Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  The indication was clear: Was there a more reviled human being on the planet than a man who did such a thing?

  Maybe a pedophile, sure. But guys like Bob Dow came in a close second.

  “He determined that there was voyeurism going on,” Tarlton said, describing one of the conclusions Boetz had drawn while studying the crime scene and searching the house. “That simply means you like to watch people doing things. Everybody was using drugs, alcohol, pills, marijuana.”

  Tarlton repeated one of the questions he had once posed to Detective Boetz: “‘Were you able to identify all the young girls in the photos and videotapes? ’” Then he answered his own question, saying, “‘Some, but not all of them.’” Out of more than six hundred photos, Detective Boetz agreed with the attorney that a “majority of them were very graphic-type photos . . . that they were underage girls in them and that it was obvious that the girls had been paid.”

  Burns called it right. Tarlton was doing his best to smear Bob’s character, which wasn’t so hard to do. Most jurors probably agreed the guy was a criminal and morally repugnant; he preyed on young girls, molested a few of them, and treated most women as sex slaves.

  But was that the matter at hand? Burns had made a point to say earlier.

  No. The issue was murder.

  Did that behavior, as vile as it was, give Jennifer Jones a license to kill?

  Tarlton was smart enough to know it didn’t matter. If a lawyer can get a jury to hate the victim for what he did to underage girls who hardly knew any better—one of them being the defendant—and they’d sleep better at night, knowing they’d taken it easy on his killer.

  Tarlton explained what a witness had testified to earlier that day, saying, “Think about what she said.... She did tell you that he didn’t care about his mother. He was neglecting her.... She saw a lot of drug use. She could identify painkillers, Xanax.” Tarlton allowed that comment to hang for a moment before delivering the punch line: “She even saw heroin being used. She said there were young girls being brought in for sexual purposes.” He repeated what the witness had said: “‘I seen it!’”

  He next focused on how Bobbi became Bob’s “chick magnet.” How Bob could “have any young girl he wanted, as long as he kept [Bobbi] happy.”

  He talked about how Kathy Jones told law enforcement and the court that she didn’t give her daughter “any guidance except with alcohol and drugs.”

  Reminding the jury of the brief testimony it heard was a good strategy. It could work. There was a fine line, though, that a defense attorney didn’t want to cross. An attorney never wanted to beat a subject down the throats of jurors; they’d come out of it feeling patronized, and probably would turn on the lawyer.

  Using one witness’s account, Tarlton then told a hideous, evil, criminal story about Bob. He talked about “the scariest” thing was how “[Bob] came up with this big, grand scheme to make some money, to scam his employer.” What was it? Tossing “his then-wife down the stairs so she would miscarry.” Then Bob could “sue somebody.” So his wife left him. “And how did he react to that? . . . He followed her around. Found her in . . . a woman’s shelter! Drove around, threatened her with a shotgun or a rifle, until she gave in and she had to go back with him.”

  Tarlton implied Bob was planning to make a snuff film with Jen, adding, “Then he . . . at various times, he had threatened violence toward the little girl.... Y’all are entitled to take these pictures back.... This is Bob Dow,” he stated loudly, making reference to the actual photos. “This is the Bob Dow we know right here. I didn’t make these pictures up. . . .”

  Spinning his case back to Jen, Tarlton said, “She didn’t dodge the question—she didn’t make up some grand scheme. She had told you what she had done here.” He mentioned Jen’s mother and how Jen was raised, concluding with a nurture argument, blabbering on about Jen never having a chance in life. “She was,” he said, “raised by wolves.” Then, some moments later, he said, “Her mother came back into her life in her mid-to-late teens and you heard her mother say that they started doing things in common. Drinking and doping, drinking and doping.” He talked about how just over one year ago was when Jennifer “finally met Bobbi Jo Smith. She loved her.”

  This got Tarlton going. Continuing what had turned into a rant, he blamed Bobbi for corrupting Jen with the help of Bob Dow, asking: “Anybody—anybody—lower than Bob Dow? Virtually no redeeming social qualities—and that’s not counting the way he treated his poor mother.”

