Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  “Bobbi Jo was a self-destructive addict,” clinical social worker and addiction specialist John Kelly said after studying this case for me. “To quiet her demons, she used drugs to live and lived to use drugs. Unfortunately for Bobbi Jo, her main enabler was Bob, her dealer. Bob was a lust-filled, sexual deviate who enjoyed the power, control, and sex he exhibited over Bobbi Jo [and others]. It seems Bob’s enabling manipulation over Bobbi Jo was for pure sexual gratification.”

  There can be no doubt that Jen and Bobbi both seemed to take pleasure—unwittingly—in the pain, without realizing it was the source fueling their desire. This was the food that kept the relationship from not only starving completely, but running at one hundred miles per hour. Maybe they were too young, too far gone when they met, too wrapped up in the drugs to realize what was happening. Whatever the case, from where Jen viewed the relationship, it went from zero to one hundred, seemingly overnight, and turned into a nonstop ride in the fast lane, where she did not feel she could (or even wanted to) jump off.

  Kathy Jones was at her ex-husband Jerry Jones’s Spanish Trace apartment with Audrey and Krystal on April 28, 2004. She had just been released from prison. Kathy had taken off from her home in Albany.

  “Jerry, I need to use your truck,” Kathy mentioned.

  Jerry knew better, but he had a soft spot for Kathy. From what Kathy has said, she left Jerry back on Father’s Day, 1989. Jen was three and a half years old. Jerry had tried every which way he could (as Audrey later confirmed) to get Kathy to come back, going so far as to give her money, attempting to rescue her out of the trenches of crack cocaine, which she had jumped headfirst into. So Kathy knew where to go when she needed something; Jerry had trained her that way.

  “Jerry tried to get me to come back to him a number of times, but I kept refusing,” Kathy said later. “And about the only time I would get to see Jennifer and [Audrey] was whenever I would go stay at the house with Jerry.... I had a boyfriend at the time (just after she left Jerry), and then I started refusing to go back or stay.”

  It was that alienation from her kids that drove Kathy, she claimed, to hit the streets for a little smoke to relieve the stressors of not being able to see the kids. That little buzz turned into a pipe and crack cocaine, she later told the court (and me), spending years chasing the red dragon. The crack led to a drinking problem. Those new habits were not easy to afford; thus, a new career in crime was born out of necessity. Kathy’s specialty now was burglarizing businesses and homes. Soon Kathy started her disappearing act—the bottom of that magician’s black hat was a prison cell with her name on it and a revolving door.

  Kathy, Audrey, and Krystal stopped by another friend’s house to pick her up on April 28, 2004; then all of them headed over to Bob’s party house after borrowing Jerry’s truck. They had no idea what Jen or Bobbi had been up to all day. But no sooner had they walked into the party house that evening of Bobbi’s birthday bash than Kathy realized this night was going to be like no other.

  CHAPTER 16

  FOR BOBBI AND JEN, the birthday celebration on April 28, 2004, started long before Audrey, Krystal, and Kathy showed up at the party house looking for them that night. If you believe the fourth version of this day, which Jen shared with Texas Monthly, Jen and Bobbi were at Bobbi’s grandmother’s house in Graford with another friend, Abigail (pseudonym), just after noon on that same day. (Bobbi said there was never anyone else with them at the house—that she would “never disrespect” her grandparents and allow someone other than Jen, whom her grandparents knew, to be in the house when they weren’t home.)

  Beginning Bobbi’s birthday celebration with a tradition—that actually was a habit—all three girls fired up the pipe and smoked some meth, Jen explained. After that, they swallowed some pills (likely Xanax, as both would later talk about a penchant for Xanax bars, also known as “school buses” and “white ladders”). Not quite the typical birthday lunch of maybe ribs and French fries, topped off with a buttercream-frosted cake, and a group of restaurant servers singing “Happy Birthday.” But the kind of party, nonetheless, that Bobbi and Jen had grown accustomed to having just about every other day—if not every day, by then.

