Fatal Beauty

by Burl Barer

  The Kansas interrogation was not resisted by the enchanting woman in the uncomfortable chains. Encouraged to tell more, Rhonda Glover continued. “When all this started, Jimmy wouldn’t let me leave, so I called my dad to come get me, and he told me that I was crazy. Jimmy put on an angel’s face, but behind closed doors I was scared of him. When I found out about the homosexuals, I had to get out of there, because I was afraid I could get AIDS, or who knows what.”

  She said when Jimmy Joste made a remark about “toy-shit-kids,” and she saw a little boy by the side of the road, that’s when she put the “cave thing together.

  “In Isaiah, it talks about the caves and murdering children,” Glover explained to Walker. “Did you know that the Texas Film Code is sixty-nine? I’ve built my case against these people, but I have no voice. No one will listen to me.”

  According to Rhonda Glover, the cave under the Mission Oaks house was no little dugout in the ground. When she said “cave,” she meant something bigger than the Batmobile’s garage.

  “Cave X is a big cave, a really big cave,” insisted Rhonda. “There is an entrance on the Regents School property, and there were constantly cars over there. The house itself was built on state park land, and there was no permit for it to be built there.”

  All this illegality was manipulated, said Glover, by George W. Bush. “He is the builder,” confirmed Glover. “Yes, George W. is the builder. The documents say Travis, Texas, not Austin, and the documents had five 9s on the bottom. I called information,” said Glover, “and found Travis, Texas, is a 254 area code, which is Bush. I prayed about it, and asked how I could prove these people were into bondage and child porn and crap. God said He would put it in the news.

  “If you look at money, on a twenty-dollar bill,” she said, “it says Satan you nasty nut in Austin. Seriously.”

  “Oh,” said Detective Walker, “I hadn’t noticed that.”

  “Well,” she responded, “it’s in code. It’s jumbled.”

  She took her finger and pointed it in the air, moving it around as she recited each word: “Satan. You. Nasty. Nut. In. Austin. It’s there, but, yeah, it’s in code.

  “And you know that little green face on the right side? It looks like a bondage mask. Yes, Jimmy has been involved with the Bush family for a long time.”

  She referred to Isaiah again, recalled Walker. “She said, behind her house there was a gate, and that there’s an entrance to the aquifer there too. There was a watchtower there. She said that the Bible Book of Revelation talks about seven golden lamps. ”

  “From my office window,” said Glover, “I could see seven golden lights out there, and they moved and shined down into the woods to light the aquifer entrance.”

  In the process of police interrogation, there is a technique known as theme development. “Walker uses this in his approach to Glover,” noted Fred Wolfson. “The idea is to figure out what type of excuse might make her admit to doing it. For example, does she blame the victim? The detective then lays out a theme, a story, a frame of reference, to see if the suspect latches onto it. In the Glover interrogation, Rhonda kept laying out the theme for the detectives. All they had to do was get all soft and sympathetic, speak in a soothing voice, appear nonthreatening, and lull her into a false sense of security.”

  Detective Fortune, who had been listening in relative silence, now addressed her in a voice filled with compassion. “You’ve been having a nightmare. No one is helping you.”

  Rhonda Glover nodded in agreement.

  “No one has listened to you.”

  At last, someone understood.

  “Yes, yes,” said Glover, “and, in the meantime, all these innocent people were being killed.”

  “How did you protect yourself?” asked Fortune.

  “I got into the high-rise, but evidently Jimmy knew where I lived because he had sent me child support. He has a lot of connections. I don’t know how far up he is connected, but he is connected. I never called Jimmy, because I was afraid for my son. I was afraid that Jimmy would kidnap him. That’s why I never let my mother see my son, because she let him go off with strangers.”

  “What was your mother supposed to do with your son?” asked Walker.

  “Well,” responded Glover, “I showed my mother some stuff Jimmy had been smoking that smelled like flesh. He smoked it in a glass thing. I knew Jimmy had property in Horseshoe Bay, and God told me that he had buried somebody on the golf course. I have all that information in my house, in the bedroom in the high-rise, in the back bedroom.”

