Bad Girls (18 page)

Jen claimed she and Bobbi never did anything without first talking it through. They had a bond, Jen later testified. They shared an unbreakable, emotional connection on top of an oath etched in their own blood—and no one could come between it.

“We cut our fingers, the tips of our fingers,” Jen said in court during her sentencing hearing, “and our blood connected to each other.” From Jen’s viewpoint, they were two lovers pledging the ultimate dedication to each other. “And from then on, that, right there, was supposed to symbolize unity,” Jen observed, adding, “like a marriage, you might say.”

This covenant, if you will, joined the two girls in DNA together for life.

I asked Bobbi Jo to explain this event to me.

She did not recall that blood oath ever taking place.

“Blood bond with Jennifer?” Bobbi questioned. “Huh? I’ve never made a blood bond with anyone, except my son’s father, and that only came from our sex, not
cutting
each other up.”

Jen claimed this blood oath took place merely days after she and Bobbi hooked up.

According to Jen, these
weren’t the only brushes they’d had with that “otherworld” of mind reading, Wicca, and black magic. And yet the following anecdote actually exemplifies a point that Bobbi disliked black magic of any kind.

According to Jen, sometime before Bobbi’s birthday, she and Bobbi Jo had met up with Bobbi’s cousin Grace (pseudonym) and another friend, Carmen (pseudonym), to have a little precele-bration. They were at Dorothy Smith’s house in Graford. At first, to Jen, it felt like a family gathering. Bobbi seemed happy. Everyone was having a good time.

Carmen was acting strange, however, Jen remembered. She didn’t say if they had gone off and gotten high or not, but one has to believe, based on the life they shared, they had. In any event, at one point, Carmen said some weird things and talked about what Jen referred to later as voodoo.

It freaked Jen out when Carmen, still talking, walked up and “touched” Jen somewhere on her body. “And I started shaking,” Jen said in a statement she gave police.

When Bobbi saw what Carmen was doing to Jen, she walked over and asked Carmen about it.

Carmen looked alarmed as Bobbi became livid, according to Jen, screaming, “Get . . . out! Take your voodoo shit with you.”

Carmen “walked back to Mineral Wells,” Jen explained.

CHAPTER 17

C
RUISING THROUGH TEXAS,
the girls talked. That electrifying
Thelma & Louise
effect, which Jen later talked about feeling as an adrenaline rush that pumped through her veins, and the thrill of taking off, on the run, after killing a man dwindled as the sun started its descent on the evening of May 5, 2004. For one, the sheer seriousness of what had taken place settled on the one adult in the group, Kathy Jones, as she thought about what the future had in store for her daughter. If the girls ran, they looked guilty, Kathy considered. If they went to the cops and pled that Bob had tried raping Jen (the story Jen was trying to sell at the current moment), that might be different. Maybe it would work? But heading into Mexico (as Kathy and Jen later said Bobbi wanted to do)—without passports, nonetheless—was probably not the best idea at this point.

Kathy stared at her daughter. Throughout Jen’s life, Kathy had never been the mother she had wanted to be. Guidance was not something Kathy had given to her daughters, especially Jen.

“I tried,” she said later. “Sometimes we had . . . There was
some
guidance, and I believe it didn’t take because of the actions I was showing her. I was telling her the right things, but I wasn’t
showing
her.”

Some might refer to that as “setting a bad example.”

In deciding where to go next, one of the girls mentioned Walmart.

“Walmart?” Krystal asked.

Bobbi was driving.

“I need a calling card,” Audrey said. Audrey had one of those pay-as-you-go Tracphones.

From Graford to Weatherford, where the girls decided to head next, Walmart was on the way. Bobbi stopped and Audrey went in; Krystal tagged along. She bought a calling card. Audrey needed to make a few calls. Audrey still wasn’t sold on the notion that Bobbi and Jen had whacked Bob. It didn’t seem possible. Two girls, higher than Mount Everest most of the time, killing a guy like Bob? It didn’t add up for Audrey. Thus, Audrey explained to me, she wanted to stay in touch with a few friends back home while they were on the run so she could get a bead on what was being said around town and on the local news. She was determined to find out the truth about what had happened.

