CALGARY -- Robbing two banks and bilking thousands of dollars from another, all to pay off an outstanding debt, has landed a Calgary woman a four-year prison term.
Jillian Leblanc sat crying in the prisoner’s box on Monday as provincial court Judge George Gaschler accepted a joint Crown and defence submission to send her to a federal penitentiary.
Leblanc, 25, pleaded guilty to two charges of robbery and one of fraud in connection with incidents between December 2008 and last Oct. 17.
Crown prosecutor Jim Sawa said Leblanc initially bilked her own bank out of more than $17,000, by depositing cheques into her own account without funds to cover them.
After all the cheques cleared, she withdrew the cash before the bank realized they were bad and froze her account, Sawa said.
“There was a zero balance at the time the account was frozen,” he said.
Leblanc also robbed two banks in the city, one last Sept. 3, an a second six weeks later.
In the first heist she handed the teller of a northeast Scotiabank a note demanding cash.
The note read: “I have a gun in my purse, don’t scream or panic and everything will be okay,” Sawa said.
Leblanc escaped with $750 and police were later able to lift one of her fingerprints off the hold-up note, he said.
In the second heist, Leblanc entered a CIBC in Douglas Glen and again handed the teller a threatening message, this time claiming to have a knife.
She was given $5,146, and fled, hopping into her getaway car which she had backed into the handicapped stall, Sawa said.
Leblanc was arrested outside her residence a week later.
Defence counsel Adriano Iovinelli said unlike many people who turn to violent crime for the first time, it wasn’t drug addiction which fuelled his client’s crime spree.
“This was done relative to a debt owed to a third party,” Iovinelli said, without elaborating further.
He said Leblanc’s crimes, particularly the fraud on her own bank in which she deposited bad cheques in her own name, weren’t sophisticated.
“It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure it out,” he said.
With credit for pre-trial custody, Leblanc must serve another three years and five months, Gaschler said.
