Way from p 15 One afternoon toward dusk, he brought a bag of equipment and waited on the ridge until the man appeared. Then he put on a ski mask, jumped the back wall, showed the man his gun, and escorted him inside. “Take what you want,” the man said. “Just don’t hurt me.” Byerly gave the usual assurances about no one getting hurt, as long as they did what they were told. The safe was on a time lock and wouldn’t open until morn- ing. He fixed his host a sandwich and sat up with him, listening to the police scan- ner he’d brought with him. Shortly after sunrise the time lock expired, and he watched carefully as the man opened the safe and stepped aside. There were velvet-lined boxes inside filled with diamonds, but Byerly hardly He left the man shackled to a table leg and told him not to free himself for 15 minutes. At home, he broke the package into smaller bundles and resealed them in plastic, duct-taping the hell out of every bundle. He stacked them into two aqua- blue plastic ice chests and packed the whole load in cat litter to help absorb moisture. He sealed the coolers, put them in the trunk and drove north out of Phoenix to the Rim Country between Payson and Camp Verde, a summer get- away area surrounded by national forest land. Near Strawberry, he took a gravel road that dipped deeper into the teeming ponderosa pines, until he came to a place where he’d stashed money before. This time he dug deeper than he ever had and buried the coolers, notching nearby trees with a hatchet and checking his odome- ter to gauge the exact distance from the “It was going to be easy”: A crime-scene photo of the bullet-riddled getaway car from Byerly’s last robbery in Tucson, with $87,000 in cash abandoned in the back seat. looked at them. He was transfixed by a brick of cash wrapped in plastic, about the size of a briefcase. Hundred-dollar bills in banded stacks of a hundred each, fresh from the bank, compact and in se- ries. Ten thousand to a stack, and by his count a hundred stacks, a fearful symme- try that worked out to a cool $1 million. On another shelf, in a fat pile, was a ran- dom collection of used bills, 100s and 50s and 20s, that came to around $70,000 and change. The money was heavy. He took it all. nearest cattleguard. He told no one where he’d been or what he’d done. Asked why, if he had so much money sitting in the ground, he went ahead with yet another bank rob- bery, he shrugs. “I thought I could have them both,” he says. “I had been planning Tucson for a long time. I had it covered. It was going to be easy.” Next week: The conclusion of “Wayne’s Way,” and how an “easy” job led to hard time. Email [email protected]. 17 phoenixnewtimes.com | CONTENTS | FEEDBACK | OPINION | NEWS | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | PHOENIX NEW TIMES JAN. 31ST–FEB. 6TH, 2019 U.S. DISTRICT COURT