It was near seven in the evening, according to Krystal, when she and Audrey walked out of the Walmart. (Some of the girls claimed they stopped at Walmart before going to Weatherford, and some said after.)

From Graford, Weatherford was west, toward Fort Worth, Arlington, and Dallas. You could take the 337 southeast through Mineral Wells, or a more direct route on the 254 east. They needed to head west, toward Abilene and eventually Mexico, if they were sticking to the plan.

Why go to Weatherford?

Bob Dow had a trailer in Weatherford, where he had lived most of the time. Bobbi knew the trailer. She had spent plenty of time there with Bob and alone.

“A ring,” Bobbi said. They needed money. (Bobbi had left her engagement ring inside the trailer, she later told me, and she wanted it. Going there wasn’t about money for her; it was about getting that ring.)

As they drove, Kathy had a moment with her daughter. Kathy was interested in something—death, the taking of a life.

“How did it feel to kill someone?” Kathy asked Jen.

Jen thought about it. She looked her mother in the eyes, as serious as she had ever been. “Pretty fucking good,” Jen bragged, sounding almost proud of what she had done.

CHAPTER 18

A
UDREY, KATHY, JENNIFER,
Bobbi Jo, and Krystal arrived at Bob Dow’s Weatherford trailer home sometime during the evening hours of May 5, 2004, after leaving Graford and stopping at Walmart (or the other way around, depending on who is asked).

As the girls piled out of Bob’s truck, the MWPD prepared a second APB to be broadcast statewide:

REF TO POSSIBLE HOMICIDE

OCCURRRED IN OUR CITY . . .

RED AND WHITE CREW CAB CHEV TRUCK OCCUPIED BY 5W/F’S POSSIBLY ENROUTE TO MEXICO . . . ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS [AND] POSSIBLY INVOLVED IN HOMICIDE . . .DECEASED SUBJ’S VEH TAKEN POSSIBLY ...

It might have seemed strange that the MWPD did not notify the public about a band of criminals on the loose (some of whom were quite hardened, had done serious time in prison, and one of whom was wanted for murder). It was up to the chief of police to stand on a podium in front of a mishmash of microphones and make that announcement, according to Detective Brian Boetz. But, the detective added, “[As we got] into the investigation, we were getting phone calls from the families. . . .”

So the MWPD decided to wait it out. After all, according to Boetz, they were gathering information on their main suspect and did not need to cause any sort of public panic. Announcing in the state of Texas that there was an armed and dangerous murderer on the loose might stir up some unneeded vigilante justice. They weren’t there yet—at least that’s what the MWPD later said about the situation. There was not a lot of concern about Bobbi going on a murder spree.

“We used . . . [the] state and nationwide communication between law enforcement agencies’ systems,” Detective Brian Boetz explained further. The MWPD was under the impression, Boetz reiterated, that sooner or later, as they put pressure on family members of the girls, the information they needed would come. Yet, those family members consisted of Dorothy Smith, the Cruzes, and Jerry Jones. The MWPD, as far as I could find out, contacted no one else.

At Bob Dow’s trailer, Audrey flipped open her cell phone and tried calling a few friends back in town to see what was happening, to learn if there was any news. Audrey wanted to know what the local stations were saying. The girls had not heard anything on the radio in the truck. It was as if the murder had not occurred, which led Audrey to start thinking that her sister and Bobbi had lied about the entire event.

Out of all of the girls on the road trip, Audrey was confused the most, she later claimed.

“When we were at Bobbi Jo’s grandmother’s house, Bobbi Jo was tellin’ them that she was the one that killed Bob,” Audrey recalled. “In the truck, Jennifer was saying that
she
killed Bob. When they first came in the door back at the apartment, Bobbi Jo was sayin’, ‘
We
killed Bob. . . .’ I didn’t understand what was going on or who did what.”

At one point, Audrey had asked Bobbi, “What in the hell is going on?” Had they murdered Bob? And if so, why’d they do it?

“Well, he was raping Jennifer,” Bobbi said (sticking to the plan she and Jen had come up with), according to Audrey.

“And that’s all she said,” Audrey told me. “She just kept saying, ‘We gotta get out of town.... We gotta get out of town. We gotta leave.... Hurry!’ So we packed up some of our stuff and some of Jen’s stuff and we done left.”

