by Burl Barer
On the afternoon of July 26, 2004, Patti Swenson sat down with Austin detectives to share what she could about Rhonda Glover and Jimmy Joste. “I’ve known Jimmy and Rhonda for about three and a half years,” Swenson told Austin detectives, “because Glover and Joste enrolled their son in my after-school program. Rhonda and I became friends after a gymnastics competition trip to Indianapolis.”
After is not the same as during. The two women had an emotional falling-out when Glover’s son tried to accept his gymnastics award in his stocking feet. “Patti yelled at my son about not having on his tennis shoes to accept his award,” recalled Glover. “He started crying on the biggest day of his life, at seven years old. There were over fifty boys competing on the trampoline, and she was yelling at him like he had control over his shoes. Jimmy ran back to the hotel and got them, and I confronted her in the coach’s area. I said, ‘If you ever yell at my child again, you will never see him on your team ever!'”
“Rhonda got upset with me and yelled at me a lot because I was sticking by the rules that were given to us,” confirmed Patti Swenson. “Yes, I made him go back to his hotel and get his shoes. That’s a fact. Rhonda got really mad at me, but she calmed down. We were on the same flight back. We talked, and she realized that I meant no harm. When she comes to town, she brings her son with her, and I take care of him for the day.
“Last December, Rhonda asked me to testify on her behalf at the custody hearing because her mother was trying to get custody of Ronnie. Rhonda told me that the reason that she and Jimmy split was because Jimmy had become involved with pot and crack cocaine. The pool man had supposedly convinced him to try it, saying that it was natural and God wouldn’t have put it on earth if we weren’t supposed to use it. She said that Jimmy got heavy into it, and that’s why she left him and went to her mom. Rhonda took a metal box to her mom’s that supposedly had some of Jimmy’s cocaine or pot in it. I guess her mom turned the tables on her. Rhonda tested positive for cocaine, and said the reason for that was because Jimmy was withholding money from her, and she wanted the money, so [she] did drugs with him, hoping that would encourage him to give her money.
“I was at the custody hearing, and I said that she was a good mother, to the best of my knowledge. As for the stuff about her son being Jesus and her being Mary, she explained that she and her son were simply doing role play. The court granted her, I think, forty-five days’ custody if she did everything the court wanted her to do. That was December 18, 2003, at the Montgomery County Courthouse. She was court ordered to live in Houston. On Christmas Eve I called and reported that there was somebody in the house. It turned out that it was Jimmy and his friend Rick Kutner. Jimmy, we thought, was staying at the Houstonian in the Presidential Suite for one thousand dollars a day.”
According to Swenson, Rhonda and her son came up and visited her a few times after Christmas. “She was here for the Kinko’s Classic in April,” recalled Swenson. Glover had an established fondness for high- profile charity events, offering her the opportunity to rub shoulders with Texas’s philanthropic elite. The Kinko’s Classic of Austin, entering its second year following a successful debut that saw over $100,000 in charitable contributions to more than twenty local charities, was exactly the type of event Glover couldn’t resist.
When Rhonda came to Austin for the Kinko’s tournament, she dropped by the gym and asked Swenson if Ronnie could hang out for a couple of days. “She took off,” said Swenson, “and the kid stayed. Rhonda called and asked me to dinner. She told me to bring her son, and we ate at a restaurant in Lakeway, and then moved to Mulligan’s.”
“Mulligan’s Billiards Sports Grill would be the perfect place for them,” commented journalist Jeff Reynolds. “It has appetizers, good food and billiards—but, best of all, it has a video room for the kids so the youngsters can play games while their parents get drunk in the bar.”
Swenson and Ronnie had a delightful time playing air hockey and video games. Every so often, Rhonda would check on them to see if either wanted something to drink. The next day Swenson and Glover met at the gym so Glover could drop her son off. “She gave me twelve hundred dollars,” said Swenson, “and told me to take good care of him, and take him to Fuddruckers for lunch.”
