“I lied to the cops,” Bobbi told me time and again. “I did. I lied. I thought I was going along with Jennifer so we could both get out of it all.”
In her response to a second letter I sent (after not hearing from her after an extended period of time), Jen finally spoke. She came across extremely bitter, apprehensive, and even unsure of what she was writing. In an odd choice of words, she said she was “unhappy to inform” me of her “lack of interest” in talking about her life, “then or now.” Continuing, she explained how “sure” she was that I would have “plenty of false facts to complete” my project, once I started talking to other people. Of course, she mocked, I would get the “ever-needy” Bobbi Jo’s “side of things,” along with Jen’s “infamous sister, Audrey,” and her mother, who would surely “help paint a picture” of Jen.
Besides a few more pokes at Audrey, and some sarcasm tossed in for good measure, Jen ended the pithy letter by asking me not to write back.
And so I never did.
CHAPTER 44
ON THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 2004, Bobbi and Jen were indicted by a Palo Pinto County, Texas, grand jury for the murder of Bob Dow and arraigned on first-degree murder charges by Judge Bobby Hart. Both bonds had been set at $700,000. This was surely not a joke anymore as the girls stood and listened to the court speak of how they could each receive terms of five to ninety-nine years, or even life, if found guilty. Jen looked quite grown-up by now: that light-skinned glow of a young teenager (although she was only nineteen, same as Bobbi) was long gone and replaced by a convict look, which Jen had entirely embraced. The change was complete. Jen had set a path for herself to turn out like her mother and here she was, filling those shoes perfectly. What’s more, there had been about thirty days when Jen had actually seen her life—and that “path” she believed she had taken long ago—come full circle when she found herself serving time in the same jail as her mother.
“We laughed, cried, hugged, told stories, forgave each other, and just bonded,” Kathy Jones later told me of that time in prison she spent with her daughter.
Bonded?
It had taken this sort of forced sobriety for both to realize there was some love within an unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship they had come to grasp throughout their lives.
District Attorney Tim Ford had to recuse himself from the case because he was kin to Jerry Jones. Both girls were appointed attorneys—Kenneth Tarlton for Jen, Bob Watson for Bobbi.
No trial date had been set during the short hearing.
CHAPTER 45
BOBBI WAS FEELING THE full weight of prison life while waiting for her case to churn through the American justice system. Via a phone call back home, Bobbi was given some grave news.
“A man just wanted to see what it was like to kill somebody,” Tamey Hurley later explained, “and [my son] was there at the wrong time.”
Someone had shot and killed Bobbi’s twenty-four-year-old stepbrother. He had been shot multiple times in the chest.
“So Bobbi was put in jail, and several months later, her brother was shot and killed,” Tamey added. “It was horrible. Absolutely horrible.”
Bobbi was devastated. Her life—a life that didn’t seem to be able to fall any deeper into the abyss—was continuing to crash and burn on the way down. Light and hope were gone. Bobbi was not adjusting to prison life.
CHAPTER 46
OVER THE COURSE OF the next year, the girls were held at Palo Pinto County Jail, although separated in different sections of the prison, not allowed to see each other. But according to Jen, this did not stop them from communicating.
During the day they yelled through the bars . . . , Katy Vine wrote in her Texas Monthly article, and were able to hold conversations.
At night, when the lights dimmed, the mice came out and inmates read, watched television and played with themselves. Bobbi and Jen—if we are to believe what Jen later told a magazine—were also able to communicate through the air ducts in the jail. And, as Jen told it, what an interesting series of conversations they had! It became a time when their relationship and loyalty to each other was put to the test, Jen explained.
Jen would remind Bobbi that Bob was scum and had it coming, and he was “going to get busted,” anyway. So they were going to get out of jail soon enough and people would “thank” them for ridding the earth of such a pathetic piece of garbage.
Bobbi would respond, Jen said, by saying she believed that, too. They’d always end their conversations with an “I love you,” Jen told Texas Monthly.