  From Tarlton’s tone in the way he portrayed Bob, Jen had done the world a favor by killing him.

  “Nineteen-year-old girl steps up here in front of twelve strangers and half a courtroom full of people and admits that she committed a crime—admits that she committed a horrible crime! . . .”

  Always end with a rhetorical question seems to be the winning flavor among defense attorneys. Allow the jury members to take that question back and, internally, ask it to themselves. Make it a moral issue on the grounds of good versus evil; or, as Tarlton did elegantly, justice versus mercy: “You know, everybody is familiar with the statute of Lady Justice,” Tarlton concluded, walking slowly toward jurors, his head down, staring at the floor. He was lost in this moment. “She’s the lady standing there with the scales and with the blindfold on.” He looked up, scanning the faces of jurors. “We know that Lady Justice may be blind, but she’s not without mercy, not at all.” Then he posed this: “What would you do if you found out that a middle-aged man had given drugs and alcohol to your teenage daughter, filmed her having sex when she was under the influence, and then paid her money for sex?”

  He strategically paused and waited a few beats.

  “May peace be with you in your verdict. Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 50

  MIKE BURNS HAD somewhat of a cocky smirk on his face, not to mention a slight note of sarcasm in his voice, as he stepped up to deliver his final words. For Burns, he needed to bring the case back to, well, reality. It was fine to blame the victim. Hell, what other chance did Jen really have? But this case wasn’t about Jen’s poor upbringing, her mother’s drug use, the fact that Bob did some really horrible things to young girls.

  For Mike Burns, it was about one relatively simple fact: murder.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Burns said during his rebuttal, “I know, and certainly hope, that you’re a lot smarter than I am because, my goodness, I got confused there for a minute. I forgot who the victim was and who the defendant was when I was listening to Mr. Tarlton tell you about his case. Bob Dow is the . . . um . . . yeah . . . no! Bob Dow is the victim.”

  In the totality of the case, Burns had said the right thing. The impact the statement would ultimately have on jurors was another story, of course. But still, the prosecutor needed to say it, knowing that the human heart is a strange apparatus. Justice doesn’t always mean that the truth and the law is served. There is so-called street justice abounding in courtrooms throughout the world. This jury could punish Bob Dow by allowing his killer to walk out of the courtroom. Mike Burns knew that.

  Yet, even in the scope of that, Burns might have taken it a bit too far, however, when he said next: “The . . . man [is] lying on his back, having the most intimate relationship with a woman, and gets three bullets shot up into his brain—and that’s the victim in this case.”

  If there was one certainty within a fog of lies, it was that Jen and Bob did not have an intimate relationship. Not by any means. Burns might have served his purpose better had he focused on the lure factor—how Jen, using Bob Dow’s own affection for her, tricked him into that bedroom so she could kill him. Put that way, her crime sounded more diabolical and sinister. Entirely premeditated, in fact.

  “And regardless of what a low-down skunk he might have been,” Burns continued, “whether he was or not, I don’t know.” (Another miscue.) “Regardless if he didn’t have any redeeming social values, I don’t know, but I tell you what.... She don’t get to make that decision.”
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  Smartly, Burns dug a bit deeper into the Robin Hood aspect of Tarlton’s previous argument—telling the jury, rightly so, how Jen had the chance to turn Bob Dow over to the police, to report his vulgar and criminal activity. He explained how she had “every opportunity” to “call these officers right there and say, ‘This man is doing these things. He’s giving young kids drugs. He’s giving me drugs. He’s making us do this.’” But that’s not what Jen did, Burns added. Then he pointed at her, hammering his claims home. “She doesn’t get to take the law into her own hands and take a human life.”

  That one statement ignited a firestorm of facts out of Burns’s mouth. He went on, letting jurors know Jen was an adult woman when she made the decision to kill Bob Dow. And as an adult, she also made the choice to star in Bob Dow’s motion pictures and take drugs and partake in sex with him and the other girls. Life was one big party for this woman, whose days and nights revolved around drugs, booze, and sex. It was an evil path, sure. But it was one that Jennifer Jones chose.

