Grandma bank robber: 'I don't remember being afraid'

Barbara Joly realized she was almost out of gas. Pulling her red Chevy Cobalt up to a pump - $6,084 from her robbery of the Mason Peoples Building & Loan on the seat beside her - the 68-year-old housewife and grandmother got out to fill her tank as a pack of wailing police cruisers roared by.

"I saw all the police cars, and I remember wondering where they were going," she says four years later, sitting on a hard plastic chair in the visiting room at the Dayton Correctional Institution. "Then I realized it was me."

Barbara Joly wasn't used to being the center of attention.

Until she undertook a eight-month bank robbery spree and became an Internet sensation known as the "Granny Robber," Joly's name was unknown beyond Middletown's closely linked church and parochial-school circles.

She was the skilled seamstress who sewed prayer shawls for cancer patients and made warming hats for premature babies.

She was the Irish-descended, non-voting member of the Sons of Italy - there every Thursday night for bocce, keeper of the money and buyer of the groceries for their fundraising dinners. "She did it for at least five years," fellow member Rosetta DiCristoforo says. "She never touched a penny."

Barbara was also known as the mother of Chris Joly, a noted athlete at Bishop Fenwick High School. That was where she spent five months a year organizing booths for the annual festival and endless hours raising money for athletics.

The high school once named her booster of the year. After repeatedly calling her to mid-court ceremonies during halftime of a basketball game, booster leaders finally tracked her down in the school's basement kitchen. She was washing dishes and hurried to accept the award still wearing her apron.

How far she'd go to support her son wasn't clear to anyone - even Barbara herself - until two decades later, when she'd rob banks in Middletown, Lebanon and Mason and finally be arrested two blocks from her last target in Franklin. All to rescue Chris.

How could it be that the doting grandmother with 14 photographs of her grandchild in her living room, who'd never had so much as a traffic ticket, had turned into a felon?

Her priest, who had seen her at 9 a.m. Mass nearly every Sunday for 19 years, says she was the last person in his parish of whom he would have believed it possible.

Her husband of nearly 50 years was so unsuspecting that he once coaxed her to the television to see a clip of the escaping Granny Robber, teasing, "Barb, that looks like your little red car."

Barbara herself would tell a judge, "I'm so sorry for the horrible mistakes I've made. I just can't make heads or tails of some of it."

And for the 31/2 years since Joly started serving a nine-year prison term, no one has.

Now Joly, Inmate 74444 at Dayton Correctional Institution, has given her first interview, and family and friends have finally spoken. From their detailed accounts of her life and actions, it's clear the seeds of her undoing were sown as far back as her childhood, when her family's only possessions were ruined in a Thanksgiving Day fire that plunged them into crippling debt.

They took root in her adolescence in upwardly mobile Kettering, where classmates wore cashmere and Barbara wore clothing she made herself - social distinctions she'd recall when her son entered high school and his higher-income classmates "were dressed to the nines whenever there was occasion for it."

"I think it was always up here," she would say in a prison interview, tapping her head, "the idea that Chris shouldn't do without. Chris was not a child who asked for a lot, but I gave a lot."

At some point Barbara Joly's giving turned to giving in, as she breached the boundaries of reasonable parenting to overindulge her son.

And then it turned to giving up, as she ruined her family's finances in fruitless efforts to rescue Chris from debt. In the end, she resorted to a desperate plan to remedy things by robbing banks - a plan the former bank teller knew from the start would fail.

"I knew I would go to jail, but I never thought of the consequences - that my son would be hurt, my granddaughter would be hurt, my friends would be crushed," she says. "I had just one focus: Go in, get money and give it to my son."

Her husband, Bill, a retired supervisor at Contech Construction Products in West Chester, didn't know about that plan on Nov. 21, 2008, when a violent pounding brought him to the front door of his Middletown home. FBI agents rushed in, rifling through drawers, cupboards and Barbara Joly's purse, and finally emerging from the couple's bedroom with a gray wig and what they said was a hold-up note.

