I had everything going really good for me and I started on that shit again, Jen wrote. This is where I always [screw] up.
It was as if Jen never gave herself the chance to be good; somehow she’d always manage to sabotage her life.
There were trees facing the back of the Spanish Trace Apartments. Jen could see them from where she sat on the stoop. According to one version of her story she later told, Jen found herself lost in thought, gazing into those woods, wondering what life had in store next.
Everything my heart desired, she wrote, talking about her time with her aunt and uncle. Car . . . cell . . . I had a boyfriend. . . . Life was great.
Stubbing out her cigarette, Jen stood.
[My boyfriend] broke up with me. . . . I am going to Fort Worth in the morning.
Audrey was supposed to show up at Spanish Trace that morning. She had taken off for a few days. She’d called Jen the night before and told her she’d be by. After speaking with her, Jen sat down and wrote how she was looking forward to seeing her sister, but hoped Audrey arrived without her “dike [sic] girlfriend.”
The dyke Jennifer referred to was Bobbi Jo Smith. And wouldn’t you know, just as Jen flicked her cigarette butt, turned to open the door and go back inside, Audrey pulled up, in fact, with Bobbi Jo.
Great, Jen thought.
Audrey needed to pick up a few things. She had been basically living with Bobbi Jo, who was staying with an older guy, Bob Dow, at his mother’s house not far away. It was one party after another at Bob Dow’s mother’s place, Audrey told Jen. Bobbi had a mattress on the floor in the living room she sometimes slept on, but she also slept in Bob’s room, which had two beds. Bob’s mother lived in a room by herself, and he supposedly took care of her. “But [Bob] more or less just collected her checks and tossed her a McDonald’s hamburger and some water every few days,” one girl who frequented the house later told me. Bob had a trailer he lived in on the edge of town; he used his mother’s house for sex and drug parties with women and young girls. Bob liked to film and take photographs of the girls who came over to the house. If a female walked into that party house, in other words, she was essentially signing up to be filmed. Most of the girls knew this.
“Every time I showed up,” said one woman, who had gone over there quite often, “it seemed like Bob had a camera hanging from around his neck.”
Before stepping into the apartment, Jen saw that Bobbi Jo was sitting next to Audrey inside the car. There were “two other people,” according to Jen, in the backseat.
“Stay here,” Audrey told everyone inside the car. “I’ll be right back.”
Audrey walked into the apartment. Jen sat back down on the porch steps.
Jennifer knew of Bobbi Jo. Not a lot about her personally, but enough to know that Bobbi was a chick who liked to party with other girls, and get down and dirty. Jen had never heard anything bad about Bobbi Jo, and there really wasn’t much to say in that regard. Bobbi readily admitted she liked to drink, drug, and have sex with women. Life was about working, drinking, sexing, and drugging. Bobbi was young. Audrey had said Bobbi was fun to be with, although she also knew that this thing with Bobbi was probably not a long-term relationship. Bobbi was too free-spirited. She liked to be around a lot of people. Bobbi also worked for Bob Dow. Not just doing handyman types of jobs for him, but there was talk that Bobbi was the lure for Bob Dow—that she got paid for bringing young girls (some just teens) home to Bob so he could have sex with them and/or film the girls. The bait Bobbi waved in front of the girls was the free drugs and booze, along with a safe place to do it.
“Ever kiss a girl?” Bobbi Jo allegedly asked Jen.
Jen later testified that she was sitting in her dad’s apartment, watching television, when this conversation occurred, but then she also said it took place on the front stoop as she sat there, staring into the woods that day. A third version of this day was then changed to Bobbi popping over to pick up Audrey and hanging around while Audrey got ready. While waiting, Jen claimed, Bobbi would jokingly harass her. Hit on her. Tease her.
“No!” Jennifer supposedly snapped in response to the question about kissing a girl. She was taken aback by Bobbi’s frankness.
