The thief who used Craigslist to hire decoys and escape a bank truck robbery has been caught. He has evaded police since last September.

The suspect wore a blue, long-sleeved shirt with a yellow safety vest, safety glasses and a mask. What initially confused police was a group of people at the scene dressed in similar attire. They had responded to an online classified ad posted three days before the robbery that offered paid landscaping work and specified exactly how the workers should dress.

Police cracked the case with a DNA match from evidence left behind at the Brink’s robbery site, and by reviewing a police report filed three weeks before the robbery about unusual items found behind a trash bin near the bank.

In the earlier incident, a person noticed the items, including a safety vest, a two-way radio, a wig and large can of Mace and watched as a man drove up and took them.

The witness jotted down the license plate and gave it to a city worker. Police traced the license plate to the suspect’s wife, police said.

Fortunately the police remembered the earlier report and were able to correlate the two.

The suspect has a history of minor crimes such as prescription forgery, but nothing this “significant,” Willis said.

Police think the suspect used a laptop and hacked into someone else’s wireless signal to post the Craigslist ad, which he thought would help conceal his identity, [Monroe police spokeswoman Debbie] Willis said.

That comment suggests that review of the Craigslist logs did not help the investigation. It certainly did not help as much as a suspicious activity report at the bank and a license plate number. Just some good old detective work, despite technology, saves the day.