Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  “People came from all over to soak in the baths and then profess it was a cure for anything they had,” said one local. “So, back in the fifties and early sixties, this was a booming town.”

  Throughout that time, the economy was great; the military was rocking and rolling. The Baker Hotel became similar to a little Las Vegas, and all was copacetic in town. But then the military base closed and the bottom fell out. No sooner had that happened than the Baker Hotel imploded as well.

  As the years have progressed, Mineral Wells has fallen more in line with the familiar poverty-stricken, jobless brand that has become small-town America. It became ravaged by the horrors of what meth and ice can do, robberies, burglaries, auto thefts, and rapes. Not a trade-off, necessarily, for a low murder rate; but a fact the locals—many of whom were born and raised in Mineral Wells—could not and would not ever deny.

  “Still,” one local told me, “Mineral Wells sometimes gets thrown that way”—being a bad place to live—“but it’s really not. Probably just like anywhere else, we have the same problems other communities have. We’re average people.”

  Yes, the one fact that MWPD officers and the locals will acknowledge all day long is that, despite the downturns throughout the years, Mineral Wells has “one of the lowest, if not the lowest, murder rates in the state.”

  Indeed, murder is not a call the MWPD gets all that frequently.

  Randy Hunter and several other MWPD officers, who arrived on the scene to back him up, weren’t in the house all that long. When Hunter and the other police officers emerged, Rick Cruz heard additional sirens—other cops and an ambulance. Now it all seemed real to the Cruzes. Something had happened—something terrible, something sinister, and maybe even deadly.

  Officer Hunter must have found something inside the house, Rick Cruz surmised, looking on.

  Hunter came out and walked over to Rick and Kathy as additional cops and the emergency medical technician (EMT) van pulled up. “I’ll need that gun, Mr. Cruz.”

  Rick handed it over. “What’s going on?”

  The officer didn’t say anything.

  “What is it?” Rick asked.

  The cop said nothing.

  Then again, he didn’t have to. The look on his face, the arriving officers and EMTs, said it all. What had started hours earlier as a “maybe” was now something much more serious. Someone had been shot. No doubt about it. And by the look of it, Rick and Kathy Cruz knew while standing there in Bob’s driveway, sizing up the scene as it unfolded in front of them, that the cop was in no hurry to help the victim out. And that could mean only one thing.

  By now, the MWPD believed there were possibly two victims inside what was an absolute garbage dump of a house on Twentieth Street. Police found a male and a female. Or a mother and her son, as it turned out. That first responding officer, Randy Hunter, knew the man was dead. But the woman, she was alive—just barely. The MWPD had no idea what happened: how, why, when, or by whom. They only inferred that a gun was somehow involved. Hunter and his team of responding officers did a cursory search of the house, where they had found the one man, presumably Bob—unresponsive, lying on a bed, cold to the touch, dead as road kill.

  As Hunter walked into that second bedroom and the arm fell off the bed, he heard a groan. And it scared him.

  What in the hell? Hunter thought.

  Not another DB.

  There was an elderly woman awake in her bed in that adjacent room, buried under a mound of covers. The room was a complete mess, “junked out,” said one law enforcement source. There were empty Happy Meal boxes all over the place. The old woman had been watching television, actually. And when Hunter approached, weapon drawn, ready and expecting to find her dead, too, she looked at him quizzically and wondered what in the world was going on. It was obvious that she had been underfed and was perhaps suffering from malnutrition and some form of dementia.

  “Out of it,” one cop told me later. She was totally oblivious to the fact that the man—her son—in the room next to her was dead. “Once she got some fluids in her, though, she bounced back quickly and was, she let us know, totally surprised that the cops were in her house.”

  One report had her sitting up in bed at one point, saying, “Is there anything wrong, Officer?” Meanwhile, Hunter was digging her out of the covers she was buried under when he realized she was alive.

