Find out how this girl made off with millions and NEVER got caught!
Except….there’s a twist!
Impossibly Innocent Heather Tallchief looked like the girl next
door type of girl.
She was pretty, she was young, and she had an innocent look about her.
When she made off with over 4 million dollars, her coworkers didn’t even have any suspicion
that she had something to do with it!
They figured that she was kidnapped instead.
And no, it wasn’t that far-fetched to assume she was kidnapped.
That’s because kidnapping was an inherent risk with the type of job they had, which
was being an armored car driver.
They were responsible for transporting large amounts of cash.
They just had no clue how cunning Heather actually was and what she was capable of!
Who was Heather Tallchief?
Just who exactly was Heather Tallchief?
Before Heather became America’s most wanted woman, Heather Tallchief moved to Las Vegas
in 1993.
She had needed a change.
Before the Vegas move, she worked as a nurse at a hospice called Kimberly Quality Care
Center in San Francisco.
Her coworkers were sad that she was moving on.
According to them, she had this amazing empathy with patients.
Even the patients closest to leaving would be smiling when she left their bedside.
But in the 14 months Heather worked in the hospice, she saw many patients go.
She had become close friends to a few of them.
Of course, this began to affect her.
She began to be depressed because of her job.
According to her mom, she began to wonder why she couldn’t be happy.
Heather didn’t have the greatest circumstances in her life up to that point.
She was born in Buffalo, New York, a place with sub-zero temperatures for six months
out of the year.
Heather hated every moment she spent in Buffalo.
Almost every day she begged her mom Ann to leave.
One day she got her wish.
Ann Tallchief packed up everything she owned and moved to San Francisco with Heather, leaving
Heather’s dad behind.
And now, Heather couldn’t take everything falling apart at her work.
She said she didn’t want to worry about anything anymore.
That’s when she decided to uproot her entire life and move to Las Vegas.
The Bright Lights
In Vegas, Heather decided on a strange career move.
She applied for work as an armored vehicle driver supplying cash to casinos.
How did she even get an interview for that job without any experience at all?!
She used her exceptional work record at the hospice to apply for jobs as an armoured car
driver.
She also had perfect credit and Kimberly gave her a glowing reference.
She was way above the average for the industry.
It may have looked an odd choice to her interviewers, but she had a perfectly plausible explanation.
She said she wanted a career in the security industrys.
She wanted to start at the bottom, to learn the industry inside out.
In a profession dominated by large men, she stood out.
But that’s the only thing she had against her.
She easily passed the background criminal record check.
Her references were perfect.
She was on.
She was hired at Loomis.
Loomis Armored
At first, like most new drivers at Loomis, Heather was assigned to the casino house runs.
This involved transporting new bills to thousands of gaming tables each day at different casinos.
Even though this seems like it’s really risky to the company and the casino, it wasn’t.
These new bills are easily traceable.
These aren’t the bills criminals want to be stuck with.
Heather was patient.
She had plenty of opportunities to go after the new bills, but she didn’t go for it.
She was waiting for a promotion.
What she was waiting for were the ATM runs.
That’s where Loomis employees moved millions of dollars of used, unmarked bills.
Those runs were given only to the most trusted employees.
Somehow, within 6 months, Heather was just that.
In her first weeks in her new job, Heather took a firing range test to qualify for a
gun.
The crazy thing was, she was really great at shooting.
She shocked her coworkers by achieving record scores.
Although she had 20/20 vision, Heather wore what looked like thick glasses whenever she
was in her Loomis uniform.
Heather also applied for admission at local law enforcement colleges, which increased
the trust placed in her by Loomis.
ATM Promotion
After just a couple months, Loomis felt that she had proved her innocence.
Her diligence and reliability on the house-runs had paid off.
She was promoted to one of the riskier parts of the business at Loomis.
ATM runs.
Five days a week, she would drive millions of dollars in unmarked bills to the strip.
Heather's two closest coworkers were guards Steve Marshall and Scott Stewart.
They rode with her in the armored truck and handled all the actual deliveries of the cash
to the ATMs.
They both liked her, because she had made a considerable effort to be nice to them.
She asked about their families and she remembered details of their friends and kids.
All that effort to be friends with them along with her incredible charm meant that she had
Marshall and Stewart's total trust!
Trust to the extent that they would allow her to drive the truck without them in certain
circumstances.
Smoke and Mirrors
On the outside, everything looked normal.
Here was a girl who was making a new start in a new career and she was the model employee.
But of course, you know that Heather had her own real plan!
Before applying to work for Loomis, Heather’s first move was to establish a series of fake
IDs.
What she would do was contact "passport collectors".
These were mostly guys who sold new passports from defunct countries, such as Czechoslovakia.
She would then go to small towns and get a driver’s license in the name of her fake
IDs.
By the time she was in Vegas, she already had real drivers licences in 12 different
names!
She also began applying for credit cards in the names of her new driving licences.
She took flying lessons as well, so she was in and out of the airports in Las Vegas.
She took her first solo flight in a Cessna in August of 1993.
Roberto Solis
Heather, however, wasn’t hanging out in Las Vegas on her own.
Her mom knew that she moved to Las Vegas with a man named Roberto Solis.
And she had a bad feeling about him.
That’s because Roberto Solis is a convicted bank robber!
