Bad Girls (31 page)

When she returned and got out of the truck to go back inside the house, Bobbi said, she “heard one gunshot go off.”

Bobbi didn’t think too much of this sound at first. After all, they were in Texas. There was a “young couple,” Bobbi explained, “living nearby.” They liked to party a lot and do crazy things. Not to mention that some people in Texas feel it is their right to fire a weapon off in the private confines of their own property, whether allowed by the law or not.

While Bobbi walked toward the front door as she heard that gunshot, she looked up and saw Jen running out of the house.

Jen appeared alarmed, scared, in shock. Totally out of it. All she had on, Bobbi told me, was “a spaghetti-string shirt and no panties. . . .”

When Bobbi took one look at her, confusion set in. Bobbi knew something terrible had occurred. Not only was it written all over Jen’s face, but that blood on Jen’s body, which Bobbi soon noticed, meant that some kind of violent incident had occurred inside the house.

CHAPTER 39

B
OBBI WAS
“puzzled” when she saw Jen outside in front of Bob’s party house on that afternoon, moments after hearing “one gunshot” from somewhere near the house.

“Take me to my mom’s apartment,” Bobbi said Jen demanded after she walked out of the party house and approached her. She must have meant Jerry’s Spanish Trace apartment, Bobbi knew, because Kathy Jones did not have a home in town.

“What’s wrong?” Bobbi asked.

Jen “never spoke,” Bobbi later told me.

As Bobbi got closer, she saw “blood all over the side of [Jen’s] face and her hand.”

“I shot Bob,” Jen finally said.

“You
what
?” Bobbi asked. (“I was in shock,” Bobbi told me. “And I didn’t know what to do or think.”)

Bobbi’s version then skips over the next few moments and picks up at “these trashy apartments,” after Bobbi and Jen pulled up to Spanish Trace.

No sooner did they walk into the apartment than Audrey and Kathy took Jennifer “in the back room and left me standing there,” Bobbi explained. “They already had two little bags full of clothes packed.”

According to Bobbi, Kathy and Audrey were ready to leave.

After a few tense moments alone in the kitchen, Bobbi heard Audrey, Kathy, and Jen walk out of the back room and then enter the kitchen.

“Help us,” Bobbi recalled Kathy and Audrey pleading with her.

“I was looking at all three of them . . . ,” Bobbi said. “I felt stupid because I didn’t know what to . . . feel.”

Bobbi never mentioned Krystal, Audrey’s girlfriend, being at the apartment that day. The next moment, Bobbi recalled, involved all of them taking off in both vehicles, traveling away from Spanish Trace speedily. The entire focus of any conversation they had was on protecting Jen from what she had just done. Kathy and Bobbi were together inside one vehicle with Audrey. Jen followed with Krystal (who was definitely with them, whether Bobbi remembered or not).

Bobbi recalled Kathy and Audrey laying into her.

“It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault,” Kathy kept repeating, according to Bobbi. Kathy was saying that “over and over” as they raced away from the apartment. What Bobbi took from Kathy’s rant was that Bobbi should be the one to take the rap for Jen and the murder because it was Bobbi who got Jen involved with Bob Dow, to begin with. Kathy said Bobbi was supposed to be the smarter and more mature of the two. It was clear to Bobbi that Audrey and Kathy wanted to shield Jen any way they could from what was about to happen next.

“You’ll love prison because you love women,” Kathy, a veteran of years behind bars herself, pled with Bobbi. “Jennifer’s in love with you. It’s
all
your fault.”

This seems to be a believable scenario. Bobbi never came out and said it to me, but the idea was (and the known facts seem to support this) that Jen, in all of her madness and irrational thinking, believed that killing Bob was what Bobbi
wanted
her to do. Jen could have taken Bobbi’s complaining of Bob as an indication that Bobbi wanted him out of the picture—without Bobbi actually coming out and saying it. And when Bob made that pass at Jen inside his truck, an idea was born. Then when he did it again inside the house after Bobbi went off to the store, well, Jen lost it. Her entire life of pain and suffering and disappointment had come to a head. Someone had to pay.

Audrey piped in at one point, Bobbi recalled, also blaming her.

“You don’t say a word, bitch,” Bobbi snapped back at Audrey. There was still some animosity there between them, Bobbi said, because they had just broken up.

