Bad Girls (24 page)

Audrey and Kathy had no choice, really. What could they do? So Audrey walked out five minutes later and Kathy followed right after.

“The place was swarmed with cops,” Audrey remembered. “There were guns pointed on us.”

Buckeye PD officers grabbed Kathy and Audrey. “Get up against that wall there. . . .” They were held, according to Audrey, at gunpoint.

Several officers went into the room, guns drawn, in search of Bobbi and Jen.

“Where are they?” an officer asked the women. “Where are Bobbi Jo Smith and Jennifer Jones?”

“We don’t know.... We don’t know. . . .”

Mike had a warrant against him, so they busted him and took Audrey and Kathy down to the Buckeye PD.

“They didn’t handcuff us or anything,” Audrey said. “But they sure wanted statements.”

When Boetz finally got hold of the Buckeye PD, somewhere around one in the morning on May 8, checking to see how they had made out at the Days Inn, he got a surprise.

“We have Kathy Jones and Audrey Sawyer. But the two other females, Jennifer and Bobbi, they ain’t here. They left the area before we got up there.”

Kathy wore a dark-colored tank top, jeans, no shoes, just socks. At times, she sat with her legs crossed and her head down. She was placed inside a small Buckeye PD interrogation room. Kathy appeared nervous and fidgety; her legs were shaking, her arms waving in all directions. It was near 4:00
A.M
. when they began. Kathy had been up all night, yet she seemed wide-awake.

“You understand you’re not a suspect,” the detective explained. A second cop, a female, sat directly across from Kathy and stared at her the entire time, not saying a word, and barely moving. “I’m here interviewing you for the Texas police there—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kathy interrupted.

After she signed a waiver, which allowed Kathy the right to speak without an attorney, Kathy told her story of what had happened. It took Jen’s mother some time to find her bearings, and she really never did. As she spoke, Kathy Jones’s narrative was all over the place.

When she got around to talking about Bob Dow, Kathy said, “He was whacked-out. He was always taking pictures and stuff.... He had a lot of guns. We was always taking pictures with the guns, you know, fooling around and stuff. But Bobbi Jo, she . . . she . . . she was like fascinated with the guns.”

Kathy explained how the girls had barged into Jerry’s Spanish Trace apartment and said (together), “We killed Bob.” Then, as she talked through the story in more detail, Kathy explained that it was actually Jen who said, “‘Momma, I killed Bob.’ And I said to her, ‘What do you mean,
you
killed Bob?’ And she said, ‘I shot him.’”

“Who said this?” the detective asked, stopping Kathy there.

“My daughter Jennifer.”

From there, Kathy then related what was to become a familiar tale—at least for the time being. “I asked her why she shot Bob and she told me, ‘He tried to rape me, Momma.’”

Kathy had a rough go with times, dates, days, who was driving, who did what, when, and where. She recalled the major events with ease, but the smaller details troubled her. Kathy couldn’t remember, for example, which day the girls had come by Spanish Trace. It took her some time to try to pin the day down, and she never really could.

When Kathy described the gun being tossed out the window, she said, “Jennifer reached back and grabbed a blanket and unfolded it and there was the gun.” Interestingly, she then added, without hesitation, as if certain: “It was a revolver, a twenty-two.” But then, rethinking that statement, she abruptly changed her mind. “It looked like, I mean. To me, it did . . . I don’t know that much about guns, you know.”

“What color was it?”

“It was black.”

“It had a big, long barrel, or one of those short ones?” the detective asked, using his hands to establish the size, as if describing a fish he had caught.

“It was long,” Kathy explained.

“Really?”

As they talked, Kathy bounced around. “I kept looking over at Jennifer and asking, ‘How does it feel?’ And she said, ‘What, Momma?’ And I said, ‘To kill someone?’ And, you know, she said, ‘It feels real good. . . .’” But then, after realizing what she had said, and that perhaps she was burying her daughter, Kathy tried to put the statement into context, adding, “I mean, I
think
she was showing off for Bobbi Jo. . . .”

