To her credit, Bobbi felt she needed to protect her boy. She knew the road she was headed down with her fiancé was not going to end pleasantly. She could see their lives deteriorating a little every day. She didn’t want her son to become a casualty of that life, a spoke in the cycle.
After the end of this first relationship, which had turned into engagement and motherhood, Bobbi Jo turned her back on men altogether. The dissolution of what might have become a marriage to a male, a father for her son, in other words, sent Bobbi running to females, she suggested. She tossed out any notion of living life as a heterosexual—and she felt free, almost normal, for the first time.
“I’ve never been with another man (willingly) outside my son’s father,” Bobbi said.
It was women from that point on for Bobbi—lots of them. They came and went. Through those relationships, Bobbi learned about life and love and caring for her child. Bobbi’s family always watched over the boy if Bobbi was ripping and running, chasing the bottle and the pipe. Bobbi knew enough not to be around the child when she was partying. She felt she could become the mother she’d always dreamed of and “desired to be,” but the pull of alcohol and drugs, for which she had no control over, clouded her judgment and kept her from doing it.
Once the split settled on her, and the totality of it began to weigh on such a young and vulnerable heart, Bobbi Jo fell even deeper into that crazy, evil abyss of drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity. Sure, she started using drugs and alcohol before this, but she took it all to an entirely new level once she and her fiancé went their separate ways, and living that lesbian lifestyle didn’t fill the hole in her heart, which she had thought it might.
“I began to get caught up with the fast life—drugs and sex with lots of women.... I was numb.”
That hole in her soul, Bobbi explained, wasn’t even that she and her fiancé had split, or that she had repressed her homosexuality for many years. That pain began back when “[someone close to me] began to sexually and physically abuse me—and my mother’s . . . emotional and mental abuse and also abandoning me. I tried to make my mom proud of me. I played sports and hoped and prayed that just one time she showed up to watch. She never did . . . and then the terribly violent sexual abuse by someone close.”
All before this girl could drive a motor vehicle legally.
It was too much. The pain broke Bobbi. For a while, the drugs and the booze filled up that space.
In Bobbi Jo, Jennifer Jones
saw a gentle female, willing to party until the drugs and booze ran dry, full of lust for the same type of life Jen was leading. Jen viewed Bobbi as a counterpart, feeding her pain with whatever poison she could get her hands on. Jen had seen this firsthand whenever Audrey brought Bobbi over to the apartment, or wherever they ran into each other out in the small Mineral Wells world of teen partying. And yet, much like Jen, Bobbi hadn’t always been the party girl and wild lesbian, up for anything, whose reputation followed her around like a storm cloud. At fifteen, Bobbi Jo lived next door to her grandmother’s house in Graford, with her aunt Kathy and uncle Richard, the Cruzes. This was just before Bobbi became pregnant and talked of marrying the guy who had knocked her up.
A staunch believer, Bobbi went to church regularly. “And her participation in church [services] was good,” Richard Cruz later said.
Bobbi was active in the youth groups as well. She’d go on retreats and other trips and act like a big sister/mentor to the younger girls, while befriending the girls her own age. She liked to participate in family outings, Richard Cruz explained later in court. She was a good girl. She was fun to be around, laughing and joking. She was always willing to do something for someone else. All of this despite the tempest of emotional pain that she was dealing with inside herself.
“Like, yeah, you know, we would play ball and stuff like that,” Cruz commented. “My kids were grown and [Bobbi] was the only kid around the house.”
It was great having Bobbi Jo around, Richard Cruz added. She always behaved and acted respectably.
Cruz was also privy to the other side of Bobbi, he said. She seemed like a naïve young girl, forced to grow up too damn fast, and maybe just beginning to embrace family as a good thing, when the bottom fell out. Bobbi was frightened of the same things other girls were, Cruz said. Like when they once went to shoot weapons off at a local firing range.
“She was very scared” of the guns, Cruz recalled.
Bobbi didn’t want to mess with guns at all. She understood the power of a handgun, and she was well aware of what it could do to a human being.
CHAPTER 11
D
ETECTIVES BRIAN BOETZ AND PENNY
Judd sat down with Dorothy Smith to get a better handle on what she had to say about her granddaughter, Bobbi Jo, who had just turned nineteen the previous week. Apparently, from the information Boetz and Judd had, Bobbi Jo told Dorothy that she had killed Bob Dow. Solid information, yes; but the statement alone still did not explain what happened, nor did it detail a possible motive—and, perhaps most important at this point, where Bobbi Jo was.