Bobbi said Kathy began bugging out, thinking back to the times she had been over to Bob’s house and had stripped for him in front of the camera. There were even things Kathy had done that she did not remember.

“I want all of his computers.... Drive back to the house,” Kathy demanded to Bobbi. “I want anything else he has, too.”

“You’ll have to kill me first, before I go back there,” Bobbi said. “You’re not taking anything from [Bob].”

“Just turn yourself in, Bobbi,” Kathy suggested, settling down. “Turn yourself in. You’ll love prison.”

Bobbi remembered driving straight from Spanish Trace to Bob’s Weatherford trailer. She did not recall stopping at Krystal’s house first. Bobbi had some money (in her wallet) at the trailer, along with her engagement ring. She knew she needed that money if they were going to take off. The entire situation, from Bobbi’s outlook, was fluid—all happening in the moment. The way Bobbi told it later, she was trying to go with the flow and figure things out as they went along. After all, Jen had just murdered a man Bobbi loved, a man Bobbi had known since she was a kid. Life had become suddenly serious, much more than drinking and drugging every day. All she had done was wake up, had a conversation with Bob, and then decided to go over and party with him.

And now Bob was dead.

In Weatherford, at what Bobbi referred to in all her letters to me as “Bob’s and my place,” she showed Kathy and Krystal (whom she brought into the narrative for the first time here) the keys to the trailer. Krystal “punched the glass out” before Bobbi even had a chance to open the door with the key.

The feel I got from Bobbi’s version was that the girls—Audrey, Kathy, and Krystal—were acting as though this was some sort of a free-for-all road trip—maybe just another day in the life of partying and taking things to the limit. The idea that Bob was dead never really came into focus for them at first. It was as if they didn’t believe it. And Jen became like a shadow: She was there in the background, but for the most part forgotten.

“What are you doing?” Bobbi yelled at Krystal. “Come on . . . stop that!” Bobbi shoved her. By Bobbi’s guesstimate, Krystal weighed about “325 pounds,” as opposed to Bobbi’s one hundred. However, Bobbi had grown up with six brothers.

“I used to fight my old man,” Bobbi said, “so I was used to physical abuse.”

Bobbi ran straight toward what she called “my bed” inside the trailer. “And my wallet was on my lil stand.” (Just as Bob Dow had promised on the phone.)

She grabbed it and then ran back into the main room of the trailer, where the rest of the women were now, Bobbi realized, rummaging through Bob’s possessions.

“Kathy, Audrey, Krystal, and Jennifer were taking Bob’s TV, and all kinds of shit,” Bobbi told me. “I was angry and confused.”

After they left the trailer, Kathy “made” Bobbi stop and pawn the TV.

From there, Bobbi’s story resembled what the girls later told police about the road trip, save for a few minor, inconsequential details. The way Bobbi portrayed her role in all of this was that she had never gone into Bob’s house after Jen killed him. She also didn’t know Jen “had sex with Bob, till she said it.”

One of the major discrepancies within the road trip narrative became what happened in Arizona. According to Bobbi, “When we arrived in Arizona, I put Kathy and Jennifer’s sister [Audrey] out. I tried to leave Jennifer, but she refused to get out of the truck.” When they got to Blythe, California, Bobbi claimed, “I called my mom, told her what happened.... I was petrified and afraid. My mamma then called police for me and told me to stay there, right where I was. When the California police surrounded us, Kathy [had already] told them I murdered [Bob] and kidnapped her daughter. It felt like they had over twenty guns to my head. They were not even going to arrest Jennifer.”

PART FOUR

MIND READERS

CHAPTER 40

O
N MAY 9, 2004, AFTER
Audrey Sawyer returned from Arizona and was able to have a quick sleep in her own bed for the first time in nearly a week, she and Kathy were summoned to the MWPD. They weren’t under arrest or in trouble (which seemed strange in the scope of this crime, seeing that both women could have been charged as accessories, or aiding and abetting fugitives). Sure, they could have been given life sentences for bad judgment; but the MWPD considered Kathy and Audrey to have gone along for the ride and guilty of nothing more than being stupid. At least that’s what Kathy and Audrey said—and, apparently, without yet speaking to Bobbi or Jen, the MWPD was not questioning any of it.

