Stolen items returned 25 years later
Published: January 12, 2005
For three decades, a convicted criminal robbed banks and business all along the East Coast, including one in Broomall, which went unsolved for nearly 25 years ago until December.
In March 1980, Marple police discovered a burglary at the Brass Register Gift Shop at 2902 West Chester Pike. Numerous Hummel figurines and plates had been taken.
Partial fingerprints recovered from the scene were not good enough for identification, and the case went unsolved, until last month.
Last April, Marple police received a call from FBI Special Agent Ray Carr saying that they’d arrested a career criminal, responsible for many bank robberies and other crimes over 27 years dating from the late 1970’s.
“This man had been robbing banks from the Carolinas to New York,” Marple Police Chief Tom Murray says.
In April 2001, two teenagers discovered a makeshift bunker packed with bank information in a wooded area near the Radnor Township Police Station.
This eventually led to the arrest of Carl Gugasian, a former Radnor man who is now serving a 17-year sentence for committing 50 bank robberies over nearly three decades.
Gugasian provided information on many of the crimes he committed, as well as where he stored the proceeds from those crimes, Murray explains.
After the interviews, the FBI went to the locations mentioned and recovered many of the items.
Carr wanted to know if the Marple Township Police Department had investigated a burglary, in a gift shop, along West Chester Pike sometime in the early 1980s.
“The first step was to try to identify the store by exact name and location. We searched our files and came up blank. We started to ask around in hopes that someone would remember the name of the business,” says Murray.
During a conversation with retired Marple Police Chief Frank Dunn at his house, Dunn’s wife Kathy recalled the name of the business.
Murray and Marple Police Det. Larry Gerrity searched through the township record storage archives to attempt to locate the original case file.
Searching through boxes stacked floor to ceiling in a room at the Paxon Hollow Country Club, the two each picked a box from the early 1980’s and began to search.
The case file, dated March 4, 1980, provided the necessary detailed list of the items taken during the burglary.
Carr was contacted and the items he had recovered matched the police’s list. Murray says that since no insurance claim had been filed at the time of the burglary, the property rightfully belonged to the family of the storeowner.
The FBI did some searches using the Internet, and identified family members, currently living in North Jersey. The store’s owner, Frank LaBate, a local resident, passed away and the store no longer exists.
“The family was first contacted by the FBI and they didn’t believe it, so the daughter called here. She thought it was prank,” explains Murray.
Several calls later, police convinced the family that it was legitimate and that the recovered items belonged to them.
On Dec. 1, Connie LaBate, wife of the owner, and her daughter Barbara Van Bell came to the Marple Township Police station to take possession of the numerous Hummel plates, and over two dozen Hummel figurines worth about $5,000.
“Cases usually are solved in a month or so, but after that the leads start to get cold. Every once in a while, a case won’t get solved for a long time,” says Murray.
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