Bad Girls (23 page)

It was well after midnight when Boetz finished with Krystal and knocked on the judge’s door.

After getting the warrant signed, Boetz called Jerry Jones to see if he had made contact with the girls again.

“I have heard from them,” Jerry said.

“Where are they?”

“Buckeye, Arizona. They’re at a motel room and want me to come and pick them up and bring them back.” Jerry was referring to Audrey and Kathy, although he didn’t say it.

Boetz got off the phone, called the Buckeye Police Department, and explained the situation. He said he’d fax them the warrant.

“Well go check it out,” the Buckeye cop told him. “Let you know what we find.”

What Boetz didn’t know, however, was that there was trouble brewing among the four women. There was the chance that the Buckeye PD officers were going to drive out to the Days Inn and find that the seam holding the women together had torn apart.

CHAPTER 27

J
ERRY JONES WIRED
the girls some cash on the evening of May 7, 2004, but it took some time to go through. Bobbi had met a man at the pool who had invited them to stay in his room as long as they needed. As it turned out, the guy, Mike Depardi (pseudonym), was cooking meth inside his room.

Thus, it was time to, once again,
par-tay
!

“When we stopped in Buckeye at the motel,” Bobbi Jo told me, “a Mexican man came up to me. He thought I was a dude. He was with his woman. He said nothing about dope. He offered me a beer. Kathy . . . was hounding him about dope. . . .”

The dude was creepy; he was like a character straight out of a Quentin Tarantino film. It all seemed surreal to Bobbi. Audrey later said she wanted no part in partying with this guy and didn’t. She admitted drinking and smoking some weed, but meth? Especially being cooked inside a hotel room by some guy nobody knew?

No way. (Incidentally, Bobbi Jo later vehemently disagreed with Audrey on her recollection.)

Before they hooked up with Mike, Bobbi and Jen were cooking up something of their own: an idea. As they stood outside in the parking lot of the hotel, waiting on Jerry’s money to come through, “They was talking,” Audrey said, “about getting married.”

(There is much dispute regarding who came up with this idea. Audrey first told me it was Jen and Bobbi. Then she changed and said it was Jen and Kathy. Bobbi didn’t even recall most of it, better yet dreaming up the idea with Jen. So once again, the truth of how this scene transpired—or if it even happened the way Jen later remembered—remains a mystery.)

The conversation (mostly coming out of Kathy Jones’s mouth) was centered on the premise that if Bobbi and Jen got married, they wouldn’t be forced to testify against each other. A wife cannot testify against her husband, or vice versa. It worked the same, the girls thought, if a wife testified against her wife.

This was certainly true in the case of Arizona law and a marriage between a man and a woman, Title 13 Criminal Code, section 13-4062, the “anti-marital fact privilege.” As the statute reads, however:
A husband [cannot testify] for or against his wife without her consent, nor a wife for or against her husband without his consent, as to events occurring during the marriage, nor can either, during the marriage or afterwards, without consent of the other, be examined as to any communication made by one to the other during the marriage....

The key phrase is “during the marriage.” What happened before and after was fair game. On top of that, you could bet the girls had not Googled the law and were totally oblivious as to what it actually stated. Not to mention that Arizona’s Constitution “explicitly” denied the “recognition of same-sex marriage.”

Audrey, at first, thought the girls were kidding.

“I’ll grab a Bible from one of the rooms,” Kathy suggested. “I can be the preacher.”

First, the girls “got really, really high” with Mike, Audrey claimed, and then smoked some of the weed they had left over.

“It was my mom’s idea,” Audrey said, changing her mind. “Bobbi and Jen were talking about getting married and not having to testify against each other, and my mom decided she could marry them right then and there.”

“Look,” Bobbi said, barely recalling what amounted to a mock wedding, “I was traumatized and coming off (down from) a high I’d been on for almost two and half weeks. I do not recall any of this.”

