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  There are other aspects of Bobbi’s character that alienated people in her circle. It’s hard for some to be around a strong personality, like Bobbi: someone unafraid of standing by her truth.

  “Bobbi doesn’t kiss ass,” that friend concluded. “That’s not what I mean. But she will not hesitate to make a situation right, even if she wasn’t in the wrong. And that’s just her. She will respect and value your beliefs and opinions without coming down on you. The loyalty that I have seen her exhibit blows my mind. Once she’s your friend, watch out—that loyalty will be there until the very end. I could go on and on about the things that make Bobbi special. Look, I’m so not saying she’s flawless, because she has her days, like most anyone else, and she’s done things she’s not proud of. But her good far outweighs any of that.”

  The one characteristic Bobbi’s friend said she displayed more than any other?

  “If Bobbi does something wrong, she’ll own it. And regardless of the consequence, she’ll admit her flaws. That’s who she is. And that’s what I love about her.”

  It was late February/early March 2004. There was a party in the middle of the courtyard in the center of the Spanish Trace Apartments. Audrey Sawyer lived at the Spanish Trace complex with her half sister Jennifer Jones, Jen’s father, Jerry, and another sister. Bobbi was standing with some friends, drinking. Audrey spotted her, but she didn’t think too much of this rather interesting-looking girl with the sun tattoo.

  Audrey had been with guys, but she was a bona fide lesbian—that much she had never denied herself. But this girl, Bobbi, Audrey never thought for a moment on that day she would ever find herself falling for. And yet that was Bobbi: As soon as you got to know her, you realized how genuine and sincere and likeable she was, not to mention how much she cared about people in general.

  A few days after Audrey saw Bobbi standing, partying at Spanish Trace that first time, a friend called. “Hey, I want you to meet someone.”

  “Yeah,” Audrey said, “who?”

  Audrey was skeptical. In Mineral Wells, everyone knew everyone. And in the lesbian community around town, the circle was very small. Audrey probably knew the girl already.

  “Name’s Bobbi Jo Smith,” her friend said.

  Audrey thought about it. She went back to that day she saw Bobbi in the courtyard. A chick like Bobbi might be just what the doctor had ordered for Audrey, who had gone through a bit of a rough patch lately.

  “Come on over,” Audrey told her friend.

  Jennifer Jones and Audrey Sawyer grew up in the same house with two other siblings. Jen and her sister, Stephanie, have the same father, Jerry; Audrey and their other sister, Emily, Jen’s two half sisters, have different fathers. The girls were all born to the same mother, Kathy Jones.

  They were reared in Lone Camp, a relatively nice area in central Palo Pinto County. Life was good, Audrey explained, adding how there were fine memories etched in the walls of that old house they called home. And yet, Audrey was quick to point out, those warm family recollections came with a price.

  And didn’t last long.

  “My mom left when I was six,” Audrey said.

  “Jennifer was almost four and Stephanie was almost two when I left the house,” Kathy Jones told me during an interview.

  “We moved around a lot,” Jen later said.

  Before the bottom of the family unit fell out, Audrey stated, their mother was a “traditional” mom. Kathy taught Sunday school at the local church. The entire family attended church services every weekend and helped out where they could. Kathy worked at a church day care. It was Kathy, Jerry, Jennifer, Audrey, and their two siblings. The family thing was working. Jerry was employed by a local oil company. The kids attended school regularly. They all got along and did things together.

  “My mom took us places,” Audrey said. “The park. The zoo. Normal things. We had a huge area where we lived. There were acres and acres surrounding the house.”

  The kids went about their early childhoods with carefree spirits, doing what it is kids between the ages of two and nine do: playing and hanging out with neighbors, watching cartoons, having fun. Kathy wasn’t Betty Crocker, but she wasn’t Mommie Dearest, either. She loved her children, arguably loved her husband, and wanted what was best for everyone. But the devil soon found his way into their lives and began wreaking havoc quickly, once Kathy had a taste of his poison.

  “My mom and Jerry got into it because my mom wanted to get a ‘real job,’” Audrey explained.

