Dressed in her pajamas, Jen lit a cigarette and sat on the back steps of the apartment. (Again, this is
her
version—which no one else involved later agreed with.) She stared off into the distance and thought about things. This run of bad luck and disappointment had to come to an end at some point. She was sure of it. Things could not be this bad for this long. Jen knew she had created the latest mess (same as most of the others), but it did not make it any easier to swallow. She’d even written about it in her journal the previous night, noting,
I [screwed] up again, like always.
She sometimes liked to start out an entry by blaming herself and pouring on the self-pity, which allowed an escape clause to feel good about what came next: getting high. Here we go again. Screw it. Life sucks. It’s too damn hard. Fire up the pipe.
One of the major regrets Jen had was totally letting her aunt and uncle down just recently. Late the previous year, Jen had been living in their house again with Stephanie. It was near the time they had been busy designing and building that new property. Things were going along well. Jen had hit a hot streak. She felt loved and needed. Alive. A productive member of society. There was someone in her life to answer to. Her aunt or uncle would not let Jen get away with things. Jen welcomed the limitations put on her.
“And then they found a pipe she was using to smoke dope, which Jen had made out of a lightbulb,” Audrey explained.
“We found drug paraphernalia in Jennifer’s room in our trailer,” Jen’s uncle corroborated. “I spent five and a half years with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, and have
zero
tolerance.”
Jen’s uncle and aunt packed her things and called Jerry. “Come and get her. She’ll be waiting outside the front gate.”
They weren’t about to allow Jen to explain her way out of this one. No way. Rules were rules. She had broken one of the central tenets of the house. It was as if she had spit in her aunt and uncle’s faces.
“She took the home we gave her and flushed it down the toilet,” her uncle continued. “Not to mention putting us at risk. A very fine thank-you, indeed.”
Jen brought hard-core drugs into her aunt and uncle’s house. A big, huge no-no. So Jen moved into a motel room that her dad, Jerry, was renting in Mineral Wells. Jerry had been booted from an apartment weeks back for not keeping up with the rent. Jen and Jerry and Audrey stayed in the motel for a few more months; then Jerry found an opening at Spanish Trace and moved in. Jen went to Santo for a quick spell, but she moved back to Mineral Wells with Audrey and Jerry.
So here she was now, sitting on that back stoop of the Spanish Trace Apartments, shaking her head, exhaling cigarette smoke, thinking about the mistakes she’d made, pondering the people she’d let down, the family members she loved, and all of the missed opportunities. She considered the way she had tossed the good things in her life aside for a pipe, took the easy road, and had nothing left.
I had everything going really good for me and I started on that shit again,
Jen wrote.
This is where I always [screw] up.
It was as if Jen never gave herself the chance to be good; somehow she’d always manage to sabotage her life.
There were trees facing the back of the Spanish Trace Apartments. Jen could see them from where she sat on the stoop. According to one version of her story she later told, Jen found herself lost in thought, gazing into those woods, wondering what life had in store next.
Everything my heart desired,
she wrote, talking about her time with her aunt and uncle.
Car . . . cell . . . I had a boyfriend. . . . Life was great.
Stubbing out her cigarette, Jen stood.
[My boyfriend] broke up with me. . . . I am going to Fort Worth in the morning.
Audrey was supposed to show up at Spanish Trace that morning. She had taken off for a few days. She’d called Jen the night before and told her she’d be by. After speaking with her, Jen sat down and wrote how she was looking forward to seeing her sister, but hoped Audrey arrived without her “dike [sic] girlfriend.”
The dyke Jennifer referred to was Bobbi Jo Smith. And wouldn’t you know, just as Jen flicked her cigarette butt, turned to open the door and go back inside, Audrey pulled up, in fact, with Bobbi Jo.
Great,
Jen thought.
Audrey needed to pick up a few things. She had been basically living with Bobbi Jo, who was staying with an older guy, Bob Dow, at his mother’s house not far away. It was one party after another at Bob Dow’s mother’s place, Audrey told Jen. Bobbi had a mattress on the floor in the living room she sometimes slept on, but she also slept in Bob’s room, which had two beds. Bob’s mother lived in a room by herself, and he supposedly took care of her. “But [Bob] more or less just collected her checks and tossed her a McDonald’s hamburger and some water every few days,” one girl who frequented the house later told me. Bob had a trailer he lived in on the edge of town; he used his mother’s house for sex and drug parties with women and young girls. Bob liked to film and take photographs of the girls who came over to the house. If a female walked into that party house, in other words, she was essentially signing up to be filmed. Most of the girls knew this.
