“We don’t do that in this county,” Burns said. “We don’t do that in this part of Texas. Don’t cheat these young officers sitting here. Don’t cheat the state of Texas. And let’s don’t cheat our community. Let’s send a message, no matter what the situation is, when you take matters into your own hands as callously and unfeelingly—if that’s a word—as you did and kill somebody, take a human life . . .”
And again, Burns would have been better off wrapping things up here. However, he went on and on, sounding more like a prosecutor not so much begging for the ultimate punishments, but a man who felt his case might be slipping away.
The wide range of sentencing options was a bit confusing, Burns explained.
“I got a recommendation. I think what you ought to do is start your deliberations at the very top of the scale, life or ninety-nine years. All right. And then consider what facts that you’ve heard that tend to mitigate this crime. And if it starts coming down, then that’s your duty to come to a consensus to see what it is. But I wouldn’t start at five years’ probation and say, ‘What makes it bad?’ and say, ‘Oh, well, maybe it ought to be seven years. . . .’ We don’t tolerate murder in this community, and I ask you to give this young woman a substantial sentence to where that message is sent to the community. Thank you.”
CHAPTER 51
T
HE JURY DIDN’T
take long deciding Jen’s punishment for taking Bob Dow’s life. That same day, April 20, 2005, word came back that a decision on her sentence had been made.
As Burns thought, the jury split the difference. Jen was sentenced to forty-eight years. Her projected release date was set for May 8, 2053. Jen would be a sixty-seven-year-old woman if she served all those years. Her first parole eligibility date was scheduled for May 5, 2028. She’d be forty-two.
Either way, Jen was going to spend decades behind bars.
As Jen was waiting to be transferred to Gatesville, Texas, the women’s prison, she spent a few more nights at Palo Pinto County Jail. And according to her, she and Bobbi had one more conversation shortly before that transfer to her new home came through.
During the penalty phase of Jen’s plea, there had been an exchange between Jen and Mike Burns (during Jen’s testimony) that implicated Bobbi as the driving force behind the murder. Jen had told the court that Bobbi was in on the entire plan and convinced her to “finish him off.” The conversation between Jen and Mike Burns centered on that “you look sexy standing there with that gun in your hand” scenario, which Jen had described in her second statement.
Bobbi had heard what Jen testified to in court. She wasn’t happy about it. It was upsetting to Bobbi that Jen was continuing the lie. And now, Bobbi considered, Jen was lying simply to take revenge on Bobbi.
According to the
Texas Monthly, Bobbi Jo . . . yelled to Jennifer through the air ducts one last time. “I’m getting out,” [Bobbi] said. “You can’t be there for me no more.... I’ve found somebody new.”
This was the story Jen told Katy Vine.
When I asked Bobbi about this alleged conversation, she did not recall that it had ever taken place. Yes, she said, she was pissed off at Jen for lying on the witness stand; but she had no idea what, exactly, Jen had said, and she never spoke to her through the bars that night.
“I have no idea where she got that stuff from,” Bobbi said.
CHAPTER 52
O
NE OF THE OBSTACLES
facing Bobbi and her fight for freedom came when her court-appointed attorney, Bob Watson, decided he wasn’t the man for the job. But instead of going to the judge first, according to Bobbi and several additional sources, Watson called a colleague.
“I think this is a case you might be interested in,” Watson explained over the phone to that colleague. “I really don’t want to keep trying the case.”
“To [Bob’s] credit, he called me and told me that I should take on Bobbi’s case,” Jim Matthews, a well-known attorney in Palo Pinto County at the time, told me.
Only problem was, Bobbi had no money.
That was okay with Matthews, he later said. He wanted to help.
The judge, however, wasn’t all that crazy with the change. He allowed it, sure—as long as it did not affect the timeline of Bobbi’s scheduled fall trial. Strangely enough, the judge was firm: He was not going to grant a continuance (even with this bombshell of a move: the handing over of a murder case from one lawyer to the other). What’s more, it was public knowledge that the interview Jen had given to
Texas Monthly
was going to be part of a story about the case published in the weeks before Bobbi was slated to face jurors. For some reason that nobody wanted to admit, it was as if Bobbi’s case was being fast-tracked. She had a new lawyer, and there was that lengthy article based on Jen’s point of view published by one of Texas’s most prestigious journals set to debut just weeks before one of its main subjects was going to face a jury. (Bobbi, under her former attorney’s orders, had refused to speak to the magazine.)
