The Femme Fatal
True Crime - Femme Fatale Style
The Femme Fatal tells the stories of women who commit crimes, blending true crime, pop culture, and astrology to explore power, obsession, and the darker side of femininity.
The Femme Fatal
Cowboy Bob: Peggy Jo Tallas
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For over a year in the early '90s, the FBI hunted one of the smoothest bank robbers Dallas had ever seen: a quiet cowboy in a white hat and a Santa Claus beard who passed polite notes, never carried a gun, and walked out of six banks like he had nowhere to be. They called him Cowboy Bob. They were wrong about almost everything.
This week, we discuss, a wild-at-heart Texas girl who loved Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, dreamed of a hacienda on a Mexican beach, and spent decades caring for her bedridden mother in a tiny Garland apartment. That is, until the day she glued on a beard, pulled a hat down low, and became somebody else.
Episode based on Skip Hollandsworth's "The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob," Texas Monthly.
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Welcome to the Femme Fatal, a true crime podcast with an astrology twist. I'm your host, Stacy Dotson. Each week I'll be joined by a guest host because this femme fatale prefers not to work alone. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Femme Fatal, and I'm joined again with Kay. Hi, Kay. Hi, Stacy. Thanks for having me back. Thank you for doing this. It's a quick one because I'm running really behind on my schedule here. So I just wanted you to join me tonight while I tell an interesting story that I read the other day.
SPEAKER_01Looking forward to this one.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So I was reading, and this is literally the book title She Kills the Murderous Socialite, The Cross Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales.
SPEAKER_01Wait, is this what's his name? Hightower? Skip Hollinsworth. Hollinsworth. That's it.
SPEAKER_00Skip Hollinsworth. Yeah. He wrote for Texas Monthly. In 2005, he wrote a piece called The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob. So it made it into this book. Basically, this book is like a collection, but it's of all female. So uh she's just number one. So get ready. Okay. Because there's a few more in here we're gonna cover. Saddle up.
SPEAKER_01Let's talk about cowboy bob.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, saddle up. Yep. There you go. The best part is it's Texas. You and I should just commit to like Texans for the rest of the year when we do this together. Does that sound good? We've talked about a lot of Texans, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yes, we have. And Floridians.
SPEAKER_00And Floridians, yes. Okay, well, I'm gonna just jump in and tell you the story, and I will have some flavor in there, but know that that comes from good old Skipp and his amazing writing. So awesome. Yeah, he's a great writer. He is, he's a great writer. So we're gonna start. Okay. Peggy Joe Tallis was born on June 6, 1944, in Kaufman, Texas, a little town southeast of Dallas. And she was the baby of three kids. She had an older brother, Pete, and a sister, Nancy. And when Peggy Jo was four years old, her dad passes away from cancer. So her mom, Helen, goes to work as a nurse's aide and raises the three kids in a tiny rent house in Grand Prairie, which is a Dallas suburb. You know, you're probably really familiar with all of that.
SPEAKER_01I used to live up in the DFW area. And if I remember correctly, from the late 80s, early 90s when I was there, Grand Prairie is kind of a blue-collar town.
SPEAKER_00Very blue-collar town, yes. Her brother's basketball star, her sister's a majorette, and Peggy Joe drops out after 10th grade. Her best friend from childhood, a woman named Karen, said Peggy Joe basically told her there was too much going on in the world to waste it sitting in a classroom. And she meant it. This is a teenager in the late 50s who used to drive around looking for stray dogs to adopt and take her friends to the drag strip to watch car races. And at one point, she just gets in her car and drives to San Francisco by herself because she wanted to see what it looked like. And she comes back with a book of beat poetry, Lawrence Fairlingetti, for her friend Karen, and says, Here, I got you this. And Karen's like, of all people, Peggy Joe went off and read poetry in San Francisco. And that's who she is. She was also apparently a looker. She had green eyes, a big smile. She was tall, like 5'10, and she was just always up for fun, from what all her friends said. So now she's in her 20s. She gets her own place in North Dallas, and she's working as a receptionist at a Marriott downtown. She meets Cherry Young. Cherry's another receptionist there, a cute blonde, and the two of them become inseparable out almost every single night. Peggy Joe's got this little burgundy fiat, and she drives it like she stole it, racing guys from stoplight to stoplight, gunning the engine, and they're hitting all the big Dallas clubs on Greenville Avenue. They like to drink beer, play pool, flirt. They go see concerts. They saw the Doors, the Doobie Brothers, and the Rolling Stones.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so this is late 60s, right?
