by Burl Barer
Rhonda Glover’s mother took the stand, and Joe James Sawyer asked her directly, “Was there a time in November of 2004 when you became concerned about Jimmy Joste’s behavior?”
Before she could go into any detail regarding her concerns, the state objected with concerns of their own. “I object to the relevance of this concern for Jimmy Joste’s behavior, and whatever it may be going next,” said Bryan Case.
Sawyer and Case met up at the bench, and Sawyer explained his purpose of this line of questioning. “I am going to ask if she became concerned about his mental state and whether she undertook to call anyone to express these feelings and who she called. She called Kelly Joste, she called the guy at UBS and the guy at Prosperity Bank. The relevance is this—the state has asked at least three witnesses, by my count, if Jimmy Joste was docile, mellow, nonaggressive. This, I think, is relevant on the issue of his behavior, and I mean, how do I—how do they [have] it both ways? I am not going to ask what the behavior was.”
“If this woman has testimony,” said Judge Lynch, “that he was aggressive or nondocile of her own knowledge and personal knowledge, she can answer those questions.”
Things did not go well with Sherlyn Shotwell on the stand, even though she had her sworn affidavit in front of her. She didn’t have her glasses and repeatedly answered “no” to questions for which “yes” was reflected in her affidavit. If that wasn’t enough, any mention she made of concern for Jimmy Joste’s mental state or behavior was met with further objections from the prosecution. When Sawyer asked Shotwell how often she saw her daughter with bruises—the implication being that the bruises were from being beaten by Jimmy Joste—Shotwell’s testimony came to an abrupt and truncated conclusion.
One interesting, yet overlooked, piece of testimony was offered by Jimmy Joste’s financial advisor, Mike Cook. Sawyer’s co-counsel, Ms. Darouzzet, asked Cook to detail charges made against Joste’s bank account by debit card or personal check.
“Are you familiar with a company named Identigene?”
Identigene is the Houston firm to which Rhonda Glover submitted the piece of bubble gum that she believed indicated that Jimmy Joste was murdering children. There were three charges to Identigene reflected on Joste’s checking account on January 19, 2004.
“Could you please tell us those amounts?”
“The top one,” replied Cook, “is eight hundred seventy, the next one is six hundred, and the bottom one is for one hundred fifty dollars.”
This meant that Jimmy Joste paid over $1,600 to Identigene for DNA testing on items submitted to them by Rhonda Glover. “It would certainly indicate,” commented Jeff Reynolds, “that Rhonda Glover had full access to, and use of, Jimmy Joste’s checking account. Here she is accusing him of being a murdering Devil worshiper, and she is using his money to conduct her so-called investigation. There were also significant charges to Joste’s account for thousands of dollars in women’s clothing at various Houston specialty stores. She may have thought he was a cruel killer of innocent kids, but she had no qualms about using his money for new clothes, car rentals, shoes and DNA investigations. ”
The total amount of funds that came out of Joste’s account in the month of February 2004 was over $300,000. In one day there were several thousands of dollars spent at various women’s clothing stores in Houston. The following month there were an incredible number of returns and credits, including over $10,000 from Louis Vuitton of Houston, to Joste’s MasterCard.
There were cash advances on the card of over $32,000, and total MasterCard activity of $313,706.43 for a combined total $346,477.13. “That’s a hell of a lot of money for a short period of time,” commented Fred Wolfson. “Even taking into account Rhonda’s extravagant lifestyle and Jimmy’s generosity, that is still a breathtaking amount of money spent on clothes, expensive hotels and jewelry. The vast majority of it was spent in Houston, not in Austin.”
When people talk about Rhonda having money because it was Jimmy’s money, his bank account records, which show where and how the money was spent, certainly lend credence to that point of view.
“Take a look at the names of the stores,” offered Wolfson. “The women’s stores where the money was being spent are all fine stores with high-priced quality merchandise. None of this was trash.”
