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.

by Skip Hollandsworth

November 1992

FBI SPECIAL AGENT CURT HUNT was working in the yard of his San Antonio home one quiet Saturday morning when the call came in: The Texas Commerce Bank off Loop 410 had been robbed. Motor bank? In his 22 years as an agent, the intense, wiry Hunt had worked a lot of bank robberies—there are about twenty a year in San Antonio—but they almost always involved a robber walking into a bank lobby, pointing a gun at a teller, and demanding all the money in the drawer. How could anyone possibly get past the locked doors and bulletproof glass of a motor bank?

It was September 21, 1991. Hunt rushed to the scene to begin investigating what would turn out to be the biggest bank robbery in San Antonio history. Grim bank officials told Hunt that someone had gotten away with almost $250,000—all the more astonishing considering that the average bank robber gets no more than $2,000. The heist was reminiscent of the old glamour days of bank robberies. The robber had reached the vault—another rarity—and then made his escape so efficiently that a customer waiting several yards away for the bank to open did not even know there had been a robbery until police cars started screaming up around him.

Quickly, Hunt ordered agents from the FBI’s bank robbery squad to fan out through the nearby neighborhood, looking for anybody who might have noticed something, searching through trash bins to see if the robber had tossed his gun or his mask while making his getaway. But they came up empty-handed. The evidence at the bank wasn’t much better. There were no security guards or security cameras, and there were no witnesses to the crime save for two nearly hysterical tellers: Kelly McGinnis, 21 and Lisa Silvas, 19.

Pretty, outgoing young women, former cheerleaders at their small-town schools, Kelly and Lisa were perfect tellers for the bank. Customers would ask for them by name. Older men driving through to make deposits invariably would flirt with them. Bank officials considered them so reliable that they were the only employees scheduled to come in that Saturday to work the nine-to-one shift.

As they later told San Antonio police detectives and FBI agents, they got out of their cars that morning and walked, just as they always did, toward the first of two locked doors they needed to open to enter the bank. Kelly unlocked the first door and walked with Lisa fifteen feet down a secured hallway to the second door. As Kelly unlocked that door and stepped inside the bank, she turned around to say something—and there, standing directly behind Lisa, was a man holding a silver-barreled pistol. He wore a maintenance-type uniform and gloves; a flesh colored mask and a watch cap covered his entire face and head. Apparently he had slipped in behind them before the first door closed. In a raspy, disguised voice, he yelled, “Cut the f—ing alarm off, bitch!”

Kelly screamed and stepped backward. The robber aimed his gun at her head and kept bellowing about the alarm, then pointed down a hallway toward an unmarked door, behind which was the alarm switch. Both women were crying, their bodies shaking. Afraid that she and Kelly were about to get shot, Lisa took the keys from Kelly’s hands and hurried to the alarm panel. She knew the alarm would automatically go off if it was not disconnected within 45 seconds after the first door opened.

While the robber used a pair of plastic handcuffs to restrain Kelly’s hands behind her back, he ordered Lisa to open the huge, gleaming gray vault across the hall from the alarm room. Pointing to a bulky object inside his maintenance uniform that he claimed was a police scanner, the robber told the tellers he would know if they secretly tripped and alarm. “If I hear anything about Texas Commerce Bank come across that radio,” he said, “I will kill both of you.”

He pushed them inside the vault room, where there were two large safes, each about four feet high. The safes were double-locked: They had to be opened with a key and the proper spindial combination. Lisa unlocked the far left safe with a key, then turned the dial as Kelly called out the combination. The robber threw Lisa a trash bag and instructed her to fill it with money.

He ignored the second safe when the tellers told him it was filled with coins. But to its right were the locked teller drawers, filled with money to be used during the workday. Lisa opened hers and dumped the money into the bag, but Kelly was so panicky that she couldn’t remember her own combination. The robber put the gun to Kelly’s head and said she had one last chance to open it. “I’m going to blow your f—ing head off,” he waned. In desperation, Kelly grabbed a nearby unlocked empty drawer and pretended it was hers. “Kelly, we are fixing to get killed,” Lisa said, pointing toward Kelly’s real drawer, “You better open it,”

Finally, Kelly came up with the combination. The robber grabbed her money and ordered her and Lisa to stay in the vault. Then he was gone.