SPEAKER_00She's in her 20s now, so yeah. She would drag Cherry to coffee houses as well because she was still into the amateur poet readings and beatnik type culture. She contained multitudes. Slam poetry, isn't that what you call it? Slam poetry, yes. And they went to movies a lot, and her favorite movie was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's a great movie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, she watched it over and over. And it's kind of prophetic, I guess. Maybe that's not the right word, but you know, the movie is two charming outlaws who rob banks and trains, but don't think of themselves as bad guys because they would never hurt regular people and won't give up life even when they know it's going to kill them. And there you go. And they go out in the hail of gunfire. That's right. That was her favorite movie.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so but Cherry does not go along with things with Peggy. In the future, no, she's not a bank robber yet.
SPEAKER_00Peggy Joe's just a just a girl in her 20s who likes to party. So what did Peggy Joe want out of life at this point in her 20s? According to Cherry, she didn't want marriage, not kids, not a career. She wanted enough money to pay her bills and have a couple of drinks, eat at El Phoenix once or twice a week. And who doesn't love their Tex-Mix?
SPEAKER_01I know a Tex-Mix is the best.
SPEAKER_00It is. That's the dream for her, right? Save up enough money to move to Mexico, maybe, and live on the beach in a hacienda. And that was her whole plan. And she had this phrase, this thing she said all the time, that deep down she was wild at heart. Okay. One afternoon, Peggy Joe and Cherry are driving around in the fiat and they pass a Wells Fargo armored truck. And Peggy Joe, totally casual, goes, you know, I could rob that thing and not have to worry about anything for a while. And Cherry laughs and says, Well, you need a gun. And Peggy Joe says, Oh heck, I'm smarter than that. Right. And so Cherry just laughs it off because, you know, it's Peggy Joe, and she never thought in a million years that that would be true. But remember that line, I'm smarter than that. So that's a philosophy that she's about to become. But, you know, 20 years earlier. But she did have a little bit of a record and a bit of a temper. She got pulled over for speeding one night and in front of a cop laughed and tore the ticket up. I'm sure that went over well. I'm sure that did not. Did she get arrested? No, he let her go. Oh. But then another night, she and Cherry were out in Fort Worth and she got into a fight at a restaurant with her, just to spat girlfriend stuff. And then Cherry walks off and went to a different bar to cool down, and Peggy Joe walked outside, and there's a pickup truck sitting there, unlocked keys in the ignition, and she just gets in and drives away.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's bad. That's grand theft auto, I believe. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I guess if you leave your keys in there, you know, just in the ignition, she should shave off the, you know, it's not like just theft auto, not grand.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00It's not grand. You're right. It's not grand at all. Anyway, so she just takes the truck and then the police catch up with her later, and she ends up pleading guilty to a felony, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, and she gets a five-year probated sentence. So no prison, but you know, a felon on paper.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, she has a record now.
SPEAKER_00And Hollinsworth made a point that I love. It's one thing to joyride in somebody's truck after too many beers. It's a whole other thing to become an outlaw.
SPEAKER_01But she didn't become an outlaw in the truck.
SPEAKER_00Not in the truck. And not for many more years. In the end, nobody actually ever said they called her an outlaw. Her niece, Michelle, said she was a babysitter who made up games and popped popcorn and told the greatest ghost stories, had a heart of gold. And that's how everybody that saw her described her, basically.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that's what I read too. People thought she was just she was a great person. She was the bee's knees, yes.
SPEAKER_00The bee's knees. So how do you get from fiat racing to what happens next, right? Right. What happened the next 20 years? So it's the mid-70s now, and Peggy Joe falls in love, real love. She tells her friends about him, and then a few months later, it's just over. She really plays things close to her chest. She doesn't talk about it, but eventually she tells her friend Karen she had driven to the town where he lived and saw his car parked out in front of a business and watched a woman get into the driver's seat. And so Peggy Joe walked up to the woman and asked her what she was doing. And the woman says, Ma'am, this is my husband's car.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I know.
