According to Bobbi, Kathy and Audrey were ready to leave.
After a few tense moments alone in the kitchen, Bobbi heard Audrey, Kathy, and Jen walk out of the back room and then enter the kitchen.
“Help us,” Bobbi recalled Kathy and Audrey pleading with her.
“I was looking at all three of them . . . ,” Bobbi said. “I felt stupid because I didn’t know what to . . . feel.”
Bobbi never mentioned Krystal, Audrey’s girlfriend, being at the apartment that day. The next moment, Bobbi recalled, involved all of them taking off in both vehicles, traveling away from Spanish Trace speedily. The entire focus of any conversation they had was on protecting Jen from what she had just done. Kathy and Bobbi were together inside one vehicle with Audrey. Jen followed with Krystal (who was definitely with them, whether Bobbi remembered or not).
Bobbi recalled Kathy and Audrey laying into her.
“It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault,” Kathy kept repeating, according to Bobbi. Kathy was saying that “over and over” as they raced away from the apartment. What Bobbi took from Kathy’s rant was that Bobbi should be the one to take the rap for Jen and the murder because it was Bobbi who got Jen involved with Bob Dow, to begin with. Kathy said Bobbi was supposed to be the smarter and more mature of the two. It was clear to Bobbi that Audrey and Kathy wanted to shield Jen any way they could from what was about to happen next.
“You’ll love prison because you love women,” Kathy, a veteran of years behind bars herself, pled with Bobbi. “Jennifer’s in love with you. It’s all your fault.”
This seems to be a believable scenario. Bobbi never came out and said it to me, but the idea was (and the known facts seem to support this) that Jen, in all of her madness and irrational thinking, believed that killing Bob was what Bobbi wanted her to do. Jen could have taken Bobbi’s complaining of Bob as an indication that Bobbi wanted him out of the picture—without Bobbi actually coming out and saying it. And when Bob made that pass at Jen inside his truck, an idea was born. Then when he did it again inside the house after Bobbi went off to the store, well, Jen lost it. Her entire life of pain and suffering and disappointment had come to a head. Someone had to pay.
Audrey piped in at one point, Bobbi recalled, also blaming her.
“You don’t say a word, bitch,” Bobbi snapped back at Audrey. There was still some animosity there between them, Bobbi said, because they had just broken up.
Bobbi said Kathy began bugging out, thinking back to the times she had been over to Bob’s house and had stripped for him in front of the camera. There were even things Kathy had done that she did not remember.
“I want all of his computers.... Drive back to the house,” Kathy demanded to Bobbi. “I want anything else he has, too.”
“You’ll have to kill me first, before I go back there,” Bobbi said. “You’re not taking anything from [Bob].”
“Just turn yourself in, Bobbi,” Kathy suggested, settling down. “Turn yourself in. You’ll love prison.”
Bobbi remembered driving straight from Spanish Trace to Bob’s Weatherford trailer. She did not recall stopping at Krystal’s house first. Bobbi had some money (in her wallet) at the trailer, along with her engagement ring. She knew she needed that money if they were going to take off. The entire situation, from Bobbi’s outlook, was fluid—all happening in the moment. The way Bobbi told it later, she was trying to go with the flow and figure things out as they went along. After all, Jen had just murdered a man Bobbi loved, a man Bobbi had known since she was a kid. Life had become suddenly serious, much more than drinking and drugging every day. All she had done was wake up, had a conversation with Bob, and then decided to go over and party with him.
And now Bob was dead.
In Weatherford, at what Bobbi referred to in all her letters to me as “Bob’s and my place,” she showed Kathy and Krystal (whom she brought into the narrative for the first time here) the keys to the trailer. Krystal “punched the glass out” before Bobbi even had a chance to open the door with the key.
The feel I got from Bobbi’s version was that the girls—Audrey, Kathy, and Krystal—were acting as though this was some sort of a free-for-all road trip—maybe just another day in the life of partying and taking things to the limit. The idea that Bob was dead never really came into focus for them at first. It was as if they didn’t believe it. And Jen became like a shadow: She was there in the background, but for the most part forgotten.