Bill Joly was dumbfounded, then chagrined when he listened to his phone messages and heard his wife say, "I'm in a whole bunch of trouble."

Barbara Joly's crimes would stun her neighbors, terrify her victims, mystify two judges. But they would also, at her lowest point, spark a conversation the Joly family had avoided for years - a conversation not unlike that many American families face, of where to set boundaries for offspring, how to face conflict rather than avoid it, how to talk to each other and how to say what needs to be said.

That conversation took place a few days after the FBI raid of the Joly home, with a shaken Barbara Joly - fresh out on bail - initiating it, and parents and son laying open problems they'd kept covered for years.

"You might say," Bill Joly says, "the new life of our family started from that moment on."

By the time she was in junior high, Barbara Laughlin had moved seven times, her impoverished parents migrating across Dayton, Kettering and Warren County to find a place they could afford to rent.

School pictures show the three Laughlin children in patches - their skinny wrists and ankles sticking out of clothing they had long since outgrown. In the Laughlin house, even basic necessities often met with Barbara's father's most common response, "That's not in the budget right now."

Still, Thanksgiving Day when Barbara was 10 was to be a day of celebration and even a little excess. Both sides of her large extended family were expected for lunch. That morning her father, Scott Laughlin, a tenant farmer and milkman, was away at the dairy after spending weeks renovating their leased Waynesville farmhouse using rented equipment. Gertrude Laughlin, a homemaker, had preheated the oven and was ready to begin the day's cooking.

As she opened the door to the kitchen, a gas leak triggered an explosion. Flames quickly engulfed the walls.

Gertrude tried to wave down hunters in a distant field, then sent Barbara and her brother to find help at surrounding farms.

The houses were too far away and the help too late. The farmhouse burned to the ground. The family had no insurance.

Scott Laughlin - an Irishman so stoic, Barbara's brother David Laughlin remembers, "he wouldn't tell you if he had a nail in his shoe" - refused to declare bankruptcy, insisting he would pay back what he owed. "The burden ..." Laughlin remembers, shaking his head. "There was nothing extra."

To help out, Barbara, the oldest, was soon making her own clothes and became the neighborhood babysitter - dependable, even-natured and infatuated with children.

A rule-follower, she took her father's lessons to heart: Take care of things yourself, without complaint. Don't trot the family's business around the neighborhood. "Nunya," her father would say when a private or controversial issue came up. "That's nunya business."

If conversation followed, he'd snap his fingers as a signal for his children to shut up.

Barbara learned the lesson well. Except once.

A couple with a young child lived up the street from the Laughlins. Both were heavy drinkers and neglectful parents. One day the boy toddled down the street alone in nothing but a diaper.

Barbara, an eighth-grader who already was telling friends she'd one day have a large family, snatched him up, ran up the street and confronted his parents. "She was screaming and yelling at them - 'Why aren't you watching him? He's your son, why aren't you watching him?' " - her brother David remembers. "It put me back on my heels."

When her father found out, he made her go back up the street and apologize.

A more headstrong child might have argued her case. Barbara did as she was told.

Barbara was so conforming she was never - "never, ever," her brother David says - in trouble, and so guileless she could never master strategies for the card games her grandfather tried to teach her.

Gangly and affable, Barbara stood out for simple talents. She sewed and knitted superbly, taught by her grandmother on the family's front porch. She had flawless penmanship. She had a knack for styling hair.

At Kettering's Fairmount High School, "Bobbi" Laughlin threw herself into pep club and chorus, but was so unathletic she bombed at tryouts for the Rhythmettes dance squad. She had so much trouble operating the family Studebaker that her frugal father finally paid someone to teach her to drive.

A good student, she enrolled at Ohio State University in the fall of 1958, only to learn her parents couldn't pay for a second quarter. She returned home to Kettering, and a family friend helped her land a teller's job at Winter's Bank in Dayton.