SPEAKER_00She realized she'd been dating a married man and had no idea. And then later her friend Karen said she doesn't think she ever got over it, that she thinks that she was so hurt. And then she basically decided right then to be alone. And then, as you'll hear in the story, it's pretty much, you know, she was alone. She never married or anything. So around this same time, her mother, Helen, is getting sick. She's been diagnosed with a degenerative bone disease. And Peggy Joe moves in with her in an apartment in Irving. She works at a computer factory and then in an office of a mobile home company. She and Cherry still have occasional wild nights out, but Cherry's married and Karen's married, and basically her friends have all kind of gone on to their, you know, married children phases. So then a year goes by and another, and suddenly it's 1984, and she's 40, and, you know, as we all do, she's aging and she's driving a delivery van for a courier service up and down Dallas freeways. And she and Helen, her mother, had moved into an apartment in Garland to be near their niece, Michelle. She's barely speaking to her brother at this time. She gets hurt, has a back injury, and she has an emergency massectomy. She goes on anti-anxiety medications, and money is just, it's not working. Her paychecks, plus Helen's Social Security, barely cover things, and Helen's medical bills keep climbing. Peggy was way too proud to ask anybody for help. Cherry, her friend, said Peggy Joe liked helping people but couldn't stand being the one who needed it.
SPEAKER_01Too proud.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, she's proud. And Cherry said something else that I think is really the heart of the whole story. She said, and I'm paraphrasing. She thought Peggy would start to feel like her life was slipping away. Like you get to a certain point, you look back, and it just isn't what you think it was going to be. And you kind of want to scream. And then Cherry said, I think Peg missed being wild at heart.
SPEAKER_01So she did something about it. She added some spice to her life.
SPEAKER_00She added some spice to her life. Yes. So that brings us to May of 1991. So it's regular morning. Peggy Joe's 46 years old. She wakes up, makes her bed, and she was very meticulous about that. She goes into her mom's room, helps her get into the kitchen, fixes her cereal, sets out her pills. They chat. Peggy Joe smokes a cigarette and drinks a Pepsi out of a coffee cup. So it's the morning. She gets her mom ready and taken care of. And then she gets her mom settled and she puts her back to bed with glass water and her mom's romance novels. She liked to read a bunch of romance novels. So she goes into her room and instead of her usual getting dressed in her shorts and shirt, she puts on men's pants, a dark man shirt, a brown leather jacket, boots that are too big for her. She stuffs a towel under the shirt to look heavier. She takes a styrofoam mannequin head down out of her closet shelf, and pinned to it is a fake beard. And sitting on top of it is a white cowboy hat. She glues the beard on, she sprays her hair gray with paint from a costume shop. She puts on big silver sunglasses, gloves, and she writes a note on a piece of lined paper. She then tells her mom she'll be right back.
SPEAKER_01Wow. So she's been planning this for a while.
unknownI guess so.
SPEAKER_00So she drives her 1975 Pontiac Grand Prix, which her brother had given her and Helen because they couldn't afford a car. She drives to the American Federal Bank in Irving. She walks in, the teller looks up and says, Hello, sir, how can I help you? And Peggy Joe hands over the note. It says it's a robbery. Give me your money, no marked bills, no die packs. So the teller hands her a stack of cash. The FBI never put an exact figure on that one publicly, but it was a modest haul, a few thousand at most. Peggy Joe nods, puts it in a satchel, and walks out. Doesn't run, doesn't peel out of the parking lot, drives straight home to make her mother lunch. Wow. That's so ballsy. It is. It's very ballsy. There's an FBI guy that's going to join the case later. His name is Steve Powell. And this is what he would later say. He'd spent about 30 years chasing bank robbers. He watches the tapes and he's like, this is a pro. Head down so cameras can't get the face, doesn't fidget while the teller reads the note, never says a word, in and out in about 60 seconds, walks, doesn't run. Powell said she was as good as any man he'd ever come across. Everybody thought it was a man, right? Everybody thought it was a man, yes. So he is the one on the FBI they're working on, and they watch a lot of video surveillance. So he clocks that the beard is probably fake, but he also notices the cowboy hats on backwards. And that was odd to him. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. But it never once, he said, entered his mind that she was a woman. And so she keeps going. Wow. Wow. So in December 1991, the same outfit, Savings of America, also in Irving, she walks out with $1,258. Not exactly a fortune, but an eyewitness did get a license plate. Agents swarm the address, and it's a lady sitting in her living room who hasn't left the house all day. They walk out to her car and the plate is gone. Peggy Joe had stolen it that morning and slapped it on the Grand Prix.
