Bad Girls (13 page)

For Audrey Sawyer, she
found hanging out, having sex, and partying with Bobbi Jo to be a blast. Audrey never spent enough time over at the party house to witness what her half sister later claimed—nor had she recalled Bobbi ever talking about Bob forcing himself on her.

Bobbi told me she accepted Bob’s deal as part of getting the things she wanted out of the guy. Bobbi was young when the sexual abuse started (in her early teens). She didn’t know any better. The guy was sexually abusing her and making her feel as though it was no big deal. If a person wants something, she pays for it. Sometimes with cash, but other times with her body. That was how Bobbi understood her deal with Bob Dow.

“Bobbi was cool,” Audrey said of her former girlfriend. “She was hyper, fun to be around. She’d make you laugh.”

Everyone said this about Bobbi.

There was never a time during their relationship when Bobbi ever talked of wanting Bob Dow dead or hating him, Audrey explained. Bobbi absolutely loved the guy, from where Audrey saw it.

Bobbi Jo was the life of the party. But still, there was an immense pain deep down, always. Bobbi sometimes had this sad, heavy look to her. When she’d get really high, her eyes bulged and turned to slits, as if she had a hard time keeping them open. She would get into a droopy sort of mood and become sloppy and lethargic. Still, it was the sex with girls that Bobbi craved more than anything—it drove her emotionally and helped to cover up and stuff all that emotional pain she suffered. Bobbi connected with the same sex on this level and never felt more alive than when she was involved intimately with another female. The problem arose when her lifestyle became a promiscuous mesh of sexual encounters with so many different girls that she’d had no emotional connection with. She’d bed down with just about any female who was around at the time.

There are photographs of Bobbi having oral sex with women; others of Bobbi passed out on a mattress on the floor in the party house, with a female having her way with Bobbi’s chest and vagina. There is maybe a third female in the background, handcuffed, waiting her turn. There are also photos of Bobbi kissing two girls at the same time, smoking weed and smoking coke and meth, along with photos of Bobbi putting a gun to her head in a mock version of pulling the trigger.

“When I first seen her, I did think she was a little boy—I didn’t know she was a girl,” Audrey recalled.

Bobbi liked to wear a leather jacket, jeans, a chain wallet. She could have easily passed, at times, for a male, especially from the backside. And this was, Bobbi later explained to me, one of the reasons why some people hated her: She was a lesbian.

Once she turned around, however, it was easy to recognize the feminine side Bobbi could not hide from. She is pretty, effeminate, and sensual. When it came to lovemaking, Bobbi might have been the aggressor, but past lovers told me that Bobbi was gentle and quiet and never demanded anything weird. She took her time if a girl was nervous. Taking into account the number of females she slept with, it was about the sex for Bobbi, not scaring anyone. Like the booze and dope, Bobbi developed an addiction to sex.

Whenever she needed to get high, there was Bob Dow with a handful of drugs, gallons of booze, standing in front of whichever lover Bobbi had that day, with a camera, the green light flashing, encouraging the two (or three or four) of them to get on with the sex so he could get all of it on film. Bobbi didn’t balk because she was getting what she wanted all around, feeding her habits quite ravenously.

Bobbi was not Audrey’s first lesbian experience: “It was like my fourth,” Audrey said.

According to Audrey, one of the drugs Bobbi Jo introduced her to was whip-its, a cheap and quick high that users get from inhaling small canisters filled with nitrous oxide.

“What makes them really popular is they’re easily accessible,” William Oswald, founder of the Summit Malibu drug treatment center, told ABC News during an interview some years back. Oswald is an expert on whip-it use.

Long after Audrey and Bobbi Jo were into whip-its, the drug made a comeback when actress Demi Moore was rushed to the ER after reportedly inhaling several canisters.

“You can get them at a head shop, you can get it out of a whipped-cream bottle,” Oswald added.

This type of over-the-counter drug seems almost harmless to the naïve mind of a teen. (It’s also readily available online, which has made this drug extremely common.) It’s marketed in the same casual way, as if it’s some sort of recreational drug that won’t hurt you. But the reality is that whip-its can cause severe brain damage, and even death. Reports claim that over 12 million people in the United States have tried whip-its—a remarkable number, by any standards—which does speak to how “innocent” users view the drug.

