Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  “I met him,” she explained to me, “through his stepson . . . my son’s father.”

  Bobbi said Bob Dow became “a father” to her. “And I treated him as such.”

  From a young age, Bob had taught Bobbi how to work construction and wire electrical outlets and circuits.

  “He had his own maintenance service and I helped . . . and did a lot of work for him.” Thinking back on it all, Bobbi said, she was grateful for the skills, trade, and experience Bob Dow had given her. And his tragic, untimely death, Bobbi added somberly, was devastating to her, regardless of the (“perv”) twisted things Bob Dow had done throughout his life.

  “Robert fed me drugs from the time I woke up until I passed out,” Bobbi admitted. “Sometimes I prayed that I’d never wake up.”

  Friends of Bobbi’s said she was quiet, mostly, and would do anything for anyone.

  “Bobbi had a huge, huge heart,” said one of her girlfriends. “There is nothing that Bobbi wouldn’t do for a friend in need, whether she was high or not.”

  Bob had a fixation with young females. Bob’s first wife, Charlene Kay McQueary, was “ten or twelve” when she and Bob met. Bob married Charlene as soon as she turned sixteen. Incidentally, the age of consent in Texas has always been seventeen. So having sex with anyone under the age of seventeen (who is not your spouse) is illegal in the state. Unless Bob Dow married Charlene when he did, he would have been committing sexual assault.

  “I’ve known [Bob] all my life,” Charlene later said in court. “We were married for a while when I was sixteen and we . . . remained friends forever.... We just decided we couldn’t have an intimate . . . a personal relationship. But we have always remained friends.”

  Charlene claimed she could live with Bob “under the same roof,” but she just couldn’t “have a real good working relationship. . . .”

  There was one part of Bob Dow’s character that Charlene talked about rather ambivalently when later pressed: The notion that he was heavily into witchcraft and satanic worship. Inside Bob’s trailer at one time were all types of bizarre books about witchcraft and satanic worshipping. Bob, Charlene explained to police, was very possessive of these books, as far back, she said, as 1997 and 1998, when she became involved in a personal project and needed some books to “cut up to do decoupage.”

  “There’s a bunch of books over there,” Bob had said. He lived in an apartment in Fort Worth then.

  “Great,” Charlene responded, heading for the shelf.

  Bob followed. He pointed to his collection of books on witchcraft and satanic worship. “Any books but those. Do not touch those.”

  Bob did not believe in God, Charlene claimed. “He told me that.”

  A woman Bob married in 1982, Elizabeth Smith (no relation to Bobbi Jo), the mother of Bob’s only child, said he could be a good man, but once he started hanging out with young girls at his mother’s house and his trailer (where Bobbi Jo also stayed from time to time), Bob changed.

  Elizabeth Smith divorced Bob six months after marrying him.

  Why?

  “Bobby cheated on me with my best friend,” Elizabeth explained—“who also happened to be my younger brother’s wife.”

  They had been together for nearly four years before marrying. And even after the divorce, Elizabeth stayed in touch with Bob.

  “We ran an apartment complex in Eastland, Texas,” Elizabeth later explained in court. They took care of the maintenance and other duties. After the split, however, Bob moved to Weatherford, the Twin Oaks section. He started living inside a trailer and working for a railroad. From there, Bob moved into his mother’s house in Mineral Wells after his brother had a heart attack and passed away. That was December 2003. Elizabeth stayed in contact with Bob because, she explained, “We had a child together.”

  “He did the best he could as a father,” Elizabeth claimed, defending Bob.

  Yet, those who knew him said Bob was not always the best man he could be to his son; but once in a while, he tried to make up for it by paying a little bit of attention to him.

  “I think he done a wonderful job in spending time, you know, and he always provided what [his boy] needed,” Elizabeth added. “Whatever [he] needed, it was there.”

  Elizabeth routinely saw Bob throughout the years after their divorce. If she didn’t spend time with him, she spoke to Bob on the phone. Bob was alone after his brother passed. He had no other siblings and his father had died many years before. Lila Dow, Bob’s mother, was paralyzed on one side of her body after suffering a terrible stroke. After Bob’s brother died, Elizabeth even stepped in and bathed and fed Lila because Bob just couldn’t do it. It was one of the reasons, Elizabeth said, that Bob was forced to move in with his mother: to care for her. While Bob spent more time at his mother’s house, Elizabeth, who had been stopping every weekend at Lila’s, caring for her, saw Bob on a more regular basis. They got to know each other all over again.

