I’ve never questioned a jury’s decision before. And I hesitated to do it here. But sometimes, well . . . sometimes juries just get it wrong.
AFTERWORD
A
NY READER
of my twenty-plus books about murder will know that I hold little back when going after guilty parties. I often chastise female murderers, in particular, as the narrative chugs along, providing all the supplementary evidence to back up my opinions. As I started working on this case during the summer of 2011, it seemed to be another one of those familiar, tragic stories: Two girls, who happen to be lovers, get high, look for action, and electrify their already violent tendencies, conspiring together to whack a guy they viewed as sleazy and disposable. I assumed I’d run into the same psychological makeup I had seen in just about all of the prior female murder cases I’ve covered, save for a few female serial-killer stories (a different psychological makeup altogether). As I read through the prosecution’s case and the police reports, it seemed a pretty open-and-shut case. It was easy (then) to see how both girls had been arrested and charged and sentenced. Some of my first calls were to law enforcement, which began to back up this general feeling I had.
As I dug deeply into the case, however, studying it more closely (and objectively), interviewing people involved, long before I ever spoke to Bobbi Jo Smith, for the first time in my long career I found myself wondering what the hell happened inside that Texas courtroom during the
one and a half
days of Bobbi’s trial. Reading through the trial transcripts, I was amazed at the lack of evidence that convicted this woman. I put myself in her place. The mendacious tales and outright lies that Jennifer Jones told were so enormous and all-encompassing and repetitive and incredibly hard to believe, there can be absolutely no way any right-minded juror should have taken one word out of Jen’s mouth as fact.
Remember, to convict Bobbi, a person would have to sign off on the notion that Jen was telling the truth when she claimed Bobbi gave her the gun (a fact that Jen herself disputed in her second statement)
and
asked her to kill Bob Dow, plying her with the “He’ll never allow us to be together” argument. Or, one better, a juror would have to believe that Bobbi gave Jen the gun with the malicious
intention
of Jen killing Bob. You’d also have to believe Bobbi’s statements, both of which she said were contrived lies she and Jen had cooked up to protect each other and get out of it all. (It’s important to note when Bobbi gave those statements: all within a week after being arrested.) After having read those statements, I saw clearly all of the fantasy and Hollywood elements of what the girls were telling the police. Jim Matthews told me he saw that scene—the one where Jen was holding the gun and Bobbi supposedly walked in the room and said, “You look sexy”—in a film.
In my opinion, as soon as police (men and women I have a tremendous amount of respect for—my career, my readers, and my friends in law enforcement can easily back up this statement) got the story that matched the case they wanted to present to the prosecutor, they stopped investigating. Look, I don’t think this was done out of malfeasance or a deep-seated desire to condemn Bobbi. I don’t believe that for a minute. These cops are good cops. I know that. Boetz and Judd were following orders from the top. Their integrity was never in question for me; that’s not what I am saying here in this book. I think it’s more out of ignorance and lack of experience in investigating this sort of complicated murder. Police and prosecutors believed the girls when it fit the scenario they had wanted (and needed) to close the case. It happens. I’ve seen this sort of blinders mentality in several cases. And what’s more, I feel Mike Burns got stuck on his “he needed killin’” theme and believed the girls acted in this manner. Burns and Boetz told me several times that, to them, it seemed the girls figured nothing would happen to them legally because they had killed a scumbag. The girls, however, had never said this outright.
I don’t believe this is true.
Also, the fact that the judge fast-tracked this case and a change of venue was never discussed—even after that
Texas Monthly
article condemning Bobbi was published weeks before her trial—is overwhelmingly and unmistakably unfair to the defendant. Then, when Bobbi’s lawyer asked for some extra time to give his final argument, this during a murder trial that lasted all of twelve hours to begin with, the judge denied it.
Those three circumstances alone boggle the mind.