  Although her answer had nothing to do with the question, detectives allowed her to continue on her topic of choice. “In the bedroom there is Styrofoam, where it looked like a little kid had cut a hole. At the Mission Oaks house, I heard noises behind the wall, and I showed the Austin police where Jimmy had taken the baseboards apart. You know, like John Wayne Gacy.”

  Glover asked Fortune and Walker if they knew about John Wayne Gacy Jr. Even if the detectives didn’t, Rhonda obviously saw sinister similarities between Joste and Gacy who, during a three-year period, viciously tortured, raped and murdered more than thirty young men, who would later be discovered under the floorboards of his home.

  “I think Gacy was Jimmy’s father, and a vice president at Southwestern Bell, and every business they owned was nine-six-six-nine. They could track anybody, and the people who knew the code, the homosexuals and the Devil worshipers, would know that was them. I have it all written in the book. I wrote two thousand pages for God.

  “Everyone thinks that because I am on a mission from God that I’m crazy,” said Glover. “When I was eight years old, I had the stigmata. You can check. It is in my school records at Oak Ridge Elementary.”

  “Rhonda told us that Susan McBee, of house 16, knew all about the cars that line up on Mission Oaks,” recalled Walker. “And then she talked about Scripture again, and she had built her case. She said no one would listen to her. Detective Fortune asked who she went to for help, and she said that she went to God.”

  The big concern for Glover, she said, was “if my son were to see Jimmy, and go off with him, I might not ever see him alive again.”

  “What do you think would happen to him?” asked Walker.

  Glover looked at him as if he hadn’t been paying attention. “He could be sacrificed in the caves,” said Glover, as if stating the obvious. “The ultimate sacrifice for satanic worshipers is a virgin boy,” Glover reiterated in May 2009. “I feared he would kill me and take my son.”

  Glover explained to detectives, “My son could be used in the pagan sacrifices. As you recall, in Isaiah, it talks about the pagan sacrifices. And if they were doing that in the caves, they could sacrifice my son. I met a guy who told me that I needed to get a gun.”

  Glover recounted taking the handgun-safety course with her son at Top Gun in Houston. “It scared me half to death to learn how to fire a gun,” she said, “but this was something that I felt I had to do to protect Ronnie and me. I was also going to take the defensive handgun course, but the guy never called me back. ”

  Glover jumped topics and time frames with astonishing rapidity. One moment she was breathlessly describing homosexuals creeping past endangered species in Cave X to participate in pagan sex rituals, and then, following the next intake of air, she was speaking of events in Houston several months earlier—but not with historical accuracy.

  “I called Jimmy because I needed child support. He ended up in Houston, behind me in a car. This was several months ago. Jimmy asked me to marry him, and gave me a ring. Well, at first I refused, but then told him that I would think about it. I mean, that was an expensive ring, and I needed the money. I never even took possession of it. Jimmy offered it to me, and I refused it. He took it back to Deutsch & Deutsch Jewelers, not me. It was an incredible-looking ring. So much so that it didn’t look real. But I never had it, and I never pawned it. I had other rings that I pawned of my own, but never that one.”

  Rhonda Glover,
remarkably loquacious for a woman in leg irons, spoke to the Austin detectives of target practice at Red’s, and how she purchased the Glock. “At Red’s they told me that everyone buys the nine millimeter,” explained Glover. “I went back to Houston, and when I decided to go on this trip, I wanted to take the gun with me.”

  Detective Walker asked her where the gun was when she went to Austin. “Oh, it was in the motor home,” she replied, and was only partially truthful.

  “I would really like to know more about your trip to Austin,” said Walker. Glover responded with a recounting of destinations, locales and purposes. Not once did she mention shooting Jimmy Joste. “She said she first went to San Marcos, where they stayed the weekend,” recalled Detective Fortune. “She rented the RV on Tuesday the twentieth. She said they left about eight and they spent the night in the parking lot of her friend’s car rental place. She said she ended up knocking over a wire she didn’t see.”

