A single father recruited his two children to help him rob banks in Texas because he thought the crime spree would bring them closer as a family.
Scott Catt, 50, and his offspring, Abby, then 18 and Hayden, then 20, were finally nabbed by authorities in November 2012, when he was collared for holding up a pair of banks for $100,000
“All I can tell you is that I thought it would help us as a family,” Catt told Texas Monthly rom behind bars. “I did it for the family,”
Catt is in the beginning stages of his quarter-century stint in prison for a string of robberies.
“I swear to you, I would only rob banks for my family.”
Incredibly and tragically, Catt admitted that he began robbing banks a couple of years after his wife’s sudden death from breast cancer in 1997, when the family was living in Oregon. He said he would rob banks from time to time for an additional $5,000 to $10,000 a year despite earning $25 an hour as an engineer.
“I didn’t feel like a criminal,” Catt said. “I didn’t load my pistol. I knew I wasn’t going to shoot anybody. And I kept telling myself that whatever money I got was insured. So who was really being hurt?”
He also managed to be a full-time father for his two children, often taking them to swim meets and cooking them dinner every night.
“Dad was a great motivator,” daughter Abby said. “At the beginning of each season, he pushed me to work hard and set goals. He told me I could be somebody. The night before every swim meet, he would cook us pork chops, noodles, apple sauce, and a protein shake. I loved it. I though our lives were good.”
If their lives were so good, people are asking themselves, then why did the trio trip up. Both children took wayward paths in adolescence as Abby quit swimming ran with the “drinking, partying crowd,” she said. Her brother did the same and he struggled with being gay.
During this time period in 2010, the father started facing financial difficulties and wondered how he could make ends meet.
Scott Catt became determined to rob another bank, but figured he could take more money if he had an accomplice — someone who could help him bag the cash inside the bank.
That’s when he turned to his son, who was just 17.
“I was having some coffee and he said he had something important to tell me,” Hayden said to the magazine. “He said he had a second job as a part-time bank robber. The way he looked at me, I knew he wasn’t kidding.
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