So, according to Kathy and Audrey, they had a wedding ceremony in back of the hotel, in a field, as cars and trucks whizzed by on the nearby freeway. One report claimed Kathy read I Corinthians, 13:4–8:

4. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

5. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

6. Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

7. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

Whatever the case, the girls gathered some wildflowers from the field and, with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, Bobbi and Jen were “married” by stand-in preacher Kathy Jones. As Audrey recalled the scene, Jen wore a swimsuit and tank top. She was barefoot. Bobbi donned a black hoodie sweatshirt pullover, with the sleeves cut off, and white sweatpants, with black stripes on the sides. Before the ceremony, Audrey recalled, Jen and Bobbi ran over to the truck stop and bought a few penny-candy, gumball-machine rings.

“It was kind of, you know, stupid,” Audrey said, thinking back to the moment. “But it was entertaining and they thought it was real.”

(Audrey told me she had photos of all this—but she could never produce them.)

The reception was held inside Mike’s room: more dope smoking and beer guzzling. After getting a good buzz on, Audrey, Jen, and Bobbi went out and sat by the pool. Kathy stayed in the room with Mike and his girl.

At some point, Bobbi fell down on the ground and had a seizure on the pool deck, twitching and shaking and flopping around.

“Shit, help me here, Audrey,” Jen said, jumping up, running over to Bobbi.

Audrey didn’t believe Bobbi was for real. She’d had several “seizures” since they had known each other, Audrey recalled, believing the seizures were a way for Bobbi to draw attention to herself.

But Jen obviously thought different.

Jen knelt down next to Bobbi. She stuck her finger in Bobbi’s mouth, afraid Bobbi would swallow her tongue and choke to death.

“She’s faking that shit,” Audrey said, walking over, staring down at the two of them. “She ain’t havin’ no seizure.”

“Help me out here,” Jen pled.

Jen finally got Bobbi calmed down. Then she went inside the room to get Bobbi some water. Now Audrey and Bobbi were alone.

“And she leaned over and she tried to kiss me, and shit,” Audrey claimed.

(Bobbi said Audrey was a liar. Bobbi already had Audrey and had dumped her. She didn’t want her anymore. And why would she do this at this time? It didn’t fit.)

When Jen came back, Audrey said something about Bobbi coming on to her.

Jen snapped, “mouthing off,” Audrey remembered. “We got into it something good.”

But Jen kept running away, playing ring-around-the-rosy, using the pool as a shield, not allowing Audrey to get to her.

“What the hell you doin’ here, Jen?” Audrey yelled across the pool. “All this—it’s crazy.”

“Shut up, bitch.”

Audrey gave up.

Kathy came out.

“Let’s go to that truck stop over there, Ma,” Audrey said. “Leave these two here.”

Bobbi’s seizures began in her early teens, she explained. It started after suffering a concussion. They are documented. Bobbi had no idea what a seizure actually was, when she first started having them. Today, however, Bobbi is forced to take seizure medication.

“At first, I didn’t even know what was going on,” Bobbi explained. “I’d wake up unable to move—piss all over me.”

As for that faked seizure by the pool, Bobbi said: “I
never
had a seizure during the
entire
time we were running.... And just a little insight? Every single one of them (Audrey, Kathy, and Jennifer) are dopeheads. . . . They lie.”

The plan Audrey and Kathy had come up with after leaving the hotel was for Kathy to try and finagle money out of a truck driver, so they could get back home. Audrey didn’t want to continue onto the next stop. The road trip, apparently, was over.

“Me and my mom planned to grab Jennifer when Jerry showed up and take her back home with us,” Audrey recalled. “We was gonna leave Bobbi there, but we didn’t want to tell Jennifer what we were doing. We wanted to take Jennifer back to find out what was going on. We knew Jerry was talking to the cops. It was sort of a plan to get Jennifer in to speak with the cops. We knew that the cops knew where we were. Jerry told us, ‘The cops said to come in and we can talk about it. If it was self-defense, fine . . . but with y’all running, they say it makes her look more guilty.’”

So Kathy and Audrey headed over to the truck stop, and Bobbi and Jen went back to the hotel room.

CHAPTER 28

B
OBBI WAS ANXIOUS
. Stewing might be a better way to describe Bobbi’s demeanor at this time. She was scared. Bobbi believed Kathy and Audrey were going to pin the murder on her; they had some sort of plan to set her up to take the fall for Jen. After spending a few minutes inside the hotel room, Bobbi took Jen and went back to sit poolside. Jen tried to calm Bobbi down.

