Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  “Wow,” Bob said the first time he met Jen (according to the version of this story that Jen later told Texas Monthly, although Bobbi did not recall this ever happening). “She’s pretty. She could be a movie star!”

  Bobbi, Jen later insisted, knew what Bob meant by that. Soon after, as the three of them were partying, Bob had a moment with Bobbi Jo to himself and said, “Ask her if she’ll sleep with me.” According to Jennifer, Bobbi was furious. Jennifer was hers.

  Yet, Bobbi knew her place with Bob, so she asked Jennifer.

  “No way,” Jen supposedly snapped. “He’s way too gross.”

  (However, when I asked Bobbi later, she said this never happened. “If Bob wanted to sleep with Jen, I could not have cared. He did sleep with her, as far as I knew. It was chaos in that house with the drugs, booze, and sex.”)

  Regardless, that was how the relationship among Bobbi, Bob, and Jen went along, Jennifer claimed. But as Bob pushed, Jen added (in one version) that Bobbi’s answer was firm: “Have any of the other girls I bring home for you, just not her. She’s mine.”

  Bobbi later told me this was nonsense. That if Bob had wanted Jen, he could have had her. Bobbi would not have balked one way or the other, because there were always plenty of girls around the house for Bobbi to party and have sex with.

  And Jennifer knew this.

  What’s more, Bobbi insisted, at that point, Jen would have done anything for money so she could buy dope. She was a coke whore in the bare essence of the term, Bobbi insisted.

  What Bobbi didn’t see—likely because her judgment was so clouded by the sex, booze, and drug culture inside that house—was that Jen had become increasingly obsessed with her new girl/girl relationship. She viewed the romance entirely differently than Bobbi did. Bobbi went to work; Jen followed. Bobbi went to the store; Jen demanded to tag along. Wherever Bobbi went, whatever Bobbi did, Jen seemed to be right by her side. Bobbi would go to the bathroom, and there was Jen, waiting outside the door, according to several sources.

  For Bobbi Jo, at that time in her life, she had stumbled into a win-win situation.

  “I liked Jennifer. She was cool. Fun to be with.”

  Heck, Bobbi Jo had turned a heterosexual female. She enjoyed every moment of that new lifestyle Jen had thrown herself into.

  “She was going to get her stuff,” Dorothy Smith explained to Detectives Brian Boetz and Penny Judd on May 5, 2004, bringing the MWPD back to her narrative of what had taken place the day before. They were in Dorothy’s kitchen. She was clearly broken up about the entire mess. “She [Bobbi] had a place to go.”

  (This part of Dorothy’s statement adds up with what Bobbi Jo later told me. Bobbi said Bob Dow had pissed her off and she was going over to the house on that day to get her belongings and some money Bob owed her. She was done with him. Never going back.)

  “Did you give them the truck?” Boetz asked.

  Bobbi and Jennifer, Dorothy explained, “left in my truck.”

  “What happened next?” Boetz pressed.

  “They came back in about an hour, hour and a half.”

  Bobbi was driving Dorothy’s pickup and Jennifer was in Bob Dow’s truck. It was strange, the two of them in different vehicles. However, Dorothy didn’t think much of it at the time—just that they were back at the house dropping off her vehicle.

  “Was there anyone else with them?”

  Dorothy said a few other girls.

  Bobbi rushed into the house. Dorothy was certain of this fact.

  “What’s going on?” Dorothy asked her granddaughter.

  Bobbi didn’t answer.

  “Bobbi?” Dorothy said sharply.

  “I have to leave,” Bobbi said. “Grandma . . . I . . . Grandma . . . I killed Bob. I shot him in the head.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Dorothy said. She knew when Bobbi was making something up—and this surely seemed like one of those moments. Bobbi Jo had tears in her eyes and became more nervous as she talked about what she claimed had happened at Bob Dow’s.

  “Yes,” Bobbi said as she grabbed a bag, flung it over her shoulder, and then started for the door. “I did, Grandma. He is not going to molest me again.”

  “Wait . . . wait, Bobbi . . . please.” (Several of the other girls there that day, beyond Jen, claimed Dorothy pulled at Bobbi’s shirt, beckoning her to stay and explain. Bobbi did not want to look her grandmother in the eye. “Because,” Bobbi told me, “I was lying.”)