“It’s trash!” exclaimed Bryan Case. “What she said on the witness stand was trash. In order to even think of finding her not guilty, you have to believe what she says. You have to believe that trash, and that is exactly what it is, trash.
“There is no reasonable doubt,” insisted Case. “There is not one specific thing you can put your finger on that offers real reasonable doubt. What she did was, in the most coldhearted way, killed Jimmy Joste.”
Prosecuting attorney Gail Van Winkle passionately weighed in on the murder and its surrounding deception.
“When she took the cab back to the Barders’ after shooting Jimmy,” said Van Winkle, “she was in the same pink floral dress. There are absolutely no pockets in that dress, so that means she walked out from the attic in that dress pointing a loaded gun at him. Well, is it logical, then, that he would suddenly start choking her as she is standing there with a loaded gun? Is that logical, or [is it] logical that he would be surprised and start stepping back, and she would shoot him and continue down the hall shooting him?”
Under the law, and common sense, if Jimmy had indeed grabbed her, he would be legally entitled to do so because she started it by threatening him with a gun. “It is much more logical,” Van Winkle said, “that she heard Jimmy, she called him. She knew he was going to come up into the bedroom, and that he was actually excited to see her. He worshiped that woman, and she surprised him with the gun and started shooting. Rhonda testified that at one point she took the gun out from her pants. She had put the gun in her pants.”
This is the problem with lies, noted prosecuting attorney Van Winkle. “When you get caught in lies, you forget what lie is going to be supported by the evidence, and what is not. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, let’s say she did change into those pants. If she did, it is directly contrary to her version of events that she had just left Red’s, swung by the Mission Oaks house to put that gun up, because she knew she couldn’t carry it on the camping trip, and just happened to run into Jimmy. If you believed that, she would have had to have changed clothes and put on those black pants before the encounter with Jimmy. Does that make sense, other than those are her shooting pants? Either way, her version of what happened is not logical and is not supported by the evidence, and is certainly not a version in which the killing is justified. It is not self-defense. It is absolutely not self-defense.”
Bryan Case had his own views on the pants/dress issue. “She says that she pulled the gun out of her pants. Well, she was wearing a dress when she left Red’s at about two-thirty. They even identified the dress she was wearing. She drives over to the house, and at some point she changes out of her dress into the pants she wears when she shoots. Maybe she changed into the pants in the car, I don’t know. And it makes sense because, as we know, every time she shoots the gun, she does it wearing pants, not a dress. She’s in the dress. She changes into pants.
“Oh, and there is the phone call to Jimmy before she gets to the house. Why did she call from a pay phone? She is not a dumb woman,” said Case. “She isn’t stupid. She calls from the pay phone to make sure he is at the house, and she does not want to have a record of it on her cell phone. She doesn’t want anything, if she gets away, to link her to contacting Jimmy directly before the murder.
“The woman goes into the house,” continued Case, “and she has changed into her pants after calling Jimmy to make sure either that he is home, or that he is on his way to meet her there. And then she lies in wait for him. Is there really any doubt in your mind that her story, which keeps changing, is ridiculous? How absurd can it get? How absurd? There are four cartridge casings in that master bedroom, four. She fired that gun four times. She says she never move
d, that she kept firing the gun from the same spot. He was standing in her way. No. No way.”
Case pointed to the forensic evidence, primarily referencing the bloodstain patterns. “He takes the first round right there in the doorway. The bullet goes through him right there in the doorway, and there is blood on the door from that shot. Bam, three more times. Bam! Bam! Bam! while he is going down the hall. But then you know what, he falls down. You know why maybe there are three or four shots right through one place on his body? Because he was very likely already dead on the ground at that point.”
