Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  McAllester cut Richard and Kathy Cruz loose. Then he called Dorothy Smith, who sounded unnerved. McAllester asked about Bobbi Jo Smith. Did Dorothy’s granddaughter admit to shooting Bob Dow in the head?

  “Yes,” Dorothy said, speaking through tears. “Bobbi Jo told me that she shot and killed Bob.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. A detective will stop by tomorrow morning to take your statement. Is that okay?”

  “Yes, I’ll be here. But please . . . please . . . be careful and don’t hurt my granddaughter,” Dorothy insisted. Dorothy pictured some sort of task force out and about, searching for Bobbi Jo. She didn’t want police to manhandle Bobbi and get into some shoot out. Dorothy loved Bobbi, knew she was a good kid, and couldn’t believe what was happening. There had to be more to this. Bobbi Jo had never been in trouble with the law—ever. Maybe it was all some sort of misunderstanding?

  “Okay, ma’am, we understand,” McAllester said. “But if your granddaughter contacts you again, you need to call us right away.”

  “Yes, I understand,” Dorothy answered.

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  “She was here with her girlfriend, Jennifer. She left with Jennifer and at least two other females.”

  Four women, Dorothy explained, all together.

  She was wrong. It was actually five women. All lesbians.

  “Do you know who they are, ma’am?”

  “No. I don’t know their names. Only Jennifer.”

  “Do you know what type of vehicle they were driving?”

  Dorothy thought about it. “A truck,” she said. “They were all in a truck.”

  Bob Dow, McAllester knew, owned a 1989 Chevy pickup.

  Which was also missing.

  Mike McAllester took a ride over to the hospital to see if he could get a few moments with the woman, Bob Dow’s mother, who had been brought in after Dow’s body had been discovered. McAllester was told Mrs. Dow was in the emergency room. Her status was considered “weak, but mostly okay.” She was getting her strength back. But whoever had been caring for the old woman wasn’t fulfilling his or her role, certainly. It had taken some time and lots of fluids to get Mrs. Dow’s electrolytes back in check, but she was coming along well.

  McAllester also found out since heading over to the hospital that Bob Dow didn’t actually live in the house where his body had been found. At least, that is, on paper. Bob had his own trailer in Weatherford, about twenty miles east of Mineral Wells, where one would suspect he spent most of his time. Through the impression the MWPD was getting, Bob’s mother’s house was his personal party house.

  “For an eighty-six-year-old woman,” the doctor told McAllester as the detective walked toward the emergency room to speak with Mrs. Dow, “she is doing reasonably all right. She suffered a stroke a few years back. So all considering, she’s okay.”

  “Any indication that she has been neglected in any way?” McAllester asked.

  The ER doctor looked at her chart. “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Can she talk? Can she communicate with me?”

  “Ah, no, not really. And listen, I’m not sure she’s even aware of anything that happened inside the house, anyway.”

  “I may need to speak with her at a later time when she’s able.”

  The doctor said that would be fine. Just not right now.

  McAllester drove back to the crime scene. He wanted the exact information on Bob Dow’s truck, so he could forward it to dispatch.

  After finding the info, McAllester called dispatch, saying, “Get that out to TLETS. . . .”

  TLETS is the Texas Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. There were over one hundred thousand law enforcement personnel with access to TLETS. “The core component of TLETS is a store-and-forward-message brokering system that ensures safe, secure delivery of content being transmitted throughout the system,” according to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).

  As the night wore down and McAllester headed home, an all-points bulletin (APB) went out on Bob Dow’s truck, which the MWPD believed was carrying four young females—one of whom was now wanted for questioning in the murder of the man who owned the vehicle.

  CHAPTER 8

  WHEN LATER ASKED ABOUT her childhood, Jennifer Jones’s simplified analysis was straightforward and concise: “It wasn’t good.” After Kathy Jones left the home, Jerry Jones had a tough job of raising the girls. The older they got, the harder it became to keep a leash on them and provide. “My father,” Jen added to her recollection of those years, “he wasn’t able to support me.”

