A Honolulu Star-Advertiser retrospective revisits a March 4, 1968, Kahala bank robbery in which the manager’s wife and three young children were held at their home to compel his cooperation. The robbers took about $90,000, then the largest amount stolen in a Hawaii bank robbery, the newspaper reports.
The family hostage plan defined the 1968 case
The newspaper’s account says the four men went to Bank of Hawaii’s Waialae branch manager Welden C. McCullough’s home the night before the robbery and threatened his children if he did not help. One stayed with McCullough’s family while the others took him to the bank. McCullough later said the ordeal for his family lasted 10 hours. The account describes a robbery organized around coercing one employee through danger to his family—not simply taking cash from a bank.
A prescription for eyeglasses found in an abandoned jacket gave investigators a lead: it was made out to Lawrence W. Brown, the Star-Advertiser reports. Police arrested Brown and the other three men within two days and recovered $88,000. The newspaper reported that the men had no prior criminal records.
The mall’s name changed; the branch’s fate is not established
The branch was described in the 1968 account as being at the Waialae Shopping Center, the site of today’s Kāhala Mall. Aloha State Daily reported that redevelopment plans formed in 1967 to turn the open-air shopping center into an enclosed mall. That history explains the different place names in accounts of the robbery; it does not establish what became of the specific bank building.
A separate 1999 robbery offers a contrast, not a trend
On July 7, 1999, four masked, armed men robbed American Savings Bank at Kahala Mall and ordered people inside to lie on the floor, according to a U.S. District Court account. KHON2 reported that the robbers later opened fire on Honolulu police officer Fred Rosskopf outside the bank. This was a different robbery at a different bank, more than three decades later: it illustrates contrasting circumstances in Kahala, but does not show a broader pattern or establish a connection between the cases.
