July 24, 2010 7:41 AM
"48 Hours Mystery:" Show Me the Money
A relaxing evening at home quickly turned into a night of terror for bank manager Michelle Renee when three masked gunmen burst into her Vista, Calif., home and took her and her 7-year-old daughter, Breea, hostage. But this was no random break-in.
Michelle, a 35-year-old divorced mother, was the assistant vice president at a local branch of Bank of America... and the gunmen knew exactly who she was and where she worked.
Strapped with dynamite, she was forced to the rob bank where she worked to save her daughter. But was Michelle really the victim, or the mastermind of the crime? "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Susan Spencer reports.
"We had gotten home right around 6:30, the sun was setting, and we were getting ready to go into the house and make homemade pizzas," Michelle Renee explained.
"I was a single mother and my daughter loved when we got to spend time together. We decided to sit down on the couch and play some Game Boy to unwind from the day.
"And then everything was completely shattered in one blink of an eye.
"The backdoor to our house just came crashing in with a sound that is completely indescribable. There were three men all dressed in black and masks, rushing towards us, SWAT style, in a line.
"They grabbed us, threw us to the floor… one man was on my back, guns to my head, and the duct tape started to unroll and rip.
"My daughter was out of sight, couldn't hear her, didn't know what was going on, and I was screaming for our life.
"There's three of them. There's nothing, absolutely nothing I could've done, to protect her.
"I'm Michelle Renee, and I was kidnapped and held hostage along with my 7-year-old daughter.
"We were held for 14 hours ... all night long until the next morning, when it was time to, as they said, "Go to work." That meant to go rob the bank on that day.
"They duct taped dynamite to our backs. And showed us a device that he said was a detonation device.
"He said, 'If you don't do everything perfect, your daughter will blow up first, you will blow up next. So don't screw this up.'
"And then I became a bank robber."
It was at her hillside home in Vista, Calif., where Michelle Renee once felt happiest.
"I lived in my dream house, pretty much. It was on top of a hill, it was overlooking the ocean."
Michelle, 35, was a divorced, single mother who was raising her daughter, Breea, and working full time as a bank manager.
"I felt very safe. I felt like we were far away," she said of her home's remote location. That is until that awful night nine years ago when the three masked men charged through her back door.
"And everything just was slow motion in that moment. It was like it wasn't real," she explained to "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Susan Spencer.
The masked men pointed their guns at Michelle and Breea.
"I was just begging for her life," Michelle said. "Please don't hurt her. Please don't hurt her."
"I heard my daughter say, 'Are you gonna kill my mommy? And - are you going to kill me?' And they said, 'No, not if your mommy does everything that we tell her to do,'" Michelle was recorded telling the FBI following the break-in. "They said, 'Do you know why we're here?' I said, 'No, I have nothing. Why are you here?'"
It turns out this was not just some random crime.
"We've been following you for weeks. We know everything about you. We know you have a roommate. When she's coming home?" Michelle said, repeating what one of the masked men told her.
And most important of all, they knew where she worked.
"We know you're the bank manager…That's why we're here. Because you're going to get us the money out of the vault [of] that bank or you're going to die," she repeated.
The intruders turned off all the lights. They duct taped Michelle and Breea's wrists and ankles and then dumped them on the couch.
Michelle said they were threatened all night long. "It was like I was counting the minutes to the end of my life," she said.
At 11p.m., Renee's roommate, Kimbra, came home. The gunmen overpowered her; they duct taped her and dragged her next to Michelle.
"At that point, they were really, really graphic with their sexual talk, super - bad," Michelle explained to the FBI.
Michelle said it was always clear which of the three men was in charge.
"He was sort of giving the orders. And he was really in control. And he was the one with the walkie-talkie radio," she told Spencer.
At one point, Michelle heard a female voice over the walkie talkie. She said she recognized it immediately. "It just clicked."
Michelle said the voice belonged to a customer who'd been in the bank with her boyfriend earlier in the day.
And when a light was briefly turned on, she got a glimpse of the ring leader.
"I knew those eyes the second I could see them," she said.
Michelle said she knew the man behind the mask was the boyfriend.
"I think I know who these people are… And it just clicked in that I started paying attention to, like, everything," she said.
The next morning, the gunmen strapped sticks of dynamite to their hostages.
"'If I push the button, all three of you disintegrate. If you try to take it off yourself, you're the only one that's gonna blow," Michelle told the FBI.
Then they tied Michelle's roommate and shoved her down on the bed. They had duct taped her eyes, her mouth, her hands and her feet.
Breea was pushed into a closet and Michelle was given one last chance to say goodbye to her daughter; she prayed not the last.
"The weight of their lives was enormous for me," Michelle said. "I just told [Breea] she was everything - everything I'd ever wanted. That she was perfect and that we're a team. And she said, 'Just be brave, Mommy…' She's like, 'I know you're coming back, Mommy. I know you're gonna come back.'"
Michelle recalled the ringleader was crouched behind the driver's seat, aiming a gun at her back as she drove to work - the dynamite hidden under her jacket.
"Every step I took with that dynamite was like a tick of a bomb. Every second," she said.
"I can't mess up. I can't make one wrong turn in my car," Michelle said. "I've got to do everything right if we have any chance of saving anybody's lives."
The gunmen had warned her not to make any phone calls or to call the police - they would be watching everything. When she got to the bank, Michelle parked in her usual spot.
Loretta Myers was already at work when a subdued Michelle walked into the bank.
"She came into the branch and she was very stoic… just off-center. It just wasn't like her. She's a vivacious, bubbly, outgoing kind of a person," Myers said.
Michelle said she was trying to act normal, but was counting the minutes until the money was delivered.
"I knew what I had to do… and that's all I could think about," she said.
At 8:50 a.m., an armored truck finally arrived.
"And all the money is now in the vault. And that's the cue. I grabbed my briefcase. I went to the vault," Michelle explained.
"It was extremely odd." Myers said with a laugh, "Never have I ever seen anybody take anything other than a pen and keys into the vault. Never."
For security, the bank required two people be in the vault to take out any money, so Michelle had to ask one of the tellers to join her. Once inside the vault, Michelle told her what had happened.
"She started panicking and going, 'Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. She couldn't speak," Michelle said. "And I lifted up my shirt and I said, 'Look what's on my back. I'm going to blow up if I'm not out of here in 5 minutes. You need to help me. I have to rob the bank.'"
Michelle took a duffel bag out of her briefcase and within minutes, she'd cleaned out the vault.
"And I just remember my hand reaching for the money and stuffing the duffel bag. And I just said, 'Do not call the police. If you call the police, we're dead.'"
"She came out of the vault with her - satchel. And kind of like an odd look on her face," Myers recalled. "And she told me she had an appointment to go to… And she briskly walked out of the branch."
