by Burl Barer
“What did you say?”
“Did you hear about the ear?”
“Bits and pieces. ”
“That’s right. I said a bit or a piece of an ear.”
“Okay,” said Walker, “I heard that.”
“Well, listen. I took a nail file and put it in a piece of plastic.”
“The nail file or the ear?”
“The ear,” explained Rhonda. “Then I took it to a DNA place, Identigene, in Houston.” (Glover was still stuck on the chewing gum when speaking to the author in late 2009. “It was a big piece of bubble gum,” she said, “gum like a kid would chew, not an adult. I took that chewing gum to Identigene. Identigene had my DNA, my son’s DNA, Jimmy’s DNA, but the DNA from the chewing gum didn’t match any of them!”)
“While I was at the house,” continued Glover, “there were things that popped up in the backyard that looked like body molds. You know, I called police in Austin and they think I’m crazy. Rick Kutner told me that I was crazy too, but I told Rick that I am not crazy at all, and that all this was really going on, and I was going to prove it. ”
Glover then told Walker and Fortune that Kutner moved into the house in the middle of the year, but then moved out because Jimmy was so crazy.
“He saw Jimmy firsthand in his deranged state of mind—Jimmy was deranged, not Rick. He came down from Colorado and helped Jimmy get some- what together and presentable. Once I left him, he got worse and had not showered or shaved or eaten. The house was torn up and he said I did it.
“Patti Swenson told me that Rick knew I wasn’t really crazy,” Glover told detectives. “Rick knew something about Jimmy, about the Devil worshiping. Jimmy tried to get me to believe that Lucifer was coming into my son.
“I ran to my mother, but she sent me back to Jimmy. ”
“How did she send you back to him?”
“The mental hospital released me to my mother’s care, but my mother just dumped me in a hotel with no money or anything. I had to go back to Jimmy because I had nowhere else to go. Jimmy came at me with a sword, and the whole time he was living a double life—looking like a nice guy to everyone, but I found him with homosexuals and Devil worshipers.”
When Rhonda wasn’t battling homosexual Devil worshipers crawling through Cave X to molest clones and children, she was attending church services at Gateway. “It’s a great church,” Rhonda said. “On Sunday, I drove all the way from San Marcos to Gateway, and all the way back—that’s the kind of Christian I am. Anyway, you can certainly see that I was worried about Jimmy and what he had been up to.”
Detective Fortune expressed sympathy for her obviously troubled situation. “It sounds as if Jimmy was a dangerous person,” Fortune said.
“Jimmy was very, very dangerous,” confirmed Glover. “He went to jail for assaulting me, you know. He pulled a knife on me, and made me go and tell them it had been my fault, and made me take my testimony back. I was scared of him.”
There is no known incident of Jimmy Joste pulling a knife on Rhonda Glover. “You can’t just take back your testimony in a situation where someone threatens your life with a knife,” says Fred Wolfson, “especially in a domestic violence call. The prosecutor would have probably pursued it, and there would certainly be a record of his arrest. To the best of my knowledge, this incident is pure fantasy.”
“Oh,” Glover suddenly blurted out, “let me finish telling you about this friend of Patti Swenson! I have been just dying to tell someone about this!”
As Glover was so enthusiastic about this friend of Swenson’s, the two detectives leaned forward in supportive attention. When she opened her mouth to speak, she said nothing about him. Instead, she returned to the topic of the DNA laboratory in Houston, and the failure of the Houston police to take an interest in her Cave X conspiracy.
“They told me,” said Glover, “that it sounded like a matter for the Austin police, as the house is in Austin, and so is Cave X.”
At this point in the conversation, Detective Fortune spoke up, communicating the deepest sympathy and compassion. “We know you were terrorized, Rhonda,” said Fortune. That was the moment that Rhonda Glover broke down in tears. At long last, Rhonda Glover had two detectives from the Austin Police Department hanging on every word. Finally her story was being told.
