Bad Girls (43 page)

In Matthews’s opinion, the court of appeals judges got it wrong.

“Look, if I go into a pawnshop and buy a shotgun and then go rob and kill a security guard somewhere, you can’t go out an arrest and charge the pawnshop owner as an accessory to the crime.”

Exactly.

And that was crux of the state’s case, fundamentally speaking: Bobbi provided the weapon. The argument that she had convinced Jen to kill Bob didn’t hold up. Where’s the evidence for that? The state provided zero.

Matthews had not filed a motion to change venues, he told me, even though Judge Ray said he was surprised he hadn’t.

“I didn’t, simply because I knew where he would have moved the trial to—a neighboring county.”

The fear for Matthews was that this neighboring county, being ultraconservative, would have held it against Bobbi “even worse” for being homosexual. Palo Pinto County was by far one of the more liberal counties in the region; and although Matthews believed there was certainly some bias against Bobbi’s sexual preference, he didn’t feel it would gravely affect the outcome of the trial.

“The people of Palo Pinto County are open-minded enough,” Matthews told me, “to put things aside. I’ve gotten a lot of not guilty verdicts in that county that were kind of surprising to me. . . . I’ve seen all white juries acquit my black defendants.”

Then there’s the issue of that
Texas Monthly
article being published weeks before Bobbi’s trial, giving potential jurors an opinion of the case from Jen’s point of view, most of which Jen lied about.

No one involved in this case I spoke to seemed to think it was a big deal.

Look, I don’t want to be accused of condoning Bobbi Jo Smith’s behavior during those years, her drug use and alcoholism, luring girls to Bob’s, et cetera. Or not sympathizing with Bob Dow as a murder victim. But questions began for me as I looked into this case.

Bobbi is not guilty of the crime she was charged with. That realization is as clear to me as anything in this case.

EPILOGUE

D
URING JEN’S SENTENCING HEARING
, she made an observation (which I covered in the narrative, but becomes a statement that deserves further scrutiny here): “Well, first, we would—we would get—we would do drugs to get inside that state of mind. And then after that, we would just sit there and read each other’s minds. We would just talk to each other without saying a word, you know, verbally. And it’s—it’s kind of, like, you know—you and someone say something at the same time. You know, y’all’s minds are thinking alike.”

One has to wonder, was Jen under this “Wiccan” influence when she purportedly heard Bobbi tell her that Bob Dow needed to die in order for them to be together? Did she actually believe later, after becoming “sober” while in prison, that Bobbi could control her mind? Or was this just another lie in a long list to cover those of which she told all along?

At another point during court proceedings, Jen made this claim: “I felt like I was afraid of losing her [Bobbi].”

That’s an important piece of information in the scope of this case.

Jen was referring to how she felt near the time of the murder. Remember, Kathy caught Bobbi in bed with another chick shortly before and told Jen about it. Jen said she didn’t believe it. And so here was Bobbi—another lover whom Jen felt slipping away from her. We know how Jen felt about her past loves and losses because she wrote about it in her journal. We also know from that journal that Jen could not hold down relationships. Losing a lover was traumatic to Jen—always. Loss was something she began to comprehend and, truthfully, expect as far back as when Kathy started going to prison. Loss was something Jen sensed coming. But with Bobbi, Jen was obsessed. There’s clear evidence of that obsession. She had never been obsessed with a lover before this. And then later, talking about this moment in her life, Jen admitted what?

“I felt like I was afraid of losing her.”

To me, that statement was such a vital piece of this puzzle.

Think about it:
“I felt like I was afraid of losing her.”

One of the most profound statements Jen ever made was in the form of a journal entry:
I’m just a . . . girl with only a broken heart and no one to fix it.

Bobbi was the fixer. But Jen was beginning to realize that Bobbi was not exclusive, and Bobbi was not in love with her, like she wanted her to be.

This statement, all by itself, said so much about Jen’s psyche, her character, and her skewed mentality at the time she met Bobbi. When I look at all of the available evidence, it’s certainly obvious to me that Jen was jealous of Bob Dow and Bobbi’s relationship. When I put that up against the three main motivations for murder—love, money, and revenge (with several subcategories bracketing off those)—and a narrative comes into focus. I would have liked to have seen a more thorough questioning of Jen by police: her life, her loves, her crimes, her passions, her thoughts about Bobbi and Bob.

But nobody asked those questions.

I had so many things to talk to Jen about. I assumed she’d step right up to the task. Hell, she had spoken to everyone else. So I pursued Jen with dogged determination (through Audrey, Kathy, and several letters of my own). I wanted her story. My aim was to see if it would change again. I wrote. Audrey said she wrote to her on my behalf. And for a time there, I heard nothing other than Jen was gravely ill, cancer or some sort of benign tumor (I heard later it was her liver), and she had spent a better part of a year in the infirmary. There were even some who thought she might die.

As I mentioned in the narrative, in early May 2012, a letter from Jen arrived. It was brief. She sounded bitter and frustrated. She described a “lack of interest” in telling me “anything” about her life “then or now.” She went on to say I should not send her anything. She wrote how she didn’t
wish to see how my ex-beloved and unfavorable sister have added their foolishness to my present state of being.
She claimed to be sorry for an “unwillingness to help” me “write a great story.”

