It was over.
The way Jen told it, after parking the truck near a field somewhere near the pool hall, she spread out a blanket on the ground as if they were at the beach. Then she invited Bobbi to lie down next to her.
“Let’s look at the stars.”
As they lay on their backs, staring up into the night, Jen claimed (in what sounded more like that fairy-tale fantasy she had dreamed up), she said they listened to the song “I Cross My Heart” by country crooner George Strait.
“You want to dance?” Jen said she asked Bobbi.
They “wrapped their arms” around each other and “slow-danced” to George Strait, reported
Texas Monthly
.
With the night came that cool desert air, crisp, dry, and chilly. Jen was getting cold.
“Let’s get back in the truck,” Jen suggested.
(“Wow,” Bobbi said when I confronted her with this story. “Jennifer really thinks this is all a joke, a game, a movie. When is she going to realize it’s
not
a fantasy—we are
really
in prison.” That entire story—lying under the stars and cuddling up to one another—was nothing more than a carefully constructed fantastical lie on Jen’s part, Bobbi said. “Jennifer was asleep in the truck [mostly]. There was no dance. No music. Geez.”)
With the blanket over them, Bobbi and Jen cuddled in the front seat for a time. Then, at some point, Bobbi decided she needed to call her grandmother. There was a pay phone out in front of the building they were parked behind. Bobbi could call collect.
This would be an odd choice, if Bobbi’s plan was to get away and escape the iron fist of the law (as Jen repeatedly had stated later). Calling home would most certainly put their location at risk. And yet, this scenario aligned more with what Bobbi later told me: “I was tired of running.”
Before calling Dorothy, Bobbi called her mother, Tamey Hurley. The last time they spoke in person, Bobbi and Jen were at Dorothy’s. Tamey had dropped them off.
“I love you, Mom,” Bobbi had said that day before Tamey drove away.
“I love you, too, baby,” Tamey responded. “Y’all stay out of trouble now, you hear me.”
Bobbi and Tamey were trying to make up for lost time. Forget about the past. Forgive and move on.
“Hey, Mamma,” Bobbi said on that night she gave up and wanted to return home. Tamey knew her daughter. Bobbi sounded different from the previous day and night, after calling and whispering into the phone how terrified she was of Kathy.
“Bobbi, you need to tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m scared, Mamma.” Bobbi was crying. “I need you to come and get me so I can turn myself in.”
“Tell me where you’re at.”
Bobbi explained.
Tamey had been told earlier that night from a family friend (a Texas Ranger, in fact) that there was a warrant out for Bobbi and Jen. “He told me it was a ‘shoot to kill’ warrant,” Tamey stated. (I never saw it.)
As Bobbi and Tamey talked, Bobbi became so overcome with emotion that she couldn’t speak. The gravity of the situation was pulling Bobbi down. She wanted out.
“Let me talk to Jennifer,” Tamey said.
Bobbi handed off the phone.
“Yeah?”
“Jennifer, now listen to me. You need to tell me what in the name of hell is going on here. I need the truth. Did Bobbi pull the trigger—did she kill Bob?”
“No, Tamey. She wasn’t even there. I did it. I tell you that. Bobbi wasn’t there. She’s saying she wants to take the blame because she doesn’t want me to get in trouble.”
After they got off the phone, Bobbi collected herself.
“I’m calling my grandma,” Bobbi told Jen.
Jen stood beside Bobbi as Bobbi spoke: “We’re tired of running, Grandma. We just want to come home.”
Dorothy asked Bobbi where they were.
Bobbi told her. Then: “You need to call the cops.... [Bob] is dead and his mother is in the next room, all alone, bedridden. . . .”
At this point, Bobbi explained to me, she was concerned about Lila and what happened back in Mineral Wells. “I am sure my grandmother flipped,” Bobbi said. “We’ve never had to face any situation like this. She told my uncle Rick to call the cops, because she was in disbelief. I didn’t want Bob’s mother to die in there. I knew she would, because no one ever knew she was in there—nor did I think anyone knew [Bob] was dead.”
According to Jen, it was Richard and Kathy Cruz whom Bobbi called, not Dorothy Smith, Bobbi’s grandmother. Yet, it was Bobbi’s grandmother, Dorothy Smith, who called the MWPD that night and reported that she had heard from the girls. Richard Cruz never mentioned that Bobbi had phoned him on that night.