At one point, in a muddle of blurred speech, Kathy speedily told the detective, “Bob’s mother, she was . . . she was done dead three days in the house before Bob was killed.... He really didn’t care about her. I was over there and walking to the bathroom one day and . . . I . . . I knew I done smelled something.... It was coming from that room.... I could hear Bob go in the room and ask her if she wanted something to eat, ‘Are you okay?’ . . . but she never said anything. I mean, this is really weird. I mean . . .”

“Wow,” the detective replied as Kathy continued. It was clear Kathy had no idea that Bob’s mother had been found alive.

Kathy talked her way through, trying to recall where the gun was tossed. At one point, the second officer in the room asked, “Is that Mineral Wells you’re talking about?”

“‘Miserable Wells,’” Kathy responded, wiping away tears, chuckling at her little joke. “That’s what we call it. ‘Miserable Wells, Texas.’”

The lead detective asking the questions had to leave the room for a moment to take a phone call. With him gone, Kathy spoke to the female. Most of what she said was a jumble of words. It was clear Kathy was coming down from whatever bender she had been on.

“These girls have got my head so messed up,” Kathy said. “I still can’t believe Jennifer shot”—but she stopped herself from finishing that part of her statement—“I think Bobbi Jo did almost talk her into it, like brainwashing her. . . .” Then it sounded as if Kathy said, “My ex-husband told me that the police in Mineral Wells told him they got proof that Bobbi Jo did it . . . that Bob was touching on Jennifer and she (Bobbi) went off. . . .”

Kathy was cut loose after a few more inconsequential questions. Then they brought Audrey in.

Audrey wore a lime green T-shirt, blue jeans, and flip-flops. Her hair was pulled back, tied in a bun. Oddly enough, she seemed in good spirits, actually laughing and joking around with the detective as they got settled.

As the interview began, there was an obvious agenda on law enforcement’s part. The detective asked immediately, “One of the main questions I need to know is, how long have you known Bobbi Jo?”

Barely audible, Audrey said, “A few months.”

It became clear that Audrey and the detective had started the interview earlier; but for some reason they had stopped and were now continuing on videotape. After that initial question, Audrey described how the girls showed up at the apartment. Her take was that Jen and Bobbi, “crying,” rushed in saying, “We killed Bob.” Then, “When we got to Bobbi’s grandmother’s house, she (Bobbi) had told her (Bobbi’s grandma) that
she
had killed him, while they had been telling us that Jennifer had killed him.”

Audrey spoke fast. She said Jen told her that after she and Bobbi were released from jail on a shoplifting charge, they went over to Bob’s house and “he wanted them out . . . but he needed to have something in return, so he wanted Jen [as payment]. Bobbi didn’t want her to, so they just got drunk and high, whatever, and Bob tried to rape Jennifer, pulling off her clothes and stuff . . . and Bobbi Jo came in and pushed Bob away. So Bob then told them to get all their stuff and leave. So they went to Graford. The next day, they come in . . . went in Bob’s house . . . and Bobbi Jo was telling Jennifer ‘put a pillow over the gun so nobody can hear it.’ ’Cause he was trying to rape her and they was trying to get back at him. And Bobbi Jo told Jennifer to go in there and try to seduce him, or whatever . . . so Jennifer went in there. Bob was naked. She was sitting on top of him. She told him, ‘Cover your face with a pillow so I can imagine that you’re Bobbi Jo.’ He grabbed a pillow, put it over his head. She grabbed the gun off the nightstand and shot him the first time underneath the pillow . . . and Bobbi Jo heard it—she was, like, waiting outside [the room]—and she walked in and then Jennifer just unloaded the gun. . . . And Bob was shaking, he was not dead . . . and so Jennifer started choking him. Then they stole his money and his weed . . . and they left, and that’s when they came to our house.”

“What would provoke your sister to do something like this?” the detective wondered.

“I don’t know.... I still can’t believe she done it. I can’t picture her doin’ it. Even though I know that she done it. That’s why I was thinking at first that it was Bobbi Jo and Jennifer was trying to take it up for her—until Jennifer started talking today.”

“Why?”

“Oh, the way that she ( Jennifer) was talkin’, I
know
she did it.”

“I bet especially when she started talking about choking this guy (Bob Dow) to death—wow!”

“Yeah, she choked me today when we got into a fight.”

“Oh, you guys got into a fight?”