“Every time I showed up,” said one woman, who had gone over there quite often, “it seemed like Bob had a camera hanging from around his neck.”
Before stepping into the apartment, Jen saw that Bobbi Jo was sitting next to Audrey inside the car. There were “two other people,” according to Jen, in the backseat.
“Stay here,” Audrey told everyone inside the car. “I’ll be right back.”
Audrey walked into the apartment. Jen sat back down on the porch steps.
Jennifer knew of Bobbi Jo. Not a lot about her personally, but enough to know that Bobbi was a chick who liked to party with other girls, and get down and dirty. Jen had never heard anything bad about Bobbi Jo, and there really wasn’t much to say in that regard. Bobbi readily admitted she liked to drink, drug, and have sex with women. Life was about working, drinking, sexing, and drugging. Bobbi was young. Audrey had said Bobbi was fun to be with, although she also knew that this thing with Bobbi was probably not a long-term relationship. Bobbi was too free-spirited. She liked to be around a lot of people. Bobbi also worked for Bob Dow. Not just doing handyman types of jobs for him, but there was talk that Bobbi was the lure for Bob Dow—that she got paid for bringing young girls (some just teens) home to Bob so he could have sex with them and/or film the girls. The bait Bobbi waved in front of the girls was the free drugs and booze, along with a safe place to do it.
“Ever kiss a girl?” Bobbi Jo allegedly asked Jen.
Jen later testified that she was sitting in her dad’s apartment, watching television, when this conversation occurred, but then she also said it took place on the front stoop as she sat there, staring into the woods that day. A third version of this day was then changed to Bobbi popping over to pick up Audrey and hanging around while Audrey got ready. While waiting, Jen claimed, Bobbi would jokingly harass her. Hit on her. Tease her.
“No!” Jennifer supposedly snapped in response to the question about kissing a girl. She was taken aback by Bobbi’s frankness.
“Ever been with a girl?” Bobbi pressed (according to one recollection of Jen’s). Then she gave Jen a wink. Bobbi wanted Jen—no doubt about it. Jen was a beautiful girl. She was young and pretty. Bobbi had heard that Jen had never been with a girl. And Jen carried herself like a fine-heeled, much older twentysomething, not the teenager she was. Bobbi was attracted to that. Jen was a quest, a “thing” for Bobbi to conquer.
“Can’t say I have, Bobbi,” Jen responded.
“How ’bout a relationship with a girl?” Bobbi asked, laughing. “Ever have that?”
Jen had gotten used to the comments. She shrugged it off. “Nope.”
On this day, reportedly, Jen was sitting on the back porch and Audrey pulled up with the gang; the way Jennifer told it another time, Bobbi had yelled from the car window: “You ever kiss a girl?”
Bobbi wore a white-colored wife-beater T-shirt. That sad and angry sun tattoo on her arm was in full view as it hung out the open window, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. The smoke billowed up, stinging her squinting eyes.
“No!” Jennifer yelled as she prepared to walk back into the apartment.
“You want to?” Bobbi asked.
Jen thought about it. “Ah . . . no.”
Bobbi took a pull from her cigarette, blew the smoke out the window, and then yelled, “Well, Jen, I could change your mind!”
Audrey was just getting back into the car. “Leave her alone.”
Audrey had not heard the conversation and told me it never took place.
Jennifer told this story to a reporter in the weeks and months after she was arrested.
Bobbi Jo Smith told me this scene, born from the imagination of Jennifer Jones, never happened.
CHAPTER 9
B
RIAN BOETZ WAS TIRED.
It had been a long, late evening. Boetz could think of a thousand other things that he would have rather done the previous night than try to make sense of what seemed to be a senseless, brutal homicide. But here was the seasoned cop on his way back to the MWPD to see what his captain, Mike McAllester, had come up with during his interviews with Richard and Kathy Cruz. In ways that most non–law enforcement civilians wouldn’t understand, it can be exciting, actually, for a detective to wake up to a mystery—a case that needed his immediate attention. Homicides in Mineral Wells were not a normal course of business, and to have one like this made the days go by a bit faster. For a cop, nothing could replace the satisfactory feeling of putting a kid toucher or child abuser behind bars. But on some days, an officer welcomed the change. There were only so many pedophiles and dopers and people neglecting their kids that a police officer could take down without going out of his mind.
