APPLETON, Wis. (WFRV) – A 63-year-old Appleton man has been sentenced to five years in prison after robbing a bank near the Fox River earlier this year.
Court records show Martin L. Schiedermayer was sentenced by an Outagamie County judge and will serve seven additional years on extended supervision following his release.
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The charges stem from a January 14 incident in which Appleton Police responded to a robbery at the Wells Fargo on South State Street. According to authorities, Schiedermayer entered the bank and demanded money before fleeing with an unknown amount of cash. He was quickly apprehended.
Schiedermayer’s motivation for the robbery was far from typical.
According to the criminal complaint, Schiedermayer told investigators he had been fired from his job on January 6 after accumulating too many absences under the company’s point system. With no job, no unemployment benefits, and looming eviction, he said he saw no way out.
Feeling hopeless, Schiedermayer said he contemplated various ways to get arrested, ultimately choosing a bank because he believed the situation could unfold peacefully. He described the act as “punching a one-way ticket” back to incarceration, a place he considered safer than life on the streets.
On the day of the robbery, Schiedermayer drove to the Wells Fargo branch, wrote a note on an island counter, and handed it to a teller. The note read, “Be cool, this is a robbery. Count out two-thousand dollars on the countertop.” The teller complied, and Schiedermayer placed the money into an envelope before walking out and scattering the note.
He then returned to his car, which was parked across the street, and waited to be arrested.
“I didn’t want a police chase,” Schiedermayer told investigators. “I wanted to get caught.”
When asked why he requested exactly $2,000, Schiedermayer said he believed it would be in the teller’s drawer and didn’t want to escalate the situation by demanding access to the vault.
Police later confirmed his identity using surveillance footage. He was wearing the same black jacket and white Green Bay Packers cap he described to police, both found in his vehicle alongside the envelope of money.
Though Schiedermayer claimed to be unarmed and never directly threatened the teller, police said passing a robbery note still creates an implied threat. Tellers are trained to treat such situations seriously to ensure the safety of staff and customers.
Schiedermayer gave a written statement recounting the robbery and his motive, saying he was “panicked and desperate about becoming homeless.” His vehicle was impounded and the evidence preserved.
