by Burl Barer
As it was an involuntary commitment at Rusk, they could only keep her if she was suicidal or homicidal. Since she was neither, there was no “reason” to keep her. Rhonda took this to mean that she was just fine.
Released from Rusk, Rhonda Glover was given medication, and young Ronnie was placed in his grandmother’s custody. “My mother was furious that I got out of Rusk so fast,” said Rhonda Glover. “Mom told people in her CPS files that I would be there six to eight weeks. Mom was so angry when I called her after only two days. She almost refused to come and get me from the bus station. Then she took me to a La Quinta Inns, next to a Denny’s, and dropped me off with fifty dollars and no car. She took my truck to my dad’s. Neither one of them would come and get me. They had turned their backs on me when I was trying to get away from Jimmy. My mom refused to help me get electricity and a phone in her name so that he could not find me. Yep, ask her. What is really sad,” continued Glover, “is that just a few months earlier, I had called my dad on his cell phone. He said he was in Giddings, which is only about an hour from Austin. I was crying profusely. I told my daddy that Ronnie and I were in a lot of danger from Jimmy. I told my dad that Jimmy was doing drugs, and that Jimmy took my car keys.”
Rhonda said she pleaded with her father to come and get her, and that she was concerned about her safety, but he refused.
According to Rhonda Glover, she had never in all her years called on her parents for money, or help in any relationship, or been in jail. “When Dad refused to come get me, I thought I was going to die right there. I cried and cried and cried. My son kept saying, ‘Mom, that is just how Papa is, you know that. We’re never getting out of here.’ Well, I got down on my knees with my rosary and said, ‘Lord, if you can just send me the answers, I have no way to leave here without getting hurt. Show me what to do.’
“A few minutes later,” said Glover, “Jimmy came downstairs and said, ‘Will you go get me some Miller High Life, and get you some lunch while you are out?’ I went to the store, and when I was in the Suburban, I found the extra set of keys in the ashtray. It was like winning the Lotto.
“I came back, and we all ate, and he lay down to sleep. I started making my plans to escape without him noticing my stuff was being packed. The night I left, my son was crying, saying, ‘Mom, we can’t just leave him like that. We have to go back. ‘ I just drove around and round in circles. With all my heart I wanted to help him because that was someone else living inside of him. It was not him. I finally went back, and I lay down on the bed beside him, and I felt as if God was taking the very life out of me. My bones started to ache, and I was literally shriveling up and dying. ”
Glover restated in 2009, “I knew that Jimmy was truly evil. The Lord was telling me that I was in a lot of danger. I had to pry Ronnie off of his dad and force him to leave. He was so upset, leaving like that.”
Assumptions of authenticity or accuracy of fact attributed to Rhonda’s reminiscences are ill-advised. The documentation of her behavior, residences and court-ordered arrangements regarding custody of her son are, in comparison, more reliable indicators of events and outcomes.
Having returned to the Houston area, Rhonda Glover and her little boy spent Christmas Day with the Shotwell family and shared Christmas dinner. “The next day,” recalled Sherlyn Shotwell, “Rhonda called to tell me that Ronnie would not be visiting on Saturday, the twenty-seventh from ten A.M. to ten P.M., as agreed, because she and her girlfriend were taking their children snow skiing in New Mexico.”
When the first scheduled visitation failed to happen, Shotwell wasn’t overly concerned. The next arranged date, January 9, 2004, was kept as agreed. “Rhonda voluntarily brought him for the weekend because she wanted to take him to sign up for gymnastics. From the ninth through the twelfth, we took Ronnie to our lake house for the weekend.”
Shotwell repeatedly called her daughter the following week. There was never an answer, and voice mail messages were not returned. “On the twenty-third, I finally reached her,” Shotwell recalled. “I wanted to pick up Ronnie the next day, but Rhonda said that they both had the flu, and he couldn’t visit.”
As would any concerned grandmother, Sherlyn Shotwell called Rhonda every day to check on the health of her daughter and grandson. There was no answer at any of Glover’s home or cell numbers. “I left messages, of course. I didn’t hear a word until the end of the month, when Rhonda called to tell me that she was moving to another apartment over Super Bowl weekend. She told me that she had met someone who had tickets to the Super Bowl, and she was going.”
