Ex-con Mark E. Wetsch loved the attention he got when he traveled with a former federal prosecutor to talk to groups across Minnesota about the financial crimes that had landed him in prison.
Now federal authorities have focused their attention on him as a suspect in nearly a dozen bank robberies by a criminal dubbed by authorities as the "Man in Black."
Wetsch was charged Thursday with holding up a bank in the small southwestern Minnesota town of Brewster, using a toy gun. In 2005, he was imprisoned after being convicted of defrauding a Twin Cities nursing home where he had worked out of $1.4 million and using part of that money to finance his daughter's training as one of Minnesota's more successful high school distance runners.
Wetsch, 49, who most recently worked as director of community relations for a Minneapolis-based health care advocacy group, recently told relatives that he'd married a woman he wanted to take to Africa. The Brewster bank robbery was supposed to fund that trip, according to a court document. In between the alleged robberies, he visited his parents in North Dakota and delivered a computer for a Christmas gift.
"Thank God he's locked up. Think of the bank tellers he terrorized," his mother, Rochelle Wetsch, said in a phone interview Thursday. "He needs help."
Wetsch was charged in Nobles County District Court with aggravated robbery, terroristic threats and theft in the holdup of the Rolling Hills Bank shortly before noon Tuesday. He was arrested later that day while driving near St. Peter, Minn. He made his first court appearance Thursday; bail was set at $300,000 and he is in custody at Nobles County jail in Worthington.
The "Man in Black" holdups included banks in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Hopkins, Arden Hills, Bloomington and Richfield. Law enforcement agencies from other cities are assisting in the investigation to determine whether Wetsch hit banks in Shakopee, Alexandria, Hastings, Orono, Faribault and Columbia Heights.
Although the robber began his spree in all-black clothing, some of his most recent robberies have featured brownish coats, authorities said. Wetsch resembles the man suspected in several of the robberies, and an apparent gun was also brandished during those crimes, they say. However, Wetsch hasn't been charged with any other bank robberies.