Usually, she liked wearing khaki pants, a simple blouse, and loafers. But on a lovely morning in May 1991, Peggy Jo, who was then forty-six years old, decided to wear something different. She walked over to her dresser, the top of which held a few small glass sculptures of dolphins with iridescent eyes that she had been collecting off and on for more than a decade. She opened one of the lower drawers and pulled out a pair of men's pants and a dark men's shirt. From her closet, she grabbed a men's brown leather jacket that she kept on a hanger. She then reached for a Styrofoam mannequin's head that was on a shelf in the closet. A fake beard was pinned to it and on top was a white cowboy hat.
She took off her nightshirt and put on the clothes along with some boots that were too big for her feet. She stuffed a towel under her shirt to make herself look heavier. She stepped into the bathroom, rubbed some adhesive across her face, pasted on the fake beard, and colored her hair with gray paint she had bought at a costume shop. She placed the cowboy hat on her head, put on a large pair of silver-rimmed sunglasses, and pulled on a pair of gloves. She then took a few minutes to write a note on a sheet of lined paper and put it in her pocket.
"Be back in a minute," Peggy Jo told her mother, tiptoeing past her room. She walked outside, got behind the wheel of her 1975 two-door Pontiac Grand Prix, drove to the American Federal Bank just off West Airport Freeway in Irving, pulled into the parking lot, stepped into the bank's lobby, and headed toward the counter, where a young female teller was smiling cheerfully.
"Hello, sir," the teller said. "How may I help you?"
Peggy Jo pulled out the note she had written. "This is a bank robbery," it read. "Give me your money. No marked bills or dye packs."
The stunned teller handed over a stack of cash from her drawer. Peggy Jo nodded, stuck the money into a satchel, and walked out of the bank. She then drove straight back to her apartment, where her mother was still in bed, getting hungry, hoping Peggy Jo would return soon to fix her lunch.
In the criminology textbooks, they are invariably described as products of a deprived socioeconomic background. Most of them are young male drug addicts who don't have the slightest idea what they are doing. When they burst into banks, their fingers twitch and their heads swivel back and forth as they look for security guards. They shout out threats and wave guns in the air. When they get their money, they run madly for the exits, bowling over anyone in their path, and they squeal away in their cars, leaving tire tracks on the road.
And then there was Peggy Jo Tallas. "I promise you, my Aunt Peggy was the last person on earth you would ever imagine robbing a bank," said her niece, Michelle. "Whenever I was in a car with her, she never drove above the speed limit. If anything, she drove below it. And she always came to a complete stop at stop signs."
But Peggy Jo didn't just rob a bank. Beginning with that May 1991 trip to American Federal, she robbed lots of banks.According to the FBI, she was one of the most unusual bank robbers of her generation, a modern-day Bonnie without a Clyde who always worked alone, never using a partner to operate as her lookout or drive her getaway car. She was also a master of disguise, her cross-dressing outfits so carefully designed that law enforcement officials, studying bank surveillance tapes, had no idea they were chasing a woman.What's more, she was so determined not to hurt anyone that she never carried a weapon into any bank she robbed. "I have to admit, I admired her style," said Steve Powell, a former FBI agent who spent most of his thirty-year career chasing bank robbers and who supervised bank robbery investigations for the Dallas office of the FBI in the early nineties."She knew how to get in and out of a bank in sixty seconds. She was very skilled and very efficient, as good as any man I've ever come across."
Although female bank robbers are not unheard of-it is estimated that women commit less than 5 percent of the some 7,600 bank robberies that take place each year in the United States- almost all of them are young women who, like most of the men, rob banks for drug money. And only a few of those women rob more than a bank or two before they quit or get caught. Accordingly, when Powell and his team of FBI agents happened to corner Peggy Jo near her apartment in 1992, they assumed they would never be dealing with her again. She was one of those women, they believed, who had succumbed to a strange bout of middle-aged craziness. She wasn't poor. She wasn't an addict or an alcoholic. And from what people who knew her said, she was utterly harmless-"A sweet lady who once chatted with me about the best way to grow plants on the front porch," one neighbor noted. Seemingly repentant, Peggy Jo pleaded guilty to bank robbery and quietly went off to prison for almost three years.And that seemed to be that.
But then, this past May, the story broke that a small bank in the East Texas city of Tyler had been robbed by a sixty-year-old woman. The woman was dressed in black, wearing a black wide-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses that covered much of her face. She was polite and did not use a gun when she confronted the teller. She placed the money she received in a black satchel, nodded "thank you," walked out the door, and climbed into a twenty-foot Frontier RV with pretty purple shades around the windows. She turned on the ignition, pushed on the gas pedal, and headed south on Texas Highway 69, straight out of town.
After all those years, Peggy Jo Tallas had returned.
If you want to understand her, her friends say, you've got to go back to Dallas in the late fifties, when she was an irre-pressibly free-spirited teenager, her hair brownish-blond and curly and her green eyes as shiny as marbles. "She had a beautiful, wide smile that made you want to smile back at her," said Karen Jones, her closest childhood friend."And what was most special about her was that she loved doing things other kids didn't do. She once drove me around looking for stray dogs to adopt. And then she took me over to the Yellow Belly drag strip just to watch the cars race."
She was the youngest of three children.When she was four years old, her father died of cancer, and her mother, Helen, found a job as a nurse's aide to support the family. They lived in a tiny rent house in the suburb of Grand Prairie. Peggy Jo's sister, Nancy, was a high school majorette, and her older brother, Pete, played on the district's championship basketball team. Peggy Jo, however, dropped out of high school after the tenth grade. "She told me there was just too much else to do in life than spend so many days at school," Karen said. One day, in fact, Peggy Jo jumped in her car and drove to San Francisco because she wanted to see what life was like there. When she returned, she gave Karen a book of poems written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the co-founder of San Francisco 's famous City Lights bookstore and an influential Beat poet whose work often decried the emptiness of modern life. (In one of his most famous poems, from A Coney Island of the Mind, he described America as a country of "… freeways fifty lanes wide/on a concrete continent/spaced with bland billboards/illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.") "I laughed and thought, 'Of all people, Peggy Jo's been off reading poetry in San Francisco,' " Karen said. "But that was just who she was, always ready for an adventure."