1999 Kingwood robbery incidents

In May to July 1999 four teenage girls from the Kingwood region of Houston, Texas engaged in a robbery spree, robbing four grocery stores and a bakery. These stores were in Harris and Montgomery counties. The girls called themselves the "Queens of Armed Robbery", and bought recreational drugs and body piercings with their money.

Jacqueline Helfgott, author of Criminal Behavior: Theories, Typologies and Criminal Justice, wrote that the fact that the perpetrators were girls from upper middle class backgrounds meant that the crime made news in Greater Houston and throughout the United States. Helfgott stated that despite the girls' use of recreational drugs, the girls' accounts and accounts of other people cited boredom as the primary reason for the crime.

The film Sugar & Spice is loosely based upon the incident.

The perpetrators, all students or alumna of Kingwood High School, were:

The girls planned the crimes while eating at a Kingwood Sonic Drive-In. The group targeted five places: Stop N Drive, Ryan's Bakery, Jack's Food Store/Jack's Grocery, Porter Food Store, and a store in Montgomery County. All of these places were on the pheriphery of Kingwood: either north along Porter Road or south on Hamblen Road.

Stop N Drive, the first location, was robbed on May 30 of that year. It was located in Montgomery County, on Loop 494, outside of the western portion of Kingwood. Forest Cove Stop-n-Drive was robbed on July 1, and there the girls got $800 ($1292.68 according to inflation), the largest amount in the robberies. Others resulted in cash and cigarettes. Ryan's Bakery was held up on July 5, and the adjacent Jack's Food Store was held up the subsequent weekend.

The girls used a 1999 Pontiac Firebird owned by Maddox's father as the getaway car. In each robbery two girls actively robbed while the others served as lookouts. Maddox was the only girl who participated in all of the robberies. They had watched television to get the modus operandi of the crime, and they had disguised themselves as males by using sunglasses, masks, hoods, and gloves. Their weapons were a .22 caliber rifle, a semiautomatic pistol, and a shotgun.

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