Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  All [my current boyfriend] wants is to [screw], she noted a few days before her sixteenth birthday. Then, as an afterthought, or as a solution to that dilemma, she wrote: I want to get high tomorrow. . . .

  Hard as it might have been, Jen tried going days without having sex, but she always gave in to temptation. In many cases, she didn’t even know the boy’s surname, and she didn’t care if one of her friends was dating the same boy. To Jen, the need to stuff those painful feelings of being inadequate, unloved, and not good enough by using drugs and sex as a numbing agent was greater than the need to do the right thing. She became hyper-sexualized, a clear symptom of bipolar disorder.

  “[Someone in Jen’s family] prostituted her to men for drugs when she was thirteen,” one law enforcement official told me.

  If true, this became a good explanation as to why promiscuous sex was not only a weapon and bartering chip to get what Jennifer Jones wanted, but a way for her to forget about and deal with the stressors of life. It was an emotional release. Without Jennifer even realizing it, the sex became a “getting even” with the abuser type of situation. Moreover, as most studies bear out, poor and low self-esteem and promiscuity go hand in hand. Researchers routinely find one associated with the other.

  Sexual abuse leaves many scars, creating feelings of guilt, anger, and fear that haunt survivors throughout their lives, writes Dennis Thompson Jr. in Everyday Health, a quote that could be attributed to Jen or Bobbi, really. Adults who have undergone sexual abuse as children commonly experience depression and insomnia. High levels of anxiety in these adults can result in self-destructive behaviors, such as alcoholism or drug abuse, anxiety attacks, and situation-specific anxiety disorders.

  Furthermore, Thompson went on to note, [that] damage extends to the sexual abuse survivor’s sense of their own sexuality.

  All true in Jen’s case.

  Bobbi’s too, perhaps.

  Jen never talked about it in her journal, but her behavior lent itself to the idea that sex was something she did for a payment: whether it was love, affection, drugs, alcohol, or to make (or keep) a boy happy.

  In one journal entry, Jen mentioned how she had “a guy stay” at the house for a week and her dad didn’t “really care that much.” That little bit of an extended leash gave Jen the notion that she could get away with more; and if she got caught, there was rarely going to be a penalty.

  As she grew older, crime became a part of Jen’s life. Sex was not filling the void any longer. She stole a truck and got caught, but she ended up with only a slap on the wrist (two weeks in the county jail). She and a friend stole another vehicle sometime later.

  The journal stopped becoming Jen’s outlet to vent as her life became more criminal and difficult to manage. It was then that a simple piece of paper and pen turned into a way for Jen to list her accomplishments, along with some new goals.

  “Messed around with” so-and-so was a popular entry, beside the date of the encounter. Jen became increasingly disenfranchised with her surroundings and lifestyle. Nothing and no one could make her feel complete. She was in desperate need of counseling and probably some medication to relax the anxiety she didn’t even know she had.

  About a year before she met Bobbi, on January 5, 2003, Jen wrote about coming home from a visit with her mother: She should get out soon!

  Then she wrote about a boy she was seeing and how she felt the relationship would soon end. The boy didn’t trust her, she believed, adding, I wouldn’t trust me either. She had ruined another relationship that showed a wee bit of promise—all because of her cheating ways and insecurities. She felt “disappointed” and like a “failure.” I am such a bad person, she wrote.

  This was the beginning of the self-hatred Jen had felt most of her teen life manifesting into something much bigger, something much unhealthier than sleeping around and doing drugs. There were longer spans of time now between journal entries. Months would go by without her penning a word.

  On June 11, 2003, Jen was feeling especially uncertain about life. Kathy had been paroled and was leaving for Wichita Falls. (She had met a guy, a preacher.) The family had gotten together and Jen was shocked, it seemed, that she “got along with everyone.” But for some reason, she had wanted to leave the party the minute she arrived. Being around the entire family was, apparently, too much.

  That entry was the last until March 24, 2004, when she turned to her journal to express how bad she had “[screwed] up again.” And she realized this latest stumble was part of a succession that revolved around her drug use. Life was spinning in circles: going one way, one moment, another the next. She saw it and felt it, but she did nothing to stop it or tell someone.

