Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  Most important to Brian Boetz was the crime scene photographs compared to Bob Dow’s room. Jen and Bobbi had each spoke in their first statements of a fight going on with Bob inside that room and Jen’s inability to protect herself—hence the need for the weapon and killing Bob.

  However, when Boetz placed the crime scene into that context the girls had described, the problem Boetz had was how Bob had been found.

  “Because of the way he’s lying there, and the way the bag is covering his head and the blanket is covering . . . part of his body,” Boetz later said.

  All of this seemed inconsistent with a struggle: Bob was lying on his back. The laundry bag was over his head.

  “Right,” Boetz added. “He’s lying on his back—to me, as if he was just lying there, not struggling or fighting with anyone.”

  Boetz then read through the statements the MWPD had taken up to that point from Bobbi, Jen, Audrey, Kathy, Krystal, Dorothy Smith, and the Cruzes. And that was when something became clear: “I decided that they weren’t being truthful.”

  Boetz went to see the girls. He didn’t reveal his hand; instead, he asked, “Would you mind taking a polygraph?”

  Both girls said they didn’t have an issue with taking a lie detector test.

  Still, neither asked for an attorney.

  CHAPTER 42

  BOBBI AND JEN WERE able to stay in touch while held inside the jail at the Palo Pinto County Sheriff’s Office (PPCSO). Jen later said in court that this was when she and Bobbi “[came] up with a different story.” Why they decided to change the story again, Jen never mentioned. Perhaps it was because the MWPD had ratcheted up pressure by asking them to take a polygraph.

  At first, when asked why she decided to come forward and give a second statement (which was ultimately the second time she lied about what happened), Jen responded, “I thought if I told a lie, then I wouldn’t be convicted of a crime.... That if I lied, and I made it look like I was the person that was—that was getting in trouble—I was, you know, I was the person that did it and everything, then I wouldn’t be in that much trouble.” Jen stopped and collected her thoughts. Then she added: “If I was the person that . . . he attacked . . . and everything, then I wouldn’t get that much time.”

  She was also trying to protect Bobbi. In coming up with this second story, Jen explained, she was hoping to spring Bobbi from jail. She said Bobbi wouldn’t leave her alone while they were locked up in Palo Pinto—that Bobbi kept complaining about not being present for her family.

  “I need to get out of here,” Bobbi allegedly told Jen one night. “My whole family is falling apart. . . .”

  On May 14, 2004, first thing in the morning, the girls were driven from the Palo Pinto County Jail in Palo Pinto, Texas, to the Behavioral Measures & Forensic Services, in Dallas. Detectives Brian Boetz and Penny Judd were convinced the problems within the stories they’d heard from both girls had been the result of lies. They wanted the truth.

  “We had held them overnight in Mineral Wells at our holding facility,” Boetz later recalled, “and there was one reason why we did that. Based on the stories that they gave us in California and the evidence . . . we thought they weren’t telling us the complete truth.”

  Boetz and Judd asked the girls to wait inside a conference room while they met with the polygraphist in the hallway. After looking over the case report Boetz handed him, the polygraphist clarified how the test would work. “One girl at a time,” he explained. “There’s a television monitor in that room over there, where you can watch and listen.”

  Bobbi went into a room with the polygraphist, while Jen was escorted into a separate room to wait. (There was some confusion later about this simple fact, and that the girls might have been polygraphed at the same time, but it’s clear that each was polygraphed separately.) Bobbi had rested since being back in town. She looked somewhat adjusted but also scared, nervous, and in great need of what her body craved most: drugs and alcohol. Not the ideal conditions with which to walk into a polygraph, but the examiner had seen worse.

  As he explained to Bobbi how the test worked, giving her a chance to review all of the questions he was going to ask beforehand, Bobbi “broke down and started crying,” Brian Boetz, watching from a video monitor, later said.

  “You all right, ma’am?” the polygraphist asked.

  Bobbi Jo continued to cry.

  From the other room, Boetz looked on. He’d seen this before. Suspects are brought to a breaking point and they crack. Boetz felt Bobbi was ready.

  “Miss Smith?”

