Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  During that week before Bob Dow’s murder, Kathy and Audrey told me they were trying to get Jen to leave the party house and move back into Spanish Trace. Although Kathy and Audrey generally wound up partying with Bob after heading over, Jen wanted nothing to do with her sister and mother telling her how to live her life. Jen was obsessed with Bobbi, both Kathy and Audrey told me. Jen was totally taken in by that lifestyle at Bob Dow’s party house and this new girl she had met and started sleeping with. Jerry had been putting pressure on Jen to shape up. Jen balked. She wanted to do what she wanted to do. Hanging out at the party house allowed her that freedom.

  Codependent might be a better way to describe what was happening. Jen had found someone who thought like her, felt like her, “understood” her. She had discovered a lover who told her everything she wanted to hear and delivered on promises. Jen had never had that before. The lovers Jen had in the past—they had always let her down. They had all wanted something from her. In Bobbi, Jen found a carefree spirit, loving and gentle, who also liked to party and have a good time.

  One day, Kathy drove to Bob’s unannounced. She was either in the mood to have another chat with her daughter about leaving the party house, was in the mood to party herself, or a combination of the two.

  After walking in, Kathy went directly to the room where Bob would later be killed in to see if Jen was asleep, passed out, or hiding.

  But Kathy found Bobbi, instead. She was in bed. There was obviously, Kathy could tell, someone else under the covers.

  “Tell Jen I want to speak with her,” Kathy demanded.

  Bobbi didn’t answer.

  “Jennifer? Jennifer!” Kathy yelled.

  Nothing.

  The person under the covers moved. So Kathy walked over, figuring Jen was trying to avoid her once again, and pulled off the covers.

  Bobbi was naked—and so was the other girl.

  Except it wasn’t Jen. Bobbi Jo (in keeping with what she later told me numerous times) was having sex with a girl she’d just met.

  (“I was not exclusive to anyone,” Bobbi said. “Certainly not Jennifer.”)

  Plastered all over the room were pictures of Bobbi and Jen, which Jen had put up. There were other photos of Bobbi’s son. They were stapled and taped to the walls. Bobbi shared this room—two different beds—with Bob.

  Kathy went around the room and tore the photos off the walls. Bobbi felt that Kathy believed she was leading Jen on. Bobbi had just assumed that everyone knew she was a free girl, not exclusive to anyone. When a visitor came over to Bob’s and walked into the house, there was an unspoken rule of thumb that it was party city, and that meant the sex, too.

  “Stay away from her,” Kathy warned Bobbi.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Bobbi said.

  Later, Kathy tracked Jen down and explained how she had just caught Bobbi in bed with another woman. To that, Jen responded: “You’re lying. I don’t believe you.”

  CHAPTER 33

  JEN WAS STIRRING LIKE an agitated parakeet after she and Bobbi were released from the downtown Fort Worth Tarrant County Jail on the morning of May 2, 2004. She’d tried calling her father, Jerry Jones, to come and get them. According to Jen, Jerry wasn’t home.

  Bobbi remembered this moment quite differently, however.

  “Her own dad wouldn’t come and get her.” And what’s more, Bobbi said, Bobbi was released first—that is, after Bob Dow bailed her out (but refused to bail Jennifer out). After that, Bobbi used her own money to pay Jen’s bail. (I asked the MWPD if they had ever asked for or received a bail receipt to prove or disprove Bobbi’s statement. They answered my question with, “We believe Bob Dow bailed the girls out.” But I never saw a receipt.)

  The way Jen explained it in court, she and Bobbi got out of jail that morning and were hanging around the street near the jail afterward with no ride back to Mineral Wells (the party house) or Graford (Bobbi’s grandmother’s house), the two places they had been frequenting in those days.

  “What are we going to do?” Jen asked. The way Jen framed this scene, she pushed the notion that Bobbi had become like a mother to her by this point. When in doubt, go to Bobbi—she’ll know. There’s no doubt Jen liked this aspect of her relationship with Bobbi. Finally there was someone more mature to take care of her needs and tell her what to do.

  Yet, if this was true, it was all in Jen’s head. To Bobbi, they were party girls. If Jen followed Bobbi, it was Jen’s decision—and hers alone. Bobbi was upset that she’d been busted for something Jen had done.

