Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  “Help me out here,” Jen pled.

  Jen finally got Bobbi calmed down. Then she went inside the room to get Bobbi some water. Now Audrey and Bobbi were alone.

  “And she leaned over and she tried to kiss me, and shit,” Audrey claimed.

  (Bobbi said Audrey was a liar. Bobbi already had Audrey and had dumped her. She didn’t want her anymore. And why would she do this at this time? It didn’t fit.)

  When Jen came back, Audrey said something about Bobbi coming on to her.

  Jen snapped, “mouthing off,” Audrey remembered. “We got into it something good.”

  But Jen kept running away, playing ring-around-the-rosy, using the pool as a shield, not allowing Audrey to get to her.

  “What the hell you doin’ here, Jen?” Audrey yelled across the pool. “All this—it’s crazy.”

  “Shut up, bitch.”

  Audrey gave up.

  Kathy came out.

  “Let’s go to that truck stop over there, Ma,” Audrey said. “Leave these two here.”

  Bobbi’s seizures began in her early teens, she explained. It started after suffering a concussion. They are documented. Bobbi had no idea what a seizure actually was, when she first started having them. Today, however, Bobbi is forced to take seizure medication.

  “At first, I didn’t even know what was going on,” Bobbi explained. “I’d wake up unable to move—piss all over me.”

  As for that faked seizure by the pool, Bobbi said: “I never had a seizure during the entire time we were running.... And just a little insight? Every single one of them (Audrey, Kathy, and Jennifer) are dopeheads. . . . They lie.”

  The plan Audrey and Kathy had come up with after leaving the hotel was for Kathy to try and finagle money out of a truck driver, so they could get back home. Audrey didn’t want to continue onto the next stop. The road trip, apparently, was over.

  “Me and my mom planned to grab Jennifer when Jerry showed up and take her back home with us,” Audrey recalled. “We was gonna leave Bobbi there, but we didn’t want to tell Jennifer what we were doing. We wanted to take Jennifer back to find out what was going on. We knew Jerry was talking to the cops. It was sort of a plan to get Jennifer in to speak with the cops. We knew that the cops knew where we were. Jerry told us, ‘The cops said to come in and we can talk about it. If it was self-defense, fine . . . but with y’all running, they say it makes her look more guilty.’”

  So Kathy and Audrey headed over to the truck stop, and Bobbi and Jen went back to the hotel room.

  CHAPTER 28

  BOBBI WAS ANXIOUS. Stewing might be a better way to describe Bobbi’s demeanor at this time. She was scared. Bobbi believed Kathy and Audrey were going to pin the murder on her; they had some sort of plan to set her up to take the fall for Jen. After spending a few minutes inside the hotel room, Bobbi took Jen and went back to sit poolside. Jen tried to calm Bobbi down.

  Bobbi paced.

  Jen suggested they go for a swim and wait it out.

  “Where’d they go?” Bobbi asked. She was looking around the parking lot of the hotel, bugging out a little. Kathy and Audrey had been gone for a while. Bobbi was concerned.

  “They’ll be back,” Jen said. “Come in the water.”

  “They been gone a long time.”

  “It’s okay,” Jen tried explaining. She got out of the pool.

  Bobbi was concerned that Audrey and Kathy had run off to the cops to give her up. Thinking back, Bobbi wondered how her life had come to this—another mess she was trying to find her way out of. There was a time, not long ago, when Bobbi had wanted to die. She had separated from her son’s father and, she told me, “I became more strung out on drugs and went into a depression.” Not seeing her child, she felt her life had become nothing but a twisted clutter of addictions and letdowns, before she was even old enough to vote. “I could not care for my son. . . .” To Bobbi, neglecting her child was the final blow, the one that hurt the most. Not being able to be a mother, Bobbi “took over one hundred eighty Xanax and went to sleep.” She thought that would do it. Put a peaceful bow on it all. Wipe away the pain.

  But it didn’t.

  “I woke up in the hospital. I hated myself. I was just like my mother.” It was not long after, Bobbi said, when “Robert [Dow] offered me a job working with him.” What seemed like a lifeline, a rope tossed down into the well, became another obstacle to overcome. “Bob only pulled me farther down.”

