by Burl Barer
Epilogue
I can’t wait for you to come see me, wrote Rhonda Glover. I have so much to tell you. The Texas prison system is very cooperative with the press, radio and television. If you are a newspaper, radio or television reporter seeking an interview with Rhonda Glover, there is no problem. Although I do a weekly radio show, “True Crimes,” write articles for the internationally acclaimed “In Cold Blog,” which are then featured in major newspapers and magazines, what you are holding in your hands is a book. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has disallowed interviews between “book authors” and inmates.
According to Suzy Spencer, veteran true crime writer, “Authors might possibly get an interview through the research department. But that involves filling out a long form that must reveal any criminal history, including DWIs, subjects us to urine tests, and orders us not to name our inmate in our books. That form must then be notarized…. Obviously, if other media were required to go through such scrutiny, TDCJ wouldn’t have to bother setting up very many inmate interviews. ”
According to TDCJ public information officer Michelle Lyons, the problem is that authors cannot verify identity as journalists can with “letterhead,” and that the TDCJ is too short-staffed to accommodate extended research visits: “The bottom line is that it’s an issue of public safety—we do have the right to approve and deny all visitors.”
This meant that my visit to Rhonda Glover would take place as a friend, not as an author of true crimes. This also meant no tape recorder, computer or writing tablet. My visits were as if I were family, or an enamored fan of a woman convicted of murder. Believe me, there are plenty of those.
Eager to meet Rhonda, I traveled to Texas on four different occasions to meet with her. Three times I returned without seeing her. The first time the Texas prison system was shut down due to an inmate somehow procuring a cell phone, and making a fortune in illegal calls. Then, next time, my visit corresponded with Glover being sent out of town for medical treatment. The time after that, it was the swine flu scare that shut down the prisons. Finally, nearing the book’s deadline, I made it through security to spend two hours with Rhonda Glover.
She wasn’t expecting me, and was delighted by my surprise visit. She came bounding into the visiting area, separated from me by a solid pane of glass. Her energy was as I anticipated, and her looks even better than I imagined.
By the time Rhonda and I met, I had read the psychiatric reports, medical records, police documents and trial transcripts. Yes, she has a vibrant and enthusiastic personality, and she is easier to read than Junior Scholastic. Her emotions—impatience, anger, frustration or happy enthusiasm—manifest themselves like neon signs in Times Square. Watch the eyes, the body language, and learn what she regrets.
She is blessed with a quick mind, creativity and intense energy. I can see why she had friends, and lost friends. If she sets her mind to something, I doubt there is little to stop her. When the conversation veers away from Rhonda Glover, it is only allowed to stray for a moment. She is the center of her known universe, and gravity pulls everything into her orbit. It is easy to see both the attraction and the aversion.
If you anger her, she knows how to manifest anger. She is still mad at her mother, despite her mother having devoted her life to caring for, protecting and rescuing her, Jimmy and their son. Beyond the tragic death of Jimmy Joste, there is the living tragedy of a mother seeing her daughter become a murderer, and a blameless child losing both his parents—one to senseless violence; the other to prison.
“My son asks me why I don’t just admit that I’m crazy,” Rhonda Glover shares. “Well, I won’t do that. I’m not going to say I’m crazy. I’ve been tested here in prison, and I’m fine. I don’t have mental illness at all. You can see the test results yourself. Well, obviously there was something seriously wrong with me to stay in a dysfunctional relationship,” says Glover. “It was crazy for me to be involved with Jimmy Joste.
“After I went to Betty Ford in 1998, I was sent to a lady who, upon her observation, diagnosed me with bipolar. No doctor diagnosed me. I agreed to go on a litany of drugs because that is how I functioned. I was in denial that I had a relationship problem, and being on pills gave Jimmy the excuse to use when the cops came. ‘Don’t worry, she’s just off her medication.’ I was taking antipsychotics and Antabuse. I wasn’t off my medications. I was on medications for a mental illness that I didn’t have. Someday the truth will come out. I know it will. Then they will all know. It will be on the news. But I want to forget about all that. I just want to go home and be a mommy again.”