“What are you doing?” Bobbi yelled at Krystal. “Come on . . . stop that!” Bobbi shoved her. By Bobbi’s guesstimate, Krystal weighed about “325 pounds,” as opposed to Bobbi’s one hundred. However, Bobbi had grown up with six brothers.
“I used to fight my old man,” Bobbi said, “so I was used to physical abuse.”
Bobbi ran straight toward what she called “my bed” inside the trailer. “And my wallet was on my lil stand.” (Just as Bob Dow had promised on the phone.)
She grabbed it and then ran back into the main room of the trailer, where the rest of the women were now, Bobbi realized, rummaging through Bob’s possessions.
“Kathy, Audrey, Krystal, and Jennifer were taking Bob’s TV, and all kinds of shit,” Bobbi told me. “I was angry and confused.”
After they left the trailer, Kathy “made” Bobbi stop and pawn the TV.
From there, Bobbi’s story resembled what the girls later told police about the road trip, save for a few minor, inconsequential details. The way Bobbi portrayed her role in all of this was that she had never gone into Bob’s house after Jen killed him. She also didn’t know Jen “had sex with Bob, till she said it.”
One of the major discrepancies within the road trip narrative became what happened in Arizona. According to Bobbi, “When we arrived in Arizona, I put Kathy and Jennifer’s sister [Audrey] out. I tried to leave Jennifer, but she refused to get out of the truck.” When they got to Blythe, California, Bobbi claimed, “I called my mom, told her what happened.... I was petrified and afraid. My mamma then called police for me and told me to stay there, right where I was. When the California police surrounded us, Kathy [had already] told them I murdered [Bob] and kidnapped her daughter. It felt like they had over twenty guns to my head. They were not even going to arrest Jennifer.”
PART FOUR
MIND READERS
CHAPTER 40
ON MAY 9, 2004, AFTER Audrey Sawyer returned from Arizona and was able to have a quick sleep in her own bed for the first time in nearly a week, she and Kathy were summoned to the MWPD. They weren’t under arrest or in trouble (which seemed strange in the scope of this crime, seeing that both women could have been charged as accessories, or aiding and abetting fugitives). Sure, they could have been given life sentences for bad judgment; but the MWPD considered Kathy and Audrey to have gone along for the ride and guilty of nothing more than being stupid. At least that’s what Kathy and Audrey said—and, apparently, without yet speaking to Bobbi or Jen, the MWPD was not questioning any of it.
Captain Mike McAllester asked the women—after they had both given their statements—to help him find the weapon that, according to Krystal, had been tossed out the window of the truck as they drove down the road out of Mineral Wells.
“I know where it is,” Kathy said. She explained.
“No,” Audrey interrupted. “You’re wrong, Ma. It’s not there. I know where it is.”
McAllester led them to his cruiser.
Finding a weapon tossed out of a moving vehicle window was probably a long shot, McAllester knew. The gun could be anywhere. On top of that, a couple of kids or someone collecting cans and bottles could have stumbled upon it and taken it home.
They pulled over to where Audrey remembered—“Between a mailbox and a fence post”—and McAllester parked his vehicle.
“Across the street,” Audrey explained.
The grass had just been cut. McAllester found his way over to the side of the road and—wouldn’t you know it—there was what
had been described to him as “the murder weapon” staring back up at him.
CHAPTER 41
BRIAN BOETZ NEEDED to head out to Blythe, California, to pick up his two murder suspects, separate them, and get each to lock down a statement of what happened in Mineral Wells. Bobbi and Jen were being held at the Riverside County Jail in Riverside, California. The girls’ arrest took place at 3:45 A.M. behind a pool hall in Blythe, after Bobbi called home and gave them up. According to a report filed by the Blythe Police Department, the girls had not been surrounded by a SWAT team of cops, armed with cocked and loaded weapons pointed at their heads. Sergeant Angel Ramirez’s brief four-paragraph report was straightforward, as those clerical types of law enforcement things go. The Blythe PD had received information that Smith and Jones were in the Blythe area and “were wanted for homicide out of Texas.” Ramirez was given a description of the girls and the vehicle and, along with one other officer, went out to “supervise and assist with the arrest.” There was no showdown at the O.K. Corral, no foot chase through the desert, no firefight. The girls were actually sleeping (or half asleep) when the cops arrived. They put up no fight. In his report, Ramirez never mentioned how many officers were involved in the arrest.