Detective Walker asked Rhonda Glover why she drove by the Mission Oaks house. “Oh, I always do that to see what’s happening,” she said. “I didn’t want to see Jimmy that day. I put an angel in the front yard.”
“Rhonda,” asked Walker, “did you have your gun with you?”
It was at this point that the interrogation took on a change in tack. “This is where the detective will ask basic questions about the crime,” said Fred Wolfson, “to determine if Glover is being truthful or deceptive. Walker pretty much knows the answer to the question. If she answers honestly about the gun, she will be remembering, so her eyes will move right. If she is not being truthful, the eyes might move to the left. If Walker determines that Glover’s reactions indicate deception, and all other evidence points to guilt, the interrogation of presumed guilty suspect begins.”
“No,” she lied, “the gun was in the motor home. After I dropped the car off, I got a taxi ride back to my friends’ house, and talked to them for a little while. They asked me if I had seen Jimmy, and I told them that I hadn’t.”
“So you didn’t have the gun with you?”
“No.”
“You would think that she would know where this conversation was going,” commented Wolfson. “I mean, the lady may be crazy, but she isn’t so stupid that she can’t figure out that here she is, in leg irons, talking with two detectives who are asking her if she had her gun with her when she went by the Mission Oaks house.”
“She did seem nervous,” acknowledged Walker. If he didn’t “spill the beans,” he, at least, tipped over the jar when he asked, “What if I told you that we know that you did have the gun with you that day?”
“Notice how he phrases that,” said Wolfson. “'What if.'” He didn’t confront her with a statement of fact, but rather a hypothetical one. In this technique the detective presented the implication of evidence or knowledge that might or might not exist. The detective typically stated in a confident manner that the suspect was involved in the crime. The suspect’s stress level would start increasing, and the interrogator might move around the room and invade the suspect’s personal space to increase the discomfort.
“But I didn’t,” objected Glover.
“Did you go shoot that day?” Walker asked.
“You mean did I go to Red’s that day and shoot? Yes, I did.”
“Why did you lie to me about that?” asked Walker.
“I didn’t lie,” insisted Glover. “I had the motor home with me when I went to Red’s.”
They looked at her; she looked at them. The lovely lady in leg irons, perfectly capable of buying into the most bizarre fantasies and paranoid delusions, was incapable of denying the real reason Walker and Fortune were asking her questions about shooting, guns and Jimmy Joste.
“I did it! “ Glover wailed. “He came after me, and I did it.”
“We told her we were there to help her get it off of her soul,” recalled Fortune, taking creative liberties with his official job duties. “She said she went to get the camping equipment from the house, and her old golf clubs for her son, because she had hers with her.”
“I had called Jimmy,” said Rhonda Glover, “and he told me that he was eating lunch at a restaurant. I thought I had time to get in, get what I wanted, and leave.”
If Jimmy Joste was dining in Aspen, Colorado, which is what Glover insisted he told her, there would be no concern about whether she had time to get in, get her stuff and leave (as she already established that she didn’t have a key to the house).
“I hung up the phone and went to the house,” Glover told Walker. “I took the gun with me and went upstairs to the attic to get the camping stuff. That’s when I hea
rd the garage door open.”
The truth, verified by all of Joste’s neighbors, was that Jimmy’s blue VW hadn’t been out of the garage in days. He was home when she arrived, and dead when she departed. Glover previously told detectives that she didn’t have a key to the house. Neighbors said the garage door had been open for a few days. (It is logical to assume that Rhonda Glover entered the house through the garage.)
“I went into the attic by the upstairs bedroom,” she said, “and then I heard him come home. I was going to hide there and hope he would just go away. I was on my knees, and when I tried to stand, I fell over a board. That’s when he heard me. He came up, and I had my briefcase, and the gun was in the briefcase.”
