Bad Girls (40 page)

“No, I was not.”

“Weren’t outside?”

“No, I was not.”

“Weren’t peeking in the window?”

“No.”

“So you don’t have any personal knowledge of what happened exactly? You just know what people said?”

“Just what Jennifer and Bobbi Jo said.”

“And that story has been changed around, right?”

“That’s right.”

While sitting at his table in front of the witness stand, Matthews took a moment. Then: “Pass the witness.”

The judge explained a few legal matters to Krystal Bailey and released her from the stand.

Kathy Jones was up next.

CHAPTER 59

K
ATHY JONES HAD
lived a hard life. There was no way for Mike Burns to put a shine on what had been decades of drugs, jail, and personal problems. Kathy had done time on a litany of charges and had been sentenced to what could be termed as nothing less than perpetual parole. Kathy had a street-smart Texas toughness about her. It was, at times, hard to follow her speech because she bounced around so much when talking. She spoke fast, and she spoke with a significant Texas brogue.

Because Kathy had been busted for everything under the sun, Burns had her admit it all to the jury. In addition, there was also no hiding the fact that Kathy was, at the time her testimony was being given, residing in the Hobby Unit, in Marlin, part of the Texas State Prison. She was under lock and key for violating her parole as part of an eight-year sentence, which she had received for robbery. She was slated to be released in just a few days, however, on December 1, 2005.

The most important part of Kathy’s testimony came when Burns asked her what happened on the day the girls came bursting into the apartment.

Kathy explained.

“Okay, well,” Burns said in a strange choice of words, “what did you hear who say what?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Kathy answered. “I can’t recall who said what first. But ‘We killed Bob.’ And . . . and Jennifer was saying that she was pretty upset.”

In her only statement to the MWPD, Kathy had stated the following: “Jennifer and Bobbi Jo came to the apartment.... They both ran into the apartment and said that they had killed Bob. Jennifer said that she had killed him, and Bobbi said ‘they’ killed him.”

To the jury, Kathy described Jennifer’s demeanor on that day as “uncontrollable . . . shaking, crying. . . .” Whereas, Kathy said, “Bobbi Jo didn’t . . . She was just kind of, like, it was just . . . like, excited, adrenaline rush, I guess. I don’t know how to—not showing, you know, no emotion.”

“No emotion” could be easily confused with disbelief or shock. Bobbi wondered why no one was challenging all these women coming in and saying she didn’t care about what Jen had done to a man she arguably loved like a father. Or that she was in total disbelief and astonishment that Jen had actually murdered Bob.

She had just killed [Bob]. . . . I couldn’t believe what was happening.

Mike Burns had Kathy explain the road trip, beginning with robbing Bob Dow’s trailer, and ending with how they went their separate ways in Arizona. What became clear in Kathy’s version of what the girls had said about the actual murder while on the road was how fluid and ever-changing their stories became over time. Jen and Bobbi had told several different versions of what had happened; each time they talked about it, a new alteration was inserted. Kathy, Audrey, and Krystal were never certain of what happened to Bob, or who actually pulled the trigger.

What might have hurt Bobbi was an exchange Kathy and Burns had near the end of Kathy’s direct testimony. Burns asked about any statements Bobbi had made during the trip. Out of the blue, Kathy said something she had never told the police or anyone else: “What I recall Bobbi Jo saying while we was in the truck, she let me know, she said, ‘I brainwashed your daughter.’ And she said, ‘She’ll do anything.’ You know, it’s
anything
—Bobbi Jo knew that anything she told Jennifer to do, Jennifer would do, or just asked.”

Bobbi dropped her head.
What the hell?
She couldn’t believe it. It was something, as she recalled, she had never said. Why should a jury believe Kathy, a career criminal—the mother of the woman who had murdered Bob? She had partied with Bob, right beside two of her own daughters! She’d even had sex with Bob . . . on camera. There were several photographs and films left behind to prove it. But maybe most important, this was the first time Kathy Jones had ever recalled this conversation (which she said was between her and Bobbi, with no one else around).

