Bad Girls (15 page)

On that Wednesday, May 5, 2004, somewhere near 2:00
P.M
., not long after Bobbi and Jen left Bob Dow’s house—Bob Dow lying on his bed, a laundry bag over his face, blood and pieces of his face running down his chin—they showed up at the Spanish Trace complex. Krystal was in the bathroom with Audrey. They were quarreling. Krystal wanted to continue the relationship; Audrey was finished.

“Get out,” Audrey said. “We’re done, Krystal.”

“What?” Krystal was crying. Audrey sounded frustrated. The relationship had run its course.
Why isn’t this chick getting it?

Krystal had been stopping by the apartment over the past few days to pick up some of the belongings she had left at Audrey’s throughout the relationship. We’ve all been there. Lovers like to leave something at their other half’s place, using it as an excuse to drive over and talk. These personal items become an insurance policy. This was where Audrey and Krystal’s relationship currently stood. Audrey didn’t want her anymore. Krystal was fighting the end, trying whatever way possible to stay connected. She didn’t want to leave that day and bring her possessions back home.

As one version of this part of the day went (and Kathy changed her story a few times, too), Kathy Jones was in the living room. She was watching a movie, listening to the argument going on in the bathroom, shaking her head, when Jen and Bobbi came bursting into the apartment enthusiastically. Both girls seemed excited and freaked out about something that had just happened.

Audrey heard the racket from the bathroom, where she was fighting with Krystal.

Jen was crying, Kathy noticed after jumping off the couch from the shock of the girls’ arrival.

“I just killed Bob.” Kathy later recalled Jen had said first.

Bobbi was jumping up and down, hyped up and manic. She said (according to Kathy): “We shot Bob.”

We?

This announcement got everyone’s attention. Audrey and Krystal were now in the kitchen, standing next to Kathy, staring at Jen and Bobbi, wondering what all the commotion was about.

“What’s going on?” Audrey asked.

“Slow down,” one of them suggested.

“Okay, what the hell is going on?” Audrey said again, taking control. This was no way to joke around.

They told her.

Audrey laughed. “Y’all are full of shit.”

“Yeah, right,” Kathy said, reacting to what Jen said about killing Bob. Kathy smiled, shrugged, and threw her hands at them. Then she walked back into the living room to continue watching her movie. There was no way Kathy Jones was going to believe that Bobbi or Jen had shot Bob Dow. It wasn’t possible. It was just some story Bobbi and Jen were telling, Kathy and Audrey both assumed, to inject a bit of excitement into the day. They were probably coked out, hyped up on meth, totally drunk out of their minds, or all three. Simply talking gibberish. This was something Audrey recalled Bobbi and Jen doing when they were high or drunk (something, incidentally, Bobbi Jo later agreed with when I asked).

“You’re full of shit,” Krystal said. “That’s bullshit.”

But Audrey noticed Jen had a look on her face that spoke to the point of this perhaps not being a joke. Audrey had never seen Jen look so stunned, so shaken up. Jen was naturally pale, anyway; but she now had a ghostly, pasty sheen to her, which Audrey had trouble writing off.

Still, taking into account what her gut said, Audrey was going along with Kathy and Krystal, adding, “You’re lying.”

Jen tried to speak, but she couldn’t. She was crying. Her hands shook.

Kathy got back up off the couch. “Okay,” she said, walking toward them, “just
shut
up . . . and listen to me. If you shot Bob, take us over there right now to see the body.”

“Yeah,” Audrey added.

“Damn straight,” Krystal said. “Let’s go see the body.”

Audrey looked outside. There was Bob’s truck. Just then, Bobbi took out $100 in cash, according to Kathy and Audrey. Then (Kathy and Audrey later claimed) Bobbi showed them the gun. (“We just thought maybe they had rolled Bob,” Audrey remembered, “that he passed out and they took his money and his truck.”)

Jen finally spoke up, according to one of Kathy’s later recollections. Jen said quite pointedly, very seriously: “I killed him—”

“
We
killed him,” Bobbi interrupted, seemingly covering for her friend.

(“I was protecting Jen,” Bobbi later said.)

Audrey and Krystal looked at each other. Kathy went quiet.

“We gotta do something,” Bobbi said. “Mom, we gotta get out of here.” (Kathy Jones had instructed all of her children’s friends to use this appellation for her.)

Kathy laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Bobbi asked.