  The door had opened. In church, the family learned that you don’t allow an entryway for evil, or the master of lies will find his way into the home and destroy it. And once he’s allowed in, no matter how, he’ll spread his wrath so subtly, no one will ever see it coming.

  “Jerry didn’t want her to work like that,” Audrey insisted. Jerry was old-school: The husband worked, and the wife stayed home with the kids.

  Kathy wanted to get out there and labor full-time. She felt the pull of the street. Back then, Kathy had the body and the looks to go with it. She felt she could make money with those assets.

  “I went to work at Sinbad’s in Fort Worth,” Kathy explained to me. “A strip club.”

  She and Jerry started to argue. Those in-house quarrels soon turned into Kathy leaving with the kids.

  Things went on like that for a while: a seesaw of getting along and not getting along. Kathy was making money and taking care of the kids. And then, as the tale goes, Kathy met a woman at the strip club and sparked up a close friendship. This new friend had just gotten out of jail. One thing led to another and . . . we’ve all heard the story.

  “My mom was introduced to drugs,” Audrey said, “and them two started partying.”

  Kathy told me there was one thing driving her to take off her clothes: “Getting the money.”

  From there, Kathy explained, her life spiraled out of control. Fast. She hit the streets full throttle with her new friend and found an easy way to forget her troubles.

  “I’ve been dealing with the devil since I been about fifteen,” Kathy told me. “Taking pills and stuff from the time I was fifteen.... I lived in Fort Worth with my dad and mom, and I was leaving home all the time, starting when I was thirteen. Lived on the street till I was seventeen.”

  Soon after Kathy hit the brick, running full steam, Jennifer and Stephanie went back to Jerry. Kathy couldn’t handle them any longer. She’d pop over during the week to visit with the kids. But Jerry, Kathy said, “always threatened that if I didn’t come back to him, I would never see the girls.”

  Then Kathy found she couldn’t handle her other two kids, Audrey and Emily, so they wound up with Jerry, too.

  “She couldn’t take care of all of us,” Audrey said.

  Kathy Jones, however, had no trouble taking care of herself.

  “She was always in bar fights . . . even with men,” Audrey said with a strange, boastful pulse of envy. “She never backed down. She was tough. She’s been airlifted to hospitals several times for fighting, overdosing. And one time she fell and hit her head.... When she wasn’t on drugs, my ma was into family stuff. She liked to sew, make all of our dresses.... She was loving.” Yet, when Kathy was on Satan’s venom, Audrey added, she “just didn’t want to be around anybody.”

  She withdrew from life.

  “The girls have seen a lot,” Kathy said of her children. “They’ve lived a hard life.”

  A majority of Jennifer Jones’s formative years, Audrey claimed, were spent watching her father, Jerry, along with her little sister, head over to, as Audrey put it, “the hood,” in search of Kathy. Jennifer and her sister tagged along with Jerry as he’d scour the projects and mean streets of whatever town they lived in then, looking for their mother, so he could drag her back home. There were times, Audrey explained, when he’d even give Kathy money, knowing what she was going to do with it.

  Kathy told me this was around the same time when she started waking up in the morning with a drink in one hand and go
ing to bed that same night with a crack pipe in the other. A typical night for Kathy in those days involved scenes she’d only, up until then, seen on television.

  “Once, my boyfriend brought me over to the dealer’s place,” Kathy recalled, “and he pulled a gun and put it to my head—all because my boyfriend had brought this ‘white girl’—me—over to the house.”

  This was how Jennifer grew up—watching her mother fall, time after time, and all of them trying to lift her up from the depths of what had turned into a relentless addiction.

  Soon the girls were split up. One of the sisters went out to find her father in California. Audrey took off and ran away with a boyfriend, only to be found and brought back. It was Jennifer who stayed behind with Jerry and moved into a trailer in Strawn, Texas, a little town south of Graford, off the I-20.

