The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (12 page)

According to Cherry, Peggy Jo didn't have any immediate plans to get married and have children, she didn't care about finding the right career, and she didn't worry about money.All she wanted was enough to get by, to pay her bills and have a little left over for a few drinks or a couple of meals each week at El Fenix. "She told me she was saving a little so that she could someday go to Mexico, just to live on the beach in a hacienda and wear bathing suits night and day," Cherry said. "She was beautiful and she was rambunctious. She always told me that deep down she was wild at heart."

But just how wild? One afternoon, when Peggy Jo and Cherry were driving around in the Fiat, they passed a Wells Fargo armored truck, and Peggy Jo made a rather odd comment: "You know, I could go rob that and not have to worry about anything for a while."

"You'd need a gun," Cherry said.

"Oh, heck, I'm smarter than that," Peggy Jo replied.

Cherry laughed. It never once occurred to her that Peggy Jo would ever work up the courage to commit an actual robbery. True, she could get a little feisty:When a police officer pulled her over one evening for speeding, she laughed and tore up the ticket in his face. And there was the night when she and Cherry had a spat at a restaurant in Fort Worth.To calm down, Cherry walked to another bar. A few minutes later, Peggy Jo walked outside and saw an unlocked pickup with the keys in the ignition. She jumped in and drove away. The police caught up with her, and she eventually pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, receiving a five-year probated sentence.

Still, it's one thing to go on a joyride in a stolen car after a night of drinking. It's another thing entirely to become an outlaw. "And what everyone needs to remember is that my aunt was a wonderful, loving woman," said Michelle (who asked that her last name not be used)."When she came over to babysit me and my brothers, she made up funny games for us to play, she cooked us popcorn, and then at the end of the night, she told us ghost stories, where the ghosts were always creaking up the stairs and doors were squeaking. She truly had a heart of gold."

Her life was not without disappointment, of course. In the mid-seventies, she told her friends she had fallen in love with a man who lived near Dallas. Then, several months later, she mentioned that the relationship was over. "She told me that she had gone to the town where the man lived and that she had seen his car parked in front of a business," Karen said. "She said she then saw a woman getting into the driver's seat. Peggy Jo walked up to the woman, asked her what she was doing, and the woman said, 'Well, ma'am, this is my husband's car.' Peggy Jo was completely devastated. She had no idea she had been dating a married man."

Not long after that, she moved into an apartment in Irving to live with her mother, who was battling a degenerative bone disease. Peggy Jo found a new job near the apartment at a computer factory, and then she worked in the office of a mobile-home construction company. She remained friends with Cherry, who by then was working as a cocktail waitress."Every now and then, we'd have an old-fashioned night and hit all the old places and listen to rock and roll," Cherry said."And one day she called and persuaded me to quit my job so that we could go to Florida and live for a couple of months on the beach."

But by 1980 Cherry had married and moved to Oklahoma City. Peggy Jo's childhood friend Karen had also married. Peggy Jo, who was still quite attractive, with a slender body and, in the words of Karen, "movie star long legs," certainly had plenty of chances to start another relationship, but she kept her distance from men. "I don't think she was ever able to get over the pain of the betrayal from the married man," Karen said. "I think she decided to be alone."

A year passed, then another, then another.And suddenly, just like that, it was 1984, and Peggy Jo was forty years old, with lines tracking out from the corners of her eyes and a touch of gray slipping into her hair. She found another job working for the Pony Express Courier Service, driving a van up and down Dallas's freeways, past a series of bland billboards, and delivering packages to businesses, and she also moved with Helen to a new apartment in another Dallas suburb-the Pecan Knoll Apartments, in Garland-to be closer to Michelle and her family. (Peggy Jo's sister, Nancy, was then living in East Texas; Peggy Jo and her brother, Pete, who had had disagreements in their younger years, were rarely speaking.)

Over the next couple of years, she endured her own medical problems. She injured her back and later underwent an emergency mastectomy, which kept her in bed for several weeks. She also began taking anti-anxiety medication, in large part because her income and her mother's Social Security checks barely covered the bills, especially as her mother's medical costs rose. "I think she was beginning to feel like she could never catch up," said Cherry, who occasionally came down from Oklahoma City to visit. "And she was too proud to ask anyone for help. She liked helping people. She didn't want people to help her."

