Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [46]
“You’re going to have to kill me,” she said.
“Ma’am, you don’t have to do this,” replied one of the officers, a young man who would later be advised by his superiors to seek counseling for the guilt that would haunt him.
“You mean to tell me if I come out of here with a gun and point it at y’all, you’re not going to shoot me?”
“Please don’t. Please don’t do that,” yelled another officer.
But then she took a step out of the RV, and from the doorway her hand emerged, holding the toy pistol. Just as she began to lower it, four officers fired, the sound of the shots echoing off the surrounding houses and Peggy Jo’s RV.
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