Alma figured William had committed suicide as planned. “It was understood that if anything went wrong, Mr. Ansley would kill me and then himself,” she later told local reporters. “I wouldn’t have had the courage to kill myself. With us, it was either make the job good or die, because Mr. Ansley said he would never go back to jail if anything went wrong.”
After being directed away from the bank, Alma ditched the car and found a nearby bar. As she drank a beer, the television came on with a news flash. Alma fled as soon as she could.
For “three cold days and nights,” she slept under a bridge in the woods near Baldwin Reservoir, about a mile from where she abandoned the getaway car, at East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue.
On the third day, she decided to walk back into town and get a room at a rooming house—where, once she saw her own face on TV, she resolved to stay put. For the next two weeks, she didn’t leave the building. She also managed to make a few phone calls to her younger sister, who did not tell anyone else—not their mother, and certainly not the FBI agents looking for Alma. “They are listening in. Your phone is probably tapped,” Alma told her sister. “But I’m okay.”
Alma might have remained at the rooming house even longer had she and a fellow tenant (and local drug dealer) not argued, their voices so loud it disturbed the other occupants. A tip went out to the police department. When they arrived, there was Alma.
“Thank God it’s over,” she reportedly said, “I’m so tired of hiding.”
THE CASE MADE HEADLINES ACROSS THE COUNTRY, EVEN the world. Alma’s past as an accessory to another heist came to light—she had been asleep in a car when a boyfriend and two accomplices robbed an inn in New York State in 1954, eventually getting a year in prison. Cleveland police deemed her a “very disturbed person.”
On November 25, 1959, Alma was indicted for armed robbery, kidnapping, conspiracy to kidnap, and “malicious entry into a financial institution.” Six weeks later, on January 7, 1960, she pleaded guilty to the last charge, while the others were dropped as part of a deal made with the prosecutor, John T. Corrigan, to reduce her prison sentence.
Judge Joseph Artl sentenced Alma to 20 years in prison, which she began on January 21, 1960, at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. The newly minted prisoner number W-7988 expressed relief to reporters afterward: “Oh, I’m very happy. I really expected him to lower the boom!”
TWO MONTHS LATER, LODEN READ ABOUT ALMA IN RUTH Reynolds’s Justice column in the New York Sunday News. She saw the bones of a great movie—“That’s what struck me: Why would this girl feel glad to be put away?” she told an interviewer in 1974—but, after years of rejection by prospective studios and directors, Loden told the Los Angeles Times in 1971, “If I wanted to get it done, I’d have to [direct] it myself . . . It was like being a housewife. You do everything—you don’t differentiate.”
A producer friend, Harry Shuster, put up the $115,000 budget, an amount Loden felt she must not exceed. Nick Proferes, the cinematographer, and Michael Higgins, who played Mr. Dennis, were the only professionals Loden hired. The others were amateurs, nonunion workers, or both. “It’s not a new wave . . . It’s the old wave,” Loden told the New York Times in 1971. “That’s what they used to do. They took a camera and they went out and shot. Around that act this whole fantastic apparatus grew up—the Hollywood albatross. They made a ship out of lead. It won’t float anymore.”
Loden disdained most Hollywood films as “too perfect to be believable” and wanted to stay far away from them. “The slicker the technique is, the slicker the content becomes,” she said, “until everything turns into Formica, including the people.”
When it was finally time to start shooting Wanda, Loden reached out to the prison warden at Marysville to ask for permission to interview Alma. It had taken Loden many years to find out where Alma was housed, but the warden refused the request. “No, I don’t think it would be interesting,” said the warden, according to Loden. “I don’t think that you should be interested in this story. I’m the person who gives permission for everything here, and that I will not allow.”
SHORTLY BEFORE DYING OF THE BREAST CANCER THAT would consume the last two years of her life, Loden gave an interview in the late ’70s for a German television documentary about herself and Wanda. “There’s so much I didn’t achieve, but I tried to be independent and to create my own way,” she said in the posthumously released broadcast. “Otherwise, I would have become like Wanda, all my life just floating around.”
Loden didn’t spend her final decade floating around. She did, however, run into difficulty after finishing her film. Though it received critical acclaim—a warm reception at the Venice International Film Festival, a rave from Times film critic Vincent Canby (“Wanda’s a Wow”)—that didn’t translate into commercial success. Loden, Higgins, and Proferes were then attached to a film to be called Love Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry, about a housewife involved with three men at the same time, but it never got made. Nor did Loden’s adaptation of Kate Chopin’s classic story The Awakening. She did direct and produce The Boy Who Liked Deer (1975), an educational short film broadcast on PBS, which was about the horrific consequences of vandalism.
Wanda, for Loden, was a declaration of filmic independence. But because she found no way to make more features—a struggle too many female directors still face—it ended up as her own albatross.
Criticized by feminists upon its release for its passive nature—which Loden took in stride, feeling she came too late to the movement—the film is now justifiably lauded as a second-wave landmark. But Wanda was more or less forgotten soon after its release, until its revival began in earnest when Bérénice Reynaud wrote an essay about it in 2002. “Wanda’s historical importance [is that] Loden wanted to suggest, from the vantage point of her own experience, what it meant to be a damaged, alienated woman—not to fashion a ‘new woman’ or a positive heroine,” argued Reynaud. Since then, Wanda’s cult appeal has only grown; its influence is evident in directorial and acting work by Chantal Akerman, Isabelle Huppert (who spearheaded a French DVD release in 2004), and Deb Shoval.
ALMA WAS RELEASED ON PAROLE FROM MARYSVILLE ON April 8, 1970, ten years into her prison sentence. She did not go back to Salina, as she had after her previous incarceration, but instead to the Denver suburb of Commerce City, Colorado, where her younger sister, Dixie, lived with her then-husband and six sons, the youngest not even old enough for school.
Alma, now 37 years old, tried to settle in. Her nephews enjoyed her company. Dixie, three years younger, was thrilled to have her sister back in her life. The one time she’d visited Alma in Marysville, taking her mother and one of her sons along, it nearly broke her heart. The years of incarceration had taken a toll on Alma’s psyche and appearance.
Dixie knew what others thought of Alma. They judged her for her actions, for being a convicted bank robber. They saw a lithe figure with a five-foot-six frame (although she had gained weight in Marysville, she slimmed down upon being released), and found her beauty dangerous. They grew weary of her lies, of which there were many.