  After quitting high school, Jen said, she “tried to get a job.” But the nearly eighteen-year-old girl found out quickly that she wasn’t “very good” at working. So each job that came along—and they were limited, at best—became a chore. She’d end up quitting. She never said whether she made the jobs out to be more than they were, or she had a run of bad bosses. Either way, there aren’t too many kids in the world who get up every morning with smiles and burning desires to rush out to their jobs. But they do it to support themselves, as emerging, responsible adults, who live healthy lives, often do.

  Apparently, Jennifer wasn’t interested in growing up.

  It was just a few weeks before her eighteenth birthday when Jen, now out of school, found she had much more free time on her hands than was good for her. If she would have just stuck it out, Jennifer Jones could have likely graduated within a year’s time. However, she wanted to get out on her own and fend for herself. School, Jen felt, was holding her back. So she moved to Santo, Texas, about a half-hour drive from Mineral Wells, explaining in court later, “I went to Santo and it’s just . . . it’s just the peak of my life where, you know, I felt like everything was falling apart.”

  Jennifer did that sometimes: She would use the wrong word. “Peak,” at least here, would lead one to believe her life was running full speed, heading somewhere.

  It was not.

  This move to Santo culminated in what was a long list of homes Jennifer had set her boots down in over a period of about a dozen years. All of the shuffling around had taken its toll on her, or so she later claimed. Not so much physically, although she was rather tired and stressed from frequently moving and changing schools. Psychologically and emotionally, Jen was feeling the effects. She was a wreck. Always waking up, wondering where or when her next home would be. Leaving behind friends she had made. There seemed to be constant change in her life.

  “It hasn’t been very easy,” Jen said of her childhood as a whole. “Not only moving from place to place, making new friends, the relationships that I’ve had with guys in my past, losing my virginity at the age of fourteen, trying drugs at fourteen, my parents separated, my grandmother dying. It’s been very testing.”

  This statement clarifies the fact that Jen suffered from not having enough direction or discipline. She had very little support when it came time to begin living outside of the nest on her own. She had hardly any social skills to survive on her own and fend for herself as an adult. All Jen knew, one could argue, was disappointment, loss, and instability. On the other hand, one could also contend that Jennifer had completely given up on not only herself, but on life in general—because she did have a support staff to lean on when she needed to, a loving and caring aunt and uncle.

  “As the girls [Jennifer and Stephanie] grew up,” Jen’s uncle told me, “we did things like buying them an entire roomful of furniture, clothing that was appropriate, and whatever else they really needed to ‘fit in’ with other kids. Most of the time, Kathy was in jail (thankfully).”

  Jennifer’s uncle (not by blood) and his wife, Jerry’s sister, said they believed in and practiced “a simple ‘rewards’ system. When the girls achieved milestones, we offered damn nice rewards— several cruises (Jamaica, Bahamas, et cetera), ski trip to Vail.... After we had purchased the girls’ furniture, and painted and fixed up their rooms, hung curtains to make them proud to have guests at their rented trailer home, w
e learned that Jerry was being evicted.”

  It was a great disappointment to Jennifer’s aunt and uncle. They had worked so hard showing the girls how life became about the choices one made. Time and again, they had given the kids a fresh start.

  “All the . . . work we put in [went] down the drain, and the furniture [was] put out on the curb as trash,” Jennifer’s uncle explained. “That was the last straw for us, and we took the girls into our home.”

  If her aunt and uncle couldn’t save Jennifer and her sister from a distance, they thought, their influence on a daily basis, inside their own home, and the overall inspiration and example they could set daily, would achieve far better results.

  “We had clear rules, simple to follow, easily understood,” Jennifer’s uncle said, recalling the time the girls moved in. “No drugs. No pregnancies. No drinking. Other than that, it was pretty much just ‘Don’t be stupid.’”