Audrey said, “They’re these little canisters that you pop open and suck up—it’s kinda like helium, but it’s not helium. Bobbi and me would get them from the local smoke shop.”

The two of them would grab several canisters and head down by the lake and “do one or two of them.” They’d get light-headed and dizzy, laugh and joke around, smoke cigarettes, and then have sex.

This was the life they led.

“They would do them all the time,” Audrey said of all the girls hanging out at Bob Dow’s house.

There was a revolving door of girls constantly in and out of the party house. There were threesomes going on at any given time: girls on girls on girls. Sometimes Bob would partake; sometimes he’d just film. Bob had a problem getting an erection, so there were lots of times when he’d simply watch and masturbate himself, hoping to get hard so he could participate.

“They would take crazy pictures,” one girl who frequented the house later told me.

Bobbi and Audrey had what Audrey described as a “party thing.” Their relationship was centered on booze, drugs, and sex. Audrey never saw a long-term thing with Bobbi.

“Yes, I loved Audrey,” Bobbi explained to me. “I cared about her more than I cared about Jennifer. After I cheated on Audrey with Jennifer, Jennifer would not leave. I was used to just messing around with women and not caring and not thinking twice about anything. Audrey and I were together for a while.” But, as Bobbi learned, Audrey started doing something Bobbi felt explained to her what type of person Audrey truly was. “I didn’t like her sleeping with Bob [Dow], but she made her own choices freely. I believe that’s what kept me from ‘falling in love’ with her. But, yes, Audrey was loved deeply by me.”

None of the girls who ever hooked up with Bobbi considered Bobbi all theirs—that is, until Jen decided she was Bobbi’s girlfriend. As a mate of Bobbi’s, a lover knew Bobbi was a party girl, and accepted that going into the relationship. A good time was a good time. Audrey was into partying back then, and Bobbi came along at the right moment. Most of the girls who ended up with Bobbi later said it was easy to love her. She made them feel good almost instantly. Even Jen, with Bobbi being her first lesbian experience, couldn’t explain how or why, but she became instantly infatuated with Bobbi.

“The relationship that we had, I felt I was real close to her, and felt I needed her more than anything,” Jennifer later said. “That if I . . . initially, if I didn’t have her, I couldn’t go on.”

(“If I didn’t have her, I couldn’t go on” becomes an important part of this narrative—remember it.)

Bear in mind, this statement came from a female who had denounced lesbian relationships (insulting Bobbi Jo in the process) a week before hooking up with Bobbi by calling Bobbi Jo Audrey’s “dike [sic] girlfriend.”

“It was . . . I cared for her,” Jen continued. “And that right there is what I felt I needed—just someone that gave me that attention and that cared for me and loved me.”

Bobbi’s lovers—especially Jen—would later talk about a feeling of being able to take on the world when they were with Bobbi, that nothing could stop them. Being with Bobbi was like believing that between the two of them, the new girl became infallible. Nothing could penetrate how important and how indestructible Bobbi made a girl feel. Everything and everyone else melted away.

That relationship was going fairly well, Audrey explained, after she got out of prison and hooked up with Bobbi Jo. But then Bobbi went and ruined it by bringing something up one night that threw Audrey off. There were certain things, Audrey said later, she just wasn’t going to do. And when Bobbi approached Audrey with a plan she had, Audrey took a step back from the relationship and reevaluated what she wanted from it.

“I want to have a threesome,” Bobbi suggested one night.

“You what?”

“You heard me. A threesome with another girl.”

“Not me, Bobbi,” Audrey responded. It was one of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind things. Naïve as this sounds, Audrey may have assumed it was going on at the party house with other girls whom Bob was filming, but she had never heard of Bobbi being involved and claimed to have never seen it herself. And Audrey wasn’t into kinky, weird stuff. She was a lesbian and proud of it. She wanted monogamy. She wanted love. She wanted a partner. Being a lesbian didn’t mean you had to partake in all sorts of frivolous, unhealthy behavior. All that stuff with Bob, that was for money and drugs.

They were at the party house, of course, waiting for some friends to come over.

“Come on,” Bobbi pressed. “It’ll be fun.”

