Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [41]
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.