On the morning of May 6, 2004, which was already shaping up to be another gorgeous Texas Thursday, as Boetz rolled into the precinct, baseball fans in Texas were celebrating and, at the same time, in a state of mourning. Controversial Houston Astros pitcher Roger “the Dodger” Clemens had recorded his 4,137th strikeout the night before, putting Clemens in second place, a hairbreadth behind Texas Ranger great Nolan Ryan, an icon of Texas sports.
The good news this morning, Boetz soon found out, was that the MWPD had a bead on a solid suspect in Bob Dow’s murder. The bad news was that nobody knew where the young girl was. The TLETS/APB, which McAllester put out, had not yet yielded any hits. But then, it was still so early in the game.
“What’d you find out?” Boetz asked McAllester.
The seasoned investigator smiled. “Sit down.”
There was a lot to explain.
Cops were still at the crime scene. Most of the evidence had been collected, but the scene hadn’t been released yet—mainly because Bob Dow’s mother’s house was such a rat hole, inside and out. So it made for a longer-than-usual evidence-collecting process. That living room where the computer was located looked like a Texas twister had gone through it. There was no telling how much of what cops had sifted through was actual evidence or just plain garbage.
McAllester suggested to Boetz that he grab Detective Penny Judd and head over and interview Dorothy Smith, Bobbi Jo Smith’s grandmother.
“Yeah,” Boetz said.
“She’ll have plenty to say.”
The autopsy answers the final question: Why did life pass from a specific human body?
Scott A. Wagner wrote in his graphic book
Color Atlas of the Autopsy.
In the case of forty-nine-year-old Bob Dow, it was pretty damn obvious that he had been shot. Smart, competent, and experienced investigators, however, would never determine this early that those wounds were the cause of death—unless they had a medical examiner (ME) agreeing with them.
The autopsy is a complete evaluation of an individual’s death and the circumstances surrounding that death,
Wagner wrote.
This was the main reason behind Bob Dow’s autopsy : to draw conclusions around the idea of what circumstance or circumstances had placed this man on that cold steel slab at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences (SWIFS) in Dallas.
It was 8:30
A.M
., May 6, as Detectives Brian Boetz and Penny Judd headed off to interview Dorothy Smith, and the pathologist Dr. Christopher Young started dissecting Bob Dow.
Bob Dow had arrived nude, his body wrapped in a light blue sheet. The first thing Young did after fingerprinting, photographing, and X-raying Dow’s hands was place plastic bags over each and tie them off. The doctor did not want to contaminate any potential forensic “trace” evidence that Bob’s hands might yield. Perhaps Bob Dow had swiped at his killer? Maybe he scratched his killer’s face or arms? Anything—and everything—at this stage of the investigation was possible.
Dow weighed in at 234 pounds. He was six feet tall. His body was “cold” to the touch, Young noted. He wrote:
Rigor [had] fully developed . . . lividity posterior and fixed.
Scott A. Wagner quoted Voltaire at the beginning of his “A to Z” autopsy textbook:
“To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.”
That truth was, in certain respects, somewhere inside or outside Bob Dow’s corpse, and it would slowly emerge as Young went about the business of examining him.
The best place to begin was with the four gunshot wounds visible on Bob’s upper body. One shot was to the right side of Bob’s chin. Dr. Young found “no soot or stippling” on the skin around that particular hole. Young called this an “entrance” wound. Stippling is unburned gunpowder and other essential material from the bullet exiting the barrel and left behind when someone is shot at close range. Stippling usually looks like small black dots surrounding the bullet wound. This particular gunshot, Young wrote, after “perforating the skin” and the “subcutaneous tissues” of the “right side of the chin,” went through the mandible before striking and avulsing through the “right lower molars.” The bullet essentially shattered a few of Bob’s teeth before “one fragment” penetrated “the right lateral surface of the tongue.” When projectiles enter the body—suffice it to say at close range (say, within an arm’s length)—they can travel tricky and unpredictable paths, splitting apart and heading off into all sorts of directions after passing through the skin and hitting the hard surface of bone or teeth. It’s not uncommon for a pathologist to see a bullet enter the body at the jawline, let’s say, split in half, head directly south, and penetrate the stomach or another major organ. The .22-caliber bullet fragment that ripped through Bob’s two lower molars had actually propelled those broken teeth down into his esophagus about midway between his mouth and stomach. Young recovered one fragment from the “musculature of the tongue.” The other section was found in Bob’s right cheek. That one bullet, in other words, about a quarter of an inch wide, struck Bob Dow on the right side of his chin, split in two, and traveled in opposite directions:
Front to back, right to left, and slightly upwards.