“Y’all are just joking.” Kathy thought about it. “Listen to me . . . I want to go see Bob right now.”

“You cannot see Bob,” Bobbi said.

“I killed him . . . ,” Jen kept saying. She continued to shake uncontrollably. She repeated that sentence over and over, as if stunned by her own words.

“They started telling details [about the murder] and I figured out that they were telling the truth,” Kathy later told police. Kathy felt the specifics Jennifer shared were enough for her to change her mind. Plus, Kathy later explained, she walked up to Jen at one point, and “I . . . just felt her whole body shaking.”

Kathy stared at her daughter, holding her face by the cheeks. “Jennifer, what happened?” she whispered. “You know . . . tell me . . . what happened?”

“Look, listen to me,” Bobbi said, “Bob was raping Jen and she shot him.”

“Jennifer, if that is true, it was self-defense,” Kathy explained. “We need to call the cops and tell them what happened.”

Later, Krystal vividly recalled the moment when she believed them, telling police: “Jennifer was crying. She was in hysterics. And Bobbi Jo was just kind of, like, jumping, like—I don’t know—like she was bragging about it.”

Krystal and Audrey still had a hard time believing that Bobbi and Jen shot and killed Bob Dow. Bob had held such power over Bobbi. He was so much more controlling and bigger and stronger and mature. He definitely had Bobbi wrapped around his finger and whupped, Audrey knew. She had witnessed the behavior herself. Whatever the reason, Bobbi had been consistently loyal to the guy. It didn’t make sense to Audrey that Bobbi would be involved in killing him. Bobbi would not benefit at all by Bob’s demise; quite the opposite, she had everything to lose by his death.

Over the past few weeks, as they hung out together and did lots of dope, Krystal had gotten to know Bobbi fairly well. They spent time talking and dreaming about getting out of Mineral Wells. Krystal, particularly, did a lot of listening.

In this regard, as Krystal stood, staring at the two of them, she was torn. “I thought it was a joke, actually.”

Bobbi said, “Pack your shit. Come with us.” She meant all three of them.

Audrey, Krystal, and Kathy looked at one another; then they shrugged their shoulders in a “what the hell” moment.

“Why not?” Kathy said. Then she stopped herself: “But wait. If this is true, if you killed Bob, why not go to the police department? Let’s turn yourselves in. If he raped Jennifer, you need to tell them that.”

No one said anything.

Then Bobbi spoke up. “No. We’re
not
calling the police. Let’s go.”

“Jennifer, you should stay,” Kathy said.

Jennifer shook her head.

(“I could not talk Jennifer into staying,” Kathy later told police. “I felt like it was better if I went with her to try to talk her into giving herself up rather than her be with Bobbi Jo alone.”)

Jennifer was apparently in a state of shock. She was shaking and crying and could barely utter but a few coherent words.

As Jen stood in the living room, unable to speak, Bobbi said, “No. No. No. We cannot do that. We cannot do it.” She meant go to the police. “We’ve
got
to get out of here—right now. We’re going to Mexico.”

“You ain’t going to Mexico,” Kathy said. “And you ain’t takin’ my daughter with you.” Kathy walked over and put her arms around Jen.

“Ma, I am going with Bobbi Jo—no matter what you say,” Jen explained.

“Well, shit, if y’all are going, I’m going, too,” Kathy said.

Kathy said she noticed something about the relationship her daughter had with Bobbi Jo. “Bobbi Jo was making the decisions.... The only decisions Jennifer was making—whatever Bobbi Jo was going to do, [Jen] was going to do it, too.”

And this comment fits perfectly into the nature of their relationship: Jen had been looking for someone to tell her how to live. Bobbi came along, and Jen found that mother figure to nurture her.

As Kathy stood, contemplating what to advise the two of them to do next, Kathy decided that Jen would be better off with her mother along for the ride.

“I was—the thing for me, just the thought was, just doing whatever they wanted to do to start with. I didn’t really know the whole situation.” Kathy was on probation; she wasn’t allowed to leave the state. She’d be tossed back into prison. “I just knew, though, that what they were saying had happened, and I had to believe it, you know, because of the seriousness of the way Jennifer was acting. And Bobbi Jo, too, just wanting to get out of there. I really had no intentions of crossing the border.”

Every minute counted. The girls must have considered that someone had heard the gunshots and called the cops. Bobbi was getting extremely antsy, everyone later said, as the immensity of the situation and what Jen had done settled on her.