“That never happened,” Bobbi told me. “Never. Just more lies told by Jennifer after the fact. She was making things up as she went along.”
CHAPTER 47
MIKE BURNS GREW up in Mineral Wells. Before becoming a prosecutor in 2001, Burns spent the bulk of his time in law enforcement in Corpus Christi, working as a police officer and special investigator, climbing the professional ladder all the way up to captain, and even the chief of police, in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. It was then, in the early 1980s, when Burns decided law school was his future. It was 1994 when Mike Burns passed the bar and became a licensed attorney in the state of Texas. His first gig was as a defense attorney. By 2001, after moving back to Mineral Wells, when a vacancy in the local district attorney’s office opened, the governor appointed Burns to the job.
Burns had gotten the call about the murder of Bob Dow about a week after the girls were brought in from Blythe.
“Look, I’m going to have recuse myself from this thing,” the county prosecutor Tim Ford said. “Would you be willing to take it on as a special prosecutor, Mike?”
“Sure,” Burns responded.
For Burns, when he looked at this case, the one word that came to mind was “bizarre.” After reviewing the police reports, interviews, and other documents, Burns came to this determination: “The more that I looked at it, I couldn’t believe that this sort of thing was going on in Mineral Wells for some length of time, under the radar of most people (especially law enforcement).”
What the prosecutor meant by that was the amateur pornography filmmaking sessions and drug binges taking place at Bob Dow’s party house.
When Burns looked at the relationship between Bob Dow and the girls, in addition to how Bobbi had paraded women and young girls in and out of the house for Bob, all of the drugs they had consumed, and the fact that nobody knew a darn thing about it, he could only shake his head in disgust and disbelief. It was incredibly appalling to Burns. He was sickened by it all, he told me.
“We tried to track down every girl in those photos,” Burns said, “and weren’t lucky enough to find them all. Some of them certainly appeared to be underage.”
Still, Burns had a murder victim to represent in court, regardless what he felt about the crimes the victim might have committed. And when he looked at the case, the most powerful, critical evidence Burns felt he had to run with became the girls’ turning on each other.
“Of course, you have evidence of them fleeing, taking the truck, pawning the dead guy’s property”—actually, it was Kathy Jones who pawned the items, not Jen or Bobbi—“the statements of Audrey, Kathy . . . and it all fell into place as far as the timeline as to what happened. Once Bobbi Jo and Jennifer gave it up, it all matched the forensic evidence. But each of the girls was the most damning evidence against the other.”
When Burns put it that way, the case sounded like an episode of CSI: Cut, paste, print! Juries, jaded by all the true crime on television today, certainly liked to see a well-rounded forensic case presented by the prosecution. Juries wanted flair and flash. They wanted to witness a slam-the-book-on-the-table piece of science that brought it all home. Prosecutor Burns seemed to have just that.
The fact that Burns didn’t have a sympathetic victim, however, somewhat nagged at the special prosecutor as he prepared his case.
“You see, down here in Texas, there’s the unspoken [law of] ‘He needed killin’,’” Burns commented. “Even though that’s n
ot a legal defense, it comes up from time to time in murder cases—especially when your victim is perceived as somebody viewed as not all that likeable. So, sure, I worried about that. He was not—and I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead—but he was not a candidate for Citizen of the Year.”
To say the least.
The fact remained, and Burns knew it, if law enforcement had caught up to Bob and figured out what was going on inside that house before he was murdered, he might have wound up in jail doing time on several serious, felonious charges. And yet—most will agree—no matter what someone does, nothing excuses another person from taking the law into his or her own hands and murdering him.
CHAPTER 48
ON APRIL 19, 2005, a few weeks shy of the year anniversary of Bob Dow’s murder, Special Prosecutor Mike Burns addressed the jury deciding the ultimate punishment Jen would receive for her role in Bob Dow’s homicide. Lo and behold, Jen had cut a deal. The guilt or innocence portion of Jen’s case would never take place. Jen had admitted (pled) to her crimes. It appeared that since Jen was arrested, she had ditched Bobbi and found a new love behind bars: Jesus Christ.