Just after 9 a.m., as the bank opened, Michelle walked out with $360,000.
"I robbed a bank to save our lives," she told Spencer.
The gunman directed Michelle to a nearby apartment complex.
"He let me out of the Jeep. I was to walk back to where my Jeep would be waiting. And then I was to go straight home."
Then he took off with the money, leaving Michelle with dynamite still taped to her back.
"Tick. Tick. Is this going to be the second that I'm going to blow up? Is this going to be the step that's going to end my daughter's life?" "I thought for sure, once they get what they want, once they get the money, we're dead. They don't want witnesses," Michelle Renee explained to "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Susan Spencer.
Terrified, and with sticks of dynamite cutting into her back, Michelle raced back to her house.
"I didn't know what I would find when I got home, if I made it home. All I knew was that's where my daughter was. Nothing else mattered… all I could think of was getting back to her."
Michelle found Kimbra on the bed. Breea was in the closet, right where she'd left her.
"I was so excited," Breea told Spencer. "I was like, 'someone's coming back.' It was my mom. I think it's my Mom… and I was like, 'OK, it's over. It's over.' Because if my mom's back, they're gone."
"I just wanted to grab her and never, never, ever let go of her. I just wanted to hold her," Michelle said.
Hold her she did.
"I was crouched down. I was just in front of her, holding her, getting the tape off of her. It hit me right then - 'Oh, my gosh - I've got dynamite on my back.'"
Kimbra and Breea's dynamite was gone; Kimbra said one of the men just ripped it off.
Later, police took photos to illustrate what happened.
"And I was like, 'OK, get it off of me. Get it off of me!' And [Kimbra] did," Michelle said.
Kimbra dashed outside and put the dynamite on the retaining wall. Then, all three ran up the hill to the nearest neighbor.
"[The security] gate was closed. And so, we began pushing the button frantically and saying, 'Please let us in. Please let us in. We've been kidnapped, we've been held hostage all night long, let us in, let us in,'" Michelle said.
Rick Brown will never forget that morning.
"I saw them down there. Even from here, I could tell they were really distraught. …I opened the gates, went down the hill real fast, helped them up to the house… They were in shock, you know, especially Kim. Michelle was a little bit more - composed. And the little girl was really composed, it was amazing."
911: Excerpts of Kimbra's call to police
Police, the FBI and the bomb squad arrived and quickly determined that the dynamite that had so terrorized Michelle was fake. It was nothing more than some painted wooden dowels and a few bits of colored wire - absolutely harmless.
Investigators then turned their attention to Michelle, questioning her for several hours.
Michelle told investigators she was sure her captor was a customer - the same man who had been in the bank just hours before the robbery.
Investigators questioned whether she could be absolutely sure, given that she was looking at eyes showing through holes in his mask. "No doubt in my mind," she said.
In fact, Michelle said the man had given her his business card and it was still in her desk. "He left me a business card. He handed me a business card that said, 'On the Spot Photography.'"
The card identified the man as Christopher Butler, who, investigators soon discovered, was an ex-con with a history of robbing banks.
"This was the card that Butler brought in prior to the robbery when he was discussing opening an account," Investigator Dale Martin said as he showed Spencer the card.
But if Michelle had met him only once, investigators wanted to know how she could be so sure it was Butler?
When asked if she had seen the man any at any other time, she said she told investigators, "No. I told you, I saw him in the bank. He came in and pretended to be a potential customer. That's all. They acted like they found it implausible."
That wasn't the only thing investigators Rudy Zamora, Dale Martin and Randi Demers found implausible.
"Her background just didn't add up to what - at least what I had envisioned to be - a person entrusted with the management of a bank," Zamora said.
Michelle, the investigators learned, had a "colorful" past, which, according to Michelle, included drugs and lots of sex. Now, that past was coming back to haunt her.
"I mean, I hadn't thought about my past in years. I left that behind so long ago. And all of a sudden, here it is," she said.
Before Michelle was a banker, she was a stripper.
"I loved it," she told Spencer. "Liked the attention, liked the music and the fact that I could disappear on stage."
Not only was it fun, but she said it paid well. Michelle continued stripping for nine years - long after she began her banking career.
"I wasn't making a lot of money as a teller, and so I would work at the bank during the day and I would dance at night," she explained.
"None of your customers knew?" Spencer asked. "No, they did not," Michelle replied with a laugh. "They did not."
Michelle's bosses did not know, either. And that wasn't her only secret.
She did not have a background in finance, a college degree or even a high school diploma.
"I lied on my application because it was the only way I could get a good job and a better future for myself," she said.
Michelle had been on her own since running away from an abusive home at the age of 15. She started as a teller in a small-town bank. Thirteen years later, with a lot of hard work, she was a bank manager - albeit a bank manager seemingly incapable of managing her own money.
"There [were] bankruptcies. There was bouncing of checks," according to Zamora.
A month before the robbery, Michelle had filed for bankruptcy for the second time, leading investigators to wonder: was that motive enough to rob a bank?
"Suddenly, I'm the mastermind," she said. Suddenly, I orchestrated the entire thing." It was crushing, Michelle Renee said, to realize that the cops weren't sure she was innocent or a victim.
"It never dawned on me that I would be a suspect. I automatically assumed that everyone would know that I was the innocent victim," she said. "I was on the verge of a full blown breakdown. It was not a good situation."
Michelle fled to a hotel, barricaded herself and her daughter inside, and tried to cope with both her fears and Breea's.
"I was dealing with a very devastated 7-year-old girl," Michelle explained. "She didn't talk a lot after that for a long time. She was very withdrawn and very clingy… a completely different child than who she was before this."
But for all their suspicions, investigators could find not a shred of hard evidence that Michelle was involved.
By contrast, Christopher Butler seemed to have gone out of his way to build an airtight case against himself. Not only was there that business card, but his thumbprint also matched one left in the red paint on the fake dynamite.
"Big mistake," said Randi Demers. "He was part of the robbery," added Dale Martin.
Investigators Martin, Demers and Rudy Zamora began tracking Butler and his friends.
Then, 10 days after the robbery, Michelle said she got a phone call from the district attorney saying, "We caught them."
"My immediate words were, 'Was it - the people that were in my bank?' And they said, 'Yeah, it was.'"
Butler was under surveillance when police nabbed him at an intersection. In the car with him was his girlfriend, Lisa Ramirez, who police suspected was the woman in the bank.
The investigators said they were in shock when they were stopped. Zamora said they were "totally surprised."
"They thought they were free and clear," said Martin.
They were so confident that they were driving around with a trunk full of evidence: masks, gloves, clothing and Michelle's credit cards - but not a cent of that $360,000…although they did leave the wrappers from the packets of money behind. In the glove compartment, investigators found a BB gun.
