For a minute, Mark Corbett thought he might get away with it.
As he sped from the Alpine Federal Savings and Loan in Craig, Colorado, toward the Wyoming border with around $10,000 stashed beside him, he felt a brief sense of relief when he heard on the radio that police were looking for a suspect in a red Fiat with Oregon plates.
That wasn’t him.
Corbett, who has since legally adopted his biological father’s last name but back then went by Mark Farnham, was driving a tan Dodge as he barreled down the highway.
That brief fleeting feeling of hope, however, was immediately replaced by a sense of dread that this wasn’t going to end well.
Up until now, luck hadn’t exactly been on his side. In fact, a long laundry list of bad decisions and missteps got him here in the first place.
At age 24, it was safe to say that Corbett’s life had veered drastically off course, starting with a mounting pile of debt, fueled in part by a cocaine habit he’d picked up back home in college in Minnesota.
Corbett came up with a plan to leave school, kick his drug habit and move to Wyoming, where he’d read there was big money to be made in the oil fields.