  “I lied to the cops,” Bobbi told the polygraphist. “I lied. But I want to tell the truth now.”

  The test was over before it started.

  I asked Bobbi Jo about the polygraph and this second story, which she and Jen supposedly invented. Why would she break down like that during the polygraph?

  I don’t have anything to say about it, she wrote back. I mean, they wanted me. And I was no fool to that test. It was all set up to try and break Jennifer and I.

  Bobbi was right about that. Boetz told me he didn’t believe them, so he set the polygraph up to see what would happen, to see how they’d react.

  As for the second statement Bobbi was about to give the MWPD, she said, “I tried to stick to the story Jennifer and I had talked about [in the jail].”

  The problem was that when a person told the truth, she didn’t have to remember details. The facts came easy. When a person lied, she got caught up in her own stories and began to backpedal. And with a young girl who’d never been arrested, going up against an experienced cop holding her freedom in his hands, the cop would win every time. Bobbi also believed then that she and Jen were a team; they had designed a new strategy and were going to stick to it

  Detective Brian Boetz escorted Bobbi into a room in the same building where the polygraph had been held. He asked her to sit down.

  “You want to give us another statement?” Boetz asked.

  “Yes,” Bobbi answered, following along with the plan she and Jen had discussed.

  Boetz had Bobbi wait for him. He needed to call the MWPD and have someone fax a blank statement and new Miranda warning document for her signature.

  Meanwhile, Penny Judd walked Jen into the examination and sat her down.

  “I’ll be in the next room,” Judd told Jen.

  Jen nodded, indicating she understood.

  Judd watched on the monitor.

  The polygraphist explained how the test was going to work, where the connectors would be placed on her body, and how the questioning would progress. Yet, just as the test was about to start, Jen turned on the tears.

  Right on cue.

  “You all right, Miss Jones?”

  “I’m sorry . . . I want to tell the truth now.”

  The polygraphist unhooked Jen from the wiring and walked her out of the room. Penny Judd was waiting in the hallway by the door.

  “Talk in there,” the polygraphist said, pointing to an open room.

  “Come on. . . .”

  After sitting down, Judd asked Jen what was going on.

  “Penny, I’m sorry for lying to you. Don’t be mad at me.”

  “Mad? No, Jennifer. I’m not mad. What’s going on?”

  “I want to tell you the truth.”

  Penny Judd felt Jen was referring to that first statement she had given back in California.

  “I want to give you another statement,” Jen said.

  Bobbi and Jen sat separately with Boetz and Judd and talked through what became their second statements regarding what had happened.

  Why?

  Because the MWPD did not believe the first statements. It was as if those two statements the girls gave back in Blythe, California, were tossed aside in lieu of what was now, the girls were saying, the real truth.

  The road trip and the lead up to the murder came out about the same this second time around. In that regard, not much had changed from the first time they told it. What was different
here became the murder itself and how it occurred. According to Jen now, she and Bobbi walked into the house together. Bob apologized for the comments about wanting sex in trade for the bail money he had apparently put up. After Bob’s apology, the following action transpired. Jen explained the events to Penny Judd in her statement:

  I walked in the bedroom, Bob’s room, got the gun out of the green lockbox [the chest] that was under the bed in the bedroom. I checked to see if the gun was loaded and it was. I placed it between the nightstand and Bob’s bed between a stack of clothes and a striped pillow. I walked into the living room, Bobbi Jo had just received $20 from Bob and they were still arguing about her paycheck. She then borrowed the keys to Bob’s truck to go to the store and buy me and [her] something to drink. Bobbi Jo left and Bob kept telling me he was sorry. I kept telling him that it was okay and I insisted that I repay him. Bob kept on saying no, and I kept on saying, “It’s okay, I don’t mind.”

  Bob and I walked into the bedroom where I took off my clothes and laid down on the bed. Bob did the same thing. Bob took the lotion off the nightstand and used it to try to make his penis hard. Bob then went down on me. While Bob was doing that, I took the gun that was between the pillow and placed it beside my hip. I told Bob I wanted to be on top....

