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Police Arrests Bank Robber After 37 Years

A bank robber who escaped from his jail sentence to build a new life in New York has been arrested after 37 years.

Bobby Love,  whose birth name is Walter Miller, was serving 30 years in jail for two bank robberies in North Carolina when he fled from the bus filled with prisoners dispatched to do road maintenance, the New York Daily  reported.

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He ditched his prison clothes and paid a man to buy him a bus ticket to Manhattan where he assumed his new identity.

With a forged birth certificate Miller managed to get a driver’s license and start anew.

He met his wife Cheryl at the Baptist Medical Center where they both worked and the pair married in 1985.

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The couple would go on to have four children together.

Although Miller never completely cut his ties with his old family – he had spoken to his sister on her wedding day in 1979 and told her of his escape – he never told his wife the truth about his past.

So it was a confused Cheryl who answered the door in January 22 this year when a dozen NYPD officers and FBI agents came knocking.

The police rushed in and one asked Miller if there were any weapons in the house, which there were not.

“What’s your name?” one officer asked.

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“Bobby Love,” he replied.

“What’s your real name?” the officer replied.

“Walter Miller,” the man conceded.

“You had a long run, Mr. Love,” the officer declared. “But it’s over.”

Miller is being held on Riker’s Island, where he is now fighting extradition to South Carolina.

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His lawyer's bid for home confinement has been rejected.

Speaking to the New York Daily News from Riker’s Island, Miller said he had often thought about telling his wife the truth about his past.

“My thoughts were that Cheryl would probably tell me to turn myself in,” he said.

But he did tell his sister that she should tell Cheryl everything after he died.

“I told my sister, ‘Go ahead and bury me the way I am and tell Cheryl everything that has happened,’” he said.

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A teary Cheryl Love told the newspaper she never suspected a thing.

“It was like I was in a movie a Lifetime (network) movie,” Ms Love said of the arrest.

“All these years, you would have thought I would have put something together. But I had no reason to.”

Although he lived cautiously, rarely talking to strangers or socialising with friends, Miller said he had become bolder as the years went by.

Last year, he went to funerals for two of his nine siblings’ one in North Carolina and another in Washington, D.C

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Police remain tight-tipped on the source of their tip-off but Miller believes it was someone at one of those funerals that dabbed him in

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