Cowboy Bob 37:15

Hi, it's Phoebe. We're heading back out on tour this fall, bringing our 10th anniversary show to even more cities. Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta, we're coming your way. Come and hear seven brand new stories told live on stage by me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr. We think it's the best live show we've ever done. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com slash live. See you very soon.

Hi, it's Phoebe. This month we're celebrating 10 years of Criminal. The very first episode came out almost exactly a decade ago. About 15 people listened, or even knew what podcasts were back then. But we were very excited to be making this show. Ten years later, I can't believe we're still getting to do this. And all this month, we're getting to spend time with some of you, in cities all over, as we take Criminal on the road.

You can learn more about our tour at thisiscriminal.com slash live, and maybe even get a last-minute ticket to one of our upcoming shows. Pretty soon we'll be in St. Paul, Chicago, Boston, Toronto, New York, Philadelphia, D.C., Raleigh, London, and Dublin. And we'd love to see you. For the next few weeks on the podcast, we're going to be sharing some of our favorite episodes from the past 10 years. And we're starting things off with one of my personal favorites of all time, Cowboy Bob. Here's the show.

Well, I can remember reading the newspaper, and back then the newspapers would print the grainy black and white photos of bank robbers or suspects in crimes. And there was this photo of a man dressed in a cowboy hat and boots and leather coat. It was like May 1991. Skip Hollinsworth is a writer for Texas Monthly.

A man with a beard, wearing a cowboy hat and a brown leather jacket, walked into a bank in Irving, Texas in May of 1991. Without speaking, he handed the teller a note that read, "This is a bank robbery. Give me your money. No marked bills or die packs." And I don't know, most bank robbers do not interest me. I mean, they're impulsive. They scream when they come into a bank. They shout. They wave their guns. They screech away.

They don't take any precautions. He was this polite gentleman, tipped his hat at the teller as he walked away with the money. He was very calm, very measured, got out just in time before the police came. And for some reason, I was sort of charmed by him. And then he did it again.

In December of 1991, what appeared to be the same man, again dressed in a cowboy hat and leather jacket, robbed a second bank in Irving, walking away with $1,200. And then, in January 1992, the mysterious robber struck again, robbing a third bank, this time in Garland, Texas. He robbed a fourth bank four months later. Each time, it was the same.

He stayed very calm, didn't speak, and was out of the bank before anyone quite knew what had happened. I mean, if you've been to Dallas, you know that we're surrounded by this ring of suburbs, and he seemed to be picking off one suburb after another: Irving, Garland, Mesquite. Skip Hollinsworth says this robber was smart.

He knew to keep his head down so security cameras would have a hard time getting a picture of his face. He didn't fidget while he waited for the teller to hand over the money. These are not cinematic bank robberies. These are not the kind of bank robberies that produce huge amounts of money so the guy can go retire in the south of France. It was just this sort of lonely-looking cowboy who was just getting about $2,000 or $3,000 of robbery.

Because bank robbery is a federal crime, the FBI was brought in to investigate. They nicknamed the bank robber "Cowboy Bob" after his trademark cowboy hat. The FBI has no leads. I mean, that's the secret of small-time bank robberies. Unless the police get there in time to catch him in the act,

If the robber gets away out of the parking lot driving his getaway car, there's a good chance he will not be caught. And it seemed to be that he had everything perfectly in control, and it was driving Steve Powell completely nuts. Oh, goodness. Uh...

I had seen many, many bank robberies. I mean, you have to understand who Steve Powell is in the FBI in Texas. He was a lead bank robber specialist, and he was tearing his hair out. This Cowboy Bob, as he came to be known around the Dallas FBI offices, was beating the best guy in the business. You know, a perfect bank robbery, I guess, and I hope I'm not educating anybody that wants to rob a bank, but...