The treasure hunt continued at a house where Butler and Ramirez had been staying. Martin said the evidence found at the residence was crucial.
Inside, investigators discovered all the ingredients for making fake dynamite: wooden dowels, red paint, wires and empty rolls of duct tape.
That same day, some 50 miles away, police picked up a third suspect - Christopher Huggins. They also recovered $93,000 stashed in a safe.
"I found out that these people were involved in gang activity. And you know, these are scary individuals," Michelle said.
For, as bumbling as they seemed, Michelle was the key witness against them, and she was afraid of retaliation, especially since Robert Ortiz - the last suspect - was still on the loose.
"We did the best we could," said Zamora. "But there was some danger there because we didn't know where Robert Ortiz was."
But after Ortiz was featured on "America's Most Wanted," he was caught in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The four suspects now all were under arrest.
"I don't even know what the hell happened," Christopher Butler told investigators during his interrogation. "All I know is you guys pulled me over."
Butler, the ring leader, wasn't talking.
"Christopher Butler said nothing," said Zamora. "He's a professional."
But Christopher Huggins and Robert Ortiz began talking immediately. And though it took her a few hours to start talking, Lisa Ramirez wouldn't shut up.
She admitted being the voice on the radio and even bragged that she was the mastermind.
"Honestly, you know whose idea that was, about eight months ago, jokingly … mine," she said during her interrogation.
"She took credit for the idea. She did it," Zamora said.
Excerpts of Lisa Ramirez's interrogation
But her most intriguing claim was about another woman Ramirez said was involved
"I think her name is Michelle. From what they had told me, this Michelle lady was helping them," Ramirez told investigators.
Here was Ramirez pointing the finger at Michelle. Determined to find the truth, investigators again asked Michelle to reenact the crime - this time with props. Although they had reservations, they put fake dynamite on Michelle, Kimbra, and even on little Breea, and took pictures.
"Were you testing her?" Spencer asked Zamora.
"We were allowing the evidence to guide us where we needed to go," he said. "[Michelle] was going to survive or she was going to break."
"She was very upset, very emotional," Martin said of her reaction.
According to Michelle, "They didn't say, 'We think you're innocent, but we're doing our job.' They didn't say, 'We have to investigate because this is our job.' They didn't do any of that."
"Every time we pushed a button, she would react in a way - a true victim should," Zamora said.
Investigators were inclined to believe her, but they were still puzzled.
"And [we'd] say, 'What are we missing? What did we miss on this?" said Zamora.
"You just didn't think these bozos could do it by themselves?" asked Spencer.
"That was always kind of in the back of our mind. Is how can these four individuals pull this off without assistance?" said Demers. "They just didn't seem smart enough."
Adding to their uncertainty was another troublesome question: who had the rest of the money?
"I wish four people being arrested was the end of the story. I wish," said Michelle. "It wasn't." It was a nerve-racking year-and-a-half after the kidnapping and robbery before the first two defendants, Chris Butler and Lisa Ramirez, went to trial.
"They said, 'They're going to bring your character into question. They're going to bring your past up,' Michelle said. "There was no possible way to prepare for what was about to happen."
Michelle was the state's key witness and she was feeling the pressure. She could no longer bear to work at the bank, she left her dream house and now, she had to face her captors.
"Every single emotion you can imagine was just coming at me like darts," she told "48 Hours correspondent Susan Spencer.
But, at least, prosecutor Tom Manning was on her side.
"We looked under every rock and explored every detail," he said. "I believed she was a victim… And I couldn't imagine that Michelle would put Breea in that kind of jeopardy."
Early on, Manning felt pretty good about his case. Along with an abundance of evidence, he had Michelle's roommate to back up her story. And better yet, he had a confession from Lisa Ramirez.
Even Ramirez's own lawyer, Herb Weston, saw this as a long shot for his client.
"You play the cards you're dealt," he explained, "and then you try to get a winning strategy."
Weston wasn't expecting a miracle, but he got one. The judge threw out Ramirez's confession, ruling that it implicated her co-defendant Chris Butler - who had never admitted anything to police.
"I was real happy," Weston said laughing.
But by the time of the trial, Butler had dropped a bombshell. He now claimed the robbery was all Michelle's idea.
"Do I believe Michelle's statement that 'I'm just a poor victim?' No," Weston told Spencer.
From the very beginning, defense attorneys raised suspicion that Michelle was involved, casting doubt on her story.
Then, Chris Butler went one shocking accusation further, claiming he and Michelle were having an affair.
"At what point did he concoct this story of meeting me?" Michelle asked. "During his interrogation, he never, ever once mentioned knowing me, dating me, my being the ring leader."
There was no evidence at all of any affair, but the very suggestion of it fed into the defense strategy of attacking Michelle's credibility. And unfortunately for her, she made it easy for them because she had told a lie - a little lie - that would have a big impact.
"Right out of the gate - I was completely up front with the jury. And I told 'em in my opening statement that she lied," Manning said.
Michelle had misled prosecutors about, of all things, an appearance on "America's Most Wanted."
"The deputy DA advised her not to do it because it was a pending case," Manning explained. "He confronted her, and she told him she did not do the interview."
"Yeah, they didn't want me to do it," Michelle told Spencer. "It was something that I wanted to participate in. So what did it matter?"
Manning tried to point out that the lie was trivial, but the damage was done.
"There's no reason a true victim has to lie. None," said Weston.
Then, on day eight, the prosecutor's star witness took the stand and tried to describe the trauma of that day: dynamite strapped to her daughter; she herself forced to rob her own bank.
"It's a stressful moment," said Manning. "She's nervous. She's fidgety. Normal and typical ways victims and witnesses act."
"I'm going to be brave no matter what. There were a lot of emotions that were coming over me. I'm going to be strong," said Michelle.
But Michelle was her own worst enemy. She even argued with the prosecution.
"You can see anger and she gets defensive," Manning said. "It obviously caused concerns for the jury."
When Spencer asked if there was anything Michelle did well as a prosecution witness, Weston said "She showed up."
When it was the defense's turn, Weston went gunning for Michelle.
"We don't win cases by evidence. We win cases by emotion," he said. "She did certain things that just seemed so unbelievable."
Specifically, why would Michelle race home to her daughter if she believed the dynamite was real?
"Here's a person who's supposed to have a bomb on her back. A bomb. And she's so worried about her daughter. So she runs into the same room where her daughter was. Would you take the chance? Does that seem believable?" Weston asked.
And if she had really been bound with tape, where were the marks?
"Why aren't there any tape marks? That's what tape does. It leaves marks. And yet, they don't find any of that. Why?" Weston asked.
The defense also zeroed in on Michelle's money problems. They portrayed her as a financial wreck: a bank manager with a history of unpaid loans, bad checks and two bankruptcies.