It was now February 2004. Every day Shotwell called; every day there was no answer. “Some of the numbers had been disconnected, and there was no contact whatsoever from my daughter.”
Shotwell was not the only person irritated and concerned by the lack of phone calls. Stephanie Olech, assistant principal at Hunters Creek School, called Shotwell on February 5. “She called me because my name was listed as an emergency number. My grandson hadn’t shown up for school since January twenty-ninth, and they hadn’t heard a word from his mother. I told Ms. Olech that Rhonda was moving to a new apartment. I also told her that I feared something was wrong. Olech said they would have the police go to both the old and new apartment to check and make sure that Rhonda and Ronnie were okay, and find out why he was not in school.” The police went to both apartments. There was no one at either location.
Upset and anxious, Shotwell placed a call to Rhonda’s old friend Sean Kelly. “I asked him if he’d seen Rhonda,” said Shotwell. “He said he saw her at the Super Bowl, and she was talking out of her head. Rhonda told him that Jimmy’s eyes were on the twenty-dollar bill. Sean told her there was no way that the federal government put Jimmy Joste’s eyes on the twenty-dollar bill, and she should not be talking about that kind of stuff to anyone else that day. Sean also told me that Rhonda had signed up to work out at his gym, but she had been late several days in a row. She couldn’t commit to daily workouts and the scheduled training times.”
Kelly also questioned where Rhonda was getting the money to buy a new Infinity, keep her 2002 Suburban, rent two apartments, buy new furniture and keep on spending as if the money would never end.
“Rhonda took Ronnie and vanished,” said Shotwell. “I hired a private detective agency and filed a missing persons report. They found Rhonda and Ronnie in Michigan. She had tried to cross the border into Canada, but they wouldn’t let her enter. I talked to the police there, and they told me that Rhonda was on her way back to Houston with my grandson. It would take about one day for her to get home. She never showed up.”
“She isn’t honest, and she isn’t trustworthy,” stated Danny Davis emphatically. Jimmy Joste’s longtime friend had deep doubts about Rhonda’s truth-telling abilities, even if her lapses into revisionist history were unintentional. “Rhonda Glover’s reputation was never one of honesty. She was known—to be blunt—as a liar.”
“Danny Davis has a lot of nerve saying things about me,” responded Rhonda. “He’s been in big trouble over things himself. He and Jimmy were investigated by the SEC. They raised money on TV in California for bogus oil and gas deals,” alleged Glover, “and Jimmy was mad at Danny for getting him involved, and he punched Danny in the face, and almost knocked him through the plate glass window on the top floor of the office building. It was a real treat to see Jimmy stick up for himself, because Danny was always such a bully. ”
“Isn’t that interesting?” commented Fred Wolfson. “Glover says it was a treat to see Jimmy stick up for himself. This fits in with the description of Jimmy being passive, as opposed to aggressive and violent. Glover seems to be of two minds about Jimmy, and neither mind is talking to the other.”
Rhonda Glover denied ever having a mental illness. “Don’t forget,” she said, “I never told any of those psych doctors about my belief I was anything but a battered girlfriend with an evil ex. That is it—that is all. To hear all these accusations of me being crazy or delusional is really agg
ravating. ”
Clearly, Rhonda’s view of things differed from the perceptions of many others. She claimed she never suffered from mental illness, while others said the opposite. She claimed Jimmy was an abusive boyfriend, while others claimed he was a perfect gentleman. Another person who offered her perspective on that aspect of the relationship was Christy Dillon, of Houston, Texas. “I met Jimmy through my husband who had known Jimmy for about twenty years. We lived about two blocks away from Jimmy. I finally met Rhonda at a nail salon.
“We had a lot of mutual friends,” said Christy Dillon. “We moved in the same circles, and I pretty much knew Jimmy and Rhonda as a couple. We were all living in Houston, and we socialized with them.”
It was Christy and Robert Dillon who witnessed Rhonda Glover “beat the crap” out of Jimmy Joste. “I remember it quite vividly because she was pregnant,” recalled Christy. “We were invited over to their condo for a barbecue. Jimmy was cooking, and she was drinking alcohol, and she wasn’t supposed to drink because she was pregnant.”