Bobbi paced.

Jen suggested they go for a swim and wait it out.

“Where’d they go?” Bobbi asked. She was looking around the parking lot of the hotel, bugging out a little. Kathy and Audrey had been gone for a while. Bobbi was concerned.

“They’ll be back,” Jen said. “Come in the water.”

“They been gone a long time.”

“It’s okay,” Jen tried explaining. She got out of the pool.

Bobbi was concerned that Audrey and Kathy had run off to the cops to give her up. Thinking back, Bobbi wondered how her life had come to this—another mess she was trying to find her way out of. There was a time, not long ago, when Bobbi had wanted to die. She had separated from her son’s father and, she told me, “I became more strung out on drugs and went into a depression.” Not seeing her child, she felt her life had become nothing but a twisted clutter of addictions and letdowns, before she was even old enough to vote. “I could not care for my son. . . .” To Bobbi, neglecting her child was the final blow, the one that hurt the most. Not being able to be a mother, Bobbi “took over one hundred eighty Xanax and went to sleep.” She thought that would do it. Put a peaceful bow on it all. Wipe away the pain.

But it didn’t.

“I woke up in the hospital. I hated myself. I was just like my mother.” It was not long after, Bobbi said, when “Robert [Dow] offered me a job working with him.” What seemed like a lifeline, a rope tossed down into the well, became another obstacle to overcome. “Bob only pulled me farther down.”

Still standing poolside,
Bobbi said to Jen, “They’ve been gone over an hour.”

“Let’s go look for them,” Jen suggested.

Bobbi and Jen went back to the room and cleaned up. Then they hopped into Bob’s truck and drove to that nearby truck stop. As Bobbi slowly drove around the parking lot, both she and Jen looking in all directions, Bobbi saw Kathy talking to a man.

There was a cop car parked in the lot, not too far away from where Kathy stood and leaned into the window of a truck. Audrey was close by, nervously smoking a cigarette.

Bobbi and Jen drove back to the hotel. Bobbi got Kathy’s and Audrey’s stuff together, asked Jen to pack up their belongings, and then packed everything into the truck.

“Over there,” Jen said.

“What?”

Jen motioned for Bobbi to put Kathy’s and Audrey’s possessions by a telephone pole, out in the open, so they’d see it.

Bobbi and Jen then hopped on the highway, putting Buckeye, Arizona, along with Audrey and Kathy, in their rearview mirror.

“We thought [Kathy] and Audrey were talking to the cops, so we dropped off their clothes . . . [and] we drove west,” Jen later said in court.

CHAPTER 29

D
ETECTIVE BRIAN BOETZ WOULDN’T
allow Jerry Jones to drive to Arizona and pick up the girls.

“I didn’t know what would happen if he went,” Boetz recalled. “So that’s why we called on the local authorities in Arizona.”

Audrey and Kathy didn’t have any luck convincing a trucker to give them enough cash to get back home. Frustrated, they walked back to the hotel.

As soon as they entered the room, however, they realized something was up.

Kathy ran out into the parking lot to check on Bob’s truck.

“Shit . . . they’re gone,” Kathy said after returning to the room.

“What? The truck’s gone?”

“Yup.”

“All of our shit was in that truck.”

They walked out of the room and soon found their belongings by that telephone pole, Audrey said. Then they went back to the hotel room and waited.

“What now?” Audrey asked.

Kathy suggested they hook up with Mike. When they got over to his room, Audrey admitted, “he was cooking some more meth, so we ended up smoking it with him.”

After getting high, Audrey went out by the swimming pool and sat down. Before long, she went back to the hotel room. As they fired up the tinfoil for a second time, Audrey explained, heating up the meth to inhale the smoke, Mike’s hotel room phone rang.

“Yeah?” Mike asked. He listened; then he put his hand over the receiver. “They’s asking if anyone in here is from Texas, and if so, they want y’all to step out of the room.”

Kathy and Audrey looked at each other.

Mike spoke again: “The cops are here.”

After about five minutes, contemplating what they should do next, Mike walked out of the room with his hands up.