“I thought she had a key, or something,” Tamey recalled. The way Jen had made it sound was that she would have no problem getting into the house.
The house was locked. Bob Dow never allowed Bobbi or Jen to have a key to his mother’s house. So Jen walked around to the backyard.
Soon everyone out front heard a loud, crashing sound.
“What the hell?” Bobbi said, shocked by the noise.
Moments later, the front door popped open.
It was Jen. She stood inside the party house, beckoning them to come in.
“What happened?” Tamey asked after walking in. “I heard a loud noise.”
Jen explained how she picked up a garden hose and smashed one of the back windowpanes in the door so she could reach in and unlock it.
Bobbi and Jen went around the house and grabbed all of their things.
“I had a backpack full of clothes,” Jen recalled in court. “Some pictures . . .”
According to Jen, she went into Bob’s bedroom and found Bobbi there. There was a green footlocker on the floor. Bobbi popped it open and found several guns Bob had stowed away in the chest. Bobbi never said why she was taking the guns, and they never discussed it, according to one of Jen’s statements. Bobbi simply walked over and grabbed as many weapons as she could find.
“Maybe three or four,” Jen testified.
From there, they locked the house and continued on to Graford.
Bobbi’s mother and brother dropped the girls off and left. Jen and Bobbi were the only ones in the house. Her grandmother was gone.
“We should take her truck and go find Bob,” Jen claimed Bobbi suggested. Bobbi put the guns away in her room at her grandmother’s house. “I want my last paycheck.”
Bob Dow owed Bobbi about $150 for some work she had done on an apartment building the previous week.
“You know,” Jen said, “I can probably talk my dad into us living at Spanish Trace with him and Audrey.”
“That’s fine,” Bobbi said (according to Jennifer’s version).
Yet, Bobbi had a place to stay. “I didn’t need to move into that apartment.”
As they discussed the best way to approach Bob, Jen first told police, the idea to kill him came up. According to Jen, as they talked at Bobbi’s grandmother’s house that day, Bobbi supposedly said, “He needs to be killed. We need to kill him.”
Jen asked why.
“I’m tired of the abuse.
Tired
of it. I’m tired of him harassing you. This is the only way that we can be together.” (Jennifer later said, “It was the sexual abuse of having to pay him to stay there at the house—of him, I guess you could say, borrowing her girlfriends for the night.”)
“No, we don’t need to kill him,” Jen later testified she told Bobbi at the moment Bobbi suggested they kill Bob.
The way Jen told the story (the first time), Bobbi went back into the bedroom she kept at the Graford house, grabbed one of the guns, walked across the hall into her grandfather’s bedroom, and started rummaging through his things, in search of bullets.
Jen followed, asking, “What are you doing?”
Bobbi found some ammo.
“You cannot do this,” Jen said, believing that Bobbi had made a decision to kill Bob, and there was no turning back. “Bobbi Jo . . . no . . . you
cannot
do this.”
It was then and there, Jen claimed (in one version of her story), when Bobbi stopped what she was doing, clicked the chamber of the weapon into place, put a squinted eye on the gun sight, and said, “This is the
only
way we can truly be together.”
The way Jen told it, that entire scene sounded as though it came straight out of a film she had just seen.
CHAPTER 34
B
OBBI LATER
told me, “I was not even
at
Bob’s house when Jennifer killed him. I was at the corner store two and a half blocks away. . . .”
The way Bobbi described her version of these events for police, she and Jen got a ride from jail and wound up in Fort Worth on Camp Bowie Avenue, at that head shop, just as Jen had testified. They started walking, same as Jen claimed, toward Weatherford, when Bobbi’s mother and Bob Dow showed up. There’s some discrepancy here about how they got back to Bobbi’s mother’s boyfriend’s house and who gave them a ride, but they both agreed later that Bob, at some point, made a sexually harassing proposition to Jen, which, in turn, made both girls angry. Not necessarily livid or furious enough for Bobbi to want to go out and grab a weapon and kill the guy, but angry enough, nonetheless, that she felt enough was enough. Bobbi was tired of ripping and running. She needed a break. She wanted to move out of Bob’s house, anyway. This was a good reason to push her over the edge and actually do it.
