by Burl Barer
According to Corry, the notice of the paternity hearing will be sent to the address the woman has provided. “The court does not check on whether that address is accurate, or [if the woman] has, or ever had, any relationship to the putative father.” When the man, who probably never received the notice, doesn’t appear, the court will make a default judgment. “At a minimum,” Corry said, “this is happening to thousands of men a month in the United States.”
Rhonda Glover had a baby boy, and named him Ronnie. “Jimmy was thrilled,” Navarro said. “They still didn’t get married, and the baby didn’t tie her down. It didn’t work that way. She used the baby as an excuse to double and triple up on the money.”
Rhonda wanted a new home in Houston; Jimmy bought her a home in Houston. Becoming bored, she then wanted a new home in Lakeway; Jimmy bought her a home in Lakeway. Bored again, she wanted a boat. Stan Wiener, a good friend of Jimmy Joste’s, took her out to buy a boat with Joste’s money. After she concluded the transaction, Rhonda said, “I want to name my boat.”
When Wiener asked her what name she wanted inscribed on the craft, she readily replied, “P.O.P.”
“Stan asked her what P.O.P. stood for,” recalled Navarro, “and she told him, ‘You boys still don’t get it. Power of the Pussy.’ That pretty much says it all. And yes, she named the boat P.O.P.“
Rhonda, twenty years younger, was bigger and stronger than Jimmy Joste. “This girl was extremely physical. She was a thousand times more aggressive than Jimmy. He was the ultimate pacifist. In fact, he was a noncombatant in the war, and worked in the medical corps.”
Joste’s reputation as a peacemaker was so well-established that his pals gave him the nickname “Preacher.” The reason for the religious appellative, according to Navarro, was because anytime an argument broke out, it was Jimmy Joste who intervened, calling for cool heads to prevail, and for the abandonment of anger and fisticuffs. “He was,” insisted Rocky Navarro, “the most loving, caring guy in the world.”
There was, sadly, one period of extended silence in the Joste/Navarro friendship. “One day I had a party for my children’s birthday,” Navarro explained. “I invited both Jimmy and Rhonda to the party, and I had just put in a swimming pool at my home here in Lake Travis. The party was breaking up, Rhonda was floating in the water, and Jimmy was here with his son, and I was dating a girl at the time, and my mother and sister are all here. Anyway, it was about midnight, and folks are kind of moving back into the house, getting ready to go. Well, Rhonda calls me over to the pool and says, ‘Rocky, come in the pool and fuck me.’ I was pretty stunned. I said, ‘I beg your pardon,’ and she kept at it. ‘C’mon, get in the water and fuck me!’
“'Are you crazy?'” responded Rocky. “'My kids are here, your son is here, my mom and sister and girlfriend are all here, and Jimmy is here, and you’re asking me to fuck you? You must be out of your mind.'” “'Oh, don’t be scared,'” said Rhonda. “'You can fuck me. All his friends have.'”
“'No way,'” said Navarro. “'You need to get out of the pool and go home. You gotta leave.'”
The following week Navarro received troubling telephone calls. “My mom called me from Houston, and my sister did too, and the message was that at the next kids’ party, which was coming up in a couple weeks, they didn’t want me to invite anyone other than immediate family. They didn’t want to have to deal with people drinking and stuff like that. What they meant is that they didn’t want to have to deal with Rhonda Glover.”
Navarro had already invited Jimmy, Rhonda and little Ronnie to the upcoming pool party in honor of his other child’s birthday. “Both my kids were born in August,” Navarro said, “and I already extended invitations that I had to take back. ”
Rocky arranged to visit Jimmy and Rhonda at a local restaurant. “We are so excited about coming to your house again,” said Rhonda.
“Guys,” Rocky told them, “we decided not to have a party this time. We’re just going to have a family deal. We are not having a party this time.”
Rhonda broke out screaming and crying. “You just don’t want me there, Rocky, I can tell. You just don’t want to have me.”
“Jimmy was looking down at the table,” Rocky remembered, “because he’s embarrassed. He’s my good friend, and here he is caught in the middle.”
Rhonda continued crying, insisting it was all about her. “I told both of them that really the party was canceled, it was a family thing, and nothing personal against her, her son or Jimmy. Now that wasn’t one hundred percent true, but because it was going to be all family, I wouldn’t be having other people there either.”
