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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Hunt knew he would not be able to get a search warrant for Victoria’s property: He had not evidence to show probable cause that the money was there. So he made the risky decision to bluff her, to make her think the FBI knew something about the money’s being on her land. The four officers pulled up in front of the property and yelled for Victoria to come back to the gate. Hunt and Montoya asked if her son had given her any money. Did she know if any money was hidden or buried on her property? Victoria said that to her knowledge, Jack had brought no money out there. We’re warning you, the officers told Victoria: Don’t try to hide something from us. They drove off again, their hopes no higher.
But three days later their strategy paid off in a way they could not have possibly imagined. Amazingly, Victoria’s husband, Bill Murray, called the Bexar County sheriff’s office and said he had unexpectedly come across a bag of money. He had spent the previous day walking around the property, he explained, and had found a spot of disturbed ground in an unmowed, woodsy area. Bill said he started digging, and there, a food beneath the surface, was a blue canvas bag filled with thousands of dollars.
Victoria says not that she told her husband that the FBI was after them and that bill replied that he wasn’t going to get in any trouble. He went outside, says Victoria, and started hunting. In an almost farcical climax, Jack Nealy’s stepfather, a grizzled Judas, had solved the Texas Commerce Bank property.
Hunt went to the sheriff’s office to help count the money. There was $147,779 in cash, bundled together with rubber bands; almost $95,000 was missing. Among the loot was a stack of forty $100 bills, with the words “Mexico Money” handwritten across the top bill. Agents checked the serial numbers from that stack. Unbelievably, they were the bait bills from the motor bank. If the FBI’s theory was right, Jack and Lisa had greedily kept the bait bills, perhaps hoping to use them in Mexico, where they would be less traceable. (Through handwriting analysis, the FBI determined that Lisa had probably written the words “Mexico Money.”)
If that evidence was not damning enough, agents found in the blue canvas bag a cluster of cutout stars and a “Wish Upon a Star” key ring from Flour Bluff High School — Lisa’s prom mementos. What were they doing there? Had Jack hurriedly grabbed a back from the apartment to store the money, not realizing that Lisa used the same bag to save her prom items?
It might have been a robbery of absolute brilliance, pulled off with a lawman’s savvy, but it ended with astonishing stupidity. If the bait bills or prom items had not been found with the money, the FBI would not have been able to conclusively link Jack and Lisa to the robbery. Perhaps, even today, the FBI would still be looking at an unprosecutable case.
At the bank, when Kelly McGinnis heard the news of Jack and Lisa’s arrest, she started crying. She exclaimed, “No, I can’t believe this!” Kelly walked out of the bank and didn’t come back for two days. “I can’t remember what was actually worse,” she says, recalling that day, knowing that Lisa, being such a good friend, would betray me.”
To reach the visitor’s room at the all-female federal correctional institution in Lexington, Kentucky, Lisa Silvas must walk past an unsmiling group of women who shave their heads and roll the tops of their pants down to their hips. “Those are the lesbian inmates,” Lisa murmurs, her little gold hoop earrings wobbling every time she moves her head. “They call themselves the Bull Daggers.” Lisa is doing her best to keep up a fashionable appearance. Underneath her prison-issued white shirt and pants, she wears a red T-shirt that matches the red bow in her hair. She keeps her face and arms tanned by sunbathing out by the prison fence during her free time, and she wears makeup. In this institution she looks almost ridiculously out of place.
At her bank robbery trial earlier in the year, Lisa’s attorney argued that she had been framed, while Jack’s attorneys wasted no time suggesting that it was Kelly McGinnis and her boyfriend who were the robbers. Kelly’s boyfriend, after all, dropped her off that morning. Perhaps he donned the mask and did the robbery. The lawyers also hinted that the $95,000, which has never been found, is not in a Grand Canyon bank account but in Bill Murray’s hands. Bill and Victoria, in fact, left town a few weeks before the trial and didn’t even show up to support Jack — a further sign, the lawyers claimed, that the Murrays had knowledge of the crime. But all of Lisa and Jack’s old friends arrived to testify against them: Kelly, Juan Morales, even Bert Karrer, who identified the prom items with a disgusted look on his face. Jack and Lisa didn’t have a chance.