Bryan Case then painted a chilling picture. “She then approaches a number of steps toward him, aiming the gun down at his lifeless body so the cartridge will eject out the top of the gun and land at Jimmy’s feet. She shoots him six times while he is lying there. You can take a look at the photos, and you can see the bullet wounds. It is a very tight pattern. She did not miss. She was a very good shot, especially when the victim is on the floor. She is standing above him, and he’s not moving.”
Finished shooting, Case said, Glover changed back into the sundress before returning to the Barder residence. “That is one way that her statement about wearing pants at the time she pulled the trigger could be true,” commented Fred Wolfson. “But [when you] look at in context of her pattern of changing into those pants, it certainly appears to confirm intent to shoot. I mean, those are her shooting pants.”
According to Bryan Case, if you want to make sense of this murder, you will never succeed because it makes no sense. “Even though the state does not have to prove motive,” said Case, “everyone wants to understand why things happen. What you have to understand is that a correct, right-thinking, rational person can’t fathom the magnitude of this event because you can’t put yourself in the position of doing these things, because it doesn’t make sense.”
The murder itself was irrational, and so was Rhonda Glover. “She killed Jimmy Joste in the most coldhearted way, and we are never going to understand it. She is mentally disturbed, that’s part of it, but you are never really going to understand it. It is too mean, too cold, and it is beyond comprehension, but beyond a reasonable doubt, Rhonda Glover is guilty of murder. ”
Rhonda Glover’s story, or various stories, did not make sense. “Murderers are generally not rational people,” said Gail Van Winkle. “The law is judged by what a reasonable ordinary person would think, not an irrational murderer. ”
There was absolutely no evidence, even based on Rhonda Glover’s own testimony, that she shot Jimmy under the “required necessity” of the laws regarding self-defense. “That is what is required to acquit the defendant,” Van Winkle explained, “that self-defense was immediately necessary. Rhonda Glover wanted to base self-defense on her stories about Jimmy being abusive in the past. ”
When Gail Van Winkle stood in front of the jury, she made her position clear: “We are here to decide what happened on July 21, 2004, and her testimony does not even rise to the level of the legitimate self-defense claim. At first, she wanted you to believe that she was unsure of what happened. She cried. She said she was in shock. She couldn’t even tell her attorney how the killing happened. Suddenly, when Mr. Case got her on cross-examination, her demeanor changed one hundred percent. She was lucid. She was evasive. She was even assertive—this is a woman who knew what she was talking about. She had planned this murder, and she had planned what she was going to testify to on the witness stand.
“She’s not a truthful person,” concluded Van Winkle. “The evidence speaks for Jimmy Joste. The evidence speaks to what really happened. It speaks to the truth. Listen to the truth, and you will find the defendant guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“The state wants you to believe that there was a plan at work here,” said Joe James Sawyer in his closing argument, “and, frankly, I agree with them. The question is, was it a plan to murder another human being, or was it a plan finally to run away and stay away? Was it because in November of 2003 events occurred that led Rhonda Glover, after all of those years, to conclude, ‘No more.’ The issue is not whether Jimmy Joste gave her presents and bought her cars. You know, you have to believe, if you buy into that has been her motivator, why bother to work? I mean, if you are a millionaire and you are this much in love, and [he is] lavishing these gifts on you, why work? I mean, if you are a goldbrick, why would you work? Do you remember Mr. Case asking her, ‘Well, you must have some financial records, certainly you must have something to show that you actually do work.’ I chose these two years, neither the beginning nor the end but some place in the middle—1997, 1998—and you’ll see she had a gross income in excess of one hundred thirty-seven thousand dollars in one year. You can’t have it both ways. She can’t be just a gold digger and also be responsible to [her] own business and work at it and have it succeed. I think one of the problems we see here when there is a woman saying that one of the mainstays of this relationship was the fact that ‘he would periodically abuse me,’ and that is an ugly thing. Invariably, a perpetrator is ashamed of it himself. I wasn’t just kidding when I was asking one of those witnesses, ‘Do you think the men who do that go out and talk about it, brag about it, confide in their friends about it?’ ‘Gee, I have a problem, you know. Periodically, I’d just beat the hell out of the old lady.’ Do you question that? Wouldn’t it be true that like many of us, there is a public face and there is a private face. There is the person we are in our daily lives and with our friends, and there is a person who we are when we are alone with our family. Those are two faces [that] can be strikingly dissimilar, but when you ask coworkers and friends, ‘Is he a violent guy?’ is it surprising that the answer is ‘No, pretty passive, pretty docile.’ Well, except for the incident at Barton Creek, where we know they say he wasn’t really guilty, he just chose to plead no contest. Maybe he did that because he didn’t have a good enough lawyer, or unfair prosecution, or"—Sawyer changed his tempo, making sure the next line sunk in—"that is the one time you see that you can prove that there was violence by Jimmy Joste in that relationship. Maybe that is the one time he couldn’t get off the hook. Maybe that is the one time you have real evidence of him being violent and abusive.
