10:49 A.M.
I remember this lady.
She was a swim coach at my high school the year I "DID NOT" join the team...
I read about her in the news just yesterday. Her son Brigam L was a real hottie...
The St. Pete Times said,
"Three days before Christmas, Jill and Edgar Soler borrowed a car and drove to a parking lot near the Republic Bank in Holiday. Jill got into the back seat and set about changing her appearance, trying to make herself look like a man.
She put on a dark jacket, a cap and blue jeans. She put bandages on her face.
"You're going to stick out like crazy," Edgar said. "They're going to take one look at you and know you're up to no good."
They both laughed.
Jill got out and walked into the bank, armed only with a note. It was about 1 p.m.
Moments later, she returned, surprising Edgar.
"You didn't do it, right?"
"Yeah, I did it."
"That fast? You just left."
"I did it."
* * *
By Christmas Eve, news of the robbery made the paper. It wasn't the kind of publicity to which Jill, 39, was accustomed.
Twice in the mid '90s, the St. Petersburg Times named her Pinellas girls swimming coach of the year, for her work at Dunedin High School. Her private life went well, too. She had married and had two children.
But then she had health problems, became addicted to pain killers and went down a path that would lead her to the Pasco County Jail. Drugs, Jill said, cost her her job, her family and, now, her freedom.
* * *
Jill Spalding grew up in Dunedin and attended Dunedin High School. She was on the school's swim team and danced tap, jazz and ballet. A photo caption in the 1981 yearbook called her "career minded."
"I was literally the all-American girl," Jill said.
But there were problems. At age 12, she said, a stranger raped her. She told no one, she said, and repressed the memory until its physical effects forced her to acknowledge it a few years ago.
After graduating from Dunedin High in 1982, Jill worked as a lifeguard, gave swimming lessons, took classes at St. Petersburg Junior College, competed in triathlons and acted in a Dunedin community theater. In 1989, she was managing a Pac N' Send in Holiday when she was elected Leader of the Year by the Tarpon-Holiday Success group, a business networking group.
Then it was off to USF, where she acquired a degree (with honors) in special education and behavioral disorders. In 1991, she married Garry Lumm and became a mother to one of his three kids from a previous marriage.
Two years later, Dunedin High School hired her to teach students with emotional handicaps and coach the boys and girls swimming and diving teams.
* * *
Sara Gerhard, who graduated from Dunedin in 1997, was a member of a team that sent swimmers to four straight state championships.
Gerhard, now 25, had swum competitively since she was 5. Jill, she said, was her most important role model and the best coach she ever had.
"Coaching was just her life," Gerhard said. "And everything that involved it, school, teaching, all of us, came naturally to her."
The teams under Jill grew from about 20 kids to more than 50 - bigger than the football team.
Meanwhile, Jill and Garry had two daughters, in 1995 and 1997. During her pregnancy in 1995, Jill kept coaching.
But both pregnancies came with complications, and Jill struggled with other health problems. She suffered gall bladder disease one summer, rushing to the bathroom to throw up every 10 minutes.
Back on the pool deck, Gerhard said, Jill would go on as if nothing had happened.
"You couldn't tell she was sick," said Gerhard, who helped with the swim lessons. "She was just that brave and that strong and like, "I need to get this done."'
Jill resigned her coaching position in 1996, citing personal and health issues, returning briefly when her replacement didn't work out.
* * *
In 1998, Jill injured her shoulder breaking up a student fight, school officials said.
It was after this injury, Jill said, that she started taking potent pain medications - Percodan, Lortab and Vicodin.
Surgery relieved her shoulder pain. But when she quit her medication, new problems arose: A tight feeling in the pit of her stomach. Throwing up, chills, leg cramps, diarrhea, the sweats. Anxiety, panic, paranoia, insomnia.
Jill didn't recognize the symptoms, but her doctor did. He set her up with a pain management doctor who prescribed an at-home weekend of withdrawal, in a controlled environment among family or friends.
"I did everything by the book, exactly as they told me," Jill said. But Garry had to be out of town part of the weekend, she said. The kids were home. It was hectic.
That Saturday night, Garry was in the living room when he heard a noise. In their bedroom, Jill had had a seizure, fallen and suffered a hairline fracture of the pelvis.
She went back to the hospital - and back on pain medication.
In 2000, Jill suffered other health problems. Among these, she said, were surgeries to alleviate complications resulting from her childhood rape.
By this time, her duties for the Pinellas County school system had been scaled down to light administrative work. But in October 2000, she resigned amid more health problems. She tried to deal with pain while fighting her addiction to pain medication.
"That was the hardest part," Jill said. "You have legitimate pain. Where do you draw the line?" It was about this time she switched from taking pills, often 20 to 30 a day, to injecting herself with a liquid painkiller, Buprenex.
Buprenex controlled the pain without giving her the sense of euphoria. "It was a much better drug until I learned how to abuse it," she said.
Over time, Jill learned to lie and manipulate to support her addiction. If there wasn't a real health problem that warranted pain medication, she would make one up.
She told other lies.
"You lie about whatever you have to lie about," she said. "You forget to do something, you make an excuse. You want to make sure everybody thinks you're fine so you tell them everything they want to hear."
Jill said she was able to get clean for periods of weeks and months, but the allure of the high was too much to resist.
"Seeing my bottle of pills and knowing it's time to medicate and my mouth starts to water," she said. "That feeling of (a pill) hitting the back of my throat and knowing that in 20 or 30 minutes I was going to feel better and I could function."
* * *
Jill's unemployment and her drug addiction drained the family's finances. Garry's job as owner of a sprinkler company and then as sexton of a Dunedin church wasn't enough to pay their bills. The bank foreclosed on their house. The couple filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
The next year, Dunedin High rehired Jill to teach special ed. This time, things did not go well.
