Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [42]
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.’”
Occasionally, at the end of the day, some man at the marina would ask Peggy Jo if she’d like to join him for a cocktail at Weekends, a little restaurant nearby that had a dance floor next to the bar. But she’d turn him down. She’d tell him she needed to get back to her house to look after her mother. Maybe next time, she’d say, giving the man an apologetic smile. Then she’d sweep the floors, take one more stroll around the docks, watch the sun set, and head for her car.
Once again, a year passed, and then another. Peggy Jo lost touch with her old friends like Cherry and Karen. Her sister, Nancy, died of breast cancer, and in December 2002 Helen died in her sleep at the age of 83. Peggy Jo was at her mother’s bedside, holding her hand. “She could have put her mother in a nursing home a long time ago,” said Suzy, who by then had become close friends with Peggy Jo. “But when we talked up at the marina, she said to me that she wanted her mother to be at home, to live out her last years in dignity, sleeping in her own bed. She was relieved her mother was no longer in pain, yet you could tell she was still heartbroken. She couldn’t talk about Helen without tears coming to her eyes.”
At Helen’s funeral, Peggy Jo and her brother reconciled. She later went to the annual Christmas dinner that Pete and his