Jimmy Joste, ever the peacemaker, looked at Rocky Navarro with compassionate understanding. “Don’t worry about it, Rocky,” he said, “I’ll calm her down. Everything will be okay.” It wasn’t. Rocky Navarro didn’t hear from Jimmy Joste for an entire year. “Not a word. Nothing. No returned calls. It was as if he vanished off the planet. ”
It was a full year later that Rocky Navarro got a phone call from a landscape company, the Big Red Sun. “Mr. Navarro, we have a delivery to make for you from a Mr. Jimmy Joste. It’s a gift. He gave us your phone number, but we need your address for delivery.”
“A gift? What is it?”
“It’s a plant,” he was told, “in a planter.” Navarro provided the address, and the next day the “plant” was delivered. “They brought this great big huge five-foot-wide metal saucer. It’s a fabulous self-contained cactus garden with rocks and cactus and succulents. It took five of us to move it out by the back pool. I mean, this thing must have cost between two and three thousand dollars. I was stunned. I asked them to tell me about Jimmy buying it for me, and they said that Mr. Joste came into their store, saw this thing and said that it would be perfect in one of his friend’s houses. He paid them for it and told them to deliver it to me.”
Not having heard a word from his friend in many months, Rocky immediately began calling Jimmy. “I called and called, and finally he answered. I said, ‘Jimmy, what are you doing spending that kind of money on me?'”
True to his character, Jimmy Joste had an honest answer. “Rocky, I haven’t been a good friend. I haven’t spoken to you in a year. I haven’t been around, and I just felt bad about it, and I wanted to send you a gift.”
“Listen, Jimmy,” said Navarro, “let me take you to dinner. Let me take you for drinks. Let me take you for lunch. ”
“No, no,” said Joste. “That’s okay. You don’t have to do that.”
Rocky, however, wanted a renewed relationship with his best friend, and finally caught up with him in person, offering Joste a free lunch or a round of drinks. “I’m not drinking at all,” replied Joste, “no drinks. ”
This was in the early afternoon, around two o’clock on July 20. “I believe it was a Tuesday,” said Navarro. “I was trying to quit smoking, and I wanted to have my last cigarette where it was cool, because it was hot outside. So we went to the Bellagio on Ben White Boulevard. I ordered beer, he ordered water. I had my last cigarette, and then we left.”
The Bellagio was not a place previously frequented by Navarro and Joste. “In fact, we had never been there together before. We went there because I was looking to have a cigarette in the air-conditioning, and in Austin that is pretty hard to find. Anyway, we left, drove around and talked for a bit, and then we decided on lunch, but nothing fancy.”
“Let’s just go to Central Market for lunch,” suggested Joste. “You know, we can check out all the divorced mothers with their kids, and you can tell me about all your girlfriends.”
Rocky asked Jimmy about Rhonda. “For the first time,” said Rocky, “Jimmy didn’t want to say a word about her. Not a word. He flat out told me that he didn’t want to talk about Rhonda Glover.”
Joste and Glover hadn’t lived together for several months. Rhonda moved out of Jimmy’s house in the Park at Travis County, a gated subdivision, and had taken off first to Houston, and then to Kansas.
“Jimm
y said that he didn’t want to talk about himself or his life at all—he only wanted to hear about my adventures. By that, he meant my adventures with women. As I said before, that was the common bond of our friendship—our addiction to sexually incredible yet highly controlling women.”
3
Rocky Navarro and Jimmy Joste were again the best of friends, sharing the sunny summer day of Austin, Texas, strolling Central Market, sampling the food, admiring the pleasant view of diverse femininity. Rocky bought Jimmy a salad for $5, and felt guilty for spending so little on a man who gave him a $2,000 gift. “I told him,” Navarro remembers, “'A five-dollar salad isn’t enough. C’mon, let me take you out to dinner.'”
“Tell you what,” said Joste, “take me home, let me shower and change my clothes. You do the same, and then give me a call when you’re ready to leave the house. You pick me up, and we’ll go out to dinner.” Rocky dropped him off, went home, got ready and placed the first of numerous calls to Jimmy’s cell phone.