“Tell us what happened,” Boetz encouraged Dorothy.
Dorothy took a sip from a glass of water on the table in front of her. This was not a hard recollection. The situation had occurred the day before. Under direction from Dorothy, Penny Judd took down the interviewee’s statement, word for word.
“It was about two-thirty when I got home,” Dorothy explained. She seemed a bit nervous, as would be expected, but also quite eager to explain what happened. She couldn’t understand. There was something missing from all of what had happened.
“Yesterday?” Boetz confirmed.
“Yeah,” Dorothy said, shaking her head. “Bobbi Jo was here.”
As she began a narrative of what had occurred, Dorothy explained that her granddaughter was not herself.
“Grandma, I need your pickup,” Bobbi had asked Dorothy.
“Why?” Dorothy said. Bobbi Jo was a child Dorothy thought highly of. She adored Bobbi. Sure, Bobbi had had some problems and had grown up rather fast. But what kid these days didn’t have issues to contend with? The whole point of Bobbi moving from the Cruzes next door into Dorothy’s home was to start anew. Bobbi and her mother were at different places in life, to put it mildly. Bobbi had given up on her mother after repeatedly giving her chances to make things up. Dorothy had always been there.
“I want to get my clothes out of Bob’s,” Bobbi explained after Dorothy pressed the issue of Bobbi wanting to use the truck. She was trying to find out what was going on. Bobbi had been staying with Bob Dow. However, Bobbi always had kept a room at Dorothy’s house and traded off, at times, between the two places. Dorothy felt Bobbi had a love-hate relationship with Bob. She was always getting into arguments with him, but she looked up to him as a mentor. Something that not too many within Bobbi’s inner circle knew was that Bob Dow had been providing Bobbi with her lifestyle: work, drugs, booze, women.
“They were very close,” an ex-girlfriend of Bobbi’s later said, explaining the often fragile and volatile relationship Bobbi Jo had with Bob Dow. “They planned on going on trips and going to work. They grouped up ideas from each other, just what to do, you know, for that day or the weekend. Like a . . . a . . . father-figure relationship, I guess you could say.”
Dorothy wanted to know why Bobbi needed the truck. “Bobbi, what’s going on?” Bobbi had “another girl” with her on this day. Bobbi’s new friend was acting strangely, Dorothy felt: wiry and looking around, white as a ghost. Something had happened. Or, rather, something was
about
to happen.
“Look, I need to get my clothes out of there right now before Bob finds [out I’m leaving],” Bobbi said. “Bob is trying to make us”—Bobbi was referring to her and her new friend—“have sex with him to pay for our fines.”
(Bobbi later disputed ever saying this, alleging that her grandmother was confusing what she had said on that day with what the girl she was with—Jennifer Jones—had said.)
Bobbi and Jen had been picked up at the mall the previous week for shoplifting. At first, nobody would bail them out, and nobody would pick them up at the jail.
Bob finally came through, according to Jen. He and Bobbi’s mother picked them up and drove them to where Bobbi’s mother was staying at the time.
As Dorothy continued to explain what Bobbi had said, she claimed Bobbi told her the previous day, “I need to pay my fine, or they’ll pick me up.”
(You see, this comment falls in line with what Bobbi later told me: She had signed herself out of jail after the shoplifting charge, but she still needed to pay the fine, or she would be in deeper trouble.)
“How much, Bobbi?” Dorothy asked.
“Two thousand.”
Dorothy couldn’t believe it. Where was Bobbi Jo going to get that sort of money?
“Bobbi—”
“Look, Grandma.” Bobbi stopped what she was doing and focused on Dorothy, looking her in the eyes. “Bob said he wouldn’t pay our fines unless we had sex with him.”
The implication of this exchange was that Bob had lied to Bobbi and Jen. Bobbi was saying Bob had picked them up and agreed to pay the fines (as in a loan), but now they had to go to bed with him to pay off that debt. Bob had been after Jen ever since Bobbi hooked up with her, and Jen had started hanging around Lila Dow’s house. That first time Bob had a look at Jennifer, he was infatuated with her. He was fixated on having sex with her (according to Jen).