  Still standing poolside, Bobbi said to Jen, “They’ve been gone over an hour.”

  “Let’s go look for them,” Jen suggested.

  Bobbi and Jen went back to the room and cleaned up. Then they hopped into Bob’s truck and drove to that nearby truck stop. As Bobbi slowly drove around the parking lot, both she and Jen looking in all directions, Bobbi saw Kathy talking to a man.

  There was a cop car parked in the lot, not too far away from where Kathy stood and leaned into the window of a truck. Audrey was close by, nervously smoking a cigarette.

  Bobbi and Jen drove back to the hotel. Bobbi got Kathy’s and Audrey’s stuff together, asked Jen to pack up their belongings, and then packed everything into the truck.

  “Over there,” Jen said.

  “What?”

  Jen motioned for Bobbi to put Kathy’s and Audrey’s possessions by a telephone pole, out in the open, so they’d see it.

  Bobbi and Jen then hopped on the highway, putting Buckeye, Arizona, along with Audrey and Kathy, in their rearview mirror.

  “We thought [Kathy] and Audrey were talking to the cops, so we dropped off their clothes . . . [and] we drove west,” Jen later said in court.

  CHAPTER 29

  DETECTIVE BRIAN BOETZ WOULDN’T allow Jerry Jones to drive to Arizona and pick up the girls.

  “I didn’t know what would happen if he went,” Boetz recalled. “So that’s why we called on the local authorities in Arizona.”

  Audrey and Kathy didn’t have any luck convincing a trucker to give them enough cash to get back home. Frustrated, they walked back to the hotel.

  As soon as they entered the room, however, they realized something was up.

  Kathy ran out into the parking lot to check on Bob’s truck.

  “Shit . . . they’re gone,” Kathy said after returning to the room.

  “What? The truck’s gone?”

  “Yup.”

  “All of our shit was in that truck.”

  They walked out of the room and soon found their belongings by that telephone pole, Audrey said. Then they went back to the hotel room and waited.

  “What now?” Audrey asked.

  Kathy suggested they hook up with Mike. When they got over to his room, Audrey admitted, “he was cooking some more meth, so we ended up smoking it with him.”

  After getting high, Audrey went out by the swimming pool and sat down. Before long, she went back to the hotel room. As they fired up the tinfoil for a second time, Audrey explained, heating up the meth to inhale the smoke, Mike’s hotel room phone rang.

  “Yeah?” Mike asked. He listened; then he put his hand over the receiver. “They’s asking if anyone in here is from Texas, and if so, they want y’all to step out of the room.”

  Kathy and Audrey looked at each other.

  Mike spoke again: “The cops are here.”

  After about five minutes, contemplating what they should do next, Mike walked out of the room with his hands up.

  Audrey and Kathy had no choice, really. What could they do? So Audrey walked out five minutes later and Kathy followed right after.

  “The place was swarmed with cops,” Audrey remembered. “There were guns pointed on us.”

  Buckeye PD officers grabbed Kathy and Audrey. “Get up against that wall there. . . .” They were held, according to Audrey, at gunpoint.

  Several officers went into the room, guns drawn, in search of Bobbi and Jen.

  “Where are they?” an officer asked the women. “Where are Bobbi Jo Smith and Jennifer Jones?”

 
; “We don’t know.... We don’t know. . . .”

  Mike had a warrant against him, so they busted him and took Audrey and Kathy down to the Buckeye PD.

  “They didn’t handcuff us or anything,” Audrey said. “But they sure wanted statements.”

  When Boetz finally got hold of the Buckeye PD, somewhere around one in the morning on May 8, checking to see how they had made out at the Days Inn, he got a surprise.

  “We have Kathy Jones and Audrey Sawyer. But the two other females, Jennifer and Bobbi, they ain’t here. They left the area before we got up there.”

  Kathy wore a dark-colored tank top, jeans, no shoes, just socks. At times, she sat with her legs crossed and her head down. She was placed inside a small Buckeye PD interrogation room. Kathy appeared nervous and fidgety; her legs were shaking, her arms waving in all directions. It was near 4:00 A.M. when they began. Kathy had been up all night, yet she seemed wide-awake.

