Bad Girls (19 page)

Later, Kathy told police: “Krystal told me it was
her
television. . . .” That, however, seems hardly possible to believe, seeing that Kathy was with them when they lifted it from Bob’s trailer.

After selling the television, the gang was in the mood to get back to some serious partying.

“We stopped at a truck stop,” Audrey said. “We got us some beer and then started smokin’ some weed. But I was the
only
one”—as if it mattered—“that wasn’t drinking.”

Then Bobbi hit the 171 out of town and found Interstate 20, some miles after that.

“Any idea where we’re going?” Kathy asked, taking a pull from a beer. She was wondering if Bobbi was still thinking about Mexico. Or had another plan. They seemed to be making it up as they went along.

“Mexico,” Bobbi restated, according to Kathy.

“We’ll go here, and then we’ll go there,” Jen added. Then, an interesting piece of dialogue all the girls agreed they heard Jen say: “I did this, maybe I should drive.”

“Maybe we stop back in Mineral Wells and ask Jen’s dad for some money,” Bobbi suggested.

“They was just driving in the opposite direction,” Audrey explained. “They didn’t know
where
the hell they was goin’.”

No one pointed out that the quickest way to Mexico wasn’t west, but south, heading toward Waco on the 77, into San Antonio, and then across the border from there.

“I don’t think [Bobbi] knew exactly where she was driving,” Krystal later said. “She was scatterbrained. I don’t know. . . .”

As they traveled along the interstate, the drive turned long and quiet and monotonous. They pounded beers and smoked weed. The music coming from the stereo was pure country, and there were times when, Kathy and Jennifer later claimed, they all sang along to a popular tune.

Occasionally the conversation turned back to what had happened at Bob’s. The girls were curious. They needed to know. So far, they’d heard several different versions of what was one truth: Bob Dow was dead.

“The story kind of changed a
lot,
” Krystal remembered.

Audrey later told me Bobbi took on the role of leader quite aggressively and confidently, and was beginning to “piss everyone off” with her demands and the way she made the decisions about what they were going to do, where they were going, and when.

“My mom was going to knock her out a couple of times,” Audrey said. “But Bobbi was the one with the gun.”

Bobbi said that analysis by Audrey was a total fabrication. It wasn’t as if she was driving with the gun tucked in her belt, threatening everyone with it, waving it around. There was a gun in the truck—yes. But no one in particular had it. Additionally, Bobbi explained, Kathy was the one telling her where to go, taking total control of the trip.

Tamey Hurley did not see her daughter as a leader. To the contrary, Tamey told me, “Bobbi was a follower. That was her trouble. It kind of freaked me out when Jennifer became so attached to her. Part of Bobbi’s problem was always that she was so softhearted. She always wanted to make everyone happy. She’d do anything she can to please people. She was always taking the blame for other people so they wouldn’t get into trouble. Her brothers, especially.”

“Bobbi was definitely someone who would stand up and take a hand across the face for you,” said a friend. “She would absolutely take on someone’s pain. She would take responsibility for things she didn’t do to protect a friend. That is Bobbi.”

Heading down the 20 toward Odessa, about sixty miles from the Arizona border, two hundred miles from the closest crossing into Mexico, Kathy and Bobbi Jo got into an argument.

“And what the hell if we get pulled over?” Kathy snapped at Bobbi. What was the plan then? Here were five girls cruising through Texas in a stolen vehicle, a dead man left behind in Mineral Wells. They had drugs on them; Bobbi was knocking back beers and smoking weed as she drove; they had a loaded weapon; they were all supposedly laughing and yelling and screaming to the music blaring from the car stereo. Kathy was beginning to feel that there was no light at the end of this tunnel—that this was not going to end in a good way. Jen said in that
Texas Monthly
article that she and Bobbi were talking about going down in a hail of gunfire, busting through a barricade of police at the border as if they were outlaws. Bobbi was certain that the cops were onto them and there would, at some point, be a roadblock set up with their names on it—sheriffs and deputies and cops with rifles pointed at the windshield, surrounded by a band of reporters with cameras, pumping it all out live on the cable networks. This was their destiny. Their fifteen minutes.