  There was a woman they had spent the night with in the same cell who had also been released. Jen recalled that Bobbi went to the woman and asked for a ride. The woman had said something about her husband coming to pick her up.

  “Where you two going?” the woman asked.

  “Anywhere you’re going,” Bobbi said.

  It wasn’t far. The woman’s husband dropped them off in Fort Worth, near one of those trashy downtown fantasy shops that sold bongs and dildos and cheap lingerie.

  From there, Bobbi and Jen started walking. Then Bobbi called Bob. He wasn’t answering his cell. So Bobbi—again, according to Jen’s recollection in court—called her mother.

  Turned out Bobbi’s mother was with Bob Dow.

  “Bob has been looking for the two of you all morning,” Tamey Hurley told her daughter.

  “What?”

  “You missed him.”

  “Missed him?”

  “We’re going to hop in his truck now and come and get you.”

  Bobbi explained where they were.

  After catching a ride with Bob and Bobbi’s mother, Jen and Bobbi headed back to Tamey Hurley’s boyfriend’s house in Weatherford. Bobbi wanted to see her son, who was at the house with his grandmother.

  According to Tamey, as they drove, Bobbi turned to Bob and said, “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have nothing. You’re my dad. I love you.”

  “You see, Bob Dow controlled my daughter so many different ways that I had lost reach of her,” Tamey recalled for me later. “It was that bond between them of her having a father.... Even if it wasn’t the ‘right way,’ Bob was the closest thing she’d ever had to a dad.”

  Bob pulled into the driveway and they all went inside.

  Tamey Hurley explained that while Bob, Bobbi, Jen and one of Bobbi Jo’s brothers (who was there when they arrived) were inside her boyfriend’s house, Tamey’s boyfriend pulled her aside.

  “Look, I want him out of here,” Tamey’s boyfriend said, meaning Bob. He said he didn’t trust him. “I don’t like how he looks.”

  Sketchy-looking Bob could have that effect on people.

  “Bob,” Tamey said a moment later, “look, y’all are gonna have to wait outside in your truck. You can’t stay in here.”

  Bob left the house and sat in his truck.

  Then Tamey’s boyfriend said he didn’t want Jen there, either.

  “My boyfriend had heard bad things about Jennifer and her mother,” Tamey later said, “and didn’t want any trouble. So he asked me to tell Jennifer to leave, too.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Bobbi said to Jen, who then walked outside and waited with Bob inside the truck.

  The way Jen recalled this scene in her statements to police later on, it went like this: While she sat alone with Bob Dow inside his truck, Bob said, “Y’all cost me my party money for the weekend. You know that?”

  Jen looked at him. She knew the tone. She was disgusted enough with herself for getting pinched stealing and spending the night in the clinker. She didn’t need Bob and his perverted antics now. And she never went into detail how, but she claimed that Bob Dow was the one who put up the $100 bail money she needed to bond herself out of jail.

  “Sorry” wasn’t going to cut it with Bob, Jen later testified. By now, Jen knew Bob enough to understand what he wanted. He’d been bugging her to have sex with him, she claimed, since that first time she’d shown up at the party house.
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  “I know,” Jen said. She realized she owed him. She didn’t need to be reminded of it.

  “You need to pay me back,” Jen claimed Bob insisted.

  “Yeah, Bob. . . .”

  “I need that money back.”

  “I know . . . I know,” Jen said louder. “Look, I’ll get a job. I’ll ask my dad for the money. I’ll do whatever. But I’ll get you that money back.”

  “Well, I know a way you can pay me back.”

  “No, Bob. No way.”

  “Just have sex with me,” Bob suggested.

  “No. No way, Bob.” Jen opened the door. “No!” she said, slamming it shut.

  Exiting the truck, Jen walked back toward the house.

  “He tried to rape me,” Jen said after walking into the home.

  “What?” Bobbi asked.

  Tamey shook her head. She couldn’t believe it.

  Bob sat in his truck, looking on as Bobbi and her mother came outside. He could easily tell that Bobbi and Tamey were furious with him. At this moment, Bobbi and Tamey believed Bob had attacked Jen.