Captain Mike McAllester asked the women—after they had both given their statements—to help him find the weapon that, according to Krystal, had been tossed out the window of the truck as they drove down the road out of Mineral Wells.

“I know where it is,” Kathy said. She explained.

“No,” Audrey interrupted. “You’re wrong, Ma. It’s not there.
I
know where it is.”

McAllester led them to his cruiser.

Finding a weapon tossed out of a moving vehicle window was probably a long shot, McAllester knew. The gun could be anywhere. On top of that, a couple of kids or someone collecting cans and bottles could have stumbled upon it and taken it home.

They pulled over to where Audrey remembered—“Between a mailbox and a fence post”—and McAllester parked his vehicle.

“Across the street,” Audrey explained.

The grass had just been cut. McAllester found his way over to the side of the road and—wouldn’t you know it—there was what had been described to him as “the murder weapon” staring back up at him.

CHAPTER 41

B
RIAN BOETZ NEEDED
to head out to Blythe, California, to pick up his two murder suspects, separate them, and get each to lock down a statement of what happened in Mineral Wells. Bobbi and Jen were being held at the Riverside County Jail in Riverside, California. The girls’ arrest took place at 3:45
A.M
. behind a pool hall in Blythe, after Bobbi called home and gave them up. According to a report filed by the Blythe Police Department, the girls had not been surrounded by a SWAT team of cops, armed with cocked and loaded weapons pointed at their heads. Sergeant Angel Ramirez’s brief four-paragraph report was straightforward, as those clerical types of law enforcement things go. The Blythe PD had received information that Smith and Jones were in the Blythe area and “were wanted for homicide out of Texas.” Ramirez was given a description of the girls and the vehicle and, along with one other officer, went out to “supervise and assist with the arrest.” There was no showdown at the O.K. Corral, no foot chase through the desert, no firefight. The girls were actually sleeping (or half asleep) when the cops arrived. They put up no fight. In his report, Ramirez never mentioned how many officers were involved in the arrest.

Ramirez and another officer searched the area around Bob’s vehicle, as well as inside, to see what they could come up with.

“I ripped the pawn ticket up and tossed it in the parking lot,” Bobbi told one of the officers after being asked if they had any weapons.

Sure enough, after a quick search, all the pieces were scattered about the parking lot where the truck was parked.

I collected the torn pieces of paper,
Ramirez reported.

The pieces of paper were not that pawn ticket, however. They were pieces of paper that were actually part of a handwritten letter and a Western Union receipt.

Jen and Bobbi were locked up, Bobbi said, in a “restroom for men” that night. Bobbi was told by the Blythe PD that “they had nowhere to take us, so we stayed in that nasty restroom.”

The following morning, a bus headed out to the local jail.

“They put us in the front cage,” Bobbi explained.

The bus was full of men (on the other side of the cage, in the back of the bus) heading out to various local prisons.

Bobbi was handcuffed to the fence and behind her back, her feet shackled to the floor. Jen wasn’t handcuffed at all, Bobbi recalled. The men in the back were whistling and calling to Jen with sexually aggressive remarks.

“She thought it was cute,” Bobbi remembered. “I was in total shock.”

As they stopped at the prison and the men were led out, as each passed by Bobbi and Jen, Bobbi was the target of a slur of some sort, she felt, because of the way she looked.

“Pussy sucker,” said one man, who then spit on Bobbi.

“Dyke bitch,” said another.

Several more men walked by and said nothing, but they spit on Bobbi.

This was all new to Bobbi. She was terrified. She had never been in a situation so humiliating and seemingly barbaric.

“I had spit all over my hair, in my ear, on the side of my face by the end of it,” Bobbi said. “Jennifer didn’t even wipe it off for me—she turned her back, like she didn’t know what was going on.”

Brian Boetz took
his colleague, Detective Penny Judd, and headed out to Blythe, a twelve-hundred-mile, eighteen-hour drive (without stops) from Mineral Wells. They left at 6:00
P.M
. on May 8, knowing that the girls would eventually be arrested. By ten-thirty the next morning, May 9, they were at the Buckeye, Arizona, PD, picking up that pair of videotaped interviews that Buckeye authorities had recorded with Kathy and Audrey.