Ramirez and another officer searched the area around Bob’s vehicle, as well as inside, to see what they could come up with.
“I ripped the pawn ticket up and tossed it in the parking lot,” Bobbi told one of the officers after being asked if they had any weapons.
Sure enough, after a quick search, all the pieces were scattered about the parking lot where the truck was parked.
I collected the torn pieces of paper, Ramirez reported.
The pieces of paper were not that pawn ticket, however. They were pieces of paper that were actually part of a handwritten letter and a Western Union receipt.
Jen and Bobbi were locked up, Bobbi said, in a “restroom for men” that night. Bobbi was told by the Blythe PD that “they had nowhere to take us, so we stayed in that nasty restroom.”
The following morning, a bus headed out to the local jail.
“They put us in the front cage,” Bobbi explained.
The bus was full of men (on the other side of the cage, in the back of the bus) heading out to various local prisons.
Bobbi was handcuffed to the fence and behind her back, her feet shackled to the floor. Jen wasn’t handcuffed at all, Bobbi recalled. The men in the back were whistling and calling to Jen with sexually aggressive remarks.
“She thought it was cute,” Bobbi remembered. “I was in total shock.”
As they stopped at the prison and the men were led out, as each passed by Bobbi and Jen, Bobbi was the target of a slur of some sort, she felt, because of the way she looked.
“Pussy sucker,” said one man, who then spit on Bobbi.
“Dyke bitch,” said another.
Several more men walked by and said nothing, but they spit on Bobbi.
This was all new to Bobbi. She was terrified. She had never been in a situation so humiliating and seemingly barbaric.
“I had spit all over my hair, in my ear, on the side of my face by the end of it,” Bobbi said. “Jennifer didn’t even wipe it off for me—she turned her back, like she didn’t know what was going on.”
Brian Boetz took his colleague, Detective Penny Judd, and headed out to Blythe, a twelve-hundred-mile, eighteen-hour drive (without stops) from Mineral Wells. They left at 6:00 P.M. on May 8, knowing that the girls would eventually be arrested. By ten-thirty the next morning, May 9, they were at the Buckeye, Arizona, PD, picking up that pair of videotaped interviews that Buckeye authorities had recorded with Kathy and Audrey.
When they reached Riverside, California, Boetz and Judd were told the paperwork to release Bobbi and Jen was going to take a few days. So the detectives decided to go see the girls and conduct interviews with each while they waited. Why waste the time, moping around, waiting on paperwork? Boetz told me. After a good solid rest, Boetz and Judd headed in to see the girls on the morning of May 10.
Bobbi and Jen had decided on a story they were going to stick to. According to what Jen told the Texas Monthly, this conspired tale of what happened emerged as Jen and Bobbi were holed up together inside a cell in Riverside. They talked while locked up and decided to see if they could get Jen out of it all. They decided to tell lies to make it seem as though Bob had been raping Jen. If they stuck to it, perhaps the authorities would believe them and feel the crime was committed in self-defense.
Jen walked up to Bobbi, who was sitting on the floor, her back to the cell wall. Jen said, “I have an idea” (according to what Jennifer told Texas Monthly). Jen explained to Bobbi how “no one really knew what happened inside Bob’s bedroom.” Because of that, she and Bobbi could concoct any story they wanted, as long as they stuck to it. Jen even mentioned Bobbi’s son and how he would be without his mother if Bobbi went to prison. It just wasn’t fair. They had to do this.
“I’m going to take the blame for you,” Jen said she told Bobbi as they waited inside that jail cell.
After they chitchatted a bit more, Bobbi said (according to Jen’s version in Texas Monthly), “You know I’m going to be with you forever if you do that.”
