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This Guy Robbed a Bank to Impress Taylor Swift, Cops Say

A love story that could have only happened in his, uh, wildest dreams.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Photo of Rowley via the Ansonia Police Department; photo of Swift by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

Most of us have done pretty insane things for love, but some people really take it to the extreme. However, perhaps no one looking to make a relationship work has gone quite so far (or failed quite so hard) as Bruce Rowley, a Connecticut man who allegedly told the cops he robbed a bank, drove to Taylor Swift's house in Rhode Island, and tossed a bunch of cash over her fence to impress her.

According to the Hartford Courant, Rowley allegedly held up a bank in Ansonia, Connecticut, for $1,600 last week. But instead of spending the spoils on himself, he apparently high-tailed it to Taylor Swift's $17 million mansion in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and chucked some of it over the fence, despite the fact that Swift's property is worth literally 10,000 times more than what he stole.

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Now cops say that the bizarre money toss was Rowley's way of trying to convince the singer that, you know, she belonged with him.

"It seemed he wanted to propose to her,” the Ansonia Police's lieutenant Patrick Lynch told the Courant. "But she wasn’t home when he went there. He said he threw some of the money over a fence to impress her."

Saddled with the unbearable weight of his unrequited, uh, love story, Rowley tried to shake it off with a lonesome drive home in his getaway car. But he wasn't—what's the phrase? Ah, yes—out of the woods quite yet. Before he could make it back, a few cops stopped him with a set of spike strips and arrested him. He then fessed up to the crime, telling the officers he'd done it all, not with any bad blood or whatever, but because he had a "crush" on the artist.

"We didn’t know about Taylor Swift until our officers picked him up from state police to drive him back to Ansonia," Lynch told the Courant. "He began to talk all about it in the cruiser."

Short of actually getting Swift to marry him, maybe Rowley just wanted to get written into one of her innumerable songs about a failed romance. A hit song about a runaway fugitive, robbing banks and leading the cops on a high-speed chase for love could be good inspiration for Swift's next pop record, or at least a music video. Then again, maybe only in Rowley's, y'know, wildest dreams.

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