The Almost Great Bank Robbery
When a lovestruck cop and his teller girlfriend pulled of f the biggest bank heist in San Antonio history, it seemed like the perfect crime. If only they hadn’t made one small mistake.
Brian says: Even some 18 years later, it's hard for me to believe that this is the same Lisa Silvas that I used to give rides to school to, and let her keep her books in my locker. This article describes her pretty well, even though when I knew her, she was a freshman in high school. (January 6th, 2009 at 3:30pm)
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Recently, in his first interview about the case, Jack Nealy insisted to me that he and Lisa are innocent. In a separate interview, Lisa told me that she now knows Jack committed the robbery, but she maintains that she never knew he was planning it and that she participated in no part of it. Perhaps, Lisa says, her dark brown eyes blinking back tears, jack robbed the bank out of love: “He might have done it to hold on to me, to try to impress me, to keep me.”
Regardless of who’s telling the truth, one thing has become clear. The story of the Texas Commerce Bank robbery is really a story about a doomed romance, about two red-hot lovers who inexplicably lost their way. “I don’t know if we’ll ever know the real motive,” says Sergeant George Ramirez, a robbery detective with the San Antonio police who helped investigate the couple. “But I know it had something to do with attraction. Here’s a guy who was twenty-eight years old, and here’s a girl who was nineteen, and they start getting caught up with one another. Well, as they say, that stuff can move mountains.”
They were raised in mostly fatherless homes: Lisa Silvas’ parents divorced when she was twelve, and Jack Nealy’s father died in an airplane crash when he was six. Beyond that, their childhoods were ordinary, empty of the kind of mishaps that a psychologist might point to as the cause of later problems. In retrospect, nothing could seem so harmless as their early backgrounds.
Growing up with his mother and two sisters in a small home in rural Bandera County, northwest of San Antonio, Jack wasn’t used to great comforts in life. After his father died, his mother, Victoria, made ends meet with her social security checks. Jack lived the life of the typical small-town high school student — football games on Friday nights, visits to a country and western dance hall on Saturday nights. He and his friend William Norwood would split a six-pack of beer and talk about becoming police officers. “We thought that was every guy’s dream — to be a cop when you grew up,” says Norwood, now a policeman in the Fort Worth suburb of Euless.
After graduation Jack joined the Marines and by all accounts was an outstanding soldier. He earned two good-conduct medals and at least nineteen commendations. He received a Navy Achievement Medal for saving a fellow Marine from drowning. For two years he received top-secret security clearance to work as a Marine embassy guard abroad.
In 1989, when Jack was honorably discharged after eight years in the service, he went straight to the San Antonio Police Academy. He raced through all the background checks — a polygraph, psychological tests, and interviews. Neighbors and former employers from as far back as high school were interviewed. The department couldn’t have asked for a better prospect. He had a military haircut, he already knew how to keep his uniform perfectly pressed, and he was such a good marksman with a .357 Magnum that he could outshoot anyone in his class.
The police life mattered a lot to Jack — so much, in fact, that it busted up his first marriage. In 1985 Jack had married a woman he met while stationed as a Marine guard in the Bahamas. They had two children, but they separated in 1990, eventually divorcing in January 1991. In an interview with the FBI following the robbery, Jack’s ex-wife called him “thoughtful” and “nonconfrontational,” but she said he was so “preoccupied” with law enforcement that she left him, moving to Miami with the kids. Jack, in turn, settled in northwest San Antonio, handling burglaries and other small calls on his beat.
One night in September 1990, on a disturbance call at an apartment complex, he began chatting with the woman who had phoned in a complaint. Even in her bathrobe she was adorable, just a couple of months out of high school. They talked for at least an hour. Because he worked the all-night “dogwatch” shift, Jack rarely got to meet women, and he wasn’t going to pass up this chance. He even skipped his dinner break to continue the conversation. Afterward, he ran her name through the computer inside his squad car: Lisa Michelle Silvas, born July 9, 1972. Jack was infatuated.
The next right, while she was out at a party, he kept stopping by her apartment, each time leaving a business card with a handwritten message: “Hi, I came by” or “I missed you.” Another night, he showed up at her door with a chocolate brownie from Fuddrucker’s. Although Lisa made sure Jack knew she already had a boyfriend, she could not help but be flattered by the attention. She asked him if he liked being a cop, if it was true that cops let pretty girls get out o f speeding tickets. “I thought he was okay looking,” Lisa says. “But it wasn’t the sort of attraction where I looked up and said, ‘Gosh, I’d like to end up with that guy.’”
