THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 1, 1995 TAG: 9503310081
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines
NEARLY 40 YEARS is a long time to wait to say thank you. Even if the person you wanted to thank was a bank robber who left town without saying good-bye.
But that's what Linda Ivy of Chesapeake wanted to do for the stranger who came through Smithfield, N.C., in 1955. He paid her brother Troy's hospital bills and gave her her first pair of new shoes.
It's a long story that began in the fall of that year when Linda was only 8, one of 14 children working on a farm outside Smithfield.
``We were a real poor family,'' she recalled. ``One day my brother was walking across Highway 301 with a bucket he used to slop hogs. He got hit by a car.''
The car behind the one that struck Troy stopped. The driver, a young man in his early 20s, waited for the ambulance to take Linda's brother to the local hospital.
``Then he came up to my mother and offered to take her to the hospital to see my brother,'' she said.
Linda said the man told her his name was Bill Carson. Carson was traveling with a woman he said was his wife. They struck up a friendship with her mother and the children.
``He paid all the hospital bills when my brother was released about five days later,'' Linda remembered. ``After that he began to take care of my family.''
She described her family - the Hamiltons - as hard-working and dirt-poor. ``We always wore hand-me-down clothes,'' she said. ``I had never had a new pair of shoes until he bought us all shoes. And toys.''
The Carsons stayed in Smithfield and rented a bungalow just down the highway from Linda's family. ``I remember on Thanksgiving they brought us turkey,'' she said. ``That's something we hadn't seen before.''
The Carsons never told Linda's mother or anyone else in town where they were from or where they got their money.
``He told us he had been raised on a farm,'' she said. ``I think my mother felt that since he had been raised poor and country, that he somehow identified with us.''
But there were suspicious signs. ``Bill and his wife used to tell us not to be surprised if one day we went by their place and they had gone,'' she said. ``They said they liked to move around a lot. And that they might not say good-bye.''
That's exactly what happened a couple of months later. The kids and their mother went by the bungalow and the Carsons were gone.
``We thought they had moved away,'' she said. Linda's family learned the shocking truth when they picked up the newspaper and saw the Carsons' photos in it.
The story said the Carsons were really Roosevelt Lyndon O'Donnell and Tyra O'Donnell. They were wanted by the FBI for robbing a bank in Hebron, Ind.
The O'Donnells had been arrested and taken to Indiana for trial.
Linda tried to reach O'Donnell for 39 years to thank him for the favors he did for her family, even if it was done with robbery money.
``I don't have a great education,'' she said. ``I'm just a poor country girl still, but I wrote to prisons and to courthouses and couldn't ever find out where he was.''
Linda moved away from Smithfield years ago and has since married. But until early this February, she still wondered about O'Donnell and - like other members of her family - was concerned that he'd never been thanked properly for his kindness to them in 1955.
So in early February, she picked up the phone and called WVEC-TV.
``She said she and her family wanted to thank a bank robber who had helped them many years ago,'' said news director David Cassidy.
Newsman Bruce Moore interviewed Linda in a two-part segment broadcast Feb. 2-3. CNN - the Cable News Network - picked up the interview and aired it.
A photo of O'Donnell was shown during the interview. During the broadcast, Linda mentioned that no one had been hurt in the bank robbery. Roosevelt O'Donnell had ordered the bank president out of his house at gunpoint and made him go along to the bank. The bank president was released later, unharmed.
O'Donnell, who served more than 17 years for the robbery, has remarried and is now living in a small Indiana town. (``I'd prefer if you didn't say where, since my neighbors don't know about my past,'' he said.) He now earns a living as a union bricklayer.
He said he didn't watch the CNN broadcast of the story.
``One of my nieces who lives nearby saw it and called my sister,'' O'Donnell said. ``Then my sister called my wife to tell me about it.''
Why hadn't he gotten in touch with Linda or her family?
``I thought about them a lot,'' he said. ``But I was in the Atlanta penitentiary. They only allowed you to write your immediate family. And I had committed a crime. I didn't know what they'd think of it.''
And why had he decided to help the Hamiltons with the $3,000 he got from the robbery? ``I was raised on a turkey farm. Their family resembled mine quite a bit. My dad used to bring home $12 a week to feed a family of five. I saw that little boy hurt on the highway. I just wanted to help.''
WVEC-TV put the bricklayer in touch with Linda and paid the O'Donnells' air fare for a reunion in Smithfield in early March. The party included Linda's sister Doris Smith of Chesapeake and two brothers, Troy Hamilton of Chesapeake and Roy Hamilton of Suffolk.
``We had a pig picking and everything at my brother Linwood's house,'' Linda said. She added that O'Donnell, now 63, ``is just as likable as he ever was, only fatter and older.''
And O'Donnell's view of the reunion? ``Lord, it was good!'' he said over the phone. ``We was just like brothers and sisters down there. Everyone so nice. We're going back down there for a visit.''
Hopefully before another 40 years. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
TAMARA VONINSKI/Staff
Linda Ivy holds an old photo of her 13 siblings. In 1955, a
mysterious couple came to the family's aid.
by CNB