River City History: Duel with the Red Hawk

With speed and cunning on her side, Tomboy tracked down the Crime Crusader and Gail Porter just minutes ahead of her own father’s hit squad. Some accounts make out Charles Jackson to be a reluctant hitman at best and credit this with his daughter’s ability to get ahead of him. But Janie Jackson’s career in River City for decades after her career as Tomboy might mark a different story. Jackson never revealed the extent of her father’s association with the Red Hawk Gang, nor did she ever reveal the incriminating elements of her father’s activities for the Red Hawk.

With Tomboy’s warnings, the Crime Crusader and Gail were able to outrun the police hit squad without a gunfight. Though Jones was reluctant to trust a young girl, he knew Tomboy also offered him a chance to finally set a trap for the Red Hawk. They set out to lure the Red Hawk’s men into a false feint. Tomboy dressed in a wig, a dress and an over-sized pair of shoes to trick the gangs into thinking they were trailing Gail Porter.

At the same time, Jones and Porter used Tomboy’s knowledge of the Red Hawk’s whereabouts to confront the gang boss. No one exactly knows what happened for certain in the Red Hawk’s penthouse apartment. Porter’s news story says both men took gunshot wounds from one another, but the fight ultimately turned in Red Hawk’s favor as they both struggled to overcome the other. In the end, the Crusader perhaps only saw one way to beat the warrior known as Red Hawk. Both men tumbled from the twentieth story of the building and plummeted to an ignominious death.

River City History: Tomboy

Her name was Janie Jackson. Her father was a police lieutenant, Charles Jackson. Unbeknownst to his eleven year old daughter, Charles Jackson was on the take of the Red Hawk and his gang. An adventurous young girl, Janie liked to show up her brother Bill, but because she had to remain demure and proper publicly, she would often perform her adventures on the sly.

One night, she followed her father into a nightclub. She thought she would watch a raid by the River City police on the criminal enterprise. Instead she stumble into the middle of a meeting between her father and the Red Hawk. The Red Hawk had some kind of power over her father, that much was clear. Janie wasn’t happy with that realization, but she was even less happy with the next. The Red Hawk ordered Charles Jackson to hunt down a woman named Gail Porter and kill her.

Janie knew she could not just stand aside and let her father become a murderer. So she set out to do the only thing her young mind allowed her to do: she would become a costumed vigilante. Sewing a makeshift costume, she used her acrobatic abilities to become the heroic Tomboy. Years of trailing her father gave her detective skills she hadn’t even known she had. She used them to start tracking Gail Porter herself… and that path took her straight to the Crime Crusader.