“Wait a minute, Bobbi Jo just said that
she
killed [Bob] . . . . I thought you said that
you
killed him?” Kathy had asked Jen soon after they left Dorothy Smith’s.

“Look, we were all thinking in our minds, if Jennifer didn’t do this, then we ain’t fixin’ to go nowhere,” Audrey later explained. They didn’t want to stand behind Bobbi Jo, per se, and take off with her if Jen was not involved.

After Kathy asked her daughter who was responsible—and if this whole thing was some sort of prank—Jen got quiet and serious.

“Jennifer wasn’t really saying much,” Audrey remembered. “She was kind of, like, shaken. That’s one of the reasons we all decided to go with them.”

One of the girls searched through the keys on Bob’s key chain, trying several in the lock, but she couldn’t come up with the right key to get into the trailer.

“I wasn’t giving them the key,” Bobbi later told me. She didn’t want them breaking into Bob’s trailer and rummaging through his things. She had driven to the trailer so she could get her engagement ring. This way, if she needed money, at least she would have something to fall back on.

But the three of them—Kathy, Krystal, and Jen—had different plans. Without Bobbi knowing, they walked around to the back of the trailer in search of a big window to smash. This way, one of them would be able to climb in and open the door.

Suspicious, Bobbi followed.

In the front yard, Bob had one of those dangerous trampolines that kids like to take the safety nets down from and horse around upon. It was one of those round, springy leg-breakers that adults like to make zany YouTube videos of themselves doing stupid-human tricks on. There was some other junk hanging around the yard, but Audrey spied the trampoline. As the others trekked into the backyard, she walked over to it.

Looks like fun.

Watching the others head toward the back of the trailer, Audrey thought,
I’m not going into that trailer to commit burglary. Y’all can do what y’all want. But not me.

Robbing a dead man didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

Krystal found a nice window in the back and pointed to it.

They had to be ultra-careful, Jen later testified. “We couldn’t get inside. We couldn’t find the right key. We were scared because the neighbors were outside. And we were thinking that they were going to call the cops . . . since Bob wasn’t there.”

(Jennifer never mentioned that Bobbi was a part of this in any way. And with Bobbi being the size of a young boy, was she about to try and stop three grown women from breaking in?)

Krystal took a rock and smashed the glass.

They were in.

According to Audrey, Kathy and Jen were under the impression Bob’s late brother had left a stash of cash hidden somewhere inside Bob’s trailer.

“And they wanted that money,” Audrey said.

Audrey bounced up and down on the trampoline out front as the girls pillaged the inside of the trailer, lifting cushions, opening cupboards and drawers, searching underneath the bed, in the bathroom. As she sprang up and down, she felt the elastic bounce of the trampoline, which was making her stomach feel queasy, like she was on an amusement park ride. Bouncing, Audrey thought:
What is going on here? What in the hell am I doing with these people?

“I was kind of in disbelief,” Audrey remembered, thinking back to how strange that moment seemed. “I was like . . . thinking that this didn’t really happen. It even seems that way today. You know, I wasn’t there [when Bob was murdered], so it was easy for me not to believe it and think it was just all some sort of story they had made up.”

Jumping and thinking, Audrey came to the realization that maybe they were full of nonsense. Perhaps Jen and Bobbi had gotten so high that they couldn’t decipher reality from fantasy. Maybe they thought they’d killed Bob in one of their otherworld trips? Perhaps they had partied so hard, they were confusing a television movie with reality?

Inside the trailer, Bobbi searched for her engagement ring, while the others got busy thieving things.

Loading it into Bob’s truck took some time, but after about a half hour inside the trailer, they managed to leave with, as Krystal later reported, a scavenger hunt’s list of worthless, everyday items: a “twenty-seven-inch TV . . . a big, old fool’s-gold rock, [and] a strobe light. Stupid stuff.”

With the bed of Bob’s truck filled with junk from his trailer, Bobbi hopped back into the driver’s seat. She knew she couldn’t stop them from burgling the place, so she waited for them to finish and then took off.

In town, Bobbi found a pawnshop, which Kathy had directed her to. Kathy was the one with the ID and the only bandit out of the bunch willing to use it to pawn a stolen television. So she went inside and sold the television for $75 as the others waited in the truck out front.