“I got baptized on September 17, [2004], and . . . it’s just so much easier to live with God and just to know that the burden is lifted and that I’m forgiven for what I’ve done, even though it’s not right that I took someone’s life with my own hands,” Jen told the court. “And God gives me—lets me know that His love is good enough. I don’t have to seek someone else’s.”
Jen walked into a Joyce Meyer/Beth Moore prison ministry program one Tuesday night, and as it happened, a light shone on her. She was immediately saved.
New relationship with the Lord aside, it was time for Jen to face jurors deciding how long she’d have to pay for her crimes. Lest everyone forget: Jen had admitted to murdering a man. In Texas, and a handful of other states, a jury decides a defendant’s sentence; but there must be a hearing under the “punishment phase” term first, in which a defendant is allowed to essentially plead her case for leniency. What’s important to note here in this situation is, because Jen pled to murder, the hearing was her chance to shirk the blame, essentially, and place it on the shoulders of someone else, thus arguing for a lighter sentence. The opportunity presented itself for Jen to do that because she (and Bobbi) had lied several times to police. There was no one narrative set in stone. Jen could effectively invent another version (which would be the third at this point) of what had happened.
One of Jen’s biggest obstacles in doing that, however, was that she had changed her story so many times. By now, it was hard to keep track of how many lies she had told. And then the question had to become: If she had lied so often and easily to law enforcement, why believe her story now? Jen wasn’t challenging guilt, after all. As Burns put it, her argument was for the “appropriate punishment.” The responsibility on Burns was to help the jury decide what that fitting penalty should be. Did Jen deserve a second chance at some point in her life? Because she was admitting guilt and was supposedly willing now to “tell the truth,” did this teenager deserve a break?
Mike Burns explained to the jury: “On May 4, 2004 . . . the evidence is going to show that . . . Jennifer, Bobbi Jo, and Bob went over to the Ridgmar Mall . . . ,” and this was when the entire plot to murder Bob was initiated, in Burns’s opinion. Call it fate or something less pious, but when Bobbi and Jen were caught stealing, the stars aligned for that final straw to be drawn in Bob’s life.
Burns said Bob made a pass at Jen inside the truck, she got pissed, told Bobbi, and they hatched a murder plot. Burns summed it up that succinctly. Most interesting, Burns placed the first official words of a murder plan in Jen’s mouth, stating to jurors: “On the way back to Bob’s house, Jennifer tells Bobbi Jo, ‘I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him.’ And as they drive a little bit farther, she tells her, ‘No, I’m not going to kill him.’ Nonetheless, they arrive at Bob’s house and Bob is now home. So they walk in and Bobbi Jo starts talking to Bob. . . . And while Bobbi Jo is talking to him . . . Jennifer goes in the bedroom. . . .”
Burns said Jen checked the gun inside the bedroom, to make sure it was loaded, while Bobbi spoke to Bob (keeping him busy) in the living room. He told jurors Jen hid the weapon. Then, certain she had a loaded gun ready and waiting, Jen demanded that she and Bob sleep together for repayment of the bail money, quoting Jen as saying, “No, no, come on, [Bob], we need to have sex.”
Then the oral sex.
Then the “I want to get on top” scenario.
And then, Burns quipped, “She straddles over the top of Bob and they begin having sex. . . . And after he does that (puts the laundry bag over his face), Jennifer pulls the pistol out and she shoots him twice through the laundry bag.... [She] gets off him and stands to the edge of the bed and Bob is still moving. So she stands at the edge . . . and she shoots him three more times.”
Mike Burns told jurors Jen acted alone in killing Bob Dow.
“Bobbi Jo runs in,” Burns continued, “and says, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God, what have you done?’”
