“Walmart?” Krystal asked.
Bobbi was driving.
“I need a calling card,” Audrey said. Audrey had one of those pay-as-you-go Tracphones.
From Graford to Weatherford, where the girls decided to head next, Walmart was on the way. Bobbi stopped and Audrey went in; Krystal tagged along. She bought a calling card. Audrey needed to make a few calls. Audrey still wasn’t sold on the notion that Bobbi and Jen had whacked Bob. It didn’t seem possible. Two girls, higher than Mount Everest most of the time, killing a guy like Bob? It didn’t add up for Audrey. Thus, Audrey explained to me, she wanted to stay in touch with a few friends back home while they were on the run so she could get a bead on what was being said around town and on the local news. She was determined to find out the truth about what had happened.
It was near seven in the evening, according to Krystal, when she and Audrey walked out of the Walmart. (Some of the girls claimed they stopped at Walmart before going to Weatherford, and some said after.)
From Graford, Weatherford was west, toward Fort Worth, Arlington, and Dallas. You could take the 337 southeast through Mineral Wells, or a more direct route on the 254 east. They needed to head west, toward Abilene and eventually Mexico, if they were sticking to the plan.
Why go to Weatherford?
Bob Dow had a trailer in Weatherford, where he had lived most of the time. Bobbi knew the trailer. She had spent plenty of time there with Bob and alone.
“A ring,” Bobbi said. They needed money. (Bobbi had left her engagement ring inside the trailer, she later told me, and she wanted it. Going there wasn’t about money for her; it was about getting that ring.)
As they drove, Kathy had a moment with her daughter. Kathy was interested in something—death, the taking of a life.
“How did it feel to kill someone?” Kathy asked Jen.
Jen thought about it. She looked her mother in the eyes, as serious as she had ever been. “Pretty fucking good,” Jen bragged, sounding almost proud of what she had done.
CHAPTER 18
AUDREY, KATHY, JENNIFER, Bobbi Jo, and Krystal arrived at Bob Dow’s Weatherford trailer home sometime during the evening hours of May 5, 2004, after leaving Graford and stopping at Walmart (or the other way around, depending on who is asked).
As the girls piled out of Bob’s truck, the MWPD prepared a second APB to be broadcast statewide:
REF TO POSSIBLE HOMICIDE
OCCURRRED IN OUR CITY . . .
RED AND WHITE CREW CAB CHEV TRUCK OCCUPIED BY 5W/F’S POSSIBLY ENROUTE TO MEXICO . . . ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS [AND] POSSIBLY INVOLVED IN HOMICIDE . . .DECEASED SUBJ’S VEH TAKEN POSSIBLY ...
It might have seemed strange that the MWPD did not notify the public about a band of criminals on the loose (some of whom were quite hardened, had done serious time in prison, and one of whom was wanted for murder). It was up to the chief of police to stand on a podium in front of a mishmash of microphones and make that announcement, according to Detective Brian Boetz. But, the detective added, “[As we got] into the investigation, we were getting phone calls from the families. . . .”
So the MWPD decided to wait it out. After all, according to Boetz, they were gathering information on their main suspect and did not need to cause any sort of public panic. Announcing in the state of Texas that there was an armed and dangerous murderer on the loose might stir up some unneeded vigilante justice. They weren’t there yet—at least that’s what the MWPD later said about the situation. There was not a lot of concern about Bobbi going on a murder spree.
“We used . . . [the] state and nationwide communication between law enforcement agencies’ systems,” Detective Brian Boetz explained further. The MWPD was under the impression, Boetz reiterated, that sooner or later, as they put pressure on family members of the girls, the information they needed would come. Yet, those family members consisted of Dorothy Smith, the Cruzes, and Jerry Jones. The MWPD, as far as I could find out, contacted no one else.
At Bob Dow’s trailer, Audrey flipped open her cell phone and tried calling a few friends back in town to see what was happening, to learn if there was any news. Audrey wanted to know what the local stations were saying. The girls had not heard anything on the radio in the truck. It was as if the murder had not occurred, which led Audrey to start thinking that her sister and Bobbi had lied about the entire event.
