Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  As they stood on the porch, this “worried” look came over Bob.

  “What is it, Bob?”

  “Tell [my son] that I’ve always known that he was mine and that I loved him, and I hope that I’ve been the best father I could possibly be to him.”

  Elizabeth was confused. Why couldn’t Bob deliver the message himself? Was he planning on leaving?

  It was no secret between them that Bob’s son had not been given his father’s surname. There was an issue with maybe Bob not being the boy’s father and a DNA test had been conducted after the boy requested it.

  “What’s going on, Bob?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I have messages for you to deliver, and I need you to do that for me,” he said.

  Later, Elizabeth talked about this moment, making the claim: “He knew something was going to happen, and he gave me all these messages to tell everybody.... I’ll never forget them.”

  “I wanted to apologize to you, Elizabeth,” Bob continued. He didn’t go into specifics; it was something between them that neither had to talk about in detail. Bob had messed up a good thing with Elizabeth by cheating on her. He had always wanted to say that. He needed to take this moment, he explained, and acknowledge he’d done wrong. He was sorry for it.

  “Bob—”

  “Listen . . . I have a message for all of my friends and daughter.” Bob had a six-year-old child out of wedlock. He didn’t spend much time with her. “Tell them all not to be sad. . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  It sounded as though Bob was going to kill himself, or he had a feeling he was about to die.

  What Bob was alluding to, Elizabeth soon realized, was that he’d had a premonition that his number had come up. Elizabeth took it as Bob thinking that his heart was going to give out at any moment. He felt tired and sickly. All the partying, acting like he was still in his twenties. Not following doctor’s orders. Not eating right. Not sleeping. It was adding up.

  “At my funeral, I want you to throw a big party. And just tell them all, you know, not to be sad for me. Just be happy, because that’s the way they would have been with me. Tell them to go on with life and be happy. Have a party.”

  About ten minutes into the conversation, Bob’s cell phone rang.

  “Yeah . . . hello?”

  Elizabeth could hear Bobbi’s muffled voice through the earpiece. “Can you come get me?”

  “Okay. I’ll be there.” Bob looked at Elizabeth. “Gotta go.”

  CHAPTER 22

  KRYSTAL BAILEY WAS GETTING worried about the situation she now found herself in, riding shotgun with two potential murderers, along with two family members, who seemed to be in this thing for the long haul. This was not how Krystal had envisioned the past few days going as she drove over to Audrey’s two days before to pick up her things and hopefully talk Audrey into a reunion. Here, as they came upon Tucson, in the early-morning hours of May 7, 2004, Krystal thought she needed to get away from the girls and get her bum back to Mineral Wells.

  “It was just getting crazy,” Krystal said later in court. “I didn’t want to be involved any longer.”

  She wanted out.

  Krystal Bailey might have been considered a bad girl, but she was not like the rest of them. Much like Bobbi, Krystal had never been “in trouble with the law,” or “convicted of a felony.” And up until this point, she hadn’t put much thought into the girls killing Bob. She didn’t believe them. But now, as the sun rose, scorching the cactuses and desert sand of Arizona, Krystal was more certain than ever that Jen and Bobbi together—or one of them alone—had committed murder. They were one thousand miles from home and not talking about turning around. If this was some sort of joke, Krystal reflected, they had taken it to extremes.

  Bobbi stopped at a rest stop so they could take a break and use the bathroom. It was time to regroup and reevaluate, to see what everyone wanted to do.

  As the others stretched and smoked, Krystal made a call home from a payphone.

  “Mom?”

  “Krystal! Where are you? What in the hell is going on?”

  “Calm down . . . Mom . . . just clam down.” Krystal’s mother was nervous. She had been talking to people in town.

  “Did you kill Bob?”

  “What? Are you kidding? . . . No, Mom. No, I didn’t.” A sound of relief echoed on the end of the line. Krystal’s mother took a deep breath. “Why? Why are you asking?” Krystal knew at that moment the girls weren’t kidding. Bob Dow was dead.

  Krystal’s mother explained that she had spoken to the MWPD. Detective Brian Boetz had asked where Krystal had run off to; he explained why they wanted to talk to her. Through that conversation, Krystal’s mother had put two and two together and thought maybe Krystal had been involved in some way because she was so close to Audrey and Jen.