This is the first time (and it’s important to note that the Texas Monthly story would publish merely weeks before Bobbi’s trial) that Jen ever gave the impression that Bobbi had had something to do with the murder. Before this, it was entirely on Jen.
Neither of the girls asked for a lawyer. Boetz and Judd interviewed Bobbi first. According to Boetz, Bobbi Jo was wired, wispy, and gaunt. (Note that I called and e-mailed Penny Judd numerous times, but she never returned my calls or e-mails. This occurred after Brian Boetz had told me he had spoken to her and she had agreed to an interview.) It was clear Bobbi Jo had been beaten down by her days on the road. And yet, the one characteristic Bobbi (and Jen) showed more than any other, Boetz told me, was the notion that they hadn’t really done a bad thing. From what Brian Boetz felt, the girls were under the impression that this was some sort of misunderstanding that was going to go away as soon as they returned to Mineral Wells and were given the opportunity to explain themselves.
Boetz recalled upon first meeting Jen that she was “hysterical, crying, nervous, tired, hungover . . . and it sounds kind of funny, but she was every one of them” at the same time.
There were moments during the course of Jen’s first interview when she even appeared to be laughing.
The main story line both girls got across during their initial interviews in Blythe, California, with the MWPD was that Bob had been coming on to Jen for weeks and made one last aggressive advance toward her, which forced Jen into protecting herself by killing him.
Jen and Bobbi told a tale of Bob bailing them out of jail and then wanting sex from Jen as payment. When he came at Jen demanding payment, she shot him.
Boetz listened. He had problems with the girls’ statements, knowing what the crime scene looked like. (The girls had spoken of a struggle inside Bob’s bedroom—which Boetz could not reconcile with the scene after being inside the room.) Boetz let them talk through their stories without interrupting them, or playing any of his cards.
After each girl signed her statement, Penny Judd and Brian Boetz convinced the girls to waive extradition and allow the MWPD to transport them back to Mineral Wells.
Each agreed without even asking what it actually meant in the scope of their cases.
On May 11, 2004, early in the morning, Judd and Boetz picked Bobbi and Jen up at Riverside County Jail.
“Look, this ride back home is not going to be the time or place to talk about what happened,” Boetz explained as they got into the car. “We just talked about it all here. We’ll have more chances in the future to talk. You both understand?”
Bobbi and Jen said they did.
“And listen . . . there’s not going to be any touching each other or any affection going on, okay?” Boetz explained a bit sheepishly.
<
br /> Both agreed.
The plan was to drive straight back to Texas.
Brian Boetz said watching the two girls along the way became like “looking at two people in love, to be honest. They’d stare at each other, laugh, joke around, talk of things that I had no clue about whatsoever. Then they’d turn around and be crying. . . .”
This didn’t sound so much like love—but perhaps adolescent fixation, coupled with the physical and emotional difficulties and complexities of coming off a monthlong bender of using hard-core drugs and booze daily. Both girls had to be suffering from some form of withdrawal. That giddiness and mixture of emotions were their addictions draining from their pores. Their emotions were riding on that clichéd roller coaster.
“They were scared and nervous,” Boetz said. “I think, during that twenty-four-hour period of driving back, we got to see a lot of different emotions from them at different times. It told me that they really didn’t understand the severity of what happened and what they’d done.”
Boetz listened as best he could. “As I heard them, I believe they thought that when they got back to Texas that they’d be set free. There really were times when I thought that they thought they’d be set free because [Bob Dow] was a bad guy himself.”
They arrived in Mineral Wells on May 12, 2004, at 1:45 P.M. Jen and Bobbi were held at Palo Pinto County Jail, a local facility with an old-fashioned holding tank and shoe box–sized cells with whitewashed walls, a metal plate sticking out of the wall that a thin mattress sat on, a corner shelf for belongings, a library about the size of a walk-in closet, an entirely closed-in basketball court with one hoop, and a jail administrator donning a ten-gallon hat, big ol’ gun clipped to his belt, and a no-holds-barred attitude. This was where Bobbi and Jen would be held until their cases were adjudicated.
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