  “I got to San Marcos in a rented Dodge Durango. On Monday, I went to Smithville and picked up documents at Covert Chevrolet and went to Houston. I went to Top Gun, but they were closed, and then ran some errands. I packed all my things, and drove back to San Marcos, to the Quality Inn.”

  Glover told detectives that whenever she stayed somewhere, she used alias names. “She said on that occasion she used the name Emily Cartwright,” said Walker. “Then she got the dog a haircut in San Antonio at Best of Show. That was Tuesday. Then they went back to San Marcos, then to the motor home. She went to Austin, and they stayed at the car rental place overnight. She said she wanted to get a car so she could be at her CPA’s office, first thing in the morning. She said she rented a car and the taxi driver was not there. She was going to use a cab to take her son to her friends’ house. She identified the friends as Tony and Duanna Barder.”

  “Jimmy was evil. Did you know,” Rhonda Glover asked Walker, “that Jimmy was accused of chopping off his mother’s head?” Despite his career in Texas law enforcement, Walker was unaware of Mrs. Joste’s tragic decapitation.

  “Well, she lived,” explained Glover. “That was back in the ‘70s, and it had been quieted up. That’s why Jimmy moved to Austin. I first heard of this from a business associate over lunch. He said, ‘Rhonda, do you know who you’re dating?’ I said, ‘I guess I don’t, if you have some secret about him.’ He said, ‘He was the number one suspect in the attempted murder of his mother, and was ousted from Houston.’ I was devastated that I had not heard that before, so I confronted [Jimmy]. He went off on me, but admitted that it was true that they did investigate him, but they never found the weapon used, no one was ever arrested for it, and she lived. Someone came in and chopped her in the head.”

  8

  “Any suggestion that Jimmy Joste attacked his mother is absurd,” stated Hal Martin, respected Houston jeweler. “Jimmy was out driving around with me when that happened, and he was as shocked as everyone else.”

  Barbara Joste was violently attacked, but not by a member of her family. “Barbara Joste was having an affair with a married man,” stated a reliable family friend. “The wife found out, and came after Barbara with a vengeance. Barbara did the class thing and kept her mouth shut about who did it to her. No need for scandal or more problems for her, the wife or the man. I think she was just happy to survive. She passed away about twenty years later, and not as a result of that attack. ”

  Rhonda Glover’s hopscotch topic trajectory transitioned directly from decapitation to automobile rental. Glover told detectives that she only had the rental car for an hour, as that was all she needed it for. “I went to my CPA’s office, and went to Jeffrey Dochen’s office of Shelton Properties in West Lake.

  That’s all I wanted to do, because I wanted to get going so I could be in Nashville by the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth.”

  According to Glover, Dochen left her a message that he was back in town, and would help her list the house, or help with the paperwork. “I drove by the house,” said Glover, “but I didn’t see any lights on or anything. I didn’t have a key to the house anymore. I then went to the tanning salon, so maybe I was gone maybe an hour. Then I went back to Round Rock.”

  “She said her friends, the Barders, were watching her son,” recalled Walker. “She said Tony Barder had driven her to the car rental place. When I asked what kind of car she rented, she said she thought it was a Ford Taurus, and that she rented it from her friend Wes, at American Auto Rental in Lakeway. ”

  Despite any emotional or psychological difficulties, or manifest errors of perception, Rhonda Glover couldn’t miss the fact that she was in custody in Kansas, bound in leg irons, and talking to detectives from Austin, Texas. This wasn’t simply a social call.

  “What’s this all about?” asked Glover.

  “It’s about your ex,” Walker replied. “Weren’t you together for thirteen years? Did you two ever get married?”

  “No, we were never married. We never lived together thirteen years. That’s not true at all. We only lived together for a year. At one time, several years ago, we lived together in a high-rise, the Park Lane, in Houston, but he tried to strangle me, and I had to call the police and have him kicked out.”

  Glover then told the detectives that she was actually hiding from Jimmy Joste because he had come to her old apartment and harassed the guards so often that they had called in a criminal trespass charge against him.

