“Vic’s?”
Was it blood spatter from the gunshot wounds?
Boetz and McAllester didn’t think so.
It appeared to Boetz that whoever removed the pictures had cut himself or herself during that process, or was bleeding before doing so.
Over near the northeast corner of the room was a green chest—like a pirate’s—sitting on the floor,
BOBBY’S
was written on it. Boetz bent down and had a look. It seemed that someone had popped the chest open. Wearing latex gloves, Boetz had a look inside.
Later, Boetz said, “We found some ammunition and a gun.”
CHAPTER 4
J
ENNIFER JONES WAS
three years old when her mother, Kathy Jones, moved out of the house she kept with Jen, her three daughters, and her husband, Jerry Jones. It was 1988. Jen didn’t see Kathy all that much, to begin with. As it happened, Kathy had begrudgingly turned (according to an article published many years later in the
Texas Monthly,
several police reports, and Kathy herself, testifying in court and admitting in an interview with me) to “cleaning other peoples’ homes and working as a prostitute” for cash to feed a growing and ferociously intensifying crack cocaine habit.
In January 2001, several weeks before Jen turned sixteen, she was sitting and thinking about her mother and the times they never had together. Yet the stories Jen had heard about her mother throughout the years—and the fact that most of the time when Jen ever saw her mother, the visits took place inside a local prison on Sunday afternoons—were grating on her young psyche, trying to convince her that she was that same person she didn’t want to become.
In a rather open and adolescently honest journal entry as a sixteen-year-old, Jen talked about spending the night with a boy, saying:
But we didn’t do anything.
Why hadn’t she slept with him?
Because . . . I didn’t want to,
she wrote.
Without truly understanding the situation, Jen was trying to convince herself that she would never be like her mother—a woman she had mostly heard wild stories about while growing up. She
could
say no. She was trying desperately to ward off—even fight—what she viewed as a demon plaguing her: that dreaded cycle of dysfunction. Jen had been hardwired since the time she could walk to live life on terms she saw fit. But here she was, denying herself, and trying to turn a new leaf.
When she got home the next morning after being with the boy, one of Jen’s sisters approached her.
“You’re turning out just like Mom,” Jen’s older and more experienced half sister, Audrey Sawyer, the offspring from a different father, said.
“What?”
“You go out and you don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”
Audrey explained later that she was genuinely worried about her little sister. Audrey claimed she had been a mother to Jen for a lot of years, being the older sibling and watching over her, but Jen didn’t want to hear it anymore. There was no way, she told herself, she was going to wind up like Kathy Jones, the mother she never had. Jen was determined not to allow that to happen. Sure, Mineral Wells wasn’t Dallas or Forth Worth, and there wasn’t much to offer a girl with no grades to speak of and no real skills. Still, Jen had dreams of leaving town someday. Maybe moving to Washington State. Maybe meeting someone and enjoying a middle-class life. She had once said she liked reading
Better Homes and Gardens
magazine. She’d browse through the magazines and picture herself in one of those plush homes that had a lawn like carpet. Maybe a husband. A dog. Some kids, too. That perfect life set up in the magazine wasn’t a pipe dream or a fairy tale to Jen; it was doable. She believed all she had to do to get it was to
want
it bad enough.
I’m not going to turn out like my mom,
Jennifer wrote in her journal on January 22, 2001.
As each day passed and the prison kept that revolving door well greased for Kathy—with charges ranging from shoplifting to driving without and/or with an invalid license (several times), registration and insurance, possession of a controlled substance, unlawfully carrying a weapon, assault on a family member, theft, DUI (several times), prostitution, and on and on—Jen was determined not to turn out like the woman who never raised her.