“Jennifer and Bobbi are parked behind a pool hall in Blythe, California, just over the border,” Dorothy told the MWPD on the night of May 8, 2004.
Finished with the phone call, Jen and Bobbi went back to the truck and fell asleep.
It was not long after they dozed off that Bobbi awoke to the sound of a radio. Not George Strait this time, singing the blues of love gone wrong, but the static of a Blythe Police Department officer communicating with a colleague.
According to reports of the arrest, there were three Blythe PD officers surrounding the truck, weapons drawn.
If Jen and Bobbi were going to go down in a blaze of gunfire, like two wild chicks out of a Hollywood film, this was their chance. They could jump up and try to run.
Bobbi nudged Jen, whispering, “Hey . . .”
Jen opened her eyes.
The game was over.
PART THREE
SO MANY STORIES
CHAPTER 31
B
OBBI JO SMITH AND
Jennifer Jones later agreed on a few things that happened in the days leading up to Bob Dow’s murder. It could be reckoned that May 1, 2004, was the beginning of the end for Bob Dow. The girls were with Bob at the Ridgmar Mall in Fort Worth that day. Ridgmar is one of those cookie-cutter corporate malls found in every major suburb throughout America: JCPenney, LensCrafters, a super cinema, the pretzel and cookie kiosks, the vendors lined down the center aisle pimping cheap sunglasses and crappy plastic flying helicopters and smelly “handwoven” blankets and second-rate jewelry.
Jen and Bobbi were walking around the mall, holding hands, kissing, laughing, having a pleasant time on May 1, 2004. The day was fairly normal—that is, in the course of their unhealthy, unbalanced, and imminently ruinous relationship. To passersby, they looked like nothing more than two teenagers enjoying their sexuality, sharing a day at the mall together. However, there was some “old” man, flanking them in the background, holding a camera, at times snapping photos like a paparazzo.
“I was enjoying this new chick,” Bobbi told me. “It was fun.”
Indeed, Bobbi was feeding several addictions all at once.
As the photographs left behind by Bob would later prove, he and the girls enjoyed several of these adventuresome days. According to Special Prosecutor Mike Burns, who would later prosecute Bobbi and Jen, Bob had taken Jen and Bobbi (along with Bobbi and other females Bobbi had brought home to sleep and party with) to Sea-World, Six Flags, Disney, and several other luxurious, touristy destinations. Bob had documented the trips with his camera. Although a large percentage of the hundreds of photographs Bob snapped were pornographic, there were plenty of photographs depicting Bob, Bobbi, and other females out and about, like a father enjoying life with his daughters.
Bobbi had some money on her from birthday gifts, which she’d received a few days before. (“I was birthday shopping for myself,” she told me. “I never asked Jennifer to steal anything for me. I had my own money.”)
“I want a new wallet,” Bobbi proclaimed as they walked around the mall.
“Let’s go,” Jen said. She pointed to Hot Topic. Bobbi wanted a nice leather model with a chain, a reflection of how she felt during those days: rough, the alpha to the more laid-back, effeminate omega girls she hung with. According to Bobbi, this “thing” with Jen was not a love affair. The relationship was a fling, like scores of others she’d had before and during the time she spent with Jen. Bobbi was not exclusive to anyone. She liked to live her life carefree. She’d hid the lifestyle she had desired for a long time. Once she stepped out from behind that curtain, dating became a free-for-all. Jen was just one more in a long line of girls Bobbi was seeing and sleeping with.
“I wasn’t ‘in love’ with Jennifer,” Bobbi later told me. “You must understand. I liked her, but I didn’t even
know
her. I was still in love with my son’s father. Yes, I had sex with many different women all the time. But Jennifer was involved with someone else herself [while we were hanging out together]. Some dude who sold crack.”
A former boyfriend.
It wasn’t as though Bobbi didn’t know what loving another female was like. Tamey Hurley told me about Bobbi’s first relationship, although one might wonder if Bobbi, so young and naïve at the time, saw it as an affair or, like some girls that age, an experimental part of growing up. It happened before Bobbi met the father of her child. Tamey had worked with a young woman and Bobbi started hanging around with the girl. “I thought they were just friends, at first,” Tamey remembered. “But she was messing around with Bobbi Jo, and what she did to Bobbi—Bobbi Jo thought she was in love with her. It was one of those things . . . where, I was there, you know, and I saw it. But when you were around them, it didn’t seem like anything was going on. It seemed like friendship. Bobbi Jo still loves this girl to this day, deep in her heart, because it was the first person she was really ever
in love
with.”