  “I was terrified of him,” said Glover. “I didn’t go near him, or answer his phone calls. My attorney, John Green, knows all about him. I have a ton of evidence, like bloody tennis shoes and bloody shirts of his that I got from the house before I left.”

  Detectives Walker and Fortune suddenly found themselves in the Twilight Zone of interrogations. “We didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about at this point,” confirmed Walker. “Then she went about her mother, and how her mother tried to say that Glover was crazy, but that she wasn’t crazy at all.”

  “My mother sent me to a mental hospital, but they let me out right away because I am not crazy, and my mother had me sent back to Jimmy’s custody after I was in the mental hospital. I mean, at the hospital they asked me what happened, and I told them I had a bag of food in the refrigerator that had blood in it, but I’m a vegetarian!”

  “Rhonda told us that her ex had lay in bed one night and moaned and screamed, and that she found out that he was a homosexual and had male escorts. She then related some story about Jimmy telling her that George Bush owned the property that their house was on.”

  “It’s true,” insisted Rhonda Glover. “Bush owned the property around the house and my son can confirm this, and I can give you the name of a neighbor who can confirm some other things about the house and the people around it, and … a cave! Cave X!”

  At this point in the conversation, Walker finally asked her, “What in the world are you talking about? What house? What cave?”

  “I’m talking about the Mission Oaks house that I still own,” said Glover. “I read the thing about the homicide that took place at the Mission Oaks house.”

  “What thing did you read?”

  “The federal marshals had a document saying that there was a homicide at my Mission Oaks house, and I was still the owner of the house. I thought maybe he killed someone there. Did he kill someone? Did you,” asked Rhonda, “find a body there?”

  “Yes,” confirmed Walker, “we did find a body in your Mission Oaks house. What is your ex’s name again?”

  “Jimmy Joste,” replied Glover. “Did you find a kid there?”

  “No. Why do you think we found a kid there?”

  “Well,” she replied conversationally, “one day my son and I were going to Mulligan’s, and Jimmy said something that made me turn around. We saw a man and a woman on the side of the road, and there was a child in Barney pull-ups. They were talking to the child as if they were going to leave him there, and Jimmy knew I was going to be gone for hours. So I sat in the median on Southwest Parkway and watched
them. They all got back in the car and took off, looking at my house as they made a U-turn. Jimmy said ‘toy-shit-kids.'”

  “This response to news that a dead body was recently found in her home,” commented private investigator Fred Wolfson, “is absurd, incongruous and inexplicable. Listen to her. These cops are telling her that a dead body was found in her home, and she doesn’t even ask who it is, or for any information at all. Of course she knows damn well that Jimmy is the body, because she killed him.”

  “She mentioned that Rick Kutner had lived in that house,” recalled Detective Walker. “She said he could be questioned, and that her friend Patti Swenson knew how to get in touch with him.”

  “I am a very good mother,” insisted Rhonda Glover. “And I am very protective, and when all the Devil worship stuff started, I got away from him.”

  “When was the last time you saw Jimmy?”

  “I last saw him at a hotel in Houston, about three or four months ago. Every time I saw him, he looked different. About a year before, he bought me some clothes. My friend Denise had seen Jimmy, and he had been in Europe.”

  “What do you mean about him looking different?”

  “Well,” answered Glover, “one time I saw him and his face was round, and then the next time that I saw him, his face was thin. I thought he had AIDS because of his homosexual activity. But, listen, I want to finish the story about the little boy because it bothered me, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Walker, and Rhonda Glover told the story.

  “My friend Rick told me that when he came to the house from Colorado, he found it destroyed. It looked as if Jimmy had lost his mind. I went out to the trash. First there was some bubble gum in the bedroom, like a child would chew, but my son had been with my mom for months. This was last year. I left him in September 2003. Anyway,” continued Glover, “I kept the gum, and then I found a piece of candy in the trash. Then—get this—I found a candle that had been burning in the bathroom that had like a piece of an ear on it.”