  There came a point where the paranoia brought on by the meth they smoked got out of control. Jen told Texas Monthly (a somewhat different version than she would later tell police about this same afternoon) that she was sitting down watching television, giggling and having a laugh while watching some zany cartoon. Bobbi was in the shower getting herself cleaned up for the real party they had planned later on at Bob’s.

  Abby was in the living room with Jen. Neither spoke. Jen said that at one point, however, she heard something. It was Abby speaking to her, and yet Abby’s lips never moved. (Jen later claimed that she, Bobbi, and a few of their friends could read minds.) Jen was, she maintained, reading Abby’s mind at that moment.

  Later, in court, Jen talked about how this mind reading actually worked, testifying to these words under oath: “Well, it’s not really mind games in a sense. It’s more like Wiccan witchcraft, and stuff like that. There was a lot of—there was—I felt, you know, like, there was a lot of that going on [with Bobbi and me]. You’re under the influence of drugs and you just—you’re in that other world. And it’s just so easy to fall in there, and it’s so easy to be in one room with someone else not saying a word and you can read their minds. You can just go into a trance state of mind.”

  That day, as Abby sat next to her, Jen was in that “other world . . . trance state of mind.”

  I want you to leave Bobbi Jo alone and never come back was what Jen believed she heard Abby telepathically communicate to her through their minds.

  After she heard it, Jen looked at Abby. She had an urge to jump off the couch and beat up Abby. How dare Abby tell her to leave Bobbi? She was madly in love with Bobbi. Nothing—and no one—was going to keep them apart.

  Jen listened closely again to make sure she had heard Abby correctly. And for a second time, Jen didn’t like what Abby was telepathically communicating.

  While in court, Jen went on to explain in more detail about a version of Wiccan witchcraft she and—she insisted—Bobbi understood and, at times, practiced. “It’s like spells. You . . . basically, you take part of . . . bodily part of someone’s body, like a . . . like a piece of hair, or you take, like, a fingernail, something that’s part of someone’s body, and you have that, and you can put a spell over it. You can . . . you can just have a possession of that part. It’s basically . . . you can control that person whenever, like in your mind.”

  Jen said she absolutely believed it was possible and that it was taking place on this day at Bobbi’s grandparents’ house.

  The strangest part of it all, Jen later insisted, was that as she sat there on the couch, listening to Abby tell her to leave Bobbi, Bobbi came running out of the bathroom while Abby was talking vis-à-vis their minds. Apparently, Bobbi had heard Abby, too.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Jen later said Bobbi screamed, dripping wet, staring at Abby.

  Jen couldn’t believe it. Bobbi heard it, too?

  “I didn’t say anything,” Abby pled, standing up.

  “I heard it all,” Bobbi supposedly said.

  Abby would hang out with the girls at Dorothy’s sometimes, Jen said (and, to be clear, Jen gave Texas Monthly a pseudonym for Abby, so her true identity was never established. I also contacted Texas Monthly and asked to be put in touch with Abby, so I could confirm this story, but I never heard from her.) They liked to party together. Abby also wrote. She kept a book of poems at Dorothy’s house inside Bobbi’s room, Jen claimed. They’d get high and Abby would write things.

  (“Notebook . . . poems . . . ?” Bobbi later asked rhetorically, when I pressed her on this story. She had no idea what Jen was talking about.)

  “Where’s that notebook?” Bobbi demanded angrily—that is, in Jen’s version of the story. Bobbi had seen Abby writing in it earlier, after they smoked some meth
.

  Jen took one look at Bobbi and knew she wasn’t going to stop until she got her hands on the book.

  Bobbi was certain Abby was writing bad things about them. Not that they were sluts, whores, liars, or anything like that. Bobbi didn’t care too much what people said about her. What worried Bobbi was that Abby was writing (and casting) “magic spells,” as Jen referred to them, over the two of them, using the book.