  Practical, sage advice. Or maybe just common sense.

  The girls’ aunt and uncle started construction on a 6,200-square-foot home and lived in a mobile home behind that massive, growing structure. The girls had to share a room in the trailer, but they were each assigned a room upstairs in the main house. They were both allowed to give their input on its design and decoration.

  “It was truly their home,” said the uncle. “[We had four] acres on the Brazos River. [It was] beautiful, peaceful, serene, and [a] healthy environment. When Jennifer was old enough to get her driver’s license, we worked with her, teaching her driving skills . . . and then went over to Dallas and purchased a cute little used Honda Civic, red with spoiler, perfect for a teen driver. We made improvements to the car, keyed remote for safety, alarm for security, and bought both girls cell phones.” (This was when a cell phone was a relatively new thing.) “I helped her with her homework and school projects, just like any parent should do for their own child. Her grades were improved, she seemed happy,” Jen’s uncle observed.

  Stephanie stepped up and took to it all like a child growing into a responsible adult might. Jen’s sister made the right choices and carved out the best life she could for herself. She took great advantage of this wonderfully blessed opportunity. Yet, there was something inside Jen that couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Maybe she had seen too much? Jennifer was older than Stephanie. Perhaps the damage had been done and Jennifer didn’t know how to accept love?

  “Jennifer has always had this extreme self-destructive streak,” her uncle said. “We talked of college, jobs, education, and a future. All we asked in return was respect and adherence to the rules. . . .”

  Jennifer couldn’t do it.

  Regarding her mother, Jen later summed up Kathy’s role rather convincingly and sharply: “She’s been in and out of jail, in and out of prison, in and out of my life.”

  Never there for more than a whisper of a promise and a hug on the way out the door. And when Jen did see her mother, Kathy was generally always asking for something, or showing her daughter the proper way to smoke weed or drink alcohol.

  “I used to buy them beer,” Kathy laughingly told me.

  It was that constant state of not having a solid, consistent female role model in her life to bond with and rely on, Jen later claimed, that set her on a path of destruction—one she could never turn away from, no matter how much love her aunt and uncle gave her. She needed encouragement, love, and praise as much as any other teenager—especially during those ultraimportant and imperative years, when the impurities and immoral behaviors of society flow past the teen’s eyes, begging for her to take part, reaching out sometimes through peer pressure to grab hold. The wrong type of influence was all around Jen. At a time when the child needed a female to talk things over with, she was alone, having to make decisions by herself. One could argue her aunt and uncle were always willing to listen and stand in for the parent, but Jennifer didn’t obviously bond with them or take to that “rewards system,” which they offered.

  “No, I really didn’t,” Jen said when asked about receiving love from her mother, or any of the adults in her life while growing up. “Every now and then, you know, someone would give me a pat on the back. But it’s just . . . it wasn’t really enough for me. You know, it’s really hard when your family is not really there for you. And it’s just as”—and she cried here while continuing—“a kid, well, you want that. You know, you want to feel loved and you want that approval from everyone without having to try that hard.”

  Near this time in her life, Jen later confided to her journal, when that path of good and evil split, Jen found herself facing a choice. For a kid in this position, the easiest way is the most likely way. Jen chose the path of least resistance. She chose the road lined with various ways in which to forget about that life she desperately wanted to leave behind. On this path, she could numb any pain she felt with drugs, sex, crime, and a crowd of kids just like her to cheer her on. As soon as Jen found someone she could relate to on an intimate, personal level of emotion, she jumped at the chance to prove herself to that person. Despite an earlier promise she made to herself not to be like her mother, life for Jen now was about chaos and not feeling comfortable within a stable environment. Jen felt good when there was a storm brewing or happening. Stability had never been what she was used to. Being bad made her comfortable.