(The problem with this memory, however, was that no one else along for the ride could later recall Bobbi and Jen talking about it, or acting out scenes like this from
Thelma & Louise.
The impression was that Jen had made all of this up later when she sat down with the magazine.)

Bobbi talked about killing herself and the others if they got stopped.

“I’ll be damned, Bobbi. . . . That’s what y’all got planned,” Kathy apparently said. “No, no, no . . . this shit ain’t about to go down like that.”

The girls knew Kathy was a badass. Not too many people back home messed with Kathy Jones. She’d been stabbed, beaten, knocked out, done years in the joint, and was still standing. She’d taken on men and whupped her some Texas testosterone-fueled butt. Some chick the size of a twelve-year-old boy was not about to threaten Kathy and her daughters’ lives in any way, Kathy claimed, and she had made this clear to Bobbi.

There was a second weapon in the vehicle (one that Jen had taken from a green trunk in Bob’s bedroom). The plan was to pawn the weapon at some point to finance the trip.

So there were two weapons in the truck at the time, Kathy thought as they made their way out of state. The only problem Kathy could see then, which felt pretty significant to her at that moment, was that one weapon was loaded and one wasn’t.

CHAPTER 19

A
S SOON AS KRYSTAL, AUDREY,
and Kathy walked into Bob Dow’s party house on the night of April 28, 2004, they took one look at Bobbi and Jen and knew the night was going to be one hell of a bender. This was the first time Kathy met Bob, a guy she had heard a lot about.

“You want a drink?” Bob asked. He was tending bar. They were sitting around in the living room, smoking weed and drinking.

“I don’t remember what kind of drinks they were, but Bob mixed me one,” Kathy said. “And, anyway, we all got to drinking and, I believe, I did smoke weed that night, too.”

Audrey and Kathy did not know it was Bobbi’s birthday. Their mission going over there was to check up on Jen and, once again (according to them), try to talk her into leaving. They later claimed to have wanted to get Jen as far away from Bobbi (and Bob) as they could. And yet, within moments of walking into the house, they both had drinks in their hands and were partying with everyone.

Bob had his mother locked away in her room so she wouldn’t disturb them.

Bob soon broke out what Kathy described as “a big bag” of dope. Bob was the medicine man. He had all the drugs. Bob reached down into the bag and, like Santa Claus at an office Christmas party, took out yellow and white bars of Xanax, along with blue “footballs” (more Xanax). Beyond that, he had “some hydrocodone [pills], too,” Kathy recalled. Hydrocodone is an opiate prescribed to treat severe and chronic pain. As PubMed Health claims,
Hydrocodone is in a class of medications called opiate (narcotic) analgesics and in a class of medications called antitussives. Hydrocodone relieves pain by changing the way the brain and nervous system respond to pain.

In other words, serious narcotics. You take a few of those and have a cocktail and you won’t remember your own name.

“It was just like a big, old party all the time, whenever I went over there,” Kathy said. “If there wasn’t one, he was making one, you know. That’s just the way it was.”

As the night progressed, the girls got high until the moon began to burn its midnight oil and the early-morning haze arrived. They’d pop pills, drink hard liquor, dance a little bit, smoke some weed, pass out, get up, and do it all over again. No one later mentioned anything about Bob whipping out his camera and taking videos, or that they had some sort of orgy. The perversion that had become Bob’s signature, and what he was known for within the circle of girls frequenting the house, had taken a backseat on this night to the celebration of Bobbi’s birthday.

According to Jen, the filming parties took place during what was a normal, regular course of Bob’s days and nights. And the way she described how these types of parties were different from, say, a get-together like they were having on the night of Bobbi’s birthday, it appeared that it was consensual among the participants. Still, if minors were involved (which they were, according to the MWPD, Bobbi, Jen, and Audrey), even if the minors agreed with what had been going on, it was
never
consensual.
Never
okay. And certainly
never
legal. Bob was committing an evil, criminal act, stealing the innocence of girls who didn’t know any better. Even worse, he was documenting it on film.