SPEAKER_01Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_00So she gets away with that again. So January 1992, she goes to the other side of Dallas, Texas Heritage Bank in Garland, and gets about 3,000. And then again, in May of 1992, Nation's Bank in Mesquite and her haul is $5,317.
SPEAKER_01So moving up in the world, is she stealing license plates for all of these robberies?
SPEAKER_00She does. She takes plates and switches them before she goes and then takes them off. On the one in Mesquite, though, during that robbery, the teller tried to slip her a stack with the die pack in it. And Peggy Joe happened to look in the bag, and then she just takes it out and hands it back and says, No, thank you.
SPEAKER_01Oh, wow. No, thank you. No, thank you.
SPEAKER_00By now, Pal has given this guy that he's looking for a name, Cowboy Bob. And cowboy Bob is driving him and the rest of the FBI crazy. He said something like, How is this skinny little dried-up cowboy beating us this bad over and over?
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00So then September 1992, this is the day it all comes apart. She robs first Gibraltar bank in Mesquite. She only gets about $1,772. Her smallest take yet. Cops show up, FBI shows up, they trace the plate, stolen off a guy's driveway, of course. And while the agents are literally still standing in the first bank wrapping up, a call comes in. First interstate bank about a mile away just got robbed. Man in a beard, cowboy hat, leather coat, gloves. And this time he hit it big. $13,706. That was more than everything before it combined. And the teller said he was so pleased with himself that he tipped his hat to her on the way out. So yeah. So two banks the same day, same town, and Powell is losing it. He's shouting, Cowboy Bob is at it again and racing over there. But here's the thing I don't know if it was her cockiness, excitement. This is where, you know, she made the mistakes. She didn't stop to steal a fresh plate between banks. And so the Grand Prix was wearing its real plate, and a witness got it. So it comes back registered to Pete Talis, Peggy Joe's brother. Agents find him at the Ford Parts plant in Carrollton and ask him if he owns a Grand Prix with such and such plate. And he says, Yeah, but I gave it to my mom and my sister a while back. They needed a car. They tell him it was just used in a bank robbery. And Pete goes, That's ridiculous. That car can't go fast enough.
SPEAKER_01I mean, what'd you say it was? A 75 Pontiac Grand Dam. Yeah, Grand Prix. Grand Prix. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So that's how he, you know, he rationalizes that.
SPEAKER_01Can't be my sister.
SPEAKER_00He ends up giving them the address. Powell and his team pulled to the apartment complex. They see the Grand Prix in the lot and they're strategizing about how to storm the place. And out walks a woman in shorts and a t-shirt and gets in the car. And Pal goes, that's gotta be Cowboy Bob's girlfriend. The bonnie to his Clyde, right? Because, you know, that's the only story that can make sense to them. So they let her drive off to not tip off the boyfriend. They end up stopping her around the corner. She's perfectly polite. She says, Her name's Peggy Joe Talis. Yes, this is her car. She's just been to the nursery for fertilizer. And pal pops the trunk, and there is, in fact, a bag of fertilizer. He asks if he can look around her apartment, and she pauses just for a second and says, Nobody's home except her sick mother. Poor Helen. She hears the doorbell, she has to drag herself out of bed, open the door, and screams as FBI agents come in with guns drawn. They go into Peggy Joe's room and it's immaculate, bed made, everything hung up. One agent's like, What the hell? And then another one looks up at the top shelf of the closet, the styrofoam head with beard, cowboy hat. Oh. And he looks under the bed and he finds a bag of money.
SPEAKER_01Busted.
SPEAKER_00Busted. Tal says to her, Come on, Peggy Joe, you're hiding a man from us. She's the man. She is the man. She just looks at him and tells him there isn't any man she promises him. And that's when he actually looks at her. He sees the flecks of gray paint still in her hair and this little spots of dried blue above her lip. And he says, I'll be damned. And he gets out the handcuffs. And when he walks her into the downtown FBI office, he announces to the room, gentlemen, cowboy Bob is actually cowboy Bobette.