  By January 2004, Bob was living at his mother’s house in Mineral Wells, just about full-time, taking fairly good care of Lila, according to Elizabeth.

  “In the beginning, Bobby took very good care of his mother. He cleaned her. He bathed her, which was hard for him. He never had to do anything like that in his life. And, you know, there was—she never wanted for anything. And he didn’t mind paying anybody to come and do what he couldn’t do.”

  By then, Lila Dow could only feed herself if food was placed in front of her. She couldn’t bathe herself or go to the bathroom without help.

  Bob’s life went along this path for about a month. Then February 2004 came, Elizabeth explained, watching all of this from the sidelines. At this point, someone Bob had known when she was a child reentered his life.

  “Bobbi Jo came into the picture . . . ,” Elizabeth recalled. She had never met Bobbi Jo before that February day when Bobbi showed up and began staying with Bob at his mother’s house.

  “Hey, Liz, this is Bobbi Jo,” Bob said, introducing Elizabeth to Bobbi. They were inside Lila’s house. “She’s one of my workers.... I’ve known her for years. She’s going to be staying here.”

  Elizabeth thought, Well, this is okay. If she helps take care of “grandma” and cleans and what-have-you, it’ll be fine.

  “Nice to meet you, Bobbi Jo.”

  “Same here,” Bobbi said.

  And yet, what was clear to Bobbi later was how much Elizabeth despised her from that day on. Bobbi felt this coldness from Elizabeth, as if Elizabeth felt Bobbi was intruding on a good thing Elizabeth had going with Bob.

  “She hated me,” Bobbi said. “I don’t know why.”

  As a “preteen,” Bobbi Jo Smith said, she dated Bob’s stepson. It was her first romantic relationship with a boy (with any person, in fact), and she added, “All that I knew.” Bobbi had a child when she was sixteen, fathered by this same man. They planned on getting married. But the relationship didn’t last, obviously, and Bobbi split with her soon-to-be husband. She was distraught and broken, not knowing what to do. She didn’t really feel as though she could go to her mother, a woman Bobbi said had abandoned her at a young age and didn’t teach her many social skills to survive the world.

  So Bobbi Jo went to see Bob Dow, a man she knew and trusted to help her.

  “He opened his door to me,” Bobbi recalled, “and treated me just like one of his own children.”

  At the beginning, that is.

  Bobbi blames her fiancé for introducing her to, as she put it, “hard-core drugs.” She loved the man, she said, but it was the drugs and “infidelity” that drove their relationship into the ground. Bobbi never mentioned that her sexuality had anything to do with the demise of the relationship. But one would have to assume that suppressing homosexual feelings by staging a white-picket-fence family life and having no one—especially a mother figure—to turn to and discuss those feelings, would have a momentous effect on any relationship.

  “I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said of his cheating and drugging, “esp
ecially after my son was born.” Bobbi wanted to make it work because of the child. She wanted a better life for her son, whom she referred to as “the only love I’ve ever known and truly felt. . . .” She would have stayed with this man, despite having feelings for females, in order to give her son a home with a mother and a father.

  To her credit, Bobbi felt she needed to protect her boy. She knew the road she was headed down with her fiancé was not going to end pleasantly. She could see their lives deteriorating a little every day. She didn’t want her son to become a casualty of that life, a spoke in the cycle.

  After the end of this first relationship, which had turned into engagement and motherhood, Bobbi Jo turned her back on men altogether. The dissolution of what might have become a marriage to a male, a father for her son, in other words, sent Bobbi running to females, she suggested. She tossed out any notion of living life as a heterosexual—and she felt free, almost normal, for the first time.

  “I’ve never been with another man (willingly) outside my son’s father,” Bobbi said.