Out of all of the girls on the road trip, Audrey was confused the most, she later claimed.
“When we were at Bobbi Jo’s grandmother’s house, Bobbi Jo was tellin’ them that she was the one that killed Bob,” Audrey recalled. “In the truck, Jennifer was saying that she killed Bob. When they first came in the door back at the apartment, Bobbi Jo was sayin’, ‘We killed Bob. . . .’ I didn’t understand what was going on or who did what.”
At one point, Audrey had asked Bobbi, “What in the hell is going on?” Had they murdered Bob? And if so, why’d they do it?
“Well, he was raping Jennifer,” Bobbi said (sticking to the plan she and Jen had come up with), according to Audrey.
“And that’s all she said,” Audrey told me. “She just kept saying, ‘We gotta get out of town.... We gotta get out of town. We gotta leave.... Hurry!’ So we packed up some of our stuff and some of Jen’s stuff and we done left.”
“Wait a minute, Bobbi Jo just said that she killed [Bob] . . . . I thought you said that you killed him?” Kathy had asked Jen soon after they left Dorothy Smith’s.
“Look, we were all thinking in our minds, if Jennifer didn’t do this, then we ain’t fixin’ to go nowhere,” Audrey later explained. They didn’t want to stand behind Bobbi Jo, per se, and take off with her if Jen was not involved.
After Kathy asked her daughter who was responsible—and if this whole thing was some sort of prank—Jen got quiet and serious.
“Jennifer wasn’t really saying much,” Audrey remembered. “She was kind of, like, shaken. That’s one of the reasons we all decided to go with them.”
One of the girls searched through the keys on Bob’s key chain, trying several in the lock, but she couldn’t come up with the right key to get into the trailer.
“I wasn’t giving them the key,” Bobbi later told me. She didn’t want them breaking into Bob’s trailer and rummaging through his things. She had driven to the trailer so she could get her engagement ring. This way, if she needed money, at least she would have something to fall back on.
But the three of them—Kathy, Krystal, and Jen—had different plans. Without Bobbi knowing, they walked around to the back of the trailer in search of a big window to smash. This way, one of them would be able to climb in and open the door.
Suspicious, Bobbi followed.
In the front yard, Bob had one of those dangerous trampolines that kids like to take the safety nets down from and horse around upon. It was one of those round, springy leg-breakers that adults like to make zany YouTube videos of themselves doing stupid-human tricks on. There was some other junk hanging around the yard, but Audrey spied the trampoline. As the others trekked into the backyard, she walked over to it.
Looks like fun.
Watching the others head toward the back of the trailer, Audrey thought, I’m not going into that trailer to commit burglary. Y’all can do what y’all want. But not me.
Robbing a dead man didn’t seem like the right thing to do.
Krystal found a nice window in the back and pointed to it.
They had to be ultra-careful, Jen later testified. “We couldn’t get inside. We couldn’t find the right key. We were scared because the neighbors were outside. And we were thinking that they were going to call the cops . . . since Bob wasn’t there.”
(Jennifer never mentioned that Bobbi was a part of this in any way. And with Bobbi being the size of a young boy, was she about to try and stop three grown women from breaking in?)
Krystal took a rock and smashed the glass.
They were in.
According to Audrey, Kathy and Jen were under th
e impression Bob’s late brother had left a stash of cash hidden somewhere inside Bob’s trailer.
“And they wanted that money,” Audrey said.
Audrey bounced up and down on the trampoline out front as the girls pillaged the inside of the trailer, lifting cushions, opening cupboards and drawers, searching underneath the bed, in the bathroom. As she sprang up and down, she felt the elastic bounce of the trampoline, which was making her stomach feel queasy, like she was on an amusement park ride. Bouncing, Audrey thought: What is going on here? What in the hell am I doing with these people?
“I was kind of in disbelief,” Audrey remembered, thinking back to how strange that moment seemed. “I was like . . . thinking that this didn’t really happen. It even seems that way today. You know, I wasn’t there [when Bob was murdered], so it was easy for me not to believe it and think it was just all some sort of story they had made up.”
