CASPER, Wyo. — Three New York residents are jailed and facing charges in Natrona County alleging they came to Wyoming specifically to withdraw cash from banks with fraudulent IDs.

Police say the conduct with consistent with known organized bank fraud schemes operating in the northeast region of the U.S, where indebted drug users are sent to across the country with stolen or fraudulent identifications.

“For some reason, they chose Wyoming,” Assistant District Attorney Patrick LeBrun said at one of the hearings.

The case began on Friday, April 3, when Casper Police Department Sergeant Andrea Husted responded to a report of an active fraud attempt at ANB Bank downtown and arrested one woman on foot as the alleged getaway vehicle took off, according to the report. 

Bank staff had called police because they suspected the woman had been the same who’d withdrawn $12,500 the day before from their branch in Buffalo.

The woman, identified as 38-year-old Christine Fitzpatrick, pleaded not guilty to the charges in District Court on Tuesday. Judge Kerri Johnson kept her bond at $100,000 cash or surety, with state prosecutors describing her as an extreme flight risk with no ties to Wyoming.

Deputies in Laramie County spotted the alleged getaway vehicle, a black Mitsubishi, and booked the other two suspects on marijuana charges.  They reportedly found “thousands of dollars in cash” in a Doritos bag, the affidavit said. 

The suspects, 21-year-old Anthony Shioke Terrance Reynolds and 45-year-old John Stallworth, appeared in Natrona County Circuit Court in the following weeks to hear the same charges as Fitzpatrick: conspiracy to commit forgery and theft.

Their cases have been bound over to district court, and all three are presumed innocent unless found or pleading guilty. 

Fitzpatrick was originally booked as a Jane Doe, as the only two forms of identification she carried were “obviously fake” and connected to a victim of identity theft in Washakie County, the affidavit said.  Fitzpatrick told police she’d been in Wyoming about three days, and reportedly claimed to have made three successful $8,400 withdrawals at other locations in the state. Two attempts had been unsuccessful.

At Stallworth’s initial appearance, LeBrun said the suspects had been to Wright and Shoshoni.

Fitzpatrick reportedly said her two “handlers” in New York told her not to bring her real ID, and that she wouldn’t know what her “cut” would be until she got to back to New York.

Stallworth was the last to appear in circuit court. His initial appearance before Judge Kevin Taheri was on Thursday, April 30. Stallworth said he was from Brooklyn and identified Fitzpatrick as his girlfriend. 

Before reading the charges, Taheri asked him about his ties to Wyoming. 

“I came here basically to…. Well, we didn’t have a chance to do what was supposed to be done,” he said. “Wasn’t like I had a choice in the matter, me and my girlfriend, because of what was owed on drugs.”

LeBrun asked for a $75,000 cash or surety bond, citing Stallworth’s nonexistent ties to the community and “extreme flight risk,” noting that Fitzpatrick had been “abandoned” at the bank.

“That wasn’t me, I was the passenger,” Stallworth said. “I can’t chose to get out to walk up… There’s a lot we wasn’t able to discuss.”

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