  “You understand you’re not a suspect,” the detective explained. A second cop, a female, sat directly across from Kathy and stared at her the entire time, not saying a word, and barely moving. “I’m here interviewing you for the Texas police there—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Kathy interrupted.

  After she signed a waiver, which allowed Kathy the right to speak without an attorney, Kathy told her story of what had happened. It took Jen’s mother some time to find her bearings, and she really never did. As she spoke, Kathy Jones’s narrative was all over the place.

  When she got around to talking about Bob Dow, Kathy said, “He was whacked-out. He was always taking pictures and stuff.... He had a lot of guns. We was always taking pictures with the guns, you know, fooling around and stuff. But Bobbi Jo, she . . . she . . . she was like fascinated with the guns.”

  Kathy explained how the girls had barged into Jerry’s Spanish Trace apartment and said (together), “We killed Bob.” Then, as she talked through the story in more detail, Kathy explained that it was actually Jen who said, “‘Momma, I killed Bob.’ And I said to her, ‘What do you mean, you killed Bob?’ And she said, ‘I shot him.’”

  “Who said this?” the detective asked, stopping Kathy there.

  “My daughter Jennifer.”

  From there, Kathy then related what was to become a familiar tale—at least for the time being. “I asked her why she shot Bob and she told me, ‘He tried to rape me, Momma.’”

  Kathy had a rough go with times, dates, days, who was driving, who did what, when, and where. She recalled the major events with ease, but the smaller details troubled her. Kathy couldn’t remember, for example, which day the girls had come by Spanish Trace. It took her some time to try to pin the day down, and she never really could.

  When Kathy described the gun being tossed out the window, she said, “Jennifer reached back and grabbed a blanket and unfolded it and there was the gun.” Interestingly, she then added, without hesitation, as if certain: “It was a revolver, a twenty-two.” But then, rethinking that statement, she abruptly changed her mind. “It looked like, I mean. To me, it did . . . I don’t know that much about guns, you know.”

  “What color was it?”

  “It was black.”

  “It had a big, long barrel, or one of those short ones?” the detective asked, using his hands to establish the size, as if describing a fish he had caught.

  “It was long,” Kathy explained.

  “Really?”

  As they talked, Kathy bounced around. “I kept looking over at Jennifer and asking, ‘How does it feel?’ And she said, ‘What, Momma?’ And I said, ‘To kill someone?’ And, you know, she said, ‘It feels real good. . . .’” But then, after realizing what she had said, and that perhaps she was burying her daughter, Kathy tried to put the statement into context, adding, “I mean, I think she was showing off for Bobbi Jo. . . .”

  At one point, in a muddle of blurred speech, Kathy speedily told the detective, “Bob’s mother, she was . . . she was done dead three days in the house before Bob was killed.... He really didn’t care about her. I was over there and walking to the bathroom one day and . . . I . . . I knew I done smelled something.... It was coming from that room.... I could hear Bob go in the room and ask her if she wanted something to eat, ‘Are you okay?’ . . . but she never said anything. I mean, this is really weird. I mean . . .”

  “Wow,” the detective replied as Kathy continued. It was clear Kathy had no idea that Bob’s mother had been found alive.

  Kathy talked her way through, trying to recall where the gun was tossed. At one point, the second officer in the room asked, “Is that Mineral Wells you’re talking about?”

  “‘Miserable Wells,’” Kathy responded, wiping away tears, chuckling at her little joke. “That’s what we call it. ‘Miserable Wells, Texas.’”

  The lead detective asking the questions had to leave the room for a moment to take a phone call. With him gone, Kathy spoke to the female. Most of what she said was a jumble of words. It was clear Kathy was coming down from whatever bender she had been on.

  “These girls have got my head so messed up,” Kathy said. “I still can’t believe Jennifer shot”—but she stopped herself from finishing that part of her statement—“I think Bobbi Jo did almost talk her into it, like brainwashing her. . . .” Then it sounded as if Kathy said, “My ex-husband told me that the police in Mineral Wells told him they got proof that Bobbi Jo did it . . . that Bob was touching on Jennifer and she (Bobbi) went off. . . .”

  Kathy was cut loose after a few more inconsequential questions. Then they brought Audrey in.