"Last time I checked, filing bankruptcy wasn't against the law," Michelle told Spencer.
"It's motive as far as the defense is concerned," Spencer replied. "It means you needed money."
"According to them. But I was making my payments on time. I was paying everyone back.
The defense had yet another line of attack. Remember Michelle's claim that she recognized the voice on the walkie talkie the night of the kidnapping?
"It just clicked," she told Spencer. "I knew without a doubt it was the exact same voice of the woman who had come into my bank and said, 'Hey, Chris.'"
The voice of Lisa Ramirez. Michelle insisted she immediately identified Lisa's voice to investigators.
"You told them the next day," Spencer said to Michelle.
"I did," she replied.
"Without any question?"
"Without any question I feel like this person on the other end of that line said, 'Hey, Chris,' was the woman that was in the bank."
Weston said Michelle was "interviewed, I think, four times. And yet, in none of those times she ever said, 'I recognized her voice.'"
"They were always in contact with this lady on the radio," Michelle was recorded telling the FBI. "She was always calling."
"You may think you told them," said Spencer.
"I know I told them," Michelle replied.
Michelle did tell investigators about the voice on the radio, but nowhere in any FBI report is there a record of her saying she recognized that voice.
"And all of a sudden she comes up with that at the time of the trial. Which opened the door for me to say, 'Why are you bringing this up now?'" said Weston.
The truth is, it was Lisa Ramirez on the walkie talkie. She had even admitted it in her confession. But remember, the judge threw that statement out. All the jury had to go on was Michelle's own story and the defense was determined to rip it apart.
The more Weston went after Michelle, the more combative she got.
"I felt like I was the one on trial," she explained. "I started becoming very defense about what they were saying about me."
"She fought me all the way, which I love," Weston said.
Michelle called Weston "intimidating" and "rude." Weston said Michelle was "edgy."
"If you were throwing darts out of her eyes, I would've been, like, bleeding and on the floor," he said.
"He was tough for me," Michelle admitted.
"If I can get a witness angry, the jury is gonna be put off. [Michelle was] way over the board angry," said Weston. "You're a victim of a crime. You have a right to be angry. But explain to me why there's these inconsistencies."
After three grueling days on the stand, Michelle finally finished her testimony.
"It just took the breath out of me," she said. "It took the fight out of me. I really was blind-sided by this in a lot of ways.
The trial took three weeks. Now, the jury had the case.
"I got the vibes in the court room. I knew there were issues," Manning admitted. "But I thought the jury would ultimately come around and convict."
"I worry about everything," said Weston. "Some of the best work I've ever done, I still lose."
"It's a chess game," said Michelle. "I mean, whoever's the better player wins. The first hour of jury deliberation - which Weston called "the first hour of sweat" - stretched into a day; then another day.
Finally, after five days, the jury came back.
"I was waiting and waiting and waiting. I wanted to hear the words 'guilty' for what they had done," said Michelle Renee.
She heard nothing of the kind. While the jury found Christopher Butler guilty of kidnapping Breea and Kimbra, he was not convicted of kidnapping Michelle.
Jurors said later that some believed Butler's claim that he and Michelle were having an affair, although there was no evidence they even knew each other.
"[There are] no pictures. Not a phone record. Not one person that ever saw us together. Not one single thing to support this guy's claims," Michelle said.
Equally shocking was the verdict for Lisa Ramirez who had confessed, although the confession never was heard in court. The jury found Ramirez not guilty on all counts.
For Michelle, the verdict was, "complete disappointment. Shock."
"For us it was a good victory," said Herb Weston. "My client got to go home that night."
Weston's client walked out of the court room a free woman.
"Lisa Ramirez is guilty," said prosecutor Tom Manning. "And had we tried the case - separating the defendants and used the confession - it's more than likely that a jury would have convicted her."
Of the confession Weston said, "They didn't use it. That wasn't the evidence."
Spencer pointed out, "Even today, you smile when you tell me they didn't use it."
"Well, of course," Weston replied. "Because my - my girl confessed. Or made a statement that… implied at least she was aware of what was going on."
When the judge threw out her confession, the case against Ramirez hinged on Michelle's testimony. Rudy Zamora said she'd done herself no favors.
"Her credibility was shot on the stand. And the jury caught on."
"The jury did not believe Michelle," added Manning. "One juror thought Michelle was involved."
And how did Michelle think she fared on the stand?
"Horrible. Terrible. [I] beat myself up for a really long time about being so weak up there," she told Spencer.
Michelle got a chance to redeem herself two months later, when she took the stand in the trial of Christopher Huggins and Robert Ortiz.
This time, Michelle was prepared. And this time, the entire case didn't hang on her.
Manning had the confessions from Ortiz and Huggins - confessions in which they never once accuse Michelle of being involved.
The jury was out for only a day. Huggins and Ortiz were found guilty on all charges - including the kidnapping of Michelle Renee. The two men, along with Christopher Butler, were each given three consecutive life terms in prison.
Which leaves just one nagging question: where was the missing $360,000 taken from the bank?
In the end, investigators say they recovered about $100,000. The rest, said Zamora, is "gone forever."
To this day, police have no idea what happened to that missing money or who ended up with it.
Former bank colleague Loretta Myers feels that the trial left an unfair cloud of suspicion hanging over Michelle.
"If you're gonna ask me if Michelle has [the money]…no," she said. "Michelle was not a part of this. She would never, ever, jeopardize Breea. Never."
When asked if she still runs into people who wonder if she had anything to do with the robbery, Michelle said, "I do. And I get pissed about it. 'Are you kidding me?' My daughter is my world."
Breea is now 16 and focused on high school activities, cheerleading and gymnastics. But she still has flashbacks to that awful night.
"I don't think it's ever gonna be back to, like, total normal. Because it's still, like, with us a little bit," she told Spencer.
Michelle said she and her daughter still have nightmares. "And, when they come, we know how to talk about it and not let it rule our lives."
In fact, Michelle discovered she liked talking about her experience, and soon turned it into a new career.
"Without this ever happening, I don't know that I would have found something I'm so passionate about," she explained.
Michelle is passionate about telling her story. She first wrote a book about the crime. Lifetime turned her book into a TV movie, with Michelle in a cameo role as a bank teller.
About her book
Rather than running away from the worst day in her life, she continues to embrace it with motivational speaking engagements, TV and radio appearances, and an upbeat Web site.
"It seems like you've done everything possible to keep this, more or less, as the focus of your life," Spencer noted.
"My focus is - the center focus is for me now is about healing. It's about not letting things in your life that happen to you keep you down," she said. "I get e-mails from people and phone calls… that say, 'You have no idea how much you've helped me.' That's - that's worth a million bucks," she said.
And the bank manager should know.
