Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  “Shit,” Bobbi said.

  “What is it?” Kathy asked.

  “The truck . . .”

  Bobbi pulled over and popped the hood. The radiator was making a hot, hissing noise. Steam rose from the top and sides.

  The rest of them got out. Bobbi had the hood up, with her head buried in the engine.

  “We need some water. We’ll have to let it cool down,” Bobbi explained. They were close to Buckeye. There was a hotel nearby.

  Just then, one of the girls spied a truck with red and blue lights coming down the road. It looked to be a sheriff or a cop. He was heading straight for them.

  CHAPTER 25

  ON MAY 7, 2004, DETECTIVE BRIAN Boetz got a tip. Boetz felt patience was going to solve this case more than an aggressive, predatory trek out into the wilds of Texas, on a manhunt (although, one could argue with this sexist term, considering that all of these suspects were women), searching for a band of inexperienced, mainly drug-fueled females. In short, the detective knew that in time they would give themselves away. Still, one had to ask: Would an innocent bystander get hurt in the process? Of course, that was the last thing Boetz and the MWPD wanted to see happen.

  Earlier, Boetz had gotten hold of Krystal Bailey’s grandmother and heard that Krystal had called and said she wanted to come home. Krystal didn’t want any part in what was going on.

  “They dropped her off somewhere out there,” Krystal’s grandmother explained to Boetz.

  “You don’t know where?”

  “No, but her mother is on her way to go get her.”

  Boetz was interested in chatting with Krystal. For all he knew, she could have taken part in the murder, too. There had to be the question of whether Bobbi had acted alone, or if all of the women had participated.

  “Can I get a phone number for your daughter?”

  The grandmother gave it to the detective.

  Boetz called Krystal’s mother, who explained that she and Krystal were on the road, heading back to Texas. Krystal said she would call Boetz as soon as she returned; Krystal added that she was prepared to do whatever she could to help.

  Boetz asked if she had heard anyone talking about what had happened to Bob.

  “Yes,” she said. Then Krystal told the detective how Jen and Bobbi were taking credit for the murder, but she was confused as to who actually committed the crime.

  After talking with Krystal, Boetz went back to his office and typed up a second probable cause affidavit, now requesting a warrant for Jennifer Jones’s arrest on murder charges (based on that one conversation with Krystal). What Boetz really needed to do, however, was speak with Krystal in person before he could go back and rattle the cage of the judge to sign off on the warrant.

  So, once again, Detective Boetz could do nothing more than wait.

  CHAPTER 26

  BOBBI, AUDREY, JEN, AND KATHY looked on as what appeared to be a cop rolled up on them. They stood on the side of the road just outside Buckeye, Arizona, waiting for Bob Dow’s crappy truck to cool off enough so they could get back on the road.

  Later reports claimed this was a police officer. But according to Audrey’s recollection, it was one of those road patrol vehicles out and about, stopping off to see if the girls needed a hand. Bobbi didn’t believe it was a cop, either. (I could never locate a report that the MWPD or the prosecutor in this case tracked down to see what this so-called officer had to say.)

  “Do y’all need any help here?” the patrol officer reportedly asked, pulling up, leaning over the seat, speaking through a rolled-down passenger-side window. “Is everything okay?”

  “Our truck overheated,” Bobbi said as the others looked on. “We could use some water.”

  “All right.”

  The officer took off. Then, a few minutes later, he returned with several gallons of water, saying, “Y’all gotta be careful. Look out.” He got out of his vehicle and unloosened the radiator cap. According to Audrey, hot water from inside the radiator, from under all of that pressure, shot straight up into the air like Old Faithful.

  “Wow!” Bobbi yelled.

  The patrol officer helped them get the truck running again. “You should be fine now.”

  Then he took off.

  They headed toward a nearby hotel that Bobbi had spotted along the way. It was time to call Jerry and have him wire some money so they could hole up for the night.

  “We weren’t really worried about the cops catching us,” Audrey remembered. Even that close call didn’t faze Kathy or Audrey. “We just weren’t thinking straight.”

  Audrey made a call to a friend in Mineral Wells. The guy had helped Audrey out from time to time. She had spoken to him several times during the trip and he said he would send some money as soon as he could.

  “He was a preacher, but I guess . . . well, he wasn’t really a good one,” Audrey explained to me. “Me and him used to date. We used to smoke weed together and talk. In fact, he was the guy who confirmed for me that it (the murder) really happened.”

  How?

  Audrey had asked the preacher to take a drive by Bob’s the day after the murder when they first took off. He called Audrey back and told her there were cops all over the place; there was yellow crime-scene tape cordoning the house.

  “I guess he’s really dead,” the preacher had told Audrey.

  The day before the truck broke down, the preacher had promised to wire some money. They found a Western Union along the road and he made good on the promise. But they were out of funds once again. They had stopped at a truck stop, and for $6, they had taken showers. But now they were hungry, tired, and just about out of fuel.

  As they pulled into the Days Inn, which Bobbi had spotted, Audrey noticed a truck stop up the road. They couldn’t get a room without funds. So Audrey said, “I’ll call the preacher and Jerry and see if we can’t get us some money.” The truck stop had a Western Union. “I’ll be back.”