  Not once in some fifty pages of journal entries (which I reviewed) did Jen ever talk about an attraction to females. It was always boys. And just a week after that final March 24 entry, in which she referred to Bobbi as a “dyke” [sic], Jen never penned another entry—and then, well, she met Bobbi and, in her mind, had found that true love she had been searching for all along.

  CHAPTER 38

  IN BOBBI’S FIRST VERSION to the police of what happened, she claimed to be at her grandmother’s house in Graford with Jennifer on May 5, 2004. She asked if she could use her grandma’s truck to go over to Bob’s. Bobbi said she needed to pick up her belongings.

  “You better hurry, because that’s the only vehicle I have,” Bobbi’s grandmother supposedly said.

  Bobbi and Jen left.

  When they got there, Bob was moping around. They talked for a while. Bobbi never said what they talked about, exactly, because she couldn’t recall. At some point, though, Bobbi noticed a neighbor had blocked her grandmother’s truck in Bob’s driveway.

  “Let me use your truck to go get some cigarettes,” Bobbi requested of Bob.

  He threw her the keys.

  (“I went to the E-Z Mart by the Chicken Express,” Bobbi told police, “and bought some cigarettes and Jennifer a drink. I drove back to Bob’s house.”)

  Upon returning, Bobbi said she noticed that her grandmother’s truck was not blocked in any longer, so she parked Bob’s truck and moved her grandmother’s vehicle out of the way so nobody else could block it. All she wanted to do at this point was get her stuff and leave.

  Walking into the house, she heard “loud music coming from the bedroom,” Bobbi claimed. She looked around, but she didn’t see Jen anywhere. As she was doing this, Bobbi said, she “heard Jennifer screaming.” It was not a pleasant noise, as if Jen was enjoying what was being done to her.

  This alarmed Bobbi, she first told police. She believed Jen needed help.

  (“So I ran into the bedroom . . . and I saw Bob on top of Jennifer. Bob was naked and Jennifer was only wearing a tank top. I ran over to Bob [and] hit him across the back of the head with my fist.”)

  Bob didn’t take kindly to that and struck Bobbi, knocking her to the ground.

  Bobbi was now furious. She grabbed the first thing she saw—a bag of clothes on the floor—and, stuffing a knee into Bob’s chest to hold him down, hit him repeatedly with the laundry bag. As she was doing this, “I heard a gun go off. I backed up and saw Jennifer standing over Bob with a gun,” she told police.

  Jen had shot Bob once, paused, and then unloaded the remaining rounds of the weapon into him.

  Bobbi told a similar story to Jen’s, and it’s clear that they had conspired to tell this tale to cover for one another.

  “That [story] me and Bobbi Jo made up on our way to California,” Jen later told police about how this first version of what happened became a pact between them.

  The agreement was that since Bob had been attacking Jen and “raping her,” they believed the murder would be considered an act of self-defense.

  So what did happen that day, according to Bobbi Jo? How did Bob Dow end up dead? Bobbi had told her story to police and then admitted lying about it. She’d never told it again after that admission.

  I gave her the opportunity to tell it here fo
r the first time.

  It was close to one in the afternoon on May 5, 2004, when Bob called Bobbi at her grandmother’s house, she explained.

  “He was crying, with his mind games he always played on me,” Bobbi said.

  “Bob, are you okay?” Bobbi said she asked her substitute father over the phone.

  “Yes . . . [but] I want to apologize to you.”

  Bobbi listened. At one point, Bob said, “I want you to come over so we can sort it all out.”

  “Okay, Bob.” Bobbi thought about being at the party house earlier that day when Bob wasn’t home. She had looked for her wallet, but she couldn’t find it. “Have you seen my wallet?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, I left it in Weatherford. But chill . . . I made a few stops and I have some powder and vodka—we can go get [the wallet] tomorrow. Just get to me now.”

  “I need to wait until my granny gets back.”

  They hung up.

  Bobbi had her son that day. She was holding him, “kissing his head while he was asleep in my arms,” she remembered.

