And all of a sudden,
the
Texas Monthly
article reported of that moment,
Jennifer didn’t care that Bobbi Jo was a lesbian or even kissing her meant she was one too.
If this version of their hookup is true, at that exact instant, underneath a tree out on the lawn near the town library, after Bobbi kissed Jen for the first time (the first time, Jennifer said, she had
ever
been intimate with a female), Jen decided she had found true love.
“Come with me,” Bobbi apparently said, taking Jennifer by the hand.
As Jen told it, the scene took on that Grimm-like imagery, as if they were trapped inside a dream Jen once had.
And so, once upon a time, Jen went over to Bob’s house with Bobbi on that day, she explained to
Texas Monthly,
and returned to her Spanish Trace apartment, only to pick up all of her belongings, so she could effectively move in with Bobbi. Jen was taken in completely by Bobbi, she said. She was Bobbi’s girl now.
Later, under oath, Jen
would refer to her hooking up with Bobbi Jo under yet vastly different circumstances, saying: “I went over to Bob Dow’s house and stayed the night.” She was referring to early March, after being invited to the party house by Bobbi and Audrey. “And from there, it’s kind of like me and Bobbi Jo kind of hit it off. You know, we were talking. We were just, you know, getting to know each other, and . . . one thing leads to another and, you know, just together.”
Audrey was out and Jennifer was in.
Simple as that.
In a statement Audrey later gave to police, she said, “I introduced Bobbi Jo to Jennifer and . . . then I found them in bed together one night.” The implication was that Audrey had left Jen at the party house, went out, came back, and caught Bobbi and Jen having sex.
“I don’t know where that story came from,” Audrey told me later. “I never told that to the police. There was a lot of stuff that was later reported that simply wasn’t true. When Bobbi Jo and me was together, we was never separated.”
It seems impractical to believe that. What seems about right, according to most of those involved, is that Bobbi, in keeping with her promiscuous ways, replaced Audrey with her sister. Audrey got pissed and broke up with her. Sure, it sounds so
The Jerry Springer Show;
but in the lives of these women, it is definitely plausible.
Another piece of erroneous information Audrey wanted to clear up, she said, was a report that she had sex with Bob Dow two times for money.
“They—Bob and Bobbi—tried to talk me into it several times, but I never went through with it,” Audrey said. “It never happened. What happened was, Bob Dow had paid me and this other girl to mess around [together, without him]. Me and Bobbi Jo were together at the time.”
Bobbi Jo “didn’t mind.” She encouraged it, in fact, according to Audrey.
Yet Audrey later told me (during a separate conversation) that when Bobbi presented her with the idea of a threesome, she relented and left, never to return.
From Jen’s point of view, what can never be in dispute, no matter which story is believed, was the way that Bobbi Jo made Jen feel. Jen adored Bobbi from the first moment they spent the night partying and having sex. Jen was hooked. Bobbi made her feel more special than anyone else ever had. Bobbi paid attention to Jen in a way that made Jen believe she was the only woman in Bobbi Jo’s life.
“The attention I was getting, it was like I was being involved with everything that was happening,” Jen confirmed in court. “I wasn’t left out.”
This is important. Jen believed that in Bobbi’s eyes, she
mattered.
What Jen had to say and what she did was central. She wasn’t the little sister anymore, the daughter to a drug-saddled mother who was never around. The troubled child no one could handle.
“Just not exactly cling to, but, you know, it’s kind of cuddly . . . flirty,” Jen said, explaining those first days with Bobbi Jo. “She just . . .
really
cared about me.”
“Bobbi Jo gave my sister a lot of attention that Jennifer never got from anybody else,” Audrey explained.
And Jen lapped it up.
Bobbi Jo and Jen became inseparable. Never out of each other’s sight. Not for what Bobbi Jo wanted. But if Bobbi Jo went to work for Bob, painting or cleaning, Jen tagged along and waited in the car or helped out. If Bobbi had to run to the bank or over to her grandmother’s to help out, Jen was there, by her side.
There were times when Audrey stopped by the house unexpectedly to try and convince Jennifer it was a bad idea to be hanging out with Bobbi, possibly more out of a jealous agenda than her worrying about Jen’s well-being.
Jen would lock herself in the bathroom and refuse to come out. She was addicted to Bobbi by then. Nobody could tell her differently.