Jumping and thinking, Audrey came to the realization that maybe they were full of nonsense. Perhaps Jen and Bobbi had gotten so high that they couldn’t decipher reality from fantasy. Maybe they thought they’d killed Bob in one of their otherworld trips? Perhaps they had partied so hard, they were confusing a television movie with reality?
Inside the trailer, Bobbi searched for her engagement ring, while the others got busy thieving things.
Loading it into Bob’s truck took some time, but after about a half hour inside the trailer, they managed to leave with, as Krystal later reported, a scavenger hunt’s list of worthless, everyday items: a “twenty-seven-inch TV . . . a big, old fool’s-gold rock, [and] a strobe light. Stupid stuff.”
With the bed of Bob’s truck filled with junk from his trailer, Bobbi hopped back into the driver’s seat. She knew she couldn’t stop them from burgling the place, so she waited for them to finish and then took off.
In town, Bobbi found a pawnshop, which Kathy had directed her to. Kathy was the one with the ID and the only bandit out of the bunch willing to use it to pawn a stolen television. So she went inside and sold the television for $75 as the others waited in the truck out front.
Later, Kathy told police: “Krystal told me it was her television. . . .” That, however, seems hardly possible to believe, seeing that Kathy was with them when they lifted it from Bob’s trailer.
After selling the television, the gang was in the mood to get back to some serious partying.
“We stopped at a truck stop,” Audrey said. “We got us some beer and then started smokin’ some weed. But I was the only one”—as if it mattered—“that wasn’t drinking.”
Then Bobbi hit the 171 out of town and found Interstate 20, some miles after that.
“Any idea where we’re going?” Kathy asked, taking a pull from a beer. She was wondering if Bobbi was still thinking about Mexico. Or had another plan. They seemed to be making it up as they went along.
“Mexico,” Bobbi restated, according to Kathy.
“We’ll go here, and then we’ll go there,” Jen added. Then, an interesting piece of dialogue all the girls agreed they heard Jen say: “I did this, maybe I should drive.”
“Maybe we stop back in Mineral Wells and ask Jen’s dad for some money,” Bobbi suggested.
“They was just driving in the opposite direction,” Audrey explained. “They didn’t know where the hell they was goin’.”
No one pointed out that the quickest way to Mexico wasn’t west, but south, heading toward Waco on the 77, into San Antonio, and then across the border from there.
“I don’t think [Bobbi] knew exactly where she was driving,” Krystal later said. “She was scatterbrained. I don’t know. . . .”
As they traveled along the interstate, the drive turned long and quiet and monotonous. They pounded beers and smoked weed. The music coming from the stereo was pure country, and there were times when, Kathy and Jennifer later claimed, they all sang along to a popular tune.
Occasionally the conversation turned back to what had happened at Bob’s. The girls were curious. They needed to know. So far, they’d heard several different versions of what was one truth: Bob Dow was dead.
“The story kind of changed a lot,” Krystal remembered.
Audrey later told me Bobbi took on the role of leader quite aggressively and confidently, and was beginning to “piss everyone off” with her demands and the way she made the decisions about what they were going to do, where they were going, and when.
“My mom was going to knock her out a couple of times,” Audrey said. “But Bobbi was the one with the gun.”
Bobbi said that analysis by Audrey was a total fabrication. It wasn’t as if she was driving with the gun tucked in her belt, threatening everyone with it, waving it around. There was a gun in the truck—yes. But no one in particular had it. Additionally, Bobbi explained, Kathy was the one telling her where to go, taking total control of the trip.
Tamey Hurley did not see her daughter as a leader. To the contrary, Tamey told me, “Bobbi was a follower. That was her trouble. It kind of freaked me out when Jennifer became so attached to her. Part of Bobbi’s problem was always that she was so softhearted. She always wanted to make everyone happy. She’d do anything she can to please people. She was always taking the blame for other people so they wouldn’t get into trouble. Her brothers, especially.”
“Bobbi was definitely someone who would stand up and take a hand across the face for you,” said a friend. “She would absolutely take on someone’s pain. She would take responsibility for things she didn’t do to protect a friend. That is Bobbi.”