You know, you want to get in, rob the bank, leave as little evidence as possible that's going to allow someone like me to track you down. If you can get in and get out very quietly and get the amount of money that you want and get away, then you have pulled off a successful bank robbery. Former FBI agent Steve Powell says

In the 90s, he was based in Dallas, where he was the Bureau's bank robbery coordinator. I was responsible for connecting all the robberies. In other words, if we had what you would call a serial bank robber,

I would see that, oh, that was the same guy that robbed da-da-da-da-da bank. Or he may have robbed in Albuquerque or Oklahoma City. But I would study the bank robbers and tie the cases together. Steve Powell had been with the FBI for just over 20 years.

But this new bank robber, Cowboy Bob, polite, quiet, and hitting suburban banks for relatively small sums of money was outsmarting him. There was one thing about Cowboy Bob that didn't add up. When Steve Powell reviewed security camera footage, he noticed that Cowboy Bob was wearing his hat backwards. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. ♪

We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Ritual. I love a morning ritual. We've spent a lot of time at Criminal talking about how everyone starts their days. The Sunday routine column in the New York Times is one of my favorite things on earth. If you're looking to add a multivitamin to your own routine, Ritual's Essential for Women multivitamin won't upset your stomach, so you can take it with or without food. And it doesn't smell or taste like a vitamin. It smells like mint.

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Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. Hey, Sue Bird here. I'm Megan Rapinoe. Women's sports are reaching new heights these days, and there's so much to talk about. So Megan and I are launching a podcast where we're going to deep dive into all things sports, and then some. We're calling it A Touch More.

Because women's sports is everything. Pop culture, economics, politics, you name it. And there's no better folks than us to talk about what happens on the court or on the field and everywhere else too. And we'll have a whole bunch of friends on the show to help us break things down. We're talking athletes, actors, comedians, maybe even our moms. That'll be a fun episode.

Whether it's breaking down the biggest games or discussing the latest headlines, we'll be bringing a touch more insight into the world of sports and beyond. Follow A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday. The first robbery was in May of 1991. The second was seven months later, in December of 1991, in Irving, Texas. On that day, Steve Powell says Cowboy Bob parked his car directly in front of the bank.

calmly got out of the driver's seat and walked into the building. Now, with my experience, I knew either this bank robber is an idiot...

or there's something wrong with this because most bank robbers do not want you to get a good description of their getaway vehicle and especially the license plate number because we're going to be able to track that license plate number and I may be at your house before you even get home. Well, this person was using a plate that invariably turned out to have been stolen

from another vehicle, which led us off in a wild goose chase. And again, we had no clues. We had a description of the vehicle. It was an older, rust-colored Grand Prix with a tan top. But the license plate did not lead us anywhere. The third bank robbery occurred a month later, in January of 1992.

Steve Powell says that once again, Cowboy Bob parked his car in plain view of plenty of witnesses, which meant that once again, Steve Powell had a license plate number to follow up on. But once again, it did him no good. You know, a lot of times what will happen, Phoebe, is, you know, the license plate may be registered to, and I'm going to make this up, a yellow Volkswagen license.

Well, you know, that was not the description of our bank robber's card. So up until the third, maybe even the fourth robbery, we didn't have a clue. We were praying for a little break that would give us something to lead us in the right direction. And then, on September 25, 1992, Steve Powell got his wish.

He got a call that Cowboy Bob had just robbed his fifth bank in Mesquite, Texas. And, of course, now I remember it like it was yesterday. I was there. We conducted our investigation. But just like always, same description. There's no fingerprints because this individual wore gloves.

I mean, everything was the same. The cowboy hat, the sunglasses, the beard. Never spoke, used a note, put the money in the bag, and boom, the bandit is gone. Got the license plate. Well, turned out, you know, the person didn't have a clue that their license plate had been removed from their vehicle. Before I left the bank, I get a second phone call.

This time, the office advises me that we had just had the second bank robbery within about, within five miles. It wasn't very far, right there in Mesquite. And, of course, I asked for a description, and they gave it to me. And I'll be honest with you, I used a bad word because I knew it was the same silly bank robber.

And I went, "Okay, here we go." I asked them, "Okay, do we have a license plate number in that robbery?" Well, they advised me, yes, they had obtained it. I said, "All right, you know, do we have agents en route to that location?" "Yes, we do."

