Crimes that bind

PHOENIX -- He sat behind the glass partition in the county jail, his years on the run finished.

Craig Pritchert leaned forward in his black-and-white striped uniform and rubbed his eyes. They were weary and damp with tears, the eyes of a man who could see the end.

The end of a good life, a life of ski resorts and seaside towns and peace on the other side of the world, but a life based on a fake identity and cover story.

Worse, this could be the end of a love. Not one, as police assert, built on lies and lawlessness -- but rather sincere affection, he explained.

"We had what most people strive for but can't even touch," said Pritchert, drumming his fingers on the partition for emphasis as he spoke of Nova Guthrie. "It was ... the fairy tale. The only question now is the happily ever after."

But in a fairy tale, the hero isn't a suspected bank robber and his heroine the accused getaway driver -- and happily ever after doesn't include the possibility of prison for both.

Facing the past

When their past finally caught up with them late one August night, Pritchert and Guthrie had become Dane and Andi Brown, a fun-loving couple who enjoyed walks on the beach and dancing at the club where she worked near Cape Town, South Africa.

She was the manager of the Bossa Nova, charged with orchestrating big events, negotiating vendor contracts and making bank deposits. Owner Giorgos Karipidis so trusted the woman he considers "like a sister" he had given her keys to the safes.

"Dane" was an Internet trader who spent his days inside their two-bedroom flat glued to a computer, using his downtime to hit the gym or visit "Andi" at work.

"We were happy. We were working," the 42-year-old Pritchert told The Associated Press. "We struggled, but I was done with all the other. We had stopped looking over our shoulders."

"We were just two people starting a new life," added Guthrie in a telephone interview from jail. "Sometimes I felt like it's not really fair that we get to be this happy. Unfortunately, it got interrupted."

Friends such as Karipidis knew nothing of their real identities, nor the nickname that turned the tale of their alleged escapades into a sensational crime caper worthy of Hollywood.

Back home in the United States, Guthrie and Pritchert had been branded a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, lovers accused of robbing a half-dozen banks in Colorado, Montana, Texas, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington from 1997 to 1999. Pritchert also is charged with a solo job in Arizona.

The real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were products of the Great Depression who blamed their destitution on big business and the government, and struck back to take what they believed was due them.

The motivation of Guthrie and Pritchert isn't so clear.

Why would a woman from a devout Christian family who once considered medical school become the alleged accomplice to an armed bandit? Why, after turning herself in, would she return to him?

Why would a man who once had his own big dreams leave a wife and three kids and begin robbing banks? Why, even after doing prison time, would he go back to stealing?

"He seems like somebody who would rather take a shortcut as opposed to working for something ... who thinks 'the rules are for everybody but me,"' said Don Vogel, an Arizona police investigator who assisted the FBI in its probe.

As for Guthrie, 12 years younger than Pritchert, authorities and her family wonder if she was manipulated.

"If she got involved in this it was pressure from someone much older who had the keys to her heart," said her brother, Gerald Guthrie.

But the couple and those who knew them in their final days of freedom weave a much different story with one common thread: The most important thing to them -- more important than luxury or loot -- was their devotion to each other.

"This is a true love," said Karipidis. "I don't care what the cops say. This was real."

The American dream

Pritchert grew up in Scottsdale in the 1970s. The oldest of four children in a middle-class family, he started out living what seemed the American dream.

At Coronado High School, the blond-haired, blue-eyed teenager was handsome and popular. He dated one of the prettiest girls in school -- Laurie Gill, cheerleader, homecoming queen and, eventually, his wife.

Pritchert played outfield on the baseball team that brought home the state championship in 1979, his senior year, and like other boys with athletic talent he harbored ideas of making it in the major leagues.

"In athletics you have your leaders and followers, and Craig was a leader," said high school friend Steve Bender, who added that "most of his dreams revolved around playing sports."

But Pritchert never got a four-year scholarship that could have led to a professional career. After playing ball at community colleges, he was given a shot as a walk-on at Arizona State University.

The timing was terrible. The outfield was filled that year with promising players, among them a recruit named Barry Bonds. Though Pritchert earned a spot as designated hitter, he played little. By the end of the 1983 season, Pritchert's baseball and college days were over.

Already married with the first of three children, he started working for his father selling solar heating panels and tried his hand at other odd jobs. But Pritchert suggests pressure was mounting from his wife to bring home a better salary.

"I made good money ... but it never really mattered," he said. "If I was making $40,000, she could spend $80."

Laurie said the pressure came from Pritchert's realization that he had a young family and needed to provide. Her current husband, John Pulzato, met Pritchert when he and Laurie were still together and said he "was always scheming something up."

Like the time in high school when Pritchert asked a friend if he could borrow his truck and ended up using both to help him steal tires from a car dealership. They sold them and split the take.

"Craig is a very intelligent man. He can talk to you about sports, religion, politics, stocks," Pulzato said. "He could've done anything he wanted; he just wasn't patient enough to wait."

While Pritchert traveled, supposedly to work, Laurie was evicted from their home and had her car repossessed. Then one day, after she had begun divorce proceedings, she ran into her husband.

"He was driving a Porsche," she said, "and I was practically on welfare."

Only later did Laurie learn her ex-husband had turned to bank robbery.

Pritchert spent five years in prison following two 1990 heists outside Las Vegas. When released to a halfway house in 1996, he owed $55,000 in restitution and tens of thousands more in child support.

He got a job at a car dealership and did well, until the boss learned he had a record.

"Every job that he had, as soon as they found out the background he was gone," John Pulzato said. "He tried to do the straight road, and it didn't work out for him."

