“It’s the Clydesdale Bank, 158 Nethergate, I believe we are being robbed at the present time.”
The search is still on for the armed raiders behind a bank heist in Dundee that featured on the BBC’s Crimewatch in January 1997.
Eight million people watched a reconstruction of the highly organised robbery, which seemed like something from a Hollywood movie with a series of getaway cars set up in advance.
By then, the trail had gone cold and the £15,000 reward was gathering dust.
Heist timeline
It was a Friday, at 10.30am, in August 1996, when two men walked up the flight of steps and through the main door of the Clydesdale Bank in the Nethergate.
They were young, the first aged around only 17 to 20, according to witnesses, maybe 5ft 5in, slim and with short, dark hair.
His mate was slightly taller and only marginally older, around 18 to 21, with brown eyes, also very slim, with dark hair cropped at the back and patchy facial hair.
One was armed with a handgun and the other carried a knife.
Carnoustie builder William Duncan was standing at the counter when they burst in, still with the £250 in his hand that he’d just withdrawn.
The robbers ordered him and two other customers to lie on the floor.
One vaulted the security barrier and dropped down to where the tellers stood before filling up a black holdall with a four-figure sum of cash.
He then snatched the £250 from Mr Duncan’s fingers.
The men made their escape along Nethergate, Perth Road, and quiet west end streets in a grey Volkswagen Golf, which had been stolen in the Perthshire village of Kilspindie.
One of the suspects was spotted shortly after the raid, carrying the black holdall under his arm, as he abandoned the getaway car in Magdalen Place.
They switched to a blue Vauxhall Astra in Magdalen Yard Road, which was stolen in Inchture, and took off with the engine revving and tyres squealing.
They abandoned the Astra yards away in Osborne Place and they were gone.
Police roadblocks were quickly thrown up around the city.
Officers were initially hopeful that the culprits had not escaped through the dragnet.
There were sightings of three young men, including the two being sought, in a red hatchback near Osborne Place prior to the robbery.
It was never spotted or traced.
Police interviewed everyone in the bank, in the street and in the shops across the road.
Within a few days they’d talked to 300 people and catalogued 160 “items”.
Officers investigating the case received a massive public response after appealing for witnesses to come forward and the bank put up a £15,000 reward.
The Golf and the Astra were at the police garage at Baluniefield coated in fingerprint powder and photo-fits of the wanted men were distributed to the country’s police forces.
Were the banknotes worthless?
Police were almost certain the stolen notes had been stained with red dye after a security device activated and launched a poster campaign showing the type of contamination.
Detective Inspector Ian Alexander refused to say if traces of the red dye had been found in the bank or along the robbers’ escape route through streets in the west end.
Clydesdale Bank circulated the poster to every bank and every police force in Scotland.
Police were putting in a sterling shift, but still drawing a blank.
In the city it was rumoured that the culprits were Glasgow boys who thought Dundee would be a soft touch but DI Alexander insisted: “I have no reason to think they are not local.”
Crimewatch travelled up to Dundee in November to film a reconstruction but it was winter by now.
Presenter Nick Ross told viewers that the snowy landscapes captured then did not mirror the weather at the time of the raid.
The actors playing the robbers even overdid the revving of their Astra during the reconstruction and ruined its gearbox.
That aside, it was as close to the exact circumstances as possible and the reconstruction began with the getaway cars being stolen in Kilspindie and Inchture.
Another potentially exciting lead was three men being seen at the petrol station at Bullionfield but they were traced and turned out to be uninvolved and innocent.
The raid on the bank followed, although none of what happened inside the premises was shown.
There were then scenes of the robbers switching cars in the Perth Road area as they made their escape.
DI Alexander told viewers that despite the reward money on offer there had been no significant response from the criminal fraternity in Dundee.
The programme was broadcast in early January and, it was claimed, unearthed a “crucial new witness” after two men were overheard discussing the raid in a Strathclyde pub.
“A woman in Strathclyde has come forward to say she’d overheard two males talking about the bank robbery in Dundee, apparently in some detail,” said DI Alexander.
“At the time she had not heard about the Dundee robbery so she thought the men might have been putting it on for her benefit.
“Then when she saw the feature saying that Crimewatch was going to be showing a reconstruction of the incident, she put two and two together and came forward.
“We now have a couple of names.”
Nothing changed and the investigation was scaled down.
DI Alexander said: “Obviously, as time wears on, people’s memories fade and witnesses are harder to come by but one of the witnesses that did come forward was able to help us narrow down our search.
“That witness was able to help us firm up on the make of a vehicle we were trying to trace in relation to the robbery and we are still looking to trace that and a number of other vehicles.”
Was Dundee armed bank robbery linked to Aberdeen heist?
Tayside Police had quite a few meetings with their Grampian colleagues following the robbery.
That’s because, back in June that year, three men with two sawn-off shotguns turned over a small, quiet branch of the Clydesdale in Cults, near Aberdeen, and escaped with £20,000.
In the Cults raid, the getaway car had been stolen from Magdalen Yard Road, which was where the Dundee robbers abandoned their stolen grey Golf in favour of a blue Astra.
At least one of the men involved in the Cults robbery spoke with a Dundee accent and sported a baseball-type cap similar to one of the Nethergate incident suspects.
Crimewatch reconstructed the Cults job and broadcast it on August 3.
Six days later, the Nethergate Clydesdale was hit.
But that was apparently where the similarities ended.
DI Alexander said: “Both Eric Leslie (the man leading the Aberdeen inquiries) and I are now more than certain there’s no link between the robberies.”
Nobody has ever been arrested for either robbery.
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