“Leave me alone. I love Bobbi Jo.”
Jen later said she was in a state of euphoria with Bobbi and truly felt that she had found her soul mate, the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
Kathy Jones said she was equally concerned when she heard that Jen had entered into a lesbian relationship with Bobbi Jo and was now staying with Bobbi at Bob Dow’s. Jen was not ready for that type of world, Kathy knew—the one that Bob Dow created, that is. So Kathy headed over to Bob’s to see what she could do about convincing Jen that this was not the proper life for her. There were people who could handle the lifestyle, Kathy knew. Her daughter was not one of them. Jen wasn’t built for it, emotionally or psychologically. She wasn’t tough enough.
This made Jen fuming mad. She was always the little sister.
“[Kathy] went over there a few times to try and get Jen out of there,” Audrey explained. “But you know what, [Kathy] ended up partying over there with them! Apparently, Jen wouldn’t leave, so [Kathy] just stayed there and partied with them all.”
“She put Bob’s [penis] in her mouth on camera plenty of times,” Bobbi later told me, speaking of Kathy. Photographs and interviews with people at the house later proved this.
The same thing happened to Audrey. She’d go over to the party house with the intention of trying to convince Jen to come back to the apartment, that Bob Dow was a bad influence on her, only to find herself staying and caught back up in the partying.
There are photographs of Kathy with Bob and other women, not only drinking and getting high, but indulging in the sexual behaviors as well. Kathy was going back over there when Jen and Bobbi weren’t around, once she realized Bob was funding all of the parties. Kathy admitted in court later that she’d had sex with Bob on a number of occasions.
Nobody could do or say anything to convince Jen that Bobbi Jo wasn’t right for her. To Jen, the relationship was like nothing she had ever experienced. It wasn’t just the female-on-female sex with Bobbi that Jen found out she liked. It was everything. The way Bobbi made her believe she could have that white-picket-fence life she’d always dreamed of as a child and stared at inside the pages of
Better Homes and Gardens.
Jen felt it. She thought the answer to her woes was with Bobbi Jo.
“It was the attention,” Jen said in court, looking back. “The love that I felt from her. I felt the caring and the nurturing that she . . . she was giving me—that
I
was being a part of the relationship, that I could just, like I said, not have to prove, you know, anything to her.” Jen stopped here, turned on the tears, choking up. Then: “Bobbi Jo took me as I was.”
Which was all Jen ever wanted.
Something else, however, was
playing out here within the relationship Bobbi Jo had with Bob Dow. Something that was much more dangerous and dark.
“Bobby [Dow] used—he took Xanax and some painkiller,” Elizabeth Smith said. “But Bobbi Jo was bringing in heroin, which Robert objected to. He threw her out, as a matter of fact, because he caught her shooting it up. . . . I seen it with my own eyes.”
According to Bobbi, Bob would lace cigars and cigarettes with heroin, and he smoked it right along with her. Furthermore, Bob Dow was copping the dope—not Bobbi. She didn’t have the connections; Bob did.
Elizabeth seemed to see things differently, or as she wanted to see them. She claimed to have been over at the house one weekend, sometime in February. This was before Bobbi hooked up with Jen. Elizabeth walked in, through the back door. She was stopping in to check on Bob and Lila, maybe help out. That was when, she later claimed, she saw Bobbi sitting at the kitchen table, prepping some dope to be booted in her arm.
So Elizabeth ran and got Bob.
According to his former wife, Bob shouted at Bobbi, “Get the hell out!” He ran into the kitchen from another room.
The house was the size of a shoe box, however; so the obvious question would have to be: How could Bob have not known Bobbi was using heroin in the next room? It didn’t seem likely.
“I was
smoking
dope,” Bobbi told me when I asked her about this. “Not
shooting
it. Elizabeth knows that. [Her] trailer house and her life speak for itself—look into it.” Moreover, Bobbi claimed, she was not the one shooting dope in that house—but someone else was. “I’m not going to . . . stress myself out over a lie,” she added when I pressed.
Elizabeth witnessed a parade of girls coming in and out of the house. When Bob and Bobbi would have their little sex parties, Elizabeth said, she’d walk out of the house and “go outside” to wait, adding, “I wanted no part of it.”
