Bad Girls (20 page)

“What’s up?” Jen asked.

“We need a plan.”

“Yeah.”

They discussed what to tell the police if they were caught. (“It was Bobbi’s idea,” Jen recalled. “We . . . we were thinking that if we did get caught, that that was, you know, the safest plan that we could come up with. That we . . . we both wouldn’t get into trouble.”)

The plan was, Jen explained, “that he was trying to rape me. And that I was—it was self-defense that I killed him. . . .”

Jen was in “a state of mind” at the time, she claimed, within the fog of her relationship with Bobbi, that didn’t allow her to think on her own. Her feelings toward Bobbi were growing deeper every day; and now, from how she viewed the situation, they had this secret, evil act between them. Jen truly believed that she was falling under Bobbi’s spell.

“They were strong,” Jen remarked, talking about how intense her feelings for Bobbi were. “They were still in . . . a state of caring and loving and showing affection. I felt like I was afraid of losing her.”

Instead of heading south
into Mexico, a decision was made to head northwest toward Arizona. The idea of crossing the Mexican border legally (or even illegally) didn’t seem so practical. There was the likely chance that immigration and border patrol had a description of the vehicle. Heading into Mexico was more or less akin to a spiderweb; whereas, heading into New Mexico and continuing west—the new plan—seemed to be a bit more pragmatic as far as bettering their chances of getting away. As long as they could keep their noses clean and obey some rather liberal speed-limit laws throughout the southwest, they were going to be fine. There had been no roadblock or army of law enforcement waiting at the border as they passed into New Mexico, near Ciudad Juárez, heading for Las Cruces on Interstate 25. They were free and clear to continue onto Interstate 10 and find their way to Arizona.

The drive through New Mexico was quick. By the early-morning hours of May 7, 2004, they had traveled some six hundred miles or more. After passing the border into New Mexico, Kathy suggested stopping somewhere to pawn the second gun.

“Bob gave the gun to Bobbi,” Jen said later in court. (This was another important fact to highlight—the gun was Bobbi’s to begin with, as Bobbi had later claimed.)

In town, after Kathy pawned the gun, they stopped for gas and something to eat. Kathy was growing increasingly impatient with Jen and Bobbi. She needed to know the truth about what had happened. Enough was enough.

“I need to know,” Kathy announced.

Bobbi and Jen looked at each other.

Jen explained how it started the day before Bob was murdered. Jen said she needed a ride home. No one else would pick her up. Bob came. And for that ride, Jen told her mother, Bob said his “payment” would be having sex with her.

The way she first told this story, Jen implied that she was alone when Bob picked her up. And then, when they got back to the party house afterward, “Bobbi Jo walked in,” Kathy said later, explaining how she had first heard the story from her daughter, “and [she] found Bob forcing himself on Jennifer. Bobbi Jo then knocked him away from Jennifer and he told them both to get their clothes and get out.”

“So we took our stuff and spent the night in Graford at Bobbi Jo’s grandmother’s,” Jen told Kathy.

Kathy stared at the two of them. Something seemed off with the story. It had holes. Details were missing. It was too prepackaged. It felt as if they were trying to
sell it
more than
tell it.

“The next day, we went back to the house and broke in by the window in the back,” Jen continued.

Kathy believed this. She looked down as they drove and realized Jen “had small cuts on her hand.”

“You did that breaking in?” Kathy asked.

Jen held up her hand. “Yes.”

From there, Jen said, she and Bobbi walked into Bob’s mother’s house and found Bob “passed out on his bed.”

“And what happened next?” Kathy pressed.

CHAPTER 21

T
HE MORNING AFTER BOBBI
’s birthday party, Thursday, April 29, turned out to be a fairly significant day by global standards—beyond, that is, the boundaries of Bobbi and Jen’s Mineral Wells bubble. The fallout from several disturbing images of U.S. soldiers allegedly abusing Iraqi prisoners at a jail near Baghdad was fueling shock and anger around the globe. It was all over the news.