At least on paper, it appeared that this case was a perfect example for one of the reasons why a trial should be postponed.
The judge, however, remained steadfast: No way. This trial was going on, as scheduled. No more discussion about it.
I also heard, in fact, from two independent, credible sources that when Jim Matthews received Bobbi’s case file, one crucially vital piece of the case was missing from it—some of the more graphically explicit videos that Bob had filmed of the girls having sex.
Jim Matthews faced a mountain of difficulties and preparation.
“We burned the midnight oil,” Matthews told me.
What else could he do?
CHAPTER 53
M
IKE BURNS’S THEORY OF
what happened to Bob Dow—which he aimed to prove during Bobbi’s trial—was now different from what it had been during Jen’s sentencing hearing. The plot to take Bob out began, Burns explained, when the girls were caught shoplifting. The aftermath of that arrest—Bob Dow bailing the girls out, a fact nobody I spoke to could present any type of documented proof of—put into play a situation where Bobbi had supposedly initiated a plot to have her lover, Burns argued, murder Bob for her. To convict Bobbi, this was the situation Burns set out to prove.
“And Bob,” Burns told me, “who had that fixation with Jennifer and really wanted to have sex with her and had been for a long time . . . [he] bonds them out of jail. And then Bob gives them that ultimatum. ‘I bailed y’all out of jail, so I want me some of Jennifer as my payback.’ I think the plot is hatched at that point.”
Except, from all accounts, Bob didn’t present his “ultimatum” to
them
, as Mike Burns had explained it to me. Instead, Bob Dow allegedly had propositioned Jen alone in the truck.
Burns believed that was the magic moment when, he believed, Jen and Bobbi said to each other, “We got to get rid of this son of a bitch.” Because when Burns looked at their actions from that point forward, he explained further, it was clear to him that every step the girls took from that moment forward was “a premeditated plan to kill Bob.” Burns believed Bobbi told Jen to seduce Bob in the bedroom so Jen would have an opportunity to whack him. Bobbi’s motive, Burns was now certain, turned out to be as unpretentious as most murder plots. He theorized Bobbi said: “We’ll be free of this guy and we can go on with our lives. Move to California. Live in the sand and surf.” And Jennifer agreed with it, Burns alleged.
The glue holding this theory together turned dry and brittle, once it was applied to the evidence. For one, Bobbi could have walked away from Bob Dow whenever she wanted, same as Jen. Bob Dow was in no condition or position to stop Bobbi from doing anything she didn’t want to. Look at the evidence of Bobbi telling Kathy and Audrey that she wanted to go to Mexico. Bobbi was fleeing a bad situation of her friend having just murdered someone, not pursuing a pipe dream, as Burns put it, of moving to California with Jen and starting some white-picket-fence life together. In addition, Bobbi had left Bob before this moment, several times. More than any of that, though: Bobbi had a strong motive to keep Bob alive. He was her source of everything she desired most in life (even more than her own child) : sex, drugs, and alcohol.
From where Burns decided to prosecute his case, he believed Bobbi was “inside the house in the living room” when Jen capped Bob in the bedroom. “When [Bobbi] heard the shot, she runs into the bedroom. Jennifer climbs off the guy. He’s still moving and kind of groaning. So Bobbi Jo says, ‘He’s still moving, so finish him off.’ And Jennifer stands at the edge of the bed and unloads the pistol into his head and one in the arm.”
Burns got this entire scenario from Bobbi’s second statement. It all fit into the design Burns had constructed; and it even sounded good on paper. The question remained, though, could Burns prove his theory to twelve jurors? Bobbi refused to plead guilty. Bobbi couldn’t believe what was happening. She was innocent. Nobody would fall for this nonsense Burns was spinning.
Here it was, November 29, 2005; Jen was locked up in Gatesville Prison, already serving her time, and Bobbi, alone, seated in a courtroom with a new lawyer, was facing the rest of her life for a crime she claimed to have had nothing to do with. And as Bobbi sat in court, listening to Burns lay out the state’s case against her, she couldn’t have scripted the tale this guy was putting out there.