SPEAKER_01That is awesome.
SPEAKER_00The newspapers go nuts. Cross-dressing bank robber using her sick mother's apartment as a hideout. The family is blindsided, and Peggy Joe won't talk. She won't talk to reporters, not even to the FBI, not even to her own lawyer. And her lawyer ends up bringing in a criminal psychologist. And the guy that he brought in has interviewed like 50 bank robbers, but all men. Definitely not many cross-dressing women. Now he's sitting across from what he described as a nice, normal-looking woman who crosses her legs and lights a cigarette. When I read this, because I took this from the book, I thought of basic instinct. He crosses her legs and lights a cigarette.
SPEAKER_01I'm guessing she doesn't look like Sharon Stone, though.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't think she looks like that. No. And she does end up telling him, the criminal psychologist. She says the first one was to pay for her mother's medication. And that she says she never intended to do a second or third or fourth. And he asks her the obvious question so why did you keep going? And she just stares at the walls and shrugs. Later, her friend Cherry said that her theory was that she thought it was hard for Peg to admit how much fun she'd had doing, you know, robbing the banks. She never used a weapon. And so her lawyer argued that was completely out of character. She gets a very light sentence after all this. What was it? 33 months federal. And she did her time at the women's prison in Bryan, Texas. Michelle visits and says Peggy Joe comes out smiling all the time, asking about everybody and says one thing about it that it would never happen again. A true crime writer actually, you know, reached out to her about writing a book, maybe a movie deal, and she says no, she doesn't want to embarrass the family. So she ends up getting out in the mid-90s. She gets out of prison and she does exactly what she said. She goes home to Helen. They move into a little townhome in Garland to get away from the neighbor stairs. Helen's hands are shaking so badly now that she can't even hold silverware. So she's really sick. Every night, Peggy Joe bathes her mother, puts her to bed, and then sits in her own room watching TV until late and does it all over again the next day. She has a job doing telemarketing for a while, and then she gets a job as a cashier at Harbor Bay Marina on Lake Ray Hubbard. And she ends up selling bait and coolers, and everybody there loves her. Her manager, Susie, said the register never once came up short on Peggy Joe's shift.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, putting her in charge of money doesn't seem like the best idea, but she reformed.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, she reformed, basically. She was always giving money to poor people who couldn't afford bait. And there was a deaf man that was regular and she would write notes to him. Then there was a guy out of prison who was down on his luck. And Susie always asked why she helped him and other people. And Peggy Joe said, Well, we all got a past.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So she's still, you know, somewhat of a looker, I guess. Guys ask her out, and she always turns him down and she says, Maybe next time I have to get home to my mom. But she got hit on a lot at the marina when she worked there. Then unfortunately, her sister Nancy passes away from breast cancer. And then in December of 2002, Helen, her mom, dies in her sleep, 83 years old. Susie said Peggy Joe could have put her mother in a home years earlier and just refused. She wanted her to be able to die in her own bed with dignity. At the funeral, she and her brother Pete finally make up after all those years. And then they start doing Christmases. And he asks her, you know, what are you going to do now? And she says she has some plans, but she doesn't say what. So it's spring of 2004. She buys a Frontier RV off of a guy at the marina. $5,900 cash, promises him $500 more later. He's not going to get that. Just put that out there. 20 feet long, purple shades in the window. She tells Susie the time has come. She's going to put some money together and head to Padre Island or Mexico and live on the beach like she's always said she would. And she tells Susie that she should come too before life ran out on them. She sells or gives away every piece of furniture. She sells her old Volvo, leaves her potted plants on a neighbor's porch, and she's gone. Neighbor said she just flew the coop. And for a few weeks, she parks at a public park on Lake. Michelle comes out and they sit in folding chairs by the RV. Peggy Joe's drinking Pepsi from a coffee cup, smoking menthols, playing Skinnard and Bob Seeger on the radio, cooking fajita meat in a skillet as the sun goes down.
SPEAKER_01That doesn't sound like a bad life.