When Jen’s father, Jerry Jones, would try to persuade Kathy to return to the house after another round of ripping and running (hanging out with the crowd, drugging and drinking), which took her away for weeks or months at a time, Jen wondered why her father would go to such desperate lengths. Did they really need Kathy in order to live their lives? Jerry wasn’t a candidate for Father of the Year, by any means. However, he was doing the best he could with what were four children—all girls—and an absent wife. As the story went (and we should take these anecdotes here with the Jones family as just that: their version of the truth), in order to watch the children whenever Kathy decided to end up in jail or head off on a bender, Jerry had to quit his job as an oilman. He took on being a local handyman, Jen told a reporter, where he would fix doors and windows and do odd jobs for locals. He even started to clear rocks from fields for neighbors and businesses to earn extra money. He supposedly hunted for family food (deer and other game) and brought home produce from his parents’ garden.
Family looked on from the sidelines, helping where they could—worried, of course, about the children. But it wasn’t easy.
“Everyone
except
Jerry tried to keep Kathy away,” said one family source.
None of this was quite enough to replace for Jen what she lacked most: a female figure to give her that maternal advice and guidance as she needed it, someone to discipline her the way she needed punishing. Jerry had his hands full with these kids (two of whom weren’t his by blood). He couldn’t keep tabs on all of them all of the time; and the older they got, the more freedom they wanted and were allowed. So before Jen had even celebrated her seventeenth birthday, she’d given in and tried dope—the same poison that had buried its claws deep into her mother. On February 5, 2001, Jen wrote about the experience and how much she enjoyed it, calling the night out “a blast.” She said she had “tried weed” for the “first time” and “got high.” It “felt OK.” It took her out of the moment, allowed her to forget about her shitty life. She even joked about how high she got:
I couldn’t stand. Then I couldn’t hold my eyelids up.
There was a touch of uncertainty in this particular entry, as if Jen felt guilty about giving in and stepping over to the other side, which she had sometimes claimed she wanted no part of. It was a strong feeling, a magnetic pull. Not so much experiencing shame, but Jen was “disappointed” in her behavior and ultimately for being so weak. She expected more out of herself in one respect; yet, in another entry, she wrote how she reasoned:
As long as I feel good, I don’t care.
She talked about how one boy wanted her “for the sex.” She wrote,
I care, but then I don’t.
On February 5, 2001, Jen did not come home. But (like her mom might have done) she did return the following day. Jerry Jones was furious at his daughter for staying out all night without calling. He felt Jen slipping from his grasp. In all of Jerry’s anger and frustration to control a child who was well on her way to becoming uncontrollable, Jerry—without realizing it or wanting to—said the wrong thing.
It started as Jerry gave Jen the silent treatment on the day she returned. This was his way of showing Jennifer how upset he was.
Jen’s response (in her journal) was rather emphatic :
I don’t want to hear his voice anyway.
She then wrote how disgusted she felt after finding pictures in her father’s high-school diploma, which she had come upon by mistake inside Jerry’s nightstand.
And he doesn’t want to lose me,
she added, not going into detail about what had made her think so differently about her father.
Finally Jerry broke his silence that day and spoke to Jen, preaching perhaps the wrong message, at the wrong time: “I’m about to not care if you come back anymore!”
CHAPTER 5
B
RIAN BOETZ WAS
not the typical small-town detective you’d expect to find in a relatively unknown Texas town like Mineral Wells. When he was a boy, Boetz did not necessarily receive a “calling” to become a cop. His uncle had been a sheriff in Deming, New Mexico. Anytime Boetz heard his uncle talk about “the job,” Boetz’s ears perked up.
“I’m not saying he talked me into becoming a police officer,” Boetz told me, “but anytime he talked about it, the stories piqued my interest.”
It sounded thrilling and adventurous, which is one reason why lots of young boys are attracted to the game of cops and robbers. There’s a certain hubristic sense of self in heeding what is a call at a young age to become a lawman. You want to do good in the world, sure; but you also feel the need to feed a certain part of the ego that thrives on outdoing yourself or having the spotlight on you. For Brian Boetz, though, that was never part of it. He wasn’t so much interested in the limelight as he was with figuring out puzzles.
There was no doubt, he said, that once he decided to take the test and become a cop, “From day one, I knew I wanted to be involved with criminal investigations. When I started in Mineral Wells in 1995, I knew that I wanted to be an investigator.”