Michelle Renee sued Bank of America for negligence. Her case was dismissed.
Produced by Lisa Freed and Sarah Huisenga
Michelle, a 35-year-old divorced mother, was the assistant vice president at a local branch of Bank of America... and the gunmen knew exactly who she was and where she worked.
Strapped with dynamite, she was forced to the rob bank where she worked to save her daughter. But was Michelle really the victim, or the mastermind of the crime? "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Susan Spencer reports.
"We had gotten home right around 6:30, the sun was setting, and we were getting ready to go into the house and make homemade pizzas," Michelle Renee explained.
"I was a single mother and my daughter loved when we got to spend time together. We decided to sit down on the couch and play some Game Boy to unwind from the day.
"And then everything was completely shattered in one blink of an eye.
"The backdoor to our house just came crashing in with a sound that is completely indescribable. There were three men all dressed in black and masks, rushing towards us, SWAT style, in a line.
"They grabbed us, threw us to the floor… one man was on my back, guns to my head, and the duct tape started to unroll and rip.
"My daughter was out of sight, couldn't hear her, didn't know what was going on, and I was screaming for our life.
"There's three of them. There's nothing, absolutely nothing I could've done, to protect her.
"I'm Michelle Renee, and I was kidnapped and held hostage along with my 7-year-old daughter.
"We were held for 14 hours ... all night long until the next morning, when it was time to, as they said, "Go to work." That meant to go rob the bank on that day.
"They duct taped dynamite to our backs. And showed us a device that he said was a detonation device.
"He said, 'If you don't do everything perfect, your daughter will blow up first, you will blow up next. So don't screw this up.'
"And then I became a bank robber."
It was at her hillside home in Vista, Calif., where Michelle Renee once felt happiest.
"I lived in my dream house, pretty much. It was on top of a hill, it was overlooking the ocean."
Michelle, 35, was a divorced, single mother who was raising her daughter, Breea, and working full time as a bank manager.
"I felt very safe. I felt like we were far away," she said of her home's remote location. That is until that awful night nine years ago when the three masked men charged through her back door.
"And everything just was slow motion in that moment. It was like it wasn't real," she explained to "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Susan Spencer.
The masked men pointed their guns at Michelle and Breea.
"I was just begging for her life," Michelle said. "Please don't hurt her. Please don't hurt her."
"I heard my daughter say, 'Are you gonna kill my mommy? And - are you going to kill me?' And they said, 'No, not if your mommy does everything that we tell her to do,'" Michelle was recorded telling the FBI following the break-in. "They said, 'Do you know why we're here?' I said, 'No, I have nothing. Why are you here?'"
It turns out this was not just some random crime.
"We've been following you for weeks. We know everything about you. We know you have a roommate. When she's coming home?" Michelle said, repeating what one of the masked men told her.
And most important of all, they knew where she worked.
"We know you're the bank manager…That's why we're here. Because you're going to get us the money out of the vault [of] that bank or you're going to die," she repeated.
The intruders turned off all the lights. They duct taped Michelle and Breea's wrists and ankles and then dumped them on the couch.
Michelle said they were threatened all night long. "It was like I was counting the minutes to the end of my life," she said.
At 11p.m., Renee's roommate, Kimbra, came home. The gunmen overpowered her; they duct taped her and dragged her next to Michelle.
"At that point, they were really, really graphic with their sexual talk, super - bad," Michelle explained to the FBI.
Michelle said it was always clear which of the three men was in charge.
"He was sort of giving the orders. And he was really in control. And he was the one with the walkie-talkie radio," she told Spencer.
At one point, Michelle heard a female voice over the walkie talkie. She said she recognized it immediately. "It just clicked."
Michelle said the voice belonged to a customer who'd been in the bank with her boyfriend earlier in the day.
And when a light was briefly turned on, she got a glimpse of the ring leader.
"I knew those eyes the second I could see them," she said.
Michelle said she knew the man behind the mask was the boyfriend.
"I think I know who these people are… And it just clicked in that I started paying attention to, like, everything," she said.
The next morning, the gunmen strapped sticks of dynamite to their hostages.
"'If I push the button, all three of you disintegrate. If you try to take it off yourself, you're the only one that's gonna blow," Michelle told the FBI.
Then they tied Michelle's roommate and shoved her down on the bed. They had duct taped her eyes, her mouth, her hands and her feet.
Breea was pushed into a closet and Michelle was given one last chance to say goodbye to her daughter; she prayed not the last.
"The weight of their lives was enormous for me," Michelle said. "I just told [Breea] she was everything - everything I'd ever wanted. That she was perfect and that we're a team. And she said, 'Just be brave, Mommy…' She's like, 'I know you're coming back, Mommy. I know you're gonna come back.'"
Michelle recalled the ringleader was crouched behind the driver's seat, aiming a gun at her back as she drove to work - the dynamite hidden under her jacket.
"Every step I took with that dynamite was like a tick of a bomb. Every second," she said.
"I can't mess up. I can't make one wrong turn in my car," Michelle said. "I've got to do everything right if we have any chance of saving anybody's lives."
The gunmen had warned her not to make any phone calls or to call the police - they would be watching everything. When she got to the bank, Michelle parked in her usual spot.
Loretta Myers was already at work when a subdued Michelle walked into the bank.
"She came into the branch and she was very stoic… just off-center. It just wasn't like her. She's a vivacious, bubbly, outgoing kind of a person," Myers said.
Michelle said she was trying to act normal, but was counting the minutes until the money was delivered.
"I knew what I had to do… and that's all I could think about," she said.
At 8:50 a.m., an armored truck finally arrived.
"And all the money is now in the vault. And that's the cue. I grabbed my briefcase. I went to the vault," Michelle explained.
"It was extremely odd." Myers said with a laugh, "Never have I ever seen anybody take anything other than a pen and keys into the vault. Never."
For security, the bank required two people be in the vault to take out any money, so Michelle had to ask one of the tellers to join her. Once inside the vault, Michelle told her what had happened.
"She started panicking and going, 'Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. She couldn't speak," Michelle said. "And I lifted up my shirt and I said, 'Look what's on my back. I'm going to blow up if I'm not out of here in 5 minutes. You need to help me. I have to rob the bank.'"
Michelle took a duffel bag out of her briefcase and within minutes, she'd cleaned out the vault.
"And I just remember my hand reaching for the money and stuffing the duffel bag. And I just said, 'Do not call the police. If you call the police, we're dead.'"
"She came out of the vault with her - satchel. And kind of like an odd look on her face," Myers recalled. "And she told me she had an appointment to go to… And she briskly walked out of the branch."
Just after 9 a.m., as the bank opened, Michelle walked out with $360,000.
"I robbed a bank to save our lives," she told Spencer.
The gunman directed Michelle to a nearby apartment complex.
