Bad Girls (33 page)

Right on cue.

“You all right, Miss Jones?”

“I’m sorry . . . I want to tell the truth now.”

The polygraphist unhooked Jen from the wiring and walked her out of the room. Penny Judd was waiting in the hallway by the door.

“Talk in there,” the polygraphist said, pointing to an open room.

“Come on. . . .”

After sitting down, Judd asked Jen what was going on.

“Penny, I’m sorry for lying to you. Don’t be mad at me.”

“Mad? No, Jennifer. I’m not mad. What’s going on?”

“I want to tell you the truth.”

Penny Judd felt Jen was referring to that first statement she had given back in California.

“I want to give you another statement,” Jen said.

Bobbi and Jen sat separately with Boetz and Judd and talked through what became their second statements regarding what had happened.

Why?

Because the MWPD did not believe the first statements. It was as if those two statements the girls gave back in Blythe, California, were tossed aside in lieu of what was now, the girls were saying, the real truth.

The road trip and the lead up to the murder came out about the same this second time around. In that regard, not much had changed from the first time they told it. What was different here became the murder itself and how it occurred. According to Jen now, she and Bobbi walked into the house together. Bob apologized for the comments about wanting sex in trade for the bail money he had apparently put up. After Bob’s apology, the following action transpired. Jen explained the events to Penny Judd in her statement:

I walked in the bedroom, Bob’s room, got the gun out of the green lockbox
[the chest]
that was under the bed in the bedroom. I checked to see if the gun was loaded and it was. I placed it between the nightstand and Bob’s bed between a stack of clothes and a striped pillow. I walked into the living room, Bobbi Jo had just received $20 from Bob and they were still arguing about her paycheck. She then borrowed the keys to Bob’s truck to go to the store and buy me and [her] something to drink. Bobbi Jo left and Bob kept telling me he was sorry. I kept telling him that it was okay and I insisted that I repay him. Bob kept on saying no, and I kept on saying, “It’s okay, I don’t mind.”

Bob and I walked into the bedroom where I took off my clothes and laid down on the bed. Bob did the same thing. Bob took the lotion off the nightstand and used it to try to make his penis hard. Bob then went down on me. While Bob was doing that, I took the gun that was between the pillow and placed it beside my hip. I told Bob I wanted to be on top....

Then I pulled the gun out from underneath the covers, then I shot Bob twice. Then I got off him and I saw that he was still alive,
[and]
then I shot him three more times. Bobbi Jo walked in screaming, “Oh, my God . . . I cannot believe you actually did it.”

Two important factors emerged from this second statement. One, that Jen took full responsibility for the murder. Two, “The reason Bobbi Jo said that”—the “I cannot believe you actually did it” statement—“is because when we were between Graford and Bob’s house,” Jen said, “I had told Bobbi Jo that I was going to kill Bob. Then I said, no, I wasn’t.”

From there, Jen’s second statement was fairly consistent with her first. It was clear Jen was taking the onus off Bobbi and putting it on herself. Bobbi, in turn, later claimed she never once asked Jen to take the blame for her, simply because she didn’t need her to. Jen had committed the murder and Bobbi had had nothing to do with planning or executing it. All she had done was lie about what actually happened with the hope of protecting Jen.

Bobbi sat with Boetz and gave her second statement. She acknowledged that a good portion of her first statement would be consistent with what she now wanted to say. So, as strange as this sounds, they actually skipped over some details and got right to what Boetz wanted to discuss.

This second narrative of the crime, which Bobbi told, began with Bobbi’s mother being with her and Jen during those days before Bob was murdered. Bobbi explained how Tamey drove her and Jen over to Bob’s, and Jen broke the back window and they all went in. Bobbi mentioned how she wanted to take a .22 long-range revolver out of Bob’s green chest so she could pawn it because he owed her money.

“After work [the day before the murder], Bob Dow asked me if he could have sex with my girlfriend, Jennifer Jones,” Bobbi told Boetz in her second statement. “We both said, ‘No.’”

Bobbi then discussed that drive over to Bob’s on the day he was murdered, telling Boetz, “I gave Jennifer the gun. She placed it in the back of her pants and then covered it with her shirt. She told me to wait outside. I came back in one time and Bob Dow was in between her legs. . . .” Bobbi left the room. When she went back “three to five minutes later,” she noticed Bob “was shaking really bad.”

“Is he dead?” Bobbi asked Jen, according to Bobbi’s recollection.

“Yes.”

“Make sure,” Bobbi told Jen.

“I grabbed his hand,” Bobbi explained to Boetz. “I was so scared. So was Jennifer. She was also shaking. So I grabbed the gun and her clothes and told her to get out of the house. I grabbed Bob’s wallet and took one hundred and fifty dollars out of it. . . .”

The remainder of the statement was nearly the same as Bobbi’s first.

Clearly, as Boetz and Judd looked at these second statements, studying them, matching them up against the girls’ first statements, something did not coalesce.

“In my mind, I was thinking that there was probably still some truth not there,” Boetz recalled. “But they were getting a little closer.”