Jen’s testimony should have been tossed from the record as soon as deliberations began. And if Jen’s testimony was scratched, all the state had left was Bobbi’s second statement, weakly implicating herself in the “I gave Jennifer the gun” argument. Here was a second statement, it should be pointed out, that did nothing to prove Bobbi gave Jen that gun, knowing she would kill Bob Dow with it. None of the state’s witnesses added
any
evidence to the state’s contention that Bobbi told or convinced Jen to kill Bob Dow, and then
provided
her with the means to commit that horrible crime.
I’ve read it maybe a hundred times before:
Mr. Phelps, I’m innocent. I didn’t do it. You have to help me.
I get letters from the convicted (and their friends and family members) with those exact words (I’ll get even more once this book is published). I get e-mails from loved ones writing on behalf of those they believe were wrongly convicted.
In those cases where I looked into a defendant claiming innocence, as I continued investigating the case, the claim was repeatedly and quickly disproven by the
evidence.
When I looked at this case early on, in fact, and had heard that Bobbi (who did not want to talk to me until months after I began) had made this same claim, I thought,
Yeah, right . . . here we go again.
Yet, as I dug through the case, I was overwhelmed by the lack of evidence that convicted Bobbi.
Jennifer Jones is all that convicted this woman?
I asked myself time and again.
Bobbi Jo’s own statements, in which she clearly lied and admitted as much later on, were the only corroborating pieces of evidence against her? Bobbi telling her grandmother that she killed Bob, after Jen said she killed Bob, is enough to convict a woman of murder and sentence her to fifty years?
Bobbi Jo Smith, if nothing else, was grossly—
grossly
—overcharged.
I was told by Mike Burns that the law is different in Texas. Somebody murders someone in your presence and you somehow knew about it beforehand and provided the means (he was talking about his Bobbi Jo theory), you’re just as guilty. You will be convicted and sentenced in the same way as the person who pulled the trigger.
Looking at this case, even from Burns’s perspective, I was amazed that this sort of failure of justice could take place in the United States. And I can only guess that had Bobbi the means to hire herself a hotshot, high-profile attorney, she would have walked out of that courtroom, or been able to plead her case to a far lesser charge and sentence.
From there, readers, you’d have to ask yourself:
How in the hell did those first statements by the girls
ever
become part of the record? And why would a jury cherry-pick certain pieces of a statement, believe them as fact, but not believe other parts of the same statements?
Also,
why didn’t Bobbi’s lawyer argue to have the statements tossed out of her trial?
In a recent New York Court of Appeals ruling, four judges ordered a new trial for a woman “facing murder and assault charges,” finding that her lawyer “should have moved to suppress statements she made to police during a lengthy interrogation.” In a four-to-one decision, the Appellate Division, Third Judicial Department, found that the defendant’s admission that she had helped her husband plan to kill two people turned out to be “the crucial evidence” in her case and should have been challenged by her lawyer. Remember, that one sentence in the second statement by Bobbi, according to Mike Burns, is the reason why the jury had to convict her.
Look, I realize New York and Texas have vastly different ways (the most respectable word I can come up with here) of interpreting the law and how each of their courts (liberal vs. conservative) should be run. But again, all of this flies in the face of simple common sense and—at the
very
least—reasonable doubt.
Even Jen’s sister believed this. Jen’s story of what happened “kept changing,” Audrey explained during a phone call. “She told me that she went inside [Bob’s house] and they had both decided to go back over there.... They broke into the house. Bob wasn’t there. They waited until Bob got back. She [Jen] had [the gun] behind her back in her pants. She told Bob that they decided that they wanted to move back in and that she wanted to have sex with him. So she took Bob to the bedroom, he got undressed, and she told him to put something over his head so she could make believe it was Bobbi Jo. And she shot him.” Audrey said Jen never clarified if she was “doing him at the time” she murdered him, or that she “was fixin’ to do him. But I know he was lying on the bed naked.”
Not once did Audrey ever tell me that Jen said Bobbi coerced her into committing this crime, gave her the gun, or was with her. Audrey, in fact, gave the indication that Jen did it all on her own.
