The Best American Crime Writing 2006

by Mark Bowden

  Minutes ticked by. Because the curtains were pulled across the windows, the officers were unable to see inside. Some of those close to the RV were saying the things that officers always say in such situations. “Come on out, now.” “You’re surrounded.” “Just make it easy on yourself.”

  From what could later be determined, she sat at the RV’s little kitchen table, smoking a Merit, the smoke drifting from her nostrils. On the floor next to the table was her black satchel, the money useless, almost all of it stained red. A couple of feet away from the satchel was her fishing pole, and beside the pole was her box of family photos.

  Who knows what she thought about during those moments? Surely she had to have realized that she was facing a long prison sentence. Maybe, if she was lucky, she would get a couple of hours a day in a prison yard where she could feel the sun against her face. Maybe, if she was lucky, she would be released before she died.

  A few more minutes passed.

  Finally, Peggy Jo went back to her bedroom, where a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow point bullets was hidden underneath a pillow. But she didn’t touch that gun. Instead, she picked up a toy pistol that she also kept in the bedroom. She had bought it, apparently, to carry with her in case she ever needed to threaten a bank employee in a future robbery.

  She walked to the door and opened it, her hands at her sides. The police officers who had surrounded the RV could not believe what they were seeing: an unassuming woman in a wide-brimmed hat. A woman who was the age of their grandmothers.

  “You’re going to have to kill me,” she said.

  “Ma’am, you don’t have to do this,” replied one of the officers, a young man who would later be advised by his superiors to seek counseling for the guilt that would haunt him.

  “You mean to tell me if I come out of here with a gun and point it at y’all, you’re not going to shoot me?”

  “Please don’t. Please don’t do that,” yelled another officer.

  But then she took a step out of the RV, and from the doorway her hand emerged, holding the toy pistol. Just as she began to lower it, four officers fired, the sound of the shots echoing off the surrounding houses and Peggy Jo’s RV.

  The bullets came at her all at once, hitting her at nearly the same time, and she didn’t even stagger. She fell forward, like a stalk of celery being snapped.

  Once she hit the ground, however, she somehow found the strength to pull off her sunglasses. For a moment, she lifted her head. That May morning, the light was like honey. A soft breeze blew across the yard. From somewhere came the sound of pigeons cooing. Peggy Jo looked up at the dense new foliage of a sweet gum tree that rose above her. Then she closed her eyes and died.

  STILL ASSUMING THAT ACCOMPLICES were in the RV, a police SWAT team shot tear gas canisters through the windows and stormed through the front door, stepping over her fishing pole and box of photos and turning toward the bedroom. They stared at the bed, still perfectly made up, and at a couple of glass dolphin sculptures on the windowsill. After the “all clear” was announced, one officer found a small baggie of marijuana and another officer found her purse, which contained thirty-eight dollars in cash and her driver’s license. The FBI’s Millslagle ran a records check and realized that the dead woman was none other than Cowboy Bob. He called Steve Powell at his ranch and left him a message, saying he had some bad news about his old nemesis.

  Powell called back. “Say it ain’t so,” he said almost wistfully.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid we killed Peggy Jo,” Millslagle said.

  For the FBI, of course, the biggest question was how many other banks had Peggy Jo robbed. Some agents wondered if she had tried a bank robbery or two back in the sixties, when she was a freewheeling young woman tooling around Dallas in her burgundy Fiat. Others wondered if she had begun her career in the seventies, when she had been caught stealing the pickup. It is not an uncommon practice, after all, for a bank robber to avoid detection by using a stolen car as a getaway vehicle and then later abandoning it. Still others wondered if she had returned to robbing banks soon after her release from prison. After studying the evidence from the October 2004 robbery at Guaranty Bank, Millslagle did conclude that Peggy Jo was the robber. But that only led to other questions. Why had she gone back to that bank? Was she imitating her heroes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who had once robbed the same train twice? And why didn’t she dress as a man for that second Guaranty robbery? Why also did she decide to speak to the teller instead of handing the teller a note? Was she hoping that FBI agents would study the bank’s surveillance tapes and realize she had returned?

  Meanwhile, newspaper and television reporters once again hunted down Peggy Jo’s relatives. But they stayed silent. “I didn’t know what to tell them,” said Pete, who’s now retired and living in Plano. “I mean, none of it made the slightest bit of sense. Surely Peggy Jo had to know that if she was in some kind of financial jam again, we would have helped her out.”

