During the interview portion of the 2000 Ms. U.S. Continental Pageant in Las Vegas, the leggy, red-headed Ms. Washington—Peggy Sue Thomas of Whidbey Island—wanted judges to know she was a trailblazer.
Courtesy of South Whidbey Record
Peggy Sue Thomas (right), evening-gown champ, shown in Las Vegas in 2000.
Illustration by Alex Ostroy
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"Women," said the pretty, oval-faced Thomas, who'd repaired naval aircraft and been an auto mechanic, "have to know it's OK to do things out of the norm."
They should set an example for their children, the single mother of two added. The greatest ethical challenge facing women today was "Raising children with morals, even with all the violence, sex, and drugs in the media," she said.
Thomas, then 35, finished out of the money in the Vegas pageant for single, divorced, and married women ages 25 to 55. But the comely six-footer, in four-inch heels and a plum-colored dress, did win the evening-gown competition. And she appears to have turned the pageant into a life-changing experience, adopting that don't-be-normal advice she gave.
After attending beauty school as a teen, doing a hitch in the Navy, coaching a girls' basketball team, and working in an auto-repair shop, she hired on as a Vegas limo driver and later helped run a horse ranch. Her Lexus bore the personalized plate FIRYRED, and she lived in a gated community in a Vegas suburb. She married and split with several husbands, one leaving her bankrupt, another—whose horse won the Kentucky Derby—making her a millionaire.
She endured tragedy out of the norm as well: Her father's wife was murdered, as was her stepbrother. Another sibling died young, while a stepsister took her own life.
But Thomas' most extraordinary moment came just a few weeks ago on another stage. On Halloween, now 46 and no longer pageant-svelte, she walked into a Whidbey Island courtroom, where a judge asked the formerly drop-dead-gorgeous beauty contestant if she'd helped murder a 32-year-old man named Russel Douglas, who had been shot once in the head while still strapped into his car's seat.
Douglas was slain on a dead-end road above Mutiny Bay the day after Christmas 2003, sending chills through the bucolic island community. "It was done in such a cold-blooded manner," says Jeanie Dodd, a neighbor of Thomas and her mother in the postcard island village of Langley, better known for its tourist boutiques and calming views of Saratoga Passage. "I had the urge to put a sign out front of her mother's house: Good parents don't let their kids get away with murder."
Homicides are rare on America's 40th-longest island (35 miles), half of whose 60,000 residents live in the boondocks. "We've had three other murders I can think of in the last eight years," says Island County Sheriff's Detective Ed Wallace. One of them, an unrelated murder in 2003, is still unsolved. The others occurred just hours apart last month. Two north Whidbey men, both 80, were killed at separate locations, allegedly by their grandson, Joshua Lambert, 30. The homeless suspect, who insists he's sane, is defending himself in court.
But it is the once-languishing homicide of Douglas, which suddenly coalesced into arrests this summer, that "is really one for the books," says Island County prosecutor Greg Banks. Or one for television, at least. America's Most Wanted and NBC's Dateline, among others, have been on the scene, just as they and other national media were in the case of "Barefoot Bandit" Colton Harris-Moore of nearby Camano Island. His criminal history is recorded in Whidbey's Island County Superior Court, where he still faces dozens of burglary and theft charges related to his folkloric 2008–10 crime spree in the San Juans and across the U.S. to the Bahamas, where he was arrested as a fugitive and thief.
An international trail is an element of the Douglas case as well, leading from Whidbey to the Southwest, Florida, and south of the border. Accused gunman and fugitive James Huden, 58, Thomas' onetime boyfriend, was arrested in June for first-degree murder after hiding out in Mexico for six years, posing as a guitar instructor named Maestro Jim. A witness from New Mexico has supplied the murder weapon, while Huden's Florida wife, who was busted earlier this year on more than 20 drug, theft, and forgery charges, has become a potential star witness. She brokered a plea deal in Florida that brought the Whidbey case against her husband back to life, agreeing to tell authorities where Huden was hiding and claiming that both he and his lover Thomas confessed the Whidbey killing to her.
An investigator labels Douglas' death a murder-for-hire case, pointing to the widow of the victim. But prosecutors have wavered in their original claims that Brenna Douglas may have been involved in a contract shooting to collect on her husband's $500,000 life insurance policies. They have not charged her, and she has denied their claims.
Not that any additional strange twists were needed. But after Thomas was arrested in July for first-degree murder and extradited from Nevada, the Island County court dropped her $5 million bail to $500,000, which she made. Thomas, wearing a GPS tracking device, was then allowed by a fill-in judge to take off, Lindsay Lohan–like, on a 3,500-mile road trip through the western U.S. She attended a family funeral in Idaho, worked on her houseboat in New Mexico and a home in Vegas, then saw her dentist and shopped for winter clothes.