  “She knew what was right. She knew what was wrong,” Burns said. “And when the day came to shoot three bullets into Bob Dow’s brain, she chose to do it.” He mentioned how “thousands of young people have bad lives” and how thousands more grow up without parents. And still, thousands more “live on the street.” Yet, “I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that thousands of kids do not sit on top of a person, have sex with them, and shoot bullets into their brain. . . .” He called what Jen did “depravity that defies justification,” before fixing that by stating: “That is depravity that defies mercy.” He finally concluded by saying, “Depravity that defies civilization. . . .”

  Burns might have taken things too far, but his point was well taken. The jury seemed interested.

  After a little soapbox proclaiming, Burns went back through the crime, noting how Jen planned and executed it in a sinister manner, suggesting that Jen and Bobbi got off on planning the crime and carrying it out. The point was: At no time was murdering another human being a hard decision for Jen to make. She didn’t think, Oh, I’m ridding the earth of a scumbag.

  No, in Burns’s view, Jen planned this crime for a thrill, robbed Bob Dow afterward, and took off on a trip through New Mexico and Arizona and California because she wanted to have a good time. This wasn’t some sort of Robin Hood and her merry women fantasy of stealing the life of a monster for the sake of righteousness, and protecting the village during the process. Don’t be fooled, Burns warned, by Jen’s baby face and ploy of “poor me, poor, poor me.”

  “And the other thing . . . we all know what a sociopath is, right?” Burns asked near the end of a rant that surely shot up his blood pressure. “A sociopath is a person who has no conscience, and that’s basically the definition. A person who is unable to feel remorse, unable to feel—”

  Kenneth Tarlton had heard enough. He stood. “Your Honor, I’m going to object. This is introducing new matters before the jury.”

  “This is common knowledge that people know, Your Honor,” Burns defended.

  The judge considered both statements. Then: “All right, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll be guided by your recollection of what the evidence is.” Then he asked Burns to continue.

  Burns traveled back down that road of Jen being an unremorseful, unconscionable killer, who had total disregard for the law and for her fellow man. At one point, Burns turned it around and put the jury’s decision on the backs of each as if he or she was speaking for the community as a whole. Regardless of how one feels about the crimes committed by a man, Burns articulated rather well, the ultimate crime of murder can never be justified by taking that life.

  “We don’t do that in this county,” Burns said. “We don’t do that in this part of Texas. Don’t cheat these young officers sitting here. Don’t cheat the state of Texas. And let’s don’t cheat our community. Let’s send a message, no matter what the situation is, when you take matters into your own hands as callously and unfeelingly—if that’s a word—as you did and kill somebody, take a human life . . .”

  And again, Burns would have been better off wrapping things up here. However, he went on and on, sounding more like a prosecutor not so much begging for the ultimate punishments, but a man who felt his case might be slipping away.

  The wide range of sentencing options was a bit confusing, Burns explained.

  “I got a recommendation. I think what you ought to do is start your deliberations at the very top of the scale, life or ninety-nine years. All right. And then consider what facts that you’ve heard that tend to mitigate this crime. And if it starts coming down, then that’s your duty to come to a consensus to see what it is. But I wouldn’t start at five years’ probation and say, ‘What makes it bad?’ and say, ‘Oh, well, maybe it ought to be seven years. . . .’ We don’t tolerate murder in this community, and I ask you to give this young woman a substantial sentence to where that message is sent to the community. Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 51

  THE JURY DIDN’T take long deciding Jen’s punishment for taking Bob Dow’s life. That same day, April 20, 2005, word came back that a decision on her sentence had been made.

  As Burns thought, the jury split the difference. Jen was sentenced to forty-eight years. Her projected release date was set for May 8, 2053. Jen would be a sixty-seven-year-old woman if she served all those years. Her first parole eligibility date was scheduled for May 5, 2028. She’d be forty-two.

