Shock from robbery still lingering on

— While police on Thursday morning continued to look for the pair who held up the Gentry Kut and Kurl beauty salon at gunpoint the previous morning, Joyce Cook, salon owner and victim, was fighting off tears and trying to get over the shock of her ordeal.

“It’s worse today than yesterday,” Cook said. “I woke up this morning and just bawled.”

Cook has owned the Kut and Kurl Salon at its present location in Gentry (224 S. Otis and set back just a little from Arkansas

Highway 59) for more than 30 years — somewhere between 32 and 35 years, she guessed — and nothing like this has ever happened to her before.

But Wednesday morning changed all that.

Cook, who is semi-retired, was filling in and operating her shop because one of her hair stylists recently had a surgery.

When she came in on Wednesday morning, she hadn’t even opened the safe and put her change money for the day into the cash register when the robbery occurred. She was cleaning things up a little bit, she said, because she was having some painting done inside, when the couple who robbed her walked down the drive leading up to her shop from Highway 59 and entered her salon.

The woman said, “I need a hair cut,” Cook said. But before Cook even seated the woman in a salon chair, the man said “We

want your money.”

“I thought it was a joke,” Cook said, saying she didn’t see the gun at first. “But then I saw the gun” — a dark-colored semi-automatic pistol similar to those carried by the Gentry police but with a longer barrel, she said.

With a tear in her eye, she described how big the gun appeared when it was pointed toward her.

Cook went to the cash register and began to reach around to the back of it to release the drawer since she didn’t have a key. One of her assailants grabbed her hand until she explained that it was the only way she could open the register.

“I thought they were going to shoot me right then,” Cook said.

When the drawer was open, the robbers were not satisfied.

“I went to the safe and opened it and got out the money for that day and pushed the door back shut,” Cook said. But the female assailant reopened the safe door and grabbed a Decatur State Bank bag — her salon receipts for the week — other money which the salon had received for use of a tanning bed and another white envelope. Cook estimated the money taken from the register and safe to be $900.

Three times the woman said, “We want her purse,” according to Cook.

The duo took Cook’s purse, which she described as a big teal-green bag with two short straps, making it possible for her to carry it over her shoulder and under her arm or in her hand. It contained her identification and personal information as well as $1,200 in cash from a Social Security Check — Cook’s first and one she will undoubtedly not forget.

“I had cashed my first Social Security check,” Cook said, “and hadn’t made it to the bank yet.”

Cook said she had intended to go to her bank at noon on Wednesday because she had been busy and hadn’t made her deposits earlier in the week as she usually does.

If that wasn’t enough, Cook, fearing the worst, was ordered to sit in a chair while her female assailant tied Cook's hands behind her back and then tied her feet — police asked Cook to withhold what the couple used to bind her.

The duo then pushed the chair back into the corner of a back room and blocked Cook into the corner with a bookshelf while they made their escape.

After waiting until they were gone, Cook managed to push her way out of the corner and free her left hand, she said. She called 911.

A day later, Cook said she was still in shock over what happened to her, but she’s glad it was her there and not one of her employees or her husband.

“They might have stepped in or been unwilling to give in and been killed,” she said.

Cook said she thought, at first, the man was in charge since he had the gun, but she said Thursday it was the woman who seemed to be giving all the orders. She said the man was apologizing but saying they needed the money.

Friends and acquaintances were calling and stopping in at Cook’s salon Thursday morning to let her know they cared and were there for her. Even friends from afar, people she had met on travels, called because they heard of her ordeal on the national news.

Cook said her assailants were not the fugitives from Arizona also wanted for murder in New Mexico.

“The U.S. Marshal’s sent me pictures by e-mail last night,” Cook said, “and it’s not them.”

According to Cook, the pictures and descriptions of the wanted fugitive’s (John McCluskey, 45, and Casslyn Welch, 44) did not match her assailants. The photo of McCluskey showed him with tattoos on his arms, and she didn’t notice tattoos on her assailant.

Cook described the duo who robbed her as being in their 30s or 40s. The woman, she said, was petite and slender, about 5-feet to 5-feet, 1-inch tall, with medium-brown hair with a reddish cast, pulled back into a pony tail through the back of a ball cap. She was wearing a white top with a pink bra, and wearing large sunglasses which covered much of her upper face.

The man, she said, was about 6-feet, 2- or 3-inches tall, and wearing a black Tshirt and jeans. One thing that impressed Cook was the dark black thin beard he had. Cook described it as a day’s growth but so black it almost looked like it was dyed.

Following leads that the robbery suspects may have walked south on Arkansas 59 Highway and may have been seen crossing a field near the Ozark Adventist Academy on Flint Creek, law enforcement from Gentry, Benton County Sheriff’s Office, the U.S. Marshal’s service and many other local assisting agencies set up a perimeter and searched in the area. That search was called off Thursday afternoon when the suspects were not found.

Police are still following up on leads but, so far, the perpetrators of the robbery have not been identified or captured. Anyone with information on the crime is asked to call the Gentry Police Department at 736-8400.