Jim Matthews went right for Kathy Jones’s jugular. He tried to prove that, despite how sure she was of herself now, she had a hard time in the past—much like her daughter—keeping her stories straight.

“Okay, Miss Jones,” Matthews began. “Let’s talk about y’all . . . when y’all were riding in the truck and the gun got tossed out the window. Do you recall making a statement to the Arizona Police [Department] about that incident?”

“Yes, I believe I did.”

Matthews and Kathy talked about the statement being videotaped.

“Do you recall that you told the Arizona police that it was
Jennifer
that wiped off the fingerprints [from] the gun?”

“No.”

“You didn’t tell them that?”

“I don’t recall that.”

On the videotape, Kathy told the Arizona Police Department that Jen explained to her how she had wiped off the weapon; and while Jen said it, Kathy thought,
Oh, good—at least they won’t get Jennifer’s fingerprints off it
.

“You don’t remember telling the Arizona police that?” Matthews asked.

Kathy thought about it. “I might have said something like that.”

The point was that Kathy Jones couldn’t recall a lot of what she had said. Thus, based on that and her criminal history, her testimony shouldn’t be taken at all seriously. How could jurors be expected to believe one statement and not the other? Here, clearly, Kathy had thought she said one thing, but she had said something entirely different.

There was some discussion about the videotape and authenticating it, but Matthews’s point had been made.

The day ended with Kathy on the stand.

On the following morning, November 30, 2005, Kathy Jones came in for a few brief moments, answered several inconsequential questions, and was shipped back to her prison cell.

Detective Brian Boetz was next. Boetz walked jurors through the crime scene and how the MWPD came up with Bobbi as a suspect based on that interview with Dorothy Smith. For anyone seated in the courtroom, it might have seemed that Mike Burns skipped over the entire investigation portion of the case—and for good reason. There were no phone records to discuss. There were only a handful of interviews conducted with the main players. And there was no ticking-clock chase to track Jen and Bobbi down, although they had been branded “armed and dangerous” in every APB that had gone out. It was as if the MWPD found a body, felt they had their killer, and then sat back and waited for the girls to emerge. In the scope of murder investigations, it was a rather open-and-shut case. To the MWPD, there were no other suspects beyond Bobbi at first—and then Jen, after Krystal Bailey returned to Mineral Wells and gave her statement.

Quite shockingly, Burns had Boetz read Bobbi’s first statement, which the state, the MWPD, and Bobbi had rejected—all of whom had admitted at one time or another that it was inaccurate and blanketed with lies. Burns himself had called the document “hogwash” during Jen’s court case.

At one point, Burns asked Boetz what he did after they got back from Blythe and he decided Jen and Bobbi’s first statements did not mesh with the crime scene.

“We made an appointment with a polygraph examiner in Fort Worth.”

“So, did you take the defendant to Fort Worth?” Burns asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“So what happened when you got to Fort Worth?”

Boetz explained how the girls “broke down” and “started crying” and claimed they had been lying, but now they wanted to tell the truth.

The Behavioral Measures & Forensic Services institute, where the polygraphs had been scheduled, is located in Dallas, not Fort Worth. (Boetz made a point to correct this later when I asked him about it. And yet, in a court of law, on the stand, Boetz or Burns could not get this simple fact right.)

Then Burns had Boetz read Bobbi’s second statement. In that statement, Bobbi told a story of her mother going into the house with her and Jen after they went back to Bob’s on the day of the murder. She also said Jen admitted killing Bob after they arrived at the Spanish Trace Apartments. And when Kathy Jones stood in the kitchen and asked why, Jen responded, “Because I’m tired of what he is doing to Bobbi and the rest of these little girls.”

Motive.

Implicating herself in Bob’s murder, essentially the only evidence this second statement produced, came when Bobbi said she had asked Jen, “Is he dead?” And Jen responded, “Yes.” To which, Bobbi said in that second statement, “Make sure.”

