Man Goes Free After Two Confess To Robbing Center

When the Sunset Bowling Center was robbed, Derrick Kidder seemed like the perfect suspect.

The 24-year-old Coeur d’Alene man had previously been convicted of burglarizing a bowling alley. He was a convicted robber. And an eyewitness identified him in a photo line-up as the robber of the bowling center.

But on Wednesday, after six weeks behind bars, Kidder walked out of jail a free man.

Two other men had confessed to the crime Kidder was accused of committing.

“I’m not too upset because people make mistakes,” Kidder said Wednesday, shrugging off a bizarre set of coincidences that not only landed him behind bars but also cost him his job.

“I’ve never run into anything like this before,” admitted Lansing Haynes, the Kootenai County deputy prosecutor handling the case against Kidder.

Earlier this week, Cameron H. Fulton and his brother Austin M. Fulton, both of Colburn, Idaho, admitted to a string of 12 robberies spanning Idaho, Montana and Colorado, according to authorities.

One of the seven Idaho heists they confessed to was the robbery of the Sunset Bowling Center in Coeur d’Alene on Feb. 13.

Kidder admits he has a bad history.

“I was a youth gone wild,” he says.

He burglarized a bowling alley in California and spent a little more than four years in prison for robbing a restaurant.

On the afternoon of the Coeur d’Alene bowling center robbery, Kidder was delivering auto parts to a store in Hayden Lake.

His route happened to take him near the bowling center, said Coeur d’Alene Police Capt. Carl Bergh.

Police also received an anonymous tip about Kidder. It took Pat Pacheco, the bowling center manager who had been robbed, less than 15 seconds to identify Kidder from a photo.

Kidder was arrested.

“I was very shocked,” Kidder said. “I was thinking I was being set up.”

Kidder’s case even made it to the preliminary hearing and had been set for trial before he was released from jail Wednesday.

Kidder said he understands why investigators might have thought he was the robber. But he believes authorities should have released him once there were more robberies that appeared to have been committed by the same person.

Kidder planned to celebrate his release with a nice dinner. Although he lost his job as a delivery man, he hopes to continue working part-time at a car wash.

Still, Kidder said he doesn’t have any hard feelings.

“I’m trying to get my life straightened out, go straight and narrow,” he said.

, DataTimes