  It was women from that point on for Bobbi—lots of them. They came and went. Through those relationships, Bobbi learned about life and love and caring for her child. Bobbi’s family always watched over the boy if Bobbi was ripping and running, chasing the bottle and the pipe. Bobbi knew enough not to be around the child when she was partying. She felt she could become the mother she’d always dreamed of and “desired to be,” but the pull of alcohol and drugs, for which she had no control over, clouded her judgment and kept her from doing it.

  Once the split settled on her, and the totality of it began to weigh on such a young and vulnerable heart, Bobbi Jo fell even deeper into that crazy, evil abyss of drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity. Sure, she started using drugs and alcohol before this, but she took it all to an entirely new level once she and her fiancé went their separate ways, and living that lesbian lifestyle didn’t fill the hole in her heart, which she had thought it might.

  “I began to get caught up with the fast life—drugs and sex with lots of women.... I was numb.”

  That hole in her soul, Bobbi explained, wasn’t even that she and her fiancé had split, or that she had repressed her homosexuality for many years. That pain began back when “[someone close to me] began to sexually and physically abuse me—and my mother’s . . . emotional and mental abuse and also abandoning me. I tried to make my mom proud of me. I played sports and hoped and prayed that just one time she showed up to watch. She never did . . . and then the terribly violent sexual abuse by someone close.”

  All before this girl could drive a motor vehicle legally.

  It was too much. The pain broke Bobbi. For a while, the drugs and the booze filled up that space.

  In Bobbi Jo, Jennifer Jones saw a gentle female, willing to party until the drugs and booze ran dry, full of lust for the same type of life Jen was leading. Jen viewed Bobbi as a counterpart, feeding her pain with whatever poison she could get her hands on. Jen had seen this firsthand whenever Audrey brought Bobbi over to the apartment, or wherever they ran into each other out in the small Mineral Wells world of teen partying. And yet, much like Jen, Bobbi hadn’t always been the party girl and wild lesbian, up for anything, whose reputation followed her around like a storm cloud. At fifteen, Bobbi Jo lived next door to her grandmother’s house in Graford, with her aunt Kathy and uncle Richard, the Cruzes. This was just before Bobbi became pregnant and talked of marrying the guy who had knocked her up.

  A staunch believer, Bobbi went to church regularly. “And her participation in church [services] was good,” Richard Cruz later said.

  Bobbi was active in the youth groups as well. She’d go on retreats and other trips and act like a big sister/mentor to the younger girls, while befriending the girls her own age. She liked to participate in family outings, Richard Cruz explained later in court. She was a good girl. She was fun to be around, laughing and joking. She was always willing to do something for someone else. All of this despite the tempest of emotional pain that she was dealing with inside herself.

  “Like, yeah, you know, we would play ball and stuff like that,” Cruz commented. “My kids were grown and [Bobbi] was the only kid around the house.”

  It was great having Bobbi Jo around, Richard Cruz added. She always behaved and acted respectably.

  Cruz was also privy to the other side of Bobbi, he said. She seemed like a naïve young girl, forced to grow up too damn fast, and maybe just beginning to embrace family as a good thing, when the bottom fell out. Bobbi was frightened of the same things other girls were, Cruz said. Like when they once went to shoot weapons off at a local firing range.

  “She was very scared” of the guns, Cruz recalled.

  Bobbi didn’t want to mess with guns at all. She understood the power of a handgun, and she was well aware of what it could do to a human being.

  CHAPTER 11

  DETECTIVES BRIAN BOETZ AND PENNY Judd sat down with Dorothy Smith to get a better handle on what she had to say about her granddaughter, Bobbi Jo, who had just turned nineteen the previous week. Apparently, from the information Boetz and Judd had, Bobbi Jo told Dorothy that she had killed Bob Dow. Solid information, yes; but the statement alone still did not explain what happened, nor did it detail a possible motive—and, perhaps most important at this point, where Bobbi Jo was.

  “Tell us what happened,” Boetz encouraged Dorothy.

  Dorothy took a sip from a glass of water on the table in front of her. This was not a hard recollection. The situation had occurred the day before. Under direction from Dorothy, Penny Judd took down the interviewee’s statement, word for word.