The convivial atmosphere changed for the worst when Jimmy Joste admonished her on her alcohol consumption. “She punched him in the face, and put him on the ground. She was on top of him, hitting him, and he wasn’t fighting back at all. My husband and I pulled her off him.”
Despite this episode of violence, the couples still saw each other on occasion. “Rhonda would just pop by the house. She never called first. She would just show up and knock on my door. She came over to my house unannounced about eight weeks before she shot Jimmy, and Rhonda was talking real crazy the last time I saw her.
“I had just finished working out,” Christy said, “and I had on my workout outfit. My husband thinks that Rhonda is a bad influence, and there she was at my house.”
Not quite knowing what to do, but knowing her husband wasn’t thrilled having Rhonda Glover in his house, Christy Dillon came up with a practical solution.
“I know she likes sushi, and there was a new sushi bar down the street, so I suggested that we go out for lunch. I didn’t go with her in her car because I was afraid,” admitted Christy. “She looked like a drug addict. I mean, I’ve known her for thirteen years, and she looked like a drug addict, like you see in the movies. She must have lost twenty or thirty pounds, and the way she was talking—she made statements that really concerned me.”
The statements that Christy Dillon found disconcerting were the same ones that compelled Glover’s mother to seek custody of her young grandson—the stereotypical symptoms of personalized grandiose religiosity, coupled with paranoid delusions of both persecution and exceptionalness. With little appreciation for the gut-level reaction of her peers, Rhonda Glover proudly announced that her son, the offspring of Jimmy Joste, was none other than Jesus of Nazareth reborn, the long-awaited Messiah who, she was proud to note, excelled at gymnastics. “It makes me upset just to think about it.
“After she got all radical and told me how bad things were,” continued Christy, “when we went outside of the sushi restaurant—I had to get home and go fix my husband supper—she met her ex-lover Sean Kelly, who is a bodybuilder and has keys to the same complex, and I left her with him.”
Prior to hooking up with Kelly, Rhonda Glover also voiced displeasure with her mother. “She went off about her mother too. She was saying how her mother is at fault with all of this, why Jimmy had to plead guilty, why this and why that. It is all because of her mother,” Christy stated.
Rhonda was also, according to Christy Dillon, angry with Jimmy Joste because “he wasn’t doing enough or paying enough to get a better attorney in getting her back custody of Ronnie.” As for Christy’s concerns that Glover was abusing drugs, Rhonda allegedly volunteered detailed confirmation. “She said that she was freebasing cocaine, and that there was a cocaine dealer living in their house. I had never been to that house, so I don’t know. She never offered me drugs. We didn’t do drugs.
“That day,” explained Christy Dillon, “Rhonda was doing drugs while we were together. I mean she would go off to the bathroom every fifteen minutes.”
Christy was not impressed with Rhonda’s behavior or topics of conversation. “I told her that I really didn’t want to get into any of this stuff she was talking about. You know, about how everything was Jimmy’s fault because Jimmy [pleaded] guilty to that charge of domestic violence against her when he shouldn’t have. If he had not [pleaded] guilty, things would be different, and all about how mad she was at her mother for having custody of her son. She said that her son was molested by someone when in her mother’s custody. She would go back and forth between blaming her mother and blaming Jimmy. ”
Former friends of Rhonda and Jimmy’s, shocked by Joste’s tragic death, came forward to give statements to Detective Walker. “I saw Rhonda shooting up in 1999,” confirmed real estate agent Debbie McCall. “My boyfriend and I went out to dinner with Rhonda and Jimmy. Anyway, we were out to dinner, and Rhonda wanted to go to the restroom, and she asked me to go with her. We went into the handicapped stall, and she started shooting up cocaine. You know, with a needle, and she asked me to help her.” When asked if Ronnie was there at the time, McCall said that he wasn’t. She did volunteer that she had personally seen Rhonda Glover abuse Ronnie Joste.
