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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After the robbery, it didn’t take FBI special agent Curt Hunt too long to realize he was investigating an inside job. The robber seemed to know too much about the teller’s routines, the bank’s alarm system, and the bank’s layout. He didn’t go to the left side of the motor bank, where there was a large night deposit safe that the tellers didn’t have access to on Saturdays. Did he know the tellers couldn’t get to that safe? Hunt figured a robber unfamiliar with the bank would have at least zipped through all the rooms just to see what was there. Still, without concrete evidence, Hunt’s suspicions led nowhere.
Then, a couple of days after the robbery, one of the new agents in Hunt’s unit, Frank Montoya, learned that bank employees needed plastic access cards to open the gate that let into the bank’s parking garage. A computer automatically recorded the dates and times those cards were used. Curious, Montoya checked the computerized log. At 8:20 a.m. on the day of the robbery, a card was used belonging to Lisa Silvas.
But Lisa had said she parked that morning in an area near the motor bank that did not require an access card. Others had also seen her card there. Hunt and other investigators started reviewing their notes. Could someone else have used her card to park a getaway car on an upper floor, slip down the stairwell, run around the building to rob the bank, then run back upstairs, jump in the car, and drive unseen out of the back exit of the parking garage?
The FBI had found the slightest crack in the perfect crime. Agents recalled Lisa saying that the robber was probably a black man because of the way he talked. Could she have said that to deliberately mislead them? And why, for that matter, would the robber have wanted to disguise his voice unless he was worried one of the tellers might recognize it? Why did he handcuff Kelly but not Lisa? Why did Lisa grab the keys to turn off the alarm? Why did Lisa point out during the robbery that Kelly had opened the wrong teller drawer? Did Lisa try to keep Kelly from running immediately out of the vault after the robbery because she was really worried the robber hadn’t left or because she wanted to give the robber more time to make his getaway?
No one could forget how Lisa had acted toward the end of that Saturday, just before everyone went home. The chairman of the bank, who had arrived to survey the remnants of the robbery, asked Lisa to describe the robber. With Jack at her side, Lisa said that the robber was about five feet eight inches tall — to illustrate, she put her hand on top of Jack’s head — and that he weighed about 170 pounds. Then Lisa giggled, stared at Jack, and said, “Oh my God, Jack, just like you.” Either Lisa Silvas was an ingenuous patsy — or she had ice in her veins.
Hunt also remembered how another FBI agent, on the day of the robbery, told him that Nealy was standing in the parking lot asking questions about leads in the case. Furthermore, she said someone else, the plastic handcuffs used in the robbery were the kind that the San Antonio police use when they arrest large numbers of people. Maybe the scanner the robber used was the same detachable police scanner that officers have in their squad cars. And everyone wondered why Jack didn’t show up until noon that day. If he was truly concerned about Lisa, why wouldn’t he have come right away?
Hunt and his team knew they had to be careful. Incredibly, as the bank’s new security guard, Jack was in the perfect position to observe the entire FBI investigation. Whenever a teller would come back from an interview with the FBI, Jack would be able to quiz her about what the agents had wanted to know.
Hunt decided he had one option left. The investigators had to make Lisa crack. If they didn’t get someone at the scene of the robbery to confess, they didn’t have much of a case. Ideally, of course, they would like to find the stolen money in Jack’s or Lisa’s possession. But to do that, they needed to catch the couple with the bait money, a group of hundred dollar bills whose serial numbers had been recorded so that the bank could trace them in case of a robbery. Ten of the bait bills had been strapped together and kept in Lisa’s teller drawer, ten were in Kelly’s drawer, and twenty were placed in the safe in the vault. The problem was that Lisa would know exactly which bills were bait money — and if she was smart, she would already have burned them.
It was going to be an old-fashioned, down-and-dirty interrogation. Lisa sat in a windowless interview room, facing Hunt and assorted agents and San Antonio police department detectives. They laid out the case against her. They told he they knew about her parking garage card being used. Lisa said she had misplaced the card weeks earlier. According to Lisa, the officers said to her, “If you tell us where the money is, we will help you. You are a young girl; you don’t need to spend the rest of your life in prison. Try to help yourself. Maybe you got tied up with the wrong people and that’s why you’re here.” Lisa says she was crying so hard she could barely talk. Over and over, she kept saying she didn’t know anything.
