As Kathy stood, contemplating what to advise the two of them to do next, Kathy decided that Jen would be better off with her mother along for the ride.
“I was—the thing for me, just the thought was, just doing whatever they wanted to do to start with. I didn’t really know the whole situation.” Kathy was on probation; she wasn’t allowed to leave the state. She’d be tossed back into prison. “I just knew, though, that what they were saying had happened, and I had to believe it, you know, because of the seriousness of the way Jennifer was acting. And Bobbi Jo, too, just wanting to get out of there. I really had no intentions of crossing the border.”
Every minute counted. The girls must have considered that someone had heard the gunshots and called the cops. Bobbi was getting extremely antsy, everyone later said, as the immensity of the situation and what Jen had done settled on her.
“I wanted to protect Jennifer,” Bobbi later told me. “She was my friend, one of my lovers.”
Krystal stood next to the girls, waiting for what Audrey was going to do. If Audrey went, Krystal decided, she was going, too. (“I was chasing Audrey,” Krystal later said, explaining how she was still deeply in love with Audrey and unable to let go of her.)
“Let’s get out of here,” Bobbi said again.
They split up and hopped into the two trucks: Bob’s and Dorothy’s.
“I need to get some clothes or something,” Krystal said.
“We need to stop at Krystal’s,” Audrey said.
Bobbi led the way in Bob’s truck, with Kathy riding shotgun. Krystal drove her car. Jen and Audrey followed in Dorothy’s truck.
Bobbi Jo described for me in detail this scene at the Spanish Trace Apartments during those moments directly following Bob Dow’s murder. Her version was quite a bit different from what you’ve just read, which I composed from the court record and various interviews with Audrey and Kathy, along with police reports and interviews police conducted with all of the players involved. (That is, all of the participants except for Bobbi, I might add. Bobbi did not talk about this moment at any length and, surprisingly, was never really asked to do so by the police later on.)
“On the day that Jennifer murdered Bob,” Bobbi began, trying to clarify the record, “I was not drunk. Indeed, very sober I was, and so was she [Jen]. Neither drugs nor alcohol were a factor on that given day.”
Tracking the movements of the girls, looking at it from Bobbi’s point of view, it’s easy to see how that last statement could be true.
Bobbi said, “Jennifer told me she killed Bob and how.” Bobbi claimed to be outside the party house in the yard. Jen ran out the door and said, “Take me to my mother’s. . . .”
“And, of course, I complied.”
“Mother’s” was an odd word choice, but very telling. Jen knew the apartment belonged to Jerry Jones.
In any event, Bobbi took Jen over to the apartment.
When they arrived, Bobbi said, “they [Kathy and Audrey] were already packed and ready to leave, as if they already knew what was happening and what had happened.” Bobbi was referring to the ordeal back at Bob’s. Bobbi was saying that Audrey, Krystal, and Kathy already knew Jen had killed Bob and were waiting for her to arrive at the apartment. Bobbi was certain of this.
“I never really spoke to anyone at the apartment,” Bobbi later insisted. “That’s all Kathy and Jennifer’s bullshit that they had come up with.... Even while we were on the run, I never spoke much. Kathy was the one ordering us around. I got into it with her once. . . .”
I asked the MWPD if they subpoenaed phone records from Bob’s cell phone, Lila’s house, Jerry Jones’s apartment, or any of the cell phones that the girls had, so I could see if someone had maybe called over to the Spanish Trace or one of the girls’ cell phones after Bob was murdered.
Detective Brian Boetz told me, “No, there were no phone calls made moments after the murder. . . .” Boetz never clarified how he had drawn this conclusion, but I can say that there were no phone records I ever saw as part of the court file.
As she walked into the apartment at Spanish Trace, Bobbi revealed to me, “it seemed everyone knew what was happening and what was going on—but me.”
As they stood and talked, Kathy Jones, whom Bobbi referred to as “drug-crazed” on that day and most others, pulled Bobbi aside and said, “You need to take the blame for Jennifer.”
“Huh?” Bobbi responded.
“You need to take the blame . . . Bobbi. You’re gay. You’ll love prison.”
Bobbi looked at her: Are you as crazy as you sound?
(“She tried to make prison [sound] comfortable,” Bobbi recalled.)
“You’re crazy,” Bobbi said.