Heading down the 20 toward Odessa, about sixty miles from the Arizona border, two hundred miles from the closest crossing into Mexico, Kathy and Bobbi Jo got into an argument.
“And what the hell if we get pulled over?” Kathy snapped at Bobbi. What was the plan then? Here were five girls cruising through Texas in a stolen vehicle, a dead man left behind in Mineral Wells. They had drugs on them; Bobbi was knocking back beers and smoking weed as she drove; they had a loaded weapon; they were all supposedly laughing and yelling and screaming to the music blaring from the car stereo. Kathy was beginning to feel that there was no light at the end of this tunnel—that this was not going to end in a good way. Jen said in that Texas Monthly article that she and Bobbi were talking about going down in a hail of gunfire, busting through a barricade of police at the border as if they were outlaws. Bobbi was certain that the cops were onto them and there would, at some point, be a roadblock set up with their names on it—sheriffs and deputies and cops with rifles pointed at the windshield, surrounded by a band of reporters with cameras, pumping it all out live on the cable networks. This was their destiny. Their fifteen minutes.
(The problem with this memory, however, was that no one else along for the ride could later recall Bobbi and Jen talking about it, or acting out scenes like this from Thelma & Louise. The impression was that Jen had made all of this up later when she sat down with the magazine.)
Bobbi talked about killing herself and the others if they got stopped.
“I’ll be damned, Bobbi. . . . That’s what y’all got planned,” Kathy apparently said. “No, no, no . . . this shit ain’t about to go down like that.”
The girls knew Kathy was a badass. Not too many people back home messed with Kathy Jones. She’d been stabbed, beaten, knocked out, done years in the joint, and was still standing. She’d taken on men and whupped her some Texas testosterone-fueled butt. Some chick the size of a twelve-year-old boy was not about to threaten Kathy and her daughters’ lives in any way, Kathy claimed, and she had made this clear to Bobbi.
There was a second weapon in the vehicle (one that Jen had taken from a green trunk in Bob’s bedroom). The plan was to pawn the weapon at some point to finance the trip.
So there were two weapons in the truck at the time, Kathy thought as they made their way out of state. The only problem Kathy could see then, which felt pretty significant to her at that moment, was that one weapon was loaded and one wasn’t.
CHAPTER 19
AS SOON AS KRYSTAL, AUDREY, and Kathy walked into Bob Dow’s party house on the night of April 28, 2004, they took one look at Bobbi and Jen and knew the night was going to be one hell of a bender. This was the first time Kathy met Bob, a guy she had heard a lot about.
“You want a drink?” Bob asked. He was tending bar. They were sitting around in the living room, smoking weed and drinking.
“I don’t remember what kind of drinks they were, but Bob mixed me one,” Kathy said. “And, anyway, we all got to drinking and, I believe, I did smoke weed that night, too.”
Audrey and Kathy did not know it was Bobbi’s birthday. Their mission going over there was to check up on Jen and, once again (according to them), try to talk her into leaving. They later claimed to have wanted to get Jen as far away from Bobbi (and Bob) as they could. And yet, within moments of walking into the house, they both had drinks in their hands and were partying with everyone.
Bob had his mother locked away in her room so she wouldn’t disturb them.
Bob soon broke out what Kathy described as “a big bag” of dope. Bob was the medicine man. He had all the drugs. Bob reached down into the bag and, like Santa Claus at an office Christmas party, took out yellow and white bars of Xanax, along with blue “footballs” (more Xanax). Beyond that, he had “some hydrocodone [pills], too,” Kathy recalled. Hydrocodone is an opiate prescribed to treat severe and chronic pain. As PubMed Health claims, Hydrocodone is in a class of medications called opiate (narcotic) analgesics and in a class of medications called antitussives. Hydrocodone relieves pain by changing the way the brain and nervous system respond to pain.
In other words, serious narcotics. You take a few of those and have a cocktail and you won’t remember your own name.
“It was just like a big, old party all the time, whenever I went over there,” Kathy said. “If there wasn’t one, he was making one, you know. That’s just the way it was.”
Bad Girls Page 14
