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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 stu
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.
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 Cha
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 mi
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 a
In the spring of 2004 Peggy Jo approached a man at the marina who was selling a Frontier RV. She gave him $5,900 in cash and promised to pay him $500 more at a later date. She told Suzy that the time had come to move on. "She said she was going to put some money together and head down to Padre Island or to Mexico and live on the beach like she had always wanted to," Suzy recalled. "She told me I ought to come along while I had the chance, before life ran out on us. I'll never forget her saying that. 'Before life ran out on us.' "
Peggy Jo sold or gave away all of the furniture in her townhome, and she sold an old Volvo she had been driving. She carried a few potted plants over to a neighbor's front porch, and then she drove away in her RV-"Just flew the coop," one neighbor later said. For a few weeks, she stayed at a public park near Lake Ray Hubbard, spending part of the day fishing or walking along the shore, watching the herons fly across the water. Occasionally, Michelle came out in the late afternoons to visit. She and Peggy Jo would sit on maroon folding chairs next to the RV. Peggy would drink Pepsi out of a coffee cup and smoke Merit menthol cigarettes, grinding them out in a little ashtray she held in her hand.