What’s important here within this version of the event Bobbi described for me in several letters is the timeline. Jen had the timeline a bit off. In court, Jen didn’t account for an entire day. It got lost in her telling of them being bailed out of jail and heading over to Bob’s house on the day the murder occurred. The way Bobbi explained it, after they left the jail and made it back to Bob’s house, they stayed the night there (in Mineral Wells).
So the next morning,
Bobbi wrote,
Bob came and got us—and my mom was with him. He dropped us off at my mom’s [boyfriend’s house] in Weatherford . . . and Jennifer runs into my mom’s house in tears and freaking out. I was puzzled. Bob was leaving. Jennifer claimed he tried to have sex with her. I was in shock.... He’s a big perv. He’ll flirt, but I didn’t know what was going on—I wasn’t
out
there.
According to Bobbi, Bob had not been pressuring Jen to sleep with him. Sure, he had asked from time to time, but it wasn’t as big a deal as Jen later made it out to be. The idea that Bob was hounding Jen for sex was all part of the ruse, Bobbi explained, the story they made up on the run in order to get Jen out of killing Bob.
From there, Bobbi said, her mother drove them to her grandmother’s house. Bobbi had her mom stop at Bob’s along the way so Bobbi could pick up her things, including a “set of clothes and my wallet.”
Bobbi said the house was open and she went in to get a few things and realized her wallet wasn’t there. Bob wasn’t home.
Underneath her bed at the party house, Bobbi kept those guns she said (and several others confirmed) had been given to her by Bob. So Bobbi grabbed the weapons, explaining to me: “I was going to have my mother pawn them . . . so I could have some money. She told me, ‘Hell no!’ The guns were mine, a gift from Bob. . . . After my mom refused, we were dropped at my grandmother’s house.”
“I wish like hell I had pawned those guns for her,” Tamey Hurley explained, confirming this portion of Bobbi’s story. “I should have done it.” Tamey also said she knew Bob had given her daughter the guns. “Because he told me he did. She needed that money from pawning those guns.”
Bobbi and her mother have weathered a fractured, love/hate relationship. (“I don’t even know my own mother,” Bobbi told me when we first started talking.) Tamey Hurley explained that Bobbi’s father ran out on her when she was sixteen and pregnant. She was living in New Mexico at the time. Bobbi’s dad? “I think [he] has spoken to her once,” Tamey said. “It broke Bobbi’s heart,” Tamey added, “when Bobbi was old enough to realize that her own father didn’t want anything to do with her. And for a good while, after I turned seventeen and had Bobbi Jo, it was just us,” Tamey said. “Growing up, Bobbi Jo was quiet, loved sports.... She was a tomboy, but then so was I. We were poor.”
“I’ve never known [my father],” Bobbi said. “Never seen his face, except in a photo.”
The question people routinely ask, Bobbi said, is one that she cannot answer: Has she always known she was gay?
“No one really knows. I grew up a bit confused. I was attracted to women, but was always told it was wrong. I’ve never been comfortable with men, because of being molested. My son’s father and I were friends, and I began to trust him. But I am not physically attracted to men, like I am to women.”
Part of Bobbi’s experience as a child centered on spending a lot of time with Tamey’s mother and father, Dorothy and Fred Smith. Fred taught Bobbi how to work on cars and take apart motors and put them back together again.
Throughout the years, Tamey had five more kids.
“I was young and dumb,” Tamey said. “I’m ashamed, really, of how the kids were raised by me. But, you know, you cannot replace the past. You have to deal with it. Bobbi and I were always together when she was young, but then we grew apart because I, well, I had a drug problem. I didn’t want to see my daughter around it.”
Tamey’s problems with drugs, she said, stemmed from the sexual abuse she sustained as a child by someone close to her.
That dreadful, evil cycle. Bobbi got sucked into its whirlwind.
“When I could, I left,” Tamey said. “I guess”—and she paused here, carefully choosing her words through a barrage of tears—“I guess you learn from your mistakes. I cannot ever fix what was done in the past.... I thought I was . . . I thought I was . . . doing the right thing for Bobbi [in leaving her] . . . ’cause I loved her so much. I just didn’t want her to see me like I was. That was the only way I could heal myself.”
In her statement to police
(which Bobbi later confessed to me was a mixture of lies and truth to cover the story she and Jen had concocted while on the run), Bobbi recalled going over to Bob’s house, Jen breaking in, both taking some of their belongings, and then heading to Graford, where they were dropped off at her grandmother’s house. Again, dates line up here with Bobbi’s version. She claimed they stayed the night at her grandmother’s house, which would have made the date of the confrontation that ended Bob’s life May 5.