SPEAKER_00It does sound like it. Michelle said that it wasn't the life she would have picked for herself, but she couldn't help admiring Peggy and enjoyed spending that time with her. Late summer 2004, she leaves a voicemail for another Marina friend, Carla, a woman she looked after through breast cancer and brought her a cap when her hair fell out. And the message says that she's about to hit the road, and no matter what happens to me, always remembered that I love you. So Carla tells her husband, and her husband's like, Well, I'm gonna go find her driver and give her some money, you know, but she's already gone. So now nobody really knows where she went. People later said they saw the RV at Lake Texoma, at Lake Lavon, or in little towns all over East Texas. And in October 2004, in Tyler, Texas, a small branch called Guarantee Bank gets robbed by, according to the tellers, an older man with the round belly and a scraggly mustache, floppy hat, baggy clothes, gloves. He sets a green canvas bag on the counter and asks for all the money, no bait bills, no blow up money, takes the cash. The person walks out, nobody sees a car. One teller does mention one detail. The voice was soft, kind of feminine, and the mustache looked glued on and the belly looked padded. So is she back? Is Cowboy Bob back? At this point, Steve Powell is retired out near uh Lubbock. He has a ranch, he does bank security seminars, and at the very end of each one, he passes around a photo of Cowboy Bob and tells the story like he's remembering an old flame. The Tyler agents don't know any of that. They polygraph some older guy. He passes, they move on. Meanwhile, Peggy Joe's calling family from payphones saying she's fine. Michelle bumps into her at Walmart in Garland, buying cigarettes and paper towels and fajita meat in great spirits. And on May 4th, 2005, Pete hears her RV is parked by a little lake on a relative's farm in Kaufman County, right back where she was born. And he drives out and they spend an hour going through a big box of old family photos, and he said they had a really good time. She tells him she's packing up soon, going on one of her adventures. He asks, Are you okay, Peggy Joe? And she hugs him and says, Yes, she's happy. And he says, Okay, see you later. The next morning is May 5th. At this point, she's 60 years old. She makes her bed, smooths the wrinkles, lays a fake sheepskin blanket across it, edge straight as a ruler. Her nice clothes, jeans, khakis, six iron blouses are hanging on wooden rods. She puts on black, all black. Black shirt, black pants, dark lipstick and rouge from a sandwich baggie of makeup, brushes her hair gray. Next to the mirror, there are photos of her grandnieces and grandnephews, freckles and crooked little grins. Up front in the RV, she's got a whole collection: sunglasses, wide brim hats, black wigs, hair extensions. She picks a big black straw hat that comes down over her forehead and huge black sunglasses. She drives to Tyler, parks the RV at a jack in the box across the street from Guarantee Bank, the same bank from October.
SPEAKER_01Oh no.
SPEAKER_00So Butch and Sundance rob the same bank twice in that movie. So there's another, you know, little tie-in there. But she waits for the light to change, crosses the street, walks in, and this time she doesn't use a note, she speaks, tells the teller it's a robbery, she needs all the money, don't set off any alarms. Teller's barely out of her teens, hands over everything, $11,241. That's the biggest score. That's Mexico. That's the beach. And in her hurry, she makes the mistake that she's never made before. She doesn't check for a die pack.
SPEAKER_01Oh no. I really want her to get away with this. What happens next? I know. Don't you want her to get away? Yes. I'm gonna guess she doesn't, though.