Cherry paused. "And there's another thing that was going on with her," she finally said. "This is hard to explain, but I think Peg was starting to feel, well, like her life was slipping away. Do you know what I mean? It's the way women get sometimes.You get to a place in your life and you start looking back and you say to yourself that it's not working out the way you hoped.You think everything is slipping away and you feel-I don't know-crazy. You want to scream or something."

Cherry paused again."I think Peg missed being wild at heart."

She had to have been scared out of her wits when she walked into American Federal in Irving in May 1991. Although a note-job bank robbery does not involve the same kind of drama as an old-fashioned bank heist, in which the robber tunnels through the walls and blows apart the vault, it is still an incredibly daring act, a very public performance that is not only witnessed by employees and customers but is also always caught on tape.

Amazingly, however, Peggy Jo did not commit any of the amateur mistakes that many first-time bank robbers make. She kept her head down so the security cameras could not get a good shot of her face. She did not fidget as the teller read her note. During those long seconds that ticked away as the teller pulled the money out of her drawer, she remained absolutely silent, saying nothing. Then came that long walk out of the bank, when she had to be wondering if a security guard she had not seen was coming up behind her, a gun in his hand. But she did not break into a run. Nor did she squeal away in her car, running red lights and drawing more attention to herself.

In fact, after the FBI's Steve Powell interviewed bank employees and watched the surveillance tapes, he had no doubt that he was dealing with a professional bank robber. Powell, who grew up in the small Panhandle town of Tulia, eventually noticed that the robber had worn his cowboy hat backward. And he figured that the beard was fake. But it never occurred to him that the suspect wasn't a man.

In December 1991 Peggy Jo, dressed in the same outfit, stole $1,258 from the Savings of America, which was also located in Irving. This time, an eyewitness was able to write down the license plate number of the Grand Prix. But when Powell's agents tracked the license plate and converged on the owner's home not far from the bank, they found a lady sitting in her living room who said she had not been out of the house that day. She took them outside to show them her car, which was a red Chevrolet. That's when she noticed that the license plate was missing. Obviously, the FBI agents said, the bank robber had stolen the license plate earlier that day and put it on his own car to mislead them.

A month later, Peggy Jo struck again. This time, she moved to the other side of Dallas, hitting the Texas Heritage Bank in Garland for approximately $3,000. In May 1992 she robbed $5,317 from the Nations Bank in the adjoining suburb of Mesquite. During the robbery, she wisely handed back a stack of bills that contained a hidden dye pack, a small package that is triggered to explode a few seconds after it passes underneath an electronic eye positioned at a bank's exit, staining the money with permanent ink and sometimes staining the robber himself.

By then, Powell had named the robber Cowboy Bob. "And he was making me start to pull my hair out," he said. "How could this thin, little dried-up cowboy be whipping us this bad, time after time?"

In September 1992 Cowboy Bob robbed First Gibraltar Bank in Mesquite of $1,772. Police officers roared up in their squad cars, followed about ten minutes later by several vehicles filled with FBI agents. They tracked the license plate on Cowboy Bob's car to a Mesquite resident who, predictably, went outside to his driveway to find his license plate missing.

Then, while agents were wrapping up their investigation at First Gibraltar, a call came in that Mesquite's First Interstate Bank, about a mile away, had just been robbed by a man in a beard, a cowboy hat, a leather coat, and gloves. And he had hit the jackpot, escaping with $13,706. He was so pleased, the teller said, that he gave her a kind of salute as he left, tipping his hat with his gloved hand.

"Cowboy Bob is at it again!" shouted Powell, jumping into his car and racing toward First Interstate."Son of a bitch!"

