The State - News from Sept. 26, 1985

A federal prison inmate who fled while en route--unescorted--from one prison to another last January was captured in Oakland after an alleged cross-country bank robbery spree. Victor Statkus, 37, had been scheduled for early parole and was not considered a flight risk when federal authorities gave him a bus ticket and told him to make his way alone from a prison in Pennsylvania to one in Otisville, N.Y. Instead, an FBI spokesman said, Statkus embarked on the series of bank robberies, evidently to support his heroin habit.