A $1,200-lunch budget is extreme, even for the finest luxury restaurant. Fuddruckers, a Texas franchise restaurant, is not a white-tablecloth and sterling-silver establishment. It is a self-described “Shrine to the Burger Arts.” A family of four could eat their fill for under $100. “Rhonda then told me she wanted to give me more money,” said Swenson. “Rhonda reached in her purse and handed me a wad of bills.”
Such excess in financial generosity is a well-known side effect of uncontrolled bipolar disorder. “One of the most common bipolar mania symptoms is impulsive and irrational spending,” said Dr. Ronald R. Fieve. “The lifestyle of the manic-depressive who is in a high tends to be a glorious scattering of money.” So important is lavish spending to sufferers of bipolar disorder, that it may be seen as more than a symptom, but also as a form of self-medicating to counter the emotional sensation of other symptoms.
Someone who has this illness has no control over their symptoms. Willpower is useless. “Try using willpower when you have diarrhea,” said substance abuse counselor Leonard Buschel, “and that may give you an idea of how useless willpower is in the control of symptoms of illness. ”
“Rhonda said that there was something she had to do,” Swenson told detectives. “She said she would have to pay the consequences, and that I knew what she meant. I didn’t really know what she meant.” Glover hinted broadly to Swenson, commenting on Joste’s nature, behavior and primary personality flaws.
“We were sitting in the parking lot,” recalled Swenson. “Basically, she said Jimmy was Satan, and had to be gotten rid of.” Glover provided specifics of her plan, and Swenson wasn’t particularly comfortable hearing it or recalling it. “She said she was going to get him to take her shopping, and she was going to buy some sexy negligee. She was then going to go to one of the sex stores and buy some toys for, I guess, having sex, and that she would then take him back to the house and seduce him and get him to let her handcuff him to the bed. She was [then] going to cut off his penis and set the house on fire.”
Swenson was so rattled by this scenario that she later called the police nonemergency number and expressed concern. She didn’t give details, and there was no follow-up. “Then,” recalled Swenson, “I saw smoke, and Oak Hill fire trucks were going by, and I got concerned. I went, ‘Oh, my gosh, did she do what she said?'”
She and her friend Susan Riley got in her van and drove up to take a look. “We wanted to make sure that it wasn’t Jimmy’s house, and we were relieved that it wasn’t.”
If being Satan wasn’t bad enough, “Jimmy was also, according to Rhonda, into crack, cloning and child porn. She told me that she found some things around the house that she felt indicated child pornography. Yeah, I know. It all sounds pretty weird. ”
“How can some things around the house ‘indicate’ child pornography?” asked investigator Fred Wolfson. “Either she found child porn or she didn’t, and child porn isn’t something that is easy to find. Quite the contrary. I mean, there are no commercial child porn websites on the Internet.”
“The trade in child pornography on the Internet is not characterized by financial gain,” said Max Taylor, professor of applied psychology, University College, Cork, Ireland. “It is mainly a process of exchange, either directly through protocols like IRC or ICQ, or indirectly through newsgroup postings.”
With no commercial child porn sites, mutual exchange of photographs between “fans” of this type of material is the primary method of distribution. According to Professor Taylor, this is “the most worrying aspect of the trade in child pornography. Exchange acts as an entry barrier, and also gives the process a sense of security. A relationship of mutually assured destruction develops where the partners in the exchange are each dependent on the other
for security.”
“I’m sure child porn exists in people’s private collections,” agreed investigator Fred Wolfson, “that being pictures or videos that they either took themselves or got from other individuals, but I dare you to find a child porn Internet site, or even stumble upon one by accident. It would take concerted effort to find like-minded people, convince them you were not law enforcement, et cetera. Now, if Jimmy had a picture of his own son on his computer, and it was a picture taken of his son being cute in the tub with no clothes on, is that child porn? If so, every parent in America who has a picture of their kid with no clothes on when they were little could be arrested for possessing child porn.”
The only claim of Jimmy Joste having an interest in child pornography came from Rhonda Glover, who also claimed Jimmy was bisexual and hired male escorts. According to Glover, she was living in the Austin home, while Jimmy lived in Houston. She claimed that when Jimmy and his pals started cooking up crack in her microwave, she kicked him out. She later moved to Houston, leaving the house empty.