  Then I pulled the gun out from underneath the covers, then I shot Bob twice. Then I got off him and I saw that he was still alive, [and] then I shot him three more times. Bobbi Jo walked in screaming, “Oh, my God . . . I cannot believe you actually did it.”

  Two important factors emerged from this second statement. One, that Jen took full responsibility for the murder. Two, “The reason Bobbi Jo said that”—the “I cannot believe you actually did it” statement—“is because when we were between Graford and Bob’s house,” Jen said, “I had told Bobbi Jo that I was going to kill Bob. Then I said, no, I wasn’t.”

  From there, Jen’s second statement was fairly consistent with her first. It was clear Jen was taking the onus off Bobbi and putting it on herself. Bobbi, in turn, later claimed she never once asked Jen to take the blame for her, simply because she didn’t need her to. Jen had committed the murder and Bobbi had had nothing to do with planning or executing it. All she had done was lie about what actually happened with the hope of protecting Jen.

  Bobbi sat with Boetz and gave her second statement. She acknowledged that a good portion of her first statement would be consistent with what she now wanted to say. So, as strange as this sounds, they actually skipped over some details and got right to what Boetz wanted to discuss.

  This second narrative of the crime, which Bobbi told, began with Bobbi’s mother being with her and Jen during those days before Bob was murdered. Bobbi explained how Tamey drove her and Jen over to Bob’s, and Jen broke the back window and they all went in. Bobbi mentioned how she wanted to take a .22 long-range revolver out of Bob’s green chest so she could pawn it because he owed her money.

  “After work [the day before the murder], Bob Dow asked me if he could have sex with my girlfriend, Jennifer Jones,” Bobbi told Boetz in her second statement. “We both said, ‘No.’”

  Bobbi then discussed that drive over to Bob’s on the day he was murdered, telling Boetz, “I gave Jennifer the gun. She placed it in the back of her pants and then covered it with her shirt. She told me to wait outside. I came back in one time and Bob Dow was in between her legs. . . .” Bobbi left the room. When she went back “three to five minutes later,” she noticed Bob “was shaking really bad.”

  “Is he dead?” Bobbi asked Jen, according to Bobbi’s recollection.

  “Yes.”

  “Make sure,” Bobbi told Jen.

  “I grabbed his hand,” Bobbi explained to Boetz. “I was so scared. So was Jennifer. She was also shaking. So I grabbed the gun and her clothes and told her to get out of the house. I grabbed Bob’s wallet and took one hundred and fifty dollars out of it. . . .”

  The remainder of the statement was nearly the same as Bobbi’s first.

  Clearly, as Boetz and Judd looked at these second statements, studying them, matching them up against the girls’ first statements, something did not coalesce.

  “In my mind, I was thinking that there was probably still some truth not there,” Boetz recalled. “But they were getting a little closer.”

  Regardless of what Bobbi had told them—much of which the MWPD still seemed to think was mostly untruthful, according to my interview with Brian Boetz—it was enough to charge Bobbi with first-degree murder. Apparently, five words within the statement Bobbi Jo had just given—“ I gave Jennifer the gun”—were enough to warrant her arrest on conspiring and convincing Jennifer Jones to murder Bob Dow.

  I asked the MWPD if they recorded either of the two statements on video or audio.

  “No, sir. We were not able to record them, sorry.”

  “Why?” I pressed.

  “When we talked to them in California,” Brian Boetz explained, “we were under the mercy of that department. We asked for a room that would record. We were told that they were all being used, so they put us in a room in intake, which had no recording. Their second statement was when we were in Dallas, Texas, for the polygraph. The girls broke during the preinterview with the polygraph operator. They placed us in a room with no recording, so the only option we had in both cases [was] to write or type out their statements. I hope that clears it up for you. Sorry.”

  CHAPTER 43

  IN LATE MAY, AS Jen wandered around the jail one afternoon looking for someone to talk to, she sat down with a gal named Betty Gardner (pseudonym), an older convict doing a short bid on a drug possession felony. Gardner was slated to be released in a matter of weeks.