“Again I ask you to consider,” said Sawyer, “was this a plan to run or a plan to murder? I think that the most illusory thing in this case is the gun range and the gun training. Every one of you picks up the paper, looks at a television. We hear about murders every day. No one has to get trained to commit murder. It does not require a lot of training to just go get one of these guns, walk up to whomever you are going to kill and let them have it. But I honestly believe the state says, ‘No, she was getting this training to commit murder.’ God forbid that you might believe she was getting the training because she intended to defend herself, because fear and concern would’ve been perfectly legitimate reasons to learn how to use a gun, and how to learn to use it in certain situations, particularly in your own home.”
When both the defense and prosecution had given their final arguments, Judge Lynch addressed the jury. “It now becomes your duty to retire to the jury room to elect a foreperson, and then to begin deliberation of your verdict.” The jury did as it was instructed.
Despite her defense attorneys’ best efforts, there was never any reasonable doubt about the outcome. Perhaps Joe James Sawyer’s strategy in putting Rhonda Glover on the stand was to let the jury experience Rhonda Glover. If he couldn’t introduce evidence or testimony of her mental illness during the guilt or innocence phase, he could dramatically demonstrate it by putting his client on the stand.
“Because of her demeanor on the stand, the over-the-top emotional display while being questioned by her attorney, followed by her hostile attitude toward Bryan Case, it was easy to see the wide range of her emotional responses, and how quickly she could change from almost one personality into another,” said Fred Wolfson. “That may have been the idea behind her attorney having her take the stand in her own defense—something she didn’t
have to do. By seeing and hearing Rhonda Glover respond under pressure, the jury could see that she at least had emotional problems, if not full-blown mental illness.”
There were no long, arduous arguments amongst the jurors. Rhonda Lee Glover was found guilty of murder after less than three hours of deliberation.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this concludes the first phase of the trial. The second phase is the punishment phase. When there is a guilty verdict, a defendant, prior to trial, makes a determination of who they would like to have do punishment, either the jury or the court. In this case the defendant has opted for the jury to do punishment. Therefore, we will start the second phase tomorrow morning.”
“I have to compliment Mr. Sawyer,” admitted Bryan Case, “he did an excellent job of offering his client the best defense, and putting the best possible spin on what seemed to us to be an open-and-shut case. He is a very good lawyer who did what he was supposed to do.”
The punishment phase, or, as some call it, the mitigation phase, was a battleground for Rhonda Glover’s future. This is where factors that could have influenced her behavior could be brought to the jury’s attention as factors they should consider when deciding appropriate punishment.
On August 17, 2005, Douglas K. O’Connell notified Joe James Sawyer, Rhonda’s attorney, that the state of Texas intended to present a list of crimes, wrongs and bad acts committed by Glover for the jury’s consideration during the punishment phase of the trial.
The list was impressive, if not corroborated by arrests or convictions:
3/1/1999: Use of cocaine or other controlled substance or drug