Ian Gale was called a master criminal during a yearslong burglary spree four decades ago that flummoxed police and even fooled a chief prosecutor into helping Gale get into law school.
By day, Gale was a psychiatrist. Bright, articulate, well-read and cocky, Ian (he pronounced it EYE-an) Sanford Gale was a man of substance and solid reputation. He had medical and law degrees.
When night fell, Gale’s extremist views converted him into what authorities would later call a sociopath. They nicknamed the then-unidentified criminal “cat burglar” or the “telephone bandit.”
Gale would slip into dark clothing and gloves. He would become infamous as what authorities then described as the state’s worst home invader.
Starting in 1974, Gale broke into scores of homes of the well-off, largely in the city of Forest Acres, after meticulously scouting the residences. He would clip telephone lines to disable alarm systems and make off with pillowcases from the homes stuffed with jewelry, antique firearms and valuable coins. He never physically injured anyone, striking mostly when residents were away.
After his arrest, Gale admitted breaking into the home of the owner of an alarm company for the challenge. He broke into an insurance company office in a suite next to his psychiatric office in the Middleburg complex. He rode with police, boastfully pointing out which houses he violated.
On Monday, Gale, 79, died alone in a predawn fire at his small Swansea home near the Calhoun County line. He had shot himself in the head, Lexington County Coroner Margaret Fisher said Tuesday.
By all accounts, Gale had lived quietly with his wife. Annette Almond died Aug. 26. They met when she was a court reporter and worked on Gale’s case for a Lexington County attorney, Tara Almond, a relative, said. Annette never used his last name.
Gale once told The State newspaper reporter Holly Gatling that he wanted to live out his life farming on a country plot.
He was living a version of that on a 12-acre tract with a pond in a house heated by a wood stove and a space heater, said Tara Almond, who is married to Gale’s stepson. There was no central air.
“They lived a very modest life, pretty much off the grid,” Tara Almond, a Cayce businesswoman and a member of City Council, said Tuesday. The recent death of her mother-in-law after more than 20 years of marriage “hit him hard,” Almond said. “He was grieving.”
His wife was Gale’s connection to the world. “He did not have a vehicle. She drove him everywhere,” Almond said, adding that Gale remained highly intelligent, with a special interest in history. “He was a brilliant man,” she said.
Gale was 41 and had a pristine criminal history when he lived a double life in the 1970s. That came crashing down July 25, 1979, when police cruisers encircled his moving car as he drove near his Forest Acres home.
Forest Acres, Richland County and S.C. Highway Department investigators – whom Gale once characterized as “fumbling fools” – had pieced together enough evidence to make an arrest.
A search of Gale’s home uncovered a locked, 9-by-12-foot vault-like room that his elementary-age son and first wife were forbidden to enter. The loot that wasn’t stashed there was buried under the house, authorities said.
Investigators also would learn that Gale had a Swiss bank account, along with many others in the United States under aliases.
Later, Gale disclosed that he had become embittered and disillusioned with the nation’s economy. He believed the only thing of value was precious metals, his lawyer said in court. Gale also had invoked white supremacist and even Nazi views.
Investigators from the three agencies spent months painstakingly weaving together the case, seizing on minor mistakes Gale made.
Chief among those was a bogus $20 check written from checks torn from the middle of a checkbook belonging to a victim, an itinerant minister living in Maryland at the time of the theft. A false driver’s license number written on the back of the check and forged signature pointed them to Gale.
“The police can make a bunch of mistakes,” then-Forest Acres Police Chief J.C. Rowe said at the time. “The crook can only make one.”
Gale was sentenced to 15 years on a handful of housebreaking and grand larceny charges, though police said he broke into more than 100 homes. His medical license was permanently revoked in 1980.
Shortly after being imprisoned, Gale said he had instigated a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections, alleging the agency was failing to help rehabilitate inmates. He used a prison pay phone to hold a conference call with reporters at his then-girlfriend’s home, during which he likened prison conditions to those described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s account of Soviet labor camps in the book, “Gulag Archipelago.”
Gale, always one to defy convention, struck up a friendship with Gatling, whom he met as one of many reporters to cover his crimes.
In the early ’90s, Gale wrote her a letter and sent a photograph of himself holding a baby squirrel. “This is what I’m doing now,” he wrote, describing how he was helping to rehabilitate injured animals. Gale told Gatling about living a bucolic life on property that had a pond.
He also told her about having a business brokering metal to Russia. Gatling once spotted Gale at a Republican Silver Elephant event. And Gale once challenged longtime Lexington County Sheriff James Metts for the office.
Gale maintained a long-arm relationship with Gatling. He wrote a letter and sent a photo, and even submitted to her a manuscript of his 1983 book, “In From the Rain,” Gatling said Tuesday.
“He was a person without a conscience, or with an extremely flawed, damaged conscience,” said Gatling, now head of S.C. Citizens for Life, which advocates for the unborn. “He had extremely high abilities and talent. He was a person who decided to use his abilities and talent for evil.”
Charlie McLean, then the Forest Acres police force’s only detective, is 78 and still working part-time for the city as a collector of overdue fines. A plain-spoken gumshoe, McLean is credited with leading the investigation. He recalls the case as the most challenging of his 40-year law enforcement career.
“It was one of the most fascinating, time-consuming and rewarding cases I’ve ever worked on. That was a good bust,” he said Monday with a chuckle.
When he learned of Gale’s death, McLean said, “He was a brilliant man. But when we found his stupid mistakes, he was the fumbling fool.”
This story was originally published October 03, 2017 4:40 PM.