  Some time passed. Bobbi wandered into the pool area of the hotel, waiting. There was a shady-looking dude sitting poolside, sipping beers. The guy was grimy and unkempt.

  The others looked on and watched as Bobbi spoke to him.

  When she returned to the truck, Audrey was back.

  “It’s going to take a while,” Audrey explained, “but Jerry’s sending us some money for a room.”

  “Good,” Bobbi said. “That guy over there said we could hang with him in his room until we get our own.”

  When they got settled inside the guy’s room, Bobbi took a moment and called her mother. Kathy and Audrey were outside with the guy. Bobbi didn’t know where Jen was, but she assumed she was with Kathy and Audrey.

  Bobbi was confused. She didn’t know what to do. She was concerned about Kathy and Jen.

  “Mamma?”

  “Yeah, baby, what is it?” (Tamey recalled Bobbi sounding “very scared . . . whispering into the phone.”)

  “Mamma, they won’t let me talk to you,” Bobbi explained, meaning Kathy in particular. “I’ll call you back.”

  Tamey felt Kathy was leading the group and Bobbi was terrified of crossing her. Bobbi was going along with some of what Kathy had suggested, just to keep peace. She didn’t want to upset Kathy in any way.

  Bobbi called back later that night. She was whispering again. She sounded even more frightened than she had previously. She said Jen had woken her up out of a deep sleep and said that something was going to happen to her. “I think my mother and sister want to kill you, Bobbi,” Jen told Bobbi that night. “So you can take the blame for the whole thing.”

  Tamey told Bobbi to get rid of them as soon as she could and call her when she was alone with Jen.

  “The way I took it,” Tamey said later, “was that they was all gonna kill Bobbi Jo and put the blame on her for everything so they could get out of it.”

  Back in Mineral Wells, near midnight, Krystal Bailey arrived at the MWPD. Brian Boetz was waiting.

  “Sit down, get yourself comfortable,” the detective said.
Krystal looked beat from her time on the road. The miles had not been good to her.

  Krystal explained how she had waited five hours for her mother to arrive; she had to sit on top of a garbage can at a truck stop. She had no money, but it had been worth it. It felt good to be home.

  Boetz’s first major witness started with a detailed description of the night of Bobbi’s birthday celebration, April 28, at the party house.

  “I’ve been to parties over there before.”

  “What goes on at these parties, Krystal?” Boetz asked.

  “Usually, we smoke marijuana, take some pills—these Xanax bars—and drink beer.”

  “That all?”

  “Bob was usually the one that supplied all the drugs for us.”

  “What’d y’all do at Bobbi Jo’s birthday party?”

  “Same,” Krystal said, explaining how they had smoked weed and drank. “Took the Xanax pills and had some beer.” Then, contradicting what Kathy would later say, “Bob also took photos of everyone. We posed for Bob. I think Jennifer and Audrey pulled up their shirts and showed their tits. Jennifer and Bobbi Jo were making out. . . .”

  “How long did the party last?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Krystal gave Boetz a narrative of what she had heard had happened to Bob Dow. Although complete hearsay, it was the MWPD’s first glance into what might have occurred at the party house on the night Bob was murdered. It wasn’t a long, detailed statement, but Krystal was able to pull together the first account of the murder from what was a third-party perspective.

  “Jennifer [told] Kathy that she shot Bob.” Krystal said she had heard the conversation several times while on the road. “I don’t remember who asked why, but someone asked them (Bobbi and Jen) why Bob was shot.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Jennifer told us that Bob was forcing himself on her. Jennifer said she had tried getting him off of her and then she grabbed a gun and started pulling the trigger—that she ‘just kept pulling the trigger.’”

  According to Krystal’s recollection of what was said about the actual murder, Bobbi didn’t have anything to do with either murdering Bob or convincing Jen that Bob needed killing. From what she had heard, Krystal was certain Jen murdered Bob Dow on her own. That name kept coming up in her conversation with Boetz: Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer. Krystal never mentioned that Bobbi had asked Jen to kill Bob, or that Bobbi provided the weapon.

  It was all Jen.

  “She turned on me,” Bobbi explained to me when I asked about the plan she and Jen had designed. “That hurt. I never killed anyone—nor had anything to do with it. I was lost within drugs and guns and sex with all types of women, but I’m not a murderer. I do not hate Jennifer. Deep down, she knows she lied on me. . . .”

  What Krystal had reported was enough, Boetz figured, to fill in the blanks of his probable cause affidavit and rustle up the judge to sign it.

  It was well after midnight when Boetz finished with Krystal and knocked on the judge’s door.

  After getting the warrant signed, Boetz called Jerry Jones to see if he had made contact with the girls again.

  “I have heard from them,” Jerry said.

  “Where are they?”

  “Buckeye, Arizona. They’re at a motel room and want me to come and pick them up and bring them back.” Jerry was referring to Audrey and Kathy, although he didn’t say it.

  Boetz got off the phone, called the Buckeye Police Department, and explained the situation. He said he’d fax them the warrant.

  “Well go check it out,” the Buckeye cop told him. “Let you know what we find.”