She spoke to Bob about her concerns one day. “I’m worried about Lila,” she told him. “What if I take her to my home and care for her there?”
Bob didn’t like the idea. In fact, he became incensed. It had to be the check. Who would get Lila’s Social Security money then?
“You could live life as you see fit, Bob,” Elizabeth said.
“You get out,” Bob raged.
CHAPTER 13
D
ETECTIVE BRIAN BOETZ
was back at the crime scene on May 5, 2004, looking things over, searching for that lead that might put him like a bloodhound on Bobbi Jo’s trail. One would think that Boetz needed more than a short—however powerful—statement from Bobbi’s grandmother in order to make the charge against Bobbi stick. Sure, once he got Bobbi inside the box, door closed, hands cuffed, her future not looking so promising, an experienced interrogator could probably crack the young girl. But right now, no one knew where Bobbi had run off to with her girlfriends.
At some point late that same evening, Boetz made contact with Jerry Jones. The two men had a short conversation. By this time, Boetz figured Jen was Bobbi’s girlfriend. After talking to Dorothy a bit more and getting Richard Cruz’s entire story, it wasn’t hard to work out. Obviously, talking to the girl’s father could yield important information.
Boetz explained to Jerry how the MWPD had obtained a warrant for Bobbi’s arrest. He mentioned that Bobbi likely took off with Jen and several others.
“I saw Jennifer and the others earlier that day,” Jerry explained.
“Who are we talking about?” Boetz wondered.
Jerry ran down the names and explained who each female was: Bobbi, Audrey, Kathy Jones, and a girl named Krystal Bailey. Krystal was Audrey’s new girlfriend, Jerry said. Kathy was Jen’s mother.
“Her
mother
?” Boetz asked.
“Yup.”
Boetz couldn’t believe it. Jen and Bobbi were traveling with Jen’s mother and Bobbi’s ex-girlfriend.
“Where were they headed, Jerry?” Boetz asked.
“Out of town. They were all in Bob Dow’s truck.”
Boetz asked if there was anything else.
“Yeah,” Jerry said, “Jennifer hugged me . . . and thanked me for everything.” That was a fairly telling statement, perhaps letting Jerry know that Jennifer was planning on checking out somehow.
At this juncture, the fact remained that Bobbi, now wanted for murder, was on the run in Bob Dow’s pickup. She and the others could be just about anywhere; they’d had a half day’s jump on the MWPD. At
least
twelve hours. A person on the run could cover lots of roadway in half a day.
“We knew who we wanted to speak to,” Boetz explained to me. “Now it was just a question of ‘Where is she at?’ It was the only way for us to work the case.”
As Boetz saw it, even after speaking to Jerry Jones, “We didn’t have a clue as to where they were. At worst, we thought they were somewhere around Mineral Wells.”
Boetz had underestimated these women. He and his colleagues were way off in their assessment—because Bobbi Jo and the others were halfway to California by then. They were traveling in a truck full of booze, weed, a few guns, and very little money.
PART TWO
THE SECRET AGONY OF THEIR SOULS
CHAPTER 14
I
N KRYSTAL BAILEY,
Audrey Sawyer hadn’t necessarily found the ideal lover, committed in the way Audrey might have dreamed a woman would one day be. However, Jen’s blond-haired, light-skinned, attractive half sister, with the aqua blue eyes, did find a companion in Krystal whom she could count on more than her last lover, Bobbi. Yet, even in that kernel of intimacy that Audrey found, by May 2004, just weeks after she and Bobbi Jo split, Audrey was already singing the blues; and the title of the tune was Krystal Bailey.
Krystal worked at a local factory, a business that seemed to have employed just about everybody in town at one time or another. Like Audrey, she was young, pretty, and willing to give her lover companionship on top of intimacy. Krystal lived in a small, redbrick, one-story ranch in a quaint Texas suburban neighborhood. It was definitely the polar opposite to where Audrey had lived the past ten years or more. Krystal grew up in a place where kids played tag after school, and home owners cut their lawns on Saturdays and washed their cars on Sundays. It was a “normal” life, outside the confines of that unpleasant drug and sex culture that Audrey and Jen and Bobbi had been groomed in and thrived on. And the funny thing is, Krystal lived just a soccer ball’s kick away from the back of the Spanish Trace Apartments.