Back at the mall, Bob drifted off somewhere by himself as the girls walked into Hot Topic. Then they all met up inside JCPenney.
“Listen, I’m tired,” Bob explained. “I’ll meet you outside after you’re done.”
Bob left the mall and waited inside his truck in the parking lot.
As Bobbi and Jen walked the aisles of JCPenney, Jen spied a watch. Looking in all directions, when she thought the coast was clear, Jen slipped the watch into her purse.
Bobbi didn’t realize what Jen had done.
They continued shopping.
When it came time to leave the store, as Jen and Bobbi walked out, two security guards approached.
(“All I know,” Bobbi told me later, “was people chased me and her out of the mall, some ‘undercover cops.’”)
“Do you have anything from this store on you?” one of the guards asked the girls. Obviously, they had Jen on video.
Jennifer said no.
Bobbi looked at them, confused. What were they talking about?
“We need you two to come back into the store.”
Bobbi and Jen followed the security guards.
Bobbi had purchased several items from the store: a pair of pants and a few other things. The guards asked to see the bag.
“Do you have receipts for all this stuff?”
Bobbi pulled out her receipts. No problem. She could prove she had bought all of the stuff in her bag.
“I tried to plead with them and give them my receipts,” Bobbi recalled. But unbeknownst to her, Jen had “placed the [stolen] items in my bag at some point when she went to hold my hand.”
“What about this watch?” the guard asked. “There’s no match to it on your receipt.”
The guards made Jen and Bobbi sit and wait for the cops. This was alarming to Bobbi. “I didn’t say anything. I’d
never
even had a traffic ticket before this.”
Next thing the girls knew, they were sitting in a cell inside the Tarrant County Jail in downtown Fort Worth on charges of shoplifting items worth more than $50.
CHAPTER 32
J
ERRY JONES CALLED
his sister one day and said he was getting married. The call came as somewhat of a shock to Melanie Brownrigg. The disbelief wasn’t that Jerry wanted to get hitched; rather, it was the fact that the wedding was going to be held in just a few days. Jerry’s sister was not even aware that her brother had been dating anyone. Now Melanie and her husband were summoned to a wedding?
The Brownriggs knew there had to be a catch.
As they stood in the pews, waiting for Jerry and his bride to walk down the aisle, Melanie and her husband turned to see who the bride was.
“And here comes Kathy,” Melanie explained, “pregnant as ever.”
The wedding took place on November 11, 1985. Jen was born weeks later in December.
“And,” Melanie continued, “it was also a surprise [to us] that Kathy had two girls (Audrey and Emily)” of her own.
That was how Jen’s life began.
Not long after Jerry, Kathy, Jen, Audrey, Stephanie (born after Jen), and Emily became a blended family, Melanie’s mother and stepfather pledged some money to help the rather large family get a van so Jerry had the room to tote them around.
“Kathy managed to get that confiscated due to a drug search, and the five-thousand-dollar [pledge] ended up being lost,” Melanie explained.
When the girls were little, Jerry went off to work and Kathy was supposed to stay at home. One day, Melanie’s sister was doing a drive-by to check up on the kids when she realized Kathy was not around. She found all of the girls home alone. Jen was baking brownies. At the time, she was five years old. The kids had lit the gas stove by themselves.
Kathy Jones’s road to parenthood certainly was not paved with Mother of the Year accomplishments and PTA gatherings. When she was on the witness stand during Jen’s sentencing hearing, pressed by sets of lawyers, Kathy was the first to admit she was a terrible mother. At one time a beautiful woman, with golden hair and arresting eyes, Kathy struggled as a young mother—not so much with caring for her girls, but caring for herself. Kathy was a tough woman—no one can take that from her. She had escaped death, by most everyone’s count, at least four times. She OD’d on pills several times. But when Kathy’s life is looked at as a whole, drugs became the focal point. She was in and out of rehab, as well as being a popular guest at the local jail, incarcerated on a bevy of charges ranging from solicitation to drug possession. The kids, as they grew into their teens, ran away and stayed at friends’ houses to escape the madness. Melanie Brownrigg and her husband had always been there, as well as Jen’s other aunt. As Jen experimented with drugs herself, no doubt mimicking what she saw at home, her siblings often reminded her that she was heading down that path their mother had already taken. She was warned to watch out. It was a road paved with misery and darkness. There was no returning.