  Tamey walked over to Bob as Jen and Bobbi stayed behind.

  “You need to get the hell off my boyfriend’s property,” Tamey shouted. “I don’t ever want to see you around my daughter again.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bob said.

  “I should have called the cops, right then and there,” Tamey told me later. “I wanted to, but Bobbi Jo told me not to.”

  So Bob left.

  Tamey walked back to the house. Bobbi was upset. “She was crying,” Tamey said of her daughter’s demeanor right then. “And they was both screaming at Bob as he drove away.”

  Tamey confirmed that this was the impetus for Bobbi to want to get “some of the things Bob had given her” and the rest of her belongings and move out of Bob Dow’s party house. It was one thing to ply the girls with booze and dope and then convince them to get in front of the camera or have sex. It was quite another to begin making demands and barter for sexual favors.

  Tamey said, “Bob Dow was an evil, evil man.”

  When Bob first took Bobbi under his wing and started hanging out with her every day, working with her, drinking and drugging with her, Tamey went over to see him.

  “Why in the hell are you hangin’ around with my daughter?” Tamey asked.

  “I’m just helping her and [my stepson],” Bob said.

  This was around the time Bobbi and the father of her child were living together, and things were spiraling out of control. When Bobbi moved in with Bob over at Lila’s house after breaking up with her baby’s daddy, Tamey went over to check on things.

  “I went into the room to check on Bob’s mother. Bob wasn’t there. And something just wasn’t right. It was—that room and the conditions she lived under—just horrid,” Tamey said.

  Tamey cleaned the old woman up and fed her. Bobbi told Tamey on that day that Bob expected her to take care of Lila, and Bobbi did the best she could. Crying, Bobbi added, “I don’t know how to care for an elderly lady.” She was flustered. She felt terrible for the old woman. She’d gotten to know Lila fairly well over the course of time and cared deeply for her.

  “There was a lot of times that I later found out that Bob would get Bobbi really drunk, where she done passed out, and then he would shoot Bobbi Jo up with drugs and then he would do stuff to her,” Tamey explained through tears. “I don’t know how to explain it, really.”

  Bobbi, her mother, Bobbi’s brother, and Jen stayed at the house for a while after Bob had allegedly made that pass (for which only Jen was a witness), and then they all left together. Bobbi didn’t seem too upset any longer about Bob demanding sex from Jen. It was over. She’d decided, after some prodding by her mother, to get her things and get out of Bob’s. Bobbi could continue living with her grandmother.

  “I cannot believe he did that again,” Jen claimed Bobbi said as they drove away from Tamey’s boyfriend’s house.

  It had become so routine by then for Bob to ask Jen for sex, or for him to put the moves on her, it didn’t seem all that out of place to Bobbi. Bob was just, well, being Bob Dow—a pervert. Bobbi knew his ways. Sure, he’d taken it a step further here, apparently, but Bob was like that: a sex-crazed, creepy dude who thought he could convince any girl to sleep with him.

  Apparently, for Jen, though, this was her breaking point. It was time to act on that desire Audrey claimed her sister had had for years: to kill someone.

  Jen later said (in one of her five versions) that she and Bobbi decided then and there that they weren’t taking it anymore. Bob had to go. “He’s never going to leave me alone,” Jen told Bobbi. On top of that, he was coming between them. He would never stop.

  And here, in the following statement, is the only available evidence Jennifer Jones later offered as the motivation for Bobbi putting her up to murdering Bob.

  “Take us to Bob’s so we can pack our stuff and get out of there,” Bobbi told her brother. They were on their way to Graford, Bobbi’s grandmother’s house. Bobbi had stayed there once in a while when she wasn’t sleeping at Bob’s trailer or at the party house. Jen could stay with her until she found her own place.

  Bob owed Bobbi some money for work she’d done. That lifestyle over there was getting old, anyway, Bobbi considered. It was time to end it. Plus, she wanted to start spending more time with her son. Get her act together maybe. Clean up.

  Bob wasn’t home.

  “Wait here,” Jen said. She smiled.

  Bobbi, Tamey, and Bobbi’s brother waited in front of the house.

  “I thought she had a key, or something,” Tamey recalled. The way Jen had made it sound was that she would have no problem getting into the house.

