The bullets came at her all at once, hitting her at nearly the same time, and she didn't even stagger. She fell forward, like a stalk of celery being snapped.
Once she hit the ground, however, she somehow found the strength to pull off her sunglasses. For a moment, she lifted her head.That May morning, the light was like honey. A soft breeze blew across the yard. From somewhere came the sound of pigeons cooing. Peggy Jo looked up at the dense new foliage of a sweet gum tree that rose above her.Then she closed her eyes and died.
Still assuming that accomplices were in the RV, a police SWAT team shot tear gas canisters through the windows and stormed through the front door, stepping over her fishing pole and box of photos and turning toward the bedroom. They stared at the bed, still perfectly made up, and at a couple of glass dolphin sculptures on the windowsill. After the "all clear" was announced, one officer found a small baggie of marijuana and another officer found her purse, which contained thirty-eight dollars in cash and her driver's license. The FBI's Millslagle ran a records check and realized that the dead woman was none other than Cowboy Bob. He called Steve Powell at his ranch and left him a message, saying he had some bad news about his old nemesis.
Powell called back. "Say it ain't so," he said almost wistfully.
"Yeah, I'm afraid we killed Peggy Jo," Millslagle said.
For the FBI, of course, the biggest question was how many other banks had Peggy Jo robbed. Some agents wondered if she had tried a bank robbery or two back in the sixties, when she was a freewheeling young woman tooling around Dallas in her burgundy Fiat. Others wondered if she had begun her career in the seventies, when she had been caught stealing the pickup. It is not an uncommon practice, after all, for a bank robber to avoid detection by using a stolen car as a getaway vehicle and then later abandoning it. Still others wondered if she had returned to robbing banks soon after her release from prison. After studying the evidence from the October 2004 robbery at Guaranty Bank, Millslagle did conclude that Peggy Jo was the robber. But that only led to other questions. Why had she gone back to that bank? Was she imitating her heroes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who had once robbed the same train twice? And why didn't she dress as a man for that second Guaranty robbery? Why also did she decide to speak to the teller instead of handing the teller a note? Was she hoping that FBI agents would study the bank's surveillance tapes and realize she had returned?
Meanwhile, newspaper and television reporters once again hunted down Peggy Jo's relatives. But they stayed silent. "I didn't know what to tell them," said Pete, who's now retired and living in Plano. "I mean, none of it made the slightest bit of sense. Surely Peggy Jo had to know that if she was in some kind of financial jam again, we would have helped her out."
About thirty members of the Tallas family and a few of Peggy Jo's friends gathered at the Kaufman city cemetery for a private burial service. In an impromptu eulogy, Michelle told a story about Peggy Jo's adopting a wounded duck at the marina and naming it Bernice. One of Michelle's brothers read some Scripture and then said, "I am certain that in the few minutes leading up to her death, as she sat in her RV contemplating her fate, Peg was making peace with God."
There was a long silence. Michelle and Karen covered their faces with their hands and wept. "Okay, I guess we're done," said Pete, nodding at the undertaker, walking away before anyone could see the strain on his face.
Cherry Young, still living in Oklahoma, wasn't at the funeral. She didn't hear about Peggy Jo's death until August, when she called Pete to catch up. "There still isn't a night that goes by that I don't wake up and think about her," Cherry said. "Sometimes I can't get over the sadness that she's gone. But then I think about her walking out of that bank, sixty years old, that bag full of money, and I have to say that she went out doing what she loved. We'll never understand it, but she was doing exactly what she loved. I wish I could write her a note and say,'Good for you, my sweet Peg. Good for you.' "
Skip Hollandsworth was raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English from Texas Christian University. He has worked as a reporter and columnist for newspapers in Dallas, and he also has worked as a television producer and documentary filmmaker. Since joining Texas Monthly in 1989, Hollandsworth has received several journalism awards, including a National Headliners Award, the National John Hancock Award for excellence in business and financial journalism, the City and Regional Magazine Gold Award for feature writing, and the Charles Green Award for outstanding magazine writing in Texas, given by the Headliners Club of Austin. He has been a finalist four times for the National Magzine Awards, the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and his work has been included in such publications as The Best American Crime Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing.
Because Peggy Jo Tallas was so secretive, never telling one friend about another, hiding even the most simple details about her life from her own family, I wrote the story convinced that, as soon as it was published, I would hear from people who had known her. I thought they would tell me that I had missed certain key insights into her personality that would have helped me understand why she robbed banks. But for weeks, there was nothing. Then, six months after the article was published, I received a two-sentence letter, obviously written by an elderly person: ' 'Mr. Hollandsworth-the Peggy Jo I knew was a gentle, loving woman who devoted her life to her mother. If the police knew her like I did, I think they would have let her keep driving."
Jeffrey Toobin : Killer Instincts
Did a famous prosecutor put the wrong man on death row?
from The New Yorker
Many American courthouses have a Kenneth Peasley. For years, he was the most feared prosecutor in Arizona 's Pima County, which includes Tucson. He was widely known as the government lawyer who wouldn't plea-bargain, who left his adversaries seething, and who almost always won. When defense lawyers got together, they would talk about how Peasley had stuck his finger in their clients' faces, or how he wouldn't greet them in the hallway. "The defense lawyers hated him," Howard Hantman, a Pima County Superior Court judge, said."But I always thought that was because he was so good. Watching Ken was like watching great theatre. He had an instinct for the jugular like no prosecutor I ever saw."
Peasley was more than just a local phenomenon. From 1978 until last year, he tried more than two hundred felony cases, including a hundred and forty homicides, and handled about sixty capital cases. He gave lectures around the country about how to try murder cases, and he won national awards. Steve Neely, who, as the county attorney, was Peasley's boss for eighteen years, said,"He was absolutely the most effective prosecutorial performer that I have ever seen or heard of." Peasley, a two-time state prosecutor of the year, is personally responsible for a tenth of the prisoners on Arizona 's death row.
Last year, Peasley acquired another distinction: he was disbarred for intentionally presenting false evidence in death-penalty cases- something that had never before happened to an American prosecutor. In a 1992 triple-murder case, Peasley introduced testimony that he knew to be false; three men were convicted and sentenced to die. Peasley was convinced that the three were guilty, but he also believed that the evidence needed a push.
During the years of Peasley's rise and fall, the exoneration of prisoners on America 's death rows has become increasingly common. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since the mid-nineteen-seventies a hundred and seventeen death-row inmates have been released. Defense lawyers, often relying on DNA testing, have shown repeatedly how shoddy crime-lab work, lying informants, and mistaken eyewitness identifications, among other factors, led to unjust convictions. But DNA tests don't reveal how innocent people come to be prosecuted in the first place.The career of Kenneth Peasley does.