  About thirty members of the Tallas family and a few of Peggy Jo’s friends gathered at the Kaufman city cemetery for a private burial service. In an impromptu eulogy, Michelle told a story about Peggy Jo’s adopting a wounded duck at the marina and naming it Bernice. One of Michelle’s brothers read some Scripture and then said, “I am certain that in the few minutes leading up to her death, as she sat in her RV contemplating her fate, Peg was making peace with God.”

  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.

  Last year, Peasley acquired another distinction: he was disbarred for intentionally presenting false evidence in death-penalty cases—something that had never before happened to an American prosecutor. In a 1992 triple-murder case, Peasley introduced testimony that he knew to be false; three men were convicted and sentenced to die. Peasley was convinced that the three were guilty, but he also believed that the evidence needed a push.

  During the years of Peasley’s rise and fall, the exoneration of prisoners on America’s death rows has become increasingly common. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since the mid-nineteen-seventies a hundred and seventeen death-row inmates have been released. Defense lawyers, often relying on DNA testing, have shown repeatedly how shoddy crime-lab work, lying informants, and mistaken eyewitness identifications, among other factors, led to unjust convictions. But DNA tests don’t reveal how innocent people come to be prosecuted in the first place. The career of Kenneth Peasley does.

  Although new evidence suggests that the co-defendants may have had nothing to do with the crime for which they were convicted, Peasley still believes that he prosecuted the right men. “I have never seen a case where I believed the prosecutors set out to prosecute someone whom they believed to be innocent,” says Rob Warden, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, whose staff members were involved in eleven of the eighteen recent exonerations on Illinois’s death row. “They just get wedded to a theory and then ignore the evidence that doesn’t fit.” According to Barry Scheck, who co-founded the Innocence Project, which has won exonerations for more than a hundred and fifty convicted defendants, “After a while, some veteran prosecutors think that they can just trust their gut. Once you get to the point where you believe your instincts must be right, you quickly get to the point where you just deep-six inconvenient evidence.”

  One of the men Peasley prosecuted in the 1992 case is still on Arizona’s death row. Unless a court intervenes, that man, Martin Soto-Fong, who was a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout at the time of the murders, will be executed, although no date has been set. The case already ranks as an extreme example of prosecutorial misconduct, but if Martin Soto-Fong is killed for a crime he didn’t commit, it will stand for something far worse.

  SHORTLY AFTER TEN O’CLOCK on the night of June 24, 1992, in Tucson, an anonymous caller dialed 911 and said, “Yeah, I just walked into the El Grande. It’s on Thirty-sixth, and uh, there are two, uh, guys that work…. They laying down on the floor, and one’s laying in a pool of blood, and there’s no one in the store.”

  The operator apparently recognized the reference to the El Grande Market; the battered, one-story painted-brick store was a landmark of sorts on the desolate streets of South Tucson—a desert ghetto of vacant lots, trailer parks, and auto-repair shops. When the police arrived at the scene, they found that the caller had understated things. There were three, not two, people on the floor, two dead and one dying from gunshot wounds. They were Fred Gee, forty-five years old, the store manager; Zewan Huang, seventy-five, Gee’s uncle, who also worked there; and Raymond Arriola, thirty-one, who had started at the market as a clerk the previous month. Peasley soon arrived on the scene, as did Joseph Godoy, a detective with the Tucson Police Department.

  This was familiar duty for Peasley. Shortly after he joined the Pima County prosecutor’s office, in 1978, he agreed to be the first lawyer called to most murder scenes, and he held on to that demanding assignment, often working with Godoy, for almost two decades. For several months after the murders in the El Grande Market, there were no viable suspects, and pressure built in the local press for a break in the case. One headline in the Arizona Daily Star read, “TRIPLE MURDER HAS POLICE PUZZLED.”