SPEAKER_00She does not. It goes off as soon as she's out the door, red ink all over the money, and a plume of red smoke pouring out of her satchel as she's dodging traffic back across the street to the RV. A utility crew up in Cherry Picker sees her. A young couple leaving Walmart sees her. The wife goes, I bet that person just robbed a bank. And they call 911. And here's the crazy look of it. That very morning, a bunch of FBI agents and Tyler cops are already out cruising looking for bank robbers because there'd been a string of robberies in Tyler and they think a group of young men is behind it. So the second call goes out, they need to send sirens everywhere. And Peggy Joe cannot get away. So the RV is going uphill on Highway 69, and it physically cannot go over the speed limit. Gears grinding, exhaust pouring out, past churches and a movie theater and a skating rink, and a parade of police cars and FBI SUVs in tow. Hollinsworth mentions that the exhaust drifting out over a field of blue bonnets in the median. I mean, okay, that's Texas, right? That's a Texas detail. The exhaust over a field of blue bonnets. She makes one last try, hits the brakes, turns on to a quiet subdivision street called Irish Moss Drive. And before she reaches the end of it, police cars shoot past and box her in. Cops in vests, handguns, rifles, crouch behind azalea bushes and trees. A guy on the street stands in his doorway filming with the camcorder. And nobody knows who's in there. Dispatches said probably a white female, but they can't rule out that it's one of the guys they've been chasing in a wig with the gang inside armed. Curtains are pulled. They can't see a thing. So they do the thing they do. Come on out, you're surrounded, make it easier on yourself. Minutes go by from what they pieced together after. She was sitting at a little kitchen table in the RV smoking a merit, the satchel's on the floor with $11,000 of red useless money and her fishing poles next to it and a box of family photos. And, you know, what she might have been thinking, she's 60, she's a felon with the prior bank conviction. This is going to be a long, long sentence. And maybe she gets out before she dies, maybe not. So she gets up and she goes to the back of the bedroom. Under her pillow, there's a real gun, a 357 magnum loaded with hollow points. She doesn't touch that. She picks up a toy pistol instead, a cap gun she'd apparently bought in case she ever needed to scare a teller. She opens the door, hands at her side, and the cops cannot believe what they're looking at. A little older woman in a big black hat, their grandmother's age, and she tells them, You're gonna have to kill me. So one of the officers, a young guy, says, Ma'am, you don't have to do this. And she says something like, So you mean to tell me if I come out of here with a gun and point it at all of you, you won't shoot me? And another officer is yelling, please, please don't do that. And she steps out and her hand comes up, holding the toy gun. And as she starts to lower it, four officers fire. She fell forward. Hollinsworth wrote that she didn't even stagger, and then she somehow reached up and pulled her sunglasses off and lifted her head for a moment and looked up at the sweet gum tree above her, and then she closed her eyes. SWAT tear gasses the RV and storms it, still thinking there's a gang inside. They step over the fishing pole and box of photos. The bed is perfectly made. There are little glass dolphins on the windowsill. She's collected those for decades. And in her purse, her driver's license and $38. Tyler, FBI agent, runs her name and realizes who he's got. He calls Steve Powell out on his ranch and leaves a message. Bad news about your old nemesis. And Powell calls back and says almost wistfully, say it ain't so. And the agent says, Yeah, I'm afraid we killed Peggy Joe.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's disappointing. I'm disappointed with the end of this story.
SPEAKER_00I know. Think of it. The cowboy bank robber, or the cowgirl bank robber, I don't know, but she never used a gun. She's in Texas and she never even used a gun. Even at the end, it was a toy gun.
SPEAKER_01She was done. She wanted to die, but she didn't want to kill herself with a gun.
SPEAKER_00Yep. So she got buried in Kaufman City Cemetery and about 30 family members and a few friends. Michelle told a story about Peggy Joe adopting a wounded duck at the marina and naming it Bernice. Her brother, Pete, kept it together until it was over, then said, okay, I guess we're done and walked away before anybody could see his face. And Cherry Young, unfortunately, didn't even hear Peggy Joe was dead until August when she called Pete to catch up. What she said is how I want to end this. She said she still wakes up at night thinking about her, but the sadness of it doesn't go away. But then she pictures Peg walking out of that bank, 60 years old, bag full of money, and she says she went out doing what she loved. Nobody will ever understand it, but she was doing exactly what she loved. And Cherry said she wishes she could write her one last note. Good for you, my sweet Peg. Good for you.
SPEAKER_01She kind of reminds me of Phelma and Louise. Yeah. She needed a sidekick. She did. Okay, she needed to not do the things she did, but I really wanted her to get away.