  “I’ve got to go, Grandma,” Bobbi said.

  “Please stay, Bobbi. We can work this out.”

  “No. I need to get out of here now, Grandma. I’m sorry.”

  Jen stood by as Bobbi and Dorothy talked. The others, who had been waiting outside in the two vehicles, were now standing near the three of them in front of Dorothy’s house.

  “Bobbi, please. Don’t go. You didn’t kill anybody,” Dorothy said.

  “Yes, I did,” Bobbi insisted. Standing next to her, Jen nodded yes to Dorothy, agreeing with Bobbi, trying to get Dorothy to believe that Bobbi had done it: shot Bob Dow.

  “But, Bobbi, you don’t even have a driver’s license,” Dorothy said. Just then, Bobbi was getting into the driver’s side of the other vehicle.

  The other girls piled into the truck: Five females, including Bobbi and Jennifer, were now preparing to take off on what appeared to be some sort of a run.

  “Did you kill Bob, Bobbi?” Dorothy asked pointedly.

  “Yes, Grandma. I did.”

  “Did she?” Dorothy asked the other girls.

  “They all shook their heads yes,” Dorothy explained to Boetz and Judd.

  And then they were gone.

  “That was the last I seen of her,” Dorothy told the detectives. “I called Richard [Cruz] over here when he got home, and he called the police.”

  “Have you heard from her?” Boetz asked.

  “No.”

  Boetz told Dorothy that should Bobbi Jo try to contact her, Dorothy needed to call the MWPD immediately. Now was not the time to try and protect a loved one from the law. The faster they got Bobbi Jo in custody, the better it would work out for her in the end.

  Dorothy understood.

  Boetz and Judd drove back to the MWPD. Boetz sat down at his desk and began filing a probable cause affidavit, a process that needed to be done in order to get an arrest warrant issued for the apprehension and arrest of Bobbi Jo Smith. Filing the affidavit didn’t mean they could arrest Bobbi Jo on murder charges; Boetz still needed to prove to a judge the MWPD had enough evidence to claim Bobbi Jo had committed the offense.

  In the scope of it all, however, Boetz didn’t have much more than hearsay—a source claiming that someone had shot a man the MWPD had found dead.

  Was that proof of murder?

  After he finished typing, Boetz tracked down Judge Hart, who had been at the crime scene the previous night.

  Hart looked the affidavit over while Boetz waited, asked a few questions, and then agreed there was enough to issue an arrest warrant.

  Somewhere out in the world, traveling with four other women, Bobbi Jo Smith was wanted for first-degree murder—a charge, in Texas, that could place this teenager (if convicted under the right circumstances) on a gurney, with a hot needle filled with a state-issued death potion plunging into her skinny arm.

  CHAPTER 12

  IT DID NOT TAKE LONG for Elizabeth Smith to begin hating on Bobbi Jo once the two met inside Lila’s house after Bob introduced them. And yet, according to what Elizabeth Smith later testified to, based on what she witnessed during the time she spent at the house in February and March 2004, all she knew about Bobbi was that “Bob had worked with her, on and off, for years. . . .” As Elizabeth later described her feelings, what was clear was that she did not care much for Bobbi Jo.

  “I think she was jealous of me, for some weird reason,” Bobbi told me later. “I have no idea why that would be.”

  Elizabeth had no idea that Bob had known Bobbi since Bobbi was a child; nor, a
ccording to Bobbi, that Bob had been forcing her to have sex with him all those years. There was certainly a lot more to the relationship between Bob and Bobbi than Elizabeth knew.

  “She’s one of the hardest workers I have ever met and have ever employed,” Bob told Elizabeth one day after Bobbi Jo moved some of her stuff into the party house.

  Bob was repairing apartment complexes at the time. He hired Bobbi mainly as a painter, but he also taught her to do all sorts of miscellaneous maintenance jobs. She also cleaned swimming pools with Bob on occasion.

  “He could just do anything,” Elizabeth remembered, shining up Bob’s memory best she could. “He was just that talented.”

  Bob had been in the U.S. Navy. At one time, he implored values favorable to the navy’s golden standard of living, especially where cleanliness was concerned. But all that changed, Elizabeth assumed, after Bobbi Jo moved into the living room and began sleeping on a mattress.

