Betty Anne Blanchard Heitmann, BHS 1941

 Betty Anne Blanchard Heitmann, BHS 1941

EX-BURBANKER SLAIN IN NEVADA HOLDUP

A Burbank High School graduate was one of three persons killed Tuesday August 29, 1967, in the $35, 000 robbery of a bank at Overton, Nevada, a small town near Las Vegas.

The victim was Mrs. Betty Heitmann, 44, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. James E. Blanchard, of 421 N. Lomita.

Mrs. Heitmann, a 1941 graduate of Burbank High School, had three daughters, Martha, 24, of Burbank; and Betty Lou, 12, and Barbara, 15, both of whom were visiting their grandmother here at the time of the slaying.

Arrested in connection with the murders of the two women clerks and the bank manager was Terry Lynn Conger, 23, a construction worker. He was arrested in Las Vegas Wednesday on three counts of murder, and held without bail.

A major search is still under way by the Clark County, Nevada Sheriff's office to find evidence in the case, including all but $2,000 of the stolen money which was found in a farmhouse.

The robbery was staged just before closing time at the one-story bank on Main Street. Investigators said "the bodies of the victims were stacked like cordwood" in the vault. They were all shot in the back of the head. 

Mrs. Heitmann's other survivors include her husband, Jack, and two sisters, Mrs. Warren Jackson, of 711 E. Harvard, and Mrs. Wayne Haggard, of Ogallala, Nebraska. 

Services for Mrs. Heitmann will be Friday in Overton.  Find A Grave Memorial

NOTE: Terry Lynn Conger, who 32 years ago killed the manager and two women tellers of an Overton Bank and stole $35,000, died Sunday September 19, 1999 due to complications from diabetes at University Medical Center. He was 55. 

He killed 30-year-old bank manager Larry Staley and clerks Vera Walkington, 30, and Betty Heitmann, 42. They each were shot in the head with .45-caliber rounds from a semiautomatic pistol.