And I'm thinking, you know, it's probably not going to lead us anywhere. But the registered owner was way out in the Irvine, Texas area, which is way on the other side of Dallas from where we were. So I'm just standing by basically in the first bank. And one of our agents called me and he said, well, we found the registered owner.

But this is the first time, Phoebe, where the car and the license plate matched. That had never happened. The car was a brown Pontiac Grand Prix, registered to a man named Pete Tallis. FBI agents went to the Ford Auto Parts factory, where Pete Tallis worked.

They asked him if he owned a Grand Prix, and he said that he did. But he said that about a year ago, he gave the car to his mother and sister. The FBI agents told him that the car had just been used in a bank robbery, and Pete Tallis was reported to have said, bullshit, that car can't go fast enough. The FBI asked where they could find the car, and Pete Tallis gave them an address in Garland, Texas, where his mother and sister lived.

And I'm going, you know, what are the odds? Let's go check it out. So I left that bank and took off for this location. Well, this man had told us that she lives in a big apartment complex. So I pulled in and start, you know, looking for the vehicle. And sure enough, bam, I find it. And

Unbelievable to me, it has the right license plate on it, which matched what had just happened at the last bank. So I'm going, okay, this is real good. And so I backed up and positioned myself where I could keep an eye on the vehicle and called for some backup agents.

So shortly thereafter, some of our other agents started arriving. And while we are sitting there, you know, you have to understand, at that point, we're about to make entry into that apartment because we figure the bank robber's in there. Well, while we're discussing our plans to make entry, here comes a little lady walking out wearing shorts and a T-shirt,

and she gets into the vehicle. I'm going, "Okay, there's his girlfriend. We don't want to stop her. I don't know if the bank robber's in the apartment watching her or not, but we'll let her pull out and get close to the outside of the apartment complex and we'll stop her." And that's what we did.

Boom. We stopped the vehicle. Of course, you know, we identify ourselves. And I get this female driver out of the car and bring her to my vehicle and put her in the back seat. Now, she identifies herself to me as Peggy Jo Tallis. And I said, all right, Peggy. I said, you know, this car was used in a bank robbery.

"Who has driven it?" Well, she said, "Just me." And I said, "It's going to be over here in just a minute." I said, "You need to tell me who he is and tell me." And she said, "It's just me driving the car." I said, "All right. Who's in the apartment?" "Well, just my elderly mother." So I got out of the vehicle.

She wasn't gonna share anything with me and I you know, I understand that so I told the agent I said, you know, we're gonna have to go in so I stayed with her and some of the agents made entry into the apartment and Finally one of the agents comes back out to the car and he says Steve We've got the beard the hat the jacket and a firearm

And I said, "Ooh, okay." So he's going back in, and I sat back in the car, and I said, "Teggy, listen. You know, we've got the disguise. Now, where did he go?" And in just a moment, the agent came back out, and I got out of the vehicle, and he said, "Steve, we've got all the money from both robberies." And I said, "Okay, good." So I get back in the car, and I said,

I said, you know, this is over. I said, now, you've got to tell me who he is. Did you call her Hot Rod? I'll be honest with you, I probably did, because that was kind of the way I spoke back in those days. Did she seem scared at all? No. No. That was what was so calm. She was very calm.

And Phoebe, I'll say right up front with you, she never lied to me. In hindsight, I realize now she never lied. I kept saying, who are you protecting? Well, nobody. Well, who's been in the car? Just me. And we just kept going around and around that tree. All right, now,

Phoebe, at about that point, I guess the sun had changed a little bit and you've got to understand, I'm sitting in the back seat with her. I looked over at Peggy and I saw this, and I hate to say it like this, but this white stuff kind of like flaking out of her hair.

And I, you know, basically, I mean, it would be like either this person has an extremely bad case of dandruff or, and then it hit me.

She had taken, which I located myself in the apartment later, some spray that you get at like a Halloween costume store where you can spray your hair and turn it kind of white. And it was just falling out of her hair onto her shoulder. And to this day, I remember sitting there and when I spotted that,

Boom! Finally the light went off with me and I realized, "Jiminy Cricket, this is the bandit." Once you realized that this was who you were looking for, did you say to her, "It's you"? What did you say to her? Well, I told her, "You're my bank robber and you're under arrest."

