your gonna write about something you should really get your facts straight and not just go off how a pissed off "wife" feels about how it happen. . .
Really? The best story you could find was about a pimp-rapist-loser-idiot-liar and some clueless prostitutes? And other bozo commenters here actually liked it? I laugh in disbelief.
wow, that was CRAZY ,there is so much in this story that I think Hollywood should make a movie , for real.
so whats up with black men always comitting crimes while leaving evidence behind? looks like he got lucky with a liberal judge who wanted to save the poor black man..with the evidence and his prior criminal history he should not be getting out in 2017..more like 2100...he wore his ankle monitoring bracelet during the robberies..lol sound familiar like that black guy across the country saying ''What is Benghazi?'' I can see why black men belong in the slammer...if you upload a youtube video of a black man reading a thick book, I bet it will go viral.
I'm not one to regularly criticize the Weekly's work. (If I generally hated it, why bother reading it?) However, this story failed on a few levels. First, it's presented as being about the prostitutes-turned-robbers. It's reads more like a loose biography of Robert St. John (born Henry McElvane, according to the story).
The story gradually gives more focus to the Starlit Bandit(s) in later pages, but still uses St. John as the through-line. I actually think this is a huge mistake. St. John is the least sympathetic of the participants. More specifically, he's a statutory rapist, serial liar, cheater and largely unrepentant A-hole.
I can understand "falling into" crime, dealing in sex work and drugs. His willingness to pimp out (and sleep with) underage girls is what tears it for me. St. John was in a position to help those young girls (or, at the very least, not hurt them). He failed them, just as he fail the mother of his child and their young son.
Ultimately, I'm left feeling that a story which could have been great just ends up being mediocre. It's a shame. The material definitely seemed compelling at first glance.
St. John should make this story into a movie as soon as he gets out. Would be a pretty awesome script.
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