“I’m out of here, Bobbi,” Audrey said, gathering her things, walking toward the door. “You go have some fun with that other girl. Not me.”

This was how Audrey explained the breakup of their relationship.

It was around this same time, however, middle of March 2004, when Jen later said she had that little exchange with Bobbi as she sat on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette, and Bobbi pulled up with Audrey and a few other friends. Audrey and Bobbi were having problems already. They hadn’t necessarily broken up, but Audrey knew her time with Bobbi was limited.

Audrey felt that if she got involved in a threesome, Bob would film it—and Lord knows where it would end up. As it was, Audrey had heard Bob was putting all of the videos on a website. Audrey had found out Bob had even set up hidden cameras all over the house so he could get the girls on video when they didn’t know it.

“I’m going out to the grocery store,” Bobbi told Audrey the following day (after Bobbi and Jen supposedly had that conversation at the apartment). They were at the party house. Audrey said that the threesome request came around this same time.

“Whatever,” Audrey said.

And that was the end of the relationship, according to Bobbi and Audrey. Bobbi said later it was part of her normal routine. She was involved with scores of women. Audrey was just
one
more. And then Jen showed up (at the party house) just around that time.

“And wouldn’t leave,” Bobbi said, “so we started hanging out.”

In one of
three vastly different versions of hooking up with Bobbi Jo that Jennifer Jones would later tell, she claimed Bobbi called her after Bobbi had an argument with Audrey about the threesome.

(Bobbi does not recall the following scenario ever taking place, and she equates it to Jen’s drug-induced fantasy version of their brief life together.)

“Can you meet me at the library?” Bobbi asked, according to what Jen claimed in an interview she gave to
Texas Monthly.
(Granted, this was published merely weeks
before
Bobbi would face trial for murdering Bob Dow.)

Jen was taken aback by the phone call. “Why?” she supposedly asked Bobbi.

“I want to talk to you.”

Jen had been over to the party house by then a few times, she claimed. She knew what went on. The drugs. The sex. The moviemaking. The first time Audrey brought Jen over to the house, Bob took one look at Jen and, Audrey could tell, was instantly infatuated. “She’s
purty,
Audrey,” Bob had said, allegedly. “Wow.”

“Well, Bobbi and Audrey,” Jen later said in court, thinking back on that moment when she first hooked up with Bobbi (totally contradicting that later version of the same story she gave to
Texas Monthly
), “had asked me to go to a party, a get-together, whatever. And I went over there and I stayed the night.”

Jen slept on a floor mattress; yet, “sleep” was not the best way to describe that first night. “Passed out” was better. Nonetheless, Jen liked the idea that she could do whatever she wanted at the party house and not have to answer to anyone. Jerry Jones was not an iron-fisted parent by any means; but at the time, Jen didn’t want to report to him about certain things. She was underage. Her mother, Kathy Jones, didn’t mind Jen’s drinking (and, hell, Kathy admitted to me that she’d even buy the beer), but Jerry forbade it. Over at Bob Dow’s party house with Bobbi and Audrey, however, Jen could do whatever she wanted and not be called on it. She was eighteen and, arguably, an adult. But Jerry demanded certain behaviors from Jen if she wanted to remain living in the apartment.

“To . . . just . . . to just party and hang out with friends,” Jen said in court, referring to what she liked best about Bob Dow’s party house. “To do things that my dad wouldn’t let me do, like drugs and drinking.”

And it was during that time when Jen was hanging out over at the party house—every other person involved in this case agreed, even Jen, in one of her versions—when Jen and Bobbi started eyeing each other and wound up in bed.

Going back to that story Jen would later tell
Texas Monthly
reporter Katy Vine, Jen claimed that when she met Bobbi at the library on that day when Bobbi called out of the blue, they stood near a large tree, at first just talking about their lives. The way Jen described the scene on this afternoon, it almost sounded like a fairy tale, as if the way Jen remembered the day had come from a storybook she had recently read—or perhaps a Miranda Lambert song she’d heard before the interview!

She claimed that she and Bobbi were standing there, just talking (you could almost picture Jen holding a dandelion, plucking its leaves one moment, staring up into Bobbi’s eyes the next), and Bobbi took Jen by the head and planted a long, slow French kiss on her.