With his sharp and noticeable Texas drawl, Jim Matthews approached jurors and said there was “quite a different story” to tell from what Mr. Burns had just whipped up. Matthews called it “the rest of the story,” quoting famous radio personality Paul Harvey.
“Bobbi Jo just didn’t do it. She just didn’t do it. And the evidence is going to show that Jennifer Jones,
not
Bobbi Jo, murdered Bob Dow in cold blood—
not
in self-defense.”
Important point.
Bobbi needed jurors to accept this scenario in order to walk. Not that she didn’t have anything to do with killing Bob; that wasn’t at issue here. But Jen, after a cumulative life of emotional ups and downs, sexual abuse and promiscuity and chronic drug use, snapped, taking a shitty life of letdowns and emotional pain (baggage) all out on Bob Dow, who had made one too many passes at her after treating the woman Jen loved so horribly. Effectively, Jen became obsessed with Bobbi. That obsession and the fact that Bob was treating Bobbi like his personal sex slave, and Jen sat back and watched, had manifested into an evil plot within Jen’s fragile psyche. She couldn’t take it anymore. She wanted Bobbi all to herself, so she murdered the guy.
Matthews began with a play on what Burns had said earlier, noting how “the first
two
statements were hogwash.”
Bobbi’s attorney then walked over to a projector his legal aide had set up.
Mike Burns took notice.
“Is that focused?” Matthews asked his aide.
A photograph of Bobbi, as a baby, was projected onto the screen for jurors. Matthews began, “She was—like anybody else—brought up into this world the natural way.”
Burns could not believe what he was seeing and hearing.
You’ve got to be kidding me!
The prosecutor nearly came out of his skin. He stood. “Your Honor . . . I object. This is improper for an opening statement. This is
evidence.
”
“Sustained. You may give verbal without the—”
Matthews interrupted, finishing for the judge: “Photograph?”
“Photo
graphs
!” the judge snapped. “
Unless
they’re submitted into evidence.”
Then Ninth Judicial District judge Jerry Ray said something interesting. He explained to Matthews that the use of photos and videos in his courtroom during Bobbi’s trial was going to be limited and watched carefully, adding, “I don’t want to see that trash in my courtroom.”
Judge Ray said it “very sternly,” Matthews recalled.
“It (those sexually explicit photos of Bob Dow and the girls) was here during that first trial ( Jen’s penalty hearing),” Judge Ray continued, “and if you want to present it again, you had
better
have a
damn
good reason for it.”
Strange thing to say about actual evidence that was, in many respects, a focal point of this case: the fact that the girls were starring and participating in these films.
Nonetheless, Matthews took the hint, telling me later: “They needed those photos and videos during Jennifer’s penalty phase because it helped
them
say that Mr. Dow was a slime bag and deserved it and here’s all this proof.... It was fine with me that Judge Ray didn’t want it. My argument wasn’t that Bobbi did it and Mr. Dow deserved it. My argument was that she
didn’t
do it.”
Still, those photographs tell a story. A court watcher would think that they’d be crucial to Bobbi’s case. There are plenty of films that display Bobbi’s and Jen’s chronic drug use. They also show how Bobbi and Jen had sex in front of spectators, and that the sex wasn’t some sort of intimate moment between two females in love, but more or less another day in the life of Bobbi, who was bouncing through all of it with the sole intention of getting high.
Without showing the photographs, Matthews fell back into Bobbi’s history. He spoke of her early life as the only girl in a family of boys and how, as a child, Bobbi took pleasure in taking the blame for things her siblings often did. Bobbi’s life was actually going well, according to Matthews, until she met her son’s father and fell in love and had a child. When Bobbi and her son’s father split up, Matthews added, “Bob Dow welcomed Bobbi Jo into his home and really became a close friend of hers. She looked at him as a father, a friend, and even sometimes a lover . . . and you’re going to hear that even at one point [Bob Dow] proposed marriage to her.”
Marriage?
As Bobbi sat and listened, she considered that Matthews did not give the jury a complete picture of the relationship she’d had with Bob. But what could she say? She trusted Matthews and placed her freedom in his hands.