“After Rhonda went to Houston,” Patti Swenson explained, “Jimmy’s friend Rick Kutner stayed in the Mission Oaks house so the home owner’s association wouldn’t take the house back for being unoccupied. One night she wanted Kutner to leave, and she called the police.”
The last time Rick Kutner stayed at the house was around Easter, 2004. Jimmy Joste came into town and told Kutner that he needed to be out by the next day. “Jimmy wanted Rick out,” Swenson told detectives, “because Rhonda didn’t want Rick there. Jimmy wanted Rhonda to move back in, and he felt if Rick moved out, Rhonda would come back.
“The day she gave me all the money,” recalled Swenson, “I kept her son with me all day. I thought she wouldn’t be coming back. But about seven-thirty P.M. that day, she called and said she was on her way to pick him up. She did. At the same visit when Rhonda gave me all the money, she also gave me a silver bracelet. She said it was a gift from her and her son because of everything I had done for them. The last time I saw Rhonda, she did not say anything about doing anything to Jimmy. She said she was going to come back the next week, because she needed to take care of some business. The last time I saw Rhonda, I noticed her hair color was darker. It looked dyed. It was real dark with reddish highlights, and I have always known her to have sandy blond hair. I think her son is with Rhonda now, because she loves that boy and would do anything for him. ”
When Austin detectives asked Swenson point-blank if she thought Rhonda Glover murdered Jimmy Joste, the response was not hesitant. “My gut feeling,” she replied, “is that she did it—what happened to Jimmy—because she told me that she had to get rid of Jimmy because he was Satan.”
As for the home on Mission Oaks, Swenson insisted that although it was in Rhonda’s name, Jimmy’s money paid for it. Swenson also shared things with detectives that she “didn’t know for a fact,” such as, “Jimmy bought his drug dealer a car, so all he had to do was call and say he needed a car payment and the dealer would deliver the drugs.”
When Detective Walker asked Swenson if she knew anyone who would want to hurt Jimmy, she had no trouble answering. “Yes,” she said, “Rhonda.” Swenson also spoke of other decidedly unsettling behavior by Rhonda Glover.
“One night I met with Rhonda to have the locks changed so Jimmy couldn’t get in. That was in about January. She flew off the handle, and insisted that the blinds be kept shut because she thought that there were people watching the house, and if the blinds were open, they could see in. She was obsessed about the aquifer being under the house. She put holes in the walls and looked for entrances in them. She said people thought she was crazy, but she was going to prove them wrong. We were not to flush the toilets, or run the dishwasher, because the water would run into the aquifer. She actually peed outside once so the water wouldn’t go into the aquifer. Rhonda said that Jimmy was the one who tore up the bathroom, and he did it when he was on crack. Rick was the one who fixed the house back up. ”
Detectives knew that Rhonda Glover—not Jimmy Joste—sledgehammered the bathroom. She admitted it to Officer Richard Cross in 2003, the same night she complained of people hiding in her sink.
A consistent characteristic attributed to Rhonda Glover was, according to Swenson, a marked propensity for frequently exchanging automobiles. “She was driving something other than her former car—the PT Cruiser. I think it was a Dodge Caravan. She said that was a rental. The Cruiser was white. She used to have a Suburban, but she said that she sold it, and Jimmy bought her an Infinity SUV as a replacement. It was expensive, had OnStar, and she didn’t like it. She only had it for a few days before she backed it into someone in a parking lot in Houston.
“She was changing cars constantly,” said Swenson. “Rhonda would make a comment that there was something on it she didn’t like, and she would change to a new car. She told me that Jimmy was buying them for her. I believe that the reason she switched cars all the time was because she was running from something.
“I think the last time she was here,” Swenson told Walker, “was about June twenty-ninth. At that time she told us that she would be back again the next week, but she never showed up.”
“Glover didn’t have time to visit Swenson when she returned to Austin,” opined investigative journalist Jeff Reynolds, “with her busy schedule of shooting targets, shooting Jimmy, returning the Ford Taurus, and taking a taxicab to the home of her old friend Anthony Barder before making a run for Kansas.”