  Either way, Jen was going to spend decades behind bars.

  As Jen was waiting to be transferred to Gatesville, Texas, the women’s prison, she spent a few more nights at Palo Pinto County Jail. And according to her, she and Bobbi had one more conversation shortly before that transfer to her new home came through.

  During the penalty phase of Jen’s plea, there had been an exchange between Jen and Mike Burns (during Jen’s testimony) that implicated Bobbi as the driving force behind the murder. Jen had told the court that Bobbi was in on the entire plan and convinced her to “finish him off.” The conversation between Jen and Mike Burns centered on that “you look sexy standing there with that gun in your hand” scenario, which Jen had described in her second statement.

  Bobbi had heard what Jen testified to in court. She wasn’t happy about it. It was upsetting to Bobbi that Jen was continuing the lie. And now, Bobbi considered, Jen was lying simply to take revenge on Bobbi.

  According to the Texas Monthly, Bobbi Jo . . . yelled to Jennifer through the air ducts one last time. “I’m getting out,” [Bobbi] said. “You can’t be there for me no more.... I’ve found somebody new.”

  This was the story Jen told Katy Vine.

  When I asked Bobbi about this alleged conversation, she did not recall that it had ever taken place. Yes, she said, she was pissed off at Jen for lying on the witness stand; but she had no idea what, exactly, Jen had said, and she never spoke to her through the bars that night.

  “I have no idea where she got that stuff from,” Bobbi said.

  CHAPTER 52

  ONE OF THE OBSTACLES facing Bobbi and her fight for freedom came when her court-appointed attorney, Bob Watson, decided he wasn’t the man for the job. But instead of going to the judge first, according to Bobbi and several additional sources, Watson called a colleague.

  “I think this is a case you might be interested in,” Watson explained over the phone to that colleague. “I really don’t want to keep trying the case.”

  “To [Bob’s] credit, he called me and told me that I should take on Bobbi’s case,” Jim Matthews, a well-known attorney in Palo Pinto County at the time, told me.

  Only problem was, Bobbi had no money.

  That was okay with Matthews, he later said. He wanted to help.

  The judge, however, wasn’t all that crazy with the change. He allowed it, sure—as long as it did not affect the timeline of Bobbi’s scheduled fall trial. Strangely enough, the judge was firm: He was not going to grant a continuance (even with this bombshell of a move: the handing ov
er of a murder case from one lawyer to the other). What’s more, it was public knowledge that the interview Jen had given to Texas Monthly was going to be part of a story about the case published in the weeks before Bobbi was slated to face jurors. For some reason that nobody wanted to admit, it was as if Bobbi’s case was being fast-tracked. She had a new lawyer, and there was that lengthy article based on Jen’s point of view published by one of Texas’s most prestigious journals set to debut just weeks before one of its main subjects was going to face a jury. (Bobbi, under her former attorney’s orders, had refused to speak to the magazine.)

  At least on paper, it appeared that this case was a perfect example for one of the reasons why a trial should be postponed.

  The judge, however, remained steadfast: No way. This trial was going on, as scheduled. No more discussion about it.

  I also heard, in fact, from two independent, credible sources that when Jim Matthews received Bobbi’s case file, one crucially vital piece of the case was missing from it—some of the more graphically explicit videos that Bob had filmed of the girls having sex.

  Jim Matthews faced a mountain of difficulties and preparation.

  “We burned the midnight oil,” Matthews told me.

  What else could he do?

  CHAPTER 53

  MIKE BURNS’S THEORY OF what happened to Bob Dow—which he aimed to prove during Bobbi’s trial—was now different from what it had been during Jen’s sentencing hearing. The plot to take Bob out began, Burns explained, when the girls were caught shoplifting. The aftermath of that arrest—Bob Dow bailing the girls out, a fact nobody I spoke to could present any type of documented proof of—put into play a situation where Bobbi had supposedly initiated a plot to have her lover, Burns argued, murder Bob for her. To convict Bobbi, this was the situation Burns set out to prove.