“Ever been with a girl?” Bobbi pressed (according to one recollection of Jen’s). Then she gave Jen a wink. Bobbi wanted Jen—no doubt about it. Jen was a beautiful girl. She was young and pretty. Bobbi had heard that Jen had never been with a girl. And Jen carried herself like a fine-heeled, much older twentysomething, not the teenager she was. Bobbi was attracted to that. Jen was a quest, a “thing” for Bobbi to conquer.
“Can’t say I have, Bobbi,” Jen responded.
“How ’bout a relationship with a girl?” Bobbi asked, laughing. “Ever have that?”
Jen had gotten used to the comments. She shrugged it off. “Nope.”
On this day, reportedly, Jen was sitting on the back porch and Audrey pulled up with the gang; the way Jennifer told it another time, Bobbi had yelled from the car window: “You ever kiss a girl?”
Bobbi wore a white-colored wife-beater T-shirt. That sad and angry sun tattoo on her arm was in full view as it hung out the open window, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. The smoke billowed up, stinging her squinting eyes.
“No!” Jennifer yelled as she prepared to walk back into the apartment.
“You want to?” Bobbi asked.
Jen thought about it. “Ah . . . no.”
Bobbi took a pull from her cigarette, blew the smoke out the window, and then yelled, “Well, Jen, I could change your mind!”
Audrey was just getting back into the car. “Leave her alone.”
Audrey had not heard the conversation and told me it never took place.
Jennifer told this story to a reporter in the weeks and months after she was arrested.
Bobbi Jo Smith told me this scene, born from the imagination of Jennifer Jones, never happened.
CHAPTER 9
BRIAN BOETZ WAS TIRED. It had been a long, late evening. Boetz could think of a thousand other things that he would have rather done the previous night than try to make sense of what seemed to be a senseless, brutal homicide. But here was the seasoned cop on his way back to the MWPD to see what his captain, Mike McAllester, had come up with during his interviews with Richard and Kathy Cruz. In ways that most non–law enforcement civilians wouldn’t understand, it can be exciting, actually, for a detective to wake up to a mystery—a case that needed his immediate attention. Homicides in Mineral Wells were not a normal course of business, and to have one like this made the days go by a bit faster. For a cop, nothing could replace the satisfactory feeling of putting a kid toucher or child abuser behind bars. But on some days, an officer welcomed the change. There were only so many pedophiles and dopers and people neglecting their kids that a police officer could take down without going out of his mind.
On the morning of May 6, 2004, which was already shaping up to be another gorgeous Texas Thursday, as Boetz rolled into the precinct, baseball fans in Texas were celebrating and, at the same time, in a state of mourning. Controversial Houston Astros pitcher Roger “the Dodger” Clemens had recorded his 4,137th strikeout the night before, putting Clemens in second place, a hairbreadth behind Texas Ranger great Nolan Ryan, an icon of Texas sports.
The good news this morning, Boetz soon found out, was that the MWPD had a bead on a solid suspect in Bob Dow’s murder. The bad news was that nobody knew where the young girl was. The TLETS/APB, which McAllester put out, had not yet yielded any hits. But then, it was still so early in the game.
“What’d you find out?” Boetz asked McAllester.
The seasoned investigator smiled. “Sit down.”
There was a lot to explain.
Cops were still at the crime scene. Most of the evidence had been collected, but the scene hadn’t been released yet—mainly because Bob Dow’s mother’s house was such a rat hole, inside and out. So it made for a longer-than-usual evidence-collecting process. That living ro
om where the computer was located looked like a Texas twister had gone through it. There was no telling how much of what cops had sifted through was actual evidence or just plain garbage.
McAllester suggested to Boetz that he grab Detective Penny Judd and head over and interview Dorothy Smith, Bobbi Jo Smith’s grandmother.
“Yeah,” Boetz said.
“She’ll have plenty to say.”
The autopsy answers the final question: Why did life pass from a specific human body? Scott A. Wagner wrote in his graphic book Color Atlas of the Autopsy.
In the case of forty-nine-year-old Bob Dow, it was pretty damn obvious that he had been shot. Smart, competent, and experienced investigators, however, would never determine this early that those wounds were the cause of death—unless they had a medical examiner (ME) agreeing with them.
