Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [40]
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