She would work on and off in banking until 2006.

By 19, she had met and married Bill Joly, six years her senior and a high-energy, talkative, up-and-coming accountant at Armco Steel. The two moved to Middletown.

His young wife was so deferential "she'd melt in a crowd," he says now.

"She wasn't the effervescent type - not a wallflower, but not a yack-yack-yacker."

Her brother-in-law Michael Joly remembers her as "a pert redhead, spontaneous, a cute little smile. Everybody in the family liked Barbara. She was easy to like."

Barbara's life soon revolved around Bill and five other couples. The youngest of the group, Barbara soon became everyone's babysitter.

"She was a true bobby soxer," her sister Bonnie Moss recalls. "She created that home all around her, just the way Betty Furness would have kept it." (Furness was a 1950s-era actress featured in TV ads for Westinghouse products.)

The Jolys' marriage followed a traditional pattern. Barbara took care of the inside of the house, Bill took care of the outside. Barbara made her clothes, the bed and the meals. Bill made the income.

Life was good for the young couple. Barbara had more material comforts than she'd ever known.

Only one thing haunted her. After dreaming of a large family since junior high, she found out she couldn't have a child.

Twenty-nine-year-old Barbara Joly answered the phone thinking she knew why the nun on the other end was calling. A church fundraiser was approaching and Barbara, an exceptional seamstress, had agreed to make a "money doll" on which donors would attach their contributions.

"Well, are you ready?" the nun asked, and the excitement in her voice told Barbara that her agonizing 10-year wait was finally over.

All that time she had celebrated friends' pregnancies, supported her unmarried teenage sister as she placed a baby for adoption, while enduring rounds of futile fertility treatments.

Now a baby boy was waiting for Barbara and Bill Joly to adopt him, the nun said.

Barbara burst into tears.

From that moment on, "she centered her life around bringing up her son," her brother-in-law Michael Joly says. "And Chris could do no wrong."

The maternal energy Barbara had built up from adolescence, when she first dreamed of being the matriarch of a large family, would now be invested in her only child.

Motherhood would define Barbara Joly. It would reveal her obvious talents and hidden ambitions, her easy generosity and latent insecurities. It would bring out her best instincts and her worst.

As a new mother, she would polish her toddler son's high-top white shoes every day while he slept. She would ban neighborhood children from thumping basketballs against the garage door during his nap, then tiptoed them upstairs to admire him sleeping. She would trim his hair every week, and press even his play clothes.

Friends chided her for never buying clothing even a half-size too big. She shot back that she never wanted Chris to look "sloppy." They told her what she needed was more kids.

By elementary school, Chris Joly was drawing attention for his athletic skills, and Bill and Barbara were relishing being the parents of a star.

Chris Joly, now 43, says the happiest he ever saw his mother was when he was 8 years old and won two gold medals and one silver at a swimming championship at Rolling Hills Country Club in Fairfield.

"I finished the race and saw her come running down to the pool. She was just ecstatic," he says. "She was right next to my swim coach, jumping up and down."

Chris would go on to play soccer, baseball, basketball and football, and the Jolys would be there for every game, crisscrossing the state for summer tournaments, building their social life around their son's athletics.

His mother would keep score at every game, in every sport. His father would remember the name of the swimmers Chris beat at the Rolling Hills meet 34 years later.

Soon Barbara Joly could talk of little but her son, and tolerated no criticism of him. When coaches berated him at a Little League game, she yanked him out and took him home. When an altercation arose with his friends, she was immediately on the phone to their parents or at their front door. When Chris faced drunken-driving charges as a teenager, his mother alternately excused his behavior or denied it.

"Nobody was better than Chris," says Rosetta DiCristoforo, a neighbor and friend of the Jolys for 43 years. "Chris was at the top of the mountain - Chris was a genius at math, he was the best dressed, he dated the most beautiful girls. She sacrificed all of her life for him. She was fixated with her son. She lived for him."