He left prison early because he wrote poetry that got the attention of prominent literary
figures in San Francisco.
Supposedly, Heather wrote to him while he was in jail and arranged a meeting when he
was released.
Roberto and Heather lived together in a high-rise building in Vegas.
Hi-rises in Vegas are places where people can just blend right in with plenty of privacy.
Vegas is a place where people don't ask too many questions.
Smoke and Mirrors 2
A couple weeks before the big day, Heather, disguised as a nurse, pushed Roberto, disguised
as a rich old guy in a wheelchair, on to a Private Jet at Las Vegas airport.
She was establishing a pattern that would remove suspicion after the robbery.
On September 24th, Heather booked the same jet for a flight on October 1st.
On September 18th, using the name Myra Calandra, Heather called an apartment building in Denver
that specializes in furnished rentals business travel.
She made a reservation for a couple weeks.
At around the same time, she rented a garage in Las Vegas and registered it to a business
called “Reinforced Steel”.
She informed the owners that Reinforced Steel builds and repairs armoured vehicles!
The Heist
Heather chose October 1st, 1993 as D-Day.
Why that day?
Heather knew the convention schedule.
That day is when one convention started, and another one just ended.
It’s when traffic is at its heaviest.
Parking at some hotels, such as Circus-Circus and MGM Grand, became impossible.
On that particular day, it was one of the biggest change-over days in 1993.
Heather left the Loomis depot early in the morning with more than $6 million dollars
cash.
By the time she arrived at the back of Circus-Circus Casino, there was over four and a half million
dollars left.
Her coworkers Stewart and Marshall were scheduled to put in $400,000 cash to five ATMs inside.
Heather knew that it would take them at least 45 minutes.
There wasn’t any parking at the casino, just as Heather had predicted.
They both agreed to let Heather meet them at the front of the hotel at 10:15, just like
any other time.
And that’s when Heather took off for the garage reserved for Reinforced Steel, which
definitely wasn’t at the front of Circus Circus Casino!
How many millions of dollars did she get away with?
It’s up for debate.
Some newspapers say around 4 million dollars, some newspapers say it’s 3 million.
The exact figure doesn’t matter.
What matters was that she disappeared with Roberto, and they were nowhere to be found!
From trash found in the garage, it’s clear Heather had also planned how to get the money
out of Las Vegas.
Packing materials and showed that Heather had packed the cash into boxes and had the
money shipped to Denver.
Heather didn’t seem particularly tense that morning according to Stewart’s later recollection.
But her dressier shoes did strike him as out of the ordinary.
He just thought that maybe she was going out to dinner or something after work and needed
to get changed quickly.
Clean Getaway
Roughly 2 hours later at around 11 in the morning, Heather, using a fake nurse's ID,
helped push Roberto onto his Private jet at Las Vegas airport.
A short 12 minutes later, their plane pulled away and took off.
As her plane was in the air, her coworkers were
calling the Las Vegas Police Department.
They were reporting that Heather had been kidnapped.
Even the police thought that they'd find her body out in the desert!
It was a full two weeks before the garage owner became suspicious since their garage
wasn’t busy like usual.
Inside they found the Loomis Truck, $3,000 dollars in one dollar bills, a pair of thick
glasses and packing material.
It was another week before the FBI located the apartment building in Denver.
And just like that, Heather Tallchief disappeared for good!
According to the FBI, her case is one of the largest armored robberies where the perpetrator
wasn’t brought to justice.
And of course, things get even weirder.
The Surprise
Police couldn’t find Roberto OR Heather for over a decade.
Except one day out of the blue, Heather showed up and surrendered at the Federal courthouse
in Las Vegas on September 15th 2005!
Over the years, Las Vegas Detectives were baffled at how Heather and her suspected accomplice,
Roberto hadn’t been caught.
They were about to find out!
Heather told police she had been in Europe much of the time.
Apparently, she NEVER had access to the money except for a short while.
She had been in Amsterdam working as a hotel maid for years!
It Wasn’t Me
According to her, she WASN’T the mastermind behind the crime.
She claimed to be brainwashed by Roberto!
She admitted to doing everything with Roberto.
But she said that she couldn’t help it.
She claimed that Roberto constantly showed her tapes that hypnotized her after she met
him.
Apparently, the tapes made her receptive to his commands.
He was the one who convinced her to move to Las Vegas.
He was the one who told her to get work at Loomis.
He was the one who planned the heist.
He was the one who gave her all the instructions!
According to Heather, she had followed Roberto's instructions like a robot and she could remember
very little about the planning.
After driving off her route with the truck, she said she drove to a warehouse, but she
didn’t know what happened to the money she helped to pack.
But….why?
Why on earth would she come turn herself in?
Heather Tallchief basically had a moment of clarity and felt bad about her role in the
heist.
She wanted to do the right thing and turn herself in.
However, she didn’t know where Roberto was.
BUT, here’s another twist.
They have a son together!
But she left him after she learned she was pregnant because Roberto hadn’t treated
her well, especially after their son was born.
She felt that it was best for her and her son to run on their own, something they did
in Europe for roughly 10 years.
But enough was enough.
She was tired of running, and she wanted a chance for life for her then ten-year-old
son, if she did her time.
Heather was sentenced to sixty-three months in prison.
In June of 2010, she was released on parole.