  “Are you okay?” Krystal’s mother asked her daughter.

  “Mom, so the rumors are true?” Krystal wanted to know. “This really did happen?”

  “Yes . . . Bob Dow was murdered.”

  Krystal paused. She stared at the others, who were hanging around the truck. Krystal realized she was possibly traveling with a band of murderers. It became very real. She could be charged herself.

  “Where are you?”

  “Arizona.”

  “Stay right where you are and I’ll come and get you.”

  “Gotta go, Mom.” The others were ready to take off. “I’ll call you back.”

  CHAPTER 23

  WHILE BOBBI AND JEN stayed at Bobbi’s grandmother’s house during those days following Bobbi’s birthday bash, Bob called. He had gotten home and realized Bobbi had left the house. Maybe for good this time. He was upset. He wanted Bobbi to come back.

  “Let me come and pick you up,” Bob told Bobbi.

  “I don’t know,” Bobbi said. She felt conflicted. It was easy, Bobbi later explained to me, to give in to a guy who had essentially been her keeper for so many years. Bobbi wasn’t necessarily implying there was a Stockholm syndrome element to her relationship with Bob Dow. But then, looking at it from an objective point of view, here was a teenage girl, addicted to drugs, deeply involved in an abusive relationship with a much older man. Bobbi did not have the emotional faculties to address the clinical side of what was happening to (or around) her.

  Stockholm syndrome is when the victim of a kidnapping becomes oblivious to the crimes of her captor and ends up feeling sympathy toward him. She cannot escape. In some cases, he has threatened her with death if she tries. And yet, at the same time, the Stockholm syndrome victim has been taken in by her captor’s contrived acts of kindness and goodwill. It’s a psychological game of chess orchestrated by the captor; his victim is not allowed (and is certainly afraid) to move a pawn without his consent. This was not the type of relationship Bob had developed with Bobbi. However, if what Bobbi said is true, he had convinced her, through lies and manipulation, that she was dependent upon him. Bobbi explained that she never realized how “low” she’d “come” until much later, after being removed from the situation and looking at it soberly, from afar.

  “We [Bob and I] had sex with the same women,” Bobbi told me. “I never willingly had sex with Robert. He would get me so high that I’d fall asleep. Jennifer told me that he was having sex with me while I was passed out and lifeless. Whenever I tried to leave, he’d come and get me. Or look for me.”

  No one involved ever mentioned that there were any videotapes or photographs of Bob and Bobbi having sex.

  For Bobbi, going back to Bob always seemed like the right thing to do. She needed to work. She needed—was dependent upon—drugs. She was addicted to promiscuous sex with different partners.

  In a rather eye-opening 2012 article in Time magazine, “Understanding Psychopathic and Sadistic Minds,” reporter Maia Szalavitz hit on the psychological makeup of a teenager in Bobbi’s situation, writing: When young children, who are dependent on their caregivers, are abused, they have little choice but to love the
people who are hurting them. “If the caregiver is inflicting pain and you also love that person, a weird relationship can develop where pain becomes pleasurable,” said Jean Decety, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago.

  It’s the “pathways in the brain that are involved in pain processing and the pathways involved in pleasure,” Decety went on to note, that are linked. “They have to overlap to some extent. That’s why if in development something goes wrong and you mix the two, you [may] seek pleasure from pain.”

  Without Bobbi realizing it, Bobbi’s emotional state was in a holding pattern when she met Bob, which made her the perfect victim to the future madness she would endure under the direction and influence of this man. The setup started for Bobbi when “my mother abandoned me,” she said (her mother later agreeing with this statement during one of our interviews). “She left me with my grandma.” (Both Tamey Hurley and Dorothy Smith verified this.) “I bounced from house to house, family member to family member.” In hopping from one home to another, Bobbi explained, she’d end up spending a night or two with one particular family member. It was an older person in that household, Bobbi said, who would rape her. The sexual abuse began early. “He did it for so long—I thought it was okay. And being so little, I was caught in mixed emotions.” She didn’t know if it was right, wrong, or within the normal course of a day for a kid her age. “I didn’t speak of it.” And when Bobbi finally dredged up the courage to go to her mother (years after the abuse, which had started when Bobbi was nine), she claimed her mother “blamed me, saying it was me ‘making him want me.’ I didn’t understand. [My rapist] was seven years older [than me].” This went on, Bobbi said, until she met her child’s father. Through him, she met Bob Dow.

