OKLAHOMA CITY – A week after an Ellis County man was charged with five state crimes, he allegedly used pepper spray to rob a bank in Dewey County, escaped on a four-wheeler, and used the loot to post bond to get his girlfriend out of jail.
Trever Alan Bilyeu, 33, and Jaymee Lynn Boucher, 28, were indicted in Oklahoma City’s federal district court on a charge of bank robbery, and April Lynne Lane, 28, was indicted on a charge of being an accessory after the fact.
The trio are implicated in the Jan. 15, 2021, robbery of Bank 7 in Camargo.
An FBI special agent wrote in an affidavit that a man later identified as Bilyeu approached the bank about 2:45 p.m. that day and knocked on the glass exterior doors. The man was clad in a hoodie that covered his head and the drawstring was tightened; he wore sunglasses, a face covering imprinted with a multi-colored design, and black gloves.
The bank was open for business but the exterior doors were locked “to limit entrances due to the COVID pandemic,” the investigator wrote.
A bank employee approached the door and asked whether she could help. The man “said he needed to make a deposit” for his grandmother. The employee said she unlocked the door “and cracked it open.”
The bandit reached in with his left hand, sprayed the bank employee in the face with a canister of “what was likely pepper spray,” and forced his way into the bank.
The aerosol used in the at- tack was inhaled by another female bank employee, who was “just recovering from COVID-19,” the FBI agent reported. The pepper spray she inhaled “caused her to have difficulty breathing, severe coughing and vomiting.” She later was transported to a hospital.
The robber demanded money from the teller drawers and ran out of the door with the loot: $3,982 – which included five $20 “bait bills” whose serial numbers had been previously recorded, the FBI agent wrote.
The bandit fled on a four-wheeler.
Subsequently, investigators received a “tip” from a friend of a Bank 7 executive about “shady activity” occurring at a house in Fargo, in northern Ellis County.
The night of Jan. 15 Ellis County Sheriff Shane Booth called bail bondsman Rick Stevens about Lane because the sheriff said he knew she lived at the house in Fargo. Booth was told by his employees that Stevens had paid Ms. Lane’s bail that afternoon and she was released from the Ellis County jail, where she had been incarcerated on three felony charges.
The bail bondsman told the sheriff that Bilyeu posted Lane’s bail with $3,500 cash – apparently within about an hour after the bank robbery. Stevens also said that afterward, Bilyeu called Boucher for a ride and Boucher “agreed to take Bilyeu and Lane back to Fargo.”
That night the FBI agent contacted Stevens at his office in Woodward about the money he received from Bilyeu; it included three of the bait bills, the agent related. Dewey County Sheriff Clay Sander seized the $3,500 cash as evidence.
Law enforcement officers from the Ellis and Dewey County sheriff’s departments, the FBI and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol accompanied Stevens to the house in Fargo, where Stevens revoked the $25,000 bond he posted Jan. 11 to secure Stevens’ release from jail pending trial on five felony charges, and “turned him over” to Ellis County sheriff’s deputies.
Lane and Boucher were subsequently arrested, too.
BILYEU, LANE NAMED IN STATE CHARGES A WEEK BEFORE ROBBERY
Bilyeu and Lane both were named in multiple criminal charges filed Jan. 8, 2021, in Ellis County District Court.
Bilyeu is accused of distribution of a controlled dangerous substances within 2,000 feet of a park or school in the presence of a minor, distribution of a synthetic controlled dangerous substance, unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of a controlled dangerous sustance, and possession of a firearm while on probation from a five-year deferred sentence in Woodward County on a 2016 conviction of endeavoring to manufacture methamphetamine and possession of drug paraphernalia.
He also still faces a charge of malicious injury to property, filed in Woodward County in July 2020, court records indicate.
Lane pleaded “no contest” May 13 in Ellis County District Court to distribution of a controlled dangerous sub- stance within 2,000 feet of a park or school while in the presence of minors, possession of drug paraphernalia, and possession of a firearm after a former felony conviction. She was given concurrent 10-year prison sentences but seven years were suspended, plus $3,000 in fines.
She pleaded guilty in 2019 in Ellis County to conceal- ing stolen property and possession of a controlled dangerous substance. The court gave her a 10-year sentence with all but six months suspended.
Lane also pleaded guilty in Ellis County in 2016 to distribution of methamphetamine, conspiracy to manufacture/ deliver methamphetamine, and to a 2014 charge of second-degree burglary, court records show. She was granted a seven-year deferred prison sentence on those convictions.
Bilyeu and Boucher are scheduled for trial on the July docket in Western District Federal Court in OKC. Both were confined in the Pottawatomie County jail as of May 29, while Lane was in the state Corrections Department’s Northwest office at Enid.