The effect wasn't lost on Chris. Early on his mother became his confidant and ally, and a way to avoid communication with his sterner father.

"I knew I could always ask my mom, and if it got past her, it would get past Dad. I knew she had a hard time saying no to me. And I knew her communication with Dad was always tenuous," he says. "So instead of a connection among the three of us, it would be a conversation between my mom and me, and she'd say, 'I'll take care of it.' "

Her efforts to help Chris became extreme. After he and his date missed their prom cruise, she found a speedboat to try to catch the larger boat. She drove to Miami University to pick up his laundry and clean his frat-house room; and sent him on a golf trip to cheer him up as an adult after having decimated her savings to rescue him from debt.

A psychologist evaluating Barbara after her crimes would write that, to avoid upsetting her husband, she would leave him out of the loop. "She hated arguments, and she found it easier not to involve him. To describe her as emotionally enmeshed with her adopted son - her only child - would be to understate the point."

From his infancy, Barbara and Bill Joly had told their son he could turn to them for anything. In adolescence, he took them at their word.

He volunteered his mother for everything at Bishop Fenwick High School, to the extent that she'd be called away from one activity to help with another. He brought home tickets for school fundraisers that his father sold door-to-door. From out-of-state travel for athletics to custom-made shoes for his narrow feet, nothing was denied Chris Joly. Years later his mother would say that at some point Chris began to believe he was entitled to their savings - but that those savings were far smaller than he thought.

"Chris always knew he was going to be helped out," agrees Barbara's sister Bonnie Moss. "Real life had never really hit him."

For 33 years, life went easy on Chris Joly. Captain of his high school football, basketball and baseball teams, social chair of his Miami University fraternity, he'd married his college sweetheart, taken a job as marketing director of a Louisville insurance company and become a father.

Then in 2002, in quick succession, he lost his marriage, job and financial footing.

"I thought it was the perfect life," says his mother, Barbara Joly. "And then it just blew up."

Chris was overextended after buying a larger house with a $10,000 down payment from his parents to try to save his marriage. Then two years of unemployment and several more at lower-paying jobs left him behind on monthly expenses that included private-school tuition for his daughter, car payments, rent and substantial credit-card debt.

By 2004, creditors were hounding not only him but his parents - whose phone number he had given them - threatening to garnish his wages or take him to court.

Chris Joly knew where to turn for help.

"We always told our son, 'When you have a problem, bring it to us,' " Barbara Joly says. "But that kind of interpreted to 'Bring it to Mom.' "

He'd call late at night, to avoid speaking with his dad, and begin with "Ma," the name that meant he was about to ask for something. His mother would take the calls in a back bedroom, hunched over the phone.

"I'd hear her say, 'Uh-ha, uh-ha, uh-ha,' and I'd say, 'Do you ever say no?' " Bill Joly says. "She couldn't put one foot in front of the other fast enough to help him."

Spending on Chris had long been a point of contention for the couple.

Barbara, who had grown up poor, wanted her only child to have nice clothes, a private school education, money for socializing and college tuition.

Bill, who retired in 1996 from a 40-year career in management and accounting, wanted to know where they'd finally draw the line.

But Barbara wouldn't back down when it came to Chris. "It was always, 'If you're not going to make this happen, I will,' " her brother David Laughlin says.

Soon Chris was bringing his mother spreadsheets of his expenses, and she was writing him checks for $500, $2,000 and $3,000, sometimes even wiring money for an urgent need.

"I thought my dad knew about it," Chris Joly says. "Sometimes she'd say, "I can give this much, and I'm going to have to ask your dad if you need any more."

But at one point Bill drew the line - "I said, damn, Barb, when is this going to stop?" he remembers - and said Chris should take a second job to deal with his own debt.

At that, Barbara started to conceal her giving.