This time the license plate that an eyewitness saw on Cowboy Bob's brown Pontiac Grand Prix was traced to a man named Pete Tallas. FBI agents found Tallas at work at a Ford auto parts factory in nearby Carrollton. "The agents asked me if I owned a Grand Prix with a certain license plate number, and I said, 'That's right,' " recalled Peggy Jo's brother. "I told them I had given it to my mother and Peggy Jo a year or so back because they couldn't afford a car.They said, 'It was just used in a bank robbery.' I said,'Bullshit, that car can't go fast enough.' "

Pete gave the FBI the address of Helen and Peggy Jo's apartment. When Powell and the other agents arrived, they spotted the car in the parking lot. As they discussed the possibility of storming the apartment and catching Cowboy Bob red-handed, they saw a woman in shorts and a T-shirt walk toward the car.

Powell stared at her. "It must be Cowboy Bob's girlfriend," he murmured to the other agents. They allowed her to drive away from the apartment so that the assumed boyfriend wouldn't see them. When they finally stopped her around the corner, Powell introduced himself to the woman, who politely said hello and told him her name was Peggy Jo Tallas. She admitted that the car was hers, and she said she had driven it earlier that morning to a nursery to buy fertilizer. Powell opened the trunk of the car: There was, indeed, a bag of fertilizer. He asked her if he could look around her apartment. For a moment, just a brief moment, she paused. No one was in the apartment, she said, except for her sick mother.

Helen slowly eased herself out of her bed after she heard the doorbell ring and walked to the front door. She opened it and screamed as the FBI agents darted past her, their guns drawn. They moved into Peggy Jo's bedroom. Her bed was immaculately made, and all of her clothes were hanging neatly in her closet. "What the hell?" said one agent.

Then, looking on the top shelf in her closet, another agent saw the Styrofoam mannequin's head with the beard pinned to it. He noticed the cowboy hat.When he looked under the bed, he saw a bag full of money.

"Come on, Peggy Jo, you're hiding a man from us," Powell said.

She gave him a look. "There isn't any man," she said. "I promise you that."

Powell kept studying her. That's when he noticed the spots of gray dye in her hair and the faint splotches of glue above her lip. "I'll be damned," he said as he pulled out his handcuffs. He read Peggy Jo her rights and drove her to the downtown FBI office, where other agents were waiting. "Gentlemen," Powell said, "Cowboy Bob is actually Cowboy Babette."

The newspapers, of course, had a field day, writing story after story about the cross-dressing bank robber who used her mother's apartment as a hideout.The reporters hunted down Peggy Jo's relatives, but they refused to say anything, in large part because they were so stunned about what Peggy Jo had been doing. "We had absolutely no idea," Michelle said. "We asked Helen if she knew what Aunt Peggy had been doing, and she kept saying, 'Robbing banks? Peggy was robbing banks?' "

Powell himself, realizing he had the case of a lifetime, did what he could to get Peggy Jo to talk. He wanted to know how she had learned to rob banks in the first place. He also wanted to know why she had decided to rob two banks in one day and why, before the second robbery, she didn't take the time to steal another license plate. Had she gotten so cocky that she thought the FBI would never catch her? "If she had just followed her usual routine," Powell later said, "we could still very well be wondering who Cowboy Bob really was."

But Peggy Jo wouldn't tell him anything. Nor would she say much to her court-appointed attorney, who then hired Richard Schmitt, a psychologist who specialized in evaluating criminals, to interview her. During their session, she eventually admitted that she had decided to rob a bank to pay for her mother's medications. But she certainly had no intention of robbing a second bank, she said. Or a third or a fourth, she continued, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it.

Schmitt could not take his eyes off her. Up until that point, he had interviewed approximately fifty bank robbers, all of them male. He had never before interviewed what he described as "a nice, normal-looking woman" who crossed her legs while she talked with him. "So why did you keep robbing banks?" he asked her.

But Peggy Jo never answered. She kept staring at a wall, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head as if she wasn't sure what else to tell him.

"I guess it was hard for her to admit just how much fun she had being a bank robber," Cherry said.

Perhaps because she carried out her crimes without using weapons-or perhaps because the judge agreed with the defense attorney's argument that Peggy Jo's behavior was "completely out of character"-she received a mild, thirty-three-month sentence. Michelle later went to see her at the federal prison in Bryan. "I knew that she was unhappy, confined to a cell most of the day," Michelle said. "But she came out smiling, and she asked me all about me and my daughter. She didn't say anything to me about the bank robberies. She didn't say a single word. She just said it was something that would never happen again."