Staff and students reported that Jill routinely brought a syringe and liquid pain killers into the classroom and had injected herself in front of them.
Teaching assistants complained about lack of instruction in her class. Students reported watching movies in class - The Green Mile, The Matrix, Shrek.
A letter of reprimand accused Jill of leaving her classes and campus during the school day. The letter said that during a meeting about the allegations, Jill had said teachers, administrators and students were all lying to get her in trouble.
Looking back, Jill says reality had become something hard for her to keep hold of then. Her memory was spotty. She was sleepy much of the time.
Jill's contract was not renewed after the 2001-02 school year.
"I think the whole process of becoming addicted ... all of those events created a person that had no self-esteem," she said. "I lost all of what I had in myself."
* * *
Her marriage to Garry fell apart. She saw a psychiatrist to deal with the rape, she said, and started taking drugs to deal with depression.
Meanwhile, the pain medications sent her emotions reeling.
"Constantly it's either you're really up or you're really down," Jill said. "When you're up everything is soaring, everything looks rosy. When you're down, there's no way anything can be solved. So you look for the next buzz to make everything rosy again."
The need for that next buzz had become the dominant force in her life. When she had it she was happy, loving, funny. When she didn't, she was angry, withdrawn, impatient. She would blow up for little reason.
"I'm sure that's why my husband left, for those periods of time when I put him through pure hell."
Their divorce was granted in December 2002.
Garry wasn't the only one who had had enough of Jill's mood swings, lying and manipulation.
"It frustrated my family," Jill said, "to the point where they have completely shut me out."
* * *
Jill agreed to let Garry take their two daughters while she tried to get her life back together.
She met Edgar Soler through mutual friends, married him last June and moved into his St. Petersburg apartment. Jill entered a drug rehab program and has been clean since July, she said. With Edgar's support and Garry's encouragement, she worked to get back in a position to care for her daughters.
But Jill and Edgar's financial picture was bleak. Edgar, 49, had just been through a nasty divorce in New York and come to Florida to start a new life. Half of his $400-per-week paycheck as a driver for the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority went to child support for his three children, he said.
Jill had to pay child support to Garry and $70 per week for her rehab regimen.
In October, she began a job as the director for a YWCA tutoring program in St. Petersburg. But she and Edgar had only one car, and the job was far from her daughters in Dunedin.
In December, Jill quit her job at the YWCA.
So she could be closer to her daughters, the couple moved to a motel in Dunedin where they paid $195 per week in rent. They planned to move from there into an apartment.
With Jill unemployed again, there was no money for basics like food and gas, much less Christmas presents for the kids.
Their second week's rent was due Dec.25.
"If I didn't come up with the rent we'd be out on the street," Edgar said. "And that's Christmas day."
They had applied for state welfare and food stamps, they said. But they didn't qualify because Edgar made too much money.
The Saturday before Christmas, their Geo Prism broke down, leaving Edgar stranded late at night on his way home from work.
"I was tired," Edgar said. "I think when she saw me after I had to walk home in the bitter cold, that's when she decided."
* * *
The idea of a bank robbery came up first as a joke, Edgar said. But Jill began to think about it seriously.
It seemed like a victimless crime. Banks are insured. Jill would be armed only with a note. Nobody would get hurt.
"If the teller had said no, she would have walked out, that was it," Edgar said.
Edgar said he never thought the robbery was a good idea, but Jill "was adamant, she found no other way."
So Jill and Edgar, neither of whom had a criminal record in Florida, began planning the heist. They composed a note, Edgar said, that went something like this:
"Keep your head down while reading this ... Empty the money into the bag and be quiet ... There are others watching, so you're responsible if they get hurt ... Do it now."
They typed the note.
"You want a person to be able to read it," Edgar said.
They borrowed Garry's gray Kia Sephia, and it was from that car that Jill emerged the afternoon of Dec.22, disguised as a man.
The robbery "wasn't to get rich, it wasn't to have a lavish lifestyle," Edgar said. "It was to make it another week or even a month."
* * *
Jill remembers the startled look on the teller's face.
"I wanted to cry and tell her it was okay, I'm sorry," she said.
Edgar and Jill drove away with the money (authorities haven't disclosed how much), but were soon pulled over by a deputy.
Edgar stopped the car, but only Jill got out.
They wanted to get the car back to Garry, Edgar said. He turned himself in the next day.
* * *
Edgar is out now, bailed out by his family. Jill remains in jail.
Edgar has written, she said, telling her that he loves her, that it is killing him that she's in there and that they are going to get through it together.
Jill said her parents do not accept her collect phone calls. She talks with friends, her pastor and Garry. Garry and Jill's mother declined to comment for this story. Her father did not return phone calls.
Jill said she's ashamed of the robbery, and humiliated knowing her story will be read by parents, students and swimmers who once respected her.
But she hopes telling her story might help someone else make better choices.
"If it helps one person or one family recognize signs (of addiction)," she said, "it's worth it."
In recent weeks, Jill has lost 30 pounds and has also stopped taking the methadone to help her kick her drug habit, she said, using jail to go cold turkey.
"My mind's not blurry, my body feels better," she said. "I think clearer than I thought 30 days ago. ... I'm thinking with a clearer mind now than in years."
She doesn't mind being in jail for now. The drug addiction took away her self-control, she said. Jail sets boundaries she was unable to set for herself.
The hardest part, she said, is being away from her daughters. Her greatest hope is to be a good parent again.
"I feel like when I started this whole (addiction) thing six years ago, it was the beginning of the end. But now I feel like it's the beginning of an opportunity."