According to Bobbi’s version, Kathy next said, “Look, I need you to take me back to Bob’s so I can recover all of that computer equipment.”
“You’d have to kill me first,” Bobbi responded.
Bobbi admitted that she was well aware of Bob’s sordid, vile history of “making movies and taking photos with all the women he had sex with.” Bobbi admitted, “At times, I would be the one behind the camera.” She believed that Kathy wanted to go over to Bob’s so she could grab all the videos before police got there. She didn’t want the videos made public—because she and her two daughters were featured in some of them, sometimes together.
According to Bobbi’s recollection, she believed Kathy, Audrey, and Jen thought it was some sort of joke that Jen had murdered Bob. They felt that it didn’t matter. They thought of the murder as being “light,” as Bobbi called it, as if Jennifer had done the world a favor, ridding the planet of an evil, dirty man whom nobody cared much about.
“I was in shock, to say the least,” Bobbi told me. “Shocked. Confused. Scared. And young.”
As they took off from Spanish Trace, Bobbi said, the girls were still making light of “Bob’s death.” They were telling jokes and laughing.
“I was disgusted and devastated.”
CHAPTER 15
ALL THE MWPD felt it could do at this point was wait. Bobbi, Jen, and the others had taken off, and the MWPD had no idea where they’d gone. That was the short end of it. A “statewide broadcast” sent out by the department indicated how a “possible homicide [had] occurred in our city,” and the MWPD was looking for a “red-and-white crew cab Chevy truck” (Bob Dow’s) being “occupied by 5 W/F’s possibly en route to Mexico.” The report called the girls “armed and extremely dangerous.” A follow-up report, sent two hours after the first—again statewide—reported that Bob’s truck could be “possibly dark blue or green over tan.” This follow-up report named Audrey, Bobbi, Jen, and Kathy, leaving out Krystal.
I asked Detective Brian Boetz about alerting major media outlets, especially seeing that the teletype qualified the girls as “armed and dangerous.” This seemed like big, potentially important news to me.
“We did not notify the local news,” Boetz told me. “My chief would have been the person that would have notified the public.”
The APB had yielded nothing in the sense of a lead. No other police departments had spotted the vehicle. As Boetz and the MWPD checked back with Jerry Jones and Dorothy Smith, neither had seen nor heard from the girls.
The MWPD had done nothing that I could find to track down friends and family and try to develop a sense of who Bobbi (their major suspect in a brutal murder) was, where she might have taken off to, or whom she might be hiding out with. Bobbi had a son, after all. She had an ex-fiancé. She had brothers, a mother, ex-lovers. She had other family besides Dorothy and the Cruzes.
“We thought she was still in town,” one law enforcement source told me.
The MWPD zeroed in on Bobbi Jo Smith as a “possible” murder suspect and stopped there. They had the grandmother of a person of interest fingering her, a statement from that witness, a hearsay statement from the suspect’s aunt and uncle backing it up, and an arrest warrant for murder. On paper, it didn’t seem like much, but the MWPD was satisfied, and now they
were waiting for someone to call in and say he or she knew where Bobbi had run off to.
And so, as Bobbi, Audrey, Krystal, Jen, and Kathy headed out of town, the MWPD sat back and waited.
“As for the cops and Bobbi Jo,” said a source close to the investigation, “just about every person in Bobbi Jo’s inner circle [which I, the author, feel is quite a stretch to say here] was either dead or in that truck with her. She lived and worked with Bob (dead). Was dating Jennifer (in truck). Used to date Audrey (in truck). The only people that knew her well, who the cops could talk to, were her mother (who had no fixed address, I believe), her grandmother, and Jerry Jones (who did not know Bobbi at all), all of whom Detective Boetz spoke to.... So, at that point, he knew that Bobbi Jo, Jen, [Kathy], Audrey, and Krystal had hit the road for parts unknown.”
Still, there was no rush to find them.
“Neither Jen nor Bobbi Jo,” this same source added, “had the kinds of things cops usually use to track people—cell phone, credit cards, or bank accounts. All [law enforcement] knew was that they were in Bob’s truck. The best detectives in the country would have been hard-pressed to find them without a lucky break or inside information. . . .”
The fact remained: A quick check would have produced the information that Audrey Sawyer had a cell phone on her (which she was constantly using), as well as Kathy Jones.