According to Bobbi, she never stole any weapons while at Bob’s (as Jen later claimed). In addition, Bobbi didn’t want anything to do with guns at that point, she later insisted. Yes, there are photos of Bobbi squaring off in that traditional gangsta-type pose—the weapon turned sideways, pointed at the camera—along with photos of girls placing the barrels of the guns into their vaginas. Yes, Bobbi wound up with those weapons. But on the day before Bob was murdered, Bobbi and her brother were firing the weapons in the backyard of her grandmother’s house and something happened. (Likely, this was the day Jen could have later confused and said she actually saw Bobbi loading the weapon in her grandfather’s room.)
“When my brother and I started shooting them [at an old car at the back of my granny’s house], they scared my son,” Bobbi clarified. Her boy was terrified of the loud, booming noises. His panic, in turn, freaked Bobbi out. She made up her mind that she wanted nothing to do with guns ever again. The reason why she fired them, to begin with, was twofold: for some fun and because her mother had refused to pawn them. Bobbi said she was “checking them so I could sell them to an old-school [gun] dealer, who lived down [the street] from my grandmother’s.”
Tamey later backed up this claim by Bobbi, adding that Jen had been with them, shooting the guns in the yard on that day, too.
“Jennifer was obsessed with Bobbi Jo,” Tamey said. “It was like Jennifer had one leg tied to Bobbi’s. . . .”
Why Bobbi changed her story, she said, became a combination of both wanting to defend Jen and stick to the same story Jen was telling at the time, and also being young, stupid, and naïve. Bobbi believed if she and Jen lied about what happened, they would
both
get out of it and face no trouble with the law.
“I never wanted to lie,” Bobbi said, referring to her explanations of the week leading up to Bob’s murder and what happened inside the party house. She was talking about changing her statement and lying to police about how things went down. “I loved [Bob], but I was (in telling those lies) trying to protect Jennifer by telling the same story that she was—until she changed it, and kept changing it. That’s why I’ve remained silent all these years.” (Bobbi Jo has never been interviewed about her case before.) “I admitted to having guns because they were
mine.
Bob had given them to me as gifts. As a matter of fact, I had four of them.” But after that incident the day before the murder, when Bobbi’s son freaked out, Bobbi said, “I gave Jennifer all my guns (after not being able to sell them). Obviously, she kept them. Where she kept [them] or put [them], I don’t know.”
The point being: Jen had access to the weapons.
Bobbi said she didn’t care “how much [Bob] loved sex and women.” That wasn’t what mattered to her when she thought back on those years with Bob and what ultimately happened. Not even the abuse she claimed to have suffered under Bob’s hand made a difference with regard to how she felt about him.
“It still does
not
justify him to be murdered,” Bobbi said.
The reality of the situation was “the only people who know what happened on that day is [Bob] and Jennifer—however, she and I both know the truth . . . ,” Bobbi added.
And with that being said, Bobbi concluded, “It’s time for it to be told.”
CHAPTER 35
B
OBBI AND JEN
hopped inside Bobbi’s grandmother’s truck and took off to go find Bob (according to Jen’s first statement to police). Bobbi was looking for her last paycheck of $150. As they drove toward Lila’s Mineral Wells house on May 5, 2004, Jen claimed, Bobbi suggested Jen kill Bob. (Yet, this revelation from Jen does not come until later, in court, at a hearing, when Jen is facing sentencing for her crime—Jen never gave this information to the police.) They had a gun. It was loaded. As Bobbi drove, Bobbi brandished the weapon, Jen claimed. Made sure no one was around. Then Bobbi fired two shots into the woods from the window of the truck as they sped down the road. Bobbi wanted to be certain, Jen said, the gun was loaded properly. The way Jen framed this part of the murder narrative made it sound as though they were two wild chicks in love, higher than hosanna, on their way to commit the ultimate act of evil.
In a nervous mishmash of words, Jen later spoke to the court deciding her ultimate fate (she had pled guilty already), explaining part of Bobbi’s alleged strategy behind having Bob killed: “That I was—that I was going to . . . to give in to the . . . to the sexual favors for him—and that during that time, I was . . . I was going to kill him.”