Robber Turns Himself In

By Matt Wood in News on Nov 3, 2005 4:21PM

It sounds like a Johnny Cash song: a convicted felon, escaped from prison and wanted for a string of bank robberies, walks into a bar to have a few drinks, then lays his gun on the bar and turns himself in. Randy Rencher did just that, giving himself up four months after escaping the Cook County Jail. He had been watching a news report about himself on the bar's television, and asked a stunned waitress to call the TV station and alert the authorities. The kept him calm by talking to him and serving him drinks until the FBI led him away.

Rencher staged his prison break back in June. He slipped away while delivering lunches, donned a guard's uniform, and walked out. Three officers at the jail are facing discipline connected with lax security allowing the escape. He was originally jailed on drug and gun charges, but DNA evidence also linked him to an attempted sexual assault at a South Side motel in which he tied up a woman and her children, then smoked crack and watched porn while masturbating in front of them. The day Rencher escaped, he robbed a bank in the Loop wearing the deputy's uniform, robbed another downtown bank two weeks later, then knocked over two more banks in Houston and one in Columbus, Ohio.

Rencher told the bartender in Cleveland that he was tired and wanted to turn himself in to spare his 7-year old daughter and girlfriend, Fay Billyboy, the pain he was causing them. He had been walking around Cleveland praying before he stopped in the bar. All this certainly adds up to quite a country and western ballad: a bank robber on the run, turning himself in at the bottom of a bottle, looking for forgiveness from God and his woman (named Billyboy, by the way). Of course, things would have been better if he'd been drinking whiskey instead of Long Island Iced Teas, and if Rencher wasn't such a dirtbag. Cash's cover of "Hurt" is probably less disturbing.