  Bobbi looked all over the house and came up with the notebook.

  “Let’s take a look,” she said, walking back into the living room, where Abby and Jen were sitting. Bobbi held the notebook.

  Abby looked terrified. What the hell were they talking about? They were too high. A bad trip or something, she must have rationalized. They’d smoked too much meth. Wired beyond belief, their minds were playing tricks.

  Bobbi opened the notebook, but then she realized that all of the pages had been torn out.

  “Where is it all?”

  Abby looked confused.

  Bobbi rummaged through the house: drawers, shelves, under couches and chairs and cushions, closets.

  Everywhere.

  She hit pay dirt in the kitchen, Jen claimed, inside one of the drawers and underneath the couch cushions in the living room. Abby had torn the notebook pages into tiny little pieces and stuffed them in the drawer and under the cushions.

  “What the hell!” Bobbi said. She was now more certain than ever that Abby had “put a hex on them,” Jen said in Texas Monthly.

  “You’re not coming between me and my girlfriend!” Bobbi screamed in a rage, according to Jen. “Get out. . . .”

  Abby took off.

  “I need to see [my son],” Bobbi told Jen after Abby left. “I’m going to get him.”

  (“Never happened,” Bobbi told me. “I would never go and get my son after getting high. Never. It’s another set of lies Jennifer told.”)

  During the afternoon of Bobbi’s birthday, after the hypothetical mind games with Abby, Bobbi went over to her baby daddy’s house and picked up her two-year-old son. (Again, this is from Jen’s Texas Monthly version of the events; Bobbi claimed this never happened.)

  One thing that cannot be disputed is that for Bobbi this child was the essence of life. The pain of not being able to spend every moment with him was one of the reasons why the drugs felt so good: The numbing effect did its job. The drugs allowed Bobbi to disengage emotionally from those feelings of loss and detachment.

  Interestingly, here were two generations of the same cycle playing out in the lives of Jen and Bobbi. Kathy Jones and Bobbi Smith were two mothers who used the deadening influence of chronic drug use to stifle the pain of not being the parents that they desperately wanted to be.

  But neither of them saw it—or could see it.

  According to Jen, when Bobbi returned to her grandmother’s house, Jen was upstairs waiting, watching The Ren & Stimpy Show on television.

  (Bobbi does not recall this entire scene ever taking place in her life.)

  “Don’t move,” Bobbi allegedly told Jen as she put her son down and jumped on top of Jen, straddling, pinning her down on the bed.

  Jen froze. What the hell?

  “[Abby’s] underneath the bed,” Bobbi said. She was messing with Jen, trying to “freak her out.”

  As Jen later explained, the moment took on a surreal vibe, as if they were taking hallucinogens (drugs Bobbi told me she has never taken). Perhaps it was another one of Jen’s fairy-tale memories—or nightmares. She seemed to have several after the fact. As she and Bobbi lay on Bobbi’s bed, Jen explained, with Bobbi’s son playing on the floor nearby, she and Bobbi sat still as rocks “for hours.” Not moving a muscle. Stiff. Like they were in a contest. Then, while staring at the ceiling, they imagined all of the “doors in the house . . . opening and closing,” like something out of the Amityville Horror films.

  They did this a lot, according to Jen’s later testimony (in court): “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.”

  Jen also claimed that during the late afternoon hours of April 28, 2004, things turned dangerous when Bobbi was certain she could understand her son’s baby talk—that he was actually communicating with her and encouraging her to do something terrible.

  “We’ve got to burn the whole place down,” Bobbi said (according to Jen).

  It was a sobering moment. Burn the house down? Why? For what purpose?

  As Jen told it, Bobbi was worried Abby had cast a spell on the house and everything inside it. The only way for them to break the spell was to get rid of everything.

  Jen said she told Bobbi, “You cannot do that.”

