Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [47]
There was a long silence. Michelle and Karen covered their faces with their hands and wept. “Okay, I guess we’re done,” said Pete, nodding at the undertaker, walking away before anyone could see the strain on his face.
Cherry Young, still living in Oklahoma, wasn’t at the funeral. She didn’t hear about Peggy Jo’s death until August, when she called Pete to catch up. “There still isn’t a night that goes by that I don’t wake up and think about her,” Cherry said. “Sometimes I can’t get over the sadness that she’s gone. But then I think about her walking out of that bank, sixty years old, that bag full of money, and I have to say that she went out doing what she loved. We’ll never understand it, but she was doing exactly what she loved. I wish I could write her a note and say, ‘Good for you, my sweet Peg. Good for you.’”
SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH was raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English from Texas Christian University. He has worked as a reporter and columnist for newspapers in Dallas, and he also has worked as a television producer and documentary filmmaker. Since joining Texas Monthly in 1989, Hollandsworth has received several journalism awards, including a National Headliners Award, the National John Hancock Award for excellence in business and financial journalism, the City and Regional Magazine Gold Award for feature writing, and the Charles Green Award for outstanding magazine writing in Texas, given by the Headliners Club of Austin. He has been a finalist four times for the National Magzine Awards, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and his work has been included in such publications as The Best American Crime Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing.
Coda
Because Peggy Jo Tallas was so secretive, never telling one friend about another, hiding even the most simple details about her life from her own family, I wrote the story convinced that, as soon as it was published, I would hear from people who had known her. I thought they would tell me that I had missed certain key insights into her personality that would have helped me understand why she robbed banks. But for weeks, there was nothing. Then, six months after the article was published, I received a two-sentence letter, obviously written by an elderly person: “Mr. Hollandsworth—the Peggy Jo I knew was a gentle, loving woman who devoted her life to her mother. If the police knew her like I did, I think they would have let her keep driving.”
Jeffrey Toobin
KILLER INSTINCTS
Did a famous prosecutor put the wrong man on death row?
FROM The New Yorker
MANY AMERICAN COURTHOUSES have a Kenneth Peasley. For years, he was the most feared prosecutor in Arizona’s Pima County, which includes Tucson. He was widely known as the government lawyer who wouldn’t plea-bargain, who left his adversaries seething, and who almost always won. When defense lawyers got together, they would talk about how Peasley had stuck his finger in their clients’ faces, or how he wouldn’t greet them in the hallway. “The defense lawyers hated him,” Howard Hantman, a Pima County Superior Court judge, said. “But I always thought that was because he was so good. Watching Ken was like watching great theatre. He had an instinct for the jugular like no prosecutor I ever saw.”
Peasley was more than just a local phenomenon. From 1978 until last year, he tried more than two hundred felony cases, including a hundred and forty homicides, and handled about sixty capital cases. He gave lectures around the country about how to try murder cases, and he won national awards. Steve Neely, who, as the county attorney, was Peasley’s boss for eighteen years, said, “He was absolutely the most effective prosecutorial performer that I have ever seen or heard of.” Peasley, a two-time state prosecutor of the year, is personally responsible for a tenth of the prisoners on Arizona’s death row.