SPEAKER_00I know, I know. Telling the story, you have you have the feel you want her to get away. She was her own sidekick. I guess so. I'm gonna jump into astrology too. I didn't do any, like, if there's any pop culture here, we look it up because I feel like Skip Hollingsworth in this book is the best part. So let's jump on into horoscopes and homicides. My favorite. So Peggy Joe Talas was born June 6, 1944. No verified birth time, so no houses, no rising sign. We don't really need that though, because Peggy Joe is a Gemini son. Of course, Cowboy Bob was a Gemini. Gemini is the twins, duality, two sides, multiple identities, and it's ruled by Mercury. Quick thinking, observation, the ability to improvise. Peggy Joe literally had two identities. There was Peggy Joe, the daughter, the caregiver, the woman living quietly with her mother. And then there was cowboy Bob, the boots, the beard, the hat, the getaway car. And she moved between them so convincingly that trained FBI agents never once considered they were looking for a woman. That's only half of it, because Peggy Joe had a Sagittarius moon. So, and this is where Karen and Cherry's stories about young Peggy Joe get very interesting. Sagittarius is the wanderer, freedom, travel, what's over the next hill. Peggy Joe wanted San Francisco, Florida, Padre Island, Mexico, the beach. She bought an RV practically the minute her caregiving ended. And Karen's story, Peggy Joe just deciding one day she wanted to see San Francisco and driving there. That is Sagittarius moon almost to the point of parody. Gemini and Sagittarius are opposite signs. So that means she was born pretty close to a full moon, a Gemini sun opposite a Sagittarius moon. And so there's a push and pull built in. Gemini wants stimulation. Neither one can stand feeling trapped. And if you look at her adult life, her friends pair off. The man she loves turns out to be married, and you know, a bad person, obviously, because he's a cheater. And she retreats. Her mother gets sick. Peggy Joe moves in, takes a factory job, becomes a full-time caregiver, and the bills pile up. And the woman who once drove on a whim to San Francisco from Texas can't go anywhere. And so, you know, she kind of maybe felt like her life was slipping away. You know, I don't think Cowboy Bob was really only about the money. I think Cowboy Bob was also maybe a little bit of an escape hatch, too.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I totally agree.
SPEAKER_00Then there's Venus conjunct, Uranus and Gemini. Uranus is independence, rebellion, refusing to live by anyone else's rules. And Venus is what we value and what gives us pleasure. And you put them together and you get someone that needs freedom in relationships and lives. And that's what the conjunct means together. Peggy Joe never followed the script, never married, no kids, no career. She built an identity around after the married man broke her heart. She didn't go looking for replacement. She withdrew and got fiercely independent. And when she needed money, she didn't get a second job. She didn't ask her friends or family. She invented a male bank robber. And that's Uranus. And the Gemini piece makes it even better because the whole scheme depended on identity. She didn't overpower anyone. She outthought them. The FBI saw a beard and a cowboy hat and thought, man, Peggy Joe, let their assumptions do the rest. Then there's the darker one, Mars conjunct Pluto in Leo. And Mars is how we act, drive, courage, risk. Pluto intensifies whatever it touches. Mars Pluto is tremendous determination. Once this person decides, good luck moving them. And in Leo, there's performance, theater, and Cowboy Bob was absolutely a character. She didn't throw on a baseball cap, gray hair, beard, mustache, boots, leather jacket, and a hat so big the FBI named her after it. She performed Cowboy Bob.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00But you know, backwards hat.
SPEAKER_01Did you hear what happened to Pluto? That's messed up. Reference to Psych. Yep. No! Psych fans. Can't wait for Austin 27. I know.
SPEAKER_00But Mars and Pluto has an all-or-nothing quality, and that gets a lot harder to talk about when we reach 2005 because Peggy Joe had a real gun. She consciously left it inside. She picked up the toy. She walked out. She told the police they were gonna have to kill her. And she raised something she knew they believed was real. So we can't really know what was happening inside her head, but whatever decisions she made in that RV, it was final.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Sad ending. I so wanted her to get away with it.
SPEAKER_00I know. So what was Cowboy Bob really all about, right? When I put her chart next to Holland Wert's story, I kept coming back to one word, freedom. The Gemini sun, Sagittarius moon, Venus, Uranus, over and over. It's movement, independence, reinvention, refusal to be contained. And then the Mars Pluto, the determination to act when something feels intolerable. But the woman her friends describe sounds remarkably like this chart, restless, independent, not interested in convention, and always imagining someplace else. There you go.
SPEAKER_01That's her astrology. It's fascinating. Yes. Geminis are interesting. I know a few Geminis. I know a lot of all the signs. We've met a lot of people. We've met a lot of people, yes. Well, thank you. Thank you. That was a great story. Okay, well, good night, Kay.
SPEAKER_00The Femme Fatal. Created and hosted by Stacey Dodson. Produced by Mark Williams. Music by Marcia Yingling, Todd James, and Greg Loicano.