Published: September 17, 2009 10:30 pm      

Duct Tape Bandit denied parole

BURGIN — The Duct Tape Bandit will be stuck in prison for at least three more years.

Last month, the Kentucky Parole Board voted to defer Kasey G. Kazee’s parole for 36 months.

It was Kazee’s first meeting with the parole board. Under the terms of his conviction, he was eligible to do so after serving 20 percent of his 10-year sentence for second-degree robbery.

Kazee, 26, already had credit for nine months served when he was sentenced in May of last year. He will able to meet with the board again in August 2012.

Kazee is serving his sentence in the Northpoint Training Center, a medium-security prison in Burgin, according to the Kentucky Department of Corrections’ Offender Online Lookup System.

After he finishes his Kentucky sentence, Kazee will still owe the state of Ohio three years for a 2001 robbery conviction. He was on parole for that offense on Aug. 10, 2007, the day he committed the bizarre and ill-conceived crime that has become a part of local lore.

Kazee entered Shamrock Liquors at 13th Street and Pollard Road, with his entire face and head wrapped in duct tape and his shirt pulled up over his head. He indicated to a female clerk that he was armed and threatened to harm her if she didn’t give him the money in the cash register.

The clerk complied by placing the bills from the register in a paper sack, but Kazee panicked and grabbed only a couple of rolls of quarters from the cash drawer after store manager Bill Steele walked in brandishing a club.

Kazee ran out the door, but before he could make his getaway, a Shamrock Liquors employee tackled him in the store’s parking lot. The employee and other men who came running from the Foodland store next door detained Kazee until the police arrived.

In a bizarre, rambling and oft-replayed jailhouse interview he gave to a local TV station following his arrest, Kazee maintained his innocence, claiming police arrested the wrong man.

The case of the Duct Tape Bandit was featured in a dumb-crook documentary on the True TV cable network, and in a People magazine article about mentally challenged criminals.

At Kazee’s final sentencing, his attorney, public defender Brian Hewlett, said Kazee suffers from mental illness and was off his medication the day he committed the infamous bungled robbery because he couldn’t afford to pay for his prescription.

Kazee underwent a mental evaluation at the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center at LaGrange in preparation for his trial, which was averted by his guilty plea. Doctors at KCPC found no evidence of psychosis and deemed Kazee competent to stand trial.

Kazee was originally charged with first-degree robbery, but Commonwealth’s Attorney David Justice allowed him to plead guilty to the lesser charge because he wasn’t armed when he committed the holdup. Had he been convicted of first-degree robbery, Kazee would have had to have served 85 percent of his sentence before he became eligible for parole consideration.

Kazee also can shave time off his sentence by earning statutory “good time” behind bars.