  Based on her upbringing, in addition to a drug/alcohol addiction Bobbi developed while with her son’s father, one could argue that when Bobbi left her fiancé and moved in with Bob, she was at the lowest point of her life, emotionally weaker than she had ever been. She didn’t know right from wrong, in the sense of what a codependent relationship could do to her evolving psyche, not to mention her spirit. Most of the males in her life had let Bobbi down and had abused her in some form or fashion, according to the way Bobbi remembered it. And here was Bob Dow, a much older and more well-groomed abuser, a man she trusted, taking her in, plying her with the essentials of food and shelter, and then providing all the drugs and alcohol she wanted to consume. Bob became a savior in Bobbi’s skewed way of looking at life.

  Bob Dow cried on the telephone that day, Bobbi told me, when he realized Bobbi had left the party house for good and didn’t want to return.

  “I’m so sorry,” Bob said. “Please, please forgive me. . . .”

  “I don’t know.” Bobbi was fed up with the life.

  “Please come back, Bobbi. Please.” Bob begged her to reconsider his apology, and he promised that he’d be nicer. “Please, Bobbi.”

  Bobbi Jo thought about it.

  “Okay, come and get us.”

  As things would soon turn out, going back over to Bob’s was a decision she made that would change the course of her life forever.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE GIRLS HEADED northwest from Tucson to Phoenix. That stop along the way, after a long night of driving, didn’t do much for what were now severe hunger issues. They needed something substantial. By now, they were just about out of money.

  “We went into Phoenix and got something to eat,” Krystal later explained. “We really didn’t have any money, so we were kind of bummed.”

  They hit the streets and begged in the city square.

  “Some people gave us money.”

  One guy running a food cart downtown saw the girls begging and called them over.

  “I’ve got a few extra burritos,” he said. He handed Bobbi four.

  “There were five of us,” Krystal said later. “So I didn’t eat.”

  Audrey worked the phones, hoping to see, as Jen later told it, “if anybody was onto us yet.” There was also the chance that Jerry Jones, with whom they had been in constant contact throughout the trip, could wire them money.

  They drove out of Phoenix and headed toward Buckeye, Arizona, about an hour’s drive directly west of the big city. The new plan was to continue west into California. As they looked for a place to stop along the way, Bobbi realized how hot it was getting. The temperature was a scorching 98 degrees Fahrenheit by noon, with dips only down into the high 80s, spikes as high as 100 degrees. Coupled with hunger, Bobbi was tired of listening to Kathy and Audrey, she later said, both of whom now blamed her for everything.

  “I do know that when I went back to my grandmother’s house,” Bobbi told me, “after the murder and after picking [them] up, I was trying to take up for Jennifer. I felt obligated [to take the blame for the murder] because I felt it was all my fault. Her mom and sister were telling me it was all my fault and I’d love being in prison because I was gay.”

  Bobbi claimed she was confused and “only trying to be loyal to Jennifer.” In Audrey and Kathy’s view, Bobbi was a great scapegoat. And because of that, Audrey and Kathy tried to convince Bobbi to take the rap and admit to killing Bob so Jen could get out of it.

  “Kathy kept saying, ‘You’re gay. You’ll love prison,’” Bobbi told me.

  Outside Phoenix, Bobbi spied a new housing development and stopped for a break. It was midafternoon and hotter than a cowboy’s armpit. The dry air and the heat and the malnourishment were getting to everyone. They needed to collect their senses, maybe find a spot to cool off, and come up with a good plan.

  “Call Jerry,” someone suggested to Audrey.

  It wasn’t that easy. They needed to find a Western Union first, or someplace where Jerry could wire the money. Plus, Krystal wanted to return home.

  There was a water pond in the development. It didn’t appear, at first glance, that anyone was around.