  WITH A POPULATION of about half a million people, Tucson is one-third the size of Phoenix. The contrast between the two cities extends to politics and is exemplified by the difference between their two most famous sons, Morris Udall and Barry Goldwater. “Tucson is as far away from Phoenix as San Francisco is from Los Angeles,” Bruce Babbitt, a former governor of the state, told me. “Phoenix was built on the pursuit of monetary gain, and Tucson was built around the university, which has given a kind of intellectual and idealistic strand to its politics.” Tucson, however, never turned into a desert version of Berkeley or Cambridge. “There’s always been a dark side to Tucson, too,” Babbitt said. “The mob was a significant presence for years, with the Bonnano family living there. The drug trade, with the proximity to the Mexican border, has always been a problem.”

  Government, including law enforcement, dominates Tucson in the way that business, notably real-estate development, controls Phoenix. Dingy municipal buildings, not gleaming office towers, predominate in downtown Tucson. A couple of forlorn palm trees, and a cactus here and there, offer the only reminders of its desert setting. The county attorney’s office long ago outgrew its quarters in the courthouse and now occupies nine floors in a dreary building a few blocks away. There, from a corner office on the tenth floor, Ken Peasley could watch storms roll in over the Santa Catalina Mountains.

  Peasley would sometimes arrive at his desk before dawn to prepare for trials, which he often scheduled back to back. His appetite for trial work was matched by a compulsive streak outside the courtroom. He arranged the papers on his desk in rigidly precise piles. He chain-smoked. He drank a case of Pepsi a day. (Later, he lost thirty pounds just by switching to diet soda.) “For me, it wasn’t a job,” Peasley told me. “It was who I was and what I did.”

  Peasley was early for our first meeting, which was at my hotel’s restaurant. He doesn’t look like someone who could dominate a courtroom. He’s on the short side, more shrunken than fit at fifty-seven, with thinning gray hair and a wispy beard, and he dresses in the civil-service uniform of white shirt, striped tie, and oversized aviator glasses. His voice, though, is a low growl that demands attention, and he talks in emphatic declarative sentences, like a man unaccustomed to interruption. The ordeal of his disbarment may have taught him a little humility, but just a little. He’s more angry than sorry.

  Peasley’s father, a sign painter, and his mother, a legal secretary, moved from Michigan to Mississippi to Texas; they settled in Tucson when Ken was in junior high school. He attended the University of Arizona for college and law school, and served as an intern in the public defender’s office. Stanton Bloom, who is still a prominent defense lawyer in Tucson, recalled, “I was supervising Ken, and we were raising an insanity defense in a case where my guy blew someone’s head off with a shotgun. And we interviewed a witness who said my client was acting ‘like the wild man of Borneo.’ Later, I needed Ken to testify about that conversation, and he said he didn’t remember and didn’t have it in his notes. I could tell Ken just didn’t like defending people. I told him he ought to get a job as a prosec
utor, and he did.”

  As a deputy county attorney, Peasley thrived, finding satisfactions that had eluded him in his personal life. An early marriage ended in divorce, and Peasley does not see the two children from that union. His second wife, Elizabeth Peasley-Fimbres, was also a prosecutor, but that marriage ended after Peasley had an office romance with a college-student intern. (Peasley-Fimbres is now a juvenile-court judge in Tucson.) A third marriage also failed. Peasley and his fourth wife, a nurse, have been married for twenty years, and have teenage twin boys. “What he did for his job was his first love—more than women, more than his children,” Lea Petersen, the former intern, told me. “It was his identity.”

  Peasley never tried to make friends in the courtroom. “I didn’t believe in playing grab-ass or glad-handing during trial,” he said. “If I went to trial on somebody, frankly, I was convinced that they had done something really bad and I didn’t think that it was funny. So during the trials, no, I didn’t kid around a lot. There was nothing to kid around about, from my point of view.” Defense lawyers regularly asked judges to make Peasley stop glaring at their clients. “I was something of an asshole,” Peasley said.

  THE BURDEN OF THE EL GRANDE investigation fell to Peasley and Joe Godoy. Peasley and Godoy made an odd pair. Godoy is genial and outgoing, where Peasley is taciturn and severe. Godoy is thickly built, with a big thatch of black hair and a drooping mustache that curls down to his chin. When he talked about the El Grande murders, the case that led to his departure from the force, he never appeared defensive or unsure. “Joe is just totally likable, and juries loved him,” Judge Hantman said. “He was very soft-spoken, very credible, very sympathetic.” First thrown together at crime scenes, Peasley and Godoy started working cases as a team, and then became friends.