“People having a good time,” Jen said later, talking about a typical night of partying and filming. “Not just with their clothes on, but with their clothes off. Sexually, there were . . . Ah, sometimes people would get photographed being intimate with each other.”

Bob was the instigator, Jen claimed. Not Bobbi. But as far as “who kind of directed the action,” Jen later insisted, “Bob and Bobbi both did.” (This was an accusation Bobbi readily admitted to when I asked. “Yes, I did those things for Bob.”) Jen said she personally never got involved with “directing” (such an unusual choice of words here when describing what was going on inside that house).

“She would more just be, like, kind of the actor and director,” Jen said in court, speaking of Bobbi’s role. “And sit there and just tell you” what she and Bob needed. “And I would do whatever she asked me. If she asked me to pose for the camera, I would. If she asked me to take off my clothes, I would.”

Sometimes the three of them would get high and sit around, put the tapes on, and watch, laughing and joking at the action. It seemed as if Bob was some sort of Svengali or David Koresh character, wielding his experience, conning much younger and inexperienced prey. Often the films involved Jen and Bobbi having oral sex with each other. Or Jen having some fun with Bobbi’s breasts, and Bobbi reciprocating.

“It was just for fun,” Jen claimed.

Some of the other “fun,” Jen added, was a bit more risqué and dangerous.

“Sometimes we would just . . . just grab each other in the sexual body parts. Sometimes we would hold up items to each other, like a gun or a knife or something, and, you know, just pose for the camera.”

It was all part of the game—the act of getting high and engaging in risky, aggressive, and salacious conduct. The girls saw a way out of their own reality within this sexual exploitation by a male old enough to be their father. They didn’t think anything of it—especially Bobbi. It was simply what they did when they got high.

That is, until it became too much.

And then Bob Dow had to die.

CHAPTER 20

A
S KRYSTAL LATER EXPLAINED,
despite how fragmented and vague her words came across, the murder narrative of what happened back at Bob’s changed frequently as they drove out of Texas. She and the others kept going back and forth, not knowing what to believe.

“Basically,” Krystal recalled, “they said Bob was raping Jennifer and they got a gun. Basically, [they] had the gun loaded by somebody other than themselves, and [they] was going to go in and take care of it, and he (Bob) was not going to have [to rape] Jennifer at all. It was going to be taken care of.”

Krystal never placed the blame on one girl or the other; to her, Jen and Bobbi were equally responsible.

According to one story Jen told on the road, Bob had become so overpowering, abusive, and domineering—sexually harassing her continuously while she was at the house—it became unbearable to be around the man. But that was Jen, not Bobbi.

As one source later observed, “They weren’t in fear for their own lives at the time, right? I mean, they could have just moved away from Bob Dow. And if he pursued them, they could have gone to the cops and said, ‘We have evidence that this guy is having sex with underage girls.’ They could have gotten Bob Dow locked away for a long time. . . .”

Mike Burns, the prosecutor who later became involved in the case, reiterated this same point: “There’s a lot of folklore in Texas about the ‘he needed killing’ defense, but the truth of the matter is, that’s really not a fact in Texas. Regardless of the status, whether they’re good guys, bad guys, whatever, a murder is a crime, and it’s one of the most serious crimes we have. That defense is still tried in . . . courtrooms . . . of an unsavory character being killed. But it doesn’t wash with the juries . . . because they understand, and it’s part of our job to make them understand that taking a human life—regardless of the circumstance of the victim—is still against the law and needs to be dealt with accordingly.”

The argument Jen presented to the girls on the road was, essentially, that she
and
Bobbi couldn’t take it any longer. Bob Dow was constantly in Jen’s face, constantly
asking
her to sleep with him, constantly
demanding
that she sleep with him, and constantly on Bobbi’s case to
convince
Jen to have sex with him.

Bobbi, Jen later insisted, kept telling Bob no.

But Bob kept pushing.

One thing led to another; and, well, after Bob made one final advance, Jen decided he needed killing.

As Jen sat in court during her sentencing hearing and retold this part of her story (the third version by then) about being on the road that first night, after stopping for a break somewhere before heading out of Texas, Bobbi fired up a cigarette, pulled her aside, and said, “Let’s talk.”