Illinois Gaming Parlor Burglaries: Two Men Arrested in ATM Smash-and-Grab Spree

Detectives say the pattern never changed: in through the roof, cut the power, then a sledgehammer and a crowbar. What the two men are alleged to have overlooked was that they carried their phones to every job.

Two men have been charged over a run of break-ins at gaming parlors, bars and other businesses around Decatur, after cell phone records led detectives to them.

Reese A. Heckman, 34, of Decatur, and Travis R. Ziemer, 28, of Macon, were arrested on September 14 and charged the next day in Macon County Circuit Court. Neither has been convicted and none of this has been tested in court; what follows is what two detectives swore to in charging affidavits, first reported by Decatur’s Herald & Review.

Detective J. Weddle of the Decatur Police Department and Detective Jonathan Roseman of the Macon County Sheriff’s Office signed those affidavits. Their two agencies had been working the case for about two months, chasing a run of smash-and-grab burglaries at gaming parlors and bars in Decatur and the rural edge of the city.

The method, Weddle wrote, never varied. Enter through the roof. Cut the power. Use a sledgehammer and a crowbar to rip out the ATM.

It worked at Nellie’s Tavern, 2717 N. Main St., at about 4:40 on the morning of July 17. The pair came in over the bar’s roof, killed the power and wheeled the ATM out on a handcart.

Thirteen days later it didn’t. At Debbie’s Gaming, 4380 W. Main St., at around four in the morning on July 30, Weddle says they were working the ATM onto the same cart when it refused to come free of the floor. They left it standing there and went.

Surveillance cameras had picked up two men in a black Korean car, one of them noticeably taller. Ziemer is 6-foot-2. Heckman is 5-foot-10.

The phones

The break came from search warrants.

Phone records put a handset linked to Ziemer at both Decatur scenes, and the surveillance footage suggested the two had been talking to each other while the break-ins were going on. So detectives pulled the record of who Ziemer had been calling, and when — and came up with Heckman.

After that it was a question of watching where the phones went.

In the early hours of Monday, September 14, cell tower pings put both of them at BB’s B.F.E. Bar & Grill in Latham, a village about 15 miles northwest of Decatur with an ATM and slot machines inside. The Logan County Sheriff’s Office was asked to go and take a look. The power had been cut, the ATM broken open, and the slot machines smashed apart and emptied.

The two men were tracked back to a house in the 2400 block of North Maple Avenue in Decatur and arrested there at about 11 a.m., once police had their warrants.

By then the phones were finished. They had been working right up until detectives got there, Weddle wrote, and were found “severely damaged and no longer functioning” — smashed on purpose, he alleges, to take the evidence with them.

What was in the house

It didn’t buy them much.

Searching the place, officers reported more than two pounds of methamphetamine sitting in the living room and a stolen semi-automatic handgun pushed into an air duct. Slot machine vouchers from the bar in Latham were in the glovebox of Ziemer’s BMW. A safe in one of the bedrooms held what the affidavits call a large amount of cash.

A second search, at a property on West Eldorado Street, turned up a shipping container — and the container turned up most of the rest. A sledgehammer, a crowbar and a handcart that investigators said matched the equipment on the surveillance footage. A stolen Hyundai that had started life red and been painted black, with money boxes of the kind used inside slot machines in the trunk.

There was also a Bobcat skid steer reported stolen out of Decatur, and a Bobcat backhoe reported stolen from Christian County, one county over.

In custody until Tuesday

Both men were charged with burglary, possession of burglary tools, possession of a stolen vehicle, obstruction of justice and theft, plus dealing methamphetamine and unlawful possession of a firearm.

A judge denied them pretrial release, finding they were too much of a danger to the community and too much of a flight risk to let go, and both are being held in the Macon County Jail.

They are due back in Macon County Circuit Court on Tuesday, September 23 — Ziemer for his attorney’s appearance, Heckman for a preliminary hearing at which he is expected to enter pleas.

Whether the case grows from there is genuinely open, and Weddle was careful not to overstate it. The phone history had the two moving around central and southern Illinois a good deal. How many other break-ins that accounts for, he wrote, is unknown, because any of them would most likely have happened outside Macon County and outside his reach.

Not an isolated problem

The arrests land in the middle of a bad stretch for Illinois businesses that keep video gambling machines.

The state logged 502 burglaries at such establishments by June 22 — more than the 473 recorded in all of 2025 — according to Illinois Gaming Board data obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times. More than $1.5 million went in the first half of this year alone.

Different crews have been working the Chicago suburbs on a different scale. In a September 3 break-in at a Peotone travel center, police said eight masked and gloved offenders were in and back out in under three minutes. A masked crew smashed video gambling machines at a Green Oaks gas station in Lake County, and burglars damaged three machines at a liquor store in New Lenox. No investigator has publicly connected Heckman or Ziemer to any of it.