On February 14 — appropriately enough, Valentine’s Day — a federal jury in San Antonio announced its verdict o the lovelorn couple: guilty. Lisa’s mother, her old nemesis, burst into tears, raced past a courtroom guard, and held her daughter for several minutes. A look of horror swept across Lisa’s face as she realized no one was going to step in to help her.
At her sentencing a few months later, Lisa finally broke her silence and told the judge that it was all of Jack’s fault: “I realize now that I fooled myself into believing Jack loved me. I’m guilty of being a fool. I’m not guilty of being a bank robber.” Sobbing, Lisa pleaded, “I feel as if I am drowning. I am going down for the third time, and I implore you to help me. . . . Don’t let me die, Judge. Don’t let me die!” Unmoved, the judge sentenced her to prison for twelve years and eight months. Jack received a sentence of fifteen years and one month.
Since their conviction, Jack has tried to keep the love affair alive. From a federal prison in New Jersey, he sends her passionate love letters (“I love you hopelessly to eternity”). He writes that he wants them to move to Mexico when they are finally released. He tells her they will have plenty of money if a Hollywood producer comes along to film a cops-and-robbers movie based on their life stories.
In a brief interview from prison, Jack says Lisa is also writing him love letters. “She loves me, and she knows everything is going to be all right,” he says. But Lisa denies she’s writing him. Jack, she says, will never tell the truth about the robbery, because it might mean Lisa would be released from prison. “His only way to keep me is to see me locked up,” she says. Indeed, in one letter, Jack writes, “I’m sure if you were free it wouldn’t take you long to find a ‘new’ man and try to start a family.”
It now seems clear that Jack masterminded the robbery. “It’s hard for me to cope with the thought that I got you into this mess,” he writes, which is as close as he has come to an apology. “Lisa, I didn’t use you or do anything for my own personal gain. What was done was done for us, and it backfired.” One San Antonio police detective who investigated the case speculates that Jack, insecure over Lisa, decided he had to rob the bank so he could provide a good lifestyle for his new wife. Perhaps by persuading her to help him with the robbery, Jack also realized he was binding her inextricably to him. And just maybe, as Lisa claims, make sure that if he got caught, she would go down too.
But Lisa herself can’t entirely escape from the thick net of circumstantial evidence. Only she could have known, for example, which hundred-dollar bills were the bait bills. And there’s no question that either she or Kelly had to have helped Jack during the five minutes he was inside the bank. Although one person at the trial suggested that maybe Jack had been secretly involved with Kelly — at one point, Jack turned to Kelly, who was sitting in the courtroom gallery, and winked — prosecutors and FBI agents are convinced that she was not involved.
What really bothers Kelly about this story is the same thing that bothers everyone: Why would Lisa have done it? Perhaps, just as Jack was seduced by the power of a bad cop. Or maybe she figured the thrill of robbing a bank was no more consequential than the thrill of running away from home. In many ways, she is like her infamous predecessor, Bonnie Parker, a small-town girl who suddenly, mysteriously, became a beautiful outlaw. Bonnie was nineteen when she met Clyde Barrow; Lisa was eighteen when she met Jack. Perhaps Lisa, like Bonnie, simply found the whole notion of bank robbery rather romantic.
As for the great romance that got her into all of this, Lisa now says she wants to get the marriage annulled. But she cannot make herself say that she hates Jack. “I kind of feel sorry for him, because he had everything in life,” she says, utterly unaware that she could be describing herself. She still can’t accept that this one impulsive act has forever changed her life. If Lisa regrets not having accepted a plea bargain to get a shorter sentence, she won’t say. “I am not going to plead guilty to anything that I didn’t do,” she insists, confident that a court of appeals will see the truth and give her a new trial.
But toward the end of her time in the prison visitor’s room, a note of remorse seeps in. Lisa mentions the photograph taken of her for this article. She says she does not like the way she looks in her prison garb, her face sullen, her hair hanging down. She asks if a photo could be used of her from her high school days, when life was much different, when she was getting her tan at Padre Island and her hair done at her favorite salon in Corpus, when she was always the center of attention, when the boys were knocking at her door, asking for the adorable girl with the little mole on her chin.
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