  “It was about two-thirty when I got home,” Dorothy explained. She seemed a bit nervous, as would be expected, but also quite eager to explain what happened. She couldn’t understand. There was something missing from all of what had happened.

  “Yesterday?” Boetz confirmed.

  “Yeah,” Dorothy said, shaking her head. “Bobbi Jo was here.”

  As she began a narrative of what had occurred, Dorothy explained that her granddaughter was not herself.

  “Grandma, I need your pickup,” Bobbi had asked Dorothy.

  “Why?” Dorothy said. Bobbi Jo was a child Dorothy thought highly of. She adored Bobbi. Sure, Bobbi had had some problems and had grown up rather fast. But what kid these days didn’t have issues to contend with? The whole point of Bobbi moving from the Cruzes next door into Dorothy’s home was to start anew. Bobbi and her mother were at different places in life, to put it mildly. Bobbi had given up on her mother after repeatedly giving her chances to make things up. Dorothy had always been there.

  “I want to get my clothes out of Bob’s,” Bobbi explained after Dorothy pressed the issue of Bobbi wanting to use the truck. She was trying to find out what was going on. Bobbi had been staying with Bob Dow. However, Bobbi always had kept a room at Dorothy’s house and traded off, at times, between the two places. Dorothy felt Bobbi had a love-hate relationship with Bob. She was always getting into arguments with him, but she looked up to him as a mentor. Something that not too many within Bobbi’s inner circle knew was that Bob Dow had been providing Bobbi with her lifestyle: work, drugs, booze, women.

  “They were very close,” an ex-girlfriend of Bobbi’s later said, explaining the often fragile and volatile relationship Bobbi Jo had with Bob Dow. “They planned on going on trips and going to work. They grouped up ideas from each other, just what to do, you know, for that day or the weekend. Like a . . . a . . . father-figure relationship, I guess you could say.”

  Dorothy wanted to know why Bobbi needed the truck. “Bobbi, what’s going on?” Bobbi had “another girl” with her on this day. Bobbi’s new friend was acting strangely, Dorothy felt: wiry and looking around, white as a ghost. Something had happened. Or, rather, something was about to happen.

  “Look, I need to get my clothes out of there right now before Bob finds [out I’m leaving],” Bobbi said. “Bob is trying to make us”—Bobbi was ref
erring to her and her new friend—“have sex with him to pay for our fines.”

  (Bobbi later disputed ever saying this, alleging that her grandmother was confusing what she had said on that day with what the girl she was with—Jennifer Jones—had said.)

  Bobbi and Jen had been picked up at the mall the previous week for shoplifting. At first, nobody would bail them out, and nobody would pick them up at the jail.

  Bob finally came through, according to Jen. He and Bobbi’s mother picked them up and drove them to where Bobbi’s mother was staying at the time.

  As Dorothy continued to explain what Bobbi had said, she claimed Bobbi told her the previous day, “I need to pay my fine, or they’ll pick me up.”

  (You see, this comment falls in line with what Bobbi later told me: She had signed herself out of jail after the shoplifting charge, but she still needed to pay the fine, or she would be in deeper trouble.)

  “How much, Bobbi?” Dorothy asked.

  “Two thousand.”

  Dorothy couldn’t believe it. Where was Bobbi Jo going to get that sort of money?

  “Bobbi—”

  “Look, Grandma.” Bobbi stopped what she was doing and focused on Dorothy, looking her in the eyes. “Bob said he wouldn’t pay our fines unless we had sex with him.”

  The implication of this exchange was that Bob had lied to Bobbi and Jen. Bobbi was saying Bob had picked them up and agreed to pay the fines (as in a loan), but now they had to go to bed with him to pay off that debt. Bob had been after Jen ever since Bobbi hooked up with her, and Jen had started hanging around Lila Dow’s house. That first time Bob had a look at Jennifer, he was infatuated with her. He was fixated on having sex with her (according to Jen).

  It was Bobbi Jo’s job, in one respect, to bring home young girls for Bob to fuel up with dope and booze and then bed down and film. (This was an accusation Bobbi voluntarily admitted to, adding that she never made any of the girls do this. How could she? She did, however, make the offer.) It was disgusting and illegal and immoral, but Bobbi knew the game and had gone along with it.