  “Let’s go for a swim,” someone yelled, pointing to the water.

  Bobbi pulled over by the water and parked. They were “right by the freeway,” Audrey recalled. “It was a pond with a little waterfall.”

  Some of the girls stripped down to their skivvies, while Audrey and Kathy changed into bathing suits, which they’d taken on the trip. They hopped into the water, splashing and frolicking, like little children on a summer afternoon playing in a sprinkler.

  “It was hot, so we were just cooling off,” Audrey explained to me with a laugh.

  After a romp in the pond, the girls headed back out on the open road and wound up in Chandler, Arizona—in the opposite direction they had wanted to drive. They had gotten lost and headed the wrong way for miles on the interstate. “We had been driving around in circles,” Jen said in court. They were still outside Phoenix and had not made any progress. In fact, as Bobbi figured out where they were, she saw a sign, which put them south of Mesa, now southeast of Phoenix.

  “We went the opposite way,” Bobbi said.

  “I want to go back to Texas,” Krystal said.

  “I don’t want you here with us, anyway,” Audrey told her. (“She was wanting to get back with me, and I didn’t want nothing to do with her . . . ,” Audrey explained. “I didn’t want her with us. Krystal and me, we was broken up.”)

  Audrey told Bobbi.

  Maybe now was as good a time as ever, Bobbi thought.

  Bobbi found a convenience store in Chandler and pulled in.

  Krystal and the others got out.

  “They went into the store,” Audrey said, “and stole some stuff.”

  On a pay phone, Krystal dialed her mother.

  “It’s me, Ma.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I don’t really know,” Krystal said, looking around. Then she asked someone. “Chandler, Arizona,” she said.

  “Sit tight. I’ll be out there to get you.”

  Krystal gave her mother the name of the convenience store. They exchanged a few more words and hung up.

  “So [I g
rabbed] my basket of clothes, my bag of hygiene stuff, got out, and we parted ways,” Krystal later said.

  Bobbi and the others didn’t care one way or the other whether Krystal stayed. If Krystal wanted to go, she should get out and head home. The entire trip for Audrey and Kathy never had that “we’re running from the cops” feel to it, they later explained. It was more of a road trip. The talk now was that perhaps Jen and Bobbi had done the world a favor by ridding it of a man who used and abused women. Perhaps it would all go away. Maybe they’d explain how Bob was coming on to Jen and that it had gotten to be too much for her and so she shot him.

  He needed killin’.

  It’s important to point out here that throughout this trip, there had been no mention of Bobbi being the aggressor and having anything to do with asking Jen to kill Bob Dow. If you read through the transcripts and interviews and all of the documentation surrounding this part of the case, you get a feeling that Audrey and Kathy and Bobbi were trying to come up with a way to protect Jen. It appeared that they traveled with the idea that at some point they would be back in Mineral Wells and they had better have a story ready to make sure Jen did not go down for committing this crime.

  Meanwhile, Bobbi and Jen got to talking while Kathy and Audrey were inside the store. Jen was paranoid the cops were going to be waiting around every corner, weapons drawn. She was shocked they had gotten this far already.

  “We get us a hotel room. Maybe Jerry wires us some money for it,” Bobbi suggested, per Jen’s claim.

  “Yeah, sounds good.”

  Jen later admitted she felt “people were out to get us.” She meant her sister and mother. She wanted to be alone with Bobbi. It was kind of like that fantasy of Bonnie and Clyde that Jen had talked about: Here it was, her chance to live it out.

  “What do you think of Ma and Audrey?” Bobbi asked.

  Jen took a pull from a cigarette she’d fired up. “Maybe they’re trying to turn us in?”

  After saying their good-byes to Krystal, Bobbi found her way back onto the freeway, heading in the direction they wanted to go from Phoenix earlier. In the back of her mind, Bobbi was worried about Bob Dow’s truck. She knew it had trouble running in hot weather. The engine had a tendency to overheat. They’d been good about stopping and replenishing the water in the radiator so far and hadn’t run into much trouble. But as they drove toward Buckeye on the 10, the truck made a funny noise. It started bucking, too, like they were running out of fuel.