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Tallchief (Left) and Solis (Right)

Real Names: Heather Catherine Tallchief and Roberto Ignacio Solis
Aliases: Nicole Marie Reger, Myra Calandra, Heather Franco, Sonny (Heather); Julio Garrett Suave, Roberto Ignacio Zelaya, Pancho Aguilila, Pancho Agila, Roberto Zelaya, Pancho Aguilar, Miguel Angel Dominguez, Joseph Anthony Panura, Julius Gabriel Suave (Roberto)
Wanted For: Bank Larceny, Embezzlement, Theft
Missing Since: October 1, 1993

Case[]

Details: Heather Tallchief and Roberto Solis are wanted for stealing $3.1 million in cash from an armored van owned by Loomis Armored Car Company in Las Vegas, Nevada. She worked for the company as an armored van driver. Friday, October 1, 1993, began like every other day for her. She and her two partners, Scott Stewart and Steve Marshall, were responsible for making the rounds of several casinos, replenishing their automatic teller machines (ATMs) with cash.
That day, the armored van was loaded with over $3 million (in $100 and $20 bills) in preparation for a busy weekend. At 9:20am, Heather drove to the back portion of the Circus Circus Hotel & Casino and dropped her partners off. Scott carried the money while he and Steve entered the casino to refill the five ATMs inside.
The final ATM that the guards serviced was near the side entrance of the casino. The standard procedure called for Heather to move the van there to pick up her partners when their job inside was finished. They agreed to meet her there at 10:15am. But when Scott and Steve exited the casino, they did not see Heather or the van anywhere. At first, they assumed she had either gotten lost, been struck in traffic, or been in an accident. Scott also jokingly suggested that she might have taken the van.
Stranded at the casino, Scott and Steve called their office. Another armored van picked them up. They searched the area but found no trace of Heather or the van. They tried to contact her via radio and cell phone but received no response. The Las Vegas police were called. They also found no trace of her or the van. Initially, they believed that she had been abducted, as she was known to be trustworthy and dedicated to her job.
A surveillance camera recorded the moment when Heather was last seen. The tape showed her driving away from the casino and going past the spot where she was supposed to pick up her partners. It revealed no sign that she had been hijacked or met with foul play. Ultimately, the police concluded that she had fled by design with $3 million in unmarked cash.
Heather appears to have pulled off "the perfect crime". She not only got away with the money but has managed to elude capture for years. According to the FBI, it is one of the largest armored car robberies in which the perpetrator has not been brought to justice. Authorities hope that someone can help them finally track her down.
No one suspected that Heather had the inclination or the audacity to commit such a brazen crime. She had no previous criminal history. She was of Seneca Indian descent and grew up in Buffalo, New York. Her parents divorced when she was a child. In 1988, when she was sixteen, she moved to San Francisco, California, to live with her mother. She later attended City College, planning to build a career in medicine.
In 1991, after obtaining a nursing certificate, Heather was hired as a nursing assistant at an AIDS hospice. A coworker said she was a great worker who had "amazing" empathy with her patients. Later that year, she became a nurse’s assistant at San Francisco's California Pacific Medical Center. Then, inexplicably, she quit her job and later surfaced in Las Vegas seeking a new one. She applied for the job with Loomis in August 1993, approximately two months before the robbery. She told them she wanted a career in the security industry.
FBI Special Agent Grant Ashley says the investigation into this case has led him to believe that everything Heather did (from the moment she applied for the job to the robbery) was planned in advance for the sole purpose of committing the crime.
Shortly after the robbery, investigators searched Heather's apartment, which she had rented in July 1993. It appeared that she had quickly cleared the place out and left in a hurry. Most of her clothing was missing, and closets were cleared out. She had left behind a note for her mother, saying she regretted that they had become estranged. Investigators also discovered fingerprints in the apartment that provided an important clue – it seemed that she had not acted alone.
The prints were later identified as those of Roberto Solis, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison in June 1990, three years before the robbery. On February 21, 1969, he and two accomplices went to a Woolworth’s store in San Francisco and held up a Loomis armored car guard as he came to pick up the store's cash. The guard, sixty-one-year-old Louis Dake, showed Roberto that his money bag was empty. Despite that, Roberto shot him twice in the back, killing him.
In August 1969, Roberto was convicted of Louis' murder and sentenced to life in prison. While serving his sentence, he escaped but was quickly recaptured. Intelligent and articulate, he used his time in prison wisely. He became a respected poet under the name "Pancho Agila". Over the course of seventeen years, he authored five books. Professional writers heralded his achievement as proof of his rehabilitation. FBI Special Agent Joseph Dushek says that several well-known poets in San Francisco wrote on Roberto's behalf, and he was able to get an early release from the state prison as a result.