"I thought that meant Chris wouldn't have time for his daughter, and that scared me more than anything because she's my pride and joy, too," Barbara says.

Barbara had taken over billpaying and banking duties when her husband retired. Over the next years, she would slowly decimate the couple's savings, channeling more than a quarter million dollars to rescue her son.

Four years after his wife's arrest, as he struggles to erase $84,000 in debt on the home he and his wife had once paid off and chips away at $8,000 in remaining credit-card debt, Bill Joly says he regrets "burdening" his wife with the family finances. He says that only when she was arrested did he learn the disastrous shape they were in.

"When I looked back over her checkbook, I could tell the end was near. There was no way out unless everything was going to blow up," he says.

But Barbara Joly was afraid of something more than her husband finding out she'd drained their retirement savings. She was terrified that her son was despondent over finances. "She told me she believed Chris was suicidal," says her sister, Bonnie Moss.

But while Barbara would confide it to family and friends, she refused to share it with prosecutors or judges.

Even four years later, when she hesitantly broaches the topic with The Enquirer, she can't immediately bring herself to identify him.

"I had been financially supplying a family member for a long time, and I ran out of funds," she says carefully. "I was more and more stressed. I taught this person how to love, and how to get along with people. But what I didn't teach him was what to do if you have a failure in your life.

"He had had a golden life. He had always succeeded. And when this failure came along, he didn't know how to handle it."

Neither did his mother, who, a psychologist would write, "had an almost hyper-generous orientation toward those - including her adult son - who she perceived as being in need." She was devastated by his divorce and distressed over "these horrendous bills - they just stacked up and stacked up." At peak, Barbara would give Chris $5,000 a month to pay off debts that included trips to the West Coast and Paris.

It was never enough. Over time, she drained $75,000 of her own savings and an equal amount from her husband's inheritance from his parents, exhausted a $100,000 home-equity loan, borrowed from her sister, brother and niece, and maxed out the couple's credit cards, running up $30,000 of debt on one card alone.

"I was trying to pay my bills, pay my family back, but it got worse and worse. I thought, "What am I going to do? I don't have another source of funds. I didn't know there was some place I could go for help," she says. "I could see my son going downhill and I could feel myself doing the same thing. And I thought, 'I don't know where to go with this.'"

In her nylon jacket, white headscarf and sunglasses, the elderly woman who walked into the Community National Bank in Middletown was utterly forgettable. The note she slid across to a young teller was not.

It said a gun was trained on her and to hand over the cash in her drawer.

The teller would be so traumatized she would quit her job and leave banking entirely.

The robber, 68-year-old seamstress and grandmother Barbara Joly, would drive less than two miles to her home, briefly sit on her bed and stare at the money she'd just stolen, then drive to her own bank, deposit it and send it off in a check to her son.

"Frankly, I don't remember saying anything," she says now. "The first robbery that I did is the one I remember the least about. I must have been in a state of shock myself."

Barbara Joly was a coupon-clipper and bulk buyer. She was a woman who felt guilty treating herself to a new Longaberger basket once a year.

She was the neighbor who walked down the street daily, sometimes barefoot, to check on a cancer-stricken friend, the wife who made the world's best angel food cake, the mom of whom there are few pictures because she always had the camera in her purse.

And during her own two-decade career in banking, she was the teller known for balancing her drawer, the vault and the entire bank branch down to the last cent.

But in 2008, Barbara Joly's desperation to rescue her debt-ridden son - whom she believed was depressed and suicidal - would lead her to rob banks in Middletown, Mason, Lebanon and Franklin over eight months.

"Her husband, Bill, made Barbara give her word that they would give Chris no more money, and she's a person with a son who doesn't want to live, and she gave her word and something clicks, and the next day, she robs a bank," says her attorney Chris Atkins.

Her crimes would make her the target of a three-county FBI investigation and the butt of jokes by late-night talk-show hosts and Internet bloggers, who called her the Granny Robber and snickered at her unsophisticated disguise and awkward gait.

