Fading memories of Dougherty Gang's wild ride

Column

Editor's note: This is the fifth in a series on the top stories in Pasco County during 2011 as selected by The Pasco Tribune staff.

If ready access to digital news archives didn't exist, we would be tempted to believe the whole affair with the Dougherty gang was an outright invention, a slapdash low-budget Hollywood production of, by and for Generation Failure-to-Launch that made a brief stop in the theaters en route to the iTunes discount downloads section.

How, glancing up from our beach reads that first week of August, could we not mistake the cable news footage for movie trailers targeted to bored teens? The Dougherty gang's wild ride with lawmen in hot pursuit mimicked essential dog days cinema: forgettable, derivative, escapist shoot-'em-up entertainment designed to fill blank screens between summertime blockbusters and autumn's rollout of Oscar contenders.

Even the car took a star turn. What high school junior working nights to support his motoring ambitions wouldn't have had his head turned by the unlikely getaway sedan, a white Subaru Impreza four-door ("a practical, fun-to-drive alternative" — Edmunds), innocently "borrowed" before it morphed into stolen property and led Colorado cops on a doomed 120-mph chase?

The story even played to a PG-13 ending. Astonishingly, for all the flying bullets — from Zephyrhills, where the adventure hatched on Aug. 2, to a guns-blazing bank robbery in Valdosta, Ga., to southern Colorado, where on Aug. 10 the fugitives crashed and were captured — no one was mortally wounded.

The central figures — siblings Lee-Grace and Ryan Dougherty and Dylan Dougherty Stanley — emerged as oddly compelling anti-protagonists, the Busey brothers with better hair. Self-proclaimed rednecks and rabble-rousers, the trio were, when the clock began ticking on their 15 minutes of fame, marginally skilled, minimally employed and impenetrably naïve, yet supremely self-confident.

You got the impression, had Occupy Wall Street been around at the time, the Doughertys — barely a regular paycheck among them — would have been first to sneer, "Get a job." I still don't know about the value of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, but Florida's self-esteem curriculum is really paying off.

Comparisons to fabled Depression-era outlaws/lovers Bonnie and Clyde — creepy when you think about it — instantly flew, with the reckless, headstrong and shapely Lee-Grace Dougherty, 29, as Bonnie Parker. They even shared a middle name: Elizabeth.

Like Bonnie, Lee-Grace titillated. The lady was a tramp, a part-time stripper who posted brash nonsense — "I love to farm and shoot guys and wreck cars" — to accompany bikini portraits on her Flickr account. Boosting her perishable legend, as the manhunt unfolded, nude photographs, recently shot, leaked.

How fitting, then, that she alone took a bullet, shot in the thigh by the Walsenburg, Colo., police chief when, attempting to flee the crash of the Subaru, Lee-Grace pivoted and raised her handgun. Debriefed by the FBI, Lee-Grace struck a fair's fair pose. "I pointed the gun at the cop. I deserved to get shot."

After all, getting nailed by authorities for shipping sexually explicit texts to a minor while your girlfriend is carrying your baby is scarcely the mark of a Rhodes Scholar. It may, however, have tripped the avalanche of events, once the trio worked it out that Ryan's sexual offender status endangered his role as doting father.

If Lee-Grace had a master plan, however, it succumbed to the murk of events soon after they decamped from the Lacoochee bunker they shared and stockpiled with weaponry for three years. Caught speeding through Zephyrhills, they escaped by shooting out a tire on officer Kevin Widener's cruiser on State Road 54, then headed north on Interstate 75, out of Florida.

Waxing nihilistic, Ryan Dougherty sent a message his mother, "At some point, we all have to die." Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco took this to mean the worst: "It's clear that these three are on a mission."

Whatever that mission was, however, turned out to be brief, ill-conceived and poorly executed. In fact, without Lee-Grace in the mix creating the role of a lifetime for Lindsay Lohan, who'd have noticed? OK, law enforcement. But certainly not TMZ or Gawker or the dozens — hundreds? — of imitators eager to put "stripper bank robber" at the top of their blog sites.

Incarcerated out West with bail set at $1.25 million each and facing dozens of felony charges even before the various jurisdictions sort everything out, the Dougherty gang's wild ride already is a fading memory, its role as August schlock nearly complete.