  What struck Betty was that as Jen explained why she was locked up, she “laughed” about Bob’s murder. It was as if the crime she had committed was funny. Listening, Betty felt Jen showed zero “remorse” for what had happened to Bob and was even “happy” about killing him.

  Some days later, Jen spoke to another inmate about Bob’s murder. Here she expressed a somewhat similar demeanor, the woman later said. “She just seemed indifferent, I guess. Just ‘nothing’ would be my best word for it.”

  No emotion—as if Jen did not care that she had taken a life.

  This side of Jennifer Jones falls more in line with the woman I contacted and spoke briefly to in early 2012. By the time I reached out to her, Jen had told five different versions of her story. She’d lied about details she didn’t need to. And when she sat down with reporter Katy Vine for the Texas Monthly article I’ve quoted throughout this book, she altered the story once again. It was as if Jennifer Jones had been describing someone else’s life, or telling a story, a tale. For Jen, she had told so many different versions of Bob Dow’s murder and the days leading up to it and after, she couldn’t keep track any longer. This was one of the reasons I wanted so badly to interview her.

  Bobbi wrote me an angry letter laced with raw emotion and an exhausted frustration at me repeatedly asking her tough questions that had to do with timelines, things people said, and those discrepancies in Jen’s different stories. I’d ask the same question different ways. There were times when Bobbi didn’t know what I was talking about. It was clear to me she had no idea where the information had come from.

  Look, all those [girls: Audrey, Kathy, Jennifer] you keep talking to used to come over and [give Bob oral sex]. There’s photos of it. I used to tape it! . . . Jennifer and Audrey and Kathy, and all those chicks, were sexing Bob 24/7 for a high, Bobbi wrote.

  The bottom line here was: Don’t trust anything they say. Half of what they do remember is probably clouded with an agenda to protect themselves.

  “No,” Detective Brian Boetz said after I asked him if he had ever seen any photographs of Jen either having intercourse with Bob or performing oral sex on him. “It was other girls who we could not identify.”

  Bobbi called Jen, Kathy, and Audrey “hos.” To that, Bobbi said there was one thing she was proud of from that
entire time they were all together that she could take to her grave: “I never sold my pussy.”

  Jen had always come across as an innocent, effeminate girly-girl, and it helped her cause later when she was busted. Bobbi was the polar opposite, if we’re judging books by their covers. Bobbi was rough around the edges, had tattoos, a butch-style haircut, carried a chain wallet, etc. It’s easy to point a finger at Bobbi and assume she was the mastermind behind this murder, pulling Jen’s strings, telling her what to do. Even Jen played off this dynamic with Katy Vine when she told an incredibly bizarre story about Blythe, California, “authorities” pulling her aside on the day she and Bobbi were arrested in California to tell her something: “We know you didn’t do it. That tattooed girl did it. Don’t you dare take the rap for her.”

  That is simply preposterous. Those cops had no idea who Jen was, and very little detail about the crime the girls were being suspected of. They showed up to arrest the girls and to hand them over to the MWPD.

  “I slept with other chicks I knew and met,” Bobbi admitted to me, speaking of those days when she hung out with Jen. “I knew Jennifer twenty-seven days! We were not even in a relationship. I don’t know. It was more like she knew I would be there for her. I had much love and care for Jennifer, but ‘in love’ is different. . . .”

  Within many of the photographs left behind by Bob Dow, this statement of Bobbi’s rings true. In several, which police found inside Bob’s computer, Bobbi appears frog-eyed and wasted, with droopy shoulders, a sad look on her face, as if her body is caving in on her. There’s almost an aura in some of the photos indicating that Bobbi is forcing herself to snuggle up to Jen. Jen is the aggressor, with her arm around Bobbi, sometimes kissing her. It’s a testament to Bobbi’s declaration that she was in it for the sex and a good time. The idea that Bobbi—after knowing Bob Dow since she was an adolescent, him being the (step)grandfather to her child, the master puppeteer of her life, arguably her surrogate father and provider of drugs and alcohol and employment—would decide to kill him with Jen—someone she had known for twenty-seven days at the time—does not fit. Moreover, it makes little sense in the scope of the lives the three of them led.