It was just after 1:30 p.m. on March 25 when a stocky white man in a ski mask and Penn State sweat shirt walked into the First National Bank branch office on Route 19 in Portersville.

Minutes later, after threatening a teller — video images show him looming over a woman at the bank’s counter, presumably demanding money — he was walking out with a still-undisclosed amount of cash and into a long and storied American tradition: bank robbery.

Nearly a year later state police, who are investigating the crime, say they have yet to arrest anyone or even develop a suspect in the case.

The Portersville robbery may ultimately prove to be the exception that proves what these days amounts to a rule when it comes to so-called “old fashioned” bank robberies.

“Based on our experience, you will be caught, and the money you get just isn’t worth it,” said Clem Rosenberger, the chief operating officer of NexTier Bank.

But Rosenberger acknowledges that those facts haven’t stopped people from trying. Since 2000, 12 robberies have occurred at some of the bank’s 26 locations in Western Pennsylvania.

The most recent occurred on the morning of March 3 at the bank’s Morgan Center office on East Diamond Street in Butler when 35-year-old Kevin Franklin of Butler allegedly walked into the bank’s office and demanded money from a teller.

Franklin, who police have said was unarmed, made off with $2,260 and was on the loose for 24 hours before being caught while walking on Route 8, south of the city. Butler police Deputy Chief David Adams said a motorist recognized Franklin from pictures taken from the bank’s security cameras and circulated by the department.

“We got lucky on this last one, no doubt,” said Adams. “The guy didn’t cover his face, and then he was walking down a main thoroughfare after we put his face out to the media.”

The money Franklin allegedly stole has not been recovered — something that’s not unusual in a bank robbery. About 80 percent of the money stolen in bank robberies each year is not recovered, according to the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, a collective of scholars and law enforcement officials founded in 1999.

That’s one of several reasons — along with longer office hours, more branch bank offices, and a rising drug addiction epidemic — that bank robbery remains an ongoing concern for law enforcement, said David Champion, a criminology professor at Slippery Rock University.

“There is increased opportunity as well as the chance to make a lot of money quickly,” said Champion, who is a former criminal investigator and military police officer in the Army.

That’s not to say any bank robbery, robber, or investigation is the same, Adams said.

“Every call is different, every bank robbery is different. Most of the similarities end with ‘hey, give me your money,’” Adams said. “You can have 10 (investigations) go fine, but number 11 goes haywire.”

Police in Butler County have had their share of work from bank robberies in recent years. Since February 2012, six county banks have been robbed. Half of those robberies have involved branch offices on Main Street in Butler and suspects in all three of those cases were caught.

One, Cyrus Smith, 33, has been sentenced to serve 2 to 4 years in prison after stealing $3,095 from Citizens Bank on April 7. Smith used a note to demand money and claimed he had a gun, though no weapon was seen.

That money was never recovered.

So-called “note jobs” are another rising trend in contemporary bank robberies, said Doug Johnson, a senior vice president of payments and cybersecurity policy at the American Banking Association. In the 1800s the ABA used to hire posses or the Pinkerton service to pursue bank robbers. Today, it tracks and collects data on the crimes and helps banks create security policies to limit their exposure.

“While we do have some that are not note jobs, the majority of robberies are just that, with no indication that a weapon is involved,” Johnson said.

Cyber heists and digital security may be leading security concerns for banks and other financial institutions these days, but old-fashioned robberies aren’t going away.

In 2014, the last year for which data was available, there were 204 bank robberies in Pennsylvania, according to an annual report released last March by the FBI. That’s the fourth-most of any state behind California, which had 510, Texas, which had 245, and Illinois, which had 216.

The FBI’s 2014 report does not include financial information about the incidents. In 2011, the last time the bureau published financial data associated with bank robberies, $38 million was reported stolen in the incidents and about 21 percent was recovered — a rate that’s relatively consistent with 2003, when $72 million was stolen and 19 percent recovered.

Johnson said that while banks usually pursue repayment plans if the stolen money isn’t recovered outright, the institutions tend to rely more on insurance policies and write-offs to cover the cost of the crimes. He said the average cost of a robbery for a bank has dropped from about $6,000 in the 1990s to $2,500 to $3,000 today.

That drop coincides with FBI data that shows the rate of bank robberies dropping precipitously from the 1990s, when there were about 9,000 each year, to the present. In 2014 the FBI reported 3,961 bank robberies nationwide.

What hasn’t changed, Champion said, is cultural fascination with a crime made famous by 1930s celebrity criminals like John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson and “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Bank robbers may be less glamorous now, but it’s their crime that captures public imagination.

“Societies and cultures have always romanticized certain types of criminals, disregarding the actual social harm they do and choosing to view them as dashing outlaws,” Champion said. “Their actual violence and harm is somehow rationalized, and their actions are elevated to symbolic defiance against the perceived oppressive social structure.”