A fugitive turns herself in after 12 years

'A perfect crime' by a 21-year-old?
Three weeks ago marked 12 years since Heather Tallchief and Roberto Solis vanished with $3 million. The FBI agent on the case and the Las Vegas police sergeant both have since finished up their time and retired, and still there was no trace of Tallchief, Solis, or the money.

Larry Duis, former Las Vegas police sergeant: Of course I don’t like the word “perfect crime,” but it appears that it was very well-executed.

All that money and they got away with it.

Fred Tallchief, Heather’s father: A lot of people thought it was a great thing, you know. This 21-year-old kid gets away with $3 million dollars, she rips off the casinos, the insurance companies, like a Robin Hood.  She beat the system. That’s the way they looked at it.

Keith Morrison, Dateline Correspondent: And what did you think?

Fred Tallchief: It’s a 21-year-old kid with money, with a convicted murderer. My worst thought was he dumped her in the ocean for $3 million.

And for the past 12 years, that’s what Heather’s family believed likely happened.

Fred Tallchief: It’s the loss of a child, whether she’s dead or she comes back and has to go to jail for 30 years. It was the loss of a child for me.

Who is Heather Tallchief and what led her to become one of Las Vegas’s most notorious criminals?

Heather grew up in Buffalo, New York idolized by her little sister, Elaine.

Elaine Tallchief, Heather's younger sister: Whenever she had a new hairstyle I would ask her to do mine. I wanted to get a little taste of what it was like to be like her.

Heather’s parents divorced and though Fred was a hopeless drug addict, he was granted sole custody. He was a single father at 2... and stoned.

Morrison: What was your drug of choice?

Fred Tallchief:  More.

Morrison: Huh?

Fred Tallchief: More.

Morrison: More of whatever it happened to be?

Fred Tallchief: Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. It took me a quart of beer and a bag of glue, I was a glue sniffer. I don’t like the taste of alcohol so I’d sniff the glue to get the alcohol down. And I just stayed that way for the next 12 years of my life.

He re-married along the way, got sober when Heather was about 8 years old, and went on to have four more children.

Fred Tallchief: Because she was the first, I made a lot of mistakes. I had no guidelines. I was just shooting from the hip, you know.

Heather attended a Catholic high school, got into the “goth” scene as a teenager.

Elaine Tallchief: She was a trendsetter. She didn’t have to follow anybody. Just a leader. Very beautiful, always creating a different style for herself that I definitely wanted to follow.

At 20, Heather moved to San Francisco, where she got a job as a nursing assistant in an AIDS hospice.

Her record was perfectly clean when she met Roberto Solis— the man who would become her apparent partner in crime.

Morrison: Did you hear about this guy she was with, Roberto?

Elaine Tallchief: I heard about it when it happened.

Morrison: But not before that?

Elaine Tallchief: Never.

But now, her family feared she’d gotten involved with the wrong guy... and may be dead as a result.

Who was Roberto Solis?
It’s hard to say who Roberto Solis is, exactly. He has had 21 aliases. Using one of them, Solis had been involved in an armored truck heist before— a botched attempt in 1969.

That was at a Woolworth’s store in San Francisco where Solis and two accomplices approached Loomis driver Louis Dake. Dake showed Solis that his money bag was empty, turned it inside out. But Solis shot him twice in the back anyway. Roberto Solis had murdered a father of six.

Joseph Dushek, former FBI agent on the case: They could see that he didn’t have the money. So why would you necessarily shoot someone if they don’t even have the money?

Morrison: What does that say to you?

Dushek: That brings up some pretty deep questions about his attitude towards life and death and the seriousness of his violence.

Solis was sentenced to life in prison, escaped, was recaptured, and this time, stayed in prison for nearly  two decades. There, believe it or not, he became a respected “poet,” known then as Pancho Aguila.

Dushek: He considered himself to be a real intellectual, an art dealer.

He wrote five books, was included in six anthologies. And he captured the attention of well-known writers, who asked the parole board to grant him leniency.

Solis was released in September of 1991, and came back to the San Francisco area, though a parole violation for selling drugs too close to a school had him in and out of prison again. But then he was back to the city, where he met the adventurous young woman named Heather Tallchief.

Heather's last visit home
Heather had recently returned from her last trip home to Buffalo, where she’d helped her stepmother prepare for her baby brother’s birth in 1992. Elaine was 14 at the time.

Elaine Tallchief: I was sleeping in my mother’s bed. And she woke me up and she said, “All right, I’m leaving.” And she gave me a kiss on the head.  And I remember thinking I wanted to get up and give her a hug, and how sad I was that she was leaving.

Morrison: Especially on a day like that?

Elaine Tallchief: I just didn’t want her to leave at all because I hated when she left. It’s like when she’s there she’s got such energy and she’s so outgoing.

It was the last time they saw Heather. And later that day, Skyler was born. He has never met his eldest sister.

Skyler Tallchief, Heather's youngest brother: I always have thoughts of when I get older I can, you know, go out looking for her.

Heather did call occasionally from San Francisco over the months that followed. But then one day...

Fred Tallchief: She says, ‘Dad, I’m going to Las Vegas. When I get set up, I’ll call you.’

And then, a couple of months later in 1993, a knock at the door.

Elaine Tallchief: The FBI came to the door and wanted to talk to my mom. My mother told us all to go upstairs. So she was down there for a while and of course I was trying to listen. I had no idea what they were there for.

Fred Tallchief: They said, “We got her as armed and dangerous with two registered handguns. And we’re gonna shoot to kill” if they apprehend her.  And it was just—I was gone.

How could it be? What could have driven her to rob an armored truck, abandon her family, get her face on a “wanted” poster, and most probably— according to police— wind up dead?

After 12 years, Heather’s family had moved on, scar tissue forming over the emotional wounds her absence had caused.  But forget?  Hardly.

Morrison: Was this an absence that you and the rest of your family were always aware of?

Skyler Tallchief: Yes, there was.  One time I was in church with my class. I thought she was, you know, there in the back.

Keith Morrison: At church?

Skyler Tallchief: Yeah, with me.

Keith Morrison: Almost like a what, a guardian angel or something?

Skyler Tallchief: Yes, exactly, a guardian angel watching out for me.

But for police, for the FBI, the case was as cold as a case could be.

And then one day we found ourselves in a certain Los Angeles hotel. Police must not be informed, we were told, but there was news about Heather Tallchief.

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