  After a time of moving around from place to place, getting kicked out of her aunt and uncle’s, moving back in, getting kicked out again, Jennifer Jones found herself living with her father, Jerry. It was March 2004. She was eighteen and now living at the Spanish Trace Apartments on Second Street in Mineral Wells. Meth and the dopers who sought it out surrounded Jen. (“They would make that stuff and ship it by truckload from Mexico into Mineral Wells and other Texas communities,” one law enforcement official told me.)

  Spanish Trace is a two-story, post–WWII tenement showing its age. It’s located on a U-shaped street off Second Street, with apartment buildings on each side. Residents were known to hang out in back and around the building when the weather cooperated. It seemed to Jen that when she looked around, there were scores of kids her age feeling the same way: aimless, directionless, looking for the next big gig, the next party, the next good time.

  On March 25, 2004, sometime in the afternoon (according to one version of this event Jennifer would later tell), she stood in the kitchen of her father’s Spanish Trace apartment, staring out the screen door. It was one of those warm spring days in Texas: nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the sun burning down, drying out the dirt patches of dead yellowed grass. The parking lot was full of vehicles just about ready to cough one last time and be put up on blocks. Jennifer was bored. A job she’d just quit at the Chicken Express turned out to be just one more negative in a life that did not measure up. Each failure seemed to feed the next. Jennifer was vulnerable and weak. A “poor me” syndrome had settled on her. She had quit school and ended up at Chicken Express. And she couldn’t even make that work!

  Dressed in her pajamas, Jen lit a cigarette and sat on the back steps of the apartment. (Again, this is her version—which no one else involved later agreed with.) She stared off into the distance and thought about things. This run of bad luck and disappointment had to come to an end at some point. She was sure of it. Things could not be this bad for this long. Jen knew she had created the latest mess (same as most of the others), but it did not make it any easier to swallow. She’d even written about it in her journal the previous night, noting, I [screwed] up again, like always. She sometimes liked to start out an entry by blaming herself and pouring on the self-pity, which allowed an escape clause to feel good about what came next: getting high. Here we go again. Screw it. Life sucks. It’s too damn hard. Fire up the pipe.

  One of the major regrets Jen had was totally letting her aunt and uncle down just recently. Late the previous year, Jen had been living in their house again with Stephanie. It was near the time they had been busy designing and building that new property. Things were going along well. Jen had hit a h
ot streak. She felt loved and needed. Alive. A productive member of society. There was someone in her life to answer to. Her aunt or uncle would not let Jen get away with things. Jen welcomed the limitations put on her.

  “And then they found a pipe she was using to smoke dope, which Jen had made out of a lightbulb,” Audrey explained.

  “We found drug paraphernalia in Jennifer’s room in our trailer,” Jen’s uncle corroborated. “I spent five and a half years with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, and have zero tolerance.”

  Jen’s uncle and aunt packed her things and called Jerry. “Come and get her. She’ll be waiting outside the front gate.”

  They weren’t about to allow Jen to explain her way out of this one. No way. Rules were rules. She had broken one of the central tenets of the house. It was as if she had spit in her aunt and uncle’s faces.

  “She took the home we gave her and flushed it down the toilet,” her uncle continued. “Not to mention putting us at risk. A very fine thank-you, indeed.”

  Jen brought hard-core drugs into her aunt and uncle’s house. A big, huge no-no. So Jen moved into a motel room that her dad, Jerry, was renting in Mineral Wells. Jerry had been booted from an apartment weeks back for not keeping up with the rent. Jen and Jerry and Audrey stayed in the motel for a few more months; then Jerry found an opening at Spanish Trace and moved in. Jen went to Santo for a quick spell, but she moved back to Mineral Wells with Audrey and Jerry.

  So here she was now, sitting on that back stoop of the Spanish Trace Apartments, shaking her head, exhaling cigarette smoke, thinking about the mistakes she’d made, pondering the people she’d let down, the family members she loved, and all of the missed opportunities. She considered the way she had tossed the good things in her life aside for a pipe, took the easy road, and had nothing left.