Burns encouraged the jury to think about a few things while Jen’s attorney inevitably attacked Bob’s character and likely bantered that Jen “should be spared for ridding our community of this bad man. . . . How can you save the living by defiling the deceased? It don’t work that way.”
Then, concluding, Burns said, “I’ll talk to you in a few minutes about what we think is an appropriate punishment. . . .”
CHAPTER 49
F
IFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD
Kenneth Tarlton lived up to the reputation Mike Burns had set up for him. After approaching the jury and arguing on Jen’s behalf, quite emphatically, Tarlton stated that the issue at hand was not whether Jen deserved punishment, but what the appropriate punishment should be considering her “involvement” in Bob’s murder.
Burns leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and placed his pen down on a yellow legal pad in front of him. This was going to be worth his undivided attention.
“You can only consider facts and circumstances as evidence,” Tarlton said smartly. It was an important declaration. Jurors literally held Jen’s freedom in their hands, Tarlton knew. They could give her a minimum—a slap—of five years’ probation, or a maximum of—overly aggressive, perhaps— ninety-nine years to life. Burns knew shooting for something in the middle was probably reality, but Tarlton could go for the moon and stars if he chose to.
Tarlton respectfully went about detailing what evidence law enforcement witnesses had found inside Bob’s house when they first arrived. He bypassed—conveniently, of course—the reason why they were there to begin with: Bob Dow’s murdered corpse. He described how the responding officer found Bob’s mother’s room in “disarray” and “dirty,” adding how the woman had “been there a long time,” lying in her own filth. Then he talked about how Detective Brian Boetz “reacted” understandably shocked by what he uncovered inside Dow’s computer.
“Robert Clair Dow Jr. was providing alcohol, pills, and drugs to young, underage girls in exchange for sex,” Tarlton said.
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
M
IKE 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.”
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.