It was Bobbi Jo’s job, in one respect, to bring home young girls for Bob to fuel up with dope and booze and then bed down and film. (This was an accusation Bobbi voluntarily admitted to, adding that she never made any of the girls do this. How could she? She did, however, make the offer.) It was disgusting and illegal and immoral, but Bobbi knew the game and had gone along with it.
“Wow,” Bob said the first time he met Jen (according to the version of this story that Jen later told
Texas Monthly,
although Bobbi did not recall this ever happening). “She’s pretty. She could be a movie star!”
Bobbi, Jen later insisted, knew what Bob meant by that. Soon after, as the three of them were partying, Bob had a moment with Bobbi Jo to himself and said, “Ask her if she’ll sleep with me.” According to Jennifer, Bobbi was furious. Jennifer was hers.
Yet, Bobbi knew her place with Bob, so she asked Jennifer.
“No way,” Jen supposedly snapped. “He’s way too gross.”
(However, when I asked Bobbi later, she said this never happened. “If Bob wanted to sleep with Jen, I could not have cared. He did sleep with her, as far as I knew. It was chaos in that house with the drugs, booze, and sex.”)
Regardless, that was how the relationship among Bobbi, Bob, and Jen went along, Jennifer claimed. But as Bob pushed, Jen added (in one version) that Bobbi’s answer was firm: “Have any of the other girls I bring home for you, just not her. She’s mine.”
Bobbi later told me this was nonsense. That if Bob had wanted Jen, he could have had her. Bobbi would not have balked one way or the other, because there were always plenty of girls around the house for Bobbi to party and have sex with.
And Jennifer knew this.
What’s more, Bobbi insisted, at that point, Jen would have done anything for money so she could buy dope. She was a coke whore in the bare essence of the term, Bobbi insisted.
What Bobbi didn’t see—likely because her judgment was so clouded by the sex, booze, and drug culture inside that house—was that Jen had become increasingly obsessed with her new girl/girl relationship. She viewed the romance entirely differently than Bobbi did. Bobbi went to work; Jen followed. Bobbi went to the store; Jen demanded to tag along. Wherever Bobbi went, whatever Bobbi did, Jen seemed to be right by her side. Bobbi would go to the bathroom, and there was Jen, waiting outside the door, according to several sources.
For Bobbi Jo, at that time in her life, she had stumbled into a win-win situation.
“I liked Jennifer. She was cool. Fun to be with.”
Heck, Bobbi Jo had turned a heterosexual female. She enjoyed every moment of that new lifestyle Jen had thrown herself into.
“She was going to
get her stuff,” Dorothy Smith explained to Detectives Brian Boetz and Penny Judd on May 5, 2004, bringing the MWPD back to her narrative of what had taken place the day before. They were in Dorothy’s kitchen. She was clearly broken up about the entire mess. “She [Bobbi] had a place to go.”
(This part of Dorothy’s statement adds up with what Bobbi Jo later told me. Bobbi said Bob Dow had pissed her off and she was going over to the house on that day to get her belongings and some money Bob owed her. She was done with him. Never going back.)
“Did you give them the truck?” Boetz asked.
Bobbi and Jennifer, Dorothy explained, “left in my truck.”
“What happened next?” Boetz pressed.
“They came back in about an hour, hour and a half.”
Bobbi was driving Dorothy’s pickup and Jennifer was in Bob Dow’s truck. It was strange, the two of them in different vehicles. However, Dorothy didn’t think much of it at the time—just that they were back at the house dropping off her vehicle.
“Was there anyone else with them?”
Dorothy said a few other girls.
Bobbi rushed into the house. Dorothy was certain of this fact.
“What’s going on?” Dorothy asked her granddaughter.
Bobbi didn’t answer.
“Bobbi?” Dorothy said sharply.
“I have to leave,” Bobbi said. “Grandma . . . I . . . Grandma . . . I killed Bob. I shot him in the head.”
“No, you didn’t,” Dorothy said. She knew when Bobbi was making something up—and this surely seemed like one of those moments. Bobbi Jo had tears in her eyes and became more nervous as she talked about what she claimed had happened at Bob Dow’s.
“Yes,” Bobbi said as she grabbed a bag, flung it over her shoulder, and then started for the door. “I did, Grandma. He is
not
going to molest me again.”