Within a month, though, Jack and Lisa were living together. Some of Lisa’s friends weren’t surprised. They said it was just like her to do something so rash.
For a long time, Lisa Silvas grew up just as her mother, Terry, wanted — the brightest and most behaved of children. A meticulous student, she wouldn’t turn in a school paper unless her handwriting was perfect. Besides a year of cheerleading, she was nominated for homecoming queen, and at halftimes of football games she marched in the flag corps. At sixteen she entered the local Miss America Coed Pageant and placed in the top twelve.
In her small hometown community of Flour Bluff, just outside Corpus Christi, Lisa was one of the most popular girls around — “always the center of attention,” one of her friends remembers. Almost every weekend when it was warm, she would be with the in crowd at the Bob Hall Pier on Padre Island, a fifteen-minute drive from Flour Bluff. Boys would moon over her thick brown hair and perfect smile and the little mole on her chin, the kind that movie sirens from the forties had. And that’s when, at least for Lisa and her mother, the problems began. At home, boys constantly called for her. They sent her flowers and bought her costume jewelry. One ex-boyfriend, to keep other boys away from Lisa at school, would dash out of his class at the end of each period, find Lisa, escort her to class, and then run back to his next class before the tardy bell rang. Early on, Lisa learned how easily boys could be twisted around a pretty girl’s finger.
Inevitably, Lisa’s social life came in conflict with her mother’s ideas about how she should be raised. The two had typical disputes over curfew hours and underage drinking. Those who know both Terry and Lisa say they were equally headstrong. Lisa says they were equally headstrong. Lisa says when her mother wouldn’t let her go to a party, “I’d say, ‘But Mom, everyone is going. I have to do it. I’m Lisa! I have to be there.’”
Through high school, the arguments escalated, especially over Lisa’s boyfriend, Bert Karrer, a tall, handsome teen whom Lisa once favorably described as a guy “who always knew where the parties were.” Terry didn’t approve of Bert — which, of course, made Lisa all the more interested in him. Caught up in the drama of teenage romance, Lisa would sneak away from home to be with Bert. Terry Silvas would then send the Flour Bluff police looking for her daughter. Bert says Lisa found a thrill in running away: “Lisa would say, “Yeah, I can avoid the police and do whatever I want.’” Lisa denies that she ran away for several consecutive days, as some people have claimed. But she does admit that her mother once put her in a runaway shelter for two weeks after they had an argument over Bert. Afterward, Lisa moved to Houston to live with her father, then to San Antonio to live with Bert, who by then had an apartment there.
Perhaps — but only perhaps — these incidents showed a rebellious side of Lisa that would one day lead her into a life of crime. Many of her friends, however, say that Lisa was only “a little wild.” Indeed, Lisa didn’t commit any criminal act; nor did she become a troubled teenage dropout. After moving to San Antonio she enrolled as a senior at John Marshall High School, graduated, and mad plans to attend college. She fulfilled her childhood dream and found work at the Texas Commerce Band as a part-time teller, bringing home about $250 a month. She became close again with her mother.
In May 1990 Lisa and Bert went back home for their high school prom, which was held at the Corpus Christi Country Club. It was an emotional night for Lisa, a grand return to her scene of adolescent glory. She received some cutout stars and a key ring with the inscription, “Admit One, Wish Upon a Star, Prom 1990, Flour Bluff High School.” For Lisa, these mementos were priceless, something to cherish forever.
She should have thrown them away. More than a year later, those very keepsakes would ruin her. They would be discovered in the strangest of places, ironically sealing her fate.
If Lisa was hoping her move to San Antonio would give her the chance to experience the heady freedom of being on her own, the feeling lasted only a couple of months. Bert was working nights at the Subway Sandwich Shop while attending college during the day, but he wasn’t bringing in much money. Predictably, he and Lisa began arguing about finances. Bert would get mad at Lisa for spending so much to get her nails done. He would complain about her driving to get her hair cut in Corpus Christi. He didn’t understand why she had to buy so many clothes. Her clothes took up all the closets in their small apartment, plus an entire closet at Bert’s father’s home.
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