Practice to Deceive

  When Vickie Boyer was setting up a new house, Peggy Sue gave her a lot of her own used furniture. Again, it was a helpful gift and Vickie was grateful.

  “But,” Vickie said, “when anyone complimented me on how nice my house looked, Peggy just had to say, ‘I gave her that,’ or, ‘That used to be mine.’ She didn’t want anyone else to give me things; she had to be the gracious giver, and she had to take credit for it.

  “It was part of her need to be controlling, I guess. She had to be Lady Bountiful and she had to brag about it.”

  It was a minor irritant to Vickie; she continued to consider Peggy her best friend, and tried to ignore small disappointments in her attitude.

  Sometimes, however, Vickie wondered if she was in another situation where she was being controlled by a strong personality.

  Vickie and Peggy Sue had talked for a long time about quitting smoking. But the time was never right for Peggy. Finally, Vickie stopped smoking on her own. Peggy didn’t notice until she suggested that they go outside for a cigarette.

  “I don’t smoke anymore,” Vickie said. “I quit.”

  And she had done it herself, without Peggy’s permission, without telling her.

  “Peggy was so mad at me,” Vickie recalled. “That was a control issue. She accused me of betraying her by quitting cigarettes without her. I guess I was getting stronger and I wasn’t so submissive any longer.”

  After Vickie married Scott, Peggy seemed to resent their happy ending. She was single at the time with no real prospects in view.

  The three of them often went to restaurants or clubs together. And Peggy pouted.

  “I know you’re just going to talk to Scott and ignore me,” she told Vickie. “And you’ll be dancing with him and I’ll sit here all alone.”

  Vickie tried to include Peggy in her life. For all her “fiery red” beauty, Peggy Sue was technically alone. Jim was gone and had been for a long time.

  By 2007, Peggy Sue Thomas was making a good living driving limousines in Las Vegas. She was close to her father and mother and her half sister Sue Mahoney—but didn’t spend much time with her half siblings from Jimmie Stackhouse’s first marriage.

  Her best friend, Vickie, married Scott Mickelsen on July 28 that year and moved to Roswell, New Mexico, with him.

  Peggy Sue would be forty-two in September, still extremely attractive, and she kept her eye out for a man who might meet her criteria. Although Vickie was in the midst of packing up and moving, the two women were still close.

  One night, Peggy picked up a man with a scruffy beard who wore a cowboy hat, an expensive suit, and shiny boots. She found him quite handsome, although she had been in Las Vegas long enough not to fall for a man just because he was good-looking.

  They chatted as they drove past the millions of Las Vegas lights, and she thought he was fascinating. He told her he was a horse owner/trainer and rancher from New Mexico, and that his name was Mark Allen. He said he had a ranch in Roswell called the Double Eagle.

  Later, Peggy was enthusiastic when she told Vickie Boyer about her passenger. She didn’t know much about horses or ranches, but she thought Mark Allen might have money. Big money. What he’d said had a kind of authenticity that she rarely encountered.

  And the man named Mark Allen had promised to ask for her the next time he came to Las Vegas.

  Vickie knew if Peggy ended up wanting this rancher, she could have him. She had yet to see any man who hadn’t fallen for her best friend’s guile. She was a virtual magnet for males from twenty to eighty.

  Peggy Sue asked Vickie to get on the Internet and search for any information she might find about Mark Allen. Although she didn’t really want to do that, Vickie complied and found out a lot that interested Peggy.

  Mark was from a family with money and his father, William Allen, had made a fortune as an executive in the oil fields of Alaska. In 2008, Senator Ted Stevens, a well-thought-of legend in that state, was tried for corruption involving favors from Allen, who had allegedly paid for renovations on one of Stevens’s homes.

  In the ensuing trial, Bill Allen testified for the prosecution, and the beloved senator was found guilty of seven counts of lying, a disaster for his political career. Days later, he lost his reelection bid to retain his senate office. One faction accused his prosecutors of knowingly letting one of their witnesses—Bill Allen—lie in his testimony. The fallout led to a major political scandal.

  Through it all, Bill Allen was most concerned about dragging his son, Mark, into the Stevens scandal—and Mark never was.