“So the defendant told you in that [second] statement that she broke into the green trunk?” Burns asked Boetz.

“That’s correct.”

“And that she broke into it and obtained a twenty-two pistol out of that trunk?”

“Yes, sir.”

After taking those second statements from the girls, Boetz said, the MWPD believed they had a solid case of murder against not only Jen, but now Bobbi, based on those few lines in Bobbi’s and Jen’s second statements.

“Aside from a few other things, did that pretty much complete your investigation?” Burns concluded.

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you do when your investigation was completed?”

“I submitted the case to the DA’s office.”

CHAPTER 60

J
IM MATTHEWS FOCUSED HIS
cross-examination of Brian Boetz on the trunk, asking, “So you have no idea who pried [the trunk] open?”

“That’s correct,” Boetz admitted (contradicting his prior testimony).

Matthews established how there was no forensic evidence pointing to anyone in particular as the person responsible for prying open the trunk.

“Okay, so it’s possible then,” Matthews pondered, “that it could have been pried open by someone
other
than Bobbi Jo?”

“It’s possible,” Boetz answered. “But Bobbi Jo said in her second statement that she pried it open.”

(Actually, Bobbi said in that statement that she “broke into [it].”)

Matthews had Boetz explain how Bobbi became a suspect in the actual shooting based on the statements from the Cruzes and Dorothy Smith, adding, “And in looking at that information now, that absolutely is
not
the truth, is it?”

“No, sir.”

Boetz said he did not believe Bobbi’s or Jen’s first statements, but he did believe their second statements.

Matthews asked, “Seems like in Bobbi Jo’s statement, you read where Jennifer Jones and Mr. Dow apparently was engaged in—he was performing oral sex on her, Bobbi Jo walked in the room, and Jennifer turned to Bobbi Jo and said, ‘Get the [heck] out of here’?”

“Yes, sir,” Boetz said.

“So that sounded like Jennifer was telling Bobbi Jo what to do?” Matthews suggested.

“I suppose.”

An interesting exchange between Matthews and Boetz came at one point when Matthews asked Boetz about his interview with Dorothy Smith, Bobbi’s grandmother, and the Cruzes. Without perhaps realizing it, Boetz brought out an important piece of exculpatory evidence, proving how Bobbi had lied in her statements to police, perhaps revealing why Mike Burns had not called Dorothy Smith to the witness stand.

“Okay, and Bobbi Jo told them [the Cruzes and Dorothy], apparently according to your conversation with [them], ‘I shot Bob . . . ,’” Matthews said.

“Yes,” Boetz responded.

“And looking at that information now, that absolutely is not the truth, is it?”

“No, sir.”

Mike Burns called Captain Mike McAllester and Dr. Joni McClain (who was not the ME who conducted the autopsy on Bob Dow, but managed the person who did), and both explained their roles. Jim Matthews, then, did not question them at any length or with any obvious agenda, and the state rested.

In total, Mike Burns had called seven witnesses, none of whom gave him that thunderous, slam-the-book-on-the-table piece of devastating evidence to bury Bobbi and prove she had masterminded what Burns projected to the jury as a diabolical plot to murder Bob Dow so Bobbi and Jen could ride off into the sunset together.

After hearing the state’s case, jurors had to wonder where the rest of it was. If Dorothy Smith’s and Richard and Kathy Cruz’s original statements to police had been so revealing and incriminating, why hadn’t Burns called them? Likewise, if Bobbi’s mother could verify parts of the girls’ second statements (because she had been there for most of that day, save for the murder), why hadn’t the state called
her
?

During Matthews’s cross-examinations of Brian Boetz and Mike McAllester, it became clear there was zero forensic evidence linking Bobbi to Bob Dow’s murder. And even the green trunk, which Bobbi, in her second statement, admitted breaking into to retrieve a gun, did not produce any fingerprint evidence that Bobbi had ever touched it. All of the forensic evidence the prosecution had was Jen’s, which included blood on the back windowpane, blood in Bob’s room, and the bodily fluids found on Bob Dow.