“I was working for Lake Travis Taxi,” Jeffrey Burke told Detective Walker on July 26, “and on July twenty-first, I transported her from the rent-a-car place to the Barders’ home after returning the Ford Taurus. The ride cost her thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents. She didn’t tell me the address,” Burke said. “She just pointed to the house and said, ‘Right there.’ She paid cash for the fare. She had a bag and a purse. She acted like she was looking for a key for the house. I left before she went in anywhere. She had on big sunglasses. She was wearing a cream-colored floral-print dress. She might have had on some open-toed sandal types, I think, with heels. The flowers were pastel-colored flowers. She was kind of quiet. She did not say anything about where she had been, or if she did, I don’t remember. I’m not sure what time I picked her up. It was in the afternoon, because I think it was just before I got off of work at four-thirty P.M. She said that would work, anyway, because her son was in the RV asleep.”
Detectives Walker and De Los Santos drove to the address where the taxi dropped Glover the afternoon of July 21. There was no one home. “We asked a neighbor walking his dog if he had seen an RV in the past week,” recalled Walker, “and said there had been one parked around the corner on Old Mill Road at some time during the week. We started to canvass, asking residents if they knew Rhonda Glover.”
Knock on enough doors, and someone will answer. Anthony Barder responded in the affirmative and invited the two detectives into his home.
“We got a call from Rhonda on July 20, 2004,” said Anthony Barder. “We’ve known Rhonda for about ten years. She called to tell us that she was on her way to Austin, and wanted to stay with us overnight.”
His wife, Duanna Barder, had an uneasy feeling. “I don’t want her staying here,” she told her husband. “Something just doesn’t feel right,” she added.
“She was at our house on July twenty-first, the day that Jimmy Joste was murdered,” said Duanna Barder. “She called on the evening of the twentieth, and wanted to come over, but said not today. She had called and asked what we did with our kids for the summer. She called out of the blue. I have not talked to Rhonda for about a year, and the last time we talked, she was angry with me. Rhonda called again on the twenty-first and asked if she could drop off her son. We said okay. She brought some breakfast with her from Denny’s. Rhonda was driving an RV and parked it across the street in front of the park.”
“Rhonda told us that she had not seen Jimmy Joste for about a year,” said Anthony Barder, “and that
she had come to Austin to take care of some business, and put her house on the market. Rhonda was going to call for a taxi to take her to a car rental agency, and I told her I would give her a ride. About noon I took her to the car rental agency on 620, by Buster’s BBQ. During the ride there Rhonda spoke about Jimmy being Lucifer. She also spoke about her house, a Morrison Home, was built on Cave X, which was owned by Bush. She said President Bush was also Lucifer, and a clone. She said Jimmy had been doing ritualistic things in the house. She said she had been dealing with the city about her house. She said it wasn’t zoned right because it was on Cave X.”
Rhonda Glover had already been to the car rental agency once early that same morning. “I got to work at seven-thirty A.M. on July twenty-first,” recalled the morning-shift employee Brandon Garrett. “There was an RV in the front. It was kind of a beige color, with stripes on it. It had Indiana plates, and had mountain bikes on the back. I noticed it had Indiana plates as I walked by. I noticed the RV had knocked the cable and Road Runner Internet cable down. I unlocked everything, and about seven forty-five A.M., a customer I knew as Rhonda came in and said she wanted to rent a car. I knew her from having rented a car here before.
“I remembered her,” said Garrett, “because the last time she was here, she tried to rent a car without a credit card or anything. I asked her for how long. She said two days. She rented a 2000 white Ford Taurus. She asked if she could leave in the car and leave the RV here. I told her no, she had to move it right then, because she knocked the cable down, and it was blocking the drive to where the cars were. She left, saying she was going to go find someplace to put the RV. I told her everything was done. So when she came back, she could just hop in it and go. I didn’t see her after that. I don’t know when she picked up the car. I wasn’t here when she did. I don’t think she picked it up before twelve noon.”