  The responding officers were smart not to touch or meddle with the crime scene. It’s amazing how many first responders muck up what can be a slippery slope when walking into a crime scene involving a potential homicide victim. It’s those first responders, most forensic scientists will agree, that can make or break a case depending on how they go about closing off and securing a scene. In this case, the MWPD had trained its officers properly—apparently. There was a protocol and it had seemed to be followed.

  Thirty-five-year-old MWPD Detective Brian Boetz was at home, already done for the day, enjoying his life outside work, when the call came.

  “We have what appears to be a double homicide . . . out on Twentieth Street,” dispatch said.

  “Got it. On my way.”

  One murder in Mineral Wells on a Wednesday evening was beyond rare. But two? That got Boetz’s attention mighty quick. He didn’t waste much time hopping up out of his chair, grabbing his weapon and radio, firing up his black Yukon SUV, and kicking stone and dust from his driveway as the siren blared, the lights flashed, and Boetz found himself heading toward a possible double homicide.

  Inside the house, Randy Hunter made sure the old woman was taken out by EMTs and brought directly to a hospital.

  It took Detective Boetz about fifteen minutes to get to the scene. He stepped out of his Yukon, saw Richard and Kathy Cruz standing and looking rather puzzled, and then headed into the house. No sooner had Boetz arrived, than his captain, Mike McAllester, pulled up.

  Boetz was a Texas transplant. His mother, grandfather, grandmother, and he had moved to Mineral Wells from Denver, Colorado, when Boetz was twelve.

  “My dad lives somewhere in Oregon, I think,” the detective told me. “I don’t know for sure. I don’t keep in touch with him.”

  Taking a look at the house from outside as they headed in, Boetz and McAllester easily determined that no one had been taking care of the place. They’d seen worse, sure. Nonetheless, this house was nothing more than a run-down, dirty, substandard, ranch-style box of decaying wood, nearly overcome by aggressive, vinelike vegetation, with paint peeling off like confetti.

  The EMTs were gone by the time Boetz and McAllester arrived. A cursory look at the neighborhood and it was clear that they were looking at a cookie-cutter series of similar single-family ranch homes on postage-stamp sects of land. This was part of suburban Mineral Wells. Most homes were kept up best they could be under the conditions of the economic times and not much drive to fix up a community that had been falling to the ills of the drug culture for years. Drugs have a way of working themselves into the nicer communities, once the suburban partyers move on from weed and booze and into the heavier stuff, such as heroin, crack, and meth. There is no defining line much anymore, separating the “hood” from the “burbs,” unless a Realtor is talking exclusive areas of the town. Drugs are everywhere.

  “The town of Mineral Wells is definitely in decay,” one visitor to the neighborhood told me, “and none of the homes in that neighborhood will be in Better Homes and Gardens.”

  An understatement.

  “We entered through a back door”—after reaching in through what was a windowpane of smashed-out glass, with a bit of blood surrounding it, and unlatching the lock—“and found a victim deceased and an elderly female subject still alive in her bed,” Randy Hunter explained to Boetz as they got together inside and talked.

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So it’s not a double?” Boetz asked. He was confused. Dispatch had called in potentially two homicides. Could there be another victim, besides the old woman who had been
taken to the hospital?

  “No, just the one,” Hunter said. He pointed to the room where the body had been discovered.

  “Thanks.”

  The old woman, Hunter further explained to Boetz, was unmindful of what had happened inside the home. She had no idea someone had shot and killed her son.

  “There’s one deceased person inside and one being attended to [at the hospital],” Boetz explained to his boss, Mike McAllester.

  It was 8:23 P.M. Boetz had a look around the house before heading into the bedroom to examine the DB. It appeared that the old woman had lived inside her room and was being kept—for lack of a better term—by someone, probably her son, Boetz surmised.