In fact, her simple approach worked in her favor. She slid into banks so unassumingly that customers held the door open for her, and she exited the same way. She parked her car a short distance from her target and ambled back to it after her crime, putting the cash she'd gotten on the seat beside her. She handwrote simple demands and was content with whatever cash the tellers pulled from their drawers, rather than forcing them to the vault.

"I tried not to do it in a violent way. I didn't have a weapon. I didn't have a partner. I've never slapped anyone in my life," she says. "That's all I can say. It was not a big plan. I was not trying to get all the money they had.

"I wasn't a very good bank robber - obviously, I wasn't a very good bank robber."

Still, Joly had knowledge that most robbers don't. In 2003, she was working as a teller in a bank when it was robbed.

Joly positioned herself to get a look at the robber's face and shouted to co-workers to lock the door after he left. The next day when FBI agents came to her home, she eagerly sorted through photos to identify him.

She isn't sure if the incident led her to think of robbery. She says all she remembers is how desperate she felt.

"I had gone to my family for help, and it was embarrassing, upsetting - trying to work and pay my bills and then help my son and pay them back," she says. "My checking account was down to zilch. I used every penny I made to try to pay back what I had borrowed, and then (Chris) would call and say, 'They're going to garnish my wages. I'm going to have to go to court if I don't pay this credit card.' It got to the point where I couldn't keep going."

Stress had ruined her sleep, thinned her hair, hunched her shoulders. From sociable and easygoing, she'd become jittery and distracted.

"We'd play bocce together and every once in a while I'd see an emotion in her eyes, like there was something she's hiding," says her friend Rosetta DiCristoforo. "She told me, 'I'm pulled between my husband and my son.' "

When Chris called just before Thanksgiving in 2008 to again ask for help, his mother determined she would make one more attempt to save him.

On Nov. 21, she drove to Franklin to rob the Huntington National Bank, across the street from a bank where she had worked and directly behind the police station.

"I knew there were people who would more or less know me. When I walked in, I thought this will stop it, and this is the only way," she says. "It would stop me from continuing to rob banks, continuing to give to my son, continuing to lie to my husband and continuing to wreck my life."

She approached a young teller and handed her a note that demanded money and warned of an armed accomplice.

Simultaneously, a male co-worker approached to ask the teller if she was ready for lunch.

"She looked right at him and said, 'No!' and I knew that I was done," Joly says.

The teller's alarm had been noted. Law enforcement agencies had been notified. And five minutes after walking out of the bank and making a single right turn in her red Chevy Cobalt, Joly was surrounded by police cars.

"All I could feel," she says, "was relief."

Shortly after, in the interview room at the Franklin police station, Joly answered Detective Jeffery Stewart's questions politely but vaguely. She said she did not know why she had been stopped by police. She said she was on her way home from a fabric store and exited at Franklin for cheaper gas. When Stewart brought up the money sack found in her car, she said she thought she should probably speak to an attorney.

"She didn't appear surprised, not crying, no strong emotions. She wasn't belligerent in any way," Stewart says. "I don't know if relief is what I heard, but more or less someone who knew it was coming. She just kind of took her medicine."

That night, as Charnice Supper sat watching the evening news and saw her best friend since high school being arrested, she went from shock to understanding in a minute.

"I immediately figured out why she had done it - she'd talked about the money she'd given Chris, and Bill didn't know anything about it," Supper says. "But I also thought, oh, my God, we'd go to Wal-Mart and JoAnne's, we'd use coupons - she'd been robbing the banks we were driving right by."

Joly's ability to seemingly compartmentalize her life - to terrorize young bank tellers while she sewed pillows for breast-cancer victims, to rob banks while she turned in every cent of the bingo money she collected - confused prosecuting attorneys, judges and Barbara's family and friends.