  Ted Stevens, whose career had been legendary only to be sullied by corruption charges, had his conviction thrown out in 2009 by a federal judge. It was too late. His political career was in ashes, and he was nearing seventy.

  Ex-Senator Stevens died tragically in Alaska in a float plane crash a year later in October 2010 as he and a group of friends headed for a fishing trip. Secretary of the Navy Sean O’Keefe and his nineteen-year-old son barely survived, as did the thirteen-year-old son of another plane-crash victim.

  * * *

  MARK ALLEN HIMSELF DID indeed have money, more money than even Peggy Sue might have imagined. He did have a ranch, and he did own horses. He even owned some that might make a national name for themselves one day soon.

  Mark looked like a good ole cowboy, but he certainly wasn’t a show-off. Still, Peggy suspected he might actually be very wealthy. At fifty-two, he was more than a decade older than Peggy Sue. He wore well-polished boots, and either black or white ten-gallon hats, and he affected a grizzled look with a few days’ stubble of whiskers.

  He had a John Wayne persona and Peggy rapidly began to see him as a good candidate for the next jump in her life. Perhaps because he had never seen Peggy angry or unpleasant and because she was stunning, Mark Allen was soon “smitten” with her. She was in her “fiery red” stage, at the peak of her beauty.

  At first, when Mark came to Las Vegas, he asked if Peggy was available. Soon, he insisted on having her be his limo driver.

  “She caught my eye,” Allen said later. “She drove me and some friends a few times, and after that, I started calling the company and asking for Peggy. I paid a lot of bills for her before we even got married—credit cards and stuff like that. But, hell, I liked her. Then she started telling me how to take care of horses!”

  Even though it was obvious to him that Peggy knew very little about horses, Mark Allen took Peggy to visit his ranch. He didn’t need a horse expert; he needed her. Although the farmhouse there was just a three-bedroom, two-bath older ranch home all on one floor, the stables, other facilities for his horses, and the sprawling acres that surrounded it all were obviously extremely valuable.

  It was true that Peggy didn’t know very much about horses, but she recognized Mark’s stables were inhabited by fine equine specimens, and his trainers were top notch. Mark was particularly enthusiastic about a small chestnut gelding with a swirl of white on his forehead—Mine That Bird. He told Peggy Sue that he hoped to buy him. To look at him, Mine That Bird wasn’t particularly prepossessing, but Mark’s trainer, Chip Woolley, predicted great things for the horse, and encouraged Mark to buy the gelding.

  Mark’s new relationship didn’t look nearly as promising to Woolley. “Hell, she didn’t know which end of a horse to put the bridle on!”

  At the moment, however, Mark Allen was obsessed with Peggy. He asked her to marry him, and within a few months of their meeting, they invited those close to them to their wedding and lavish reception.

  Mark’s parents were there, along with Peggy’s mother, Doris, her father, Jimmie, her stepmother, Terry, her daughters Mariah and Taylor, her half sister Sue Mahoney, and of course, Vickie Boyer, along with a few dozen other friends and relatives. None of her six half siblings from Jimmie’s marriage to Mary Ellen attended. They were invited but had never heard of Mark Allen and they had virtually no forewarning of the wedding.

  The couple married under a pergola in a white, red, and gold-t
hemed ceremony. Peggy Sue wore a snow-white halter dress, a diamond pendant, a crown of Austrian crystals, and carried eighteen pure white and yellow-red roses. Mark dressed in a black leather tuxedo and a black ten-gallon hat.

  As Jimmie Stackhouse walked his daughter down the rose-petal-sprinkled aisle, Peggy Sue’s future seemed as golden as the decor.

  The reception that followed featured a large cake with a cowboy-hatted bride lassoing a groom on its top. There was even a frosted stack of hay next to them.

  Mark and Peggy’s favorite alcoholic drink was Patrón tequila, an expensive liquor made from the blue agave plant. It cost around sixty dollars a bottle, but money was no object that night.

  Or any other night. The couple always kept lots of Patrón on hand.

  The guests celebrated into the wee hours, and Peggy had never looked happier.

  And yet, there were soon harbingers of trouble ahead.