  The victim was naked, lying on a bed, half his body covered with blankets (as if he had been sleeping). A pillow or some sort of laundry bag covered what was left of his face. He had been shot, apparently point-blank, several times; the right side of his jaw had been blown nearly off his face, his cheek nothing more than ripped, torn, and bloodied flesh.

  “Looks like the elderly lady has been neglected,” Boetz said. Interestingly enough, there was a lock on the outside of the old woman’s door. Whoever was supposedly taking care of her had essentially locked her inside the room. It was clear she hardly—if ever—left that room.

  Boetz asked Sergeant Brad Belz, who had just arrived, to position himself at the front door, saying, “Keep a log of anybody coming and going from the crime scene.”

  “Will do,” Belz said.

  Boetz asked Officer Gary Lively to do the same at the back door. “Don’t let anyone in.”

  “No problem, Detective.”

  Boetz and McAllester took a moment to look around the house. A basic ranch, the front door opened into a small living room, which was “just messy . . . in somewhat disarray,” Boetz recalled. There were mattresses on the floor, pillows and blankets and garbage strewn all over, as if several people had been living in the house and sleeping anywhere they could find an open space. There was a desk, with a computer and a chair. “Stacked up on top of a stand, where the TV was on, was a bunch of videotapes. . . .” There was some other furniture spread throughout the room, sparse as it was, but it was old and decrepit, like the inside of the home itself. And there was a lone fan, Boetz took note of, “noisy and running,” sitting on a table. This gave the inside of the house a rather creepy feel, as if the fan were the only living thing left.

  Taking a right out of the living room, Boetz stared down a short hallway, which went into the kitchen on the right and a sitting room (bedroom) on the left. In the kitchen, dishes and pots and pans were stacked everywhere: on counters, in the sink, on the table.

  Disgusting. No other way to put it.

  Heading toward the rear of the house inside the kitchen, Boetz studied the door. One of the panes had been smashed and there was blood on the glass and door itself. Not a lot, but enough to get a sample. On the floor below were several bits and pieces of broken glass.

  Boetz and McAllester walked into the bedroom with the DB. A pillow—or, as Boetz realized now, a laundry bag—was covering the man’s face. The idea, Boetz knew, was to “back up for a moment and look at the big picture of what could have happened.” Any good cop will explain: The scene will speak to you if you don’t interrupt the process.

  Looking around, Boetz pointed to the wall. There seemed to be a few pictures missing. The corners of the photos or pictures were still attached to the wall by tape and staples, but the body of the pictures was gone. Boetz could tell by the grime and dust marking an outline of where the pictures had hung that someone had removed them recently. The walls were a putrid tan color, like coffee ice cream, smudged with filth and dirt and grease. There was a bureau to the left of the victim, a stereo on top of it. The bed itself was a mattress on the floor. The striped laundry bag covered the victim’s face and upper chest area; a floral blanket with flowery patterns of pink and green and white and yellow covered the man from his belly button down.

  “Gunshot wound on his left bicep,” Boetz said out loud, noticing the wound.

  “Have you looked underneath the pillow?”

  “I haven’t removed it, no,” Boetz responded.

  Both investigators had been told that the entire area had been searched, around and inside the house, and “no other persons had been found.” The only wound visible to Boetz and McAllester was on the victim’s left bicep. He had been shot in the arm.

  Boetz had Detective Penny Judd come into the room and photograph the wound on the man’s bicep.

  Looking closer, Boetz noticed a hole through the laundry bag/pillowcase. He could see gunpowder residue.

  Judd snapped a photo, and continued the take photos of the entire room, the victim, and anything else Boetz pointed out.

  “That gunpowder residue,” Boetz said, “means he was shot at close range.”

  Someone had placed the laundry bag over the man’s face and fired—almost like an execution. Organized crime figures do this: They sneak up on someone while he sleeps, place a pillow over his face, and fire a few shots into the head. Just like in the movies.

  But that wound on the bicep?

  Didn’t add up.

