Why would a young man rob a bank in the town he grew up in and think he could get away with it?
On Nov. 12, 1971 — 45 years ago this Saturday — then-24-year-old Mars Hill native Bernard Patterson did just that.
Dressed with a blue wig and armed with a toy gun, he robbed the Northern National Bank of $177,000, more than $1 million in today’s dollars, and set off an international manhunt.
It was a bizarre crime and the largest bank robbery in Maine history, perpetrated by a young Mainer whose life is worth considering as a whole for a better understanding of his generation’s experience and the experience of others today, according to Ron Chase, author of the new book “The Great Mars Hill Bank Robbery: The true adventures of Maine’s zaniest criminal.”
Patterson, who died in 2003 at age 56, was “a version of Don Quixote, Butch Cassidy, and Robin Hood,” according to Chase. A high school dropout, he was universally described as an intelligent, natural math wiz.
At the time of the robbery, Patterson was a former Army sergeant with four Bronze Stars earned over three tours in the Vietnam War, where he embraced dangerous job of a “tunnel rat” and discovered marijuana, which he smuggled back to Maine. He was denied his proposal for a fourth tour — a sign to Chase of Patterson’s early post-traumatic stress disorder.
When he robbed the bank, the teller knew it was him, but he still escaped. Taking a raft down the Prestile Stream en route to Canada, he fell into cold water, hid out on Mars Hill Mountain for a week and managed to leave town and fly with a fake identity to North Africa and Europe, where he had a brief, lavish vacation in the Alps before being captured in June, 1972.
Despite the historic crime and an aggressive prosecution, a judge who was also a World War II veteran showed Patterson some leniency, giving him an effective prison sentence of 15 years when the maximum punishment would have been 30.
Although he was released early, in 1977, Patterson was significantly aged by his time in a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania — still a notoriously violent penitentiary. “Of all the things I did in Vietnam, I was never more afraid than in prison,” Patterson said at one point.
Prison did offer him another education, in the business of growing marijuana. And when he was released, Patterson and his then wife moved to a cabin in Westfield, where he grew marijuana and they had a daughter, although the marriage did not last. He lived out of the rest of his days in the cabin, successfully evading authorities searching for his dwarf marijuana plants, while succumbing to alcoholism and eventually a heart attack.
While Chase never saw active combat during his time in the military during the Vietnam era and he ended up becoming an employee of the Internal Revenue Service and a Registered Maine guide, he felt a kinship of sorts with Patterson.
“We both returned disillusioned, distrustful of our government institutions and with an abiding sense that we no longer fit neatly into the society we had left,” Chase writes in the prologue to the book.
“I realized that Bernard was a very complex character and there was also a very sober, compelling aspect to his story,” Chase said in an email.
“Bernard was part of probably the two most significant events of the times he lived in, the Vietnam War and the social revolution. He embraced them in a very extreme way, both positively and negatively. He was an enigma. On a personal level, he suffered with post-traumatic stress disorder all of his adult life and self-medicated with marijuana.”
The story is meant to be entertaining — it may be turned into a movie — and Chase hopes people will enjoy it as a story. “I hope they’ll also come away with a greater appreciation of the impact that PTSD has on the lives of many of our soldiers,” he added.