"He let me out of the Jeep. I was to walk back to where my Jeep would be waiting. And then I was to go straight home."
Then he took off with the money, leaving Michelle with dynamite still taped to her back.
"Tick. Tick. Is this going to be the second that I'm going to blow up? Is this going to be the step that's going to end my daughter's life?" "I thought for sure, once they get what they want, once they get the money, we're dead. They don't want witnesses," Michelle Renee explained to "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Susan Spencer.
Terrified, and with sticks of dynamite cutting into her back, Michelle raced back to her house.
"I didn't know what I would find when I got home, if I made it home. All I knew was that's where my daughter was. Nothing else mattered… all I could think of was getting back to her."
Michelle found Kimbra on the bed. Breea was in the closet, right where she'd left her.
"I was so excited," Breea told Spencer. "I was like, 'someone's coming back.' It was my mom. I think it's my Mom… and I was like, 'OK, it's over. It's over.' Because if my mom's back, they're gone."
"I just wanted to grab her and never, never, ever let go of her. I just wanted to hold her," Michelle said.
Hold her she did.
"I was crouched down. I was just in front of her, holding her, getting the tape off of her. It hit me right then - 'Oh, my gosh - I've got dynamite on my back.'"
Kimbra and Breea's dynamite was gone; Kimbra said one of the men just ripped it off.
Later, police took photos to illustrate what happened.
"And I was like, 'OK, get it off of me. Get it off of me!' And [Kimbra] did," Michelle said.
Kimbra dashed outside and put the dynamite on the retaining wall. Then, all three ran up the hill to the nearest neighbor.
"[The security] gate was closed. And so, we began pushing the button frantically and saying, 'Please let us in. Please let us in. We've been kidnapped, we've been held hostage all night long, let us in, let us in,'" Michelle said.
Rick Brown will never forget that morning.
"I saw them down there. Even from here, I could tell they were really distraught. …I opened the gates, went down the hill real fast, helped them up to the house… They were in shock, you know, especially Kim. Michelle was a little bit more - composed. And the little girl was really composed, it was amazing."
911: Excerpts of Kimbra's call to police
Police, the FBI and the bomb squad arrived and quickly determined that the dynamite that had so terrorized Michelle was fake. It was nothing more than some painted wooden dowels and a few bits of colored wire - absolutely harmless.
Investigators then turned their attention to Michelle, questioning her for several hours.
Michelle told investigators she was sure her captor was a customer - the same man who had been in the bank just hours before the robbery.
Investigators questioned whether she could be absolutely sure, given that she was looking at eyes showing through holes in his mask. "No doubt in my mind," she said.
In fact, Michelle said the man had given her his business card and it was still in her desk. "He left me a business card. He handed me a business card that said, 'On the Spot Photography.'"
The card identified the man as Christopher Butler, who, investigators soon discovered, was an ex-con with a history of robbing banks.
"This was the card that Butler brought in prior to the robbery when he was discussing opening an account," Investigator Dale Martin said as he showed Spencer the card.
But if Michelle had met him only once, investigators wanted to know how she could be so sure it was Butler?
When asked if she had seen the man any at any other time, she said she told investigators, "No. I told you, I saw him in the bank. He came in and pretended to be a potential customer. That's all. They acted like they found it implausible."
That wasn't the only thing investigators Rudy Zamora, Dale Martin and Randi Demers found implausible.
"Her background just didn't add up to what - at least what I had envisioned to be - a person entrusted with the management of a bank," Zamora said.
Michelle, the investigators learned, had a "colorful" past, which, according to Michelle, included drugs and lots of sex. Now, that past was coming back to haunt her.
"I mean, I hadn't thought about my past in years. I left that behind so long ago. And all of a sudden, here it is," she said.
Before Michelle was a banker, she was a stripper.
"I loved it," she told Spencer. "Liked the attention, liked the music and the fact that I could disappear on stage."
Not only was it fun, but she said it paid well. Michelle continued stripping for nine years - long after she began her banking career.
"I wasn't making a lot of money as a teller, and so I would work at the bank during the day and I would dance at night," she explained.
"None of your customers knew?" Spencer asked. "No, they did not," Michelle replied with a laugh. "They did not."
Michelle's bosses did not know, either. And that wasn't her only secret.
She did not have a background in finance, a college degree or even a high school diploma.
"I lied on my application because it was the only way I could get a good job and a better future for myself," she said.
Michelle had been on her own since running away from an abusive home at the age of 15. She started as a teller in a small-town bank. Thirteen years later, with a lot of hard work, she was a bank manager - albeit a bank manager seemingly incapable of managing her own money.
"There [were] bankruptcies. There was bouncing of checks," according to Zamora.
A month before the robbery, Michelle had filed for bankruptcy for the second time, leading investigators to wonder: was that motive enough to rob a bank?
"Suddenly, I'm the mastermind," she said. Suddenly, I orchestrated the entire thing." It was crushing, Michelle Renee said, to realize that the cops weren't sure she was innocent or a victim.
"It never dawned on me that I would be a suspect. I automatically assumed that everyone would know that I was the innocent victim," she said. "I was on the verge of a full blown breakdown. It was not a good situation."
Michelle fled to a hotel, barricaded herself and her daughter inside, and tried to cope with both her fears and Breea's.
"I was dealing with a very devastated 7-year-old girl," Michelle explained. "She didn't talk a lot after that for a long time. She was very withdrawn and very clingy… a completely different child than who she was before this."
But for all their suspicions, investigators could find not a shred of hard evidence that Michelle was involved.
By contrast, Christopher Butler seemed to have gone out of his way to build an airtight case against himself. Not only was there that business card, but his thumbprint also matched one left in the red paint on the fake dynamite.
"Big mistake," said Randi Demers. "He was part of the robbery," added Dale Martin.
Investigators Martin, Demers and Rudy Zamora began tracking Butler and his friends.
Then, 10 days after the robbery, Michelle said she got a phone call from the district attorney saying, "We caught them."
"My immediate words were, 'Was it - the people that were in my bank?' And they said, 'Yeah, it was.'"
Butler was under surveillance when police nabbed him at an intersection. In the car with him was his girlfriend, Lisa Ramirez, who police suspected was the woman in the bank.
The investigators said they were in shock when they were stopped. Zamora said they were "totally surprised."
"They thought they were free and clear," said Martin.
They were so confident that they were driving around with a trunk full of evidence: masks, gloves, clothing and Michelle's credit cards - but not a cent of that $360,000…although they did leave the wrappers from the packets of money behind. In the glove compartment, investigators found a BB gun.
The treasure hunt continued at a house where Butler and Ramirez had been staying. Martin said the evidence found at the residence was crucial.