The autopsy is a complete evaluation of an individual’s death and the circumstances surrounding that death, Wagner wrote.
This was the main reason behind Bob Dow’s autopsy : to draw conclusions around the idea of what circumstance or circumstances had placed this man on that cold steel slab at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences (SWIFS) in Dallas.
It was 8:30 A.M., May 6, as Detectives Brian Boetz and Penny Judd headed off to interview Dorothy Smith, and the pathologist Dr. Christopher Young started dissecting Bob Dow.
Bob Dow had arrived nude, his body wrapped in a light blue sheet. The first thing Young did after fingerprinting, photographing, and X-raying Dow’s hands was place plastic bags over each and tie them off. The doctor did not want to contaminate any potential forensic “trace” evidence that Bob’s hands might yield. Perhaps Bob Dow had swiped at his killer? Maybe he scratched his killer’s face or arms? Anything—and everything—at this stage of the investigation was possible.
Dow weighed in at 234 pounds. He was six feet tall. His body was “cold” to the touch, Young noted. He wrote: Rigor [had] fully developed . . . lividity posterior and fixed.
Scott A. Wagner quoted Voltaire at the beginning of his “A to Z” autopsy textbook: “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” That truth was, in certain respects, somewhere inside or outside Bob Dow’s corpse, and it would slowly emerge as Young went about the business of examining him.
The best place to begin was with the four gunshot wounds visible on Bob’s upper body. One shot was to the right side of Bob’s chin. Dr. Young found “no soot or stippling” on the skin around that particular hole. Young called this an “entrance” wound. Stippling is unburned gunpowder and other essential material from the bullet exiting the barrel and left behind when someone is shot at close range. Stippling usually looks like small black dots surrounding the bullet wound. This particular gunshot, Young wrote, after “perforating the skin” and the “subcutaneous tissues” of the “right side of the chin,” went through the mandible before striking and avulsing through the “right lower molars.” The bullet essentially shattered a few of Bob’s teeth before “one fragment” penetrated “the right lateral surface of the tongue.” When projectiles enter the body—suffice it to say at close range (say, within an arm’s length)—they can travel tricky and unpredictable paths, splitting apart and heading off into all sorts of directions after passing through the skin and hitting the hard surface of bone or teeth. It’s not uncommon for a pathologist to see a bullet enter the body at the jawline, let’s say, split in half, head directly south, and penetrate the stomach or another major organ. The .22-caliber bullet fragment that ripped through Bob’s two lower molars had actually propelled those broken teeth down into his esophagus about midway between his mouth and stomach. Young recovered one fragment from the “musculature of the tongue.” The other section was found in Bob’s right cheek. That one bullet, in other words, about a quarter of an inch wide, struck Bob Dow on the right side of his chin, split in two, and traveled in opposite directions: Front to back, right to left, and slightly upwards.
The wounds Dow sustained to his head were fatal. There was no argument from Dr. Young there. If that shot to the side of his chin wasn’t enough, another round entered the right side of Bob’s face below his earlobe. There was “no soot or stippling” Dr. Young could find near this wound, either. What was interesting about the projectile was how it had perforated the skin and subcutaneous tissue of the right side of Bob’s face and then entered his skull, continuing into the “calvar-ium” through the “right petrous ridge and the brain. . . .” What would become important later was that the path, or “trajectory,” of this bullet went “upward, front to back, and right to left.” The shooter held the weapon—the evidence left behind would presume—at an angle with the handle of the weapon below Bob’s jawline, the barrel facing upward, toward his head. The shooter was likely positioned, one might determine from this evidence, in front of Bob, almost as if sitting on top of him. What turned out to be good news for the MWPD was that Young had been able to recover this bullet, too.