The investigation was moving with astonishing rapidity, and all indicators pointed to Rhonda Lee Glover as the person who pulled the trigger, the killer who pumped at least ten bullets into the unarmed and defenseless Jimmy Joste.
Within an hour of speaking to Sherlyn Shotwell, Austin’s Intelligence Unit was working with Bryan Sheely, of the U.S. Marshal’s Office, in an effort to locate Rhonda Glover and Ronnie Joste. They had checked Rhonda Glover’s cell phone number, and discovered it had been changed to a Houston exchange, and the name on the account was Rhonda P. Lee. Lee was Glover’s middle name. The marshals were advised that Glover provided false information on the ATF form when she purchased the Glock, which was a felony, and the ATF was notified.
“The minute she lied on that form,” remarks investigator Fred Wolfson, “she exempted herself from the right to possess a firearm.”
Kent Plemons, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was the agent assigned for the false information case. At 12:25 P.M., a warrant was issued by the ATF for Rhonda Glover. The charge: firearms violation.
“Not murder, you notice,” pointed out private investigator Fred Wolfson, “but firearms violation. There was a good reason for this, from an investigative standpoint, as will become clear. The Austin Police Department is a team of true professionals, and they know what they are doing.”
At seven-thirty that same morning, Detectives Walker and Hernandez showed up at American Auto Rental. “I want photographs of the vehicle rented by Rhonda Glover,” Walker told Lee Hernandez. “I also want lifts of the driver’s seat, collection of the drivers’ floor mat and latent-print processing as well.”
While at American Auto Rental, Walker received a call from Deputy Marshal Sheely. “He advised me,” said Walker, “that phone records indicated that Rhonda had called an RV place in Round Rock, Texas, RV Vacations. We completed processing the Ford Taurus, and I requested photos of the tires with a scale. The tires were not knobby-looking, and did not look like the tire prints from the driveway, but photos were taken for possible elimination.”
The car had not been rented since Rhonda Glover returned it, so the ending mileage was the same as when she brought it in. The ending mileage was 82,557. The contract indicated that the beginning mileage was 82,522, for a total of thirty-five miles.
Deputy Marshal Sheely reported back to Walker that a check of the RV place had been made. “They knew Rhonda Glover at American Dream Vacations,” said Sheely. “She was a former customer who still owed them money from a previous RV rental a month earlier.”
The rental agent in July of 2004 with whom Rhonda Glover did business at American Dream Vacations RV Rentals and Sales was Francis Mund. “I did the contract with her when she c
ame in to rent the RV,” said Mund.
“You know, we don’t just let people pick one out and drive it away. We have paperwork that must be filled out, and it’s a regular rental contract. I would say she came in around lunchtime, or midafternoon. As for the RV itself,” Mund said, “it was the biggest one we had. We made out the contract, you know, when she was going to pick it up and when she was going to return it. It was not open-ended. She had a specific date that she was going to return it. At the time she came in, she paid some. She seemed as if she had a lot to do, she was in a bit of hurry and everything. She came back later and paid the rest. She got the thirty-eight-foot diesel pusher. It will accommodate four people.”
“I paid for that RV with my credit card,” recalled Rhonda Glover. “And, yes, they knew me there, and the RV had GPS on it. Obviously, if I was intending to hide, I would have rented the RV from someplace where they didn’t know me, and I would have paid cash and not used my credit card.”
“Rhonda is so full of shit,” said one of Glover’s more recently disenfranchised former friends, “she was out of her mind for a hell of a long time before she shot Jimmy, out of her mind when she rented that RV, and now she is trying to portray herself as thinking logically? Logical people don’t call the cops because there are people hiding in the sink, or shoot their son’s father because he is a lapdog of Satan. I don’t believe a word she says about anything. She’s an attention whore, plain and simple. If she knew that killing Jimmy would get her all over the newspaper and TV, she would have shot him earlier. She will say whatever suits her at the time. She would promise you the moon while stealing the stars.”
Glover promised to return the RV on July 28, 2004. That didn’t happen. She was arrested in Kansas on July 27. Mund had to send a driver to pick up Glover’s RV. “It wasn’t in Texas,” she lamented. “It was out of state somewhere. I think it was Kansas.”