  A half hour went by.

  Jen looked out and saw that Bobbi’s grandparents had returned. “They’re here, Bobbi Jo,” Jen said.

  “Great.”

  Whether it was the right thing to do or not, Bobbi wanted to get over to Bob’s fast. She was feeling the tug of the drugs and booze, gnawing at her, telling her to go out and get her funk on. It had become a daily routine: She would wake up, find out if Bob needed any work done, and then figure out how to get high.

  “Gram, if I fill your truck up [with gas], can I use it to run to Mineral Wells?”

  Dorothy Smith, however begrudgingly, said yes.

  Bobbi kissed her son. Said her good-byes. Then she and Jen took off.

  Whenever Bobbi drove, she liked to blast music. As they headed toward Mineral Wells from Graford on the 337, it wasn’t that Bobbi didn’t want to talk to Jen, “I just didn’t want to talk to anyone. My son was on my mind and I was trying to figure out why I was fixin’ to go over [to Bob’s], knowing I’d end up high and gone from my son. . . .”

  It was the juggling act all addicts face: Today is the last day. Tomorrow I’ll stop.

  Bobbi’s life had become a pattern she could not deny. She was an addict living in the bubble of her full-blown disease. Bob Dow knew what type of candy to wave in front of Bobbi’s face when he wanted her company, or when she got mad at him and left the house. Bobbi would hang out at Bob’s and end up either smoking heroin, smoking meth, taking pills, snorting coke, or drinking herself into an oblivion of not knowing what the hell was going on around her. She could not stop herself from doing this. There was not one source I spoke to who could deny this statement. Two things, when I spoke to people about Bobbi Jo, became implicit in the conversations: Bobbi had the heart of an angel, but she loved nothing more than consuming all the dope and booze she could find on any given day.

  How bad had it gotten?

  “I know that Bobbi Jo had even tried shooting tequila and vodka” into her veins “at one time. I saw it!” said one woman who frequented Bob’s party house.

  Bob’s house was Bobbi’s escape from the reality of everyday life and the pain of her past and present. She understood that walking through Bob’s door meant she’d soon become numb to the emotional mayhem of her life. In doing this, she’d be away from her son “for weeks at a time,” Bobbi recalled, and it bothered her immensely. However, the pull of the drugs and booze was stronger than that maternal instinct.

  “I was lost and desperately trying to get away from everything that was around [me]. I was on a one-way street to hell—and my addictions were killing me slowly.”

  A devout Christian, having grown up in the church, Bobbi said she couldn’t understand “why God never answered my prayers.” She was “very depressed after having” her son, “and his father and I split on very bad terms.”

  Talk of being involved in the Wiccan culture and black magic, which Jen later recalled while speaking to Texas Monthly and then under oath in court, was a baffling concept to Bobbi. When Jen claimed she and Bobbi were reading minds and found a notebook inside Bobbi’s grandmother’s house written by their other friend, Bobbi could not recall any of it. One particular day at Bobbi’s grandmother’s house, Jen and Bobbi had a friend over. They thought the friend had cast a spell on them, Jen told reporter Katy Vine. So they burned anything she had touched, including all of the pieces of that notebook they found ripped up and inside drawers. Bobbi did not recall it ever happening.

  “I don’t know anything about a notebook and I never brought anyone but Jennifer to my granny’s house. I know better. There was never anyone with us but my son, or my baby brother . . . so I don’t know anything about any notebook story.”

  The Wiccan connection was something Bobbi had no recollection of whatsoever.

  “I’ve never been involved with any kind of Wiccan. I’ve been a Christian. My grandmother raised me with ‘religion.’”

  Moreover, Bobbi maintained, “I don’t know anything about voodoo.” She was confused and asked me, “Jennifer told you this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I believe it’s more of [Jen’s] fictitious lies. She don’t even know how many stories she’s told.”

  Jen’s aunt Melanie Brownrigg seemed to confirm what Bobbi was saying, telling me, “She lied all the time. Jennifer was a really good liar. . . .”

