A 64-year-old man who won a new trial on kidnapping an Anaheim bank worker to help him steal more than $167,000 was convicted Thursday in a retrial.
Charles Craig Clements was previously convicted of the Jan. 27, 2009, bank heist, but won a new trial on kidnapping charges from the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in October of last year because of the misuse of a jailhouse snitch in the prosecution.
“This guy right here, Charles Clements, you’re going to hear robbed the Bank of the West,” Deputy District Attorney Rebecca Garcia said in her opening statement of the retrial. “And he did it by kidnapping two women.”
Clements was convicted of two felony counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. He was scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 13.
Clements was sentenced in January 2012 to two life terms plus 18 years on two counts of kidnapping to commit robbery and three counts of second-degree robbery. He was granted a new trial on charges of kidnapping to commit robbery.
Bank employee Alison Lopez, who was 7 months pregnant, was home on vacation from her job at the Bank of the West in Anaheim at about noon when Clements showed up. She was waiting for her mother and mother-in-law to accompany her to an ultrasound appointment, according to prosecutors.
Clements, posing as a package deliveryman, “tells her a fake, crazy story about a motorcycle gang had his son,” Garcia said. “It worked … because she feels she has no other choice (but to help him).”
Clements told her the motorcycle gang was forcing him to rob the bank, according to Garcia. The defendant clamed if he didn’t do the holdup, the gang threatened to kill his 10-year-old son and them if they didn’t steal from the bank, according to evidence in his first trial.
The defendant convinced her to call her friend Cindy Chin at work so she could come out and stay with him while Lopez went into the bank to get cash out of the bank’s vault, Garcia said. Chin came out thinking she would see Lopez’s new car, Garcia said.
Lopez retrieved a little more than $167,000 from the vault and came back with the cash in a bank bag. Clements drove the two women a short distance away, left them and ran home.
The FBI received a tip about a month later that Clements had been “bragging” about the heist, Garcia said.
Authorities put Clements under surveillance and grabbed a discarded cigarette butt to compare the DNA it contained to a pair of sunglasses left in Lopez’s home. When authorities got a match, they served a search warrant at Clements’ home and found $35,000 in a storage locker, Garcia said, adding that investigators also found guns in the residence.
Clements’ wife, Tammy Rae Clements, was also in on the bank heist, Garcia said. She accepted a plea deal in March 2011 and was sentenced to three years in prison.
The couple, now divorced, were having financial troubles with their armory business and faced significant debt.
Tammy Clements told authorities that she dropped Clements off at Lopez’s home and he returned a couple of hours later, Garcia said. Charles Clements ran in with a “big black duffle bag” and dashed upstairs and then came back down and left for two weeks, the prosecutor said.
After Clements was charged with the bank heist he was later also accused of soliciting to kill the victims based on the allegations of snitch Donald Boeker, according to the appellate court ruling.
The informant “testified that Clements became obsessed with having Lopez killed and that he wanted her dead so she could not testify against him and there would be no kidnapping charge,” according to the ruling.
“Boeker told Clements that would cost him, and Clements claimed to have money left over from the robbery and offered Boeker $10,000,” according to the ruling. “He testified that Clements wanted him to kill the woman’s husband and baby as well.”
Jurors deadlocked on the solicitation of murder charge and it was later dismissed.
Clements’ appeals fell flat in state and federal courts until the Orange County informant scandal broke when he made a legal claim based on Boeker’s use in the trial, according to the ruling.
Boeker falsely testified he did not receive any special treatment despite getting a break with a lesser sentence and that investigators on the case worked to help him get the lighter punishment, according to the ruling.