In 1991, Peggy Jo Tallas got out of bed in her Dallas apartment, put on a brown leather jacket, aviator glasses, a cowboy hat and a fake beard. She then got in her vehicle and drove to a bank in Irving and handed the teller a note that read: “This is a bank robbery. Give me your money. No marked bills or dye packs.”
The teller handed her a bunch of cash and Peggy Jo fled the scene – and it would not be the last time she did this. She would go on to rob four more banks.
As her reputation grew, her crossdressing went on to earn her the nickname “Cowboy Bob” before the FBI finally caught her.
Peggy Jo was sentenced to 33 months in prison and her story is one of many that’s documented in a new book by Skip Hollandsworth, an award winning staff writer at Texas Monthly.
He joined the Standard to talk about his new book “She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales.” Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Texas Standard: You know, you’ve been covering true crime for decades at this point. Why did you feel the need to document Peggy Jo’s story and put this book together in the first place?
Skip Hollandsworth: Well, how could you not be interested in Peggy Jo and try to understand the mystery at the heart of her life?
I mean, this was a woman who lived a middle-class life. She got a two-bedroom apartment that was cheap and inexpensive, and she took her elderly mother into one of the bedrooms and took care of her there. And this is a woman who used to, according to people I would talk to, like to tell them that she was wild at heart.
And here she was living this kind of life until she decided to rob banks. It’s not like she’s gonna shoplift something. She came in with the notes and she drove away without exposing her face and she never drove her getaway car fast. She was the ultimate Bonnie without the Clyde.
Let’s focus on that for just a moment. Why did you want to focus on the Bonnies, if you will? I mean, why document the stories of just women here?
Well, because I just think everyone is fascinated… I’m not the only one. Everyone is fascinated by women who embrace the shadow sides of their lives. I mean, they will live a law-abiding norm, perfectly normal lives until something happens, something begins bubbling up to the surface and everything changes.
So I began to realize that I had all these stories about women in particular, and the things they did when they decided to touch their own shadow side. And it would be their… You know, an unanswered passion, a moment of despair, a kind of overwhelming jealousy, and off they went.
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Let me ask you about the way that you go about putting these stories together, because your storytelling is epic. You really dig in, almost like you’re a detective yourself. What’s the process like putting one of these pieces together?
Well, it’s pretty simple. You want to get what I call the money quote. And that would be somebody who knows your main character so well to put that person into perspective.
And so when Peggy Jo’s friend said to me, you know, “Peggy loved to talk about being wild at heart,” I went “bingo.” So I was eventually able to take a tour of her getaway car. I was able to go see the apartment where she changed into a cowboy outfit before going to rob banks. I found a relative who showed me pictures of her when she was young.
It’s just building it up slowly, detail by detail.
You get the full human dimension. They’re no longer just names and what they did. They become very real to you.
And why do we feel, or at least I do, why do I feel for these women? And of course, there’s maybe my favorite woman criminal of all, Vickie Dawn Jackson, the serial-killing nurse out of Nocona, Texas.
Why? Why would someone who had, you know, built a career saving lives ultimately turn to taking them?
Well, that’s why journalists like going after those kind of stories, because that is the ultimate question.
This is a woman, young woman, who would wear like 26… She had 26 press uniforms, nurses uniforms. She’d put one on, they were all on hangers in her little apartment on what she called the “poor side of town.” She put one on so she’d go to work.
She’d stop at the Dairy Queen before she went to work and eat the same thing every day – tacos, onion rings and salad with ranch dressing. And then she would go take care of her patients.
And she was a Florence Nightingale in that town until one day she began using a kind of chemical that stopped a person’s breathing and was hardly detectable. She began killing patients, maybe as many as 20 over a three- or four-month period.
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Were you ever able to satisfy your own curiosity then?
That’s the thing about doing small-town stories. I talked to enough people in the small towns who either knew somebody who either knew Vickie or knew somebody who knew Vickie and realized that she had been holding this grievance against people in town who had been ignoring her back in high school when she was just the wallflower of the high school, going off to work at a nursing home to help the elderly patients and being spit upon and it finally it all came tumbling down.
These are remarkable stories and you’ve been writing about true crime for years. What drew you to this genre?
Well, I grew up, I had a white bread childhood. I mean, I was the son of a devout Presbyterian minister.
And just, standing at the distance, loved watching these people who had crossed some invisible line into a deeper, darker insanity. And I could not stop thinking about these characters.
You know, true crime seems to be incredibly popular right now. There are a lot of movies, books, TV shows, and a ton of podcasts. I wonder if, in a way, our attraction to some of these stories reveals more about ourselves than maybe we’re sometimes willing to admit.
Yeah, you know, how many people out there are feeling stuck, who will walk into a bank and they won’t necessarily rob a bank…
But I’ve always said there’s two kinds of people: Someone who walks into a bank and takes a little look around just a little too long. Maybe thinking, “you know, I wonder what it would take to rob this place.”
“She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales” will be featured at the Texas Book Festival in Austin during the weekend of Nov. 8-9.
