Cowboy Bob's last ride

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

DALLAS, TEXAS - Outlaws and desperadoes have been giving lawmen headaches as long as there’re been banks to stick-up. There was “Butch and Sundance,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “Pretty Boy” Floyd to name just a few.

But it was Cowboy Bob who bedeviled a onetime Texas FBI agent.

Steve Powell, retired FBI agent: I don’t know how many times I sat and studied the surveillance photographs.

Bank robbers aren’t keen on having their pictures taken and Cowboy Bob wasn’t showing the bank security cameras much more than a 10 gallon hat, oversized shades, a mustache, and a Santa-length beard.

In the early ‘90s he started knocking off one suburban Dallas bank after another. FBI man Steve Powell and his bank robbery unit saddled-up after the cool-as-can be bandit they dubbed Cowboy Bob.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: This robber’s saying to you in effect, “Catch me if you can.”

Powell: You’re exactly correct.

Cowboy Bob’s M.O. rarely changed. Stroll in, slip the teller a note signaling this was a hold-up—no alarms, no tricks. Then without a word spoken, he’d calmly walk out with the stolen cash.

One time, Cowboy Bob even showed a little flair that might have tickled Butch Cassidy himself.

Powell:  After receiving the money, the bandit tipped the hat, turned and walked out.

Every time, Cowboy Bob made a clean escape in a burnt orange Pontiac Grand Prix.  The license plate— always stolen— changed on every hold-up.

From May of ‘91 to May of ‘92 the 10-gallon bandit, described as a white male, about 5’10”, mid-40’s robbed four banks in the greater Dallas area.  He seemed to be grabbing money at will.

Murphy: It looks like Cowboy Bob has run circles around you.

Powell: That’s correct. It was frustrating. This bank robber was "getting getting away with it."

He got away with it until September 25, 1992 when he got greedy and held up two banks in a row in Mesquite, Texas, and made an uncharacteristic slip at the second. Cowboy Bob made his getaway in the orange Grand Prix but instead of the customary stolen plate attached, the car had its real one. An authentic plate led to an owner and address. 

Powell: I couldn’t leave the first bank quick enough to try to get to that residence to see if I could find that vehicle.

Tracing the plates and owner led to an apartment complex in a Dallas suburb. When the FBI-man pulled-in, sure enough, there was the parked Grand Prix and it wasn’t long before a middle-aged woman got in the car and drove off. Agent Powell figured this had to be Cowboy Bob’s wife, or his girlfriend.  The agent stopped the car and the driver identified herself as 48-year-old Peggy Jo Tallas.

Agents, meanwhile, stormed the woman’s apartment and found her elderly mother home but no Cowboy Bob.  There was something else though— a mannequin head with a beard stuck on it.  The beard looked a lot like ones they’d seen in grainy bank surveillance pictures.

Powell: I got back into the vehicle and sat down with Peggy and I said, “Peggy you have a problem, child,” and I said, “Now, come on, who’s been with you? Where is he?”

And again, just stone-faced, no emotion, she said, “I’m the only one that’s been in this vehicle. There is nobody else.”

Agents up in the apartment, meanwhile, kept looking and soon found a stash of over $15,000 stolen from the two Mesquite banks earlier that morning.

Powell: I told her,“We’ve got all the money.” She stuck with her story. It was at about that time that I noticed something had been applied to her hair that was now falling on her shoulder and I looked at that and then, at that moment is when it clicked with me… that’s the moment that I asked her to step out of the vehicle that she was under arrest for bank robbery.”

Murphy: "Cowboy Bob" was the wrong handle?

Powell: It’s not “Cowboy Bob,” it’s “Cowboy Babette.”

The FBI posse had its man, only she turned out to be a woman. She pleaded guilty to one count of bank robbery and was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison.

Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly executive editor: She gets out in the mid-90’s. She returns to living with her mother.

“Texas Monthly” executive editor Skip Hollandsworth was intrigued by what would make a woman in her late 40s turn to bank robbing. His article on Peggy Jo Tallas—a.k.a. “Cowboy Bob”—is in magazine's November issue. Hollandsworth thinks Tallas did it for the money, certainly, but just maybe he wonders if it wasn’t the hair-raising thrill of it all.

Hollandsworth: She would tell her friends “Deep down, I’m wild at heart.” And that was this signature phrase of hers. And she loved events where people bucked the system.

Peggy Jo Tallas

The few people and relatives who knew Peggy Jo told the writer that she was definitely shaped by the mildly rebellious '60s. She loved the Rolling Stones when she saw them in concert.  And made a kind of pilgrimage to San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, the haunt of the ‘50s beat poets.

Peggy Jo was a small town high-school dropout from a family that didn’t have much money. She never seemed to burn with ambition to make any money back in the ‘70s. She worked a minimum-wage job as a hotel clerk by day and chased boys on the Dallas bar scene by night.

Hollandsworth: She didn’t care about money, everyone said. She just wanted enough to get by. And even back then, in those years, she would say, “I’m saving up a little because someday I want to go to Mexico, live on the beach and wear nothing but a bathing suit night and day.”

But her freewheeling fantasies of the ‘70s gave way to leaden realities in the ‘80s and beyond. There was a fizzled romance with a married man. Obligations to care for a failing live-in mother who needed increasingly expensive medicines. For Peggy Jo Tallas, B.B. King had it right, "The thrill was gone."

And come the early 90’s, the “Texas Monthly” writer speculates that the deep down wild-at-heart Texas spinster just may have reached back to live all too vividly inside her favorite movie from the ‘60s.

Hollandsworth: One of the things she loved most was a movie called “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” who loved robbing banks and robbing trains even though they knew this great super posse was on their way after them.

Murphy: Robbing banks with a song in their heart... twinkle in their eye?

Hollandsworth: There was a Robin Hood aspect to them because they always were throwing money at poor people that needed help, and they never hurt innocent bystanders in their robberies and Peggy Jo was drawn to that. She watched that movie a lot.

Was that where “Cowboy Bob” came from? In her mind, was Peggy Jo out there riding with the Hole in the Wall Gang?

In any case, after a term in prison, her desperado days were behind her by the late ‘90s, living still with her elderly mother, now working in a small marina complex on a lake south of Dallas. The people there were crazy about the kindly lady famous for her collection of straw hats.

Carla Dunlap, friend: She’s full of love, full of laughter, full of life.

Who knew that the restless spirit of Cowboy Bob would even think about one last ride?

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