And, you know, now you've got to understand, she never admitted anything to me. And once I told her she was under arrest for bank robbery, I saw no emotion from her. Steve Powell and his agents arrested Peggy Jo Tallis and immediately took her into custody. She was 48 years old.

Had you ever been so stumped in your whole career? I mean, when you think about all of the bank robberies that you handled in your long career, does this one really stick out? Well, no, it does. I'll be honest with you because, Phoebe, I'd have to show you the surveillance pictures from the robberies.

I mean, if you could have told me, well, that's a female, I'd like to hear you say that because it was so far from what I was looking for that when it actually happened, yes, I was amazed. And, you know, Phoebe, if you can understand, now I feel like an idiot. It just never clicked with me that it was her. You know, I wonder, she'd been so smart, right?

All through those other bank robberies. What do you think happened? You know, it seems like an amateur mistake. I know what you're saying. And invariably, they will finally make a little mistake. Now, this one wasn't a little mistake.

But she had robbed that first bank, and I'm sure once she got away from that bank, she counted the money and said, oh, Jiminy, I didn't get enough. So she was in a hurry for some reason, and she took that stolen plate off of her car and went and robbed the second bank with her real license plate visible.

And that's what brought her down that day. Had that not happened, Lord knows how long we would have been looking for her. Peggy Jo Tallis was convicted of three counts of bank robbery and sentenced to 33 months in federal prison. Skip Hollinsworth wrote about her for Texas Monthly in 2005. He reported that a psychologist named Richard Schmidt sat down with Peggy Jo Tallis...

Richard Schmidt said that when he would ask her questions, she would just sort of look at him and matter-of-factly smoke her cigarette. Shrugging her shoulder, shaking her head as if she wasn't sure what else to tell him. She didn't know how to tell him. She said, you know, she needed some money to help out her mom who was sick and whose medications cost too much money. And psychologist Schmidt said,

was enamored with her. Just as Steve Powell, the FBI agent, was enamored with her. What was she doing? She goes, well, I just wanted to pay for my mother's medications, but I really had no intention of robbing a second bank or a third or a fourth. And then she pulled out her cigarette case and lit another cigarette. And what Schmidt realized was, is that she deep down just enjoyed the heck out of robbing banks.

Richard Schmidt would later describe Peggy Jo Tallis as a nice, normal-looking woman. When she got out of prison, she laid low. She continued to live with and care for her sick mother. She got a job at a marina just outside of Dallas. Years passed, and after her mother died, Peggy Jo bought an RV. That same year, Steve Powell retired from the FBI and moved from Dallas to Lubbock.

Every once in a while, he'd teach a class for bank employees on how to spot bank robbers. He'd always tell the story of Cowboy Bob. And then, a couple of years later, someone walked into the Guarantee Bank in Tyler, Texas with a mustache, wearing a big hat and gloves, and walked out with a bag of money. And if Steve Powell was working still,

for the FBI, I think he would have known immediately who that was that had robbed that bank. We'll be right back. There was a robbery at a bank in East Texas, a very small bank called the Guarantee Bank in the town of Tyler. And according to the tellers, the robber was an older man with a round stomach, a scraggly mustache. He wore a big floppy hat. He had on baggy clothes. He wore gloves. He placed a green canvas bag on the counter.

And he said out loud, "Give me all your money. No bait bills, no blow-up money." He got a stack of cash. The teller later said to the FBI that his voice sounded sort of strange. And the mustache appeared to have been glued on. And his stomach looked more padded than real. This was in 2004.

Bank tellers told the FBI that the bank robber had taken the money and just calmly walked out of the bank and down the street. No one saw a car. The FBI interviewed an older man they thought matched the description of the bank robber. They gave him a lie detector test, which he passed. So they continued their investigation and continued interviewing older men.