Mike Burns boiled his thoughts down into one basic argument, beginning the state’s opening with: “This is a case about relationships between two young women . . . and it’s about murder. And I believe the evidence will show in this case the following—Bobbi Jo Smith, the defendant, and a young woman by the name of Jennifer Jones were lovers, and they lived together under the roof and in the house of a man named Bob Dow. . . .”
From that moment forward, Burns did his best to sell his theory of an extreme (maybe even obsessive) love affair between Bobbi Jo and Jennifer that turned into a need to rid themselves of what Burns projected to be the one obstacle standing in the way of their happy ever after.
“And the evidence is going to show that this defendant took advantage of the dependence that Jennifer had on her.... The evidence will show that the plan was to
kill
Bob Dow—and the evidence will show that it was Bobbi Jo’s idea.”
A bold offering from an experienced attorney—after all, proving an
idea
was about as hard as proving how much in love the two girls were.
Nearly impossible.
Next, Burns put words in Bobbi’s mouth, explaining to jurors how Bobbi once told Jen: “We need to kill Bob. . . . We have to. We have to kill Bob because that is the only way that we can be together and be free of this man. He’s not going to molest me again—anymore. He’s not going to molest you anymore. We’re going to kill Bob.”
All very audacious statements Mike Burns attributed to Bobbi Jo Smith, but he did not say where each word had come from.
As he continued, Burns painted Bobbi as the mastermind/puppeteer to Jen’s more naïve, willing, and weaker character, placing the entire onus of the crime on Bobbi.
He spoke of how Jen lured Bob and how they walked into Jerry Jones’s Spanish Trace apartment after the murder. Meanwhile, entirely changing his theory from his opening statement during Jen’s penalty hearing, Burns said: “This defendant, Bobbi Jo, told the girls, ‘We just killed Bob.’”
In his opening statement that past April, Mike Burns said Jen first announced, “I killed Bob.” But now, during Bobbi’s trial, he put those words into Bobbi’s mouth.
And nobody challenged this.
Then Burns moved onto that now infamous road trip, focusing on how Bobbi tossed the weapon out the window as they drove out of town.
How Bobbi called the shots as they made their way across Texas.
How Krystal decided she wanted out.
How, Burns said, “they”—Bobbi and Jen—worked “on their story” during the entire road trip.
How Bobbi and Jen ditched Audrey and Kathy in Arizona because Bobbi believed they were talking to the police.
How they “cooked up” their first statements—admission documents Mike Burns himself referred to as “hogwash”—to “protect themselves.” And how a second statement Bobbi gave to police was not gibberish at all (like her first), but what law enforcement believed to be the truth: Bobbi gave Jen the gun after loading it and then sent her into that bedroom to murder Bob. And yet, Burns left out (either knowingly or unknowingly), nowhere in that second statement did Bobbi ever admit to convincing, asking, or manipulating Jen into killing Bob Dow.
Still, the question—rhetorical or otherwise—that no one seemed interested in asking hung in the hot air of Mike Burns’s opening: Why believe the
second
statement of a defendant’s if you are not going to believe the first? And what about that one line Jen had said to her mother during the road trip? After Kathy had asked Jen how it felt to kill someone, Jen allegedly replied, “Pretty fucking good.” Did that sound like a young woman being
forced
into murder?
Lastly, Burns promised the jury that they’d hear from Jen herself, now a born-again Christian, who was ready to tell the true story of what happened, clear her conscience, and send Bobbi to prison. He failed to say, though, that this would be Jen’s fifth version of the events in question: first and second statement (one and two), her testimony from the penalty phase of her sentencing hearing (three), her bizarre tale of clear, outright lies in
Texas Monthly
(four), and now this, Jen’s imminent testimony in Bobbi’s trial.
“And when all of the evidence comes in ... ,” Burns concluded, “we’re going to come back to you, and we’re going to ask you to find this defendant guilty of murder.”
CHAPTER 54
B
OBBI’S ATTORNEY
, Jim Matthews, later claimed he had been paid only $50 for taking Bobbi’s case. “That,” he told me, “and a night in a hotel room.” Essentially, Matthews had taken the case pro bono.