“I wanted to protect Jennifer,” Bobbi later told me. “She was my friend, one of my lovers.”

Krystal stood next to the girls, waiting for what Audrey was going to do. If Audrey went, Krystal decided, she was going, too. (“I was chasing Audrey,” Krystal later said, explaining how she was still deeply in love with Audrey and unable to let go of her.)

“Let’s get out of here,” Bobbi said again.

They split up and hopped into the two trucks: Bob’s and Dorothy’s.

“I need to get some clothes or something,” Krystal said.

“We need to stop at Krystal’s,” Audrey said.

Bobbi led the way in Bob’s truck, with Kathy riding shotgun. Krystal drove her car. Jen and Audrey followed in Dorothy’s truck.

Bobbi Jo
described for me in detail this scene at the Spanish Trace Apartments during those moments directly following Bob Dow’s murder. Her version was quite a bit different from what you’ve just read, which I composed from the court record and various interviews with Audrey and Kathy, along with police reports and interviews police conducted with all of the players involved. (That is, all of the participants except for Bobbi, I might add. Bobbi did not talk about this moment at any length and, surprisingly, was never really asked to do so by the police later on.)

“On the day that Jennifer murdered Bob,” Bobbi began, trying to clarify the record, “I was not drunk. Indeed, very sober I was, and so was she [Jen]. Neither drugs nor alcohol were a factor on that given day.”

Tracking the movements of the girls, looking at it from Bobbi’s point of view, it’s easy to see how that last statement could be true.

Bobbi said, “Jennifer told me she killed Bob and how.” Bobbi claimed to be outside the party house in the yard. Jen ran out the door and said, “Take me to my mother’s. . . .”

“And, of course, I complied.”

“Mother’s” was an odd word choice, but very telling. Jen knew the apartment belonged to Jerry Jones.

In any event, Bobbi took Jen over to the apartment.

When they arrived, Bobbi said, “they [Kathy and Audrey] were already packed and ready to leave, as if they already
knew
what was happening and what had happened.” Bobbi was referring to the ordeal back at Bob’s. Bobbi was saying that Audrey, Krystal, and Kathy already knew Jen had killed Bob and were waiting for her to arrive at the apartment. Bobbi was certain of this.

“I never really spoke to anyone at the apartment,” Bobbi later insisted. “That’s all Kathy and Jennifer’s bullshit that they had come up with.... Even while we were on the run, I never spoke much. Kathy was the one ordering us around. I got into it with her once. . . .”

I asked the MWPD if they subpoenaed phone records from Bob’s cell phone, Lila’s house, Jerry Jones’s apartment, or any of the cell phones that the girls had, so I could see if someone had maybe called over to the Spanish Trace or one of the girls’ cell phones
after
Bob was murdered.

Detective Brian Boetz told me, “No, there were no phone calls made moments after the murder. . . .” Boetz never clarified how he had drawn this conclusion, but I can say that there were no phone records I ever saw as part of the court file.

As she walked into the apartment at Spanish Trace, Bobbi revealed to me, “it seemed everyone knew what was happening and what was going on—but me.”

As they stood and talked, Kathy Jones, whom Bobbi referred to as “drug-crazed” on that day and most others, pulled Bobbi aside and said, “You need to take the blame for Jennifer.”

“Huh?” Bobbi responded.

“You need to take the blame . . . Bobbi. You’re gay. You’ll
love
prison.”

Bobbi looked at her:
Are you as crazy as you sound?

(“She tried to make prison [sound]
comfortable,
” Bobbi recalled.)

“You’re crazy,” Bobbi said.

According to Bobbi’s version, Kathy next said, “Look, I need you to take me back to Bob’s so I can recover all of that computer equipment.”

“You’d have to kill me first,” Bobbi responded.

Bobbi admitted that she was well aware of Bob’s sordid, vile history of “making movies and taking photos with
all
the women he had sex with.” Bobbi admitted, “At times, I would be the one behind the camera.” She believed that Kathy wanted to go over to Bob’s so she could grab all the videos before police got there. She didn’t want the videos made public—because she and her two daughters were featured in some of them, sometimes together.

According to Bobbi’s recollection, she believed Kathy, Audrey, and Jen thought it was some sort of joke that Jen had murdered Bob. They felt that it didn’t matter. They thought of the murder as being “light,” as Bobbi called it, as if Jennifer had done the world a favor, ridding the planet of an evil, dirty man whom nobody cared much about.