If one looked at this bullet wound without speculating where the shooter was positioned, however, one could also argue that Bob Dow’s killer could have snuck up on him and put a cap—maybe the first one—into the back of his head near his ear. And there was one killer, any good investigator knew, that this sort of procedure worked best for: the hired hit man. Organized crime. If one took a complete look at Bob’s life as it presented itself this early, one would have to take into account that he was treading in several areas of treacherous social water. For example: Did the father of one of these girls he was videotaping find out what was going on and pay back a pervert with a little bit of vigilante street justice? Had the brother, boyfriend, or father found out that Bob was supplying his sister, girlfriend, or daughter with unlimited amounts of dope for sex and thus sought revenge by murdering Bob and making it look like someone else had done it? In a case like this, it’s easy to put blinders on when the evidence seems to be stacking up against one particular suspect. However, cops with integrity don’t do that. They sit back and wait for all of the evidence to emerge, and then they evaluate their case, which was why Dr. Young’s autopsy became so relevant.
Young noticed that another .22-caliber projectile had entered the right side of Bob’s head, “posterior to the ear.” There was no soot or stippling there, either. This shot entered Bob’s brain also. Young recovered the fragment. The trajectory was basically the same: It went front to back, right to left, upward.
When the doctor put them together, these three shots had likely been fired in succession. Some type of order. Although there was no way to tell which was first or last, the shooter had done this quickly.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
And then an anomaly popped up. The doctor found a projectile entrance wound on Bob’s “left upper arm.” It was centered nineteen and a half inches “below the top of [his] head.” On this wound, there was “sparse stippling” extending two inches “above and below the defect.”
The shot had fractured Bob’s left humerus, but had done nothing else. It was a strange wound, all told, when taken into context alongside the three money shots, which were certainly intended to kill the man. It almost appeared as though this shot took place after the fact.
Or was this shot meant to stun the man to allow the three kill shots to do their business?
A toxicology test was conducted on Bob’s blood. The Dallas County medical examiner found no alcohol in his blood, but there was .05 milligrams of cannabinoids (cannabis) per liter of blood, which meant Bob had used marijuana not long before he expired. In addition to the cannabis, doctors found .002 milligrams per liter of blood of metoprolol, a heart medication, along with .012 milligrams of diltiazem, another heart med. Those made sense, seeing that Bob’s heart weighed in at 640 grams, slightly more than double the weight of a normal heart. (The pathologist came to find out that Bob Dow was in terrible health and in desperate need of a new heart.) On top of that, there was a larger than normal amount, 1.3 milligrams, of meprobamate, a tranquilizer used to tre
at anxiety, uncovered. The drug is marketed as Miltown, but meprobamate is a short-term–relief drug designed to take the edge off if an individual is high-strung.
Another finding by Dr. Young was the presence of “black circular material” that resembled “gunpowder.” These “flakes,” as Young described them, adhered to the skin on Bob’s “left lower chest,” his “right upper abdomen,” as well as the “dorsal surfaces of the hands bilaterally.”
What did finding gunpowder residue on Bob Dow’s chest mean?
Gunpowder would not be present on Bob’s chest and stomach if the shooter stood in front of him and fired. The shooter would have to have been straddling Bob Dow (sitting on, or leaning over, his chest) in order to leave gunpowder flakes where the doctor found them. The only other possibility was that Bob fired the weapon, holding the gun out in front of himself, maybe framing someone for the crime.
Still, could a man fire three shots into his own head and one into his left arm?
It did not seem possible.
Brian Boetz and Penny Judd pulled up to Dorothy Smith’s house. Dorothy lived in a modest white ranch-style home with a marvelous, almost picture-perfect, birch tree in the front yard. Looking around the family-skewed, suburban neighborhood, a globelike Texas skyline stretched as far as the eye could see. This part of Texas is flat as a griddle. Down the block, the one piece of visible infrastructure was an old water tower projecting into the sky like a rocket ship taking off.
Boetz and Judd looked around as they approached the porch.
Boetz knocked.
Clearly upset by their presence, Dorothy was expecting them.
“Come in,” she said. “Come in.”
CHAPTER 10
ACCORDING TO BOBBI JO SMITH, she had known Bob Dow for six years, as far back as 1998. Bobbi was twelve years old when she was first introduced to Bob.
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