“The two detectives,” commented investigator Fred Wolfson, “certainly perceived the glaring absurdities of her narrative. A man comes home, and she is going to crouch in silence waiting for him to leave. As he lives there, he might not leave the house for two days, three days. Perhaps he has nowhere to go, plenty of food in the fridge, and he has guests coming. She could be crouching up there for the better part of the week. She said that she brought the gun with her in the briefcase for protection in case he was home. However, she just spoke to him and ascertained that he was in Colorado. Hence, there was no reason for her to have any concern that he would show up because he is in a faraway state.”
Perhaps realizing the incongruity of her statement, she quickly clarified it. “I mean, I didn’t have the briefcase out, but I did have it with me. I didn’t expect him being there, but I did have the briefcase with me. I just wanted to make sure that if he was there, I could protect myself, because the last time I saw him, he said he would kill me.”
The detectives were not buying it. “That doesn’t match what we saw, Rhonda,” said Walker.
“I didn’t want to leave the Glock in the RV because my son knew the box it was in, and might get into it. I decided to hide it,” she said. “There was a Christmas stocking in the attic, and the Glock would fit in the bottom of it perfectly. I didn’t just want to put the gun in its regular case up there, because if he and his druggie friends went up in the attic to find something to pawn for drugs, they would certainly pawn the gun. I knew that they would never find it if I put it in the Christmas stocking. ”
Unlike Rhonda Glover, Jimmy Joste was not known to pawn his possessions for drugs, even when down to his last $50,000 in cash.
“There I was, upstairs in the attic, when I heard the garage door open. I thought that maybe Jimmy had made a phone call, telling the men he’d hired to kill me where I was, and that it was time to take care of me. I was terrified. The floor was plywood, and when I went to move, I tripped over a board and landed with a loud thud on the floor. Well, this was right above the garage. Whoever it was that showed up would know exactly where I was.”
Glover then told detectives that Joste came at her, and they struggled. The scenario she described did not correspond to the physical layout of the attic or the forensic evidence. “We were struggling,” said Glover, “and I got free and made it to my briefcase and got my gun.”
Listening intently, Walker and Fortune merely nodded in encouragement as Glover continued her version of events. “She said he hit her on the head with the gun,” recalled Walker. “She supposedly had the gun in her hand when he hit her in the head with it. ”
“I didn’t have my finger on the trigger,” said Glover, “because I had been taking a defensive class with a guy named Rico. I bought kickboxing and Tae Kwon Do stuff. I know that stuff, so I kicked Jimmy off of me. I got up and then I was in the bedroom.”
“What happened then, Rhonda?”
“He was coming at me, and he was screaming, ‘You fucking bitch! I’ll kill you!'”
Glover’s gaze darted quickly between the expressionless faces of the two detectives before she added a secondary fear factor: “His voice wasn’t human! It was demonic! ”
Walker and Fortune said nothing.
“It was a demonic voice, like Satan!”
The two detectives kindly encouraged Glover to continue her narrative.
“I emptied the gun into him,” said Glover succinctly.
“What did he do when you shot him?”
“He fell over in the hall, but not until I had finished shooting him.”
Fortune and Walker already knew better. Forensic crime scene experts could easily tell that the shooter blasted at least one bullet directly into Jimmy’s groin while standing over him.
“I just emptied the gun and ran,” she insisted. “I was standing in the bedroom when I shot him. I just kept shooting. He finally fell over when I was done shooting.”
“But, Rhonda,” said Walker, “that doesn’t match up with what we saw. ”
Glover denied having shot in the hallway, saying it was only in the bedroom. “I’m not a very good shot,” she said, “and I hadn’t been shooting long.”
“Why did you go to Red’s that day?”
“I always practiced,” Glover replied. “I mean, if I am going to have a gun, I should know how to use it if I have to.”
Detective Fortune inquired as to when she went to the Mission Oaks house. “Was that before or after you went to Red’s?”
“I went to Red’s that morning, in the motor home. I can’t remember if I went from there to the house. I think I went to get the rental car first.”