The first time Jen told Audrey about the murder: “She told me that she was the only one that shot him and that she freaked out. Then she changed it up the second time. All the other stuff was the same. But that she had shot him twice, got off of him, and then Bobbi Jo came into the room, picked up the gun off the floor, and that Bob was shaking and asking them for help.... So that after [Jen] shot him, [Jen] went over there and choked him and then he died.”
There were no bruises on Bob Dow’s neck that would indicate strangulation. This was simply more of Jen telling erroneous lies to either make herself look more badass gangsta, or because lying for Jen was just another one of her many emotions—something she did, I believe, without thinking, at will.
I asked Bobbi
why she believed Jen killed Bob. If Bobbi was to be believed, then Jen committed this crime for her own reasons, on her own.
“I don’t know . . . why would
anyone
do this? If I had to say, I’d say she did it for Kathy,” Bobbi said. “Kathy wanted to go back to the house and rob Robert as soon as [we] went over there [to the Spanish Trace apartment]. They were all packed and ready to run when we got there. . . .”
What’s clear to me was that Bobbi took the brunt and burden of Jen’s entire life of loss, emotional pain, and dysfunction. As someone who has studied for his profession the minds of female murderers, I can see clearly that as Jen grew, she developed what I’ll coin as a “soft conscience”—she was systematically able to commit crimes, lie to those she loved, sleep around, do drugs, drink excessively, even change her sexuality to feel accepted and loved, and it all became easier for her as time went on. She began to feel normal while involved in abnormal behaviors. She was comforted by her own psychological fall. Lying became a way for Jen to feel right.
If Jen’s journal was read in its entirety, a clear picture would emerge of a girl hardened by her surroundings, growing increasingly angrier by the day, nurturing a volcanic rage, which would need to be released at some point. Jen was a pressure cooker. She was a woman who, when the right moment came around, would feel the need to deal with her anger issues in a violent manner. That was Jennifer Jones. The end result and facts of her life support it.
In one of her last letters, Bobbi made a valid point when she wrote,
I came into this with you by my own choice. I’ve kept my mouth and my mind closed down and shut out—and at times all of this overwhelms me. It makes me remember things I hid deep down. . . . Regardless what happens, I know I’ve been able to tell the truth.
She thanked me for that opportunity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
WOULD LIKE
to thank the usual suspects (you know who you are). It gets kind of redundant naming the same list of people at the end of every book. So I will just say here that my family and friends, colleagues, and those working for me are the foundation of what I do, and I could not continue my work without any one of them. When it comes to my readers, moreover, I am always at a loss for words when trying to address all of you and express my gratitude to your continued support. You are the most important part of my work.
I am also profoundly grateful to each one of my
Dark Minds,
Investigation Discovery viewers. Thank you for allowing me to do what I love.
I am honored and humbled by both my readers and viewers and their dedication and willingness to spend the time they do with me.
It feels weird for me to thank Bobbi Jo, and there’s really no reason to. Moreover, she wouldn’t want me to thank her. We had a love/hate relationship. Bobbi understands she has issues that need dealing with and she is working toward the goal of getting the help she needs. I greatly respect that. Sobriety is a wonderful thing, a gift. In 2013, I celebrate eighteen years of sobriety myself.
I do want to thank Kathy Jones, Tamey Hurley, and Audrey Sawyer for opening up to me. Tamey, especially, was brutally honest, as was Kathy Jones. Tamey shared many personal bits of her life, which I chose not to include in this book. Tamey is a tortured soul, like her daughter. They need time to reconcile. Time to love again. I’m told they are beginning anew.
For Kathy and Audrey, I wish them the best. There is love in their hearts. Jennifer should have trusted Audrey more.
There was one person, Shauntá Weston, a friend of Bobbi’s, who initiated a dialogue with me. Miss Weston was very helpful. She believes in Bobbi. Thank you, Shauntá, for your help.