This was where Burns placed Bobbi as, he said, she whipped into action, directing Jen, telling her what to do next, so they could get out of there quickly.
Then Burns explained how they drove to Spanish Trace and the first words out of Jen’s mouth were “I killed Bob.”
Burns said Jen immediately took the rap for the murder while at Spanish Trace, before Bobbi finally piped in and told Kathy and the others, “No, I killed Bob.”
The scene, as Burns described it here, came across panicked, lots of “statements going back and forth.”
Nowhere in Burns’s comments to the jury did he implicate Bobbi in the murder of Bob Dow in any form or fashion. His entire argument centered on Jennifer, one would guess, so she was certain to be given the harshest sentence the jury could administer.
The condensed case Mike Burns presented over the next day bolstered his opening argument that Jen was a cold-blooded murderer, acting alone, killing a man after his repeated requests and even attempts to have sex with her failed. And that one final demand for sex as payment pushed Jen into taking a gun and killing him.
If one listened closely, and put Burns’s argument into the context of Jen’s promiscuous life of growing up addicted to sex, it would certainly bolster an opinion that Jen had snapped. Bob had pushed the wrong button one too many times; Jen responded by allowing all of that repressed anger—a volcanic rage, which she had harbored and built up over the years—to explode in one violent, fatal moment.
Closing out his case, Burns stated the obvious: “Murder is the most heinous crime on the books. It holds one of the highest penalties. And this is a case that is of the utmost seriousness because of the nature in which it was committed and because of the future dangerousness of this defendant.”
When speaking of Jen’s “future,” an argument could be made for less time in prison. Prison might harden this girl. If anything was clear by this point in Jen’s penalty phase, it was that she was probably more of a danger to herself than to anyone else.
Concerned about covering all bases, Burns then keyed in on a defense tactic he believed Jen’s attorney would soon implement: the strategy of blaming the victim.
“I suspect when counsel for the defense gets up, you’re going to hear a litany of crimes, bad acts, and otherwise about the deceased. Do not chase that rabbit trail, because the victim in this case is not Jennifer Lynn Jones. The victim in this case, no matter what you think of him, is Robert Clair Dow Jr.”
Burns encouraged the jury to think about a few things while Jen’s attorney inevitably attacked Bob’s character and likely bantered that Jen “should be spared for ridding our community of this bad man. . . . How can you save the living by defiling the deceased? It don’t work that way.”
Then, concluding, Burns said, “I’ll talk to you in a few minutes about what we think is an appropriate punishment. . . .”
CHAPTER 49
FIF
TY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Kenneth Tarlton lived up to the reputation Mike Burns had set up for him. After approaching the jury and arguing on Jen’s behalf, quite emphatically, Tarlton stated that the issue at hand was not whether Jen deserved punishment, but what the appropriate punishment should be considering her “involvement” in Bob’s murder.
Burns leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and placed his pen down on a yellow legal pad in front of him. This was going to be worth his undivided attention.
“You can only consider facts and circumstances as evidence,” Tarlton said smartly. It was an important declaration. Jurors literally held Jen’s freedom in their hands, Tarlton knew. They could give her a minimum—a slap—of five years’ probation, or a maximum of—overly aggressive, perhaps— ninety-nine years to life. Burns knew shooting for something in the middle was probably reality, but Tarlton could go for the moon and stars if he chose to.
Tarlton respectfully went about detailing what evidence law enforcement witnesses had found inside Bob’s house when they first arrived. He bypassed—conveniently, of course—the reason why they were there to begin with: Bob Dow’s murdered corpse. He described how the responding officer found Bob’s mother’s room in “disarray” and “dirty,” adding how the woman had “been there a long time,” lying in her own filth. Then he talked about how Detective Brian Boetz “reacted” understandably shocked by what he uncovered inside Dow’s computer.
“Robert Clair Dow Jr. was providing alcohol, pills, and drugs to young, underage girls in exchange for sex,” Tarlton said.
Bad Girls Page 26