Walker asked her where her son was during all of this, and she told him that the boy was asleep in the motor home. “I told her I knew it helped to get it off of her chest,” recalled Walker. “I then brought up that I knew she had been practicing in Houston on different ways to shoot someone. I told her one of the ways she practiced was in the bedroom with the attic door. ”
“This wasn’t premeditated at all,” Glover quickly explained. “That was my house, and I had a right to be in my house and protect myself. Jimmy Joste was a murderer! I was scared of him, and I practiced all sorts of scenarios. There were things in the house I wanted, and I told Rico that I wanted to go back. I’m guilty of protecting myself and my son,” said Glover. “I hid upstairs, and he found me upstairs.”
With tears streaming down her face, Rhonda Glover finally said the magic words that brought the casually framed interrogation to an end: “I want a lawyer.”
She was offered a tissue and water. “I told her the interview was over,” said Walker. “I told her I was going to give her my card if she wanted to talk to us again. I let her know that we could not initiate contact with her, since she had asked for a lawyer.”
“Am I going to be sent home?”
“Well, we are dealing with a federal warrant,” Walker explained, “so I’m not sure, but I believe that you’re going to see a judge on Friday.”
“Wait,” said Glover. “I don’t want you to leave until I give you the names and phone numbers of witnesses to the things I want investigated. I don’t want you to lose any time investigating the cave, and all the evidence I have about that.”
“She said she would give us permission to go to her apartment,” recalled Walker. “I left the room to advise the marshals what was going on. Rhonda then began giving information to Detective Fortune.”
“In my house,” she told Fortune, “in the crawl spaces, there is a formaldehyde smell. I found a little girl’s hairbrush. My mother has the hairbrush,” said Glover. “Look in those crawl spaces!”
She wrote out a “consent to search” for her apartment on Allen Parkway, and told detectives that another serious issue was that the Houston Forensics Lab was closed, so she didn’t have anyone to take the evidence to. “You will find the candle wax with the DNA, the candy, pants with semen, and in the bag of evidence you will find some pictures that my son and I took, and …”
The pause was beyond pregnant; Walker prompted Glover to release whatever she was holding back.
“And what, Rhonda?” he asked softly, comfortingly.
“You can see an outline of a body in the air hoses.”
Detectives made a mental note of the body in the air hoses.
“The entire house was redone by the 9/11 company,” Glover said, and gave detectives contact information for Patti Swenson. “All this information is in the motor home. Ask Patti Swenson. She’ll tell you.”
“Thank you, Ms. Glover,” said Walker. “I know this was tough for you to do.”
“I never wanted it to come down to this,” she explained. “I just wanted to be left alone. I really didn’t think he would be there. It was him or me. He was coming at me.”
Rhonda Glover wiped away more tears, then looked up at Walker and Fortune. “You know, I called the police so many times for help, and they did nothing to him. Go look,” she encouraged, “there are tons of police reports on him—just look at all the times the police came out to that house.”
Walker and Fortune already knew how many times Austin police responded to Rhonda’s calls, and all calls ended with the responding officer determining whether or not this emotionally disturbed person was a danger to herself or others. Having delusions is not criminal, but medical. It only becomes a matter for law enforcement if there is a perceived and/or verifiable danger resulting from the delusions.
“Delusions,” explained counselor Leonard Buschel, “are false beliefs that someone firmly clings to. For example, the delusions that one is famous or publicly important or is a god, believing a spouse or partner is unfaithful when it is not true, believing one is being followed, spied upon, secretly listened to, or thinking that random events contain a special meaning for you alone. Then there are other even more bizarre delusions, such as believing things that are actually impossible, such as having the delusion that there are dolphins serving on [the] state supreme court, that your husband is a gerbil, your rabbi is the pope, or that there is a rat living in your mouth with whom you communicate. Delusions are one aspect of the psychotic features of psychosis, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, as well as some other psychiatric conditions [that] can be made worse, of course, by use of alcohol or other substances that alter mood or perception.”