He turned to trading stocks on the Internet but wasn't making enough to cover living expenses and all the money he owed. Those who stand by him say Pritchert feared delinquent payments would land him back in prison.

"You come out having paid your dues, but you can't restart your life because you have a record and a big debt and don't know what to do," Karipidis said. "Any man would be pushed to the limit."

As Pritchert put it: "The odds were seriously stacked against me."

At 10:45 a.m. on Aug. 12, 1997, a man walked into Norwest Bank in Scottsdale wearing a long-sleeve shirt, baseball cap, gloves and a stocking over his face. He approached the teller, pointed a gun to her head and yelled: "Give me all your money!" His backpack was filled with more than $32,000.

Spontaneous combustion

When they met it was like spontaneous combustion.

Nova Guthrie had moved to Farmington after college to sell cleaning equipment with older brother, Gerald. Pritchert, claiming to be a vacationing trader, was introduced to him through a mutual acquaintance. The two men were dining one night when Gerald called and asked his sister to join them.

"I'd never met a woman like her," Pritchert recalled. "She was something else."

On the surface, they were as different as can be.

Guthrie was raised in Boone, Colo., a no-stoplight hamlet surrounded by horse farms and fields. She was the last of eight children born to Ralph and Delores Guthrie, a steelworker and schoolteacher.

Guthrie excelled in school. She was a member of the National Honor Society, the French and math clubs and Christian student fellowship. At Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, she was a premed major who was voted president of her sorority.

Athletically built with brown hair and lively dark eyes, she enjoyed weightlifting, diving off bridges and riding motorcycles with Gerald. On summer breaks from college, she worked with her brother at a steel tank factory and learned to weld.

The day after they met, she took Pritchert water-skiing -- and she never looked back. Where other boyfriends were threatened by her intelligence and verve, Guthrie finally met her equal in Pritchert.

"I saw something in him that matched something in me, and that never went away," Guthrie said. "I've never known a more kind or a more gentle man, or anyone who loved me better."

"It was the happiest I'd ever seen her," added Gerald. "She lost some weight and became more feminine. It was almost like she blossomed. It was, in some ways, very beautiful."

Crime career begins

Not long after, on Oct. 31, 1997, a bank was hit in Durango, Colo. Pritchert and another suspect still on the loose are accused of taking $64,600. Guthrie drove the getaway car, police said.

And so it went. According to investigators, Pritchert bought scanners, two-way radios, gloves, wigs and masks. A handgun was purchased through a newspaper ad. He and Guthrie would then scope out a target.

The pair spent two months in Oregon, a court affidavit alleges, prior to a Feb. 19, 1999, bank holdup in Bend, Ore., that netted $120,000. They snowboarded at Mt. Bachelor, worked out at a local gym.

Pritchert used a similar modus operandi in that robbery as others, authorities say, entering the bank just before closing and ushering employees into the vault, binding their hands and ankles. Guthrie waited in a nearby car, communicating by radio. Afterward, Pritchert burned his disguise and supplies.

"He was the smartest bank robber I've ever chased," said Scottsdale police detective Tom Van Meter, who began hunting Pritchert after the 1997 Scottsdale job. "He did his homework."

In all, authorities suspect the duo made off with more than $300,000. When not robbing banks, they allegedly lived it up at ski resorts or beaches in such places as Belize.

Investigators' first big break came shortly after the Bend heist. While passing through Phoenix, Pritchert and Guthrie stopped at the home of one of her relatives. The family persuaded her to stay. Soon after, in March 1999, she turned herself in to the FBI in Denver.

Guthrie agreed to cooperate and began providing details about the holdups. But authorities released her and weeks later she reunited with Pritchert, whom she'd told Gerald she couldn't live without.

Worth a thousand words

It was a photograph that led to another photograph that led to their downfall.

Someone in the States from South Africa saw the "Wanted" poster. It showed a woman who looked eerily similar to the manager of the Bossa Nova. Check out the Web site, the tipster told authorities.

There, next to snapshots of birthday cakes and toasting barflies, was a smiling dark-haired beauty posing with her friend and boss, Giorgos Karipidis.

Guthrie ran the club's Web site. How could she make such a slip? Karipidis believes she had convinced herself that the past was truly past, that she and Pritchert had "finally found peace."

South African authorities acknowledge the two appear to have lived a lawful life the three years they were there. They drove a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle -- no longer a BMW with a false compartment to hide cash. Their DVD player was a gift from Karipidis.

Pritchert notes they could have stolen from the club at any time, but didn't.

"I wasn't trying to make a lot of money fast," he said. "I was trying to live and be happy. I'd finally figured the secret out. ... A good woman."

They were eating Chinese food and watching television when police arrived the night of Aug. 19.

When Karipidis went to visit them in jail, they confided their identities. Guthrie, in particular, seemed embarrassed. But what struck him were the questions they asked over and over.

"How is Nova?" Pritchert asked. "How is Craig?" Guthrie implored.

Later, scanning e-mails Pritchert often sent Guthrie at work, Karipidis found one note written only hours before their arrest. He remembered it saying: "'Thank you, princess, for always taking care of me. I don't know what I'd do without you."'

Pritchert was extradited to Arizona to be tried in the Scottsdale robbery. He faces a 30-year maximum sentence, though charges are still pending in other states. He has pleaded innocent.

Guthrie was taken home to Colorado and booked on charges stemming from the Durango robbery. She faces up to 20 years, but is also indicted in the Oregon heist. Guthrie also pleaded innocent.

They said their goodbyes in a U.S. marshal's van. As for any future contact, "that would be up to Nova," Pritchert said. "I hope so."

"Definitely, we will see each other again. It's just a matter of time," said Guthrie. "I've got something that every woman would want. You don't walk away from that."