So did the relatively small amount of money she took - a total of $10,408 in four robberies - when she knew the vaults held more, and the proximity of her targets, all within 20 minutes of her home.

But getting money wasn't Joly's only wish for her son.

"Chris and Bill didn't realize what they were doing. Each time Chris would call and his dad would answer the phone, he'd say, "Dad, can I talk to Mom?" They just couldn't get that together," she says from the visiting room at the Dayton Correctional Institute, where she is serving a nine-year sentence. "My being out of that equation was the thing we needed - it brought them together."

The Joly house was mostly silent as two aging parents and an adult son faced each other, Barbara's crimes and their own broken relationship. Then they did something they hadn't done in years. They told each other the truth.

"Nobody wants to know the truth," Bill Joly says now, as he struggles to manage housework, pay the debts his wife incurred, and jot down family news to have beside the phone for the twice-weekly phone calls from his wife in prison. "The truth sometimes hurts."

It hurt that night as a shaking Barbara Joly, just released from jail on bond, told her family, "I was just ready to go over the edge."

It hurt as she described the tightrope she had walked between them, unable to say no to her son's needs because she feared he would kill himself, unable to tell her husband how much she had given Chris because he'd see they were financially ruined.

It hurt them to hear that, for years, she'd been sinking in the silence that lay between them.

It hurt her to realize that the two people in the world closest to her didn't see she was sinking at all.

"Bill has never been one to sit down and talk. I couldn't make him see," his wife of 52 years says in the visiting area at Dayton Correctional Institution, her thinning hair tied up in a knot. "He could see something was happening to me, but he couldn't stop to talk about it."

A psychologist who evaluated Barbara Joly noted her husband's extreme concern for her, but also his tendency to sidestep her worries about Chris with comments like, "Let's not even go in that direction - it's gonna work out."

"He did not come across as the sort of person who's inclined to spend a lot of time reflecting on the more nuanced aspects of behavior, his own or other people's," the psychologist wrote.

Then a crisis exposed the ruptured relationships and pattern of avoidance that had plagued the Joly family for years.

Barbara's arrest for four bank robberies - charges that could have carried a 20-year prison term - meant there could be no more sidestepping.

From earliest childhood, Chris Joly knew he was at the center of his mother's affection, but believed he was a disappointment to his father. He quickly learned to bypass his father by taking concerns to his mother, who relished being his confidante.

"It's the biggest aspect of our family that created the situation - that communication was very difficult between my father and I, and my mother was the intermediary," Chris Joly says now. "She wanted to make peace between us, and the only way to do that was to say yes to me, and maybe not tell him what he needed to know."

For Barbara, the friction between her son and husband - combined with a compulsive need to smooth her only child's way in life - led her to a solitary, secretive and finally absurd attempt to save him.

That attempt, her attorney says, took her out of the safe confines of her quiet, small-town life and shook even her own basic assumptions about herself.

"In the photographs of her, her eyes were scared," says attorney Chris Atkins. "I think much of that was being in the legal system, but you don't know if some of it was being scared of herself - who am I? That's a scary question to ask yourself."

"The real Barbara everyone knows is not the Barbara who robs a bank. The church-goer, the quilt-maker gives us the true Barbara who does not rob banks. But the Barbara who gets married early, who wonders what life would have been like without that marriage. ... Her life was such that maybe she never really knew who she was or who she could have been," Atkins says.

Who Barbara Joly was that November night was a lost soul.

Forced to confront her actions, to speak the truth to her son and husband, Barbara Joly took the first step to being found. As she told a psychologist later, "Finally, everything had to get laid on the table - no more Mom in the middle."

For the last year, Barbara has been working on communication and assertiveness skills with a visiting priest at her prison. When he first invited her to anger management classes, she resisted, saying, "I'm not mad."

Now she says feelings of fear and helplessness were buried deep within her. And she says finally - ironically, confined in a state penitentiary - she has found the freedom to say what she feels.