“I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on,” said Navarro. “We made plans, and I was expecting Jimmy to answer on the first ring, or at least the second call, if he were in the shower or something. Well, I kept calling and calling, and never got an answer. I mean, what the hell? So I must have called Jimmy twenty to thirty times over the next three days, trying to take him out to dinner. I didn’t get a phone call back until Sunday, and that was the cops telling me that Jimmy was dead.”
That was the last Rocky Navarro heard from the Austin Police Department. “I guess they didn’t need me to tell them anything. They must have had plenty of evidence or information. I mean, if they needed to know more about Jimmy, the guy to ask is Danny Davis. Jimmy and Danny have been buddies since grade school.”
Davis was going into sixth grade at Spring Branch Elementary School in Houston, Texas, when he met Jimmy Joste. “He was going into eighth grade for the second time,” explained Davis, “and driving to school in a yellow Corvette. We could drive to school when we were fourteen. He was older than the rest of us. Well, we have been friends ever since we met.”
Best buddies through school, the two boys matured into men with common interests and shared business ventures. “We formed two companies together,” confirmed Davis. “The first one was in 1980—Texas Ranger Oil and Gas. The second one we formed in 1990—Energy Discovery Group.” When the oil and gas industry fell on hard times in the mid-1980s, Davis and Joste went broke almost immediately.
“It was a rough time,” said Davis, “but we recovered. As for Jimmy, it was the late 1980s and early 1990s when he pioneered horizontal drilling, which is now used worldwide. Jimmy started drilling wells again, and making a decent amount of money.”
Joste’s horizontal-drilling efforts were both financially lucrative and of lasting impact on the industry. He and his partner, Ted Garner, came up with the original idea in 1985, and they had the rights to this technology for all of Texas. The partners sold their rights for a substantial profit about five years later.
“When Jimmy told me that Ted Garner and he came up with the technique of horizontal drilling, I didn’t believe him,” recalled Rhonda Glover. “I contacted Tom Johnston with BecField in Houston. He confirmed that Jimmy was telling me the truth, and that horizontal drilling was really a major breakthrough. ”
“As you can imagine, Jimmy rebounded quite well,” recalled Davis. “When Joste had money, Rhonda had money—Jimmy’s money. Jimmy was always buying her cars. She owned a Cadillac. Jimmy bought Rhonda a Cadillac Allanté. He took the money out of the Energy Discovery account, the company we had together. ”
Rhonda enjoyed the Cadillac, and when Davis met the couple at the Houstonian Hotel, she was behind the wheel. “They were checking into the Houstonian for the weekend,” said Davis. “He would stay there, and he would stay at other places. Even though he had a place to live, Jimmy would check into a hotel for a few days. ”
Stepping out of the Cadillac, Rhonda proudly said to Davis, “Look what Jimmy bought me.”
Glover had often said that Jimmy Joste was broke when they started dating, but Joste’s business associates placed the years of Joste’s financial difficulties at a much earlier date. “Off and on through the ‘80s and ‘90s,” said businessman Robert Dillon, “Jimmy had dealings that put him back on track to recovery. In fact, Jimmy was doing okay in the early 1990s, plus he had the Joste family resources.
“Jimmy’s family owned property just down the street from where I lived,” recalled Dillon. Jimmy Joste’s father was Martin William Joste, and his mother was Barbara Kelly Joste. His grandfather was Forrest Kelly, of Wichita, Kansas, a successful wildcatter, and the CEO of the Tret-O-Lite, Petrolite Corporation.
“They had a beautiful home up front and three residences in the back, with a swimming pool in the middle,” recalled Dillon. “I think Jimmy was living in one of those residences at the time, as was Danny Davis. I lived just down the block, about a half block away, but I never lived on those premises.”
Dillon met Rhonda Glover while she was vacationing in Acapulco at the Via Verde Hotel. “She was out by the swimming pool,” he recalled. “I had no idea she was there until she walked up to me and said hello.” Glover wasn’t with Joste. She was with bodybuilder and personal trainer Sean Kelly, who, for a time, was her live-in boyfriend. “Rhonda recommended that I hire him,” said Dillon, “and I did, and the three of us trained together for a brief time.”