  What Boetz didn’t know, however, was that there was trouble brewing among the four women. There was the chance that the Buckeye PD officers were going to drive out to the Days Inn and find that the seam holding the women together had torn apart.

  CHAPTER 27

  JERRY JONES WIRED the girls some cash on the evening of May 7, 2004, but it took some time to go through. Bobbi had met a man at the pool who had invited them to stay in his room as long as they needed. As it turned out, the guy, Mike Depardi (pseudonym), was cooking meth inside his room.

  Thus, it was time to, once again, par-tay!

  “When we stopped in Buckeye at the motel,” Bobbi Jo told me, “a Mexican man came up to me. He thought I was a dude. He was with his woman. He said nothing about dope. He offered me a beer. Kathy . . . was hounding him about dope. . . .”

  The dude was creepy; he was like a character straight out of a Quentin Tarantino film. It all seemed surreal to Bobbi. Audrey later said she wanted no part in partying with this guy and didn’t. She admitted drinking and smoking some weed, but meth? Especially being cooked inside a hotel room by some guy nobody knew?

  No way. (Incidentally, Bobbi Jo later vehemently disagreed with Audrey on her recollection.)

  Before they hooked up with Mike, Bobbi and Jen were cooking up something of their own: an idea. As they stood outside in the parking lot of the hotel, waiting on Jerry’s money to come through, “They was talking,” Audrey said, “about getting married.”

  (There is much dispute regarding who came up with this idea. Audrey first told me it was Jen and Bobbi. Then she changed and said it was Jen and Kathy. Bobbi didn’t even recall most of it, better yet dreaming up the idea with Jen. So once again, the truth of how this scene transpired—or if it even happened the way Jen later remembered—remains a mystery.)

  The conversation (mostly coming out of Kathy Jones’s mouth) was centered on the premise that if Bobbi and Jen got married, they wouldn’t be forced to testify against each other. A wife cannot testify against her husband, or vice versa. It worked the same, the girls thought, if a wife testified against her wife.

  This was certainly true in the case of Arizona law and a marriage between a man and a woman, Title 13 Criminal Code, section 13-4062, the “anti-marital fact privilege.” As the statute reads, however: A husband [cannot testify] for or against his wife without her consent, nor a wife for or against her husband without his consent, as to events occurring during the marriage, nor can either, during the marriage or afterwards, without consent of the other, be examined as to any communication made by one to the other during the marriage....

  The key phrase is “during the marriage.” What happened before and after was fair game. On top of that, you could bet the girls had not Googled the law and were totally oblivious as to what it actually stated. Not to mention that Arizona’s Constitution “explicitly” denied the “recognition of same-sex marriage.”

  Audrey, at first, thought the girls were kidding.

  “I’ll grab a Bible from one of the rooms,” Kathy suggested. “I can be the preacher.”

  First, the girls “got really, really high” with Mike, Audrey claimed, and then smoked some of the weed they had left over.

  “It was my mom’s idea,” Audrey said, changing her mind. “Bobbi and Jen were talking about getting married and not having to testify against each other, and my mom decided she could marry them right then and there.”

  “Look,” Bobbi said, barely recalling what amounted to a mock wedding, “I was traumatized and coming off (down from) a high I’d been on for almost two and half weeks. I do not recall any of this.”

  So, according to Kathy and Audrey, they had a wedding ceremony in back of the hotel, in a field, as cars and trucks whizzed by on the nearby freeway. One report claimed Kathy read I Corinthians, 13:4–8:

  4. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

  5. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

  6. Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

  7. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

  8. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge,
it shall vanish away.

  Whatever the case, the girls gathered some wildflowers from the field and, with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, Bobbi and Jen were “married” by stand-in preacher Kathy Jones. As Audrey recalled the scene, Jen wore a swimsuit and tank top. She was barefoot. Bobbi donned a black hoodie sweatshirt pullover, with the sleeves cut off, and white sweatpants, with black stripes on the sides. Before the ceremony, Audrey recalled, Jen and Bobbi ran over to the truck stop and bought a few penny-candy, gumball-machine rings.

  “It was kind of, you know, stupid,” Audrey said, thinking back to the moment. “But it was entertaining and they thought it was real.”

  (Audrey told me she had photos of all this—but she could never produce them.)

  The reception was held inside Mike’s room: more dope smoking and beer guzzling. After getting a good buzz on, Audrey, Jen, and Bobbi went out and sat by the pool. Kathy stayed in the room with Mike and his girl.

  At some point, Bobbi fell down on the ground and had a seizure on the pool deck, twitching and shaking and flopping around.

  “Shit, help me here, Audrey,” Jen said, jumping up, running over to Bobbi.

  Audrey didn’t believe Bobbi was for real. She’d had several “seizures” since they had known each other, Audrey recalled, believing the seizures were a way for Bobbi to draw attention to herself.

  But Jen obviously thought different.

  Jen knelt down next to Bobbi. She stuck her finger in Bobbi’s mouth, afraid Bobbi would swallow her tongue and choke to death.

  “She’s faking that shit,” Audrey said, walking over, staring down at the two of them. “She ain’t havin’ no seizure.”