  By now, Jen was into her “I’m not going to end up like Mom” stage of heading out at night with boys, running around, smoking weed, and thus beginning to develop a street mentality that sneaks up and kicks a person’s ass if she’s not able to thwart it. The fact was, Jen was turning into her mother, however slow and progressive and stealthy the process seemed. On February 18, 2001, Jen confided once again in her trusted journal, writing how “so much has happened” in her life that she could hardly wrap her adolescent mind around it all. She had gone to Bluff Dale the previous night, a small town of about two thousand, about an hour’s drive from where she lived in Strawn. There was a boy there whom Jen had been eyeing.

  Went . . . to make a promise to stay sexually pure till [I’m] married, she wrote, almost mocking herself, finishing the sentence in a sarcastic laugh, I already broke it.

  It was then that Jen first began hurting herself for the hell of it. Her sister and a friend dared Jen one night to burn herself. “Use the cigarette lighter,” her sister’s friend encouraged. “Go ahead, Jen. . . .” The idea was to keep it lit and heat up the metal tip so it was hot enough to leave a burn mark on her skin, like a cattle brand.

  Jen took a look at everyone, fired the thing up, got it red hot, and pushed the tip into her arm, singeing herself with a hiss, melting her skin like wax, leaving behind a mark. She’d succumbed to peer pressure, it seemed, with not so much as thinking twice about it. Her friends had pushed her to do something and she did it. And the strange thing about that day was, Audrey later clarified, Jen realized how much she actually liked the pain. She had found a release. A way not only to allow herself to feel alive, but to gain attention while doing so; and, all at once, she had begun to carve out the “badass” reputation she had been desperately chasing (same as her mother).

  “She wanted people to talk about her in that way,” Audrey said.

  Same as they talked about Kathy, who had a reputation as someone to be feared, a woman who did not mess around and took no bull from anyone. Kathy kicked ass first and never asked questions. Jen had heard these stories. As Jen was growing up, Kathy had become a legend in Jen’s fragile, inexperienced, immature mind. Those shoes of Kathy’s, Jen realized as time went on, were going to be hard to fill, but she could do it.

  During this chaos, Jen and her sister had, at times, lived with an aunt and uncle, experiencing bouts of normalcy. That aunt and uncle—the Brownriggs—watched Jen and her sister, bought them things, and had a positive effect on their lives. They lived in Granbury, a fairly good-sized town of about eight thousand in Hood County, south of Mineral Wells and Fort Worth. For intervals, Jen would stop her bad behavior as her aunt and uncle influenced her and her sister with routine, parental discipline, and showed them love. Jen felt a sense of being involved in a family unit; she had everything a child on the cusp of going completely bad needed to turn things around. Audrey later explained that Jen had even gone so far as to call her aunt “Mom” once in a while and appreciated the structured atmosphere of having to answer to an adult, an authority figure. Jen felt that someone cared about her and what she did. She even started to do well in school. She stopped drinking alcohol and gave up cigarettes. She wanted to prove to her aunt and uncle there was good inside her. She could do the right thing under the right circumstances. All she needed was a chance.

  “They even took her and [her sister],” Audrey said, “on several vacations, cruises, and things.”

  Rewards. Every kid needs a carrot—needs to chase something. Jen was no different. She saw a rainbow. She felt there was some good that could come out of a life she had not discarded entirely. She could turn things around.

  While living with her aunt and uncle in late 2003, Jen met a boy, whom she referred to in her journal as “my wish come true.” As Jen saw him, this kid was a straight arrow; he was the perfect counterpart to Jen’s wiry, wild side. He played piano. He sang. He was an honor student. He is so sweet and talkative, Jen wrote. They had gone “parking” one night. Jen wrote: He is only 18, but he would be smart and sexy for me. What she meant by “only 18” was that she liked much older men. When she met this boy, she was just seventeen; so they were just about the same age. This was different for her. He went to Texas Tech. She called him her “dream man.”

  In this journal entry, it’s clear Jen knew what was good for her. She felt it with this boy. The entire relationship gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling. We [talk] about everything, she wrote, except drugs and drinking. He wanted nothing to do with either, and Jen respected him for it.

  “I’d rather have a boy first,” Jen’s new friend told her one night as they discussed marriage and children.

  “Oh yeah?” Jen responded, smiling.

  “Then a girl,” he followed up. “Girls are hard to raise.”

