Convicted murderer robbed bank

Press, 10 March 1982, Page 4

Convicted murderer robbed bank

PA Auckland A convicted murderer, William George Lomas Wells, aged 60, was yesterday jailed for a “bizzare” bank robbery he committed while on parole. Wells, who walked into the High Court at Auckland with the aid of a stick, threatened the bank teller with a child’s toy potato gun, before escaping on an Auckland Regional Authority bus with $4OOO in a paper bag. Wells appeared for sentence after pleading guilty to robbing Jill Linda Munro at the Auckland Savings Bank, Owairaka, on September 4. He was sentenced to two and a half years jail. Counsel for Wells, Mr J. T. Buxton, asked Mr Justice

Vautier to take into account the “bizzare circumstances” of the offence.

It was a comic robbery he said; but for the fact that it was so sad. Wells had been convicted in 1967 and sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. Until 1978 his sentence was served in a mental hospital. Wells was released on parole in June, 1980, but had since been recalled to continue the sentence. Mr Buxton said there was no danger to anyone involved in the robbery. He said Wells had used a potato gun and then used his bus pass to make his getaway. When the bus stopped at traffic lights near the bank, Wells was apprehended by bank staff and the driver.

His Honour said the community was plagued by robbery offences. He accepted that Wells’s offence was at the lower end of the scale, was naive and bizarre. He said that since Wells’s parole had been cancelled the sentence of the Court would have little practical consequence. He refused an application made by Mr Buxton to continue the order that Wells’s identity be suppressed. Footnote: Wells was convicted in the Supreme Court at Auckland in February, 1967, of the murder of 19-year-old ’ Lesley Margaret Soutter, whose body was discovered near’ the Gillies Avenue badminton courts in Epsom. -