For Bobbi and Jen, both of whom were totally oblivious to what was happening in the world, the morning started late (around noon). After another night of partying at Bob’s mother’s house—this time with Jen’s mother and sister—Bobbi and Jen wound up back in Graford at Bobbi’s grandmother’s house.

“Can you come up and get us?” Bobbi asked Bob over the phone.

“I guess,” Bob said.

Bob Dow drove from Mineral Wells to Graford. From there, the girls went with Bob to his friend’s house to have lunch.

After that, Bobbi asked, “Can you stop off at the store for us?”

In what seemed to be the normal course of the day for the past several weeks, Bob stopped at the liquor store and went in and bought the booze Jen and Bobbi needed to get through the day.

It was party time all over again.

They spent the afternoon at Bob’s drinking.

“I took half a Soma and fell asleep,” Jen said in one statement she later gave to police. Soma is the trade name for the prescription drug Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant designed to treat pain from muscle injuries and spasms; it’s definitely not a good companion to alcohol. It’s safe to say Jen passed out. She certainly had not fallen asleep.

Nevertheless, Jen didn’t say what time, exactly, but she claimed to have opened her eyes to Bobbi standing bedside, staring down at her.

“Grace (pseudonym, Bobbi’s cousin) and Charlie (pseudonym, a friend) are outside,” Bobbi said, according to Jen’s recollection. “Get up. Let’s go.” Bobbi shoved Jen’s arm. “Come on.”

Jen never argued with Bobbi. Plus, Jen wanted to be with Bobbi, wherever Bobbi went. When she talked about this day later (if we are to take anything Jennifer Jones says in her first statement to police as truth), Jen said she wanted out of Bob’s house, regardless of whether Bobbi Jo left, too. Bob had turned from a man who had been providing the girls with drugs and alcohol into this weird, forcefully perverted character who creeped Jen out. Bobbi, by then, was used to his antics. But Bob had been coming on to Jen since she started staying at the house with Bobbi, especially when Jen was alone with him. He was obsessed with Jen—according to
only
Jen. Bob had gotten used to having the women Bobbi brought home, but Jen was different. There was something about her that turned Bob on in a way Jen could not figure out. Maybe it was the simple fact that he couldn’t have her. Either way, it was beginning to turn into a problem for Jen, who said in court (her third version of events) that Bobbi had become incensed that Bob was making advances toward her.

I felt obligated to care for him and his needs,
Bobbi explained in a letter to me when I asked about this.
I did bring all kinds of women to him in exchange for money and drugs. Women loved me—how I looked, how I was. I’d take them over to “party” and [Bob] would do the rest. That went on for two years before I even
met
Jennifer. . . . I have not cared less if Bob wanted Jennifer or had sex with Jennifer. It didn’t matter to me. I wanted to drink and do drugs. If not with Jennifer, I’d find another girl.

According to Jen (during her sentencing hearing, the third version), all Bobbi had asked in return for those years of service to Bob was that he stay away from Jen.

Bobbi vehemently disagreed with this statement, saying that the relationship she had with Jen wasn’t like that one bit. Jen was just one more in a long line of girls Bobbi slept (and partied) with at that time. If Jen developed a fixation on Bob Dow wanting her, it was in her own mind. Yes, Bobbi said, Bob had made comments about Jen and she and Jen agreed to try and make this alleged “rape” story fly; but no, it wasn’t true. Bobbi didn’t care what Jen did—least of all with Bob. Because if it wasn’t Jen providing for Bobbi’s sexual needs, it would have been another female. And, Bobbi insisted, Jen had had sex with Bob a few times, anyway, for money and for dope.

It was all part of Jennifer’s fantasy that I would be angry with Bob for coming on to her,
Bobbi concluded.
Jennifer . . . hated [Bob].

Bobbi’s friend Charlie lived
in Millsap, a twenty-minute drive from the party house. There’s some indication that Jen planned on moving into Charlie’s house to get away from Bob; but in her first statement to police, she never finished explaining why she didn’t, or how much thought she had actually put into the idea.

Bobbi and Jen wound up staying at Charlie’s house, likely partying, until the following day, April 30, a Friday.