After Krystal dropped off her car around the corner from Spanish Trace and grabbed a few belongings from her house, she hopped into the truck with Audrey. (Jen was now driving; apparently, she wasn’t too distraught any longer and could operate a motor vehicle.) The girls made their way to Bobbi’s grandmother Dorothy Smith’s house, in Graford. They wanted to drop off Dorothy’s truck. They had a stash of booze, some weed, which Jen jacked from Bob after killing him, but not a lot of money. Bob Dow never carried much cash, so they were only able to get gas money, per se. That would be just enough to make it through Texas, if they were lucky.
According to Kathy’s later testimony, the murder weapon was sitting inside a blanket in back of Bobbi as she drove.
Kathy looked on as Bobbi told Jen (who, contradicting what the others said, Kathy claimed was riding with her and Bobbi at that time) to grab the weapon.
“What?” Jen supposedly asked. They were going about sixty miles per hour.
“It’s inside the blanket.”
Jen reached in back, found what Kathy later described as a “bloody comforter,” and handed it off to Bobbi.
“Hold the wheel,” Bobbi said (according to Kathy).
Jen did as she was told. Bobbi took a yellow T-shirt and wiped the gun down, Kathy recalled.
The girls were thinking they had to get some additional cash for the trip. One hundred dollars wasn’t going to get them very far. The more money they had, the farther into Mexico and away from Mineral Wells they could get.
Bobbi said, “Steer the truck. . . .”
In Kathy’s version, Jen steered as they drove across the city limit of Mineral Wells on the FM (Farm to Market) 1821 N, with Audrey and Krystal following behind, watching as Bobbi “leaned out of the window and threw the gun toward the left side of the roadway. . . .”
But in Jen’s courtroom version of this same event, she said: “We were driving down the road—I don’t know which one. Bobbi Jo took the gun out from the blanket in the backseat. And she opened it up, and she was beating it against the door, whatever, trying to get the bullets out. And then she threw it in a ditch. We kept on driving, and then Bobbi Jo said that I need to drive her grandmother’s truck back to the house, since I was the one that took it.”
So they pulled over, let Jen out, and switched there, on the road (according to Jennifer’s recollection).
Audrey and Krystal looked at each other as they saw the weapon fly out the window. Neither could clarify who was driving the truck at this time or who actually tossed the weapon out the window. (“I think it was Bobbi,” Audrey told me.)
For some reason, as they drove by the area in the tall weeds where the weapon landed, Audrey and Krystal took note of where they were.
Things were a bit calmer when they arrived at Dorothy Smith’s house. Bobbi and Jen were manic, but Kathy—arguably the adult in the bunch—knew the farther away from the crime scene they were, the better their chances became of getting out of Dodge without wearing metal bracelets.
Kathy waited with Audrey and Krystal outside for several minutes as Bobbi and Jen went in. Jen said they stopped at Dorothy’s to get “our things.”
Dorothy soon came out of the house, tugging at Bobbi’s shirt, pleading there in front of everyone for Bobbi to stay.
Kathy later claimed she heard Bobbi tell her grandmother, “I killed Bob. . . .” (“I was really confused,” Kathy added as she recalled this moment for police. “Because Jen had told me that she shot Bob.”)
Jen told the court (during her sentencing hearing, months before she was interviewed by Texas Monthly and Bobbi’s case went to trial), “And then we reached her grandmother’s house. And that’s where Bobbi Jo told her grandmother, ‘I killed Bob. I killed Bob.’” When asked if she had said anything while at Bobbi’s grandmother’s house, Jennifer claimed, “No, I didn’t.”
Krystal heard them talking and walked closer. She heard Bobbi Jo say, “I killed Bob. I shot him. I killed him.”
But Dorothy didn’t “believe her and asked Jennifer” if it was true.
“Bobbi Jo killed him,” Jen said (this by Krystal’s recollection).
What was clear was that Bobbi wanted to leave right away.
Bobbi and Jen walked toward Bob’s truck as Dorothy followed close behind, peppering the girls with questions. Dorothy became increasingly upset the more time she spent with the girls, Krystal said.
“We have to go, Grandma,” Bobbi told Dorothy. “I wanted to return your truck.”