Jen is obviously afraid of the truth—and may not even know at this point what that
truth
is. She openly and shamelessly lied to Katy Vine and
Texas Monthly
after pleading out her case, weeks before Bobbi’s trial. I believe this was part of a carefully thought-out design to bury Bobbi for turning on her. Look at those incredible tales of meeting Bobbi under a tree out on the library green, the road trip, and what happened with Bob, which Jen had told Katy Vine (whom I later spoke to about this case).

There comes a time in a series of lies when the liar needs to stop talking. How could Jen keep track of it all? Her story fell apart each time she told it. If she laid out
another
version to me, it would only add to the disaster that turned out to be her life during those days before and after she murdered Bob Dow.

Scary numbers appear
when the facts surrounding the imprisonment of women in this country are studied. According to The Sentencing Project: Research and Advocacy for Reform in Washington, DC, the numbers are staggering:
Women in state prison . . . were more likely to report using drugs at the time of their offense than men (40 % vs. 32%), and nearly one-third reported that they had committed their offense to obtain money to buy drugs.
One out of every three women is serving time in prison because of drugs.
More than half (57 %) of women incarcerated under state jurisdiction reported that they had experienced either sexual or physical abuse before their admission to prison. Nearly three-quarters (73.1 %) of women in state prison in 2005 had a mental health problem, compared to 55 % of men in prison. Women in prison are considerably more likely than men to have been diagnosed with a mental illness. In state prisons . . . 23.6% of women were identified as mentally ill, compared to 15.8 % of men, while in federal prisons the proportions were 12.5 % of women and 7 % of men.

These numbers play a role in this case.

As I researched the fact that a good portion of the females in our prison system are a product of abuse, I came across some rather disturbing information that played directly into the Jennifer Jones/Bobbi Jo Smith story. According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry,
Childhood trauma darkens the child’s vision of the future as well as her attitudes about people. Young people who have been traumatized will voice cautious, one-day-at-a-time attitudes. They may say that you can’t count on anyone. Sexually traumatized girls may shrink from men (using avoidance to cope with the trauma) or approach them with overly friendly sexual advances (in an attempt to master the trauma by trying to relive it). Traumatized children tend to recognize the profound vulnerability in all people, especially themselves.

That same article went on to say, these
trauma-related fears often persist into adulthood.

What I found most compelling when I compared this research to the girls was:
Within the traumatized child, internal changes may occur which can affect her later in life, surfacing in adolescence or early adulthood.
The key here is that without the proper treatment,
some childhood traumas can result in later problems [characterized] by violent behavior, extremes of passivity and re-victimization (people who were raped or incestuously abused as children often fail to protect themselves from rape), self-mutilation, suicidal or self-endangering behavior, and anxiety disturbances.

After finishing this book, readers, how do the girls match up to this research?

“I think it was a combination of them both and the things that were going on in their lives at that point,” Brian Boetz later told me when I expressed the opinion of not categorizing Bobbi as a cold-blooded killer. Both girls were amped up on dope. Both had come from hard-core backgrounds and grew up without a sense of direction. Their view of right and wrong was skewed.

On top of it all, as well, Bob Dow did not help his own cause. What he did to Bobbi and Jen (along with scores of other women he used) was immoral and sadistic. He took advantage of these girls as much as he possibly could. I’m never one to bash the victim of a homicide, and that’s not what I mean here. I only say this to point out how the girls’ lives turned out was, partly, manifested by the adults around them. Both of the girls were, arguably, adults by age. But we would have to ask: Were they adults emotionally?

This story is not over. I am going to pursue—and I have no idea why; after all, I could just let Bobbi go and let her do this on her own—the idea of getting Bobbi someone who will listen to the facts of her case. I am going to try and convince someone that this woman has been overprose-cuted, at the least, and deserves a new trial.

I also have to wonder: Was Bobbi punished for the disgust those closely connected to this case felt for Bob Dow, along with the rather ugly relationship Bobbi and Bob had?

In one of the last letters she wrote to me regarding this book, Bobbi did not have good things to say about her attorney, Jim Matthews.

I never believed he was for me,
she said.

As my own relationship with Matthews continued, I began to agree with Bobbi. Matthews repeatedly promised me documentation he never delivered, including Bobbi’s entire court file, which she had given written permission for him to send. He had repeatedly said he wanted to help Bobbi, believed in her innocence, and wanted to see that she got a new trial. Yet, time and again, Jim Matthews did not do what he told me he would.

In the end, Bobbi was quite a different person than when I first met her. She was no longer defensive and bitter and continually on guard. She said she did want to meet me “face-to-face” at some point, adding, “I thank God that you’ve come along. I pray in hopes for a second chance with my son. I want to take him to his baseball games. I want to be there for his first crush. I’ll admit I’ve learned a lot being trapped within these walls. I use my lessons for positive motivation now, and I will not make the same mistakes twice. I am a woman. I am a mother.... I refuse to give up.

Look, I could be entirely wrong about Bobbi—as I’m sure there will be some who read this book and disbelieve her. What’s most important to me, always, are facts. Personally, I’d need a
hell
of a lot more than what was presented in court to send a nineteen-year-old away for fifty years. There were too many lies told, too many variables. I couldn’t convict on twelve hours’ worth of testimony—half of which was Jennifer Jones lying under oath. I think a major part of this case revolves around the repulsion some felt when they looked at the photographs left behind. Did Bobbi’s extremely graphic and revolting sexual acts on film condemn her? Did the fact that she had sex with Bob and was promiscuous with females turn into a terrible loathing that convicted her? Was Bobbi punished for Bob Dow’s reprehensible behavior? Was she shown bias because of her sexuality? We live in a society today where these questions become relevant.