“Then they took me back to . . . get my clothes, so I would not have to go back over there [to the party house] alone,” Jen said of Bobbi and Charlie.

If Jen wanted to move out of Bob’s, so be it, Bobbi felt. Go for it. Bobbi didn’t care if the girls she brought over to the party house hung around or left. There would always be others.

Bob Dow’s sexual bombast, coupled with several overt sexual advances Jen later claimed he made toward her, had reached the point where Jen couldn’t take it anymore. She was beginning to feel as though it wasn’t safe being around Bob, with or without Bobbi (a factor that would become very important in Bob’s murder).

Jen grabbed her clothes.

Bobbi Jo’s family—grandmother, aunt, and uncle—were in Mexico, set to return on Saturday, May 1. In Jennifer’s version of this day, the plan was to hang out in Graford at Bobbi’s grandmother’s house and wait for them to return. From there, Jen could decide where to go next.

Jen later claimed Bobbi wanted to stop by and pick up Kathy, Jen’s mother, so Kathy could meet Bobbi’s grandparents.

“Not true,” Bobbi later said. “The last person in the world I would want to introduce my grandparents to was Kathy Jones.”

“I don’t recall this taking place,” Kathy later told me when I asked her about the day and Jen’s recollection of a plan to meet Bobbi’s grandparents.

A few weeks before,
on April 6, 2004, Bob Dow stood on the porch outside his mother’s house and talked with ex-wife Elizabeth Smith. Elizabeth and Bob had had casual conversations in the past. On this day, though, according to Elizabeth’s memory, Bob was in one of his moods, feeling sorry for himself. The girls, he explained, were getting to him. They were becoming a pain in the ass. Bob didn’t know what to do.

“I like Bobbi Jo,” Bob told Elizabeth. “She’s a chick magnet, you know. I can have all the young women I want, as long as I keep her happy. She’ll bring in lines of them, as long as she’s taken care of.”

Elizabeth didn’t know what to think, or how to respond. She knew Bobbi was a lesbian, and she said she didn’t have a problem with it. However, Elizabeth had never really met any of the girls Bob was referring to (so she claimed). Elizabeth would leave the house before the “parties” started, she later testified. She’d call Bob and hear loud music in the background, lots of girls talking and laughing and making a racket, and he’d explain what was going on. To her, it was wrong; though, she said, what went on inside the house was “Bob’s business.” She had no idea Bob was exploiting underage girls. She assumed they were all consensual adults.

In addition, Elizabeth wasn’t close to Bobbi and later claimed she had never even met Jen. Not once. (A comment that lends itself to Bobbi’s version of the relationship she had with Jen.) Elizabeth had heard a lot about Jen while at Bob’s, but she had never been introduced. And Elizabeth was no dummy. Bob had what Elizabeth later described as “a weakness for the flesh.” She learned this firsthand while married to the guy. However, she stayed out of the way when it came to what he did when she wasn’t around.

“That was him,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, Robert wasn’t perfect, and my belief is, none of us are, if we really looked in the closet.”

As they stood on the porch, this “worried” look came over Bob.

“What is it, Bob?”

“Tell [my son] that I’ve always known that he was mine and that I loved him, and I hope that I’ve been the best father I could possibly be to him.”

Elizabeth was confused. Why couldn’t Bob deliver the message himself? Was he planning on leaving?

It was no secret between them that Bob’s son had not been given his father’s surname. There was an issue with maybe Bob not being the boy’s father and a DNA test had been conducted after the boy requested it.

“What’s going on, Bob?” Elizabeth asked.

“I have messages for you to deliver, and I need you to do that for me,” he said.

Later, Elizabeth talked about this moment, making the claim: “He knew something was going to happen, and he gave me all these messages to tell everybody.... I’ll never forget them.”

“I wanted to apologize to you, Elizabeth,” Bob continued. He didn’t go into specifics; it was something between them that neither had to talk about in detail. Bob had messed up a good thing with Elizabeth by cheating on her. He had always wanted to say that. He needed to take this moment, he explained, and acknowledge he’d done wrong. He was sorry for it.