  “Change?” she said. “A lot of things began to change, yes. . . .”

  Bob wasn’t keeping the house clean. Elizabeth blamed Bobbi. “He wasn’t staying at home taking care of his mother. I was spending more and more time there,” Elizabeth added.

  And this, too, was easy for Elizabeth to blame on Bobbi.

  It wasn’t just Bob being gone all of the time, out and about, working with Bobbi Jo, running around, Elizabeth said. There was “a lot of drug use” going on around the house. “A lot of drug use.”

  What Elizabeth didn’t see and never quite understood was that Bob Dow had turned into a drug addict. He had been heavily involved with all sorts of drugs long before Bobbi Jo stepped back into his life and asked him for help. It wasn’t Bobbi Jo who turned Bob into a doper and influenced his life in negative ways. In fact, one could argue it was Bob Dow who did this exact thing to Bobbi Jo.

  When Audrey Sawyer first met Bobbi Jo, Audrey had just been released from prison, completing time on a two-year bid. The crime that put Audrey behind bars had been committed in Strawn while Jennifer and Audrey’s other sister were living there. Jennifer and a friend had broken into a store directly across the street from Jen’s friends’ house, where a group of teens had been partying one afternoon. After Jen and her friend committed the crime, they showed up where Audrey was hanging out with their other sister.

  “And we all got drunk,” Audrey explained with a laugh.

  There were other friends there, too.

  “Well, they, Jen and her friend,” Audrey added, “they told us that they had broken into the store. They said it was easy.”

  So Jen and her friend went back into the store. Audrey and the other girls followed. One thing led to another and, Audrey explained, “we all ended up getting into trouble for it.”

  Most of the girls were underage and placed on probation, including Jennifer. Audrey and Jen’s friend, both eighteen, were arrested. Audrey was on probation then for a separate charge and wound up with a two-year bid.

  When she got out of prison, Audrey moved into the Spanish Trace Apartments, where Jerry Jones and Jennifer lived. Between the time they all got pinched for robbing the store and Audrey went off to prison, Jen had evolved as a would-be, aspiring criminal, graduating from small theft to more risky things. She got busted two months after the store theft, for example, for writing bad checks—for the most part, an adult crime. Her drug use had escalated by then. She needed money to fund those good times.

  After that, Jen stole a car. As time went on and she got older, it was clear her crimes were becoming more serious. She had set the risk-taking bar higher.

  Whenever Jen felt backed into a corner—no one else to turn to, her big sister not there—she wrote. Near this time when she was breaking the law and getting caught, Jen wrote about going to visit her mother, Kathy Jones, who was herself working on a prison bid. And yet, Jen seemed to joke about a drug bender she had been on herself, writing, I have been awake for 36 hours. I feel ditzy! And so she decided, since she was already awake, she might as well write Audrey a letter: Then paint my toenails red.

  Feeling guilty the following day, Jen again turned to her journal, adding, I am such a bad person [who does] the stupidest things. Well, I am going to try and get some sleep.... Please pray for me tonight.

  Drugs were controlling Jen’s thoughts and actions. Telling her when to sleep, eat, shit, get up, work, do the right thing—and she was only sixteen years old. Jennifer Jones, with a mother and big sister in prison, was following right along in the wake of her pedigree, but maybe, in some ways, hoping to surpass her sibling and mother and grasp that Clyde Barrow dream of becoming criminally infamous.

  It’s worth noting, this was long before she ever heard the name Bobbi Jo Smith.