The first time Kathy Jones met Bob Dow was on the night of April 28, 2004, Bobbi Jo’s nineteenth birthday. When they talked about it later, this particular night seemed to be a turning point for all the girls involved in the madness that was taking place at Bob’s party house for the past few months—not to mention the dark end to it all of it, which was to come a week later with Bob’s murder. Each woman—Krystal, Audrey, Kathy, Jen, and Bobbi Jo—spoke of this night as a defining moment. And each had her own story to tell.
“Bobbi Jo’s birthday—I don’t know what day that is, but that’s the day I met [Bob],” Kathy explained in court. “It’s whenever I went over [to Bob’s] that night and I had left my [second] husband in Albany [Texas], (an hour-and-a-half drive west of Mineral Wells). That night I went over there and they was having her birthday party.”
Kathy drove to Bob’s, not realizing there was a celebration going on. Bobbi was growing up. No longer that “kid” of eighteen, struggling—or being forced—into (true) adulthood. Nineteen felt so much more mature than eighteen, suffice it to say, within the world Bobbi lived. Bobbi was feeling good. There was a new girl, a little younger than her, hanging around Bob’s house. She was a hot female, obsessed with her every move. Bobbi was making money from Bob, providing him with a train of girls to film at all hours of the night and day, on top of her hourly rate while working maintenance jobs. She was learning several different trades from Bob. Despite her upbringing, as Bobbi claims, of an absent mother and father, she still had a strong family core—her grandmother, aunt and uncle, a brother she was very close to—to fall back on when she desired normalcy. Bobbi understood now that she didn’t need her mother, though she had a hard time keeping track of where the woman was at any given time, anyway. Bobbi felt as though she had a place of her own to live, drink, do all the drugs she wanted—all of this without anyone looking over her shoulder. To boot, she could sleep with as many women as she wanted, without anyone bothering her. Effectively, she could finally live the lifestyle she had so desperately wanted since realizing she was gay.
Bobbi said Bob was like a father to her.
“Bob and I nev
er had sex with each other.” Bobbi denied reports that Bob was some sort of sexual slave master, turning her into his personal sex goddess, whether she was into it or not. “But we did share all of the same women.”
In addition, Bobbi insisted, it was not Bob Dow who had turned her into a doper, dependent on various drugs and alcohol. Sure, Bob fed her addictions. But it was “my son’s father that introduced me to drugs,” Bobbi explained to me. “And I could not break myself away from pills and alcohol. I was drunk often and loved to smoke weed.”
Bobbi was away from that man (her son’s dad) now and on her own. It had taken some time to become independent; but by nineteen, Bobbi had done it. The only pang of guilt nagging at Bobbi Jo as she contemplated her life at nineteen, and where she was headed, was the one thing that meant more to Bobbi than anything else: her son.
Still, life, as far as Bobbi could tell, was going along okay. She had plans to obtain sole custody of her son eventually, get her own place, and get off the hooch. Moreover, she saw her son when she wanted. One could argue that Bobbi had the best of all worlds during that time before Bob was murdered.
This relationship with Jen—however intimate and emotionally connected Jen may have felt it had become—was a train carrying a lot of baggage, rushing on a violent collision course. Going back to March, when they first met, from day one, the relationship was built on a platform of betrayal. Since then, at best, it had grown into what was both an abnormally codependent, dysfunctional, and masochistic union; at worst, it was a manufactured love affair based on nothing more than sex, lies, lust, and drug use.
According to what Jen later told Texas Monthly (maybe the one thing Bobbi Jo agrees with her today), Bobbi’s and her entire “existence” together as a couple was centered on abusing drugs and alcohol. They’d get drunk and high for 48 hours straight, Katy Vine wrote in her article “Girls Gone Wild,” published in the Texas Monthly’s September 2005 issue. One week of partying led to two weeks, then three weeks, Vine reported, adding how Jen had told her that she and Bobbi favored Xanax and meth, weed and shots of vodka. They slept very little and “hardly ever ate.” After a two- or three-day binge, for example, as they were coming down from all of the dope, constantly telling each other how in love they were (according to Jennifer), Bobbi and Jen found themselves strung out to the point of unremitting paranoia. The withdrawal was intoxicating in and of itself, sucking their emotions dry; they’d feel so depleted and depressed, they’d have to start the bender all over again to feel normal.
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