“Rhonda,” I ask her, “may I quote you in the book saying, ‘I believed at that time’ about the cave, the clones, the bodies?”
“No, you don’t understand. All that is true, Burl. Listen to me. In the book, please don’t say that I killed Jimmy. I didn’t kill him, don’t say that. I don’t want my son to read that I killed his father. Okay, I shot him, and he died, but I was only protecting myself. It wasn’t like I killed him, or murdered him. I have people who believe in my case, people who know how a woman must have the right to defend herself in her own home. There are so many things I didn’t tell, so many things I was afraid to tell. Things that my lawyer said not to mention, that he told me to keep secret. Like the cave, for instance, that’s true. They may have told you that there are only two entrances to Cave X at Regents School. There are other entrances, and all those things I said about what goes on in there is true. I just had to not mention some things because it was too dangerous, so my lawyer told me not to talk about them.”
Rhonda is referring to the competency decision: she was competent to stand trial if she could keep her mouth shut and follow her lawyer’s instructions on what not to talk about. If she could keep some things “secret,” then she was competent. That is, admittedly, a rather mind-boggling standard of mental competence.
“Why did Jimmy believe that the three of you were going to leave the country?”
“How did you know that?” she asks as if I had just announced the location of Amelia Earhart. “How did you know that?”
“He said so, Rhonda. Jimmy told more than one person that all of you were leaving together for Canada. ”
Her mind races so fast you can almost smell burning rubber coming from her cerebral cortex. “He didn’t tell Rocky Navarro,” she says as if laying out a perfect hand of poker. “They were best friends. If Jimmy really believed that, he would have certainly told Rocky, and he didn’t.”
She pauses for a moment; her eye movements indicate the creative process at work.
“He was planning to leave the country after he killed me,” she says, improvising with remarkable fluidity. “He had his plans, and I knew he was going to either pay to have me murdered, or do it himself. He had both in mind. He hired two men to help him kill me that day.”
This version was never told to the police, nor was it presented in the courtroom. “Jimmy brought help with him to take me down. He did not expect for me to have that gun, because I have always been adamantly against them. He knew I would never resort to that. Or, at least, he thought I would not. So, if I were planning to kill him, why would I go to the gun store where we knew the owners so well? There are ways to get a weapon on the streets. I have met many of his thug friends. I was in rehab. I speak the drug language, money talks. I could have gotten a gun from the streets. Why would I do it the legal way?”
I don’t mention the fact that she didn’t get it the legal way. She gave false information on the ATF form, rendering the transaction illegal.
“If I were going to claim it was self-defense,” she continues, “then why wouldn’t I just immediately call the cops and cry rape or something?”
Good question.
“Innocent people run, that’s why. My intentions were to get my son to my mom’s and then tell her to help me, but she wasn’t there. Then my son asked me why I was crying so hard, and I said, ‘Something happened to Jimmy and I am sad.’ He s
aid, ‘Mom, why are you going to let him ruin our last summer trip?’ I just knew that I was coming to prison. I truly did not know he was broke and my thoughts were all about them saying I did it for money. You see where I am coming from? Plus, with those guys seeing my car and my face, I believed they knew more about me and my family and they would come after me. I did tell my first and second lawyers about them, but neither one chose to investigate it. They said unless I knew them, there was literally nothing we could do. I can pick them out of a lineup. I am certain about that.”
Joe Lanza, her new attorney, has been informed about these two mystery men who came to kill her, but they hid behind Jimmy when she started firing. “They used him as a shield,” insists Rhonda. Jimmy wasn’t bulletproof, and two shots went right through him and into the wall.