  It was not long after Audrey served her time and was released that she met Bobbi Jo. Mostly, the time they spent together was at Bob’s mother’s house, a five-to-ten-minute drive south of the Second Street Spanish Trace apartment complex. Audrey would go over to what all of them—including Bob Dow—referred to as the “party house” and hang out with Bobbi Jo. Audrey and the others felt safe at the house: a place to party and do what they wanted without worrying about being busted. There would be girls, young and old alike, hanging out, Audrey said, all the time. “Drinking, popping pills, smoking weed . . . whatever.” It was one big, perpetual bash. As far as Audrey could tell, Bob Dow was the ringleader, keeping tabs on and providing what was a nonstop conveyor belt of drugs, sex, and booze. Bob had what seemed to be an endless stash of pills, weed, booze, and other hard-core drugs—meth and coke included, two popular drugs of the time that attracted lots of girls. Unbeknownst to her at the time, what Elizabeth Smith later discovered was that Lila Dow’s house had been gifted to Bob the previous fall by his younger brother after he died. According to several sources, from the time he took over for his brother, Bob received (and cashed) his mother’s Social Security checks as payments for taking care of her. Many of the girls who frequented the house claimed that Bob’s idea of tending to his mother’s needs, however, consisted of tossing her a Value or Happy Meal from McDonald’s every once in a while, or warming up some canned soup. The old lady was “incapacitated” in many ways, mostly due to the stroke she had suffered. She stayed in her room, staring blankly at a television screen, seemingly waiting to die. She did not have a clue about what was going on just outside the walls of her bedroom. When Bob had his little parties with the girls, he’d lock his mother inside her room by placing a padlock on the outside of her door.

  Certainly not that loveable “good father” and “good son” Elizabeth Smith later described. Which would lead one to believe that Bob Dow put on a show for his ex-wife whenever she was around.

  “Bob Dow was pretty quiet when I went over there, most of the time,” Audrey remembered. “But he could be very perverted, too. Weird guy. He’s hard to explain. He was kind of dorky, you could say.”

  Bob wore big tortoiseshell-style glasses over his hazel eyes. He had a receding hairline, but he was not bald. He had some gray hair, generally greasy and unkempt, and what seemed to be continuous stubble of beard growth. He wasn’t fat, but he carried a large beer gut. Bob Dow did not take care of himself. He was viewed by most of the girls hanging around the house as “scuzzy” and “dirty.”

  “He’d stare at people (the girls, mainly). He’d . . . just . . . He was very strange,” Audrey said.

  The one thing most agreed on was that Bob used the hell out of Bobbi Jo, who became, in a sense, Bob’s personal prostitute, employee, drinking and drugging buddy, and madam—all wrapped up in one.

  “Sometimes,” Jen later testified, “Bobbi would have . . . she would have to sexually give herself to him in order to get something in return, like drugs or money. She would have to sometimes give up her girlfriend and sleep with Bob to get what she wanted. . . .”

  (Here was an interesting turn of phrase by Jen: “her girlfriend.” Why not “me”? If what Jen later claimed was true, that she and Bobbi were totally in love, why say
“her girlfriend” in place of herself? This statement, which Jen made in court, fell more in line with Bobbi’s analysis of the relationship—that she and Jennifer were party friends and sometimes sexual partners, nothing more. It made sense that Jen would describe this aspect of Bobbi’s life by stating how Bobbi would have to “give up her girlfriend.” Jen never saw herself as Bobbi’s exclusive girl, because she wasn’t.)

  According to Jen, Bobbi came up with a name for what Bob forced her into doing: “paying the rent.” Jen was never jealous of the relationship between Bobbi Jo and Bob, she claimed. But she felt it “wasn’t right,” adding, “It made me . . . disgusted more than anything that a man would go to that level, you know, to say, ‘You need to sleep with me in order to be able to live in my house, to be able to get what you want, instead of working for it.’”

  Jen said she witnessed times when Bob would “force himself” on Bobbi Jo, even though Bobbi made it clear she didn’t want to have sex with him. Afterward, Jen would ask Bobbi how she felt.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Bobbi would say. (“Dismissing it,” Jen exclaimed.)

  Before Jen moved herself into the party house—an important fact in this case—and started sleeping with Bobbi Jo, Bob forced Bobbi to have sex with him, Jen claimed.

  “I would say at least maybe three times a week,” Jen explained in court.

  For Audrey Sawyer, she found hanging out, having sex, and partying with Bobbi Jo to be a blast. Audrey never spent enough time over at the party house to witness what her half sister later claimed—nor had she recalled Bobbi ever talking about Bob forcing himself on her.

  Bobbi told me she accepted Bob’s deal as part of getting the things she wanted out of the guy. Bobbi was young when the sexual abuse started (in her early teens). She didn’t know any better. The guy was sexually abusing her and making her feel as though it was no big deal. If a person wants something, she pays for it. Sometimes with cash, but other times with her body. That was how Bobbi understood her deal with Bob Dow.