For Hunt this was a difficult moment. He was used to dealing with longtime criminals, not sweet, pretty girls. Many of these officers had teenage daughters of their own. Nevertheless, they laid it on thick, telling her what jail would be like, how difficult it would be to survive. They told her if she would confess, they would get her a light sentence. But she didn’t waver. Begrudgingly, the officers had to admire her. “She was good, real good,” one detective says. “Her body language, everything about her, was perfect.”
After Lisa’s interview, the FBI talked to Kelly McGinnis in an adjoining room. They knew she and Lisa had become much closer after the robbery. The young women talked on the phone in the evening, visited each other’s apartments, and went to counseling together (paid for by the bank) to get over their nightmares from the robbery. The agents could not let go of the idea that Kelly knew something about Lisa and Jack’s involvement in the crime. But Kelly kept insisting to them that Lisa had done nothing wrong. The agents said things would be much better for her if she could get Lisa to confess. Kelly, loyal to the end, angrily replied that Lisa and Jack weren’t the robbers. If they wanted to talk to her again, she snapped, they could contact her lawyer — which only made some agents eve more suspicious about what Kelly might have had to do with the robbery.
Later that day, the FBI brought in Jack Nealy. But by then, Jack knew exactly what was coming. He didn’t even feign surprise that he was being accused of a crime. “If I did something wrong,” Jack told the officers, “you will have to prove it.” They asked if they could search his car and apartment. Jack replied, “You will have to get a search warrant to do that.” According to Jack, Hunt jumped up and shouted, “Don’t you ever tell me how to do my job! I’ve been doing this for eighteen and a half years, and you’re just a babe in the woods!” Hunt was so angry, says Jack, that “spittle was coming out of his mouth.”
Jack asked if he was under arrest, and when Hunt said no, Jack stood up and told them he was going home.
The cops had their robbers. Unfortunately, they couldn’t prove it in court. Lisa Silvas went back to the bank, and Jack Nealy, to the investigator’s anguish, went back to work as a police officer. Brashly, Jack told people that he and Lisa were going to take a vacation in Florida to get away from the FBI’s hounding. What the FBI would not learn until much later was that Jack and Lisa had no intention of going to Florida. Instead, telling no one, they flew to the Cayman Islands, where it is easy to deposit cash into a numbered, untraceable bank account.
During the next week, the FBI and the San Antonio police reinterviewed people at the bank and tracked down relatives of Jack and Lisa. The officers were getting nowhere. Then, one hot afternoon, Hunt, agent Frank Montoya, and two police detectives drove into rural Bandera County, looking for Jack’s mother, Victoria.
Over the years, Jack’s mother had become reclusive, unwilling to socialize with her neighbors, going months without even seeing her own children. She didn’t own a phone. If she needed to get in touch with Jack, she would leave a message for him at the police station whenever she happened to be in San Antonio, which wasn’t often. In truth, the children didn’t try very hard to see her either, mainly because they weren’t fond of her second husband, an older man named bill Murray, whom she married in 1983.
Hunt and the others pulled up to the property, not knowing what to expect. Victoria, always distrustful of strangers, would talk to the men only from behind a farm gate. Hunt told her that Jack and Lisa were suspects in a bank robbery. “What bank robbery?” Victoria asked. She hadn’t been reading the newspaper or watching the news on TV. Anyway, she said, the idea of her son robbing a bank was “an impossibility.”
The officers asked as series of routine questions. Had she seen Jack recently? Yes, she said. Jack had been out for a brief visit four days earlier. Was Jack acting differently? Victoria replied that he was fine. Frustrated, the agents and detectives drove away. The trip had been a waste of time. The list of people to interview was growing shorter, and so far no one had given them a clue.
Then, out of the blue, Curt Hunt said, “Gus, we’ve got to go back. We need to ask her one more question.” Something — a good cop’s instinct, perhaps, or the intuition that comes after years of criminal investigations — had clicked in special agent Hunt. He wasn’t exactly sure why, but he suddenly thought the money might be buried on that land.
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