“I told Lanza that Sawyer did not want me to tell the jury all that stuff. I was not prepped for the stand at all. I had no idea what to say and I was out of it. I was on pills that do not go together, Burl. I refused my pills before trial. That is an automatic ground for reversal. I hope you get to see the truth come out and the book takes on a whole different perspective for you. So, you see, that the bullets that went to his elbow were the first ones fired at him to stop him. The next ones were where the black dude used Jimmy as a shield. I had not intended for him to have a fatal wound, Burl. I was firing at another attacker as I was being attacked. There were two other men there with him that day. He showed up and came straight up to the guest room. I had been in the attic looking for my camping equipment to take on the RV. I went to hide the gun there because the gun store told me I did not have a concealed carry license, the only way to carry it was to and from the gun range. So I legally own that house. I was planning on hiding it in my Christmas stocking upside down. It would fit perfectly without detection. I carried it in a computer case.
“If I left it out like that, then they would want to hock my computer, right? I mean, I already knew that strangers had been in there. Do you have any clue how violated I felt and scared? I had been robbed there before. There is a police report on it. Anyway, Jimmy came in and started screaming and asking about our son, and I said, ‘You will never see him again,’ and that is when he started choking me. I pretended to be passed out and he found the gun. Then there was a knock at the door downstairs. He went into the bathroom and fixed his shirt and put his glasses back on and went down there. When he left the room, I ran to the desk to call 911, but there was no phone.
“You don’t realize how connected Jimmy was,” Rhonda continues. “You don’t know who he was tied into. I ran away, and I thought those men would call 911 and Jimmy would live. I didn’t think I mortally wounded him. I’m not that good a shot. I could tell you the names of the men who were with Jimmy that day, the day he tried to kill me to stop me from saying what I found on his computer. I was told not to say anything at my trial about it. They came to kill me, all three of them. One of them jumped me. When I was shooting Jimmy, they were hiding behind him, using him as a shield. I thought I was going to die. My lawyer told me not to mention this at the trial. You see, Jimmy was very highly connected. He wanted me killed because I knew too much. I knew what he did, especially after what I found on his computer.”
“You mean child pornography?”
She makes what is known in body language as the “defensive beating gesture"—the hand goes suddenly up to the back of the neck. It is called the defensive beating gesture because the arm begins to rise as if about to beat someone, but instead goes to the back of the neck. For those who read body language, it indicates that the person making the gesture would like to beat you for what you just said, and is defensive. In short, it is my opinion that Rhonda Glover wishes she’d never said a word about the nonexistent child porn.
“No,” says Rhonda. She isn’t talking about child pornography; she’s talking about evidence of more commonplace criminal wrongdoing. “He was cooking the books,” insists Rhonda. “He was ripping people off, falsifying data, and he was in big with the Mexican drug gangs and Mexican oil swindles.”
There is no proof whatsoever of her allegation that Jimmy Joste had any connection to criminals, specifically drug gangs who tap remote pipelines, sometimes building pipelines of their own, to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of oil each year. What Rhonda Glover appears to do is simply take anything and everything that has any linkage to any aspect of Jimmy’s life and make it part of his evil empire. She never said a word about Mexican oil until it was in the newspaper. Within twenty-four hours she has Jimmy connected to Mexican drug lords and the nationalized Mexican oil industry.
“We spent a lot of time in Mexico,” she says. “We went there all the time.” That clinches it. When an oilman holidays in Mexico, there are nefarious dealings afoot.
Rhonda Glover has little or no patience for those who doubt her accusations against Jimmy Joste. “People don’t believe he beat me, for example,” Rhonda says. “Look at my face. Look closely. I’ll point out all the scars inflicted on me by Jimmy.”
She points to one above her eye. “See that? He hit me with a candelabra. See this one? And here above my lip? On September 11, 2001, he put me in the county hospital with broken ribs.”
Rhonda, confident in her ability to persuade, offers logical “proof” that she didn’t plan on killing Jimmy Joste, that it wasn’t premeditated. “Think about this,” she says, “I never called in advance for a sitter. My friends, the Barders, were called at six-thirty the night before and asked to watch my son. If I had plans to meet Jimmy at my house that day, I would have made arrangements for my son way in advance. Anyone with kids knows you don’t plan anything without a sitter arranged in advance. Tony and Duanna Barder will tell you I was not even in touch with them for one year prior to me asking them to watch my son that day.
