Prison for Bellingham robber who waited for cops — 3 times

A Bellingham man must serve 4 1/2 years in prison for robbing three banks and waiting outside for police to arrest him, a Whatcom County judge has ruled.

Richard Kenneth Gorton, 65, pleaded guilty to robbery in the first degree for his most recent robbery of a Peoples Bank in Bellingham.

On that morning, Nov. 2, he walked into the bank at 4183 Meridian St. and informed the teller he was about to make a large withdrawal. He handed her a note.

“This is a bank robbery,” the note said. “I want …$100 bills, yes that’s right. I’m armed with a knife. I’m a seasoned bank robber.”

Gorton waited outside for police to arrest him.

“Don’t shoot me,” he told police, according to charging papers. “I’ve done this before.”

Gorton had, in fact, been sentenced for almost identical robberies twice in the preceding year.

On Oct. 24, 2014, he gave a note to a Banner Bank teller: “This is a robbery.” She gave him an envelope of $100 and $20 bills, as he’d requested. He tucked the cash into a brown leather backpack and waited outside for police to arrest him. That month he hadn’t paid the $212 rent for his York Street apartment, according to court records, and he told officers he would rather be in jail than homeless.

He pleaded guilty in January to robbery in the second degree. A Superior Court judge ordered Gorton to serve six months in county jail. Half of the sentence could be nixed, however, if he lived in transitional housing for 90 days and used that time to find a more permanent home.

On April 13, Gorton walked into a Key Bank in Fairhaven and handed another note to a teller. In it he explained that he didn’t want to hurt anyone, and that he was unarmed, but he wanted to rob $1, according to court records. Again he waited outside for police. He gave the same explanation about being homeless soon. Prosecutors tried to have the case resolved through mental health court. Gorton received a sentence of eight days in jail for misdemeanor theft.

One glaring difference in the latest robbery was that Gorton brought and mentioned a knife. As police spoke with him outside the Meridian Street bank on Nov. 2, he told officers he’d tossed the Winchester folding knife into some nearby trees. Police found it. He told them it had been in his pocket while he was in the bank.

Prosecutors charged him with robbery in the first degree, a class A felony. Gorton did not want to pursue a legal defense, his public defender said. He pleaded guilty as charged last week, and Superior Court Judge Raquel Montoya-Lewis approved a plea bargain that will put him behind bars for 54 months.

“It’s not ideal,” said James Hulbert, the deputy prosecutor in the case. “We just ran out of options, and we need to err on the side of never letting something like this happen again.”

Since the first robbery some have wondered on social media if Gorton was a victim of a weak economy. Charging papers signed by Hulbert note that at the time of the third robbery Gorton lived off $700 a month in government benefits, that he received food stamps, and that he had about $300 cash of his own money in his wallet. Gorton told investigators that he no longer wanted to pay rent, “even though he had the money to do so,” according to the charges.

“I would feel comfortable saying that (the economic factor) has nothing to do with it,” said Darrin Hall, Gorton’s public defender.

Throughout the three cases it has become clear, Hall said, that Gorton suffered from mental health problems that, while not debilitating, led him to believe he was about to lose his housing.

“It seems kind of silly to put someone like Mr. Gorton in prison. He’s not intending to hurt anybody,” Hall said. “But how do we know how someone’s going to respond to his actions?”

One of the conditions of the sentence states that Gorton must comply with the recommendations of a mental health evaluation.

Also, Hall said, the sentence means for the next few years, Gorton will know he has three meals a day and a place to sleep at night.

This story was originally published December 21, 2015 at 4:44 PM with the headline "Prison for Bellingham robber who waited for cops — 3 times."