  They talked about it, or maybe the high wore off. Either way, Bobbi apparently came up with the idea of gathering anything in the house Abby might have touched. So they jumped off the bed and collected all of the weed, perfume, makeup, papers, and magazines that Abby had touched and had an old-fashioned backyard bonfire.

  “There was some girl that Bobbi Jo met that was into Wicca,” Bobbi’s mother, Tamey Hurley, later told me, saying how both Bobbi and Bob Dow had told her. “And supposedly this girl put a curse on the house, and it scared Bobbi so bad, she wanted to burn the house down. They were all high, of course. But Bobbi Jo was terrified.”

  Bobbi did not remember this.

  Jen claimed she and Bobbi never did anything without first talking it through. They had a bond, Jen later testified. They shared an unbreakable, emotional connection on top of an oath etched in their own blood—and no one could come between it.

  “We cut our fingers, the tips of our fingers,” Jen said in court during her sentencing hearing, “and our blood connected to each other.” From Jen’s viewpoint, they were two lovers pledging the ultimate dedication to each other. “And from then on, that, right there, was supposed to symbolize unity,” Jen observed, adding, “like a marriage, you might say.”

  This covenant, if you will, joined the two girls in DNA together for life.

  I asked Bobbi Jo to explain this event to me.

  She did not recall that blood oath ever taking place.

  “Blood bond with Jennifer?” Bobbi questioned. “Huh? I’ve never made a blood bond with anyone, except my son’s father, and that only came from our sex, not cutting each other up.”

  Jen claimed this blood oath took place merely days after she and Bobbi hooked up.

  According to Jen, these weren’t the only brushes they’d had with that “otherworld” of mind reading, Wicca, and black magic. And yet the following anecdote actually exemplifies a point that Bobbi disliked black magic of any kind.

  According to Jen, sometime before Bobbi’s birthday, she and Bobbi Jo had met up with Bobbi’s cousin Grace (pseudonym) and another friend, Carmen (pseudonym), to have a little precele-bration. They were at Dorothy Smith’s house in Graford. At first, to Jen, it felt like a family gathering. Bobbi seemed happy. Everyone was having a good time.

  Carmen was acting strange, however, Jen remembered. She didn’t say if they had gone off and gotten high or not, but one has to believe, based on the life they shared, they had. In any event, at one point, Carmen said some weird things and talked about what Jen referred to later as voodoo.

  It freaked Jen out when Carmen, still talking, walked up and “touched” Jen somewhere on her body. “And I started shaking,” Jen said in a statement she gave police.

  When Bobbi saw what Carmen was doing to Jen, she walked over and asked Carmen about it.

  Carmen looked alarmed as Bobbi became livid, according to Jen, screaming, “Get . . . out! Take your voodoo shit with you.”

  Carmen “walked back to Mineral Wells,” Jen explained.

  CHAPTER 17

&nbs
p; CRUISING THROUGH TEXAS, the girls talked. That electrifying Thelma & Louise effect, which Jen later talked about feeling as an adrenaline rush that pumped through her veins, and the thrill of taking off, on the run, after killing a man dwindled as the sun started its descent on the evening of May 5, 2004. For one, the sheer seriousness of what had taken place settled on the one adult in the group, Kathy Jones, as she thought about what the future had in store for her daughter. If the girls ran, they looked guilty, Kathy considered. If they went to the cops and pled that Bob had tried raping Jen (the story Jen was trying to sell at the current moment), that might be different. Maybe it would work? But heading into Mexico (as Kathy and Jen later said Bobbi wanted to do)—without passports, nonetheless—was probably not the best idea at this point.

  Kathy stared at her daughter. Throughout Jen’s life, Kathy had never been the mother she had wanted to be. Guidance was not something Kathy had given to her daughters, especially Jen.

  “I tried,” she said later. “Sometimes we had . . . There was some guidance, and I believe it didn’t take because of the actions I was showing her. I was telling her the right things, but I wasn’t showing her.”

  Some might refer to that as “setting a bad example.”

  In deciding where to go next, one of the girls mentioned Walmart.