“I want you to know,” says Rhonda, “that the things Danny Davis said about Jimmy buying me homes and cars are lies. He did not. He once bought me a Jeep Cherokee because while I was pregnant, and went into premature labor, he told GMAC to come get my Cadillac. I’m not crazy. I’m not delusional. I know exactly what I’m talking about. I have the evidence. I found bubble gum in the house, and my son hadn’t been there in months. There had been a child in that house.”
“I know adults who chew bubble gum, Rhonda—”
“No!” She cuts me off, and her impatience and anger at my comment is obvious. “Children chew bubble gum, not adults. And this was a big, really big, wad of bubble gum. ”
“Adult size?” I am pushing my luck.
She rolls her eyes. She heard me. She understood me. She has chosen to ignore it.
“I told them about the bubble gum,” says Rhonda. “I have that gum, and the shoe on the snow. We found that shoe, you know. You read about that, right? There was a child’s shoe in the snow.”
This is the Rhonda Glover I saw on the DVD of her interrogation by Austin detectives. This is the Rhonda Glover, declared incompetent to stand trial, the Rhonda Glover who told people her son was Jesus Christ and that Jimmy Joste and George Bush were murdering children in a cave.
“Oh yes, I remember that,” I say, with encouraging enthusiasm, “you collected all that evidence and sent things to Identigene.” The money to pay Identigene, it was revealed at her trial, came from the bank account of Jimmy Joste.
“Yes!” She’s pleased that I know this. “The DNA wasn’t mine, Jimmy’s or our son’s.”
I purchase Rhonda another Coca-Cola, and our conversation continues. She speaks of her supporters, the horrors of domestic violence, and the Second Amendment Foundation. “They are big supporters,” insists Glover.
“In the Gun Week magazine that my dear friend Alan sent me was an article about a man who shot four people, then went to play video games. He received four life sentences. The article said he would have to do twenty-three years before he saw parole. I got forty-six years for self-defense in my own home, with my own weapon, against someone who had been in jail
for assaulting me and threatening my life, and I will have to do twenty-three years before I talk to the parole board if things do not get overturned in court. I learned that I had a twenty-year deal, and did not know about this until recently. Please pray for the courts to allow me a new trial. But isn’t that an amazing story? I have the equivalent of four life sentences in Maryland. Aren’t we all living in America, and under the same Constitution protected by our Second Amendment? Why is Texas so off-kilter in their sentencing?”
Under the same Constitution enshrining the Second Amendment, Rhonda Glover did not have the right to bear arms. She lost that right when she put false information on her application to purchase the Glock 9mm. She can’t claim a right she forfeited. The Second Amendment Foundation is a big supporter of the right to self-protection and defense of liberty by all those “eligible” to own guns. Rhonda Glover was not legally eligible to own a weapon. It would be difficult for them to champion her when her possession of a handgun was a violation of federal law.
“Do you ever speak to my lawyer?” Rhonda asks. “I write him all the time, but I don’t hear from him.”
I assure her that Joe Lanza, her current attorney, is a knowledgeable man of excellent reputation. Yes, he gets her mail.
“You know, if you reveal too much, it could be dangerous for you too,” says Rhonda, concerned for my safety.
“Hey, this is what I do, Rhonda. I investigate, I report. I search for truth. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I find that under a layer of fake lies and half-truths are real lies and half-truths.”
“Some people have stood by me, unconditionally,” asserts Rhonda. “I have friends who care about me, friends who would have testified on my behalf at my trial, but they were never called.”
I find myself thinking of Patti Swenson, who testified for Rhonda at the custody hearing, saying what a good mom she was, and how Rhonda and her son were only doing Bible study role play when Rhonda was Mary and Ronnie was Jesus. Rhonda isn’t happy with Patti anymore. Based on previous patterns, it is possible that Rhonda could embrace Patti as her dear pal on a moment’s notice. Rhonda has been mercurial with her friendships all her life. Sometimes you are on the bus; sometimes you are off the bus. Sometimes you are under the bus!!!