  Driving and listening to music, puffing on a cigarette, with thoughts running through her head about missing her son and all that dope and booze she was about to devour, Bobbi almost drove off the road at one point, she said. “Tears filled my eyes.” What got Bobbi was thinking about what she was doing to her son by darting off to Bob’s to get drunk and high—again. Bobbi was disappointed in herself. She had let her son down by leaving him.

  Jen was staring at Bobbi, wondering what was going on. Why are you crying? But Jen didn’t say anything, Bobbi remembered. “Jennifer never spoke.... [She] just grabbed and held my hand.”

  This relationship with Jen, as Bobbi remembered it, was one more in a long line of women Bobbi was seeing at the time. According to Bobbi, Jen was not her girl. Jen was there, in front of Bobbi at the time. Jen might have been head over heels for Bobbi, but all Bobbi wanted was the sex and a partying partner. Furthermore, with all the dope and booze she was consuming daily, Bobbi was in no position to love anyone.

  Bob Dow—at least the way Bobbi Jo later explained it to me—was waiting at the door for them when they arrived. As they approached, Bobbi noticed Bob had been crying. When Bobbi walked past him, into the house, Bob reached out and grabbed her in a loving way. He pulled Bobbi in close and kissed her on the forehead, as if she had been a long-lost daughter, now returning.

  “I love you,” Bob said. “I don’t mean to act the way I do.”

  “It’s okay, Bob.”

  They stood in the living room for a few minutes. Bobbi could tell Bob had been partying; he was loopy and seemed out of it (something his autopsy report confirmed). He had called, she now figured, because he was lonely and wanted someone to hang out with.

  “Are we going to work in the morning?” Bobbi asked.

  “Yeah,” Bob said. He pulled out $100. “Hey, go down and get me three cigars and a pack of menthol smokes—get whatever you want, too.”

  The cigars, Bobbi understood, were for the drugs. “We’d cut them open,” Bobbi recalled, “and pull all the tobacco out and filled it with weed—sometimes coke and heroin.”

  Blunts.

  And this is where the story of what happened to Bob Dow becomes a bit more complicated. Bobbi went to the corner store without Jen, she told me, which was something Bobbi did all the time.

  When she returned and got out of the truck to go back inside the house, Bobbi said, she “heard one gunshot go off.”

  Bobbi didn’t think too much of this sound at first. After all, they were in Texas. There was a “young couple,” Bobbi explained, “living nearby.”
They liked to party a lot and do crazy things. Not to mention that some people in Texas feel it is their right to fire a weapon off in the private confines of their own property, whether allowed by the law or not.

  While Bobbi walked toward the front door as she heard that gunshot, she looked up and saw Jen running out of the house.

  Jen appeared alarmed, scared, in shock. Totally out of it. All she had on, Bobbi told me, was “a spaghetti-string shirt and no panties. . . .”

  When Bobbi took one look at her, confusion set in. Bobbi knew something terrible had occurred. Not only was it written all over Jen’s face, but that blood on Jen’s body, which Bobbi soon noticed, meant that some kind of violent incident had occurred inside the house.

  CHAPTER 39

  BOBBI WAS “puzzled” when she saw Jen outside in front of Bob’s party house on that afternoon, moments after hearing “one gunshot” from somewhere near the house.

  “Take me to my mom’s apartment,” Bobbi said Jen demanded after she walked out of the party house and approached her. She must have meant Jerry’s Spanish Trace apartment, Bobbi knew, because Kathy Jones did not have a home in town.

  “What’s wrong?” Bobbi asked.

  Jen “never spoke,” Bobbi later told me.

  As Bobbi got closer, she saw “blood all over the side of [Jen’s] face and her hand.”

  “I shot Bob,” Jen finally said.

  “You what?” Bobbi asked. (“I was in shock,” Bobbi told me. “And I didn’t know what to do or think.”)

  Bobbi’s version then skips over the next few moments and picks up at “these trashy apartments,” after Bobbi and Jen pulled up to Spanish Trace.

  No sooner did they walk into the apartment than Audrey and Kathy took Jennifer “in the back room and left me standing there,” Bobbi explained. “They already had two little bags full of clothes packed.”