“Yeah . . . ,” Audrey said, explaining how it started with Jen saying she believed Audrey and Kathy were going to turn them all in. “And I pushed her,” Audrey said after describing how
she
had taken all of her belongings out of the truck and was going leave the group. “And she pushed me right away. And then we started fighting. And then she grabbed me by the neck right here”—Audrey put her hand up to her neck to show how Jen had put her hand on her trachea and squeezed—“she said, ‘I killed somebody before. . . .’” Audrey had a hard time breathing, she explained, as though Jen knew exactly what she was doing.

“Bobbi Jo and my mom had to break us up. . . . After she did that to me, I know, you know . . . she’s always had this in her. She was always so evil. I walked in the door one time and she had my sister Stephanie with a choke hold up against the wall—this was about three or four years ago.... And she’s always had anger built up inside of her and she has said she always wanted to do this (kill somebody).”

Nowhere in that statement did Audrey mention anything about Bobbi having a seizure or Bobbi coming on to her. The way Audrey made it sound, Jen had had a death wish since a young age, a strong desire to take a life, and anybody who might get in the way of that was going to experience her wrath.

The statements that Kathy and Audrey gave somewhat explained what went on during the road trip. Neither woman had offered the MWPD anything more than they already had—which, in the totality of the crime, was effectively nothing more than a number of statements that caused more confusion than anything else. These were contradictory statements, extremely inconsistent. Both Bobbi and Jen seemed to be taking the blame at various times.

After giving statements, Kathy and Audrey were dropped off back at the Days Inn, where they waited for Jerry Jones, who had gotten the go-ahead from Brian Boetz to pick up the women and drive them back home.

CHAPTER 30

T
HE NEW PLAN
was California, the Golden State. The border was about an hour away if they traveled fast. One of the first towns over the border on the 10 is Blythe, which resides in Riverside County. Blythe is located, essentially, just over the Colorado River, where the 10 crosses into the state. It’s desert country. You don’t want to be around this area in the summer, when the average temperature ranges from about 101 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Dry heat or not, those temps will kill you if you’re not careful. Moreover, if your vehicle is prone to overheating, Blythe is probably not the best place to be heading.

Bobbi and Jen had nothing: no money, no food, no idea what to do. All they had was a truck running low on petrol—and each other.

Pulling into Blythe on West Hobsonway, the main drag off the 10, the girls looked for a place to park the truck and sleep. It was late. Out here, the sky turns as black as tar when the sun goes down, and the stars shine like silver rocks on the bottom of a riverbed.

Bobbi was beginning to feel the effects of the trip and what she had gotten herself mixed up in. Why in the world, Bobbi considered, would she cover for a girl she knew only twenty-seven days, a little over three weeks? Did she really want to get involved in some sort of shoot-out with police over a crime she’d had nothing to do with? And Bob—although Bobbi knew the guy was no good for her and was not the most stand-up citizen—“a perv,” on top of it all—a guy who exploited females at the expense of Bobbi bringing them over . . . still, in no way, did Bobbi want to see him dead.

“As I began to come out of a fog, I realized Bob was dead and that Jennifer had killed him.”

It was a surreal thought.

Jen was driving this time. And, according to the story she told in
Texas Monthly,
her legs were all burned up from sitting in the truck—the sun beating down on her bare skin all that day as they drove from the Days Inn to California.

When they crossed the border, Jen claimed, she turned to Bobbi and said, “We can’t run forever.”

And so they found a place to park for the night.

Jen also told the magazine that she was disappointed there was no roadblock along the California border, along with troops of cops waiting for them. It had felt kind of glamorous being on the run with Bobbi, Jen thought. Likewise, there had been nothing in the newspapers or on the radio/television about Bob’s murder. Jen had expected the idea of two “killers,” armed and dangerous and on the run, to be a national story. She said she had been looking at newspapers, hoping to see something about the crime, but she never did. As it happened, Jen realized they weren’t going to be famous. They wouldn’t be doing any televised perp walk on CNN, or sitting down with Anderson Cooper or
Dateline
in the coming months. They were two girls, broke and tired—and out of fuel and fervor—pulling into the back parking lot of a pool hall in Blythe, California, feeling the entire episode now grating on their fragile psyches.