Inside, investigators discovered all the ingredients for making fake dynamite: wooden dowels, red paint, wires and empty rolls of duct tape.
That same day, some 50 miles away, police picked up a third suspect - Christopher Huggins. They also recovered $93,000 stashed in a safe.
"I found out that these people were involved in gang activity. And you know, these are scary individuals," Michelle said.
For, as bumbling as they seemed, Michelle was the key witness against them, and she was afraid of retaliation, especially since Robert Ortiz - the last suspect - was still on the loose.
"We did the best we could," said Zamora. "But there was some danger there because we didn't know where Robert Ortiz was."
But after Ortiz was featured on "America's Most Wanted," he was caught in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The four suspects now all were under arrest.
"I don't even know what the hell happened," Christopher Butler told investigators during his interrogation. "All I know is you guys pulled me over."
Butler, the ring leader, wasn't talking.
"Christopher Butler said nothing," said Zamora. "He's a professional."
But Christopher Huggins and Robert Ortiz began talking immediately. And though it took her a few hours to start talking, Lisa Ramirez wouldn't shut up.
She admitted being the voice on the radio and even bragged that she was the mastermind.
"Honestly, you know whose idea that was, about eight months ago, jokingly … mine," she said during her interrogation.
"She took credit for the idea. She did it," Zamora said.
Excerpts of Lisa Ramirez's interrogation
But her most intriguing claim was about another woman Ramirez said was involved
"I think her name is Michelle. From what they had told me, this Michelle lady was helping them," Ramirez told investigators.
Here was Ramirez pointing the finger at Michelle. Determined to find the truth, investigators again asked Michelle to reenact the crime - this time with props. Although they had reservations, they put fake dynamite on Michelle, Kimbra, and even on little Breea, and took pictures.
"Were you testing her?" Spencer asked Zamora.
"We were allowing the evidence to guide us where we needed to go," he said. "[Michelle] was going to survive or she was going to break."
"She was very upset, very emotional," Martin said of her reaction.
According to Michelle, "They didn't say, 'We think you're innocent, but we're doing our job.' They didn't say, 'We have to investigate because this is our job.' They didn't do any of that."
"Every time we pushed a button, she would react in a way - a true victim should," Zamora said.
Investigators were inclined to believe her, but they were still puzzled.
"And [we'd] say, 'What are we missing? What did we miss on this?" said Zamora.
"You just didn't think these bozos could do it by themselves?" asked Spencer.
"That was always kind of in the back of our mind. Is how can these four individuals pull this off without assistance?" said Demers. "They just didn't seem smart enough."
Adding to their uncertainty was another troublesome question: who had the rest of the money?
"I wish four people being arrested was the end of the story. I wish," said Michelle. "It wasn't." It was a nerve-racking year-and-a-half after the kidnapping and robbery before the first two defendants, Chris Butler and Lisa Ramirez, went to trial.
"They said, 'They're going to bring your character into question. They're going to bring your past up,' Michelle said. "There was no possible way to prepare for what was about to happen."
Michelle was the state's key witness and she was feeling the pressure. She could no longer bear to work at the bank, she left her dream house and now, she had to face her captors.
"Every single emotion you can imagine was just coming at me like darts," she told "48 Hours correspondent Susan Spencer.
But, at least, prosecutor Tom Manning was on her side.
"We looked under every rock and explored every detail," he said. "I believed she was a victim… And I couldn't imagine that Michelle would put Breea in that kind of jeopardy."
Early on, Manning felt pretty good about his case. Along with an abundance of evidence, he had Michelle's roommate to back up her story. And better yet, he had a confession from Lisa Ramirez.
Even Ramirez's own lawyer, Herb Weston, saw this as a long shot for his client.
"You play the cards you're dealt," he explained, "and then you try to get a winning strategy."
Weston wasn't expecting a miracle, but he got one. The judge threw out Ramirez's confession, ruling that it implicated her co-defendant Chris Butler - who had never admitted anything to police.
"I was real happy," Weston said laughing.
But by the time of the trial, Butler had dropped a bombshell. He now claimed the robbery was all Michelle's idea.
"Do I believe Michelle's statement that 'I'm just a poor victim?' No," Weston told Spencer.
From the very beginning, defense attorneys raised suspicion that Michelle was involved, casting doubt on her story.
Then, Chris Butler went one shocking accusation further, claiming he and Michelle were having an affair.
"At what point did he concoct this story of meeting me?" Michelle asked. "During his interrogation, he never, ever once mentioned knowing me, dating me, my being the ring leader."
There was no evidence at all of any affair, but the very suggestion of it fed into the defense strategy of attacking Michelle's credibility. And unfortunately for her, she made it easy for them because she had told a lie - a little lie - that would have a big impact.
"Right out of the gate - I was completely up front with the jury. And I told 'em in my opening statement that she lied," Manning said.
Michelle had misled prosecutors about, of all things, an appearance on "America's Most Wanted."
"The deputy DA advised her not to do it because it was a pending case," Manning explained. "He confronted her, and she told him she did not do the interview."
"Yeah, they didn't want me to do it," Michelle told Spencer. "It was something that I wanted to participate in. So what did it matter?"
Manning tried to point out that the lie was trivial, but the damage was done.
"There's no reason a true victim has to lie. None," said Weston.
Then, on day eight, the prosecutor's star witness took the stand and tried to describe the trauma of that day: dynamite strapped to her daughter; she herself forced to rob her own bank.
"It's a stressful moment," said Manning. "She's nervous. She's fidgety. Normal and typical ways victims and witnesses act."
"I'm going to be brave no matter what. There were a lot of emotions that were coming over me. I'm going to be strong," said Michelle.
But Michelle was her own worst enemy. She even argued with the prosecution.
"You can see anger and she gets defensive," Manning said. "It obviously caused concerns for the jury."
When Spencer asked if there was anything Michelle did well as a prosecution witness, Weston said "She showed up."
When it was the defense's turn, Weston went gunning for Michelle.
"We don't win cases by evidence. We win cases by emotion," he said. "She did certain things that just seemed so unbelievable."
Specifically, why would Michelle race home to her daughter if she believed the dynamite was real?
"Here's a person who's supposed to have a bomb on her back. A bomb. And she's so worried about her daughter. So she runs into the same room where her daughter was. Would you take the chance? Does that seem believable?" Weston asked.
And if she had really been bound with tape, where were the marks?
"Why aren't there any tape marks? That's what tape does. It leaves marks. And yet, they don't find any of that. Why?" Weston asked.
The defense also zeroed in on Michelle's money problems. They portrayed her as a financial wreck: a bank manager with a history of unpaid loans, bad checks and two bankruptcies.
"Last time I checked, filing bankruptcy wasn't against the law," Michelle told Spencer.
"It's motive as far as the defense is concerned," Spencer replied. "It means you needed money."