Regardless of what Bobbi had told them—much of which the MWPD still seemed to think was mostly untruthful, according to my interview with Brian Boetz—it was enough to charge Bobbi with first-degree murder. Apparently, five words within the statement Bobbi Jo had just given—“ I gave Jennifer the gun”—were enough to warrant her arrest on conspiring and convincing Jennifer Jones to murder Bob Dow.

I asked the MWPD if they recorded either of the two statements on video or audio.

“No, sir. We were not able to record them, sorry.”

“Why?” I pressed.

“When we talked to them in California,” Brian Boetz explained, “we were under the mercy of that department. We asked for a room that would record. We were told that they were all being used, so they put us in a room in intake, which had no recording. Their second statement was when we were in Dallas, Texas, for the polygraph. The girls broke during the preinterview with the polygraph operator. They placed us in a room with no recording, so the only option we had in both cases [was] to write or type out their statements. I hope that clears it up for you. Sorry.”

CHAPTER 43

I
N LATE MAY, AS
Jen wandered around the jail one afternoon looking for someone to talk to, she sat down with a gal named Betty Gardner (pseudonym), an older convict doing a short bid on a drug possession felony. Gardner was slated to be released in a matter of weeks.

What struck Betty was that as Jen explained why she was locked up, she “laughed” about Bob’s murder. It was as if the crime she had committed was funny. Listening, Betty felt Jen showed zero “remorse” for what had happened to Bob and was even “happy” about killing him.

Some days later, Jen spoke to another inmate about Bob’s murder. Here she expressed a somewhat similar demeanor, the woman later said. “She just seemed indifferent, I guess. Just ‘nothing’ would be my best word for it.”

No emotion—as if Jen did not care that she had taken a life.

This side of Jennifer Jones falls more in line with the woman I contacted and spoke briefly to in early 2012. By the time I reached out to her, Jen had told five different versions of her story. She’d lied about details she didn’t need to. And when she sat down with reporter Katy Vine for the
Texas Monthly
article I’ve quoted throughout this book, she altered the story once again. It was as if Jennifer Jones had been describing someone else’s life, or telling a story, a tale. For Jen, she had told so many different versions of Bob Dow’s murder and the days leading up to it and after, she couldn’t keep track any longer. This was one of the reasons I wanted so badly to interview her.

Bobbi wrote me an angry letter laced with raw emotion and an exhausted frustration at me repeatedly asking her tough questions that had to do with timelines, things people said, and those discrepancies in Jen’s different stories. I’d ask the same question different ways. There were times when Bobbi didn’t know what I was talking about. It was clear to me she had no idea where the information had come from.

Look, all those [girls: Audrey, Kathy, Jennifer] you keep talking to used to come over and [give Bob oral sex]. There’s photos of it. I used to tape it! . . . Jennifer and Audrey and Kathy, and all those chicks, were sexing Bob 24/7 for a high,
Bobbi wrote.

The bottom line here was: Don’t trust anything they say. Half of what they do remember is probably clouded with an agenda to protect themselves.

“No,” Detective Brian Boetz said after I asked him if he had ever seen any photographs of Jen either having intercourse with Bob or performing oral sex on him. “It was other girls who we could not identify.”

Bobbi called Jen, Kathy, and Audrey “hos.” To that, Bobbi said there was one thing she was proud of from that entire time they were all together that she could take to her grave: “I never sold
my
pussy.”

Jen had always come across as an innocent, effeminate girly-girl, and it helped her cause later when she was busted. Bobbi was the polar opposite, if we’re judging books by their covers. Bobbi was rough around the edges, had tattoos, a butch-style haircut, carried a chain wallet, etc. It’s easy to point a finger at Bobbi and assume she was the mastermind behind this murder, pulling Jen’s strings, telling her what to do. Even Jen played off this dynamic with Katy Vine when she told an incredibly bizarre story about Blythe, California, “authorities” pulling her aside on the day she and Bobbi were arrested in California to tell her something: “We know you didn’t do it. That tattooed girl did it. Don’t you dare take the rap for her.”

That is simply preposterous. Those cops had no idea who Jen was, and very little detail about the crime the girls were being suspected of. They showed up to arrest the girls and to hand them over to the MWPD.

“I slept with other chicks I knew and met,” Bobbi admitted to me, speaking of those days when she hung out with Jen. “I knew Jennifer twenty-seven days! We were not even in a relationship. I don’t know. It was more like she knew I would be there for her. I had much love and care for Jennifer, but ‘in love’ is different. . . .”

Within many of the photographs left behind by Bob Dow, this statement of Bobbi’s rings true. In several, which police found inside Bob’s computer, Bobbi appears frog-eyed and wasted, with droopy shoulders, a sad look on her face, as if her body is caving in on her. There’s almost an aura in some of the photos indicating that Bobbi is forcing herself to snuggle up to Jen. Jen is the aggressor, with her arm around Bobbi, sometimes kissing her. It’s a testament to Bobbi’s declaration that she was in it for the sex and a good time. The idea that Bobbi—after knowing Bob Dow since she was an adolescent, him being the (step)grandfather to her child, the master puppeteer of her life, arguably her surrogate father and provider of drugs and alcohol and employment—would decide to kill him with Jen—someone she had known for twenty-seven days at the time—does not fit. Moreover, it makes little sense in the scope of the lives the three of them led.

“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

O
N 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.