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."
A true-crime author contacted Peggy Jo while she was in prison, asking her to collaborate on a book and perhaps sell it to Hollywood and make a lot of money, but she turned him down.
"She told me she didn't want to embarrass her family with more publicity," Cherry said. "And I think she also was determined to put that part of her life behind her."
Peggy Jo did try to put it behind her. By the mid-nineties she was out of prison and back living with her mother. To avoid the stares of their neighbors at the apartment complex, they moved to a two-bedroom townhome in Garland, 1,120 square feet in size, with a tiny backyard. She spent most of her time with her mother, whose hands by then were shaking so badly that she couldn't hold her own silverware. Every night, she gave her mother a bath and put her to bed. Then Peggy Jo sat alone in her bedroom, usually watching nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel until late at night.
For a while she worked as a telemarketer, going to an office for a few hours a day and making cold calls, offering whoever answered the phone the opportunity to receive a catalog filled with lovely home decorative items. She later found a job as a cashier at the Harbor Bay Marina, at Lake Ray Hubbard, just outside Dallas, selling customers everything from coolers to minnows to those key chains that float in the water."She was one of our best employees," said Suzy Leslie, who was then a manager at the marina. "Not once did the money in the cash register come up short on her shift. And what I loved about Peggy Jo was that she checked on the poorer customers. She was constantly pulling out her own money to help some of the families pay for bait. She used to visit with a poor Vietnamese woman who came out here to fish off the docks for her family's supper. There was a man who came out here who was deaf, and Peggy would write down questions on a sheet of paper, asking him if there was anything he needed. And I know she used to give some money to a man out here who had been in prison and was still down on his luck. One day I asked her why she did that, and she said, 'Well, we all got a past, you know.' "