“She turned him down,” Matthews continued. “But not because she was mad at him. He was just a lot older than her.... She just couldn’t see him being her husband for the rest of her life.”
Matthews, knowing full well that conservative Texas courts liked to keep things clean, walked jurors slowly into what he obviously viewed as a taboo subject to approach inside Judge Ray’s courtroom : Bobbi Jo’s sexuality.
“[You] may or may not agree with what you hear about Bobbi Jo and some sexual things. But that doesn’t make her a murderer. She and Bob Dow . . . they liked each other. He cared about her. She cared about him.”
The idea with this opening was to paint a complete picture of the Bob Dow/Bobbi Jo Smith relationship. Matthews did a fair job of it. He spoke of how Bob taught Bobbi the construction trade, took her on as an apprentice, and even explained how the business side of things worked.
“She was kind of a tomboy,” Matthews explained, adding how Bobbi “enjoyed being outdoors” and “working with her hands and . . . she could begin to try to feel self-supported and maybe someday raise [her son] on her own.”
The way Matthews portrayed the relationship, a listener would be hard-pressed not to believe that Bob Dow and Bobbi Smith, at one time, had a loving bond—same as maybe a father and his daughter.
But then Matthews digressed, delivering the ugly punch line to his father-daughter bombast: “You’re going to learn that Jennifer was jealous . . . of the relationship between Bobbi Jo and Bob Dow. She didn’t like Bob Dow. Bob Dow didn’t necessarily like her. He kind of wanted to have sex with her, but he was kind of like that. And that’s one of the reasons that you’ll hear that Jennifer killed him. She
wanted
him out of the way.” Then Matthews raised his voice, shouting: “She didn’t like the triangle. Two is company and three is a crowd. And she wanted to end that. . . .”
If one was to look at the case objectively—and neither lawyer could do that, of course—one would draw the conclusion that Jim Matthews, on the basis of the law, had a solid argument here. If he was to take Jen’s journal and build on all of the self-hatred she’d harbored, her promiscuity and disobedience, her criminal record, on top of the low self-esteem she brought into the relationship with Bobbi, he’d have one hell of a case to present for a girl gone bad—a girl gone terribly wrong, who was in no position to enter into a relationship with a woman for the first time. And when Jen testified, Matthews could easily impeach her testimony with her own words from that journal. Jen had been let down again and again by her lovers. Here, she met Bobbi and—there can be no doubt—became immediately infatuated and arguably obsessed as soon as Bobbi showed affection and cared for her. She followed Bobbi everywhere. She would not allow Bobbi out of her sight. Even when faced with the notion that Bobbi was not exclusive to her, Jen continued the relationship.
“The photos of Jen and I having sex was all at once,” Bobbi told me. “Our ‘sex life’ was not what you think. All of those photos were taken with several other women.... I remember having sex with Jennifer . . . [but] she had a boyfriend. She’d leave and go with him all the time. [Our affair] wasn’t a ‘relationship’—it was drugs.”
Part of the problem Bobbi had (and she didn’t even realize it) in proving how desperate, despondent, codependent, and abandoned by love Jen was when she walked into Bobbi’s life turned out to be that Jen’s journal (which would have told jurors a lot about Jen’s character) was sitting in a box inside her aunt’s house collecting dust. It would never be entered into the record as evidence. Nobody had interviewed Jen’s aunt and found out about the journal. Bobbi’s legal team of Jim Matthews did not have the resources to hire a private investigator to conduct its own investigation (which might have produced the journal and more), or located other witnesses to back up the idea that Jen had a history of violence and her life was spiraling out of control when she met Bobbi.
Bobbi also believed—and Matthews backed up her claim—that part of the reason she was so vigorously prosecuted (and perhaps grossly
over-
prosecuted) fell into a well-choreographed plot to punish her because she was a lesbian.
“In reality,” Bobbi explained, “they all could not stand me. The county jail (where Bobbi was being held) threw me in a cell with no water and not even a toilet. I had my skin break out and they refused to treat me. They did me wrong . . . just because they knew I was gay. They wanted to ridicule me and put me alone so [as I was told over and over] I’d ‘stop screwing women.’ They called me names for being gay. . . . They lashed out over my sexual preference and tried me in a court, where I had no chance!”
