For 13 years, authorities had searched for the elusive gunman who walked into the Xerox Federal Credit Union on the corporation’s sprawling upstate N.Y., campus on Aug. 12, 2003, wearing women’s sunglasses and an ill-fitting wig, and shot two people before absconding with $10,000 in cash.
Joseph Doud, one of the customers who was shot, stumbled out the door of the credit union on the corporation’s 40-acre campus in Webster, N.Y., collapsing in a nearby building with a gunshot wound to his shoulder.
Doud survived. Raymond Batzel, of Rochester, 51, did not — and how his case was solved is the subject of the next People Magazine Investigates: Titled “Mahhunt,” the episode first aired Sept. 25 at 9/8c on ID and streams on Max. (An exclusive clip is shown below.)
A longtime machine operator at Xerox, Raymond stopped in at the credit union that morning to make a final payment on his car. When he finished his transaction, he headed toward the exit at the exact moment the gunman emerged from a nearby office. According to witnesses, the robber shouted at Raymond to get down, pointed a gun at his head and fatally shot him.
No one will ever know what really happened in that fatal moment, “but the kicker part of this is that my dad was hard of hearing on his left side,” Raymond’s oldest daughter, Shannon Batzel, explains. “So he probably didn’t hear him say, ‘Get down.’ It infuriates me.”
As employees and customers screamed, the gunman jumped into his car and in a flash, was “in the wind,” says retired FBI Special Agent Peter Ahearn. “He disappeared into thin air.”
At the time, Shannon and her younger sister, Carrie, then 15 and 13, were in California visiting their aunt, uncle and cousins when they learned their father had been killed.
“My body was just moving on autopilot,” says Shannon. “I knew things had changed forever.”
But no one knew that the brutal murder that ended her father’s life would become a complicated investigation riddled with fits and starts that took more than a decade to solve.
Immediately after the shooting, authorities launched a massive manhunt but were unable to find any sign of the gunman. All they had were grainy photographs of a man wearing a mish-mash of a disguise including a fake FBI raid jacket and a U.S. Marshals badge and folded-up umbrella he left at the credit union.
That seemingly innocuous piece of evidence became “the linchpin to the whole case,” says FBI Special Agent Seth Fleitman, thanks to DNA left behind on it by the suspect.
“But we didn’t know who it belonged to,” says Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas Gregory.
Airing pictures of the suspect on the TV show, America’s Most Wanted didn’t yield any workable leads.
But a March 2016 press conference asking the public for information by showing them digitally enhanced pictures of the shooter helped investigators turn a corner. Shortly after, former Xerox employee Jamie Labatte came forward saying he believed his former co-worker, Richard Wilbern of Rochester, was the suspect. Fired for excessive absenteeism, Wilbern was a disgruntled employee who filed a discrimination lawsuit against the company in 2001 that was ultimately dismissed.
Knowing Wilbern was a solid lead, investigators dug deeper into his past. They learned he’d been convicted of a 1980 bank robbery and for the illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun in 1987.
Down on his luck and earning only $3,000 a year, the single father also needed money to help pay for his son’s pricey private school.
With so much adding up about Wilbern, investigators needed to get a sample of his DNA.
“But,” says Fleitman, “we didn’t know where he was.”
Investigators didn’t need to look very long. Three weeks after the press conference, Wilbern called the FBI, claiming he’d been the victim of an eviction scam.
“The timing, it was almost unbelievable with him calling in and then him being in town to come in for an interview in person,” says Fleitman.
Catching a Killer
Under the guise of hiring Wilbern as a paid source, Fleitman and Jasie invited him to the FBI office, hoping he would leave a DNA sample on the bottle of water they offered him.
When he drank from the bottle, they were elated — until Wilbern let his one-year-old son he’d brought to the meeting take a sip from it.
The lab didn’t want to use that sample, so they had to start anew.
Knowing Wilbern was motivated by money, Jasie says he came up with the idea of signing him up as a paid source with phony documents to get him to come back to the office. But that wasn’t enough to get a solid DNA sample.
“Seth says, ‘What if we have him put the documents in an envelope and then seal the envelope?’” Jasie recalls.
Wilbern came to the office, signed the documents and licked the envelope, sending it to the lab for testing.
“I knew it was going to be a match,” says Jasie.
It was. The DNA from the envelope matched the DNA found on the umbrella the gunman carried into the credit union the day of the shooting.
On Sept. 27, 2016, they brought Wilbern back to the office and made the stunning arrest. On Nov. 8, 2019, after a five-week trial, Wilbern was convicted of murder and robbery.
Fleitman and Jasie say they were happy they were able to get justice for the family. “There are no words to describe how good it felt to help that family get some closure on this part of their life,” Fleitman says.
On Sept. 22, 2020, Wilbern was sentenced to life in prison.
Shannon, her family, and Raymond’s mother and brothers and sisters were pleased with the sentence, but still miss the man who always made them smile.
“He loved his Buffalo Bills and he loved the Rhino soccer team,” says Raymond’s older sister, Diana Batzel Powers. “He would even schedule everything around these games.”
Known for having a big heart, “He lived by his values and compassion for others,” she says.
As for Raymond’s wife, Sharon, a former nurse, and his three children, the conviction doesn’t make up for all the milestones and moments they missed with him.
Carrie, now a realtor, is married with two children. Shannon, a married stay-at-home mom, has two sons and a stepdaughter. Their stepbrother, Jeremy Thomas, Raymond’s son from a previous marriage, lives in Colorado.
“I think about my father every day as my kids play,” says Shannon. “I can see my dad throwing them all up in the air and playing with them and being the best grandpa that he could be.
“It hits you. My son, Jackson, he got my dad’s blue eyes and his blonde hair. It reminds me a lot of my father.”
“It took a while,” she says, “but we finally got justice.”