  Audrey wore a lime green T-shirt, blue jeans, and flip-flops. Her hair was pulled back, tied in a bun. Oddly enough, she seemed in good spirits, actually laughing and joking around with the detective as they got settled.

  As the interview began, there was an obvious agenda on law enforcement’s part. The detective asked immediately, “One of the main questions I need to know is, how long have you known Bobbi Jo?”

  Barely audible, Audrey said, “A few months.”

  It became clear that Audrey and the detective had started the interview earlier; but for some reason they had stopped and were now continuing on videotape. After that initial question, Audrey described how the girls showed up at the apartment. Her take was that Jen and Bobbi, “crying,” rushed in saying, “We killed Bob.” Then, “When we got to Bobbi’s grandmother’s house, she (Bobbi) had told her (Bobbi’s grandma) that she had killed him, while they had been telling us that Jennifer had killed him.”

  Audrey spoke fast. She said Jen told her that after she and Bobbi were released from jail on a shoplifting charge, they went over to Bob’s house and “he wanted them out . . . but he needed to have something in return, so he wanted Jen [as payment]. Bobbi didn’t want her to, so they just got drunk and high, whatever, and Bob tried to rape Jennifer, pulling off her clothes and stuff . . . and Bobbi Jo came in and pushed Bob away. So Bob then told them to get all their stuff and leave. So they went to Graford. The next day, they come in . . . went in Bob’s house . . . and Bobbi Jo was telling Jennifer ‘put a pillow over the gun so nobody can hear it.’ ’Cause he was trying to rape her and they was trying to get back at him. And Bobbi Jo told Jennifer to go in there and try to seduce him, or whatever . . . so Jennifer went in there. Bob was naked. She was sitting on top of him. She told him, ‘Cover your face with a pillow so I can imagine that you’re Bobbi Jo.’ He grabbed a pillow, put it over his head. She grabbed the gun off the nightstand and shot him the first time underneath the pillow . . . and Bobbi Jo heard it—she was, like, waiting outside [the room]—and she walked in and then Jennifer just unloaded the gun. . . . And Bob was shaking, he was not dead . . . and so Jennifer started choking him. Then they stole his money and his weed . . . and they left, and that’s when they came to our house.”

  “What would provoke your sister to do something like this?” the detective wondered.

  “I don’t know.... I still can’t believe she done it. I can’t picture her doin
’ it. Even though I know that she done it. That’s why I was thinking at first that it was Bobbi Jo and Jennifer was trying to take it up for her—until Jennifer started talking today.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, the way that she ( Jennifer) was talkin’, I know she did it.”

  “I bet especially when she started talking about choking this guy (Bob Dow) to death—wow!”

  “Yeah, she choked me today when we got into a fight.”

  “Oh, you guys got into a fight?”

  “Yeah . . . ,” Audrey said, explaining how it started with Jen saying she believed Audrey and Kathy were going to turn them all in. “And I pushed her,” Audrey said after describing how she had taken all of her belongings out of the truck and was going leave the group. “And she pushed me right away. And then we started fighting. And then she grabbed me by the neck right here”—Audrey put her hand up to her neck to show how Jen had put her hand on her trachea and squeezed—“she said, ‘I killed somebody before. . . .’” Audrey had a hard time breathing, she explained, as though Jen knew exactly what she was doing.

  “Bobbi Jo and my mom had to break us up. . . . After she did that to me, I know, you know . . . she’s always had this in her. She was always so evil. I walked in the door one time and she had my sister Stephanie with a choke hold up against the wall—this was about three or four years ago.... And she’s always had anger built up inside of her and she has said she always wanted to do this (kill somebody).”

  Nowhere in that statement did Audrey mention anything about Bobbi having a seizure or Bobbi coming on to her. The way Audrey made it sound, Jen had had a death wish since a young age, a strong desire to take a life, and anybody who might get in the way of that was going to experience her wrath.

  The statements that Kathy and Audrey gave somewhat explained what went on during the road trip. Neither woman had offered the MWPD anything more than they already had—which, in the totality of the crime, was effectively nothing more than a number of statements that caused more confusion than anything else. These were contradictory statements, extremely inconsistent. Both Bobbi and Jen seemed to be taking the blame at various times.