"According to them. But I was making my payments on time. I was paying everyone back.
The defense had yet another line of attack. Remember Michelle's claim that she recognized the voice on the walkie talkie the night of the kidnapping?
"It just clicked," she told Spencer. "I knew without a doubt it was the exact same voice of the woman who had come into my bank and said, 'Hey, Chris.'"
The voice of Lisa Ramirez. Michelle insisted she immediately identified Lisa's voice to investigators.
"You told them the next day," Spencer said to Michelle.
"I did," she replied.
"Without any question?"
"Without any question I feel like this person on the other end of that line said, 'Hey, Chris,' was the woman that was in the bank."
Weston said Michelle was "interviewed, I think, four times. And yet, in none of those times she ever said, 'I recognized her voice.'"
"They were always in contact with this lady on the radio," Michelle was recorded telling the FBI. "She was always calling."
"You may think you told them," said Spencer.
"I know I told them," Michelle replied.
Michelle did tell investigators about the voice on the radio, but nowhere in any FBI report is there a record of her saying she recognized that voice.
"And all of a sudden she comes up with that at the time of the trial. Which opened the door for me to say, 'Why are you bringing this up now?'" said Weston.
The truth is, it was Lisa Ramirez on the walkie talkie. She had even admitted it in her confession. But remember, the judge threw that statement out. All the jury had to go on was Michelle's own story and the defense was determined to rip it apart.
The more Weston went after Michelle, the more combative she got.
"I felt like I was the one on trial," she explained. "I started becoming very defense about what they were saying about me."
"She fought me all the way, which I love," Weston said.
Michelle called Weston "intimidating" and "rude." Weston said Michelle was "edgy."
"If you were throwing darts out of her eyes, I would've been, like, bleeding and on the floor," he said.
"He was tough for me," Michelle admitted.
"If I can get a witness angry, the jury is gonna be put off. [Michelle was] way over the board angry," said Weston. "You're a victim of a crime. You have a right to be angry. But explain to me why there's these inconsistencies."
After three grueling days on the stand, Michelle finally finished her testimony.
"It just took the breath out of me," she said. "It took the fight out of me. I really was blind-sided by this in a lot of ways.
The trial took three weeks. Now, the jury had the case.
"I got the vibes in the court room. I knew there were issues," Manning admitted. "But I thought the jury would ultimately come around and convict."
"I worry about everything," said Weston. "Some of the best work I've ever done, I still lose."
"It's a chess game," said Michelle. "I mean, whoever's the better player wins. The first hour of jury deliberation - which Weston called "the first hour of sweat" - stretched into a day; then another day.
Finally, after five days, the jury came back.
"I was waiting and waiting and waiting. I wanted to hear the words 'guilty' for what they had done," said Michelle Renee.
She heard nothing of the kind. While the jury found Christopher Butler guilty of kidnapping Breea and Kimbra, he was not convicted of kidnapping Michelle.
Jurors said later that some believed Butler's claim that he and Michelle were having an affair, although there was no evidence they even knew each other.
"[There are] no pictures. Not a phone record. Not one person that ever saw us together. Not one single thing to support this guy's claims," Michelle said.
Equally shocking was the verdict for Lisa Ramirez who had confessed, although the confession never was heard in court. The jury found Ramirez not guilty on all counts.
For Michelle, the verdict was, "complete disappointment. Shock."
"For us it was a good victory," said Herb Weston. "My client got to go home that night."
Weston's client walked out of the court room a free woman.
"Lisa Ramirez is guilty," said prosecutor Tom Manning. "And had we tried the case - separating the defendants and used the confession - it's more than likely that a jury would have convicted her."
Of the confession Weston said, "They didn't use it. That wasn't the evidence."
Spencer pointed out, "Even today, you smile when you tell me they didn't use it."
"Well, of course," Weston replied. "Because my - my girl confessed. Or made a statement that… implied at least she was aware of what was going on."
When the judge threw out her confession, the case against Ramirez hinged on Michelle's testimony. Rudy Zamora said she'd done herself no favors.
"Her credibility was shot on the stand. And the jury caught on."
"The jury did not believe Michelle," added Manning. "One juror thought Michelle was involved."
And how did Michelle think she fared on the stand?
"Horrible. Terrible. [I] beat myself up for a really long time about being so weak up there," she told Spencer.
Michelle got a chance to redeem herself two months later, when she took the stand in the trial of Christopher Huggins and Robert Ortiz.
This time, Michelle was prepared. And this time, the entire case didn't hang on her.
Manning had the confessions from Ortiz and Huggins - confessions in which they never once accuse Michelle of being involved.
The jury was out for only a day. Huggins and Ortiz were found guilty on all charges - including the kidnapping of Michelle Renee. The two men, along with Christopher Butler, were each given three consecutive life terms in prison.
Which leaves just one nagging question: where was the missing $360,000 taken from the bank?
In the end, investigators say they recovered about $100,000. The rest, said Zamora, is "gone forever."
To this day, police have no idea what happened to that missing money or who ended up with it.
Former bank colleague Loretta Myers feels that the trial left an unfair cloud of suspicion hanging over Michelle.
"If you're gonna ask me if Michelle has [the money]…no," she said. "Michelle was not a part of this. She would never, ever, jeopardize Breea. Never."
When asked if she still runs into people who wonder if she had anything to do with the robbery, Michelle said, "I do. And I get pissed about it. 'Are you kidding me?' My daughter is my world."
Breea is now 16 and focused on high school activities, cheerleading and gymnastics. But she still has flashbacks to that awful night.
"I don't think it's ever gonna be back to, like, total normal. Because it's still, like, with us a little bit," she told Spencer.
Michelle said she and her daughter still have nightmares. "And, when they come, we know how to talk about it and not let it rule our lives."
In fact, Michelle discovered she liked talking about her experience, and soon turned it into a new career.
"Without this ever happening, I don't know that I would have found something I'm so passionate about," she explained.
Michelle is passionate about telling her story. She first wrote a book about the crime. Lifetime turned her book into a TV movie, with Michelle in a cameo role as a bank teller.
About her book
Rather than running away from the worst day in her life, she continues to embrace it with motivational speaking engagements, TV and radio appearances, and an upbeat Web site.
"It seems like you've done everything possible to keep this, more or less, as the focus of your life," Spencer noted.
"My focus is - the center focus is for me now is about healing. It's about not letting things in your life that happen to you keep you down," she said. "I get e-mails from people and phone calls… that say, 'You have no idea how much you've helped me.' That's - that's worth a million bucks," she said.
And the bank manager should know.
Michelle Renee sued Bank of America for negligence. Her case was dismissed.
Produced by Lisa Freed and Sarah Huisenga
Copyright 2010 CBS. All rights reserved.