Rhonda’s regimen of weight lifting and bodybuilding made her exceptionally strong—much stronger than her nonathletic and older boyfriend, Jimmy Joste. “She is an exceptionally strong woman,” said Dillon. “She could lift three hundred fifty pounds with no problem. That was more than I could do. Now, you must understand that anyone who says that Jimmy abused her, or beat her up, is out of their mind. Rhonda could whip his ass in a heartbeat. In fact, my wife, Christy, and I saw Rhonda Glover beat up Jimmy Joste. He defended himself by blocking a few blows, and they were wrestling together and fell on the floor because he was holding on to her as she was trying to pummel him. I jumped over a chair that Rhonda had knocked over, jumped in and physically separated the two of them.”
Robert Dillon, Danny Davis and Rocky Navarro all agree that Rhonda was a high-strung hellcat with a marked propensity for irrational outbursts and episodes of physical violence. Joste, they insist, was docile and passive, despite a publicized episode known as the “Barton Creek Incident.”
Rhonda Glover represented the situation as one in which Jimmy Joste tried to choke her at Barton Creek Country Club. He was arrested for domestic violence and got put in jail. Jimmy’s friends, however, believed that Glover went down to the bar and got drunk. Then, reeking of booze and ready to rumble, she returned to their room and instigated the fight with him.
According to court records, “Glover stated that Joste hit her with his fist on her stomach, kicked her on her left leg and slammed her head into the floor of their hotel room.” Joste admitted to pushing Glover, but he said he did not assault her in any other way.
The couple’s son, who was six years old at the time, witnessed the assault and told investigators that he yelled, “Don’t hurt my mother.” At one point the boy got out of bed and attempted to assist her when Joste picked him up by his neck and threw him on the bed, court records said. The child suffered no obvious injury.
Joste was charged with assault of family violence, but Glover later asked that the charge be dismissed. Prosecutors refused to dismiss the charges, and Joste eventually pleaded no contest to that charge and was placed on deferred adjudication.
In deferred adjudication, explained investigator Fred Wolfson, a defendant is required to meet certain criteria for a period of time. At the end of that time, if the defendant has met a set of court-set requirements, no conviction will appear on his record. In Joste’s case, he was released from deferred adjudication on March 24, 2003.
Rhonda Glover called Anthony “Tony” and Duanna Barder, close friends of J
immy’s, twice the night of the Barton Creek Incident. The first time was to beg them not to get Jimmy out of jail. A few minutes later, Glover called back. She changed her mind and entreated Tony Barder to go rescue her beloved Jimmy.
“That was in 2000,” said Ruben Garcia, of the Travis County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO). “I was sent out in response to a family disturbance. I encountered Rhonda Glover, and she was very distraught, and had bruises and other marks on her. I observed redness and slight swelling on Glover’s right cheek, just beneath her right eye, and the beginnings of a black eye. Gina Hill, a female officer, conducted a physical inspection and found injuries also in her groin area. There was a large oval-shaped knot on her left leg on the shin area. Rhonda Glover,” added the deputy, “was intoxicated. I detected the odor of alcohol on her immediately.”
This deputy was the same man who was instrumental in securing an emergency protective order in this incident against the arrested Jimmy Joste. “I have a lot of training in spousal abuse, and the sheriff’s office takes this issue very seriously,” he said. “Most of the cases are prosecuted by the county attorney’s office, and they take this issue very seriously also.”
If Rhonda Glover pressed charges against Jimmy Joste, the county attorney would not necessarily allow her to drop the charges. “If Glover were to drop charges,” stated the deputy, “they could still pick them up and file them. In such a situation the county attorney takes it to trial. If the trial were to take place, Rhonda Glover would have had to testify against Jimmy Joste.”
According to Garcia, women in these cases often withdraw or recant their story, but the county attorney may go to trial whether the victim wants to or not. The alleged victim, Rhonda Glover, would then have to attend classes on battered spouses. Joste pleaded no contest.
“Jimmy went along with that,” said Rocky Navarro, “even though it was Rhonda who was the violent one. He never raised a hand to her except to defend himself, I’m sure of that. He was not a violent man at all. Rhonda admitted that she probably did take back her statement that Jimmy had been the aggressor. She was perfectly clear in her recollection that she tried to drop the charges.”