Seven months later, on May 5th, 2005, Peggy Jo Tallis parked her RV across the street from that same Guarantee Bank in Tyler, Texas. This time, she walked in with no cowboy disguise. Which I've just always found fascinating, why she would change her M.O. after so many years of successfully getting away with dressing as a man. So she parked across the street in her RV,

She walked into the bank. She, of course, didn't use the gun. She was very polite when she told the teller that she wanted her money. The teller gave her everything in her drawer. $11,000. Peggy Jo says, thank you. And she walks out the door. And her heart must have been, this is always what I've thought, is that her heart must have been racing. $11,000 was a huge amount of money for her. She'd always wanted to go live on the beach in California.

Mexico, and this was a chance to do it. She would be able to pay for a trip down there. And as she walked out the door, however, the teller had slipped in a dye pack. It looks like real money, but if you walk through the door with the alarm on it, the dye pack blows up and all this red smoke sort of blows everywhere. It gets on you, gets on the bank, gets on all the money.

And so she had screwed up by letting the dye pack get in there, yet she kept walking resolutely toward her RV and got in the RV and drove away. Well, she had to drive up a hill from the bank to get away. And the RV was old and it was going through gears really fast and exhaust was pouring out of the pipe.

And soon there was this line of police cars following her through Tyler. Because they still weren't sure who was in the RV and who was driving it and who else was in there. They thought there could be an entire gang of bank robbers in there. So they were very careful as they cornered her on a cul-de-sac. And so they all lined up behind their cars with their rifles pointed at the door. And they said, come on out.

A spokesperson for the Tyler Police Department later said that the female suspect got up from the driver's seat, went back into the coach, and pulled down the shades on the driver's side. According to a police sergeant on the scene, the officers waited outside the RV with their guns drawn for nearly 10 minutes. Skip Hollinsworth says Peggy Jo Tallis smoked a cigarette.

He says she could have picked up the .357 Magnum she kept under her pillow, but instead, she picked up a toy pistol. The cops almost gasped when this elderly lady opened the door and stood on the steps, and she says, I'm not coming with you. I'm not going back. According to police, she waved the toy pistol in the air and said, you're going to have to kill me.

The police spokesperson later said that the pistol, quote, looked real. There is nothing to indicate it was a toy. When Peggy Jo Tallis pointed her toy pistol at the police officers, they shot her. She was 60 years old when she died. I think she knew this was down to the last inning, and she still had one chance at bat. And she had gotten away so many other times that...

I think that she thought, maybe I've got one last bat and I can hit it over the fence. And let's be honest, if she had gotten away, if the dye pack had not gone off and she had gotten into that RV undetected and she had made it up that hill, she was on her way to Mexico. This is

land that she always talked about with her friends, the beaches of Mexico where she could go and hide away and not be held accountable to anyone and live the life she had always wanted to live instead of a life that she had to give up for taking care of her mother for so many years. Because this would have been her second arrest and conviction for bank robbery, she would have spent the rest of her life in prison. She said, "It's worth going down and doing it with a toy pistol so I don't hurt anyone else."

And she did. You know, I'll be honest with you, Phoebe. I am, in my mind, I am convinced Peggy Jo was not the type of person that wanted to go back to federal prison. That was just not in her game plan, so to speak. What did you think when you heard what happened in 2005? How did you hear? Well, it...

I didn't, you know, I'll be honest with you, I didn't want to hear that. And there was a part of me, even though, you know, she never lied to me when I was with her, you know, years prior. You know, there was a part of me that said, damn, I wish I'd have been there. Maybe I could have talked to her. But it didn't happen, so...

You know, I never harbored any ill feel against her. There was a lot that she did that, I hate to say it this way, but as a bank robber that I respected. I really don't think she would have hurt anybody. So, you know, to hear that she had been shot and killed, it just, it kind of hurt me. I didn't want to hear it. But it was the way things went.

FBI agent Steve Powell says Peggy Jo Tallis came close to being the most perfect bank robber he's ever seen. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, Sam Kim, and Megan Kinane. Mixing by Veronica Simonetti. Engineering by Russ Henry.

Special thanks to Krista Foltz. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. If you like the show, tell a friend or leave us a review. It means a lot. We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads. And you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, too.

This month, while we're on tour, we're putting out a bonus episode every week. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.