  For most of their eight-year friendship, Vickie Boyer believed Peggy when she said she didn’t do drugs—until the day that she surprised Peggy snorting cocaine. She knew that Peggy was a heavy drinker; she couldn’t hide that, and after she married Mark, that continued unabated. Vickie was shocked to learn at last that Peggy Sue was heavily into illegal substances.

  Mark Allen hired Vickie to be his assistant. Her salary wasn’t all that much—forty-five thousand dollars a year—but he was more than generous to her and her husband, Scott. Allen bought Vickie a truck, and gave her thirty-five thousand dollars to put down on a house she wanted to buy.

  Mark was openhanded with many people he knew, including his bride. He had his house remodeled, adding two bedrooms for Peggy’s girls, two new bathrooms, and a fully outfitted kitchen. In the backyard, he constructed a swimming pool with a slide, and a barbecue.

  One feature of the farmhouse had been less than ideal when Peggy Sue and her daughters moved in. The master bedroom was adjacent to the ranch office, and the only doors in between were swinging, tavern-style doors. There was no real door to shut, much less lock, and the trainers and cowhands came and went often.

  Not surprisingly, they had little privacy. Mark added a new bedroom for them at the other end of the house, with a lockable outside door.

  “She had her mother move in,” Mark recalled. “They were a package deal. Peggy Sue said she wanted all ‘her people’ to take over from my employees. That wasn’t gonna happen.” Outside of that, Mark gave Peggy everything she asked for. He bought her mother, Doris Matz, a cozy fifth-wheeler to park at the ranch, as well as a new car.

  They had joint bank accounts without any limits on Peggy Sue’s withdrawals.

  Because Mark’s driver’s license was temporarily suspended, Peggy suggested that any vehicle, boat or other expensive equipment should be registered in her name. It would make things so much easier. He agreed.

  Mark was generous to her parents. He sent Jimmie and Terry on lavish vacation trips, bought them presents, and always welcomed them into his home.

  “Mark bought a posh houseboat and named it the ‘Peggy Sue,’ ” Vickie Boyer recalled. The Peggy Sue was plenty large enough for them or guests to live aboard, just like a real house. When a chunk of Mark’s oil money came in, they paid $253,000 for a pontoon boat for day outings on the water. Mark also bought numerous vehicles for them.

  All of their acquisitions continued to be in Peggy’s name only.

  Vickie Boyer’s job with Mark forced her uncomfortably into the private lives of her new boss and Peggy Sue. With her office being in their home, she couldn’t help but overhear their arguments, and she was far too close to many of Peggy’s financial machinations. Vickie liked working at the Double Eagle Ranch, but being at Peggy’s beck and call every day allowed her to see small fissures in the perfect image she had initially seen in her best friend.

  Peggy Sue had been Vickie’s rock, the one person she believed she could count on. Being an unwilling ear-witness to Mark and Peggy’s arguments could be dismaying. Vickie knew that Peggy was interested in money, but she had also thought that she sincerely loved Mark Allen when she married him.

  A few months into the marriage, Vickie wasn’t so sure about that.

  Jim Huden had been gone for more than three years and Peggy rarely spoke of him or seemed to care what had happened to him. According to Vickie, beyond Mark, there weren’t any men in Peggy’s life.

  Life on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico, wasn’t nearly as exciting as driving a limousine in Las Vegas, and although Peggy had pretended to be interested in horses, she really wasn’t. Mark spent so much time out in the stables and ring with his head trainer, Chip Woolley. She resented that. And she didn’t care for most of the people who worked for Mark on the ranch.

  Mark had bought the gelding without much promise from a breeder in Canada, the small horse that was born with splayed legs. Somehow, despite his physical handicaps, Mine That Bird had won four out of six races at the Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto. In 2008, “Bird” was voted the Canadian Champion two-year-old Male Horse.

  Running in the 2008 Breeder’s Cup Juvenile race, Mine That Bird came in dead last. But Mark believed in him, and the small horse had heart. He won two more races, and he qualified for the Kentucky Derby!

  His odds weren’t good: fifty to one. Peggy couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.

  She hated the way most of the ranch hands ignored her, answering only to Mark. If Peggy made remarks or did something to ruffle their feathers and Mark called her on it, she blamed Vickie. She said it was Vickie’s fault, that Vickie was the one who had complained about them.