Matthews became somewhat grandiose at one point during his opening, asserting, “And, you know, Bobbi Jo is many things . . . and it’s so important what you’re doing as a jury. This country is the greatest country on the face of the earth. We have the most powerful military. We have the most powerful political system—”
But Burns had heard enough. “I object. This is argument,
not
opening statement, Your Honor.”
“Sustained. . . .”
“Anyway,” Matthews continued, “I hope that you keep your hearts and your minds open to hear the rest of the story, because there is another side. It is very important to hear the other side of the story and to know everything before you begin to make up your mind about it.” He paused. “Thank you.”
For Jim Matthews at this stage, there were just a few words about Bobbi and Bob, and no promises of groundbreaking evidence or a surprise witness who would persuade the jury. It was as if Matthews was confident on the merit of his case alone, and he didn’t need to carry on with rhetoric or conjecture. He wanted to get on with the trial.
The judge took a fifteen-minute recess.
CHAPTER 55
A
FTER THE BREAK, MIKE
Burns introduced his star witness. Jennifer Jones had changed. She was nineteen and had packed on some prison weight, about thirty pounds by several estimates. She had that hard, weathered look of a woman who had become part of the penal system. She was a number now. No longer that light-skinned, smiling teen, effeminate and girly, out in the world looking for a good time. Here was a woman, by all accounts, who clearly was comfortable in her new role as a convict.
Jen admitted she had been convicted of murder in this case. Burns eased into her life and had Jen explain where she was from, where she lived, and how she met Bobbi. Throughout this biographical portion of her testimony, Jen did not tell the story she had recently given in detail to
Texas Monthly,
wherein she had met Bobbi beneath a tree in front of the town library after Bobbi called; and that when Bobbi planted one on her, Jen was immediately swept off her feet in some sort of fairy-tale love affair. Nope. She never said any of it. According to what Jen now claimed (her fifth version), she met Bobbi over the course of a few weeks while Bobbi was dating Audrey; and then, at a party one night at Bob’s, Jen and Bobbi “hooked up” (a story that Bobbi later agreed with).
Jen talked about how difficult a life she’d had: dropping out of school, doing drugs, having sex with any boy who wanted it, moving around a lot, her mother in prison, a father unavailable to her the way she wanted. What became most interesting about this exchange was how Jen explained that she had never really felt loved or had ever gotten that parental approval, which all kids crave. She was marrying that thread of her testimony with meeting Bobbi and, for the first time in her life, feeling all those things from Bobbi.
For Jen, it was about the attention she got. Bobbi made her feel wanted and whole—and she lapped it up.
“Was it a good feeling?” Burns asked.
“Yes, it was.”
“Did there come a time when you fell
in
love with Bobbi Jo?”
“Yes, there was.”
A few questions later, after Burns introduced Bob Dow into the dynamic of Bobbi and Jen’s love affair, he asked, “All right, did Bobbi Jo and Bob have an intimate or a sexual relationship?”
“Yes, they did,” Jen said without expanding beyond how Bobbi was forced to “sexually give herself to him in order to get something in return . . . [and she would] have to sometimes give up her girlfriend and sleep with Bob to get what she wanted. . . .”
Jen said she and Bobbi had a name for this: “paying the rent.”
Bobbi sat, listening, shaking her head in confusion. She was deeply hurt by this explanation of her life with Bob. This was not the truth Bobbi had remembered living.
What in the world is Jennifer trying to prove?
Bobbi asked herself as she listened.
Here was Jen lying under oath and nobody was challenging her. Bobbi was beside herself.
How could Jennifer tell one story after another and not be held accountable? What is Mr. Matthews thinking?
“How did you feel about her having to do that?” Burns asked, referring to Bobbi allegedly selling herself to Bob.
“I didn’t think it was right.”
“Did it make you jealous of the relationship between Bobbi Jo and Bob?”
“No, it didn’t make me jealous.”
“Why not?”
“Because it made me more disgusted. . . .”
In one breath, Jen had said she fell in love with Bobbi; in another, she claimed not to feel any jealousy when a man she hated was having sex with the woman she loved.