In September 1986, Roberto was released on parole. However, he was later returned to prison for parole and narcotics violations. After his release in 1990, he began using the name "Julius Suave". In 1992, he met Heather at a San Francisco nightclub, and they soon began a relationship. When they met, she was going through a tough time in her life. A relative had sexually assaulted her, and she had lost her job. Roberto apparently gave her the comfort she needed.
Forty-eight-year-old Roberto and twenty-one-year-old Heather were an unlikely romantic couple and adept partners in crime. According to the FBI, shortly after the couple began their relationship, they also began planning the robbery. Investigators learned that they designed their scheme with meticulous care.
One of the first things Heather and Roberto did was establish false identities. Heather obtained several false names and applied for driver's licenses, credit cards, and passports under these names. In early 1993, she and Roberto moved to Mexico, where they lived for about three months.
By the summer of 1993, the couple's plan was ready to be put into action. In July, they moved to Las Vegas and rented an apartment. Six weeks later, Heather applied for the job at Loomis. On her application, she said she had previously worked as a guard for a Las Vegas art collector, Julius Suave (one of Roberto's aliases). After gaining the trust of her partners and employers, she was allowed to drive the armored van alone. She and her partners were also promoted to the ATM shifts, which gave her access to large amounts of cash.
According to the FBI, Heather and Roberto recognized that the most difficult challenge in a multimillion-dollar robbery is often not the theft itself – but the getaway. At 11:20am on October 1, two hours after Heather drove the armored van away from the casino, an unusual couple arrived at Las Vegas' Hughes Airport. It was Heather and Roberto.
A week earlier, Heather had chartered a private jet to fly them to Denver, Colorado. The FBI later discovered that she and Roberto had taken this same flight two weeks before the robbery in an attempt to establish a pattern that would remove suspicion from them after the crime.
According to Agent Dushek, the couple was well-disguised. Roberto looked like an older man, a doctor. Heather was sitting in a wheelchair and looked like a sick, invalid older lady. Only three small suitcases were taken aboard the plane. According to Agent Dushek, it would take approximately eight to ten suitcases to transport $3 million.
FBI agents surmise that Heather and Roberto shipped the money ahead of them. The pilots who flew the private jet remembered them well. When they landed in Denver, Heather simply got out of her wheelchair and walked off the plane.
Three days later, the FBI traced Heather and Roberto to an apartment in Denver; they had rented a room there a week before the robbery. But by then, it was too late. The couple had checked out on the day of the robbery. The wheelchair Heather used was left behind. The FBI believed Denver had been only a brief stopover for the couple before they continued on to their final destination. But where was it?
Investigators found an address that indicated Heather and Roberto may have fled to Miami, Florida. But that address turned out to be merely a postal drop containing two forged passports with the names "Nicole Marie Reger" and "Joseph Anthony Panura". Both were for entry into the South American nation of Suriname. The couple never showed up to pick up the passports. And the FBI questioned whether Suriname had truly been their destination. It was possible that they had intended for the documents to be found as part of an elaborate effort to mislead their pursuers.
On October 13, 1993, thirteen days after the robbery, investigators discovered the armored van in a warehouse at a commercial rental site in Las Vegas. The warehouse had been rented by Roberto. The van was discovered after the warehouse's owner grew concerned when he had not seen or heard from Roberto in several days.
Inside the van were a .357-caliber Magnum revolver, a notebook, Heather's work clothing, and about $3,100 in small bills. Inside the warehouse were packing materials and blank waybills. This confirmed the FBI’s suspicions that the $3 million had been packed into boxes and shipped to some unknown destination. Also found in the warehouse were a pair of thick glasses, information about yacht charters out of San Diego and Acapulco, and telephone numbers for businesses in Miami, the Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands.
The FBI learned that Heather and Roberto had set up a phony business at the warehouse, "Steel Reinforcement Inc.", so they could abandon the van in plain view without attracting suspicion. Heather even had business cards made for the company with the names they had on their passports.
According to the FBI, Roberto opened the business under the guise of retrofitting vehicles to be used as armored cars and vans. As a result, no one was surprised when an actual armored vehicle was brought into the facility. The ploy was one of many carefully crafted details in a seemingly flawless crime.
The FBI believes that immediately after dropping off her partners at the casino, Heather drove to the warehouse a few blocks away, where she and Roberto packed up and shipped out the money. They then went to the airport, boarded the private jet, and disappeared.
Agent Dushek thinks the robbery was well-thought-out, well-conceived, and well-executed. But he says that crime does not pay. He does not believe it was a "perfect crime". He thinks that the FBI will still get Heather and Roberto. He says the couple only has to make a mistake one time, and they will get them.
Based on evidence found in Heather's apartment, investigators believe she and Roberto may be posing as art dealers. They have also received information that the couple recently traveled to Europe, possibly England. They may also be in Mexico or Central America.
Extra Notes:

  • This case first aired as a part of an FBI Alert on the May 25, 1994 episode. Also featured were Joseph Gardner, Floyd Travers and Ora Prince. It was later expanded on the October 2, 2001 episode.
  • The FBI Alert was excluded from the FilmRise release of the Robert Stack episodes.
  • It was also profiled on America’s Most Wanted, Dateline, and the Netflix documentary, Heist.
  • Originally, police believed that Roberto's name was "Julius Suave"; it took them two months to determine his true identity.
  • Sources vary on several details in this case, including: the year Roberto was released from prison (1987, 1991, or 1992); the amount of money stolen ($1.5, $2.5, $2.9, or $4.1 million); whether Heather or Roberto originally planned the robbery; where she met him (some sources state she wrote to him while he was in prison); what time she dropped off her partners (8:15 or 9:20am); where she was supposed to meet her partners that day (front or side entrance); how many ATMs were at the casino (five or six); whether Heather or Roberto was in the wheelchair at the airport; and which airport they went to (Hughes or McCarran).
Tallchief 2005

Heather after her 2005 arrest

Results: Unresolved - On September 15, 2005, Heather surrendered to the U.S. Marshal's Office at the U.S. District Court, a federal courthouse in Las Vegas. She had been on the run for twelve years. Two days earlier, she had flown from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to the United States. She had been working there as a hotel maid and living under the name "Donna Marie Eaton" with her fiancé, Robert Wallace, and ten-year-old son, Dylan.
Heather told the police that she turned herself in because she was tired of hiding and living on the run and wanted Dylan to have a normal life. She said she had waited to turn herself in until that point because she wanted to make sure he was taken care of and that he understood the crime she was accused of.
After her surrender, Heather claimed that Roberto was the mastermind behind the robbery and that he had hypnotized, manipulated, and brainwashed her into involvement. She said he convinced her to get the job at Loomis. She claimed she did not know his plans until the day of the robbery.
Heather said that on the day of the robbery, Roberto gave her "strict" instructions on what to do. He told her to drive from the casino to the rented warehouse and gave her specific streets to use. He then threatened to kill her if she did anything incorrectly. She said she only helped him because she feared for her life and wanted him to be proud of her.
Heather claimed that after arriving at the warehouse, she helped Roberto pack the money into boxes, which he shipped to Florida. After that, he made her change into the "old woman" disguise, and they flew to Denver. After Denver, they went to Florida, the Caribbean, and finally the Netherlands. While there, they lived off of the stolen money, which Roberto controlled.
About a year after the robbery, Heather discovered she was pregnant with Roberto's child – Dylan. Two months after Dylan's birth, she took him and left Roberto. According to her, she has not seen Roberto since, and he has all of the stolen money. Following that, she spent most of her time in Europe. She said she used a fake accent, avoided Americans, and did not socialize much, to avoid people asking about her past. She decided to surrender in early 2005, although she met with an attorney before doing so.
Heather faced nine felony charges, including: bank larceny, conspiracy, bank fraud, and embezzlement. On November 30, 2005, two months after she surrendered, she pleaded guilty to bank and credit union embezzlement and possession of a fraudulently obtained passport. On March 30, 2006, she was sentenced to sixty-three months (five years and three months) in federal prison. She was also ordered to pay nearly $3 million in restitution.
On June 1, 2010, Heather was released from prison after serving five years. She then spent another five years under federal supervision. She remains in the United States and has since returned to a career in healthcare. She remains close with Dylan, who graduated from college in 2019.
Roberto remains at large and is still wanted by the FBI. He is Nicaraguan, stands 5'10" to 5'11" tall, and weighs between 150 and 180 pounds. He has hazel (or brown) eyes and curly brown hair, which he may have dyed black. He wears glasses, and his eyes are light-sensitive. He sometimes wears blue contact lenses or a patch over his eye. He has the eye disease exophthalmos, which causes his eyes to bulge out, making him look "bug-eyed". However, he may have had this corrected with surgery.
The words "Esta Vida Loca" (which translates to "This Crazy Life") are tattooed on Roberto's right forearm. He has been known to sell and use drugs. He was born on September 6, 1945. If he is still alive, he would be in his late seventies. He may now be in Jamaica, Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, or Europe. Heather believes he is now deceased.
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