The whole operation took less thank five minutes. For several seconds the two tellers remained in the vault, debating whether the robber had really left the bank. When they dashed out, Kelly hit alarm buttons and called their supervisor, and Lisa dialed 911. Then both women did what for them was the next natural course of action. They tearfully called their boyfriends. Kelly’s boyfriend, who had just dropped her off a the bank, came back right away. But Lisa couldn’t reach her fiancé, Jack Nealy, a respected second-year police officer with the San Antonio police department. He had been working the night shift and was no doubt asleep, as he always was at that time of the morning, with the phone unplugged by the bed. Lisa paged his beeper, leaving the bank’s number.

When Jack called the bank at about ten—yes, he said, he had been sleeping—a bank official informed him about the robbery. “Oh, God,” Jack exclaimed. He arrived at the bank around noon; he said he didn’t come sooner because he knew the investigating officers wouldn’t want another cop “tromping all over their crime scene.” Wearing shorts, a pullover shirt, and a San Antonio police department baseball cap, he introduced himself to a couple of FBI agents outside the bank, then went inside to see Lisa.

Frankly, everyone from the bank was glad to see the stocky, square-jawed 28-year-old Jack. A highly decorated ex-Marine, he had been president of his San Antonio Police Academy class, graduating sixth out of 38 cadets. In the words of no less an authority than San Antonio police chief William Gibson, Jack was a “young man who excelled.” His goal, his friends said was to be named a lieutenant or a captain.

On the spot, a bank executive asked Jack if he would work in his off-duty hours as a security guard at the motor bank. Obviously, the skittish tellers were going to need protection. Jack said he would be happy to start the following Monday.

But according to Curt Hunt, Jack Nealy was the wrong man for the job. Less than a month later, after a miraculous break in the case, the FBI arrested Jack for the robbery of the motor bank. Then, in another shocking twist, the FBY arrested Lisa Silvas for acting as Jack’s accomplice. It seemed impossible to believe. If the authorities were correct, the all-American couple were also bold, calculating bank robbers. Almost overnight, Lisa and Jack had become a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.

A CAREFULLY PLANNED BANK ROBBERY—especially one where no one gets hurt—never fails to capture the public’s imagination. Citizens find themselves admiring the robber who is smart enough to beat the elaborate security systems and get the loot—which is after all, not anyone’s money in particular but money that belongs to an impersonal, fully insured bank.

While the robbery at Texas Commerce Bank was dramatic enough, the arrests of Jack Nealy and Lisa Silvas brought a sensational dimension to the crime. No one who knew the couple could come up with any comprehensible motive why the two would try something so daring. Neither of them had a criminal record; nor were they living bitterly on the edge of society, resentful of people in better positions. They loved their jobs. Jack had wanted to be a policeman since the age of five, when he would pull over his sister on her bicycle and write her speeding tickets. Lisa, at the same age, was playing “store,” handing out play money from a toy cash register. As Lisa got older, her mother says, she talked about growing up to become a bank teller.

More than a year later, the couple’s closest friends and associates are still speculating about the robbery. When members of Jack’s police academy class run into one another, they regularly bring up Jack’s name, shaking their heads in disbelief. “I’ve gone through it all, over and over, asking myself what I could have missed about him,” says San Antonio police officer Juan Morales, Jack’s best friend at the academy. “But I can’t look back and say, ‘Okay, this is where he changed.’”

Those who know the twosome also debate whether Jack talked Lisa into the robbery or Lisa persuaded Jack. Jack was “a dutiful police officer who had always done his job,” explains his attorney, Stephen A. Nicholas of San Antonio. “And then he meets this good-looking girl who wants to experience a lot of things. She wants more and more, and that means more money.” But others suggest that Lisa was a naïve teenager who was manipulated by an older man. Lisa’s younger brother, in a letter to the federal judge who presided over her case, calls her, “a blind damsel in distress led by a deceiving grim reaper, Jack Nealy.”

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