  There was a pair of men’s jeans on the floor by the side of the bed. McAllester walked over and, carefully, being certain not to disturb what could be an important piece of evidence, he reached inside the back pocket and took out what appeared to be a wallet.

  He looked for a license.

  The Cruz family had it right. The guy’s name was Bob. He was Robert “Bob” Dow. He was forty-nine, his fiftieth birthday about a month away. Bob had a potbelly stomach, but he was otherwise in what was average shape for an American by today’s standards. He was butt naked underneath the covers. Either he had been getting himself ready for bed when someone shot him, was already sleeping, or his killer had surprised him.

  As Boetz stood near Bob Dow, he looked closer at the walls, where he had seen those missing pictures earlier.

  There was blood on the wall.

  “Vic’s?”

  Was it blood spatter from the gunshot wounds?

  Boetz and McAllester didn’t think so.

  It appeared to Boetz that whoever removed the pictures had cut himself or herself during that process, or was bleeding before doing so.

  Over near the northeast corner of the room was a green chest—like a pirate’s—sitting on the floor, BOBBY’S was written on it. Boetz bent down and had a look. It seemed that someone had popped the chest open. Wearing latex gloves, Boetz had a look inside.

  Later, Boetz said, “We found some ammunition and a gun.”

  CHAPTER 4

  JENNIFER JONES WAS three years old when her mother, Kathy Jones, moved out of the house she kept with Jen, her three daughters, and her husband, Jerry Jones. It was 1988. Jen didn’t see Kathy all that much, to begin with. As it happened, Kathy had begrudgingly turned (according to an article published many years later in the Texas Monthly, several police reports, and Kathy herself, testifying in court and admitting in an interview with me) to “cleaning other peoples’ homes and working as a prostitute” for cash to feed a growing and ferociously intensifying crack cocaine habit.

  In January 2001, several weeks before Jen turned sixteen, she was sitting and thinking about her mother and the times they never had together. Yet the stories Jen had heard about her mother throughout the years—and the fact that most of the time when Jen ever saw her mother, the visits took place inside a local prison on Sunday afternoons—were grating on her young psyche, trying to convince her that she was that same person she didn’t want to become.

  In a rather open and adolescently honest journal entry as a sixteen-year-old, Jen talked about spending the night with a boy, saying: But we didn’t do anything.

  Why hadn’t she slept with him?

  Because . . . I didn’t want to, she wrote.

  Without truly understanding the situation, Jen was trying to convince herself that she would never be
like her mother—a woman she had mostly heard wild stories about while growing up. She could say no. She was trying desperately to ward off—even fight—what she viewed as a demon plaguing her: that dreaded cycle of dysfunction. Jen had been hardwired since the time she could walk to live life on terms she saw fit. But here she was, denying herself, and trying to turn a new leaf.

  When she got home the next morning after being with the boy, one of Jen’s sisters approached her.

  “You’re turning out just like Mom,” Jen’s older and more experienced half sister, Audrey Sawyer, the offspring from a different father, said.

  “What?”

  “You go out and you don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”

  Audrey explained later that she was genuinely worried about her little sister. Audrey claimed she had been a mother to Jen for a lot of years, being the older sibling and watching over her, but Jen didn’t want to hear it anymore. There was no way, she told herself, she was going to wind up like Kathy Jones, the mother she never had. Jen was determined not to allow that to happen. Sure, Mineral Wells wasn’t Dallas or Forth Worth, and there wasn’t much to offer a girl with no grades to speak of and no real skills. Still, Jen had dreams of leaving town someday. Maybe moving to Washington State. Maybe meeting someone and enjoying a middle-class life. She had once said she liked reading Better Homes and Gardens magazine. She’d browse through the magazines and picture herself in one of those plush homes that had a lawn like carpet. Maybe a husband. A dog. Some kids, too. That perfect life set up in the magazine wasn’t a pipe dream or a fairy tale to Jen; it was doable. She believed all she had to do to get it was to want it bad enough.