"I've said to my husband - here's a for-instance - 'Before I came in here, how often did you call our son?' He didn't. I said, 'How often do you call him now?' He said, 'A couple of times a week.' " She sits forward, her eyes widening. "I said, 'A-ha - doesn't that tell you something?'

"And I had never told my son, now listen to me - you have all the ability you need to stand up on your own, the faith and the ability to do it yourself," she says, her pale cheeks flushing, her words coming in a torrent. "After my arrest, my son looked for other jobs. He interviewed and had his choice of jobs. He started one the week I went to Marysville," to the Ohio Reformatory for Women.

She leans forward. "That's a sign to me that God is saying to me, 'You need to do something else with your life rather than running around in circles trying to do things for them.' "

What Chris Joly does now is work as a mortgage broker in Louisville. "In hindsight, I should have declared bankruptcy," he says, "but then I wouldn't have been able to get licensed in the mortgage field if I did."

What his mother does now is teach knitting classes for fellow inmates, mend uniforms, make objects for charities and dream of "going home and cooking dinner and just sitting down and talking to my husband and doing the dishes and doing the laundry and going to the grocery store."

Her attorney says he will request her release in 2017, when she has served eight years of her nine-year sentence.

By then, she will be 76. Bill Joly will be 82.

He has kept things as much as possible as they were before his wife was led off to prison in Feb. 11, 2009, so distraught she could not look back in the courtroom at her husband, brother and sister, best friend and priest. Barbara's hand-stitched "Welcome" sampler hangs inside the front door. Her Sudoku and "Curves: Permanent Results without Permanent Dieting" books are on the coffee table. "She was big on Curves," Bill says with a smile.

He is waiting to have a knee replacement until she can be beside him. He says he sometimes fears dying before she's released.

"We could have taken some trips," he says, dropping the forced cheerfulness that is his usual demeanor. "I wanted to go to Alaska so badly. The worst thing for me is having to take care of the house - to cook, to take care of the laundry. I tell her, 'I'm doing things, babe, that I never thought I'd have to do.' "

Chris Joly says his mother's imprisonment has altered how he and his parents relate to each other, and changed his father profoundly.

"Before all this happened, my dad wasn't a very emotional person, rarely said I love you, even to my mom. Since then, he's the polar opposite. Now every time we talk on the phone, there are one or two 'I love yous,' " he says. "He's basically become my mom."

At Dayton Correctional Institution, Barbara shakes her head slightly at the thought her imprisonment brought the reconciliation between father and son she'd always wanted.

"Yes, it was a sacrifice and the biggest part of the sacrifice" - here, she cries for the first time in a four-hour interview - "was giving up part of my life with my husband."

Her voice grows stronger. "Because it actually brought us closer. My husband never kissed me in public - never. He was not a really affectionate person. But when I walk in here," she says glancing across the prison visiting room, "he hugs me and he kisses me and it doesn't matter who's around.

"We have found a stronger love, a stronger marriage - and because of that, it hurts even more."

Bill Joly says it hurts him, too - that he feels guilty enjoying a nice meal out because Barb can't, that he misses her every Reds Opening Day, when he goes to the parade without her.

"She used to do angel food cake with this fantastic icing. I haven't had an angel food cake since she left," he says quietly, then visibly rouses himself. "I'm determined I'm going to be positive for Barb. I don't want her to be scarred by this. I want her to come home the same person she was when she went in."

It's something Barbara Joly can't promise.

At Dayton Correctional Institution, inmates and even guards still look at the white-haired, slightly hunched woman in Reeboks, navy pants and a shirt with a green collar - signifying an honor inmate with a low security risk - and marvel that she's the Granny Robber.

"They say, 'Mrs. Joly, come here. I want to talk to you. Are you really that person?' she says. "I say, 'Yes, I am - at least I was that person.'

"I don't feel I am any more."

Cincinnati Enquirer