It took Boetz five years of patrol work, learning the ropes, paying his dues, before he took the detective’s test and earned a position as an investigator in the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the MWPD. It’s fair to say this is a coveted spot—that is, considering there are only four investigatory positions to go around in the MWPD, within a force of twenty-eight sworn officers, including the chief.
The worst cases to get handed, Boetz said, were “sexual assaults involving children. And we have our fair share of them.”
One of the most gruesome murders Boetz ever investigated took place inside a small convenience store.
“We get there and the female clerk was nearly decapitated. The killer used a machete. And you know, all for a little over a hundred dollars out of the cash register.”
Cops like Boetz will agree that it’s those types of brutally senseless cases that have become the norm in police work. On average, about two-thirds of murders are easily solvable. In 2004, for example, there were approximately sixteen thousand murders in the United States, about one-third of which went cold, or unsolved. For a police department the size of Mineral Wells, however, there was rarely ever an actual “caper” to dig into as an investigator.
But here it was, May 5, 2004, and Detective Boetz found himself involved in what appeared to be a whodunit. It was that blood on the wall that bothered Boetz most as he and Captain Mike McAllester surveyed the homestead of Bob Dow’s mother—plus, the idea that Bob Dow was killed at such close range.
He knew his killer,
Boetz thought. “That was clear to us almost immediately.”
The scene screamed of such a personal crime.
Before long, realizing there wasn’t much to do inside the bedroom where Bob Dow had been slain, Boetz, who was now the supervising officer at the scene, looked on as crime scene investigators (CSIs) tagged evidence inside the home with little yellow placards (markers). It wasn’t about looking for that one hair or cigarette butt, maybe a bullet casing left behind by the killer. Evidence like that would help, obviously. However, most homicide scenes did not reveal that sort of Hollywood-type evidence, at least not at first blush. The job was not like
CSI
or
Law & Order
. Those TV dramas tried hard to get it right, and sometimes they did. But investigating the type of homicide the MWPD was looking at on this night was more about putting the pieces together, step-by-step, analyzing what evidence they uncovered, putting boots to the ground, and taking the case to the street.
“It’s whatever evidence inside the house we thought, as we looked around and studied the crime scene,” Boetz explained, “that was pertinent (or maybe not) to the crime.”
Boetz and his team walked around and studied the place, especially inside the room where the murder, clearly, had occurred. They looked for subtle hints of what happened. Was it a home invasion? Was the murder a consequence of a burglary gone wrong? Revenge? A love affair? An unpaid debt? A bad drug deal? All of those were possibilities, Boetz knew; each of these would have to be explored on some level. Then again, the evidence, as each piece was collected and analyzed, would determine if the murder actually had occurred in the bedroom, and if the shooter left behind anything to place him or her at the scene.
A smart, well-schooled investigator did two things in this situation: He left every option open and investigated the case until he was absolutely certain he had his man.
McAllester called the district attorney (DA), Ira Mercer, and asked him if he could get over to the scene ASAP.
“I’ll be there in a few,” Mercer said.
It was smart to have the theoretical prosecuting DA at the scene, directing traffic, so to speak, watching over the processing of the scene. It was a good way to head off any future problems. This type of murder was not common in Mineral Wells, and policies and procedures were in place to make certain a thorough, flawless investigation ensued.
Not long after Ira Mercer arrived, Judge Bobby Hart walked through the door. A passerby would think there was a party going on at the house, for every law enforcement official in town wanted in on what was sure to be the town’s most sensational murder case in some years. But that wasn’t the purpose of the judge’s visit. Hart was there to pronounce the victim dead and order an immediate autopsy or not.
Again, procedure. Dotting the
i
’s and crossing the
t
’s.
After McAllester brought the DA and judge up to speed, he told Boetz he was taking off. Richard and Kathy Cruz were still outside, waiting. McAllester had spoken to them briefly and gotten some information, but he needed to get the couple down to the MWPD so they could be officially interviewed.