  The house was locked. Bob Dow never allowed Bobbi or Jen to have a key to his mother’s house. So Jen walked around to the backyard.

  Soon everyone out front heard a loud, crashing sound.

  “What the hell?” Bobbi said, shocked by the noise.

  Moments later, the front door popped open.

  It was Jen. She stood inside the party house, beckoning them to come in.

  “What happened?” Tamey asked after walking in. “I heard a loud noise.”

  Jen explained how she picked up a garden hose and smashed one of the back windowpanes in the door so she could reach in and unlock it.

  Bobbi and Jen went around the house and grabbed all of their things.

  “I had a backpack full of clothes,” Jen recalled in court. “Some pictures . . .”

  According to Jen, she went into Bob’s bedroom and found Bobbi there. There was a green footlocker on the floor. Bobbi popped it open and found several guns Bob had stowed away in the chest. Bobbi never said why she was taking the guns, and they never discussed it, according to one of Jen’s statements. Bobbi simply walked over and grabbed as many weapons as she could find.

  “Maybe three or four,” Jen testified.

  From there, they locked the house and continued on to Graford.

  Bobbi’s mother and brother dropped the girls off and left. Jen and Bobbi were the only ones in the house. Her grandmother was gone.

  “We should take her truck and go find Bob,” Jen claimed Bobbi suggested. Bobbi put the guns away in her room at her grandmother’s house. “I want my last paycheck.”

  Bob Dow owed Bobbi about $150 for some work she had done on an apartment building the previous week.

  “You know,” Jen said, “I can probably talk my dad into us living at Spanish Trace with him and Audrey.”

  “That’s fine,” Bobbi said (according to Jennifer’s version).

  Yet, Bobbi had a place to stay. “I didn’t need to move into that apartment.”

  As they discussed the best way to approach Bob, Jen first told police, the idea to kill him came up. According to Jen, as they talked at Bobbi’s grandmother’s house that day, Bobbi supposedly said, “He needs to be killed. We need to kill him.”

  Jen asked why.

  “I’m tired of
the abuse. Tired of it. I’m tired of him harassing you. This is the only way that we can be together.” (Jennifer later said, “It was the sexual abuse of having to pay him to stay there at the house—of him, I guess you could say, borrowing her girlfriends for the night.”)

  “No, we don’t need to kill him,” Jen later testified she told Bobbi at the moment Bobbi suggested they kill Bob.

  The way Jen told the story (the first time), Bobbi went back into the bedroom she kept at the Graford house, grabbed one of the guns, walked across the hall into her grandfather’s bedroom, and started rummaging through his things, in search of bullets.

  Jen followed, asking, “What are you doing?”

  Bobbi found some ammo.

  “You cannot do this,” Jen said, believing that Bobbi had made a decision to kill Bob, and there was no turning back. “Bobbi Jo . . . no . . . you cannot do this.”

  It was then and there, Jen claimed (in one version of her story), when Bobbi stopped what she was doing, clicked the chamber of the weapon into place, put a squinted eye on the gun sight, and said, “This is the only way we can truly be together.”

  The way Jen told it, that entire scene sounded as though it came straight out of a film she had just seen.

  CHAPTER 34

  BOBBI LATER told me, “I was not even at Bob’s house when Jennifer killed him. I was at the corner store two and a half blocks away. . . .”

  The way Bobbi described her version of these events for police, she and Jen got a ride from jail and wound up in Fort Worth on Camp Bowie Avenue, at that head shop, just as Jen had testified. They started walking, same as Jen claimed, toward Weatherford, when Bobbi’s mother and Bob Dow showed up. There’s some discrepancy here about how they got back to Bobbi’s mother’s boyfriend’s house and who gave them a ride, but they both agreed later that Bob, at some point, made a sexually harassing proposition to Jen, which, in turn, made both girls angry. Not necessarily livid or furious enough for Bobbi to want to go out and grab a weapon and kill the guy, but angry enough, nonetheless, that she felt enough was enough. Bobbi was tired of ripping and running. She needed a break. She wanted to move out of Bob’s house, anyway. This was a good reason to push her over the edge and actually do it.