Cowboy Bob: The Mysterious Middle-Aged Bank Robber Who Fooled the FBI

About 5-foot-10, with a slight paunch, beard, and graying hair, the robber was silent but polite when he strolled into Dallas-area banks. The FBI called him Cowboy Bob on account of the 10-gallon hat he'd wear inexplicably backwards during his stick-ups, and for nearly a year in the early '90s, he led veteran FBI agents on a wild goose chase. When they finally caught up with him, they found something that turned their investigation on its head.

A TALENTED THIEF

The first five times Cowboy Bob hit, between May 1991 and September 1992, his execution was near-flawless. Unlike most bank robbers, he stayed calm. According to witnesses, he never brought weapons, avoided the cameras for the most part, and checked the bills for dye packs (radio-controlled devices intended to stain both cash and thief bright red). He’d pass a note announcing the robbery and instructing the teller to hand over the cash, then walk out slowly and drive away calmly in his 1975 Pontiac Grand Prix fixed with stolen license plates.

He drove the FBI crazy. The beard and hat and silence made him hard to identify, and the stolen license plates made him almost impossible to track. He didn’t make scenes, didn’t peel out in his getaway car, didn’t attract much eyewitness attention. “He was making me start to pull my hair out,” former agent Steve Powell told Texas Monthly in 2005. “How could this thin, little dried-up cowboy be whipping us this bad, time after time?”

The sixth time, however, he screwed up. Maybe he’d gotten greedy, or maybe he’d gotten cocky, but when the Grand Prix pulled away from First Interstate Bank in Mesquite, Texas, it was sporting its actual license plates. Powell and his team traced the number, taken down by a witness, to a Ford factory worker nearby. His name was Pete Tallas and he’d given the Grand Prix to his sister Peggy Jo.

Powell and his team raced to the apartment where Peggy Jo and her mother lived, expecting to find a cowboy-hat-wearing boyfriend and a kiddie pool of cash. But there were only the women, and neither one of them had much to say about any robbery.

Even when agents found a mannequin head with a fake beard in the closet, and a sack full of money in the bedroom, even when they pressed Peggy Jo on the location of this boyfriend, all she had to say, according to Powell, was: “There isn’t any man. I promise you that.”

That’s when he noticed the glue still clinging to her upper lip and the flecks of gray dye in her hair.

WILD AT HEART

Peggy Jo Tallas grew up in Dallas in the 1950s and '60s. She loved rock 'n' roll, hitting local clubs with her friends, and the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. She had a wilder side—in her twenties, after a night out, she stole a car that had its keys left in the ignition and took it for a joy ride. Caught and convicted of a felony, she got five years' probation. Mostly, she dreamed of living on the beach in Mexico.

But as the '70s passed and the '80s began, things took a different turn. Her mother became ill, requiring most of her attention and money. Disappointed in love, and in a rocky relationship with her brother and sister, Peggy Jo didn't have a lot of positive things to focus on. She held a series of jobs, and lived in a series of small apartments with her mother. She watched the bills pile up. The once "wild at heart" young woman was now swallowing anxiety medication.

She never explained why she became Cowboy Bob. When the media pressed, when book and movie opportunities were thrown at her, she stayed silent. Those who knew her best thought that while the first robbery was a way to help cover her mother’s medical bills, later she just started to have fun with it.

Her lawyer painted a pitiful picture:

"At the time of these robberies, Ms. Tallas' mother was bedridden, suffering from a severe and chronic degenerative bone disease. Ms. Tallas' intense emotional attachment to her mother coupled with her own chronic mental impairment prevented Ms. Tallas from appreciating the wrongfulness of her actions."

Regardless, she and her family stayed mum. Peggy Jo pleaded guilty to bank robbery and served nearly three years in prison.

When she got out in the mid-'90s, things quieted down. The years crept by. She took a job at a marina, where locals loved her for the attention she paid their kids, for the extra bait fish she’d dole out, and for the occasions when they came up short on cash and she dipped into her own pocket to make up the difference. No one knew her backstory; she was just the likable older woman in the straw hat. Her mother passed away.

In 2004, something changed. To friends and acquaintances, that air of restlessness was back. Peggy Jo, now 60, left the marina, purchased an old RV off a neighbor, and took off for a year, touching base only sporadically. When she did, she spoke of going off-grid altogether, finally getting down to Mexico.

Of course, to do that, she’d need money.

ONE LAST JOB

If cockiness and carelessness foiled her in the 1990s, it’s harder to say exactly what went wrong on May 5, 2005. Why, for example, was Peggy Jo wearing sunglasses and a floppy woman’s hat instead of a male disguise when she walked into the Guaranty Bank in Tyler, Texas? Why did she actually speak to the teller instead of passing a note? And most curiously, why did she not check the money for a dye pack as she had at every robbery before?

We’ll never know. When the pack detonated, spraying the money red and releasing a plume of smoke, Peggy Jo made for her RV, walking across several lanes of traffic, right in front of construction workers and civilians, who phoned the police.

A short chase ensued, ending in a residential area, where after some time—presumably spent in contemplation of her limited options—Peggy Jo emerged from her getaway recreational vehicle. She had something dark in her hands, and in one of the few utterances she ever made during or about her crimes, she dared the cops to shoot. At first, they demurred. She was their grandmothers’ age, after all.

But she was set on her course of action. According to witnesses, her final words—uttered as she raised what was in her hand—were “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?”

She fell with four bullets in her, a children’s toy gun in her hand. Later, the cops would find a very real .357 Magnum in the RV.

Peggy Jo Tallas, a.k.a. "Cowboy Bob," was a true anomaly. She was a woman, first of all—they make up only a sliver of the bank-robbing population. She worked without a partner, and she wasn’t robbing for drug money or to pay off gambling debts. She was good at what she did from the get-go. By all accounts, she was unusual—someone to be studied, or, at the very least, a worthy challenge for law enforcement.

There was a reason, after all, that FBI agent Steve Powell’s first reaction to her demise was, “Say it ain’t so.”

Additional Source: “A mystery in boots and beard,” The Dallas Morning News, July 3, 2005