  Jen thought about that comment. Boy, did she ever know what he was talking about.

  And he is right, she wrote, describing the conversation.

  CHAPTER 7

  IT WAS ONE THING for Captain Mike McAllester to get the gist of the Cruz story outside, in front of victim Bob Dow’s mother’s house. However, it was quite another to lock them down to a statement that they would sign.

  Richard Cruz was a forklift operator at a rather large employer in Mineral Wells. Cruz was a workingman’s man. He was a blue-collar guy who, he said later, was just trying to be a good citizen in coming forward to report what he had heard. What he wanted to make clear to McAllester was that his statement was absolute hearsay. He was talking about things that his mother-in-law had told him and his wife.

  McAllester said he understood. The MWPD was in the information-gathering stage of its investigation. Nothing more.

  Both Kathy and Richard Cruz seemed nervous. Rightly so, perhaps. Murder was serious business. The Cruzes knew they had potentially devastating information about a suspect. Someone they actually knew. A family member.

  Kathy Cruz’s niece.

  Richard Cruz explained that he and his wife valued the close-knit family atmosphere he believed he could characterize when talking about the Smith family. Dorothy Smith, his mother-in-law, was a good woman. She had great instincts and didn’t mind helping family members in need.

  “Well, what happened to lead you to call us?” McAllester asked.

  Cruz explained how he and Kathy had arrived home from work at about four-thirty that day, which seemed like so long ago now. “And as we got out of our vehicle,” Cruz explained, “Kathy’s mother waved us over to her house.”

  McAllester took notes and listened, saying, “Continue. . . .”

  “Well, Dorothy was very upset. She was talking to Kathy’s sister on the phone.”

  As Richard Cruz spoke, McAllester got a sense that Richard was confident in what he was saying—that he believed Dorothy. Continuing, Cruz explained, “[Dorothy] said Kathy’s niece shot Bob.”

  “Her name?”

  “Bobbi Jo Smith,” Cruz answered. “She’s nineteen. Bob is an acquaintance of Bobbi Jo’s.”

  “Did she say what happened? Why she shot him?”

  “Dorothy said Bobbi Jo came over to her house and was ‘very upset.’ She said she had shot Bob. . . .
I told Dorothy after she told us that maybe it didn’t happen that way because Bobbi Jo likes to exaggerate, especially when she’s on drugs.”

  It was hard to believe that a nineteen-year-old girl the size of little boy, as Cruz described Bobbi, could manage to shoot a much bigger, older, and stronger man like Bob Dow. McAllester thought about the crime scene he had examined and how Bob was lying on his back with some sort of laundry bag over his head. Maybe his killer had surprised him? Maybe Bob Dow’s killer snuck up on him, tossed the laundry bag over his head, and unloaded those rounds into his face without him ever knowing what hit him?

  “What else did Dorothy tell you?”

  “She said, ‘No way.’ Bobbi Jo wasn’t making it up.”

  “How’d she know that?”

  “Dorothy said she spoke to Bobbi Jo’s girlfriend”—who was apparently with Bobbi when she showed up at Dorothy’s, both freaking out, talking about shooting Bob Dow—“Her name is Jennifer . . . and she said, ‘Bobbi Jo shot Bob. . . .’”

  Richard Cruz explained how he’d searched Bobbi’s room inside Dorothy’s house and uncovered a holster with a missing weapon and an unloaded second weapon. Then he told McAllester how he called the MWPD and got Bobbi Jo’s mother on the phone; she helped coach the cop following him toward Bob Dow’s house.

  McAllester knew the rest.

  Obviously, the MWPD needed to corroborate both secondhand and thirdhand statements by finding Bobbi’s girlfriend—this Jennifer—and also getting over to Dorothy’s and obtaining a statement from her. Still, according to these two witnesses, Bobbi Jo had admitted to murder.

  This thing was coming together rather quickly for the MWPD—just as they were accustomed and used to. In this town, when applying effort, the solving of murders seemed easy. But there had to be a catch somewhere. And what about the old woman found nearly unresponsive and literally starving to death inside a second bedroom in the house? How did she play into this scenario? Was she even coherent enough to speak?