  “Oh, don’t be mad at her,” Peggy would say. “Vickie didn’t really mean that.”

  Mark continued to be bighearted with Vickie Boyer. When one of her brothers died, Mark gave Vickie five hundred dollars to buy a plane ticket home for his funeral. When her aunt died in Wisconsin, Mark asked Peggy to give Vickie a thousand dollars. She did, but Peggy wasn’t happy about that.

  Mark was easygoing and trusted people.

  “To him,” Vickie said, “a handshake was a contract. He was a good businessman but he believed most people were as good as their word.”

  Once Mark and Peggy had their new bedroom with its outside door, Vickie was relieved that she could no longer hear most of their quarrels. But Peggy often complained to her about Mark. That puzzled her best friend.

  “She had everything she’d always wanted: money, a good man who loved her, fabulous vacations, a husband who was kind and generous to her daughters and parents, anything she wanted. But she still complained.”

  Peggy Sue had always been soft-spoken, using her subtle wiles to seduce men. Still, sometime in early 2008, Vickie became concerned for her.

  “Peggy started yelling and screaming. That scared me because she had never done that before.”

  When she and Mark disagreed, he wouldn’t fight back. As she screamed at him, Mark simply stepped back, waiting for Peggy to calm down. She had become a different person from the woman he married. He was seeing a side of her he’d never encountered before.

  Before Christmas 2007, Mark had asked Vickie to buy two airplane tickets and make reservations at a posh resort in one of the Grand Cayman Islands in the western Caribbean Sea. It would be the ideal place where he and Peggy Sue could relax and enjoy each other, and hopefully sand down some of the rough spots in their fledgling marriage.

  It sounded as though they were working their problems out, but just before they were to leave, Mark and Peggy Sue had a serious fight.

  In view of that, Mark said he wouldn’t go to the Grand Caymans. Peggy Sue would have to find someone else who might like to share that exotic—but now ruined—vacation with her.

  But no one wanted to go with her,” Vickie recalled. “In the end, with Mark’s permission, I said I’d go.”

  It was not a pleasant trip. All the expensive restaurant visits and Patrón tequila had made Peggy Sue’s slender Vegas body a thing of the past. Most days, she didn’t want to go to the
pool or the beach where someone might see her. When she did go, she wore “old lady” bathing suits that covered her from her shoulders to her knees.

  “We mostly stayed in the room,” Vickie said. “For four or five days, with all that wonderful scenery in the Caymans and so much we could have done, Peggy wouldn’t go out, and it wasn’t fun for me to go out alone.”

  Peggy ate and drank her way through what should have been days in the sun. Vickie was vastly relieved when they finally boarded a plane for New Mexico.

  More and more now, Peggy Sue was stockpiling money and things she wanted to keep. She showed Vickie a storage unit where she had secreted a small sports car, jewelry, and a rare John Wayne gun. She wanted Vickie to hide the pontoon boat in another storage unit. Vickie refused. Peggy had convinced Mark that they should store the pontoon craft and he agreed as long as it was close by. In actuality, Jimmie Stackhouse soon hooked onto it and towed it behind his truck to his place in Idaho.

  Peggy was certainly acting like a woman who was anxious to be single again. But she didn’t want to be single and poor again.

  Peggy dipped deeply into the bank account she shared with Mark. She took $354,000 from that account and deposited it into a Wells Fargo account that was solely in her name.

  Vickie didn’t know about that at first, but she found out and was relieved when Mark managed to reverse that huge transaction.

  She realized that Peggy was stealing smaller amounts from Mark, too. Mark had given her ten thousand dollars to pay the pool man. She never did. Instead, Peggy put the money into her own account.

  When Vickie asked her why she was putting things in the storage unit, and diverting funds into her own bank, Peggy Sue just smiled and said inscrutably, “Because you never know . . .”

  What did she mean by that?

  Vickie Boyer was concerned that Peggy Sue was going to dump Mark as soon as she had enough stockpiled in her storage units and bank accounts. That would probably hurt him a lot because he seemed to have tried everything to make his bride happy.